Posted by adamebell on Dec 22, 2024
preface
welcome to my 'adam bell games 2024 year in review' post. this is shaping up to be kinda long, with a little more transparency into my life than i normally share online. thanks for reading it! a quick preface to maybe make me seem like less of a bummer: in sports terms, 2024 was a rebuilding year. i didn't "win many games" but that's because i'm building for a winning season next year. tune in to the 2025 year in revew post to see if that was smart.
by the way if this is your first time visiting comradery, it's like patreon! you can support me monthly here and in return you'll get access to pdfs of every game i've ever made.
adam bell games 2024 year in review
a few days ago, I announced that lockedroomgame.com was officially live as a public playtest. this is the headliner for my year in review post because it's basically all I publicly accomplished* on the year, but it's a really big accomplishment! the site has the full rules of the latest version of the upcoming locked room murder mystery game. it's a really cool website that I spent far too much effort putting together, because the game itself is proably the closest thing i've made so far with "mass appeal" or whatever. so i'm really hoping it pans out. if i'm going to keep making games with any kind of regularity, i basically need it to do well when it hits kickstarter, so i wanted to try the "give the basic version of it out for free while you work on the full polished version" strategy of game release & marketing.
Not releasing any paid games or running kickstarters in 2024 was probably a foolish move, seeing as i haven't had any sort of employment all year. my last official day of work was actually the first day of pax unplugged in december of 2023 - if you saw me at my booth then and thought i seemed a little off it's because my life was radically changing and i wasn't sure how to feel about it**. thankfully, my partner was able to find a job that at least covers our rent not too long after i lost mine, so the unemployment i was facing was a lot less stressful than it could have been.
my plan going into the year was to prepare a finished game that i could crowdfund the moment my unemployment checks stopped coming, July 2024. that was a huge failure because, as it turned out, i was still incredibly burnt out. toasted. zero in the tank creatively, emotionally, socially. one part job shit, one part creative woes, one part weltzschmerz, one part the crushing awareness that doing any activity in 2024 comes with the risk of contracting covid because nobody gives a fuck anymore about it (i don't know why).
so i blasted past July with no finished game in sight. it was a relatively restful time at least. i read a lot of books, and got some good video game time in. i pet my cats and did my chores. the biggest thing that happened was that i went through vision therapy. i started in april and it took me until october to "graduate." i figured out that i had binocular vision dysfunction, which means my eyes never properly learned to work together***. vision therapy was a series of looking through funky lenses and 3d glasses to basically put my eyes through a workout until they learned how to cooperate. it's super neat and it has genuinely improved my life, but it was also pretty tiring!
around October i started to feel like a creative human again. good lord did that take a long time, but i'm glad it finally happened. i started refinining the locked room murder mystery game which led to the version you can play today. when i decided that the locked room was going to be a board game, i started work again on Uneasy Lies the Head 2e to run for zine quest. i also started trying to get my "business" together by revamping my website and putting together a retailer catalog so i can maybe actually start selling games at a quantity that can pay my rent. i genuinely don't know if it's possible! and that makes me pretty nervous and fills me with some of the most conflicting feelings that i can imagine.
i can look at my game design "career" from three lenses and get three very different pictures. through a creative lens, it's been great. i love doing game design and i'm pretty damn good at it. when i finish a project, i'm proud of it, i'm full of confidence that i've made a good game, i killed that shit. and that's backed up any time i hear feedback from people who engage with any given game of mine. people who play or read my games are pretty unanimous in letting me know that they're good games.
through the lens of "i'm just a guy selling his silly little games" aka the hobbyist lens, i'm also killing it. i don't have specific numbers because i'm a fucking idiot, but through the years i've sold at least 500 copies**** of each of my four "flagship" games (no stone unturned, grasping nettles, legend has it, my brain is a stick of butter). that's so many!! most of those sales came from their respective kickstarters or at conventions, but it's really cool to think about how many copies of the things i've made are out there.
through the final lens, the business lens, i'm total shit. i probably don't have what it takes to be a business man. i hate marketing, i think advertising is violence, i just want my work to stand on its own damn legs and be recognized enough that i can pay my bills off of it. that's not feasible! it's constant labor to get new people to engage with your work, and i completely stopped doing any of that in late 2022 because my day job woes took over my life. my games don't seem to have escaped the containment of my little corner of the indie rpg scene, so there's only a very slow trickle of new people finding out about them.
