Hello friends, it's been a while! I'm still around believe it or not, and I'm really excited to announce my new game to the world soon. It's very different from The First Tree, but it still shares my love for personal and emotional storytelling in games.

Geoff Keighley and Kyle Bosman have invited me to share my game for the first time during the Opening Night Live stream for gamescom (!!!!!!). There's also a surprise announcement during the reveal, so be sure to watch the whole pre-show on August 20th.

If you're going to gamescom, please come find my booth in the Indies of America (in the Indie Hall, 10.2) section and come say hi! Elise, who voiced Rachel and helped a lot with The First Tree, will be there too! This is my first time in Germany, and I'm looking forward to meeting you all.

I can't wait to share this new game with you. I've been working on it in secret for years now, and I think some of you will really like it. I'm pretty nervous, but I'm excited to share this new story with you.

Sincerely,
David

Hi everyone, I was invited to the Earth Appreciation Festival sale on Steam, and my game is the cheapest it will ever be, which is 90% off! I'm also broadcasting a pre-recorded stream when I played my whole game from beginning to end and showed off all the easter eggs, so that will be running on loop for the next few days. Watch the stream on the store page, and thanks for your support! http://steamoss.com/steamstore/app/555150/The_First_Tree/

I know, I know, you're probably thinking "a Nintendo Switch announcement here!?" ...BUT, this is a really special thing that I've worked hard on, and I think most fans of my game would find this limited edition interesting. This will be the last thing I release regarding The First Tree. A big thanks to all the amazing people who've played my game and enjoyed the journey. Without further ado, here's what you get in the full special limited edition:

[store.strictlylimitedgames.com]I've partnered with Strictly Limited Games, and we're both excited to share this collection with everyone. Pre-orders are open NOW[store.strictlylimitedgames.com], and there's only a couple thousand units available, then it's gone forever! Thank you for all the support, I can't believe this game is worthy of a physical release like this, and it's something I'll treasure the rest of my life. I'm excited to keep making games, and I can't wait to show you what's next.

Sincerely,
David

OK, time to do this. I’ve been meaning to do a big DAVID WEHLE™ update for a while now and explain why I haven’t released a new game yet, but you know how life gets in the way. Especially when life is a quarantine hellscape, you have three beautiful, amazing, exhausting kids to raise, a spouse’s job you support, a viral YouTube channel that turns your brain to mush, a thousand emails waiting in your inbox since your game is free on the Epic Games Store (with an impressive number of redemptions too! … meaning lots of emails and customer support issues), etc., etc. What also contributes to my lack of updates is because… I just don’t really like posting online. Fascinating correlation, I know!

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a venting/ranting blog post (well, maybe a bit), because my life is seriously AMAZING and INSANELY BLESSED and LUCKY. I can’t believe how many dreams keep coming true, so much so that I feel I don’t deserve it and I really pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes… but I did want to at least be honest, because I owe that to myself.

Wow, where do I even begin? Well, how about we start with the reason I’m even a full-time indie game dev now: The First Tree. This small hobby project I worked on at night morphed into this gargantuan beast (or fox) that took over my life the past 5 years. Which is great! I’m living the dream! And yet, I really didn’t expect it to do as well as it did. At its core, my game is a slow-paced, sad walking simulator (ahem, I prefer the term “exploration game,” but you know what I mean) that somehow seemed to launch at the right time to the right audience. It resonated deeply with some of you, and for that I’m eternally grateful. I still get emails almost daily how my game changed their lives in some formative way. I’m beyond honored.

However, with that spotlight came criticism and demands from the ever-present, insatiable internet. I would randomly be surfing the gamedev subreddit trying to decompress, and I would see a comment by some rando saying how much I didn’t deserve my success, and how it was all one huge lucky fluke. And I believed them!

