Where would that money come from? Working a second job would cost precious time and energy, and borrowing money from a publisher or investor comes with obligations that can be creatively detrimental to the project. It would take at least a year to do it, and of course it costs money to live during that time. It wouldn't be an easy task - the prototype was far from the final vision, and would take more than just two people to finish the game. ![]() This was the motivation they needed to work on Dustforce full time, to turn it from a prototype into a full game. Woodley and Lexie received an email from Valve, inviting them to put Dustforce onto Steam. In the few days after the prototype was posted online, an article on drew some positive attention. ![]() They finished the game by August, in time for the contest deadline. Lexie worked at a second job during the day, and joined Woodley at night to build their prototype. For four months, they worked in an outdoor shed, living on cheap frozen foods and bulk soft drinks. They built the Dustforce prototype during the summer of 2010, motivated by the deadline of a game contest. Right: Dustforce as it is today, built in our own engine.ĭustforce started out as the project of the first half of Hitbox Team, Lexie and Woodley. Left: The original prototype of Dustforce, made in GameMaker. Now that we've finished our own first project, we'd like to contribute our own data about Dustforce to the growing trend of transparency in indie game development. It was just one data point, but a valuable one. There was a series of helpful articles by David Galindo that talked about the financial details of his game, The Oil Blue. Fortunately, independent developers don't have the same financial obligations that publishers do. The closest thing out there were unofficial sources, like VGChartz, that gathered retail information, but lacked in digital sales data. When we first started working on Dustforce, it was frustrating to not be able to find much data about whether indie game development is a realistic thing to do with your life. This trend has made discussing sales figures an uncomfortable topic, akin to talking about your salary. With so many non-hits being made, publishers try to keep sales numbers a trade secret, as the more disappointing figures can be worrisome to investors. Video games have traditionally been a "hits driven" industry - the majority of revenue for a publisher comes from a handful of big commercial successes. Finding game sales data is notoriously hard.
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