From Late-Night Game Hobbyist to Successful Studio Owner, with Colm Larkin

Jordan: 00:00

Welcome to Playmakers, the game industry podcast. Whether you work at a studio, publisher, service provider, or startup, this is the podcast that will give you the information and entertainment you need to succeed in the game industry. Who am I? Just your friendly neighborhood veteran designer and producer, Jordan Blackman. In each episode of Playmakers, I uncover insights, tactics, and know-how from a wide range of game industry luminaries. My goal is to help you win the game of making games. Are you ready? Then let's begin.

Welcome to another episode of Playmakers Podcast. I'm your host, Jordan Blackman, and this week we have a great interview with the one and only Colm Larkin. Before I dive into the interview, I just want to remind you that if you enjoy what we do on the show, if you love learning about the game industry from people in the trenches making things happen, then subscribe! And if you know someone who should be listening, go ahead and share the show with them.

Now, on to Colm Larkin. Colm is a full-time programmer and game designer with deep roots in board gaming. What’s amazing about him is his journey—starting out solo and transitioning to a partnership, then building a full team. He went from working in a totally different field to becoming a full-time game developer and studio owner. His journey is one many dream of but get stuck along the way. Colm has made it to the other side.

He’s worked on two titles so far with his studio, Gambrinous: Guild of Dungeoneering, which you can play on a bunch of platforms (I played it on iPad), and Cardpocalypse, which was an early Apple Arcade title. You can find that across multiple platforms as well. Both of these games have a distinct sense of style, charm, and design. You can really sense his board gaming background in his work.

In this episode, we talk about how Colm made the transition from dreamer to part-time to full-time studio owner. We dive into the psychological hurdles like perfectionism, what helped him get that first game off the ground, and how he knew when it was time to expand his team. You’ll hear about going from solo to a partnership and then to managing a larger team, the role of art and animation, and how to manage those as a small studio. Colm also shares advice on working with publishers. This is a fantastic episode for indie game developers or anyone looking to make the leap into full-time game development. Now, let’s get into it—my interview with Colm Larkin.

Colm, welcome to Playmakers.

Colm: 03:43

Thanks so much for having me, Jordan.

Jordan: 03:44

It’s great to have you. You know, we were just talking before we started recording about how long we've been planning this.

Colm: 03:50

Several years.

Jordan: 03:51

Years! So, that's on me, of course.

Colm: 03:53

Many years, actually. In the interim between our first chat and now recording, we made a whole new project from scratch, released it, and moved on to something else.

Jordan 4:01

Right! On a whole new platform that didn’t even exist back then.

Colm: 04:03

Exactly. Yeah, quite a lot has changed.

Jordan: 04:06

Well, thanks for your patience. I’m glad to have you here. You know, we were originally connected through Brenda Romero, who was really impressed by your work, as am I. And it’s great to finally dive in with you.

Colm 4:18

Yeah, she’s a local out here now. She's based in Galway.

Jordan: 04:24

Oh, I didn’t know that. And you're in Dublin, so you’re on either side of the island of Ireland.

Colm: 04:30

Exactly.

Jordan: 04:30

Well, I’m going to recruit you to help me get her on the show at some point down the line.

Colm: 04:31

I’ll try my best.

Jordan: 04:33

I wanted to talk about your journey because I think what you’ve accomplished is what so many people aspire to do. You’ve had incredible results, both with the products you’ve made and in terms of building your business. Just to recap for the audience, you started off doing this part-time, right?

Colm: 04:51

That’s right. I was working as a software engineer, not in games, and trying to make games on the side in my free time. That transitioned into giving up my career to go solo, then forming a small team, and now we’re six people working full-time. We’ve been at this level for the last four or five years, but that’s the path over the last seven years.

Jordan: 05:16

That’s really the key thing I’d like to dive into with you—your journey and the steps you took along the way for people who might be in that position you were in six or seven years ago. You have a job, your passion is to make games, you're doing things on the side, but I know how difficult that transition can be.

Colm 5:34

It was really hard. I meet a lot of people at that point—part-time game devs, first-time game devs, hobbyists—those were all labels I would have identified with before making the leap to becoming a full-time game creator.

Jordan: 05:48

Take me back to that time. What were your days like? What was going through your mind when you were just starting out? How were you managing your time?

Colm 5:56

now. In: 2013

Jordan: 06:12

And that's when you started the "One Game a Month" challenge, right?

Colm: 06:16

Yeah, exactly. It was kind of like a self-paced game jam.