i have ideas about what i can be doing better and will continue into 2025 trying to do so. if you have any ideas for me, please do reach out! i'm open to literally any unsolicited advice you might have. i'd be the most open to hearing a thousand renditions of something like "hey buddy your games are ass and people are just humoring you" because then it'd be easy to get out of this whole thing. unfortunately i doubt that will happen; like i said in the paragraph about the creative lens, i make some good shit.
i'm not going to sit here and bemoan myself about being bad at business too much because it's a classic case of "indie guy needs to wear a billion hats to succeed." if you're reading this you're probably a game designer too and know it all too well. but let's peek at some numbers: in 2024 i made about 4500 dollars on games. this number is both higher than i expected when i sat down to pull it all together and about 10-15x lower than it needs to be if i want to succeed. it's a great number for lens number 2 -- if this was beer and hobby money i'd be doing great! but we're talking lens 3 where there are bills and rent i need to pay and 4.5k won't cut it.
around 1500 of that came from sales on my personal website across 58 orders. that's a good start, but it's of course not a living. a non-negligible chunk of that came in spikes when my games were mentioned on skeleton code machine. i made around 800 bucks apiece from itch, IPR, and the local zine fair. yes that's right, the single-day zine fair i tabled at brought in just about as much money as an entire year's sale period on itch.io and IPR. my games sell really well in person because they're lovely and cool and I can get people excited about them, but not as well online for reasons that escape me.
recognizing that, the "correct" business decision to make would be to start tabling at as many conventions and events as i can get my hands on. gen con, pax unplugged, origins, local game cons, and anything else. i'd love to! but there's a catch, and that catch is the continued covid pandemic. i won't get into it much here, but covid is terrible and brain altering and if i catch it there's a decent chance it melts the stick of butter in my skull.
so ideally, i won't have to go to conventions! but less ideally, that means i'll either need a runaway hit kickstarter to break me out of the tiny corner of the indie scene that i'm currently in, or it means i'll need to get involved in some sort of far-reaching distribution network and get into game stores all across the country and world. that second one feels more controllable since runaway kickstarters feel something like a lottery, so that's what i'll be pushing towards.
in the meantime, i'd like to thank you if you've read this far. if you'd like to support me so i can keep making games, you can back me here monthly! i'd appreciate that and it'd let me start posting here more often. you could also buy games from my itch sale or the sale on my web store. you could tell your friends to do the same! and finally, you can join the locked room discord and playtest the game and help me spread the word about it.
cheers,
adam
if you want to discuss this post with me, you can do so on bluesky here.
*i also released two free games on itch - promise the moon and shoot the moon - which are both pretty cool and entirely unrelated! promise the moon is a gmed game about political action on a moon colony that recently went independent. shoot the moon is a game where you play hearts and there's a little extra roleplay element. it's for the below a bad moon jam.
**you see, at the end of last november i was informed that i was being either laid off or fired from my shitty corporate job. whether i was laid off or fired doesn't super matter in the long run because i was thankfully able to collect unemployment for the first half of the year. that was extremely helpful but it also played a little havoc on my ability to do a big games project because every week while filing for unemployment, i had to check a box saying i haven't increased my participation in my side-business. i'm not sure what it really meant, but the implication was that i'd lose my benefits if i started making money on my own. but yeah, i'm not sure if i was fired or laid off because neither my boss nor any of the hr people i talked to would tell me when i asked. i had just come off of a 3-month unpaid leave that i took after finishing a big project that was probably my worst working experience in my adult life and i was completely spent. i figured i could take some time off, get my head on straight, and try to start fresh when i got back. but no, that wasn't an option, because there was no work for me when i got back and after about a week of sitting around i was told there would never be any work for me again. at-will employment is extremely cool.
***to put it simply, i've spent most of my time the last 32 years not looking at stuff beyond a glance because my focusing system was fucked up. it's a condition that actually often presents similar symptoms as adhd, so it would have been great if our beautiful healthcare system would have caught that when i was younger. i can confidently nail down a few things that bvd made me worse at: baseball when i was a kid (i couldn't hit the ball for shit), being on the road (i don't have a driver's license because it makes me uncomfortable; sometimes when i ride my bike i'll zone out - not anymore!) taking notes in class (switching focus points between paper and whiteboard is apparently hard when your eyes don't work right), studying and reading (reading anything that doesn't fully captivate me literally puts me to sleep because my brain has to work overtime to correct the two disparate images coming in from my eyeballs), playing video games (i have slightly better aim now), etc etc etc
****this actually might not be true of no stone unturned, but we'll call it close enough. because the original run of it and grasping nettles were both handmade zines, i have genuinely zero conception of how many i produced.