And to add to it, some devs considered me an indie marketing “guru”, which I was uncomfortable with. I worked hard to market my game every week, and after my GDC talk, people assumed marketing was my passion; the reason I got up every morning. Just to clarify… NO, I don’t like marketing, and I hate being the center of attention. I don’t like asking people for money and wishlists. But I did what was necessary because I was passionate about telling stories, and I wanted to give my story a fighting chance to be seen on the crowded pages of Steam.

So now, you’re probably wondering “well then David, why did you make fancy YouTube videos showing off your success? Not very modest if you ask me.” This honestly could be a long blog post all on its own, because my experience of putting myself in the spotlight and becoming a “content creator” is… complicated. It was an unusual step for me, especially since I never even showed my face online (as a game developer) until my GDC talk.

First off, I always wanted to teach and start a YouTube channel. I love video editing, especially since I’ve been doing it longer than making games! It’s a huge passion of mine. And teaching people who didn’t know they could make and finish games was a huge motivator (and it’s been so rewarding already). But the second reason is, I was scared. I was self-employed, and I was riding the success of a “huge lucky fluke” that would probably not happen again. I wanted to make sure I could provide for my amazing family, and give them food and health insurance and security in these tumultuous times. I was turning my lifelong passions and hobbies into a business, and it wasn’t as simple of a mental transition as I thought.

So, I went all in on YouTube and the accompanying online course called Game Dev Unlocked. I spent years editing the scripts and videos, and polishing them to a shine. At first, no one watched my videos, no one was buying… and in the blink of an eye, the YouTube algorithm picked up my main autobiographical video (“How Making Indie Games Changed My Life”), and I started getting 5,000 subscribers a day. Right now, I’m at 150,000 subs, which is still hard for me to believe. I always had a dream of earning 100k subs on YouTube, so I was pretty happy with the whole thing. Sales were OK, but mostly people didn’t want to buy the course. Then the emails came in…

Something you should know about me: I am a textbook “people pleaser,” and if someone asks for my help, I take it very seriously. If someone is mad at me, even if I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s all I can think about, and it ruins my day. So, taking an onslaught of people begging for help and multiplying that by an impossible amount of people for my brain to truly comprehend thanks to the internet… and let’s just say it wasn’t a healthy mix.

I received thousands of emails from people who were begging me for some kind of reassurance that everything would be OK. That their dreams would come true too. And I wanted to help every single one of them. I went from a nobody working on a game for fun to becoming a spokesperson for the indie game dream. I couldn’t even get a shake from the Chick-Fil-A drive-thru without someone recognizing me and asking for game dev advice. And it didn’t stop there… I would get emails from suicidal kids asking for help, teenagers from Afghanistan asking me to get them out of their country, and on one occasion I received an email from a hopeful game developer in a war-torn country who had just experienced a bomb blowing up their neighboring village. His friends were dead, and he was hoping he could finish a game before he died too, and he needed my help. How do you say no to something like that? Didn’t I owe it to everyone because I was lucky with my hit game and I needed to “pay it forward”? (Something people constantly reminded me of)

And then to top it off, after you’ve given everything you’ve got to other people in need… you get hate mail in your inbox. You spend the whole day serving your children and strangers on the internet, then when the kids are finally asleep, you hit the bed to relax and take a look at your phone to decompress, and you randomly come across an angry gamer in your Twitter mentions telling you your game they got for free sucks, and that you took away a potentially great game from them and that your apology isn’t good enough.

Long story short, I went to a mental therapist for the first time in my life. I was broken trying to care for two toddlers and a new baby in a pandemic (which is very, very hard), taking care of my course students who gave me their hard-earned money and demanded results, and the countless people begging for help on the internet. I was this introverted, internet-lurker trying to take on the weight of the world. I was so tired and hurt that no one cared about me and my needs… only what I could do for them.

Quitting my day job and making this hobby my full-time job has stirred up… mixed emotions. This statement may disturb some of you, but I was definitely 100% happier when I had a full-time job and I was working on my game at night. I missed working with the amazing team at The VOID, working on Star Wars… back when the success of my game was this abstract thing I could only daydream about. Mostly, I was making my game for me with no outside expectations to pay the bills or satisfy the ever-demanding internet, and that brought me a lot of joy.

