The Death of Motivation — Or, How zero-budget indie-dev teams fall

April 2022 — The month that everything fell apart.

Humans are fickle beings.

We do not understand ourselves. And so… unseen forces direct our every move, changing and shifting that which we consider worthy on a whim.

The reason people do what they do.

It is that same thing that makes you crave sweets while under stress. Or seek the attention of your beloved, like a little puppy, even after he/she played with your feelings for the eleventh time. It is:

The internal reward system. A system so fragile and malleable, yet stubborn and non-sensical…

You see… Running a venture on pure and simple morale, on zero-budget, is a very difficult task. Not because it is inherently a foolish proposition, but rather because there are unseen enemies hiding in plain sight.

Such enemies are the parasites that latch on to our internal reward system, and hijack it for its own sake.

They are the things that we know by the names of money, prestige & fame. Things you can quantify and measure: in dollars, number of followers, units sold, etc.

They hijack your brain, and turn it inside out.

You stop doing things for their own sake, for the pure enjoyment of it. And start doing them for the sake of these numbers that represent things we find desirable.

They become work. And you start to hate doing them, unless you’re getting paid for. (1)

This is what rewards do to you. And they are absolutely everywhere.

This is what it did to me. And the reason why I suddenly stopped being able to hold my team together.

(1) Source: Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise and Other Bribes

Back when I first built my development team, I did so on the basis on non-crunch culture, like many other rising indie studios.

The idea was that we would develop our game without pressures, simply enjoying the process, and learning from the experience at our own pace.

And for as long as that held true, maintaining morale and motivation was a breeze.

People worked without issue, responsibly, and teamwork happened naturally.

Yet it all started to change mid-March, when I decided we would try our hand at marketing ourselves. But things really went downhill in April.

You see… When my focus as team lead was on our development process, our reward system was happy. We were making steady progress each week, and we were learning a lot everyday. And so, our internal metrics told us that we were succeeding. We were on top of the world!

But once I shifted my attention towards marketing, and starting sucking really REALLY HARD at it, my internal reward system started getting fuzzy.

Unhappiness seeped in. And that unhappiness bled into my team one way or another.

The metrics had changed, and I hadn’t realized it.

The “number of followers” started ruling over my reward system. And through me, it also ruled over my team’s.

I started getting absent more often, as my self-worth started plummeting. And every time I managed to pick myself up, and gave it another try… I’d soon enough be smashed back into the ground.

Then, one of my team members went off on a vacation over two weeks, and ended up disappearing for the whole month, before officially taking an indefinite leave of absence in order to “take care of all the stuff that had had him so busy”.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand that he wanted to take a leave without burning any bridges.

Productivity overall had completely plummeted with the members that still remained.

So I tried to revitalize the remaining team by clearing up the language in our scrum board so as to make the tasks easier to understand and track. Expanded upon the design document, adding drawings and more descriptive language so as to paint a clearer picture for the game.

And while that did help me personally to actually realize how much work was still left to be done, and to tackle tasks more efficiently… It really didn’t do jack squat for the rest of the team to recover their motivations over the long run.

The damage had already been done. And I still didn’t know how the heck I had managed to screw things up so badly, beyond the fact that my mental stability had hit rock bottom.

And do you know what the worst part was?

None of them would even blame me!

They all said that it was because of an issue of their own, that had nothing to do with the team.

But that’s because logic struggles to understand emotion.

We feel what we feel. And only once we feel what feel, do we actually stop to think why that might be.

And if we don’t know for certain why we feel as we feel, then we fabricate a reasonable-sounding explanation for it. Even if such reason has nothing to do with it.

We still accept it as truth, and then just move on.

This was really dangerous.

I had a serious problem on my hands. That could possibly mean the full dissolution of the team, and the definite death of the project.

So I spoke about it with one of my team members, my pupil Cid, and thought about it real hard, in search of an answer as to why had it become so dreadful to even think about working on this project.

And I asked about when we had stopped having fun with this project. And while he answered that it was probably “school”, that which killed his enjoyment (yeah, he still goes to school), when I presented to him my hypothesis, he seemed to agree wholeheartedly.

The moment that I stopped doing this for its own sake, and turned it into just another tool for the purpose of achieving my own goals, that I got so obsessed over our numbers, is the moment when all enjoyment drained from our process.

And I can only hope that this is not irreversible.

I can only hope that I can turn this around, and return the joy of our craft back into our project, for all of our sakes.

This entry has been a bit of a downer. And even more so, after the sad note that was my previous article.

I do not want to leave anyone with the feeling that the world is a bleak place, so please allow me to sign this note off with some hopeful words:

May the joy of our work triumph over the dread of sorrow.

And may we all bask in the light of youthful folly, until the end of our days.

Poland has some beautiful words in their anthem that I wanna take for this occasion too, and such words are:

“Poland is not yet lost!”

And so, in the same vein, I’ll say to you all:

WE are not yet lost!

So soldier on!