Jordan 6:17

It was like a Twitter thing, wasn’t it?

Colm: 06:18

Yeah, it became a little thing for a few years. There was even a meetup here in Dublin where a few people would try to make a game each month. Over that year, I think I made six games—not every month, but most of them were just weekend projects. So it was really like a game jam, with a place to show it afterward. It had a nice combo of a deadline—since that last weekend of the month was usually when I worked on it—and then a place to present it and get feedback. We had a meetup in a pub here in Dublin, and a few people would bring laptops to show these little, janky games. It was impressive what some people made. One of my first prototypes is what eventually became Guild of Dungeoneering. Now, it’s unrecognizable from what I made that weekend, but it had a germ of the idea, like placing tiles to create a dungeon. That process helped me complete things, because for years before that, I hadn’t finished much of anything. I’d even come up with the company name back in 2008, five years before, but I hadn’t managed to finish a project. In 2013, with these one-game-a-month jams, I was more productive in a few weekends than I had been in the previous five years. It energized me.

Jordan: 07:31

So having that community and the deadlines helped you go from “this is something I want to do” to “this is something I’m actually doing.”

Colm 7:40

And it gave me confidence because I had finished things. I created a little personal portfolio of prototypes—none of them groundbreaking—but it showed me that I had an effective way of working.

Jordan: 07:53

Do you think it also helped prepare you for making bigger games? You were learning how to be clever about what it takes to finish a game.

Colm: 08:04

Yeah And cutting things is a key part of that. Game jams are great training for that because you’ve got limited time. I mean, they’re also famously good at simulating the tough parts of game dev, like staying up all weekend. I tried to approach it in a more sustainable way. One game a month was self-paced, so it wasn’t as intense as a weekend-long thing. I’d just spend a Sunday on it, which was much more manageable. But yeah, finishing things on a deadline means you’ve got to cut stuff, and you’ve got to launch. Those are crucial skills, and I’ve done a lot of that since. We’ve launched two professional, for-sale, multi-platform games as a company. Practicing with smaller projects really helps.

Jordan: 08:45

Are there specific things you remember learning during those early projects that you still apply when working on games today?

Colm: 08:54

Definitely. One of the main things is just hacking it together—don’t worry about making it elegant. I’m a programmer by background, but when it comes to game jams, you just need to get something working. It doesn’t matter how scalable or how clean the code is, you just need it to work. That mindset is actually great practice, even for bigger projects, because you end up throwing away a lot of code. You’ll prototype, playtest, and refine things. Almost every game studio scraps a lot of their work. So don’t get too caught up in making it perfect—just make it rough and playable.

Jordan 9:35

That’s great advice. We’ve heard similar things from other guests like Dave Rohrl, who designs casual games, and Bernard François, who specializes in prototyping. They both emphasize the same idea: especially early in the process, you shouldn’t worry too much about perfection. In fact, Dave says they intentionally aim to throw out code, and they’ll only develop on platforms they know won’t be final.

Colm: 09:55

Nice. Yeah, I've heard of people doing like a Pico 8 as a, it's just like really lo-fi kind of prototyping. You can make full-on games in it, but I've heard of people prototyping in that because it's too low fidelity to make their final game. You're forced to throw it away at some point.

Jordan: 10:11

And that's what you're saying, right? Like, don't be elegant at first because you're going to go back anyway.

Colm: 10:16

Yeah. And it gives you that nice feeling of progress instead of, kind of—and programmers are famous for this—endlessly making something that isn't viewable by the player really elegant. Backend code doesn't matter if you don't have a game.

Jordan: 10:31

And mentally, it gets you over the idea of perfectionism. That's the technical version, right? Trying to make it perfect, and then ultimately, it's perfect by never existing.

Colm: 10:41

Yeah. And it gets you over that real fear of, "Well, this isn't good enough." 'Cause it's definitely, you're making—especially at like a game jam level, but also as a first-time creator trying to make that first professional game—it's not good enough when you look at what you're up against. Triple-A level has thousands of people working on it, and the really polished indies have 20 to 50 people working on it for several years. And it's just probably you by yourself or with a couple of people working on your first project. Let alone those bigger teams who have iterated and done many games.

So you will mentally compare yourself to them, and doing janky projects and sharing them—this is something I often talk about as well—forcing yourself to get people to play them or just posting them online gets you over that fear of comparing. Because, sure, you don’t compare, but very quickly, if you force yourself to do that, you realize it doesn’t matter, and you get really good feedback. It’s very energizing.

