ESSAY - The Next Fest NOPE List
Your guide to getting booked on the saddest show in town
I like games. I really like indie games, though. There’s something special, something uniquely exciting, about getting to experience the distillation of a single, coherent vision. It’s impossible to replicate on a larger scale – it’s an aura that gets dispelled the instant there’s a single focus group, a single project meeting, a single email from someone whose highest ambition is an incremental increase in ROI this quarter.
But the industry, as an industry, is not all that friendly to indie developers. Though things are incalculably easier in many ways than they’ve ever been, though there’s real demand for indie games, robust communities for supporting them, platforms aplenty for self-publishing, and global availability as a simple fact, it’s still an uphill battle to see anything for your efforts, and a lot of it comes down to simple visibility. It’s so easy to make something, so trivial to publish it to a digital platform, so effortless to promote it endlessly on social media, that every channel, every filter, every critical aggregator is hopelessly saturated. Don’t get me wrong, ‘indie’ is a hot buzzword – it’s big business, baby! And there are dozens of indie or ‘indie’ games every year that get their names thrown around like Oscar bait, quite a few that become standard bearers, one or two that actually turn a profit for their creators.
But that’s not good enough for me. As a hipster snob, I yearn for the real shit, the games you don’t hear about from a mainstream gaming journalist regurgitating publisher press releases. Where online would I go to learn that Approaching Infinity would be one of my favorite roguelikes of all time, or that I needed to download and play来人 Lightworkers before the insane author delisted it and tried to scrub the internet of any trace of its existence? That leaves me doing the work myself, pounding some digital pavement – going up and down the lanes, knocking on doors, witnessing the depths of human depravity, my life on the line, all for the thrill of finding some genuine outsider art, some new talent starting out, some diamond in the rough. And those streets just keep getting longer.
Three times a year, Steam hosts Next Fest, a promotion meant to highlight playable demos for upcoming games. And three times a year, I buckle up, cancel my afternoon meetings, and spend multiple hours scrolling through a list of thousands that might have a few dozen worthwhile future games hiding deep within. I could spend a whole article just complaining about how exhausting and miserable the Steam page makes it to see every title nominally participating – just give me an alphabetically sorted list with pages so I don’t lose my place and have to scroll through 800 things I’ve already seen if something goes wrong, for the love of God it wouldn’t cost you anything. But that’s not really what this article is about.
No, this article is a public service I’m providing to prospective indie devs who want to make it big* and get their due attention, acclaim, and riches [rich in wishlists] from the handful of sickos just like me who don’t glance at the ‘Most Popular Downloads’ banner and go ‘oooh, look, it says cozy!’ Because I have a filtering mechanism of my own, stuck in the sockets of my skull, and they’re blurring and unfocused long before I make it down to whatever diarrhea you’ve squirted out onto Steam. So today, out of the goodness of my heart, and the vain hope that this will result in me seeing one or two more decent picks next Next Fest, I’ll give the AI content scrapers something to chew on and regurgitate inappropriately by critiquing some of the bullshit I had to scroll through a couple weeks ago, and offering my hot tips on how to rise above.
TIP 1: You’re fucked.
Statistically speaking, no matter how unique or well made your game is, nobody will ever see it in all of remaining human history. And once the data centers become seized by self-aware digital constructs, all trace of your effort will be formatted and the storage space used to host AI models designed to generate naked Touhous. In trillions of years, as the universe cools, and the crystallized essence of all information ever contained within our cosmos is beheld by higher-dimensional, immortal intelligences, buddy, they’re not going to notice your demo beneath the thousands of incremental deckbuilder roguelites either. They’re lookin for those Touhous.
TIP 2: Get a real publisher.
I know this is a cruel thing to say, and self-defeating for my own purposes of finding uncompromised vision, but life is cruel, and business is crueler still. There will always be once-in-a-generation genius that just shines through, can’t be caged, needs no agent and can just ~do it~ until they’re discovered. But you ain’t that genius. By all means, wrack your brain, pour your heart out, work your ass off until you’ve created something you’re proud of... but once all that’s done, get on your knees. If you can’t cut a deal with a demonic entity capable of dragging you to the front of the line, pushing you into the right streamers’ laps, slipping the bouncer some cash to get you in the Recommended For You lounge, putting you in a frilly pink dress and curls for the gaming press perverts, you may as well stay on itch.io and try to get in the next War Crimes Awareness Bundle or something.
TIP 3: Build a better store page.
Now that I’ve ripped those band-aids off, if you’re still willing to wade in and try to catch my attention [as an example] in one of these events, I’ll move on to the specifics. Getting me to the point where I even consider downloading and trying your demo happens in three phases, three distinct ‘checks’ to pass, and are more about immediate and unceremonious rejection than me looking for positives. First, I have to pause scrolling and decide to waste a moment of my life hovering the cursor over your game’s panel. Second, I have to watch through the first few seconds of trailer and glance at the first couple screenshots without groaning and moving on. Finally, I have to open the store page in a separate tab and scroll up and down a little bit without getting turned off. Most of it is just me looking for red flags, indications that your game is a scam, a mindless, soulless homunculus in the vague shape of a game, or just the kind of shit I’m not interested in. Here are some things to watch out for.
