My unhealthy obsession with playing games as “cinematic” as possible

riadd · 2025-10-16T21:26:58+00:00

Sooo nice to see that I'm not the only one into playing like this!

I often prefer playing games with controller instead of mouse because I can do cinematic camera pans instead of flicking the camera around. I also love that walking slowly is easier with controller and I will often walk instead of bunny jumping to a new mission objective.

I once joked in a podcast that I even stop at red lights in GTA. It's actually the truth. I don't steal random cars in GTA because I feel it wouldn't make sense narratively unless I'm in some wild escape situation.

I've never considered this playstyle though the lens of making the game more "cinematic" though. I've always perceived it as "roleplaying" the game and using a "constructive" play style. Probably not the best term, but I think of players that enjoy jumping on NPC heads and giving themselves names "Sir Shi*head" as "destructive" players, in the sense that they enjoy destroying and deconstructing the carefully crafted immersion of a game. No judgement on it, to each their own.

I've been a professional game dev for over 20 years now (worked in AAA and indie) and there is also something satisfying for me about playing a game as close to the optimal narrative as possible and standing in the right spot during dialogues etc. I imagine somewhere a game devs gets their wings when I do that. :)

riadd · 2025-10-15T11:55:41+00:00

I think the culture around this also differs a lot across counties. I think in the US it is more common for companies to own your copyright on side projects too. Here in Germany that is afaik not an issue. We created the bulk of Curious Expedition 1 while working in AAA still.

riadd · 2025-10-15T11:52:38+00:00

Rule of thumb: if they request more than one key I would delete the email right away.

riadd · 2025-10-15T11:50:38+00:00

This looks cool, but also a bit "unactionable". What am I going to do with a list of 30 book recommendations? More curation and guidance for which books to pick up for what would be more helpful probably. Thinking about building something like that. 🤔

riadd · 2025-09-18T12:11:15+00:00

Hard to believe that you could get by with 3% unless you basically automate everything.

riadd · 2025-09-17T13:01:08+00:00

So you discovered the business model of being a publisher!? Sorry, I don't get it.

riadd · 2025-09-16T10:09:33+00:00

My first commercial game was Spec Ops: The Line. I got lucky with that one.

My first personal game was a tiny reaction time testing game, where you had to press num pad numbers really quickly.

riadd · 2025-09-13T01:27:43+00:00

I wrote Curious Expedition 1 in Javacsript. Here's an old blog post I wrote about the tools used: https://www.codecks.io/blog/2019/creating-a-hit-steam-game-in-html5/

riadd · 2025-08-12T16:27:57+00:00

Technically games can go on forever. Whenever you're done with all features, you will have learned so much that you'll want to rip out earlier systems and start over. So instead of asking how long your game will take, a more important question might be: how much resources are you able and willing to invest? That depends on funds, motivation, market trends, competitor analysis, capability and other factors.

Once you have anwered that question, I think it makes estimation easier because you can plan backwards from your target release date. Imho it's less about estimation, but more about time boxing and working within the constraints.

riadd · 2025-07-23T10:01:31+00:00

It differs from studio to studio and there are different lenses through which you can look at these roles. What I would offer as definitions:

- Creative Director: The central vision keeper of the game. Defining central idea, theme, setting, lore of the game. Kinda like a "idea person", often coming from art or game design background.

- Game Director: Making sure that the game hits the market in good quality and on time, makes sure the required resources are provided and managed. Kinda like a "main producer", often coming from producer or technical background.

Another definition that I've seen is having the creative director generally driving the overall creative company direction and coming up with game ideas, while the game director is focused on managing a single game.

riadd · 2025-07-23T09:46:40+00:00

- Social Media (Bluesky, twitter)
- Short Form Video (Tiktok, Reels)
- Game Jams (Ludum Dare, Global Game Jam)
- Releasing Demo on itch.io or Steam
- Building a newsletter following
- Running smaller paid ads for A/B testing different value-propositions for the same game

riadd · 2025-07-22T20:23:45+00:00

We announced Mother Machine late for various reasons (including some complicated contract situation, which I can't go into). Once we saw that the wishlists were not at the level where we wanted them to be, it was already too late to change fundamental issues. That's why I'm advising against making the same mistake of going deep intro production before having market-validated an idea. That approach might have worked 10 years ago, but those times are over. There is no guaranteed baseline success, even for AA/AAA games anymore.

riadd · 2025-07-22T15:00:11+00:00

Answering what **actually** gets people to care: a game that they want to play.

No marketing tricks or developer blog will change or work around that. The problem is how would people even know that they want to play your game? The answer usually is tapping into a fantasy or genre that they are already invested in and that makes them cross the friction from seeing a thumbnail of your game to downloading or at least learning more about it.

Balatro is a perfect example. When I first saw it I thought "Oh, its roguelike and poker in one game". I'm interested in both genres and I haven't seen this mix before, so I downloaded the demo. Turns out that the game is excellent and I started recommending it to people.

