One indie developer who lives in a village with a population of 1,000 people can't quite wrap his hand around the fact that 250,000 Steam players bought his fantasy roguelike about dwarves.
"It's crazy, but I have no reference point," the mostly solo developer behind Dwarves: Glory, Death, and Loot says in an interview with Jake Lucky of the Gaming Interviews YouTube channel.
The developer, known as Rafa, reveals that his RPG/roguelike/auto-battler mish-mash kind of snowballed into a relatively giant hit. Dwarves attracted about 30,000 players in its first month in Steam Early Access, then "just kept getting better and better, and more players were coming in... I mean, it's insane. I think I just haven't even realized, but it was just gradual progress, right?"
What makes the game's success even more unbelievable for Rafa is that those 250,000 players vastly outnumber the local population of his village, which, in his opinion, already has "too many" people. "I cannot even know all of them," he jokes. "And then you have 250,000 people and it's absolutely incredible. It's really wild to me [...] It's absolutely crazy. It's not adding up in my head. I cannot imagine it, right?"
After committing to full-time game development for about a year, Rafa also says he didn't actually know game dev "was even a career path I could choose or anyone could choose for that matter." In fact, he thought only huge studios could manage to release games, and the biggest lesson he learned throughout all this was that anyone, even you, dear reader, can "just sell a game on Steam as a normal person." Whether it manages to sell 250,000 copies probably depends on it being, you know, good and stuff.
Dwarves: Glory, Death, and Loot hit 1.0 earlier this year, but Rafa hints that he still wants to support the game into the future.
In the meantime, check out the very best roguelike games you can play right now.
