Moon Garden Optimizer is now listed on Steam. You can still play the game in browser for free on Itch.io, but the Steam version will be paid and have expanded content.

Moon Garden Optimizer is a puzzle strategy game about growing a garden while conserving water. It’s the only strategy game I’ve seen that lets you undo as much as you like. Wishlist on Steam!

Ahem.

So I’d like to discuss the decision to put the game on Steam, and also sell it for money. Selling out, as it were.

Selling out implies that I’m getting some sort of payout from doing this. Which, maybe yes. But also, maybe no. Listing a game on Steam costs me $100 upfront. If I sell 70 copies at $2 each, that about breaks even, before taxes. I’m not sure I’m reaching that target. But also, the target doesn’t matter.  Red or black, it’s a small sum of money compared to cost of my labor on the project. What I’m saying is, I’m selling my soul for a buck, and I don’t even care about the buck! Worth it because souls don’t exist.

In my completely unbiased opinion, it’s a good game. I played it hundreds of times, and playing the thing has been my favorite part of making it. Obviously it’s pretty niche, and it suffers for having had only a few playtesters, but I think it deserves to be put in front of more people who would enjoy it. So that means putting on Steam. And once it’s on Steam, selling it for a few bucks seems necessary to accurately communicate what kind of game it is.

And if we question that decision? I can have it both ways: there’s still the free version on Itch.

One result of this whole process, is that now I get recommended gamedev content. There are several gamedev subreddits, and more gamedev youtube channels than anyone knows what to do with. I try to avoid them because they’re generally not good and I don’t want to give the algorithm any more bright ideas.

Anyone can see that gamedev communities have a fraught relationship with commercialism. Much of the time, it’s presumed that everyone wants to make a commercial product. Almost all advice is geared towards that goal. And yet, you can tell that a lot of people simply aren’t making something that will be commercially successful. It feels like most game devs are delusional, and it’s a running joke that we all know it.

Even for game devs who are explicitly doing it as a hobby, it kind of feels like we are role-playing as professionals. A sort of cargo cult to capitalism. After all, our role models are ultimately the professionals. It may seem petty to care about player counts, but then what other goals do we have? To make art??

If I may make an analogy to my own game… Moon Garden Optimizer adopts some of the trappings of cozy games; in a literal sense, it’s a farming sim. Farming sims often want players to curate a garden that pleases their own sense of aesthetics. My issue with farming sims is that I’m essentially just rearranging sprites that someone else drew, so the ceiling on my aesthetic pleasure is pretty damn low. So what else is there left to do? If the game allows it, I end up optimizing the garden to achieve in-game goals, like making money or filling out the Museum of Every Plant. I find that… ludonarratively dissonant.

So in Moon Garden Optimizer, you’re given a very clear quantitative goal: conserve water. Narratively, conserving water does not actually matter, it’s said to go to billionaires’ swimming pools. Mechanically, conserving water gives you virtually no rewards. You still do it though, because you’re a robot and someone told you to do it, and anyway what else is there to do on the Moon.  In the process, I find the gardens more aesthetically pleasing than your typical farming sim, because in every garden I see a clever solution to a problem that didn’t need to be solved.

So what I’m saying is, making a product is like a game, and the number of copies you sell is your “score”. That’s what it feels like. But I’m a hobbyist, the score doesn’t actually matter.

You could say I’m well-practiced in the zen of hobby art. I’ve blogged for 18 years with virtually no extrinsic reward. I’ve stopped caring about it for longer than I ever cared about it in the first place. Sure, readers would be nice, but also meh. We know how internet fame treats people. It might be fun to chase that car but I wouldn’t want to catch it.

I recently read a long article by Liz Ryerson, discussing the tension between professional and non-professional indie devs:

developers made up of one, two, or three people are often more likely to be making games in an idiosyncratic and personal mode, more akin to older indie programmer-designers. […] but these developers are in tension with the developers who are trying to start small indie studios in order to make higher production value games so they can procure funding from publishers.

The devs who are aspiring to get publisher money might feel threatened by the non-professionals who are essentially handing out the goods for free. Liz quotes Stephen Murphy as saying:

it turns out it’s the hardest thing in the world to convince aspiring commercial indie devs that freeware is not some kind of monstrous class enemy stealing money directly from their pockets. are you really gonna send a bill to kikiyama [creator of Yume Nikki] for potentially distracting people from your kickstarter for Kingdoms Of Azaluth: Chapter 1?? motherfucker??? it’s like watching graffiti artists use that as a launchpad for a gallery career and then turn around and complain that all these people drawing on walls are devaluing their labour.

Fortunately I have not encountered anyone making this argument.  But it’s one of those things that I think about, it’s the argument made by figments in my brain.  I should probably stop.