Jordan: 11:31

It makes sense. And it also seems like it would encourage you to focus on, like, what's the big hook? What can I do that’s super unique? Because you’re going to have to hang the experience on that.

Colm: 11:42

Yeah. And that’s a really good thing to focus on. You know, a small-time hobbyist creator can’t compete on perfect graphics. You probably can’t compete on content size of game, or hard-to-make features like hundreds of people playing in an online MMO. You're totally right. You need to go for something smaller and look for something novel. But also, you're given that freedom. You can make something really crazy and weird that wouldn’t work for a bigger team.

Jordan: 12:08

Totally. Now, here you are, you’re making these small games, you’re learning some skills, you’re learning how to finish. And something in that experience must have inspired you to make this real. Where were you between—you’re working on your job, you’re doing this—how did you make that transition to the next step from there?

Colm: 12:26

In the course of ten months, I'd made six little projects. And that gave me some confidence. I actually went back to the first one and said, this one, I quite liked, I'm going to spend, I remember at the time thinking three more months on it and wrap it up and like, try and release it as a very small game.

Jordan: 12:41

And very quickly I started kind of developing in the open. I had a kind of a thread on the site called TIGSource.

Colm: 12:49

Oh, I remember TIGSource, Derek Yu.

Jordan: 12:50

Yeah.

Colm: 12:50

Exactly. And so that's Spelunky, right? Phil Fish's Fez, Minecraft, and Papers, Please all had this kind of thread on there, and I'd read their threads where they would just kind of share playable builds of their game as they made them and talk about their process as well.

The Papers, Please one is especially good because it just jumps into such technical kind of—it’s really cool. I started doing that with my little game, Guild of Dungeoneering, and I'd just share kind of my idea. And I always had a playable prototype because I was building in Flash. So I basically had an embeddable version of the game. Kind of everything I'd made so far was playable on my website. So I'd ask people for feedback there. And, I'd share on Twitter, I'd share in our local groups here in Ireland, and I'd bring my little build along to our meetups. So I started being very open about what I was creating and asking for feedback early on.

s just, at the time—this is: 2013

Jordan: 14:18

This was on Humble Bundle?

Colm: 14:20

Yeah, so really it was just on my website. So right there where you could play the Flash version of the game at the time, right below it was just like a little widget. Yeah, it was provided by Humble.

Jordan: 14:31

I didn't realize that they offered that. Okay.

Colm: 14:33

Yeah, there are ways to take payments and stuff, but that was just a really easy one, and it was game-related, so it kind of took away a pain point.

Jordan: 14:40

You know, I'm noticing this trend in your story where you've used a lot of kind of social, existing social constructs, whether it's the one game a month, or, TIGSource threads or this, make a dollar thing.

Colm: 14:54

I don't know. Maybe I was looking for reasons to kind of kick my ass a little bit to force me to do things. So, taking money was a good example. It forced me to make a better webpage with some marketing copy on it because I had to sell. So I had to write the little blurb, like, well, what is this game? It's not just this little hosted, like, really quite low-end content demo at the time. So it forced me to write it, and that's good, because you practice that, and you need that.

And later on, that meant I was contacting press at some point later, like six months later, I already had my blurb ready. So yeah, jumping in and trying and doing things like that kind of forced me to do some of the work that sometimes is less fun early on when you're, when you're a hobbyist, you have to do everything yourself.

Jordan: 15:35

I don't know if it was the case for you, but I think for a lot of people who are trying to do this sort of thing, when you're alone, it's really hard to remember that it's real or it's only real if you think it's real, you know? So it's sort of ephemeral. And I can imagine that these sorts of constructs help keep it real.

Colm: 15:52

Definitely. Yeah. And other people talking about it. So, things like one game a month, there's a sense of community. Yeah, you're not just alone, in your bedroom or something. And it definitely, definitely helps anchor it a bit.

Jordan: 16:03

When you were making this first sale, had you left your job or were you still working full time?

Colm: 16:09

I was still working full time. So this was still, at the time I was essentially devoting my Sundays to it. That was actually really hard. So later on when I left my job, my wife and I got loads of our family time back. You know, not only did I go from one day, nominally Sunday, to up to, five days a week working on my project, we actually got our full weekend back together.

