Lessons From the Vault of Obscure Mac Games: What Pillars of Garendall Can Teach Us About Starting Over
It’s an RPG over 20 years old that’s still enjoyable to play though it’s not an earth-shattering feat of narrative design. Rather, it’s the story behind what happened after the game was released that gave me a wake-up call as an indie developer.
I was going to publish this on Gamasutra, now Game Developer Magazine, when it had been a minute since I last published there. But their blogging platform is completely broken at the time of posting and hasn’t even been fixed since they changed domains. So it looks like Medium is getting this piece that was strictly meant for industry people to talk shop. Hey, even if you’re not in games, maybe you’ll learn something from this.
Without further ado, I was compelled to pen this in an era where we, the indie devs, are constantly overwhelmed and freaking out over the messy state of distribution and game pricing. The conversations don’t stop on social media, in the games press, at small local dev meet-ups and large international conferences. On Discord groups, Twitter threads, LinkedIn posts, Steam pages, and our phones have become permanent…
