ThunderPerfectWitchcraft - Non-commercial games and music

[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Hi.
I'm Valentin. Turning 31 this year, I have some fond recollections about the internet of the time before everything was eaten by the corporations.

I'm half of ThunderPerfectWitchcraft.org. We are an anarchist video game studio specialized in 2D-Games. Half a year ago, I started to review other non-commercial games on my blog, the arcane cache:
https://thunderperfectwitchcraft.org/arcane_cache/
one of my latest activities was an attempt to write a manifesto and do community work to establish a non-commercial underground game art gaming scene. By pure chance, I stumbled upon your board just now - and I think that the idea of this community is highly compatible to what I have in mind.

Looking forward to write with you guys!
Valentin

[Melooon]

Hello Valentin, welcome to the forum 

Apologies it took me a while to get to this post, but I know we've already interacted in other threads so I feel like you've had some welcome vibes at least!

Very cool games project, I wish I could get it together to do something like this! Im curious if you work in the game industry professionally? And/or if not, do you plan too? That's something iv struggled with a lot! Hows your feeling on inclusion in the wider games-scene as a non-commercial game maker?

Hope you enjoy the forum!!

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[ThunderPerfectWitchcraft]

Hi Melooon; sorry in return that me took a eternity to realize I got a reply on this Thread (thought I would get noticed about it, and saw it when I checked the "Unread Replies"-function), and thanks for the welcome!
The vibes here are indeed nice ;).

Glad you like our games; I find your digital art also damn cool, and surely couldn't create something like it (let alone an active burning-board-community!).

Neither me nor my friend and partner in crime is active in the industry. I'm programming (with video games in mind) as an autodidact for over 15 years now (with longer and shorter breaks in between, but quite constantly), but doubt that I could fulfill professional standards in this field anyhow - I'm far to chaotic. My friend is an hobbyist visual artist, and feels likewise. When we started, we had the wild idea that we could maybe get some bucks by doing nice video games - but we realized soon that this would require us to play by the rules of the market (doing games that sell good, probably investing money in marketing, participating in jams, heavily using proprietary social media, and so on) - we then decided to do it rather purely for fun.

Our inclusion in the game scene is basically non-existent - sometimes I have self-doubts because of this, but I'm relatively sure that our games are good after all. I believe that non-commercial video games suffer from being threwn together with commercial "indie"-games that have a much higher budget (and thus production value) - so even those who technically would be interested can hardly find us. I try to do a bit community work towards forming a "underground game"-scene with my blog the arcane cache, but it often feels like a battle against windmills. That being said, I'm still happy with my hobby (or hobbies) and proud about what we did until now :).

Greetings