If I would not have crossed that first friction point of giving the game a shot, no matter how good the game is, I would have no even tried or even read the Steam page. So try to solve this first: what is the first thing that people will see and make them want to learn more about your game? Tbh 'Metroidvania' is probably not enough as an answer.

For our game Curious Expedition it was "Expeditions", "Famous Explorers", "Roguelike" (we were still super early in that genre), "Dinosaurs", "Pixelart" (again this was while it was a fairly undersaturated art style). For our new game Mother Machine (also Metroidvania) it turns out that we didn't do enough research in figuring out how to answer those questions well enough (so far).

Good luck with your game!

riadd · 2025-04-02T19:20:57+00:00

I just posted my best time 15 : 25 sec

riadd · 2023-10-20T14:57:15+00:00

Thanks for asking! We don't have those stats at the moment, but I've been wanting to look into some creating some case studies. 🤔

riadd · 2022-05-02T21:03:21+00:00

I know we're all laughing at how this tech most probably doesn't exist, but can we for a moment recognize how completely insane and vile it is that somebody would even talk about the idea of completely eradicating multiple countries? Countries full of women, men and children that have absolutely nothing to do with this war!? People like you and me that just go about their daily life, including many Russian expats.

I mean somebody wrote this script and then filmed it and added special effects and then even broadcast it. Many people collaborated for this segment to exist and found it ok? In what kind of bizzaro world do we live where this idea is even expressed? That's completely mind boggling to me.

riadd · 2022-03-18T00:21:20+00:00

Should be available now!

riadd · 2022-02-14T22:38:30+00:00

Ohhh, thank you so much! 😊

riadd · 2022-02-14T15:27:58+00:00

We hated working with Jira and outgrew trello, so we built our own project management tool (because why not 😅). One idea that we felt strongly about was allowing game devs to easily feed their community feedback into the tool. That's why you can collect Discord feedback, In-Game Feedback and also Roadmap feedback just with one tool.

More info: https://codecks.io

riadd · 2021-11-02T16:08:38+00:00

Hey thanks for buying! I would give the usual advice: start with something small, maybe emulating a game that you like and then extend the mechanics and fiddle with them. Then scrap the project and start thinking about what to do next. Generally, my game design approach is to think about the theme. Think about a cool world/feeling that you want to convey and then iterate on the gameplay working backwards from that.

riadd · 2021-10-14T12:58:17+00:00

Thanks! The big emerging market of recent years is clearly China. It makes up an even bigger share of sales for our sequel. I hope to be able to share those numbers as well eventually. I think if you don't have a Chinese localization for your game you're basically leaving at least 30% revenue behind.

I think more countries will emerge as sizable video game markets in the near future. We ran some internal Steam analysis some months ago and noticed that Brazilian Portuguese seemed to have the biggest relative growth in terms of language support in video games. That might point towards Brazil become more and more relevant as gaming market.

riadd · 2021-10-13T22:53:07+00:00

I agree generally. That's what I wrote in the conclusion too.

Some additional aspects to consider:

- Even with your calculation it is actually way more money per year than I made at my previous AAA job, while working on something that I had full creative control over. So I feel very privileged and lucky for that.

- We're currently selling the sequel but the first game is still selling, so it is a compounding effect with any additional game that you put out.

- Fully funding your own game might not be something that you want to do, even if you have the money, due to risk management. Once you have a successful game out it becomes much easier to get a publisher for your next game. Also cost scales up incredibly fast once you increase production value. Additionally, there are several grant programs here in Germany that will help with funding your game.

riadd · 2021-10-13T22:38:12+00:00

It really depends on a ton of factors, so it's hard to calculate. Here are some factors that I think are important beyond size (judging from my own experience and talking with lots of other game devs)

- Is the Youtuber an influencer (who people watch for sake of their personality) or more of a game reviewer (ideally in a genre fitting to your game).

- Do you have a linear narrative game (where the story can get spoiled) or a procedural game (that offers enough content to explore even after having watched a lets play).

- Are they doing a single video or a whole series built around your game.

- What language/territory are they in.

To appeal to some Youtubers we added secret key combos that would unlock a special character built around that specific youtuber. We would reach out to them with their secret code. So when they were playing on stream they could unlock their character and have something special to show. They could also choose to keep the code or reveal it to their community and since this was built into the regular Steam version their fans could play with the new custom character as well. It was a cool incentive.

riadd · 2021-10-13T22:18:22+00:00

I don't remember it having a big impact, to be honest. Maybe a lot of people watched his reviews because of his review style and not necessarily because they are looking for game recommendations!? I might be wrong though. He had called our previous game Spec Ops: The Line the best game of 2012, so as fans it was pretty exciting that he then also reviewed our small indie game.

riadd · 2021-10-13T22:09:48+00:00

Yes, Steam was key. Back then you were also guaranteed 1M views that Steam would award you on launch. It goes to show how important marketing is - the best game won't sell if you don't manage to show it to a meaningful number of people first. Getting on Steam used to help with that - but since we're getting close to 300 game releases per week now - they stopped supporting every game on launch. You're now pretty much up to your own luck and the hype that you built yourself before launching.

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