Well... here we are. Flock Around is finally out. Here are a bunch of disconnected thoughts about it. Written originally a few months after the game came out.
I was the sole engineer and lead designer of Flock Around. The original pitch came from Toby after watching a documentary called Listers: A Glimpse Into Extreme Birdwatching.
In the credits I listed the names of the 3 Secret Plan founders with no job titles for aesthetic purposes. But since I'm writing a blog post about the game and how it was made I may as well spell out who worked on what.
It was the second Godot game I ever made (the first was Solatro), so I made lots of mistakes during development. Some of which I was able to fix, others I was not. Since it's our debut title as Secret Plan, much of the technology developed for this game will be rolled forward into future games. Basically everything we do from now on will derive from this game. I think there are some core systems that are worth keeping, but some systems (namely anything to do with gameplay UI) I want to start completely over on.
I'm typically a stickler for good UI/UX but Flock Around is really not my best work. There's so much I want the UI to do but I can't figure out how to get Godot's layout system to give me the result I want.
Chris Zukowski believes we are in a golden age, a great conjunction, of indie games. Basically he's identified a particular set of hot genres that are (relatively) easy to make quickly that are very "indie friendly." He's not the only one who's been seeing the writing on the wall. Since the release of PEAK there has been a gold rush for casual, silly, low-fidelity games you can play with your friends. Dubbed "friendslop" by someone on twitter.
As an aside: the word friendslop has been somewhat controversial and I wanted to just put my 2 cents in. A few arguments against using the term I've heard are:
I agree with both of these sentiments to an extent. However I have two counterpoints:
For these reasons, I'm comfortable using the word friendslop and saying Flock Around is a friendslop game, or at least tries to be.
We also wanted Flock Around to be a digital third space like webfishing (is webfishing friendslop? 🤔). I think it managed to be both of those things and neither of those things at the same time. I think Flock Around turned out to be a pretty good singleplayer game that happens to have pretty robust multiplayer support (proximity chat, multiple options for how to share progress, etc.).
Toby handled all of the marketing for this game. I don't think I've marketed a single game I've ever worked on, and I've definitely not marketed a game with the level of commitment that Toby has. He has posted one short-form video per day every single day since we started. At time of writing he still has not stopped. I attribute most of the game's success to this marketing. I have lost count of the number of times someone has sent me a DM saying "I saw your game organically on my feed!" or "Did you say Flock Around? I think I've seen that game before."
The game is published (a better word is: funded) by Outersloth. They're nice people and offered a really fair deal. I recommend working with them if you're ever given the chance.
It hasn't become a mega-hit making us all rich, but it certainly didn't flop either. Toby describes this as the "second best possible outcome."