But there’s almost a bittersweet tone in his voice as he describes the aftermath of the game. I think I’m designing games to be enjoyed by the masses.”ĭodrill’s initial three-month experiment has been by any measure a success. “I’m not so independent that I feel like, you know, ‘this is a message that I’m trying to tell, and you need to accept it’. That stubbornness comes out in what Dodrill calls his “pedestrian sensibilities”. “I’d definitely say I’m pretty stubborn in my ways.” Working with another person or even opening up a studio may not work for him – mostly because he’s too stubborn.
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I’m just a guy who got lucky.”īut Dodrill says he wouldn’t want that, anyway. Now the game is out, and it’s actually selling, I don’t think myself as an “auteur”. “The best way to do that was to make my own game.
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“I just think of myself as a guy who loves videogames and who wanted to love them more by understanding how they were made.” There is no one else to blame, or to share the victory. Dust is the game Dean wanted to make – if it fails or succeeds, it will fail or succeed on his shoulders. There’s a benefit to working by yourself. If he fell sick during development, there was absolutely no one that could pick up the slack. Although he hired a writer, voice actors and musicians, Dust is very much a one-man band. Unlike them, Dodrill has done almost all of the bulk of the game himself – art and coding. But even he had a team – Jon Blow had programmers.
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But Dodrill’s story shows even independent developers, able to set their own pace and schedule, are no strangers to this. There are thousands of developers who can attest to the problems with crunch time, when studios rocket towards the release of a game and all hands are on deck. “I would be in this weird other world,” he says. Everything was about the game – from dawn to dusk. That’s why I was just working non-stop.”ĭodrill’s crunch was so brutal there were weeks when he didn’t step outside, even to take a short walk. “But that made things harder, because I couldn’t go to bed thinking I would just do something tomorrow, because tomorrow would bring new challenges. I wanted this 10% of my life to be worth it, and I wanted to release a product I was happy with. That was what made it so stressful, trying to make this game. “When I first started talking to Microsoft about the Summer of Arcade, it was made pretty clear that this was not a deadline we could miss. Dodrill spent more and more time refining the art and structure of the game, creating a story and a skeleton for a much larger and ambitious tale.ĭodrill was given some affirmation when he won a title at Microsoft’s annual “Dream Build Play” competition, and was finally given a chance for mainstream success when he was invited to release Dust as part of the company’s Summer of Arcade. The game quickly spiralled into a full-time affair, and a serious one at that. Non-stop emails and trying to keep up some resemblance of a community.” “The first few weeks after the release were still very hectic, and a lot of marketing. Having now released to the world a project on which he has painstakingly worked for years, Dodrill is sleep-deprived and restless.
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It’s a consequence that speaks to the gargantuan task of actually sitting down and creating a game without having a support team behind you – a process that exaggerates the well-known horrors of “crunch” even after the game itself is packed and shipped. It’s sold enough for Dodrill to continue making games, and has received favourable reviews.īut the success has come at a greater price. Dust: An Elysian Tail was released as part of Microsoft’s Summer of Arcade in 2012. Such was Dodrill’s predicament, he barely saw his new daughter in the first few weeks after she was born in the lead-up to the release of the game. He remained indoors for weeks at a time, glued to his desk, all the while working towards a crushing deadline. Two of those years have been in a self-imposed crunch, working days that regularly stretched into 18 hours. The artist and programmer has spent four years creating his first game – Dust: An Elysian Tail - alone.