What IS this game!?

I had the pleasure of dropping in on the Indie Game Academy's stream this morning to talk about CRUFT. It's a cool looking program that Willem is running over there, and I could tell from talking to him that he knows things about games. He had some great advice, and I wish we had crossed paths sooner. Check out their first batch of new developers' projects, which have recently been Kickstarted, here.

While playing, Willem asked a question that I won't get tired of hearing. Actually, it was more of an exclamation: "What IS this game!?". Cruft is quirky. It looks familiar at first: crafting ingredients, recipes... but then things get weird. You're buying stuff on your phone? Your yard is filling up with trash? Are you living out of your van?

The answer to that last question is up to you.

The answer to "What IS this game!?" though, is this: it's a game about exploring a deep tree of craftable stuff, and then, having too much stuff. You're crafting for crafting's sake, to be able to say "I made this". There aren't really other games out there like CRUFT.

Watching Willem grapple with our game and its quirkiness delivered a huge dose of perspective. Like spinach stuck in your teeth, CRUFT puts parts of our collective personalities on display in a way that I couldn't actually see for myself. For example, I would call the game "cozy", because its mechanics are basically no-risk, but Willem saw an almost dystopian undercurrent to it. He's right! I would be lying if I looked around at the collective human situation and said "this is fine". I'm actually relieved to find out that I am incapable of completely suppressing these concerns.

Now that I can see the end of my todo list for version 1.0, it's time to put our Marketing Hats on. Or maybe more accurately, I have to get a marketing hat. There will not be a publisher backing us up on that, not this time. So, I'm gonna be out there (mostly on the internet) talking to anyone who wants to listen about what we're up to. If there's a way for you and I to help each other reach an audience, build our presence, or just make some useful content, drop us a note! We'll figure something out.

~Will