After countless awards, millions of dollars in revenue, and several soundtrack remixes being performed at all the hottest gamedev parties, everyone's favorite indie game is finally a year old!
That's right, I'm talking about Shapes of Gray! It's the game's birthday week! And it's available on Mac! AND IT'S FIFTY PERCENT OFF!!!
For real though, huge thanks to everyone who's played Shapes of Gray. This year has been absolutely crazy, and the amount of people who've reached out to tell me how much they're enjoying the game has blown me away.
I don't have too much else to say on this big day--I covered most of what I'd wanna talk about in the big Six Month announcement post back in March. Again, thanks for playing--there's more to come.
Shapes of Gray Postmortem, 6-Month Anniversary, and SPRING SALE!!!
Hey everyone! I’m Trent Steen, the developer behind Shapes of Gray. It’s been six months since the game launched on Steam, so I wanted to share my story of the game’s development to hopefully give some behind-the-scenes information to any aspiring developers out there… and also because I noticed that I’m dumb and haven’t used any visibility rounds yet and need to write up a product update to get Shapes of Gray back on the front page. So here we go!
I began working on Shapes of Gray in September 2013 with no experience in game development whatsoever, aside from having played around with GameMaker for a few hours. I had just moved in to college to begin pursuing a degree in game design and wanted to do some extra work outside of classes to get a leg up on the competition by learning as much as I could about game development before graduating.
With Hotline Miami and Spelunky fresh in my mind from playing them the previous summer, I sought to make a small arcade game that combined elements of both. Upon realizing that I had no artistic ability beyond drawing monochromatic blobs, Shapes of Gray was born.
A few months went by. I had made a little bit of progress on the game, and while it was radically underpolished and limited in content, the fun started to become apparent. I showed the game off at a local convention which the lead designer of Morrowind happened to be attending. He played it, and… died instantly.
He tried again, and… died again.
Mortifying.
This went on two or three more times before he suggested that I play the game and he watch. I played through the dozen levels that I had completed at that point, with him smiling the whole time. He offered his words of encouragement, gave me a ton of feedback on smoothing out the difficulty curve, and wished me well.
One month later, I put the game on Steam Greenlight, where it was promptly trashed.
That’s the internet for you! (There were plenty of nice comments too.)
A couple more months went by, and I released a prototype of the game on itch.io.
Except, the part of the story that I like to leave out is that it wasn’t a prototype.
In my mind, hey, that was the finished game!
A few friends of mine from the old IGN boards bought it. One dude who has a weekly “Catgirlurday” segment on his blog (hasn’t missed a single Saturday in eight years!) even gave a ten-dollar tip!
Aside from that, though… the game didn’t get much attention.
And comparing current-day Shapes of Gray to February 2014 itch.io prototype Shapes of Gray, it’s not hard to see why! The old version lacked polish, the difficulty curve was all wrong, and the marketing was super pretentious. (This was back when Devolver Digital was just starting to make waves with their punk style, you see.)
I didn’t do anything else with the game for a while. In my mind, it was done.
Then, that summer, I got a call from Nintendo.
A few TOP SECRET weeks later, I was ready to make games for the Wii U eShop. What would be my first one?
Why, Shapes of Gray, of course!
So I began porting the game and expected to have it out in, say, three weeks. “It’ll be easy!” I thought. “I’ll make sure all the code works on Wii U, and then be done!”
“But I’ll also make sure that it feels good being played on dual analog!”
“And add in a better title screen!”
“And change the ending a little bit!”
“And, also within this three week period, I’ll add in fifty more levels with harder enemies!”
“Except, you know what? I should really alter the original set of fifty levels a bit to smooth out the difficulty curve. I’ll have to rearrange the enemy placements and also come up with new combinations of enemies, while also adding in more interesting interactions between their attacks which will enable the player to have a more options for clearing each level.”
“So, four weeks then.”
“Right. But, while I’m at it, I’ll add in more visual effects too to really have some nice gray eye candy.”
“Oh, you know what else would be fun? An arcade mode with its own leaderboards and achievements.”
“Cool. Shouldn’t take too long.”
…four months later, that same local convention rolled around again. While the lead designer of Morrowind didn’t show up this time, a lot of people stopped by the Shapes of Gray table and played the game.
And… they liked it.
They laughed. They asked questions. They got surprised. They got angry. They felt triumphant.
A month later—exactly one year after submitting the game to Steam Greenlight—I took the old Greenlight page down and re-submitted the new-and-improved version of Shapes of Gray. It was…
…received pretty well.
Maybe I had something here.
The next few months went by quickly enough, and before I knew it, the game was finished. It released on the Wii U to a mildly positive critical reception. The porting process didn’t go perfectly, and there were some framerate issues with that version of the game, but the people who picked it up enjoyed it for what it was, and I had finally accomplished my lifelong goal of having a game on a Nintendo console.
Over the course of the summer, I pushed the Greenlight page hard, until finally, August rolled around and the game was Greenlit.
Two years after I began development on the game, on September 23, 2015, Shapes of Gray launched on Steam.
Is it the top-grossing PC game of all time? Are Let’s Players rushing to get videos out of it? Did I do cocaine with Toby Fox at GDC?
Nah. The game has sold just about as well as most Steam games do: well enough to have a bit of extra dough on the side, but not enough to make a career out of it by any means. This was not surprising or upsetting to me.
What did catch me off guard, however, was just how much the people who did try the game really enjoyed it. I’ll be completely honest, at the risk of sounding a little too proud: I love Shapes of Gray. It really is the “Hotline Miami meets WarioWare” hybrid that I wanted to play. And that I literally haven’t seen one negative comment about the game since its Steam launch warms my heart more than you guys will ever know.
Reading reviews, watching videos, and talking to people on Twitter about Shapes of Gray will never stop being fun for me. What a lot of people don’t realize is that, when a developer says they’re “excited for players to get their hands on our game,” they’re not just blowing smoke up your butt. Seeing people have fun with a game you’ve worked on really is the best feeling in the world.
I would love for more people to play Shapes of Gray, and I would love for the people who’ve already played it to let me know what they think of it, either in the form of a Steam review (which helps the store page receive more views) or a tweet. That being said, I’m already completely satisfied with the small-but-loving reception that the game has received so far, and, while I’m not going to be able to make game development my full-time career anytime soon, you better believe I’ll be making games until the day I die.
To celebrate Shapes of Gray’s six-month anniversary, the game is on sale this week for 75% off, which brings the price down to below two dollars—still slightly more expensive than a McChicken, but nowhere near as spendy as a Big Mac. Check the game out if you haven’t already, and if you have, maybe snag a copy for a friend?
Thank you so, so much to everyone who has played Shapes of Gray so far. You can check out any of the other little side games I’ve made here, and you can always find me at @Secret_Tunnel on Twitter if you’d like updates on what I’ll be up to in the future.