You know, from a family point of view, that was massive for us and it was actually a big relief. So I didn't feel like I was being pulled in lots of different ways and, not doing enough for all the different things in my life. And I guess I was lucky that I was able to give up, a paying job and essentially work unpaid for a time. You know, being supported by my wife at the time, and then I got into an Irish government kind of scheme, kind of like an entrepreneurship training scheme that came with a stipend for six months. That really helped bridge kind of that time when I gave up my engineering job.

Jordan: 17:00

I'm curious if there was a goal you set for yourself, like, "Oh, I will, make this transition full time when X, Y, or Z," or how, how did you know?

Colm: 17:09

Yeah, I didn't really know, but we were expecting our first baby. That was the big kind of, "Oh, baby's coming in six months. There's no way I could, do a risk like this then." And probably I could get this game finished in six months full time, thinking about me, working one day a week. That wasn't quite true.

It took maybe a year and a half and it ended up with five people working on it for the last six months. So it was pretty far from true for six months by myself. But yeah, that was the big impetus—starting a family and feeling like I wouldn't be able to make the risky jump into trying to start my own project.

Jordan: 17:44

Sort of a now or never moment.

Colm: 17:45

Yeah. And when I did that entrepreneurship scheme, there were several people in the same position just starting families, and it was kind of like, "I better go for this now then because otherwise it's just gonna be too hard."

Jordan: 17:58

Yeah. Are there any other kind of major challenges in this early phase before we kind of turn to finishing the game, kind of the publishing experience, some of those elements?

Colm: 18:08

Definitely finding the time was a huge challenge for me, and being able to dedicate more time was fantastic. I know that's not possible in every case. Keeping your scope down, like trying to make it almost laughably simple, you know. I started that project thinking I could put this together in three months. That's the right kind of scope. It may not be your dream project, and that's okay. It's a first project. It's something cool. You want it to be novel and interesting, something you're excited about, but it doesn't need to be the game you've always dreamed of.

Jordan: 18:38

Yeah, I think a lot of times if what's good about your idea is that it's huge, it's not that great of an idea. There's something wrong with the idea.

Colm: 18:45

That's a big red flag for, kind of creating at this level as well.

Jordan: 18:49

Totally. So was there anything you did to find the time? I mean, the thing I've noticed about time is that the lack of time is real, but also we can distract ourselves with so many things. There's so much time that we think we need to spend on stuff that is actually available.

Colm: 19:04

This is fast-forwarding a little bit, but the thing that helped me the most in actually being productive was having less time available. When I became a parent, family time and time with my kids became really important and non-negotiable. It’s different. Before that, you can kind of work any hours you want. But once I was, being a parent, and as the kids got older, I had to pay more attention—pick kids up from school, drop them off, things like that.

Actually, for a time, I was working a four-day week, and one day a week on Mondays was like my parenting day. Having less time for my business, my game creation, actually helped me so much to focus. It was much harder to put things off and procrastinate. And it was also very easy to work on things that weren't that useful.

Colm: 19:48

So I was much more focused when I had less time available. You know, I’d be thinking, it’d be like Thursday, and I’d be thinking, "Oh, I need to do this because if I don’t do it, I don’t work on Mondays. It’s not going to be ready till Tuesday or Wednesday." And I told someone I’d have it ready this weekend—something like that.

Jordan: 20:02

It's basically creating a constant stream of deadlines. There's an expression I heard, which is something like, "If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person."

Colm: 20:13

Yeah, that's very true.

Jordan: 20:14

Or, "If you want something to get done, give it to a busy person." There you go.

Colm: 20:17

Yeah. And I think maybe it's a way of tricking myself into being that kind of person. Because I think naturally I’m not. So, yeah, like deadlines, even fake deadlines, help me a lot.

Jordan: 20:26

So we'll probably just have a couple of kids, just for the extra deadlines.

Colm: 20:29

Yeah, they are not flexible about times, which is good.

Jordan: 20:36

I've heard that. Okay, so where do you want to go next in your journey? I mean, I'm imagining there was the phase of realizing, okay, I need to expand this team. This isn’t going to be possible just by myself. What was that like?

Colm: 20:47

Yeah. So quite early on, when I said, "Okay, I’m going to make this a real game, I’m going to sell it for money," and I put up that kind of pre-order widget. At the time, I didn’t believe anyone would buy it until it was more close to being a real game. But, surprisingly, people did. At that time, I partnered with an artist. A guy, in the end, I know quite well—Fred, who’s now a partner in Gamera’s. And that changed everything in terms of the perceived quality of the game we were making.

