An Interview With The Maker of Indie-Game “Grim Quest”

As a fan of Flutter, and old school “RPG” games, I am pleased to present this interview

Illustration by Pytr Mutuc for Monomyth Game Studio

A few weeks back I came across a mobile game called “Grim Quest,” which I would describe as an “old school dungeon crawler.”

The premise is simple, and the grind repetitive, but it still manages to be fun and even addictive, if you are into classic RPG-style games like this, which I am.

When I discovered that it was created in Flutter, by a one-person team, I decided to reach out to its creator, Goran Kovač, and ask him is he was open to me interviewing him, which he was.

No need for a big pre-amble. Let’s jump right in…

1. Why is your company called “Monomyth Games”?
   Monomyth, also known as the Hero’s Journey, is a common template of stories that have been present throughout human history. Basically, they involve a hero who goes on an adventure, is victorious in a decisive crisis, and comes home changed or transformed. It’s a theme that defined contemporary fantasy stories and, by extension, many fantasy-themed RPG games. And since I develop traditional RPG games, I think the name fits.
2. Why did you do your game/s in Flutter? (What are some pros and cons of Flutter, for your purposes?)
   Back in the day, I worked as a full-time Flutter developer for a company that developed mobile apps. It was the era of COVID lockdowns and I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I wanted to see if I could create a game with my skill set, and that’s all really. I didn’t choose Flutter for any specific feature, I was just curious and, as it happened, I was pretty proficient in Flutter at that time, so it was really the first logical option. I’m self-taught, so my programming skills were, and still are somewhat limited.
   
   The first pro of Flutter is its speed. You can really create fast if you know your way around the SDK. The other is its cross-platform portability with minimal changes in the codebase. As for the cons, there are many, but they boil down to the fact that Flutter is not a dedicated game engine or even an SDK aimed at developing games. It can work really well for certain types of games, but those types are few and somewhat niche.
3. Name a couple of your favorite Flutter packages. Can you tell me a more obscure package that you appreciate?
   I really don’t use that many packages. What I use is pretty common stuff for ads, monetization and accessing platform specific features. tutorial_coach_mark (link) is neat for creating animated UI tutorials. Not sure if I can call it obscure, though. auto_size_text (link) helped me with all sorts of text scaling issues, so it’s only fair to mention it too.
4. Did you code or work in IT before jumping into Flutter?
   Yeah, I’m actually a law major. I taught myself programming in Java and did some native Android development in it before jumping to Flutter. The jump happened soon after I landed my first job as an Android developer — the company decided to switch to Flutter and I had to follow suit.
5. How did you learn Flutter?
   I learned Flutter on my daily job. It’s one of the best things that happened to me as a developer. Flutter’s syntax really sits well with me and I find that developing things with Flutter is immeasurably faster than going the native route. I regret nothing, and plan to stick with it as long as possible.
6. Is game development a full-time job for you? If it is, what did you do before game development?
   Yes, I’m currently a full-time game developer. I developed mobile apps in Flutter prior to that, as mentioned before.
7. Do you use a Mac to do work? Can you describe your work setup? (Office/room, computer specs, monitors, etc.)
   I use Mac only when I have to build and upload a new version of my games to the App Store. For everything else I use a Windows laptop. I don’t believe in setups much. Overthinking your setup is a luxury a busy developer can’t afford. I use my laptop (any laptop with minimum required specs will do) and a single monitor. It gets the job done and keeps distractions at a minimum.
8. What are your work habits like? 8 hours straight? Early morning, coffee-dependent? 2-week marathons, then breaks to recover?
   I don’t really have a schedule. I work when I can and when the creative spark lights up. There have been periods when I worked 16+ hours a day and periods when I didn’t work at all. Even so, I try to dedicate at least an hour or two each day to all the stuff that needs to be done that doesn’t include game development itself. Stuff like customer support, marketing, etc…
9. Which publishing process is less of a headache: the Apple Store or Google Play?
   For the better part of my game development experience the App Store has been much more of a hassle than the Play Store. Recently, it’s becoming the other way around, and increasingly so. I guess these things fluctuate with changing company policies. Not much we developers can do about it in any case, except grit our teeth, do the grind and hope for the best.
10. For your first game, how long after launch until you had 100 downloads? 10,000? 1 million?
    In retrospect, I was pretty lucky with my first game, Grim Quest. Someone at Google must have noticed it right at release, or an algorithm singled it out for some reason. Its rise was pretty fast and steady right up to the point when it reached 2 million downloads some 2 years later. It slowed down considerably after that. That’s all I can say, as I don’t remember the exact timeline and milestones.
    
