Eastshade is an open-world, first-person adventure game where you play as a traveling artist. It was released for PC on February 13, 2019, and for Xbox One and Playstation 4 on October 21, 2019. 

Quick Facts

* Most of the budget was for living costs, while living as cheaply as possible. If a publisher asked us to make a game like Eastshade for 200k we'd laugh at them. A bare living cost style budget is not really comparable to an actual hiring budget. If we wanted to convert this budget to its actual economical value, it would have been more like 700k.

The Beginning

I landed my first game studio job in 2010, and ever since then I knew that one day I’d want to make my own game. I always assumed it would take a lot of money, and that no publisher was likely to hand it to me to try, so I saved religiously. Assuming I’d have to hire a team to build something substantial, I thought it was going to take a very long time to build up the funds. But my outlook changed in 2013, when I saw a number of indies creating impressive products solo or near solo.

I’d been working on what would become Eastshade at home in the wee hours for months, and was making good progress. My inspiration burned so hot, I was finding it hard to get to bed, which resulted in a severe lack of sleep. Some people can manage to work on their indie project while holding a regular job, but I’ve always had a very single-project mind, and struggle with multiple projects. I knew I could only keep doing one. With years of savings stockpiled, in December of 2013 I quit my job at Sucker Punch Productions as an Environment Artist to go full time on Eastshade. I knew I could pinch pennies to make the savings last, and with no children or mortgage my tolerance for risky financial moves was high.

The first year of Eastshade development was a very special time in my life. Imagine a moment of pure inspiration— the feverish kind that burns so hot it gives you goosebumps (maybe that only happens to me). I felt that burning inspiration every day. The inspiration waned slightly each year, and eventually gave way to commitment, which, as it turns out, becomes easy to hold when you’re 3 years in and have invested your life savings. In the last year, when I had sight of the finish line, neither commitment nor inspiration seemed required, as the thrill of finishing and releasing—the moment I’d been fantasizing about for so long—was all I needed to keep swimming.

Team

I started the project alone, but fortunately I didn’t have to finish it alone. By the second year my partner Jaclyn was making major contributions in design, writing, UI art, and in-game illustrations. By the fourth year she was working on the project full-time and doing quest markup, mapping, and testing. Most of the game’s hallmark mechanics were of her conception and design, including the painting mechanic itself, as well as the inspiration mechanic. In addition to her high level art chops, she has grown into the best game designer I know, and it’s safe to say the game would have been wholly unrecognizable without her.

Beyond myself and Jaclyn, our composer, the amazing Phoenix Glendinning, has been working closely with us from the start. We also had a character artist, Daniel Merticariu, who was an army unto himself, and single-handedly modelled all the outfits and characters. Toward the end of production we hired two quest scripters and a programmer to help us implement quests and get the game across the finish line. Finally, we worked with a number of additional contractors, including voice actors, translators, DO Games who handled our console ports, as well as our publicist extraordinaire Charlene Lebrun of Player Two PR.

Design

Throughout Eastshade’s history, there were a few eureka moments of design. I’d always known I wanted to make a game that was a place. A strong sense of place is my favorite thing a video game can give, and it is, and will always be, the main design pillar of any game I have authority in designing. And I knew I wanted it to be a nice place, where you could feel cozy and safe.

In the beginning the idea was to make the game’s core loop through survival mechanics. We had hunger, coldness, energy, and the idea was to build progression with finding things to help these depleting bars. We had come to our first major design dilemma: The constantly depleting bars were entirely at odds with how we wanted the game to feel. They penalized the player for doing the very thing we wanted the game to be about, which is going slow and feeling that sense of place. We needed a new core loop.

The painting mechanic was born from trying to think of a way to reward the kind of thing we wanted the player to do in Eastshade, which is to go slow and smell the roses. One fateful day, about a year into development, Jaclyn came up with the idea that the player could be a painter, and create quests around the player capturing certain objects, places, colors, times of day, or a combination of those. This would work in perfect harmony with wandering and smelling the roses, because the slower the player went, and the more they let the sense of place wash over them, the better they would do at these quests. It was genius. That was the first eureka moment in our design journey.

The next eureka moment came about 4 years into development, and although it’s a less prominent feature, to me, was even more momentous. It was the type of idea that doesn’t make new work, but rather solves existing problems. It was the inspiration mechanic. The idea was that creating paintings would cost inspiration, and new experiences in the game world would give you inspiration. So drinking tea, reading a new book, discovering a new location, relaxing in a hot spring, hearing a tale from a story teller, listening to street music (basically exactly the cozy stuff we wanted the player to be enjoying) would all reward your player character with inspiration.

This totally closed the game loop, created a harmony between theme and mechanics, and gave us an easy way to tie all auxiliary actions into the core loop. It was, again, Jaclyn’s genius. It was amazing that such a tiny and easy to implement feature could have such a profound impact on the game, and that it came so late in development, yet fit like a glove. It made me realize the true power of a good idea. Ideas that come in the form of more content, or at the cost of production resources are a dime a dozen. I have hundreds of ideas of that nature lying around. But an idea that solves problems is precious.

Marketing

For as long as we’ve been working on Eastshade itself, we’ve also been working on its promotion. I don’t think there’s any one or two things that are the magic bullets, because every game has different avenues that work for it, and indeed, the marketing effort is the sum of its parts. I’ll try to give a rough outline of the things we did for Eastshade:

*Number 1 is big. Charlene (who is th