Before that, I was using just free art I had found, always with the intention of finding an artist and creating original art. But when I teamed up with Fred, and we ended up with the hand-drawn style for Guild of Dungeoneering, which is quite iconic in the end, and quite unusual, and stands out—that really, really helped us. And it just matches so well with the style of the game. So, you're drawing pretend maps on square graph paper, and it really helped with the vibe. Even a single screenshot of Guild of Dungeoneering can evoke nostalgia for anyone who's ever drawn D&D maps on square paper.

That was my first partnership, and it changed everything. Now, both of us were working part-time at that time, and Fred was still part-time when the game launched. He was based in Australia, and I was here in Dublin. I would chat to him about what art needs I had, and then he'd go off and at some point dump a big pile of art on me.

And then I'd be like, "This is great. Next time I'm working, I'm going to work through some of this." But I’d kind of have this backlog of art, and I’d be slowly working it into my prototype. The fact that we were both part-time worked fine because there was never any point where we needed to work on the same thing or iterate that way.

Jordan: 22:28

So there's a lot in there. I mean, I do want to just highlight the point you made about the importance of art. I think—and I'm curious about your thoughts on this—but I think especially for any new brand, particularly with a smaller budget, having some unique style, some truly unique original look is the easiest way to really get attention, stand out, and get noticed. I've seen it time and time again, especially with games that have lower development budgets, that that becomes the thing people notice.

Colm: 22:59

And there is this massive amount of unused art styles available in the art world that can inspire you, and you can make something no one’s ever even really seen before in a game. And that’s what I would encourage anyone to try. Try and look for something new.

Jordan: 23:15

I remember how unique Limbo looked when it first came out.

Colm: 23:18

Yeah. Or Superhot.

Jordan: 23:20

What’s that, the shooter one that looked like an old cartoon, like a Disney cartoon? Like a classic Disney cartoon?

Colm: 23:25

Cuphead. Cuphead.

Jordan: 23:26

Yeah.

Colm: 23:26

Yeah, I think that was extremely labor-intensive, but it certainly stood out.

Jordan: 23:31

Limbo too. I think Limbo ended up being a pretty expensive game actually to build.

Colm: 23:35

I often think about this when we’re kind of trying to figure out the art direction for a new project—is, are we being different enough? So having a unique style, visually, I think is a huge, huge bonus for indie games that aren’t competing with high-fidelity graphics.

Jordan: 23:52

I mean, that is something that attracted me to Cardpocalypse, back in the early days of Apple Arcade. It stood out to me.

Colm: 23:58

That’s kind of going into like 90s cartoons. They’re like oversaturated and almost like Garbage Pail Kids monster design. We try, and it’s a game set in the nineties, so we went really hard on that.

Jordan: 24:09

Do you remember the cartoon Doug?

Colm: 24:11

I don’t know that one.

Jordan: 24:13

I think that’s what it was called. It reminded me a bit of a cartoon I remember from the nineties. I’ll figure it out. I’ll send it to you after the show.

Colm: 24:16

I’d love to see that. Yeah. We get fans now and again kind of sending us stuff saying, "Hey, this character." So like Wolfgang is one of the characters in Cardpocalypse, one of the dogs. They’d say, "Hey, was this based on this specific variation of this anime I like?" You know, one of the characters had this alternate armor that looks like it, and we were like, "Never heard of it." But when we had a look at it, we were like, "Yeah, it is a bit like that."

And you know why? Because they’re both like extremely 90s looks. Yeah. So it’s kind of cool to hear when you’re kind of plumbing the same space. Those cartoons were all plumbing that same space at the time as well, so of course.

Jordan: 24:49

Right. And it’s sort of our memory of these 90s cartoons is sort of abstracted. So I think it’s easy to think something looks like that, even if it doesn’t look that much like it. Do you know what I mean

Colm: 25:00

Definitely. Yeah. And we, we were trying to tap into that. We’re doing like the loud voiceover, kind of rocky music. We did it quite well with Cardpocalypse to kind of capture that feeling without it needing to be, for example, a fully animated cartoon. That’s another thing actually that I think is good advice. It’s kind of like Guild of Dungeoneering, I think, is a good example of this. It feels very alive. There’s actually no real animation in the game. So, you draw out little maps on a grid, and you put down little kind of cardboard tokens. That’s kind of what they look like.

And they move, and they respond and solve quite nicely. But none of them have animation. It’s not like an animated frame-by-frame animation of a monster fighting you. But because we’ve styled it like a pretend board game, that’s totally fine. As a game maker at our level, I absolutely love when the game itself lets you cheat that way.

