Well, I think this is an honest, mature, and insightful response to an article that probably didn’t deserve it. The topics you bring up are more fascinating than the majority of game development articles I read, and to see a glimpse of the development process of DT so intimately is a privilege I have never experienced with any other game.

I have no idea how you found this review on my backwater website, though I would like to know. Given how Kratzen only gets 150 visits a day on a good day, many of them from Web crawlers, I think most developers vastly overestimate just how much impact my opinions have on the public opinion of their work at large.

Despite this, I am impressed at how much effort you put into clarifying the nature of DT. For someone who is fascinated at how games can get created at all given how much work goes into them, it really is exciting for me to get such a thoughtful message from the developers themselves.

I’ll clarify the nature of the review, and of Kratzen in general. I don’t pull punches. I’m cynical by default, though I also realise that life can be an amazing thing to live. I see art as an extension of this amazement with living, and in doing so, I have the highest expectations for what art can be and how it can interact with us. Games is just one of many art forms. When I created Kratzen, I hoped, in some small regard, to improve this medium that I loved so much, and has done so much for me while asking for little in return.

This is why I’m harsh. For every developer I upset or disappoint, there are dozens of prospective gamers and designers who can learn from what I’m saying and consider it for their own work; there are still titbits of knowledge from my old projects like Froghand and the 10kB Gallery that I think about when brainstorming ideas I’d like to create one day. I think I’m similar to you in this way. There is so much creativity I have and only so much time, skill, and money to go around creating it.

Assume a hypothetical situation where I’m on your team, I’m looking over a prototype we have so far, and I need to offer suggestions to improve it. I wouldn’t be a dick. I wouldn’t make jokes or try to be funny. I would be as honest, straightforward, and rational as I can in regards to the nature of the prototype. I would cite my sources for my ideas and link to textbooks, Gamasutra articles, and so on. I wouldn’t treat my ideas as gospel, but instead try to communicate them to you, as honestly and intelligently as I can, so that we, as a team, could put out a game that would be the best game that we could make given the resources we have.

But I’m not on your team, and I’m on nobody’s team. I’m the asshole at the end of the bar offering unsolicited opinions about things he’s played and people he doesn’t know. The review I would write for you and the review I write for my audience are two vastly different reviews. I have the privilege to crack jokes and be cruel, because that’s entertainment, and people learn better when they’re having fun.

I’m sorry if I misinterpreted anything about the nature of the development of DT, or if I wrote anything false about you or your other teammates. I did the best that I could given the evidence and resources that was available to me, and I always try to be, if not kind, as fair as possible to the work before me. I have learned a long time ago that if you try to please the person you’re criticising... you won’t.

So I don’t e-mail you, come into your Discord, or post on your Itch page anything to do with my reviews, because then both of us will feel bad and we’ll end up pleasing nobody. I write for an audience. I have to accept that the interests of Developers, Froge, and the Audience are diametrically opposed to each other. I can really only please one at the same time, two if I’m lucky, but I can’t please everyone at once.

Once again, I’m sorry that my review needed clarifying. I am grateful that you took the time and effort to write to me, and I will certainly update my review to add in this lore you’ve shown me. I don’t ever update my reviews once they are published, because mixing opinions at different periods of times is a bad look. In this case, I found the information fascinating, and I think whoever is reading the DT review will also find it fascinating.

So to talk about what you’ve e-mailed me about:

I would review Uncommon Time if I was working on Kratzen anymore; I stopped three months ago to focus on my personal hobbies. It looks like prime critic bait, and the ”Female Protagonist, LGBT” tags also interest me personally. I don’t associate with either 4chan or 8chan culture anymore, but I think giving a fair shake to a game that many people hate is a good test of my rhetorical abilities.

I emphasise with anyone who finds themselves with too many ideas and not enough time to make them come to fruition. The old engineering adage, Parkinson’s Law, is “work expands to fill the time available for its completion”. Trying to rebel against that would just lead to burnout and making you hate whatever you work on in the future. I can understand why the game would be incomplete then.

It’s easy to think about what you could have done differently, or what you could have changed in order to make a more coherent experience for whoever ends up playing your game. One of the tragedies of having an imagination is not being able to organise it in a way that makes sense to anyone else; in fact, the problem with all art is that it has to meet an audience. But you can’t change anything. The time’s already passed. All you can do is move on, catalogue your game as an experiment, and do better next time. And it looks like you’re all set to do just that.

I have an Itch.io page (https://froge.itch.io/). I have some experiments on there. I could look back on Three Drunk, Pissed-Off Frogs and think about how much I wrote, how me and my partner only had three days to get it done, and how I screwed him over by giving him a 9,000 word script instead of something that he can work on in a reasonable amount of time. But it’s passed. And all I have is some clever dialogue and a somewhat interesting world to go off of. It’s an experiment. And, sure, if anyone reads it, maybe I would have to clarify some elements to them as well. But it’s too late for that. If I revisit TDPOF, I’ll have a hell of a lot more time to do just that.

But it’s really not about the end result. It’s about the journey. Three days, and I’m never going to forget about them. I was solicited by my partner, we scrubbed over IRC, I spent a hell of a lot of time in a text editor, and I basically came up with this massive, frog-related world in just three days. Is the end result good? Who gives a shit? It’s the fact that I made it which is the important thing.

Same with you. You can justify it all post-mortem as saying you couldn’t do this or that, but it doesn’t matter. Making games is one of the most stressful, yet satisfying talents one can ever endeavour to learn. And it’s the making of them, and not the having-been-made of them, which is most rewarding. The game itself is just a nice little bonus you get. Ice cream on a peach crêpe, if you dig it.

So since you have all the time in the world to make DT 2... use that time. A game is released forever, but it’s made in the blink of an eye. Enjoy it. Enjoy the fundamentally frustrating experience. Enjoy having a vision. Enjoy creating the damn thing. Then create again. And again.

Banebigguy: It’s good to see the gang is back in action. Fuel the frustrations you felt with the original game and make a better show of it this time. Not for me. But for you.

Dustzero: Enjoy being amateurs. When you’re a professional, it stops being a unique experience; all the joy is drained out of you, and making games - this wonderful thing - becomes just another job. That’s when you stop caring. That’s when the experience stops being amazing and starts being routine.

Gudgames: You’re welcome. I’ll expect to be surprised - but then, is it a surprise? I enjoy games much more when they’re free software. More developers should honour their open-source ancestors in this way.

Thank you all for the kind messages. If you ever need guidance... well, there’s a lot more reviews to sift through.

Back at it again with bad opinions — Prime Minister Froge.