    BetaFamily (https://betafamily.com) helped with early testing and getting the game off the ground somewhat. I also did some promotion with Google Ads but my budget was laughable, so it was only a minor factor. More than 90% of my downloads were and still are organic, from users simply browsing the store. I later learned that curators on Google Play will feature games they consider worthwhile, and they often look for such games in various popular publications. Perhaps it was this article on Android Central that did it: https://www.androidcentral.com/grim-quest-android-game-week. I can’t say for sure, but I’m really grateful to the author.
    
    Anyways, once things started rolling the momentum just kept increasing. I had pretty solid reviews and the numbers grew on their own. I’m sorry I can’t be of more help to other aspiring developers in this regard. I know next to nothing about marketing and I have only a vague idea about what SEO is, even today.
11. During development of your first game, did you ever contemplate giving up? If you did consider this, what re-motivated you to keep going?
    No, I don’t think I contemplated giving up. I was motivated by positive feedback I got from the people I showed it to (friends and co-workers mostly) and was determined to see it through.
12. Why did you choose these types of “old school RPG” games? Are you a fan of gamebooks, or D&D, or fantasy fiction? Were there any existing games that you took inspiration from?
    Again, I have to go back to the game’s inception point. I didn’t have much choice. I knew next to nothing about game development and there were only a few types of games I could see myself creating with the skill set I had in Flutter at the time. On the other hand, I grew up on old-school RPG games and fantasy literature, so the choice really made itself, in a way.
    
    I took a little bit of everything from old-school classics like Wizardry and Might & Magic, but the major chunk of inspiration, especially regarding the tone and themes of the game, came from the game I was playing at the time: Darkest Dungeon. Since I didn’t know anything about graphics and didn’t want my game to be just a poor man’s copy of those games, I decided to spice it up with something I always thought most of them lacked: detailed written storytelling and lore one finds in a DnD handbook. At least that’s the basic formula which I later expanded upon.
13. I notice your games are ad-supported, but with the option for a one-time payment to remove ads. What generates more revenue, the free (with-ads) version or the paid (ad-free) version? What percentage of people make a payment of any form? (Even if it is just an upgrade, and not the full-on ad-free purchase.) Are donations common?
    My ads to in-app purchases revenue ratio has always been about 40/60. About 20% of returning players decide to remove ads. Donations are few and far between, I mostly have them because some people ask for it, not because I earn anything palpable from it.
14. In reviews of your two games many people mention the ads are “fair,” and you are not money-grubbing or sacrificing gameplay by pestering users to pay for the ad-free version of the games, or crippling gameplay if they don’t pay up. This is obviously a choice you made. How did you come to this choice? Do you feel you have struck the right balance?
    We all know the current state of mobile gaming is a corporate greed-driven affair that creates copy-pasta addiction simulators and ruins potentially good games for profit. As I said before, I am a passionate gamer myself. I’m also something of a rebel. Going against this sad trend was one of the main motivations that led me to experimenting with mobile game development in the first place. I wanted to create a game that incorporates a fair, gamer friendly monetization model and goes against many bad practices that dominate the mobile gaming world these days. Earning a living out of it came as a side effect.
    
