Devlog: Muffles is a Beautiful Failure
Hello gamers,
In case you haven’t heard the word on the street… Episode 5 of Muffles’ Life Sentence is live! That means you can now play the entire story, front to back—no more waiting for future releases.
Huge thanks to all of you who have been playing and spreading the good word about Muffles. I’m inspired by so many of you who have reached out with support, stories, questions, and fan art. It keeps me going when things get hard. And sometimes game dev gets pretty hard (I’ll get to that in a minute).
Muffles on the Mind
Unlike those of you playing E5 for the first time, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on it. Even after it was implemented, we had almost two months of testing before release, which gave me and testers time critique and analyze things.
It now feels like the perfect time to do a mini postmortem and reflect on what I did right—and wrong—in making Muffles. I’m going to focus mainly on the big picture and what this means moving forward, and leave a more detailed analysis for later.
So let’s get into it—put on your thinking caps and fasten your seat belts.
What Did I Want For Muffles?
Here was my list of goals in making my first major game:
- Make a good game
- Focus on writing interesting characters in a compelling story
- Learn how to make art through highly stylized visuals
- Build a community via social media/Discord who would want to hear about my next project
- Be able to make more games
I’m going to go through these one by one and touch on (in my opinion) where Muffles ended up landing. I had big ambitions with my first game and knew how high the stakes were to get it right. A lot of this is based on feedback I’ve heard from others, with my own judgment filling in the gaps.
Make a Good Game
Muffles is interesting. The top-down, three-color pixel art style works surprisingly well. The deckbuilder combat is a bit slow and clunky, but it has satisfying moments and tension. The humor seems to land for a lot of people, and themes of identity are explored without overshadowing the plot.
I think Muffles isn’t always set up to be the most fun game. It also has spooky elements, but it isn’t really a horror game. It’s kind of a weird RPG, but those who go into it expecting a traditional RPG experience will be very surprised.
I think it’s fair to say Muffles has a bit of its own identity crisis—one that makes marketing it and placing it in an easy-to-understand category pretty difficult.
Characters and Story
Y’all love some weird little freaks. And I love writing them. The premise of Muffles gave me a ton of mileage to see a number of characters through to the end while sprinkling in new ones along the way. I think my best writing may have peaked earlier in the story, but I feel really proud of the characters I brought to life and confident about doing more going forward.
Each episode was a bit of a different beast. While I think that makes for a varied progression, it also led to some tonal inconsistencies. Episodes 4 and 5 received a lot of critique, and I’ve learned so much about writing to theme. I ended up doing a lot of rewrites for Episode 5 that helped, but some of that could have been avoided from the start.
Learning How to Make Visuals
People are always so complimentary about Muffles’ visual style. As someone who couldn’t draw a good-looking circle before working on Muffles, it’s been meaningful to hear that people connect to the game through the art. Working on Muffles has given me the confidence to try new mediums, explore new styles, and improve my pixel art skills significantly.
The choice for Muffles to be 2D pixel art with a restrictive color palette was a necessary one. While it turned out looking nice, I have mixed feelings. I believe the style and direction are major factors in the game’s marketability struggles. Realistically, any top-down, retro-style indie game is going to turn away a large portion of the gaming audience. Those games can still find major success—but it’s harder.
Find People Who Like the Weird Stuff I Make
If you’ve read this rambling devlog up to this point—guess what? You’re exactly the kind of person I’m talking about!
Muffles hasn’t performed well on social media (aside from some decent response on Reddit), and the Discord is small but growing all the time. But while Muffles may lack player numbers, the players it does have are absolutely phenomenal.
Those of you who engage with others, talk about the story, post fan art, give feedback, playtest, share the game, and read the devlogs—I truly believe that many successful games right now don’t have half the heart and creativity that Muffles’ community has. And that’s because of you. It’s incredibly cool.
Make More Games
To everyone who bought Muffles or supports the Patreon: thank you. Truly. I don’t want my next words to diminish the impact your support has had in helping ensure more games can come out of my brain.
I thought that if I created a really good RPG Maker game inspired by games like OFF and Paper Mario, it could grow into something sustainable—something that would allow me to keep making games long term.
Good news: for now, I’m going to keep making games. I’m not going to substantially compromise my style or the kinds of projects I want to pursue just to build a career in game dev. But I’ve also learned a lot. Change can be good—and exciting—and might help bring the weird ideas in my head to more people in the big, scary world.
All in All
Well, it’s happened again. What I claim to be a devlog is actually just an excuse to stay in bed a few extra hours and sort through my complicated, often conflicting thoughts about Muffles.
You might be wondering… what does this all mean for Bossy and future games?
Nothing outright just yet. But… it probably means moving to 3D. Shorter games—possibly much shorter. Likely leaning more into outright horror. And talking with all of you to make sure the next thing is as great as it can be.
More details to follow. For now—thank you for being part of the adventure.
In other news…
I need to get up. I’m so hungry.
Bye!
-Bossy