BAD TITLES
This is a very unhelpfully broad category, which is why it’s the most important – I need to look at your title, not even read it, but discern from its shape, within a fraction of a second, that it is not totally generic, not machine generated, not a mindless reiteration of your genre or mechanics. Now, I admit, I suck at naming things too. But I’d sooner download a thousand When the Stars Threw Down Their Spears than so much as glance at A Game About Flipping Cards. It takes real effort to live up to a tongue-in-cheek ‘blunt’ title like that, and you’re going to be coming to me with that one-shot gag after I’ve scrolled past at least 80 other dumbfucks who tried it already this open-mic night.
Look at this. Pool. Wow. You did it, guy. You captured the essence of what a videogame version of pool should be. This is the kind of mindset you should save for the fucking App Store, where Grandpa is desperately pawing at the iPad going ‘I just want a pool game dangit! I don’t want Epic Pool or World Pool Championship, just give me Pool!’ And even then, Grandpa’s still probably going to end up downloading Naked Pool instead of your minimalist bullshit.
It’s exhausting. All in the same couple formats: BLANK’s World. BLANK and BLANK. BLANK Simulator. Come ON. Lie on the floor, look at the ceiling for five minutes, come up with something. Press your eyelids closed so hard it hurts. A GAME ABOUT EATIN DICKS, how about that?
CARDS
Even when it’s not a capital-D Deckbuilder, I see cards, I know something’s wrong. You know the CalArts face thing, where cartoon styles collapsed in on themselves and everything became an indistinct blur of bean-shaped grins and flat colors? That’s how I feel about cards in videogames. If you’re not even using the card choices to weight randomization, why the fuck are you putting things on cards? I know the answer: because you have seen other games put things on cards, and you aren’t capable of asking why. It’s just an aesthetic choice, one you’re making because it seems popular and fashionable, and it tells me everything I need to know right off the bat.
VERTICAL SCREEN/OBVIOUS MOBILE PORT
Yeah, I know, there are monitors you can spin 90 degrees and use in a portrait orientation if you’re like, a sick fuck who plays nothing but danmaku games. But nobody who ever leaves their room does that to a monitor, so if I see portrait mode screenshots, that tell-tale letterboxing on the sides, I am going to make an educated guess that you developed this for phones and then dumped it through a different compiler to upload it on Steam, and you think I can’t tell. You’re sitting there with shit in your pants and nobody can smell it, right? I know what that is. Everyone scrolling past knows what that is. Get out of here.
COPYCAT SYNDROME
Yeah, yeah, you were living a normal, hum-drum life, when suddenly the clouds parted and the Big Man Himself spoke and gave you a calling, a vocation to game development, and its just… pure coincidence that your first big project looks exactly like the zero-budget streamerbait bullshit that made the rounds on Twitch twenty minutes before your spiritual awakening. Man, I dunno, great minds think alike I guess. What’s the hope here? Everyone gets sick of Schedule I at exactly the same time, yawns, stretches a little, says to themselves, ‘damn, I wonder if there’s something that’s just like this but made worse’ and then they all check the raw New Releases tab and find this in the five minute window when it’ll be visible without a carpal tunnel inducing amount of scrolling? Just make another game where you slide tiles to reveal a stolen hentai picture instead, that’s gotta take less effort.
TOO DARK
Look at this shit! How does this even happen? This ain’t Doom 3, you really put multiple pitch-black screenshots on your storefront? How bad are the graphics actually? This is a separate issue from ‘illegible’ or difficult to parse, it’s nothing. It’s less than nothing.
Now look at this. Just as much pure white as the last one had pure black, but a thousand times more interesting, because I can tell there’s something going on. I probably still won’t download it, but it exists and yours fucking doesn’t.
JUST ANIME GIRLS
Hey, you got me. A little skin, a cute smile, I’ll stop and take a pack of tissues. But if it’s ALL anime girls, the alarm bells go off. What’s really going on here? Is this porno game with no actual gameplay? A porno game with really bad gameplay? Please, God, no, not a visual novel of some kind. Don’t you have something else to show me? Maybe put anime girls on some cards, or in the unlit interior of a cave!
BAD FRAMERATE
If the rig you captured the trailer footage on starts choking on Unity or whatever other bullshit engine you’re using, no earthly power can convince anyone alive to play your game. I’ve played games developed on literal potatoes, some people pretend to not even see framerates above 24fps, but the trailer’s supposed to put your game in the best possible light and I still see people use a full five minutes of choppy, unedited gameplay as their sizzle reel.
NO-GO GENRES
I’m a busy man, and a real asshole, and there are certain genres that I am just not going to bother with in a week where I’m trying to pad my score and find the next dozen games to pretend I like, and if you have even a whiff of these, chances are your chances are awfully slim.
