Small Beginnings - CRUFT

I like to make stuff. I order a lot of stuff online. I've been out of the professional game-making loop for months now. Put it all together and you get the inspiration for Go On's first game.

CRUFT is about pulling up to a vacant lot, setting up, and bootstrapping into a new life. You can farm, you can get into manufacturing, you can pan for gold if you like. When you feel like you've done enough you can pack up a few things and drive off to a new life in a new lot.

A $25M budget does not get you as much as it used to.

I've worked on some pretty big games in the last 20 years. Packing it all up to work on an indie game is a pretty big culture shock. There are no arguments about what you are making. There is no art department to wield (except for my wife who graciously spends time diligently sitting at the dining room table learning Aseprite so that we can have super-tiny ducks in the yard). There's no swag, but now that I think of it I should make a few mugs. There is no schedule, but also no paycheck. There are far fewer zoom calls about things that are only tangentially related to the game at best. It's all about the game.

It's fun, but it's scary.

I'm relying on my history making games but also forced to recon with the parts of the process I'm not good at. I'm no artist. I'm a middling audio enthusiast. Writing code is hard. And yet, balancing economies is fun. Writing interesting characters and stories is invigorating. Working through novel gameplay is heaven. So CRUFT also marks a point in time where I'm bootstrapping.

CRUFT is (lemme consult the Miro board) a cozy, incremental, crafter. It has a lot of stuff to buy, sell, and craft. Managing space is important as almost everything you do creates an object called... CRUFT. CRUFT gets in the way and begs the organizational gland in all of us to dispose of it. And yet, some amount of mess is tolerable. I, myself, have a somewhat high tolerance for chaos in the workspace. Playing this game is a bit of a self-troll at times.

Would you like some delicious Corned Beef and Cabbage that has been sitting out in my yard next to the Small Animal Pen in which I raised the Cow from which I butchered the Brisket that I brined to make this delightful meal? Grew the Cabbage in the same yard. Chef's kiss!

There's not a ton of pushback beyond cleaning up the CRUFT all over the place and the sheer amount of stuff you can buy/sell/make. You're always moving forward, until you decide to move on. It's not directionless though. There's tons of stuff to unlock and learn and lots of ways to strategize/optimize how you do things... if you care to.

So here we are, makin' an indie game. I'll do my best to log the journey here as much for myself as for the random passer by. My hope is to get a demo up on Steam early next year and immediately get rich right after when CRUFT enters early access. That is how I have heard this works.

I'll also probably blog a bit about game design in general, as I can't really stop myself from thinking about it.

Thanks for reading,

Matt