How To Make It As A Full Time Indie Dev

So with the incremental, that is purely from a market research standpoint.

That is the hot genre on Steam right now.

It's not a genre that I would personally say I would jump in and play myself, but I did go do a lot of, like I played Keep On Mining, I played Laika, I played, I got a whole bunch of the games and I went playing them and, uh, trying to figure out what overall is in behind this, uh, behind this genre and what, uh, people, what makes them tick, I guess.

Um, I think part of the problem with me and finding an audience, including whether it's incremental or racing or not, um, is I'll buy games and play them, but I think I'm too developer-oriented that when I'm playing a game, it's because I want to learn about The decisions the developers made and why is it like this? I'm not necessarily buying and playing the games because they're fun.

I mean, I do play games for fun, but it's rare.

I don't think I've ever really, in the last 10 years, I don't think I've gone and said, oh, I got to go play this game because it's fun.

And I wish that were different in my brain, but it's who I am.

And I think it's a weakness as far as trying to find out what does a player want?

Yeah, the funny thing for me that's like a little bit like that for me is I did business school.

And now when I watch a movie, I can't help but see all the product placement.

And so like my wife gets super annoyed sometimes because we're like Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz.

Like sometimes I just let her enjoy it, but I still see it.

But yeah, you almost can't see, unsee like what they're doing and all these things.

So I totally resonate with that.

After this journey of playing all these incremental games, did you have any takeaways of what you feel like the genre is trying to do?

Uh, definitely.

Um, I felt what I was getting, like what most of those games were speaking to me and resonating with me as a person was, uh, they allow you to jump into this relaxed state where you're going to progress regardless of making good or bad decisions.

Like there's, you can't hurt yourself too bad in them.

You might slow down the game, but that's not really like, there might be some people out there that do play for like, let's help see how fast I can get the number to go up.

And, uh, you know go as fast as you can but there's also i think for the majority of players it's just about being able to shut off your mind entering this zen relaxed state of you are doing something but it's not it's letting your mind do whatever your mind wants to do it almost puts me into a sleepy daisy state Which I've got to say, when I'm playing my own game and it's doing that same thing, I'm like, yes, I nailed it.

But it's also kind of like, I'm not done with a day's work yet.

I can't be in

this state right now.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

And something that this is sparking for me, I haven't heard anyone describe it quite like that is that maybe a piece of the appeal of this too, is that it's sort of it's almost the opposite of like scrolling or like a tick tock feed.