It’s not all doom and gloom though! I’m actually very happy now and in the best shape I’ve been since the pandemic started. I’ve had to confront my weaknesses and personality quirks, but I’m a better person for it (and I’m sure these issues would’ve come out eventually). I hired an awesome community manager for Game Dev Unlocked who is helping SO MUCH with the emails, I can’t even tell you the mental burden it alleviates. I even leased a co-working office to help separate work from my home, and that’s been a huge help too. I’ve decided to work with my old friends from The VOID on a cool, new VR experience. It will take me away from my projects a bit, but I’m ecstatic to work with a great team again (and not manage anything, whew).

These are all things I would’ve never guessed I needed, because I thought I knew myself pretty well… turns out I didn’t.

The reality is: running a business is HARD. Running it solo is even harder. You have to remember, I was burnt out on The First Tree well into the Steam release in 2017, but I kept working on it for 4 more years due to my fears of failing again and not earning enough money for my family.

So, I was wrestling with the age-old concept of commercialism and art. There was this dichotomy of doing whatever I wanted and being true to my vision (what most people assume the indie dev dream is like), and doing only what customers wanted to buy. This is something that has killed me with YouTube… in one specific instance, I was super excited to make the exact video I wanted to make. I loved every part of its creation, and I thought it had a message that would inspire everyone. I lovingly edited it over several weeks, posted it, and excitedly waited for the stats… and it was by far my worst performing video.

This is not a new problem. Even the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo was a commission forced upon him by the very violent Pope Julius II. My wife and I regularly talk about the fine balance between artistic integrity and commercialism, a problem she is very familiar with as an artist who constantly needs to balance what she wants to make with what the customer wants to hang up in their home.

For The First Tree, I was lucky. It was pretty much what I wanted to make (I had to compromise a lot of things of course), and it turned out millions of people wanted it too. Recently, I thought the safe business decision would be to do it all over again, so I started work on a spiritual successor to The First Tree (an idea that I may revisit one day since I do love the story idea). But that isn’t happening anytime soon. Trust me when I say I am now currently burnt out on animal exploration games.

So that realization left me with a question: what do I do next?

I’ve decided I need to make a game that I want to make, for me. It will be a bit different and I’m almost certain most fans of The First Tree will not love it… but it’s an idea that gets me super excited. It’s an idea that could help me fall in love with game development again.

A few more details: this game will be story-driven, first-person, and will use the Unreal Engine. That means development is gonna be slow going, because I have to learn a whole new tool. The “smart business” decision would be to make something quickly in Unity which I’m already familiar with… but I want to do this for me, and UE5 looks like a lot of fun. I’m also shooting for an early-ish release date so I avoid burn out and I keep the game short: I want to release it in Fall 2022, but knowing game development, it will probably take longer.

With the help of my therapist, I’ve also concluded that I’ve been too accessible on the internet and that my self-worth isn’t determined by the amount of people I try to help online. Of course, I love helping people and seeing them succeed, but I need to step back and focus on my family and myself. I will delete my social media apps on my phone (I will still post big updates occasionally) and stop responding to most emails, tweets, DMs, etc. It’s not that I’m ungrateful… in fact, if I don’t say thank you or at least acknowledge the incredibly nice people who share a sweet message about my game or want to tell me how I inspire them (still hard for me to believe, lol), I feel a ton of guilt… but I need to let that go. Please know I’m extremely grateful to all the fans who follow my work, so even if I don’t thank you directly, I truly mean it: thank you.

I will still post and stream occasionally on YouTube when I want to (and I still do live Q&A’s for my GDU students). The online course sales will help support my family as I work on a potentially risky game idea (and my new job will help alleviate the risk too). I’m gonna try one more marketing experiment and sell a mini-course soon (and add an Unreal section), and after that I’m done working on it. A gigantic thank you to the people who bought my course and are part of the amazing community, it has helped me and my family tremendously, and it’s inspiring seeing the games you make!