    I like to believe I have struck the right balance. I certainly try to do so. It’s a subjective thing, and you can never please everybody, especially when you have to think about paying the bills, but I think the majority of my users see it as fair. To my surprise and delight, I found that a lot of people are more than willing to reward fair practices with their wallets.
15. When you were developing your first game how many hours (on average) would you spend on it in a week? How has that changed now that you are maintaining it/them? How does your time allocation change, pre and post-launch? (As in 10% marketing pre-launch, versus 50% time spent marketing post-launch, for example, or whatever…)
    At the time I was developing Grim Quest I was still working a full time job, so any work I did on the game was crammed in whatever spare time I had. Late hours of the day and weekends. I would even use those lazy hours on the job to crank out a few lines of code each day (hope my former employer doesn’t see this). It was a very chaotic time in my life, all in all, but I was completely immersed in it and I didn’t see it as a chore. In fact, it was a pretty invigorating experience.
16. Is there anything that you didn’t consider — and surprised you! — during this process? Was there anything you thought would be a big deal in developing a game that ended up being easy-peasy, or a non-issue?
    You have to understand that the whole process was an experiment of sorts. I went into it with no expectations, no idea where I was going to end up and improvised along the way. I had fears that the game would be too basic, with it relying only on text and static graphics, but it turned out alright. I was pleasantly surprised when people told me it had an addictive gameplay loop. I also had doubts about my writing abilities, English not being my native tongue, but that turned out fine too — luckily, people don’t expect Oxford-level writing in their mobile games.
17. What was the single biggest issue to launching your first indie-game?
    One of the biggest issues I faced was the assets. I didn’t have any budget so I had to search for free stuff. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of good assets just floating around in the public domain, but there’s a limit to what one can find that way, and working with a limited set of assets can be tricky. I had to adjust my way of thinking and design the game around the assets I had. As I understand it, it’s usually the other way around in game development — you come up with an idea, tell artists what you want and they provide. Approaching it from the opposite angle really forces you to think outside the box and stretches your creativity to its limits.
18. In general, was making a game, and launching and supporting a game, even more work than you imagined? (Because to most people, the notion of being a one-person, jack-of-all-trades indie game-maker seems like such a big task that it would be foolish to even try… At least beyond a hobbyist level, who is not aiming for commercial success.)
    I have to admit that it was actually less work than I thought it would be. It was still a lot of work, mind you, just not as much as I imagined. It all boils down to the type of game you’re developing, I guess.
    
    From a technical standpoint, Grim Quest is a really simple game — partially, I got Flutter to thank for that. Coding it wasn’t that hard, and creating its UI elements in Flutter was a breeze. Having all the assets from the public domain also removed a large chunk of work from my back. This allowed me to focus more on the things I enjoy, like writing, creating content and designing game mechanics. When you get to do the things you enjoy, can it be considered work at all?
19. How long did it take from the first line of code, or written plan, or first “measurable step,” until your first game was published? (And which was first, Apple or Android?)
    I think it was about 6 months. The game was first released on Android in a semi-beta state. It had just the core mechanics and pretty basic content but it was a little barren. Then it was another 12 months of writing new content and expanding on the core game mechanics. I’m thankful for the fact that a lot of people saw the game’s potential early on, and positive feedback only motivated me to keep upgrading it.
20. Was the idea for a game milling about in your mind for years before you jumped in?
    I’ve been in gaming most of my life, so I’ve been shuffling game design ideas in my mind for a long time. I’ve always been drawn to the creative part of it, and even dabbled in modding for several games I’ve played over the years. But to answer your question, no, Grim Quest wasn’t premeditated at all. As I’ve said before, it just happened at the spur of the moment, and most of it was heavy improvisation.
21. If Elon Musk told you: “I will pay the salary of one person to help you for the next 365 days,” what skill-set would you want to assist you? Another Flutter dev? A Graphic Designer, a composer/audio talent, a Writer, a Web Developer, a Marketer, a Business Analyst, a Salesperson… any of these? Or something else, with a different main skill?
    I think I’d go with a 2D artist, I can’t ever get enough artwork for all the things I want to implement in my games.
22. What advice do you have for other one-person App or Game Developers?
    Know your strengths and your limits, and scale your projects accordingly. I see a lot of solo game devs taking on unrealistic ideas, stuff you can’t possibly finish on your own. You can’t pull off AAA scale games. You probably can’t pull off small indie studio scale games either — unless you’re a renaissance genius like Eric Barone, that is. You have to think outside the box and be creative. Try something different, something that’s doable within the domain of what you’re good at. If you overreach, you’ll just end up burned out and disappointed, with nothing to show for your trouble.
23. Do you have any future plans for new Apps or Games?
    Yes, I’m working on the 3rd game in the Grim series at the moment.
24. Is this what you want to be doing 10 years from now?
    In 10 years I’ll be 45, and hope to be happily retired, lol. Jokes aside, yes, I can see myself still doing this, albeit at a slower pace. I’d like to explore new ideas and maybe try my hand at different genres.

Please visit www.monomyth.info to learn more about the studio and the games that they have on offer.

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