Who are the developers?
Rami Ismail, Richard Cook, Daniel Worley, Ryan Zhem, Becca Spurgin
Richard cook is an indie dev that worked on games like 30 minutes or less, pro janitor police and super combat fighter. He also got work at a company to help with the game battlesloths. He is very passionate about games and his passion project was super combat fighter, a game that takes inspiration from the original mortal combat games that use scans of actors as characters.
He was kicked out of college because instead of being focused on one or a few areas, he was instead interested in most creative fields. He ended up homeless and going from friend to friend for support. However, despite all of these problems, he remained focused and passionate about games. He went to many game conferences, like GDC, East Coast Game Conference, and RTX, to gain industry experience, make connections and market his ideas to people. He feels the most important part of the development process to him is having fun making the things he loves.
Rami Ismail worked on games like Nuclear Throne, Radical fishing, super crate box and ridiculous fishing. He started off making the flash game radical fishing with a group of friends in a small indie team. The game sold well and made them a nice profit to put towards making a new game and also gave them some good experience and an audience. Around this time was when mobile gaming was starting to make an appearance and take off, and this was the perfect platform for flash games like radical fishing. They begun to make a new and improved version of radical fishing for mobile devices, with improved graphics, mechanics and systems.
Unfortunately, one morning during development they woke up to a mob on twitter of people unhappy that they had "plagiarized" a game called Ninja Fishing. This caused a breakdown in the group where they felt that they had no reason to continue to work on this as they have a bad rep due to a false narrative. They decided to spend the last of their money going to GDC. However, instead of this being the last thing they did together, it was instead a helpful trip meeting devs and fans that encouraged them their idea isn't plagiarized and instead they should finish the project. They ended up finishing the project and continuing to make games.
Becca Spurgin made Arcadian atlas, a tactics ogre style game. She worked alongside her twin brother making a tactics ogre style game in RPG maker. The game was heavily inspired from Final Fantasy Tactics, a PlayStation x game that Becca loved as a kid. The game was made with help from a college student that was experienced in RPG maker, however eventually he became too busy and left the project. They wanted to find a way to fund the game to keep doing it as their main focus, and to do this they looked into kickstarter. Unfortunately, kickstarter has had, and still continues to have, a lot of bad apples that leave a sour taste in people mouths, especially on the social site reddit. There have been a lot of games that cancel development after having been funded and running with the money.
Becca Spurgin decided to put the game up on kick starter to help get it funded. Unsurprisingly, people began to doubt it as time went on and stopped funding it as it seemed like the project wouldn't fall through. However, they managed to finish the project.
Joy Tholen created the choose your own adventure game dropsy. Dropsy started off as an idea that Joy shared on online forums and had people give their input on how the story goes, which eventually fed into his game. He faced hardships of dropping out of high school and dealing with a potential for closure on his and his father's house while trying to achieve his dream of making games. He contacted publishers to try to get his game out there and have people playing his work. As he was creating game he gradually got better at drawing his levels, which meant his old designs looked worse and he had to go back to hold them to the same standard, however this took time that he didn't have so he got to the point where he had to say that's it and move on.
All of these devs have a passion for games and want to have their game be successful and make people happy with their games, however they also learned over their journeys they need to take pride in their work themselves and a successful game is one that you enjoy making, not one that makes money.
The more games you make and take pride in the more you learn and the better the next will be if you give yourself room to work.