Posted this in the SteamGAF thread.
This is pissing me off. People giving him shit for that trailer instead of reading the tweets that the game is in early stages.
The dev deactivated their Twitter account right after this, FYI.
That's sad to see. A lot of gamers simply don't understand how game development works, he maybe shouldn't of shown it off early you might say but being an indie developer is not that easy and most aren't in a position where they can't not show it off early. It's a twisted conundrum which makes indie game development harder than it should be with elements outside of pure game development.
People saying the early footage didn't look good or rough or something, well of course it does. This is early footage, early gameplay always will look rough but I think the idea was to give a brief awareness of the general direction the project was going rather than sending it off to be judged as if it was a finalized product.
Some will say then don't show a game too early, but indie developers kind of have to show off their games early. Indie devs don't have the marketing that bigger studios have and many have to even struggle for any sort of mainstream attention. You'll hear this over and over as an indie dev, it's tempting to not want to show your work until it's "perfect" but it's been shown time and time against that's a determent to getting your game out there as an indie, you should show your game early as possible to allow a greater period for people to learn about and hopefully get interested in your game, people get more excited about things before they release that they learn about than something they learn about that's "out now." It's just a psychological thing with shoppers and wanting something they can't have, but also it's very rare for a game to get much coverage after release, so you need to be open before release.
But then gamers are honestly full of judgement. And to make matters worse we live in the internet era and there's strange accessibility to game developers than many other fields out there. So people sometimes make things weirdly personal over social media or other things, and don't get me started on people either with malicious intent or going 'rage dramatic' over something. Then there's a lot of armchair game devs who think they know the answer that the developer so obviously doesn't get or simply don't know the first thing or very little about game development or any of the things about game development, and commence to attack you for being some lazydev, or to give them what they want rather than what you want to try to make, or accuse you of this or that or belittle the work you've put into something. Add to that 'drama' groups who will attack anything that doesn't fit into their vision of perfect or whatever, whether it be that your game gets attention with something more depraved like GamerGaters, anti-'SJW' peeps, call to arms for "this gameplay decision I don't like", technical peeps who won't accept less than perfect in their games, among others.
Game development is a tough cookie, making games in itself is hard and already requires you to make a lot of personal sacrifices and can honestly be very fatiguing, and often not even to great earnings or anything like that, so you kind of have to work off of passion. And that passion can be killed off by the recent rise of social incidents from some very vocal and sometimes hostile gamers who try to make these things very personal.
So sometimes it can be tempting just to say, "Fuck it." You either don't get attention but generally nice small community but it makes it hard to make a living off of it, or you get attention and gamers are on your side until you do something that upsets someone for some reason and suddenly they'll turn on you faster than a pack of wolves to try to tear you apart rather than be any sort of constructive unit about it. I know that's not everyone, but it can be tiring, extremely tiring, and then it can simply make it seem like the hard work simply may not be worth it. It's especially hard when you're indie and a sole worker or one of maybe 2-5 people who work on a project because it's a very personal thing and you have more work that cuts into your own personal life quite often, taking a lot of time from you that could be spent doing something else, it doesn't pay great for most and gamers will devalue your games, belittle you for mistakes to getting personally hostile with some groups, and often for little money in the end for so much of your time, effort, sacrifice, etc., and sometimes over things that are simply just silly like this, "IE an early game still years off looks rough, what a surprise!". It basically requires you to stay passionate, and if that passion dies it's very easy to just want to quit.
