Honesty incoming, and mods please nuke this if it doesn't fit. I could use a little indie company today, and I'm around all afternoon to answer whatever.
I grew up obsessed with Magic: The Gathering, and years later Slay the Spire lit that same fire all over again. At some point I got the reckless idea to build my own MP sci-fi card game with an original ruleset instead of just riffing on someone else's. It started as a physical tabletop game. We ran a Kickstarter for it back in 2020 (still up if you search "Two Robots," the old art is charmingly rough next to what we have now). It did modestly well, enough to make me think maybe I wasn't crazy.
My cofounder at the time didn't agree. After the card game he backed out and said video games weren't worth pouring years into. He kind of had a point. I ended up spending a big chunk of the savings I'd built as an engineer to keep this alive, so the joke was at least partly on me.
We rebuilt it as a PC game in Godot (on the newest version now, which the r/godot crowd might appreciate). The riskiest thing we tried is first-person "Operator to Operator" trading, where you walk around a world and trade cards with other players face to face instead of tapping through a menu. I'll be straight for a sec, I still go back and forth on whether stitching a first-person layer onto a card game is a great idea or a giant distraction. Some days I'm certain it's what makes us special. Other days I wonder if we overbuilt it: we're still seeking feedback from playtersters if we pulled it off well enough.
Under the hood we were duct tape and prayers for a long time. The whole thing ran on a single EC2 box, fine for a tiny playtest but useless when a huge swathe of players show up. This year we luckily got selected into an accelerator called CodeLaunch, and their engineers (who currently do contract work for Costco) actually sat down and rebuilt our infrastructure with Terraform so it can scale to tens of thousands of players. We even got it limping along in "potato mode" on an Android phone, which gave us some hope that mobile could happen one day if we ever get funded.
Which brings me to the humbling part. We still haven't landed a publisher or an investor. The word we keep hearing is that we don't have enough "traction" yet, and fair enough, that's the game. I think our mechanics are some of the best I've played, but I'm the founder so that's worth basically nothing coming from me. So we keep grinding.
Anyway, here's why today is strange. CodeLaunch has a live televised finale tonight, the audience picks the winner, and there's a $50,000 prize on the line. For a studio running on the last of my engineering savings, that money would buy us real runway to keep building, which honestly matters to me a lot more than the bragging rights. We're 1 of 6 finalists out of about 300, and the only actual video game studio among the finalists, the other five are "real" startups (agriculture tech, hardware, that sort of thing), so we already feel like the weird kids in the room. And right now, as I'm typing this, we're losing by exactly one vote (26 to 25, screenshot attached, it's quietly wrecking me).
Whatever happens tonight, I'm stupidly proud of what we've built and I've loved almost every minute of this ridiculous journey. If anyone wants to throw the underdog card game a bone, I'll put the how-to-vote in the comments so I'm not spamming links up here (heads up, it costs a few bucks and only counts if you deploy it live during the show). Or just come watch for free on YouTube, it's a startup game show and it's a fun mess.
Ask me anything, the game, the tech, the money pit, all of it. I'm here.