Interview with Dene Carter - Fluttermind's director and creator of Moonring

Wordfoxes - What motivated you to start developing games independently?

Dene Carter - I originally began back in 1985 as an indie dev! I saw the arcade game ‘Defender’ and decided that was what I wanted to do with my life. Since then I’ve worked for Microsoft and EA and been fortunate enough to only work on games I was enthusiastic about, but my dream was always to return to indie dev and… not have to deal with managing people ever again!

WF - What were the biggest challenges you faced during the development of your game?

DC - Moonring may be free but it’sverycomplicated. The biggest challenge was actually just ‘coding discipline’. Because I thought nobody would play it, I engineered a lot of systems in very sloppy ways, and thought it would not matter. Now I have thousands of players and every bug fix risks adding two more!

WF - Before the interview, you told me that you developed the game without the intention of making it multilingual, as you didn't expect having so many people to play it. So my question is, if you thought that way, what was the main goal of making such a game? Was it to test something? Your skills maybe?

DC - I made the game simply because I felt that kind of game needed to exist. Even if I was the only player. I put it on Steam thinking I’d get afewplayers, but I assumed it would be fewer than 100! In my mind, I was making the game for those 100 people who were about my age and also thought a game like this should exist.

WF - How do you balance the creative process with the technical demands of development while managing the entire project on your own?

DC - I find the creative and technical stuff often bleeds together. The moons of Moonring came about because I wanted to shift the 4-colour palette around in the game and wanted to justify that. As a bit of a pagan, moons are often on my mind and someone also said the game looked like it was ‘always night-time’ so I made that part of the fiction. This happens a lot!

Regarding the balance of creative and technical work, it actually allows me to move to something that feels different if I’m feeling overwhelmed by one part of the work. This stops me becoming bored or frustrated.

WF - What tools or game engines did you use, and why did you choose them?

DC - I just use Love2D as a framework. I began using Zerobrane, and then moved to VSCode for its speed and syntax checking. For music I use MilkyTracker and for art I use a mixture of Xara and Pyxel.

WF - I’m not sure if you have marketing or not, I believe you don’t, right? If so, how did you handle the marketing and promotion of your game without a support team?

DC - As the Creative Director of Fable 1 & 2 I’m fortunate to have quite a few people interested in my work, and who were happy to join Discord and discuss another RPG. Beyond that, I don’t really do marketing or promotion. I kind of hate that stuff! I do, however, spend alotof time with my people on Discord and they are super helpful. The game would be so much worse (and buggier) without them.

WF - What are your main inspirations or influences, both inside and outside the gaming world?

DC - So many! H.P. Lovecraft, Michael Moorcock, old RPGs from the 1980s (e.g. Dragontorc), The Lords of Dus novels, and music: black metal, weird older goth, neofolk and death-industrial music, old ASCII Roguelikes (Nethack, Angband), the older Zelda games, OSR tabletop games, Dark Souls and Bloodborne. I’m fortunate to have a lot of interests and never get bored, really.

WF - If you could give one piece of advice to other indie developers who are also working solo, what would it be?

DC - Make a smaller game. And finish it. And don’t expect to make money. Don’t follow a trend: it’s usually over by the time your game is finished!

WF - How did you approach the testing and quality assurance process for your game, given that you were working alone?

DC - My Discord users: I had support from a couple of people who played the game way more than I was capable of doing. If you think the game has bugs now? It would never have come out without them.

WF - What has been the most rewarding aspect of developing a game solo?

DC - I’ve most enjoyed seeing people engage with the world and its Lore, as well as argue about which God is best. For me that’s all an indication that I made something that matters.

WF - How do you handle feedback from players, and how has it influenced your game development?

DC - I listen to it. Always. However, I listen for what the ‘problem’ is that they are blighting, not the solution they are offering. If someone finds a fight ‘boring’ and offers a bunch of new mechanics to ‘make it more fun’ then the problem might actually be that the fight is too long, or too hard, and a small tweak of the hit-points, or decreasing the strength of the monster fixes it.

For a ‘solo’ game, I owe a lot to others: Wayne Imlach offered lots of advice and most of the art, Khand and Baddoar composed some of the music for free, and Funslinger was my only playtester for a year or so! Pretty much all the cool things about the game came from conversations about how I could do things better.

WF - Do you want to share anything about the future? Do you have any plans for the future? What are they? Do you intend to continue developing solo, or would you consider collaborating with others?

DC - I’m currently in the early stages of making Moonring 2. This time I’m bringing on my brother who worked with me on Fable. He’ll be helping me keep the game technically solid, and ensuring we make it in a manner which allows language variations this time!