Jordan: 25:47

Right, so you’ve picked a sort of metaphor. Is that what you mean?

Colm: 25:50

Yeah, like the stylistic choices meant we had a far easier time. You know, we didn’t have to animate our whole game. There’s basically no animation in Guild of Dungeoneering.

Jordan: 26:00

Right, and why should it be? Because it’s a drawing. Right? It looks—the style is as a drawing.

Colm: 26:05

Yeah, and your character looks like a little cardboard token on a board game. And so does the monster. So, they kind of move at each other, and some icons fly, but they never animate. That meant it was possible, early on for two people part-time to actually kind of hack it together.

Jordan: 26:19

Yeah, that’s a great insight. Because I think folks who are listening and are maybe considering doing something like this can try to think of what’s their version of that?

Colm: 26:30

Yeah, that might lead them to something novel that someone hasn’t tried before. So, you know, limitations can be good for that. Well, what if we don’t have X? There’s no monsters, or there’s no this. What if it was just walking around a forest? So, like limitations can help you there as well.

Jordan: 26:47

So let’s talk a little bit about the publishing side as you’re kind of getting ready to finish this. It sounds like, how many had you sold as you’re closing in?

Colm: 26:55

Let’s say in the first six months of me having that site up and a playable version of the game, I ended up selling a few hundred copies. Well, and let’s say at 10 a go, that’s a few thousand dollars. So, that’s not even a month or two of real salary of what I’d given up. But at the same time, it was huge because this was a really janky demo and no release date in sight, no real promises made—just, yeah, I’ll give you a copy of the game whenever I finish it. So it was incredibly motivating for me. And again, we talked about this before about deadlines. For me, it was like, well, I owe these people a game now.

Jordan: 27:26

Right. And this was before early access. So people weren’t accustomed to buying like that.

Colm: 27:32

Yeah, I think it was Minecraft very early on. Minecraft was free, and what we now know as Minecraft was called survival mode. And you got that if you basically sent 10 over. That was kind of why I was thinking, well, if you ask for money, it's suddenly more serious. And when people put down money, then they were serious. And I felt like, well, I need to create a real game here.

Jordan: 27:53

Yeah. Okay. So how did that transition to changes in your development or publishing? Like as you're getting ready to launch, what started to happen?

Colm: 28:02

Steam Greenlight started around that time when I started that project. So about maybe a year into Steam Greenlight, I put the game up on Greenlight and got greenlit. Kind of around the time they started really increasing the amount of games they were putting through Greenlight. So we got approved for Steam, maybe a year before we launched. And that felt good because at the time, I was focused on self-publishing and, "Here’s our game. Now we're allowed to release it on Steam," which is kind of laughable to think about now. But at the time, 2013, 2014—just before that, let’s say 2012—it was incredibly hard. You weren’t allowed to release your game on Steam, and it was this huge marketplace. It made a huge difference then when that opened up.

So I'd managed that kind of on the back of just, I guess, that we had polished our marketing a bit and convinced that what we were making was worthwhile enough for people to actually pre-order. We put together a pretty good presentation, got through Greenlight—though it was speeding up at the time, it was definitely easier. And I kind of moved from that to trying to get into free spaces at big game shows like PAX, but I didn’t get into any. Most of those shows would have a few little free booths that they’d give to promising indies, and I submitted for a few that summer right after we got greenlit, kind of didn’t get into any, and I was like, "Hmm, okay, I kind of think I need to be there to get to the next level of reaching more people."

Jordan: 29:22

PAX is perfect for you.

Colm: 29:23

Yeah, so that’s when I reached out to publishers. So up until that point, I was like, "Yeah, we can bootstrap this, and you can get your game on Steam, but can you reach an audience?" I don’t know. I went shopping around for publishers and signed with Versus Evil. At the time, they had essentially just published The Banner Saga, which was a big hit, but otherwise were just starting out their own journey as a publisher.

gotiation was like the end of: 2014

Jordan: 30:02

How did you zero in on them or ultimately...

Colm: 30:06

Before I started looking, probably the only similar type of publisher I had heard about was Devolver. But my usual approach is to kind of shop around and approach everyone. So I'd also recommend people do this when they're looking for a job, for example—go on lots of interviews, because it's good practice.

And so I did the same, I approached every single person. It was in that kind of, like, not Sony, but like people publishing indie games. And I ended up pitching, at the time I think, basically everyone that existed. Got far along with a couple and ended up going with VS Evil. But when I started the process, I'd never even heard of them.

