#yuandthoughts

one thing that really stuck with me while researching korean gamedev: the indie scene is tiny. like, surprisingly small.

it’s not that the talent isn’t there. it’s that making a small game in korea is way riskier than going corporate.

big studios offer stability, social respect, and… health insurance. indie? not so much.

plus, the market is so dominated by mobile, gacha, and huge multiplayer games that a solo or small-team project can easily get drowned out.

When I was designing my own game, I thought some ideas were super obvious… but when I showed them to others, I realized they weren’t obvious at all

wild how some korean games do great in the west but barely register locally.

players there are deep in mobile, ultra-competitive, streamlined experiences. meanwhile, global audiences are like: yes. give me the flashy, the cinematic, the melodrama.

it’s weird. and kind of encouraging.

sometimes your work makes sense somewhere else.

I’m currently reading a book on narrative design in games. There’re some thoughts on player classifications (mentioning both Bartle’s taxonomy and Jesse Schell’s ideas). I do understand that those are just theoretical concepts that were created solely for game developers. And slightly outdated too.

But I can’t just ignore it anymore. Again, these ideas are not a call to action but rather a reference. But I’m curious whether real developers really stick to any of this stuff.

I mean Pac-Man was developed to attract teenage girls. It’s ‘kawaii’ and doesn’t involve any violence. It was extremely popular. And it was developed like in 70s.

So isn’t Pac-Man a 40 year old proof of the fact that girls presumably don’t play games because they are, in fact, all made for boys? Hear me out there: girls and boys may enjoy different stuff BUT most of the games are made exclusively for boys (at least having them in mind as a key audience). Thus, statement that girls don’t play games is incorrect from the very beginning. It’s just they are not heard or anyhow represented in the industry.

And I’m not even talking about gender socialization which obviously has the greatest impact on today’s situation.

Girls do play games. They are just excluded from gaming beforehand.

WHYS EVERYONE SO PERFERCT

I CANNOT STOP COMPARING MYSELF

idk if that actually works but it’s still a great opportunity for indies

here’s the link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/11g8MCMFNrBM0CXIWrT8bej5vqR1fCJGMhoFfbS5ph3Q/edit?usp=drivesdk

you know the ones. were these endless popups? walls of text, maybe?

or that feeling of “are you calling me stupid??”

i just started a research on tutorial design and now i’m very curious: what’s a tutorial that totally lost you? or made you rage quit???

after thinking about why korea has so few indie devs, i started wondering—what does an indie scene actually need to grow?

support systems help. local festivals. visibility. even just… time.

but also: a culture that’s okay with failure.

when making weird little games isn’t seen as a waste of time.