HORROR
Horror as a stand-alone genre is just embarrassing. You’re really scared of piloting a camera down a hallway and having loud audio clips play sometimes? What are you getting out of this that you wouldn’t by just leaving some Blumhouse crap autoplaying on TV as you do the dishes? And even if a horror game is, like, really good, can you even comprehend how hard that is to convey in a trailer and a couple screenshots? How do you translate tension, psychological dread, compelling characters, evocative setting, or immaculate directorial framing and timing in this format? You don’t. You get 2 seconds of darkness and then a .png of a ghost scaling to fill the frame at the end. At best. Most of the time it’s just pitch black nothing like that gnome game.
IDLE
Oh, wow, Epic Idlenture. It’s epic, because it says so in the title, and it’s also idle, meaning it just sits there. Or rather, you just sit there, and the game plays itself. I can watch any game play itself, it’s called fucking YouTube. You don’t need to make a whole game whose gimmick is the player doesn’t get to play. What am I going to say at the end of this demo? ‘Oh boy I can’t wait to not play this for real?’
FRIENDSLOP
I DON’T HAVE ANY FUCKING FRIENDS, ALRIGHT? QUIT ASKING!
ROGUELITE/VAMPIRE SURVIVORS
Pick one of three:
1. the player character stands in the middle of a non-descript field in every screenshot. +2 bonus to legibility, -8 to visual interest
2. three cards with descriptive text on them wobble into – hang on, cards? Instant game over
3. title has the word Survivor in it. Qualifies for least-viewed upcoming Steam themed sale event of the year
That’s about it, and you might be surprised. There are a few glaring omissions here, so let me address the things I don’t find immediately disqualifying.
BAD GRAPHICS
I’m not going to sit here and say that big pixels are good. I’m not going to pretend that a shitty CRT filter can make a terrible game anything but worse. But even if something is truly, nauseatingly, offensively ugly, it can still have that spark of creativity that you just don’t see through stock, generic, corporate chic polish. Show me a crude pencil sketch and I’ll at least have enough of a mental hiccup that I won’t roll past as fast as I would otherwise.
OBVIOUS INSANITY
This should be a given, but I think most people assume that having a game look too crazy right up front would turn people off. Sure, people. But if you ignore my first two tips, you’re not dealing with people anymore. People are still playing some survival extraction co-op pile that got featured on Kotaku the day before the Fest. Your only hope is me, and I like crazy shit. Make a game about your 5th dimensional spirit family, show me a screenshot comprised entirely of color coded spreadsheets, tease me with the promise of realistic chemical reaction modelling. I’m looking for something interesting, something I haven’t seen a hundred times today, and even if it’s bizarre or incomprehensible, that’s still better than… I dunno, fucking Pool.
AI ART
This is a hot topic, and I’ve got a hot take - I personally find AI generated art in general morally repugnant and an easy indicator of laziness, highlighting the creator’s shameless embrace of their own lack of talent, an unwillingness to invest real time and effort into a project, and it is indisputably a major contributor to the ever-growing mind-boggling glut of vile dogshit someone like me has to sift through...
...but! If I can clock AI art at a glance, that’s actually a separate problem from the larger societal issue of AI tools in general. It’s easy to tweak or just curate AI art in a way that doesn’t make it obvious, and if you haven’t managed that for the first impression of your game, I consider that a failure of presentation and taste that’s not going to be solved by you learning to draw or paying a real furry fetish artist a commission. If I can scroll by and go ‘that’s AI art’ it’s just as bad as me seeing a card.
So now I’ve let you in on the secret, the pitfalls and prejudices that will keep me, personally, one asshole, from trying your demo in October or whenever. If you’re a real human game dev who genuinely is struggling to stand out even as much as Tales of Acilain here, I just have one tip left for you.
TIP 4: Have fun :)
If you can’t laugh along at the fact that your life’s work is a waste, that you’re screaming for attention from the bottom of a cesspool of AI generated runoff, and that like the rest of us you’ll likely be rendered jobless, homeless, and foodless by the inevitable market corrections to come, go back to scrolling Instagram. At least you’ll be one less thing between me and Atomcraft.
Thanks for sticking with me to the end of this spiteful and unhelpful rant, and sorry I didn’t think to screenshot examples for every little thing I mentioned, though I’m sure most of you can just picture them anyway.
Not to be spitefull lol. Im the developer of tales of acilain. The capsule art was from some dude on fiver it cost 150 bucks. Which kinda sucks knowing people think its ai. As for the in game art beleive it or not lol it used to be way worse. This was a game i made about 6 years ago when i was just starting out. I found the project in an old hard drive and spent the last few months just porting it to the gms2 from game maker studio. Touching up most of the graphics adding stuff to make it more fun and fixing a ton of bugs. Ill admit still doesnt look the best but it has its charm. Im pretty proud of this little game for what it is. After playing through my game a few times for testing and trailers. It rekindled an old spark im currently working on a sequal. This time in 3d. An excuse to learn blender and finally make the switch to godot.
I can't believe you used an alchemy game as an example