It was kind of like, "Find all the companies that do this, look what games they're doing, and then just pitch them." And the nice thing was, I had my pitch ready because I had a playable version of the game that I could just link to them. I had a video I'd made before. I had, it had nice art.

I had my marketing blurb because I'd done Steam Greenlight and I’d done my website to sell it. And I had sales numbers. I was like, "Look, 200 people have bought it already." And I had some press already. So doing all that hard work for the previous year, year and a half, had given me this nice little pile of stuff to use for this kind of business deal, basically. So that really helped me.

Jordan: 31:17

I think that's a really important takeaway—that even if you're planning to work with a publisher early on, start developing these assets because they’re only going to help you in those deals.

Colm: 31:28

Definitely. And you need to make their job easy. They need to see why anyone should care about the game you're making. And so, yeah. If you're taking pre-orders or if you're just looking for interest on it, like any kind of open development, like if you've made videos of what you've made and there's enough people viewing them or commenting on them, that’s your community that you're building up. And that's a really, really good sign if you then want to shop around to publishers. You need to point at all these things, say, "Look, there are people who are into this, even though it's only this basic."

Jordan: 31:57

Are there some other things for, let's say there are people out there listening who have a product, are somewhere between alpha and release, and are kind of in this process—things that you wish you had known or would want to share with them now that you've been through it a couple of times?

Colm: 32:16

Probably the hardest thing—and I don’t know a way to make this better—but if you do go to a publisher, they want to know when your game will be ready. And I don’t know of anyone who’s gotten this right. Games are very hard to estimate because there's so much guesswork in the game design itself.

I imagine even people who are making a very similar sequel to a game they previously made get this wrong because there’s still always a lot of experimentation. You build something, try it, possibly scrap it, build something else. If I had some magic time machine to tell me how long it would take us to make the game, that would certainly have helped me, but that’s not realistic. That’s not possible.

Advice I always pass on, some of which we've already talked about, is don’t be afraid to share what you're working on with people. It can be very tempting to feel like your idea is too precious to share, and I think that's a mistake, particularly for a first-time creator. You should actually share that before you start making it, and you can do that in more limited ways, like going to local game dev meetups is a really great way to get feedback on your idea.

Because these are people who do this all the time. I remember for Guild of Dungeoneering, I tweeted the idea and I think it was something like, "An RPG where you don't control your hero, you build a map around them." And someone tweeted back saying, "Oh, that sounds cool. What game is that?" You know, I was like, "Oh, I haven't made it yet. It's just my idea." That alone tells you, okay, maybe that is worth pursuing. It’s feedback.

Jordan: 33:38

And I, I think those things are connected.

Colm: 33:39

Yeah. So getting used to getting feedback.

Jordan: 33:41

I think there's a connection between people underestimating the amount of work to produce and overestimating the value of the idea and wanting to hold it tight.

Colm: 33:50

Yeah, it's true. And I understand why you can end up like that as well, because before you actually go through the hard work of making, the slog of execution of an idea. The idea is precious because it's the thing that's making you want to do that slog. You know, and I talked about this earlier, your idea, particularly the bare bones prototype version of that idea, does not match up with other people's finished creations. So you're embarrassed of your idea or your prototype. That's completely natural. And you have to force yourself to get over that.

Jordan: 34:20

Colm, I think we could do, I feel like we are halfway through what I would like to talk to you about because I think there's a lot to say about Apple Arcade and your second release. And I think that’d be very interesting, but I would love to just use our last few minutes in really whatever way you think is most useful for the audience or if there's anything you want to share. And then, we’ll get this out and then maybe, if you're interested, we could do it again and kind of do what I feel like is the second half of your story that we just weren't able to get to.

Colm: 34:48

Yeah, no worries. We were really focused on the early stuff, but it is really interesting. And I think there are a lot of people in the same space that I was back then. I think it is interesting that in our follow-up project, Cardpocalypse, we actually hired extra people and we started with five people full time, which for me at the time was a lot.

A big team, and then we worked in secret. So it was really different from what I'd done with Guild of Dungeoneering, which was me solo part-time and sharing everything, like oversharing. We worked on the game for nine months before we announced it—five people full time. That time in person months, that might be the entire development time of Guild of Dungeoneering, getting from idea to release. And it was, it's the idea that once you get a certain level of following or fan base, we didn’t want to go back to kind of the really janky homemade first prototype approach.

