The game has a complex premise - it stars Clem, a desert bounty hunter with plenty of baggage, and it involves mech battles, emotional narrative scenes and home-management mechanics, including some light gardening. Ruiz did contract work for a while after Aztez, and in 2018 he pitched Bounty Star to people he knew at Annapurna. Even with a hefty amount of hype behind it, Aztez had trouble standing out, and that was the last time Ruiz tried self-publishing. There were 309 games added to Steam in 2010 in 2017, there were 6,306. Ruiz and his business partner built Aztez in between contract projects, and by the time it was ready to debut on Steam in 2017, the indie market was saturated. It shifted to a community-voting approach called Greenlight, before eventually landing on the everything-goes Early Access model we know today. This system had fully imploded by 2012: On the heels of breakout hits like Braid, Super Meat Boy and Fez, the indie market was overrun by new games and developers, and Steam dropped its curation efforts. He began working on Aztez in 2010, when Steam was a curated marketplace where Valve employees hand-selected individual games for the platform. Ruiz’s career is a microcosm of the shifting landscape for indie developers over the past 10 years. “It’s possible, but without help, I just don't know how anyone's doing it … I got a lot of friends in the same boat.”
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