THE FIRST STEP.

When starting anything, you expect a lot to go wrong. You expect hardships, you expect potholes in the road that so many other people drive down. Especially a game studio.

Obviously, having only started operating in January, Ponderous Studios LLC is still in its infancy. We have a lot of ground to cover, and being such a small team can be challenging because so much of that work is delegated to just a few people. In the beginning it’s all starry-eyed excitement and nonstop energy, and as you’d expect, it kind of dies down over the coming weeks since there’s just such a tall mountain to climb. Knowing what the peak looks like but not being able to see through the clouds is scary, and on top of creating a game with a small team, forming a business has its own challenges as well.

We started off on the macro scale, asking the big questions first. What is the end goal? How do we monitor progress? Is this worth our time? Why are we doing this? What’s for dinner tonight?

All these big questions are easy to answer. The end goal is to make a game that we can publish and give to players to have an experience that they enjoy. That is and should be the reason anyone makes a game.. just to be an interactable piece of art for people to enjoy, and remember. Monitoring progress? Easy, use one of the dozens of online tools that allow you to create a board, share it with people, and assign tasks. Okay, next? Our time is better spent working on something we love than playing TFT for nights on end.. dinner? Well.. what do you want?

We arrived at the end of this macro-session, and we were confident. It’s all digestable and easy to keep in your head, so we were thinking it was pretty smooth sailing from there. Then we started thinking a bit more on each portion of this hypothetical mountain we were about to start climbing. We could see specific locations on the climb and rationalize what our plan-of-action was, but.. what if there’s a crevasse that’s a bit wider than people said when you did your frantic googling? You only brought enough supplies you thought you needed, so then you’re stuck trying to Dude Perfect jump across the gap. Unfortunately, that means you end up turning into a museum exhibit after your body is found preserved in ice 20,000 years later.

Verbose metaphor aside, there were a lot of small details we weren’t able to consider when going through the planning and implementation of our company and our game. When you think about the assignments.. how do you delegate them? Who does what? How long should they take? Wait- how long should this whole thing take? How will we handle version control for builds of the game, storage for those versions, a consistent codebase, find help? It was all just so much to consider and it all fell on us at once after the big questions got answered. A whole web of connecting parts that all felt required to even get started formed, and it was a lot. While it may sound like I’m dooming about it, we enjoyed the challenge. It shouldn’t be easy, and once we had all our ducks in a row, it got kind of easy again. That felt wrong, and we both knew there was something we missed.. if it was as simple as just setting up some infrastructure and some planning, what is stopping everyone from just making games and getting a private chef that can decide dinner for you?

Everyone does.

Google how many people have climbed Mount Everest, now multiply that number by 12.24. That’s roughly how many games are on Steam, and obviously not all of it is competition, but damn! 89,000+ games by the end of 2024 is an insane number, and I’m sure a large portion of those came from the recent years after Greenlight got red-lit (Some time in 2017).

This is a terrifying metric, and something that took me a while to get a hold of. What the hell does someone do in a market that saturated to get noticed? That was the first large hurdle for us to tackle. Before any code was written, before any concepts came to be, we did our research and had to figure out what works, what doesn’t, and why that was the case. I recorded a rant of me rambling aimlessly for fifteen minutes practically screaming at Garrett about Steam store pages and what they were doing to gain attention, but in a shortened TL;DR version:

It’s all about community, and being willing to listen.

People are far more likely to invest their time and their hard-earned dollar bills into something that they feel a part of, and something that they understand. Social outreach and forming a community that feels real is an important aspect of this entire process, and likely one of the most important in my opinion. With the current industry, people are far more passionate about smaller studios making titles that they don’t have to give an arm, a leg, and $70 to play. The visuals aren’t as important as they used to be because eveyone’s seen the hair follicles of John Price’s beard get more and more detailed for six games over a span of the better part of two decades. The game needs soul and it needs to be fun, but more importantly, it needs to have a community. That’s why this site was launched, it’s why we post on social media, and it’s why I am writing today. We’re just normal people who can’t decide what to eat for dinner every night, just like everyone else.

That last bit seemed a bit crass, and that’s a sensitive point that a lot of the studios and developers I’ve seen don’t often pursue. They gather people who care, but then fail to form relationships with them. Allowing people to be a part of development instead of just developing and hoping they love it is a crucial distinction. Take, for example, the Hollow Knight community (Silksong is dropping this year I swear). The Silksong subreddit is a battleground of people farming karma off taking anything and everything the developers out of context. The game (for worse, there’s no better here) hasn’t even been released yet and there’s a subreddit with over 100,000 people on it. The devs enjoyed interacting with their audience and took a lot of important feedback to heart for the development Hollow Knight, and that paid off. Obviously, their recent PR is a bit rough after promising a game a handful of times and not delivering, but that’s not the point. They knew the most important detail: if someone out there wants to support my passion project when there’s no pressure or FOMO riding on it, I want to know that person’s name, what they like in games, and what they play. I want them involved, I want their feedback, and I want their invaluable support. It is such an important aspect of growing a community, and, apologies for rambling, but all-in-all, it’s me saying that we want community in our development. It’s monumental in growing a successful product and creating a brand that people recognize, trust, and look forward to giving their time. If you can get that, you can get karma farmers on your subreddit and what’s better than that?

“The most important step a man can take.. It's not the first one, is it? It's the next one. Always the next step, Dalinar.”

This quote from Brandon Sanderson’s phenomenal series The Stormlight Archives is an important philosophical pillar of mine and Garrett’s. When staring up at that climb, pushing yourself to take each next step towards the peak is paramount. You can’t just think of how tired you are, and you can’t just turn around and give up either. Pushing your foot forward, toughing it out, and committing to your passion is difficult, but it’s important. Going up the mountain of developing a game, running a business, and creating a product for people to enjoy and give their time to is hard. That next step is scary to think about, because it could be right into a hole, but to get to even have a “next step”, the first step must be taken. It all starts with an idea, and that’s the easy part. Fantasizing about it with your best friend can be exciting. You can go through dozens of Google Doc’s on different ideas for games over the last seven years, but that first step is what matters most. Give yourself a place to even allow there to be more steps.

If you have an idea for a game, maybe a song, possibly a piece of art- literally anything that you can put your creativity into and leave your mark on this world, do us at Ponderous Studios a favor and take that first step. Create something, and if you want, join our climbing expedition. The peak can and will be different for everyone, and that’s okay. The only thing that matters is that after the first step is taken, all you think about is the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

What this all means.

We’ll be posting blogs on a monthly basis, hoping to get information out of how development is going in a transparent way without coming here to vent about bugs or simply just give word-for-word examples of what step we’re in. If this is something you think you’d be interested in, you can make an account here and sign up for notifications on when these come out. I hope you enjoyed my informal writing, and please know that we do want a community of people that understand our project, share our passion, and want to summit this mountain with us.

If you want to join us in our journey as a studio and as people, feel free to join our Discord and we can get to know each other.

Additionally, we also want to know you and what your climb is all about, so if you’re down, tell us about it. We also need dinner ideas.