I've seen other people do it. That time when we were working in secret was actually quite frustrating for me because I actually prefer being open about projects.

You know, I like going on Twitter and sharing like a hilarious bug in our game or some weird silly thing I've found. But if you're working in secret because you're trying to make a bigger launch, like make a reveal or an announcement, which has value, it's kind of a frustrating way of working for me.

So I'm actually doing that right now. We have an announcement two days after we record this, probably by the time this is out, it'll be done. I'm really looking forward to it because it will be back to, well, now I can just... go back to oversharing, which I love doing.

Jordan: 36:20

That'll be great for the next time we chat.

Colm: 36:22

Yeah, yeah, definitely. And it's kind of back to my personality. I think it's similar for a lot of creators — those little bits of feedback are encouragement points. You are working on something that somebody may care about, and that's a real fear — that you're making something that everyone will hate. I hear about this in every kind of medium, you know, writers, anyone getting over the hump and actually sharing rough prototypes really helps you get that feedback. You're thinking, yes, someone will care about this. Someone's looking forward to this. That's a really good feeling.

Jordan: 36:55

How did you weigh that up for Cardpocalypse and decide to take that other path?

Colm: 36:59

I guess because we'd gone, we'd worked with the publisher, we'd done a big more traditional launch. You know, we had stopped — for example, as soon as I signed with the publisher, I stopped sharing that playable build. That was their idea, and it did actually mean when we launched, there were people looking forward to where the game was at. So we kind of took from that and went for a more traditional approach where, when we did reveal that it was Cardpocalypse and the look was the Cardpocalypse look, that launched, we had the song, we had cool animation that meant we were showing final-level polish when we started showing it.

Jordan: 37:36

Well, but you're revealing again for the next one, right?

Colm: 37:38

Yeah. And we've been working in secret on it. This is a bit more going back to our roots, so it's going to be fun.

Jordan: 37:43

Very cool. And do you think that the reveal — well, let me ask you this: Did Cardpocalypse reveal as an Apple Arcade title?

Colm: 37:51

No, no, no. So it was more just that Gamberness as a studio was making a new game, and it was called Cardpocalypse and we had a first trailer. No, we weren't allowed to say we were on Apple Arcade until they eventually said it. Apple is a very secretive company. I think they launched almost a hundred games. And everyone was in the same situation — you weren't allowed to say. You weren't allowed to say Apple Arcade was a service because all these games were signed well before it was announced to anyone. And then you weren't allowed to say you were going to be on Apple Arcade until they said it.

And they weren't working with us to make that announcement. They just did it on their own time. So, a very Apple way of doing things. I remember at the time being very excited about Apple Arcade as this possibly novel way of experiencing games. They talked a very big talk around offering a service that was very different to the kind of way you played on mobile at the time. Looking for deeper games, looking for narrative games like ours. I'm not sure they delivered on that in the end. Like, if you look at Apple Arcade games and compare it to the Apple TV originals, and the way they showcase the creators and actors involved, compared to some of the games in arcade — from really, really well-known game creators — they’ve never really showcased that side of it.

Jordan: 39:01

Yeah, well, I would love to get into that. Let’s get into that next time we talk because I’m very interested in Apple Arcade and your experience, and I think there’s a lot there.

Colm: 39:09

Apple Arcade, as a deal for us and for Cardpocalypse, was really good.

Jordan: 39:14

Well, congratulations on everything you’ve accomplished. I think it’s an amazing story, and I think you’re an amazing guy, and I think your games are absolutely incredible. And I can’t wait to find out what you’re announcing next.

Colm: 39:25

Thanks, Jordan. Yeah, it’s fun coming up on six years next month since we launched Guild of Dungeoneering. That’s kind of cool.

Jordan: 39:30

Well, thanks for coming on, and hopefully, we can have you on again soon without three years going between it.

Colm: 39:37

That’s good too — new things to talk about.

Jordan: 39:39

Thanks, Colm. Catch you on the next one.

Colm: 39:41

Thanks, Jordan.

Jordan: 39:52

Another episode of Playmakers Podcast is in the bag, and if you want the show notes with all the links wrapped up with a bow for you, you can find all that at playmakerspodcast.com. That’s playmakerspodcast.com. If you’re interested in giving some feedback on what you’d like to see on future episodes, you can also reach out to me there. In the meantime, if you want to support what we do, the way to do that is to write us a review and subscribe. I will see you on the next episode. We have some great stuff coming your way, so I will catch you then on PlayMakers.