I’m a bit worried about the whole thing since this new game idea could flop, which could definitely affect my family. But a sappy, high-school yearbook quote is coming to mind… I think it applies here: “A ship in harbor is safe—but that is not what ships are built for.”


Thanks for reading,
David

It finally happened after 2.5 years of work: my online school GAME DEV UNLOCKED hit version 1.0! There is so much content that I can't even type it all up, so I made this sweet sizzle reel of everything:

Don't know how to code? No problem. Don't know how to market your game on social media? It's covered. Want to publish your games everywhere including Steam and consoles? You got it.

I put my all into this learning resource, so if you've ever been tempted to make a game yourself and release it on Steam, you'll love this online course. I even walk you through how to make a beautiful exploration game called The Last Waterfall, and show you how to publish on Steam and start making money from game dev.

I'm very proud of all this content, and I would love if you joined our GDU family. It also has one of the best, nicest game dev communities ever, so take a look by clicking this link! You'll automatically redeem a coupon for 40% off![courses.gamedevunlocked.com] I'm excited to see what you create. :)

- David

I'm excited to announce that a limited edition vinyl OST of The First Tree is now available, courtesy of Mana Wave Media! It includes the gorgeous orchestral tracks by Josh Kramer, and also features new gorgeous artwork.

Here's where you can buy a copy[www.manawave.co], hopefully there are still some in stock. All the income supports the record label and the composer, so if you loved the music in my game and you're a vinyl collector, I think you'll really like this record. Take care everyone, thanks for taking a look. :)

- David

I made The First Tree without knowing code, while working full-time, and while taking care of a new baby, and somehow the game succeeded financially. I never thought this hobby would take off, and it's thanks to gamers like you. And one of the best parts of this game dev journey has been showing gamers how to get started making their own games and how to market them effectively. That's why I started an online school called Game Dev Unlocked[courses.gamedevunlocked.com].

I've put years of my life into making this the best learning resource available, and I think you'll find it pretty helpful.

If you've ever wanted to make a game and share it with the world, now is the time to do that. Check out the GDU page to learn more: https://courses.gamedevunlocked.com/p/game-dev-unlocked

If you ever have questions, send me an email[www.gamedevunlocked.com] or watch some of my YouTube videos I'm making about game development. Now let's go and finish some games!

- David

My first ever live stream! I'm gonna play through my second game The First Tree and answer questions about game development, reveal hidden easter eggs, and more. I'd love to see you, so come check it out and say hi, and if you've missed the stream, be sure to check out the replay for an in-depth look behind the scenes of The First Tree.

https://youtu.be/qPdOQDy5yIA

One of the perks of making a B-list, semi-popular indie game is that I get to help a lot of aspiring game designers. I gave a talk recently at the Game Developers Conference, and even though I was nervous wreck beforehand, it was a dream come true to talk about my experiences on how I became a full-time indie dev. After that talk, my inbox exploded again, and after answering the same few questions over and over, I realized I should make a high-quality resource for people to learn. So I'm proud to introduce my new big project: Game Dev Unlocked[www.gamedevunlocked.com].
I'm almost ready for early access launch, so if you have any interest in game development and making a game for Steam, then I encourage you to sign up for the email newsletter[www.gamedevunlocked.com] and subscribe on YouTube. I'm gonna do tons of stuff like giveaways, free asset packs, and of course lots of game development tips. I hope this resource helps lots of aspiring game designers, because in this day and age, it's never been easier to make a game, and the world is waiting to hear your story! It's a lot of work, and it can be a gamble, but trust me—it's worth it!

Thanks for all your support. It's because of you that I get to make games for a living. Please email me at david at thefirsttree dot com if you have any questions, I love to help where I can!

- DW