my 5 year indie developer journey
Hey, I'm Samuli, also known as Comfie and I make indie games here in the mythical land of Finland. Uhhhh, indie games are cool, yeah, hot take.
I've made a lot of games over the years and, well, as you can imagine most of them are bad, lol, which is why most of them are not available for y'all to play. Still, on my Itch.IO page you can play all of the games that are there! Some are decent, at best, but some are actually quite fun.
I started my dev journey in 2017-2018 I believe, and it took me a while to get adjusted to the tools. I didn't have a lot of prior knowledge with computers so using these grand development tools seemed impossible, but I still managed to push through that and started to development my skills.
For the first few years I had no design knowledge or anything, all I knew was how to use the engine and how to scribble on my sprite editor, which meant that I developed my interest and passion for design later in my journey.
I tried really hard to find myself as a developer, especially at first, but at some point I just stopped caring, which actually helped me understand what I enjoy about creating games, which is kinda ironical and fun. Dunno, maybe the less you care the more you develop or something, please take that with a grain of salt lmfao.
In 2020 I started to hang out in online forums and chatrooms which changed my whole view on making games, prior to that I had no connections with anyone and did everything alone. I met a lot of cool people that helped me figure out development and shit, it was very cool, I really appreciate that, thank you, you know who you are. At the same time I was introduced to twitter which showed me a whole new side of indie development, for the first time I really felt like I wasn't alone doing this.
Slowly I started to build a small following or something, a friendgroup of other devs that supported me and my work, which I love and appreciate from the bottom of my heart. From those chatrooms I met Temul, who was the first dev that I collaborated with. Our friendship was kinda odd because I had this whack-ass persona that I portrayed on those chatrooms which made for some hilarious interactions. We worked on a few projects, I still look at these times very fondly. We worked on a mini-game collection called the juicebox. Sadly most of our projects never got finished but I at least had a fun time, hope Temul feels the same way haha.
At around october of 2021 I participated in Ludum Dare 49, and made a game called Unsteady Bounce. The game feels like a monumental milestone on my journey, because it was the first game I made that used something else than janky pixelart as visuals. The game had this charcoal hand-drawn aesthetic and managed to score the 30th place in the graphics category!
After that I continued with the same aesthetic and took part in the Ludwig gamejam where I made Back to the Nest. Back to the Nest was a life changing experience because I met so many cool people through it and gained a lot of friends and peers. I honestly miss that time a lot, everyone was hanging out in this groupchat and supporting eachothers projects, it was great. I was also chosen as one of the winners of the jam, which led my game to be shown at Ludwig's stream, which was a big visibility boost. Back to the Nest remains as my most played game on Itch.IO with about 10,000 plays, which is mindblowing to me.
After these two projects I started working on my largest project to-date. Moonstuck, is a colorful precision flying game, with a lot of charm and really fucking steep difficulty curve, lol. I spent 6 months on this project and well, I'm slowly becoming more accepting of the project. When I finished it and was working on it I hated it. The game had a lot of flaws in design and in development. For example I handplaced 4000- outline objects which took me 2- months of work, it was not very pleasant nor fun. Still, I appreciate the project. I got to work with a cool composer, Jaden, thanks Jaden I really appreciate you! My good friend Z from one of the early chatrooms I was in also put the game on Steam for me, for free, I know, crazy. I owe Z a lot. With all of this Moonstuck has around 30 000-40 000 plays on Steam, which still blows my mind. Moonstuck was released in the summer of 2022.
After Moonstuck I worked on multiple smaller projects. I made 3 games with my close friend Sai. Those projects had their ups and downs but working with Sai has been a blast. I also worked with a few other friends HIS, Milkman and Frog, and we made this pretty cool Tron inspired game, tho I didn't amount a lot to this game. Still was fun! Maybe I'll be able to work with them again in the future.
At some point I was introduced to Paradise and met some pretty cool peers through it. I've gotten a lot of opportunities through it and I am forever grateful for the people that wanted to invite me there. I met a very quirky and cool friendo Plant through Paradise. Me and Plant have been working on a cyclical dynamic multi-layered shmup a of late. It should be out in december of 2022 or early next year. Also been finally working on a game with my friend Jasper, who does some crazy art n stuff, we've been talking for like a year about making a game together and it feels like it's finally actually happening! I also went to my first indie dev meetup event thing in November of this year, where I met cool peeps and I'm really grateful for that. I met Perttu, Pavla and Kai there, which was really cool, we are making a nuclear winter inspired topdown exploration game together, it's going to be a blast.
As you can probably read I've been collaborating with a lot of people lately, it has been so much fun but also draining for my social battery and things, so I've decided to tackle a few games alone after this. I enjoy working with people but also solo dev has its own quirks too.
That's pretty much everything for now. Today is 21/11/2022 and uh, I just condenced my whole dev journey into this small text, kinda crazy. Ok, that's all, thanks for reading, uhh bye.
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