Road To Paradise - The Dragon

I hope you got that the title of this blog was a joke, not a lie.

I think the ideal indie dev probably perfectly balances their time between actual game dev, testing, marketing (there should be a better word for 'marketing' something free), and the kind of social networking that maximizes the efficiency of marketing. I am not that ideal person. I like to keep my nose buried in the editor. I can't stand marketing or trying to draw attention to my games because:

1) I am bad at it. There is a line between reasonable self-promotion and being an annoying overhyper/attention hog. I have trouble perceiving that line. After a period where I erred on the side of hype, I now err on the side of hiding.
2) I'm a shy person in general. I don't like putting myself out there. Especially not to promote my work. I know I post a LOT on the forums, but that is just because I have heaps of free time and poor discipline; I am still shy. (And honestly the forums here are rather quiet right now, so even a few posts per day and I see my username all over the place like I CAN'T STOP POSTIN' or something.)
3) Perhaps most importantly, getting people to play/read/watch your game/book/movie takes away time and energy from actually creating that thing.

I think part of my obscurity results from the fact that I'm not a visual artist or a pixel artist. When I make progress on one of my games, it's usually not something you can see in a screenshot, like custom graphics or beautiful maps. It's usually something you'd have to play the game to really appreciate.

So anyway, no one is anticipating the release of Episode I of RTP: The Dragon, which will probably happen later today or tomorrow. At least I assume no one is, because it only has three subscribers and as far as I know they could be my mom, my dad, and my best friend lol.

Nonetheless, I will "stealth" release it (not really that, of course, just not having the time/energy/inclination to make a lot of noise about it before release) and hopefully it will get a little attention. My Theme Roulette game, Chapelwaite, got a lot more attention than I expected. I think it demonstrated the range of graphics, styles, systems, and themes that I'm capable of working with, especially when compared with RTP: The Dragon.

This game puts off some "this is my very first RM game" vibes (as well it might; it was the first RM project I had touched in fully five years), but don't let them fool you, it's anything but. I already considered myself a veteran of this scene when certain people joined as total newbs who have gone fully commercial/semi-pro by now. I might be at that point myself (not that I personally would ever NOT make free games, don't get me wrong) had I not taken a five year hiatus from game dev, but I did. And that's fine. Hopefully, I'll get there eventually. Heck, I had been at this for a decade when pianotm first joined RMN and that guy's got 80 billion MakerScore now.

Anyway, in the case of this project, an effort was made to strip-down, aim for a degree of minimalism, and avoid any feature creep, also--to a point--to be faithful to the RTP aesthetic, or at least an RTP aesthetic. The plain vanilla default CSS of this gamepage is meant to be consistent with the same aesthetic. Kentona made a game called Generica. The aesthetic I'm playing with might well be called "Defaultia".

The first episode of RTP: The Dragon is coming out later today, or possibly tomorrow, depending on your time-zone and my work speed. I will be calling it version 0.5 and considering it to be an open beta. I do hope you will check it out.