Building a Factory That Makes Music
# Building a Factory That Makes Music
I love when an episode starts with a small win that turns into a whole conversation about momentum. Last time Manik came on, he was flying solo with a wild music-meets-automation idea. This time, he showed up with a publisher, a fresh demo, and the kind of data only real players can generate. It felt like catching someone mid‑stride, when the work is finally colliding with the world. We didn’t talk about big promises or dream boards. We talked about hard choices, weird systems, and the actual numbers coming in after launch week.
## What we talked about
We started with the headline: Manik signed with a publisher and dropped a demo alongside the Six One showcase. The match made sense because the publisher’s catalog is delightfully strange and his game lives in that same pocket. He didn’t wait around to be discovered. He pitched them cold with a tight message, a trailer, and a deck before a Steam page even existed. That startup muscle memory from his previous life translated cleanly into the indie pitch game.
Then we dug into the demo. In the first forty‑eight hours he tracked 15,800 factory objects placed, an average playtime of twenty‑eight minutes, and a hilarious stat that made me smile: the harp is the most used instrument. Players landed in three camps. One group was instantly hooked and already sharing it. A bigger group loved the core mechanics but wanted UI polish and a gentler tutorial. A handful bounced off, confused by the expectation of a rhythm game. That distribution told him exactly where to focus next.
The design itself is a trip. You’re base‑building your music. Nodes on a grid give you rhythm as distance, pitch as color, and branching logic for patterns that evolve. It’s a visual composer wrapped in a factory sim, with tower‑defense surfacing later. He tried a conveyor‑belt version months ago, scrapped six months of work, and replaced it with the current node system that makes on‑the‑fly music changes actually feel good.
On the production side, Manik’s still a team of one at the core, with a full‑time engineer from Post Physical supporting systems like save/load and UI plumbing. Unity is the engine. Most art is smart kitbashing instead of sculpting every asset from scratch. Lighting is intentionally simple. It’s a craft‑spend strategy: push effort into the mechanics and the musical toys, not into polishing every rivet.
Fourth, hold strong opinions loosely. Scrapping six months of work hurts. Doing it anyway because the design needs to breathe is how you end up with a better game. That willingness to kill a pet mechanic is a huge marker of maturity. It’s also how you keep momentum when you’re building something that mixes objective automation with subjective musical taste. The truth shows up when players touch it.
Finally, build feedback into the ritual. I loved that when you close the demo, a feedback form pops automatically. It’s polite, quick, and already delivered dozens of useful notes from people who just finished playing. That’s a loop worth copying. Shorten the distance between a player’s feeling and your next decision, and you’ll make smarter choices faster.
## My closing thoughts
What I took away from this conversation is that the indie path rewards people who can be two things at once. You have to be a designer and a product manager, an artist and an analyst, a joyful tinkerer and a ruthless editor. Manik is living in that overlap. He’s treating his game like a living instrument and his process like a business, and that combination is why the momentum feels real.
If you make games, there’s a lot here to steal. Package your pitch before you need it. Ship a demo even if it’s imperfect and let the numbers tell you where to point your time. Put your energy where it changes the feel, not the screenshot. Use AI where it removes toil and avoid it where it risks your signature. Most of all, keep your taste in the driver’s seat and be willing to throw out the map when the song asks for a different road.
I’m cheering for this one. It scratches a part of my brain that loves systems and sound and the freedom to build a groove that belongs to you. If you try the demo, leave the team some notes. They’re listening. And if you’re in the middle of your own weird idea, keep going. Momentum shows up when the work meets the world.
Episode Info
We wandered into business, too. Wishlists hit 2,500 in the first two months with spikes from a viral trailer and the demo showcase, then the usual valley. The publisher is stepping in where most indies need it most: trailers, social, creator outreach, localization, store management, and porting once certain revenue thresholds hit. Translation: he gets to spend more time making the game sing while someone else builds the megaphone.
We couldn’t avoid the pricing conversation. I grumbled about seventy‑dollar sticker shock and he made a fair point about value per hour. He also pitched a sliding‑scale idea tied to hours played with a cap, which would let people sample cheaply and pay more only if they’re genuinely in deep. It’s not how storefronts work today, but it’s the sort of player‑aligned experiment I’d love to see.
And yes, we talked AI. He leans on it heavily for coding assistance but avoids it for production art right now. Ideation is useful, sure, but consistency and quality still lag in 2D and 3D. Where he’s optimistic is AI as an enabler inside creative tools—animation helpers in Blender‑adjacent workflows, smarter posing, anything that removes the tedious keyframe grind so humans can shape motion and emotion instead of babysitting tangents. I’m in the same camp: automation should clear the runway, not replace the flight.
## What stood out / lessons learned
First, pitch like a founder. Manik didn’t wait for inbound. He built a crisp narrative, packaged proof, and went hunting for fit. The same thinking that closes a seed round helps you court a publisher. Know your comps, your revenue shape, your audience, and why this partner’s community will actually care. That clarity doesn’t just get you a deal; it sets the relationship up to work because you already agree on the story.
Second, ship to learn, then aim your fixes. The demo data told him exactly where the friction lived: oversized tooltips that blocked placement, a tutorial that over‑explained, and features like a top‑down camera locked behind progression that many players never reached. It wasn’t an existential crisis, it was a to‑do list. When ninety percent of early feedback boils down to usability and onboarding, you’re not in trouble—you’re in the fun part where polish has huge ROI.
Third, protect the creative budget. He’s ruthless about where time goes. Mash up assets, keep lighting simple, and pour energy into the systems that define the experience. For indies, that tradeoff is survival. A perfect shader won’t save a muddy design, and a clean onboarding will. The way he’s operating reminded me that production isn’t about doing everything; it’s about choosing the right things to do now.
