Cross-Post: Game Development on $0 A Day

Over on the Megowan Blog, I just started a short series of posts on the specific challenges–and the tools to address them–for being an independent game developer.  Come read it here!

The Relevance of “Serenity” to Gameplay

A few years ago, I wrote up some observations about “serenity” in the gaming experience.  The blog that hosted that ancient entry is no more, but a friend salvaged that entry.  I have reposted the entry to this blog, and will devote a follow-up blog entry to covering how social games and other trends have possibly affected–or reinforced–my old conclusions.

And yes, my wife still plays World of Warcraft.

[A few years ago,] I was formulating theories about how desirable “serenity” is for [the casual game audience]. I attempted to make field observations and collect anecdotes to back the theory. I picked up some “serene” games, and tried them out, and also had my wife try them.

Eufloria (formerly “Dyson”) (Windows) is an independent real-time strategy game that deals with seedlings colonizing small planetoids, and was recently submitted as an indie game finalist. The music is relaxing ambient electronica, and the art is spare and elegant, like a Chinese painting. The main interactions are clicking and dragging from one planetoid to another to direct groups of seedlings to fly around, and zooming in and out to observe the overall flow of the game. When zoomed in, the music fades out and you can see your seedlings zooming around and firing on enemy trees and seedlings, and eventually burrowing to the center of a planetoid to sprout new trees. I found this game very relaxing.

Noby Noby Boy (PS3) is the latest toy from the creators of runaway hit Katamari Damacy. There are no threats, no objectives, and no deaths. It’s an activity played on a colorful, randomly generated playground. It’s in the joy of discovery of how Boy interacts with his quirky little worlds. The music is mellow acoustic guitar.

Flower (PS3) is the second offering from thatgamecompany, creators of flOw. This game is more of an “experience”. In fact, you play a breeze in a grassy field, collecting petals from flowers that bloom when you pass over them. The visuals are serene outdoor scenes showing little to no human influence. There are no threats, no enemies, very few obstacles, no button mashing, no time limits. Nothing chases you, nothing can harm you.

Anything by Ferry Halim on his site Orisinal. Halim has created flash experiences that are all elegant, beautiful and serene, exploring some minimal mechanic with wonderful animations and slow but cheerful background music. One of his pieces is called The Crossing, in which you help deer leap over a river in a sun-dappled forest.

I believed that these games represented the relaxingest of the relaxing in recent products. I found them all fascinating and soothing. I encouraged my wife to take a break from World of Warcraft to try them out. If my theory was correct, she would be relaxed, and want to continue playing.

I was completely wrong.

She found all of the games to be stressful and, with the notable exception of Eufloria, loathed them all. To be honest, my wife is a hardcore gamer, and I was floored when she found these simple, accessible games to be more stressful and agitating than her usual fare of epic battles against overwhelming enemy forces.

So we talked about her play experience.

• In Flower, It was stressful to be a breeze on a meadow when she was trying to cause a flower to bloom, and missed. There was no consequence other than blowing back to a new position and trying again, and yet it was more stressful than melee combat. It was time lost, and failure in her own eyes.
• It was stressful to be in an environment and not know the rules or what would happen. Free play can paralyze a player.
• In Eufloria, It was stressful to lose a base to an enemy who could then turn that planet into a facility for producing more enemies. That the characters and enemies were non-sentient seedlings was irrelevant. The beautiful graphics and relaxing music did not matter when she helplessly watched enemies attack and seize a planetoid because her reinforcements couldn’t get there in time to successfully defend the base.

We reached a conclusion that we have heard elsewhere, in higher profile circles of controversy:

Once she was playing, the mechanics and her ability to perform to her satisfaction mattered so much more than the theme and environs as to render them insignificant.

Does anyone have examples that support or refute this?

I Admit It

I jumped into developing a social game a year ago.  And I made a judgment error.

I had very solid ideas, a healthy blend of tried and true mechanics and themes with fresh innovations (okay, okay, iterations) to make something great.

But I was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stuff that I would have to teach myself in order to make just one social game.  I would have to learn Flash, which is both an animation system and a programming language.  I would have to learn web services and server programming, and marketing.  I would have to learn the Facebook API, and that changed every few weeks.

But I had newfound insights into economics, which told me that I could trade one currency for another in development just like in so many other things.  I made the decision to trade money in exchange for expertise and elbow grease.

That was the beginning of the judgment error.

I underestimated my own ability to handle the various aspects myself.  I outsourced  a great deal, and spent a whole lot of money, which meant that I had a very rapidly approaching deadline for finishing the product.  My goal was to get to market quickly, and that was the wrong goal.

The end result was that I misspent my resources.  Had I taken it upon myself to learn everything I needed to learn, then develop all of the aspects myself, it would have taken longer–perhaps twice as long–but the money would have lasted until I had completed development on my own.  The art would have been worse, and the code would not have taken advantage of the best programming practices as established by folks with many years of experience in these unfamiliar areas.

A big part of that is that I had lost a lot of confidence in myself over the past few years.  I was in an employment situation where I was given to doubt my abilities.  I had encountered such difficulties on the job that I wondered if my abilities and accomplishments beforehand had been flukes or luck.  When I was finally on my own, I doubted my own ability to master the necessary skills to craft something on my own.

After a year away from that company, I recently had the chance to encounter the people I had worked with before.  But this time I had distance and perspective, and could more clearly see where the problems lay.  That company had a particular, specific way of doing things, and it was a way that was destructive to having any sort of vision, leadership or communication outside of the physical offices.  I was one of many people outside of the physical offices, and so there were simply too many forces within the company arrayed and deployed to prevent any kind of success for an external resource.

That realization, while infuriating, was also energizing.  I was not the failure, the liability, the financial drain that the company had led me to believe that I was.  Simply put, I was a resource that they were unable to utilize.

At my current contract job, I program.  I acquired exactly the kind of knowledge that, a year ago, intimidated me into spending my life savings to have other people do the work.

Theme Park Design Blog

Folks who have known me for any amount of time are aware of my former career in the theme park industry. I still love that world, and get a lot of my game design lessons from there. The theme park, as an industry, is almost exactly a century older than the computer games industry, and had similarly controversial beginnings.

After hitting a stumbling block in October 2010, I am resuming my blog analyzing design challenges in the theme park industry.  It’s over here.  Sometimes, there are pretty pictures.

Today’s new entry takes a look at the things you may not realize are happening to you while in line for a ride.  Oh, don’t get all paranoid, this isn’t FOX News.

A Good Problem to Have

In just a few weeks, I will be completing my contract with The Amazing Society.  It will conclude six valuable months of engineering work on a children’s online role-playing game, Marvel Super Hero Squad Online.  I cannot overstate the incredibly large volume of talent and experience that the founders have brought together to make this remarkably rich children’s game.

I would be happy to continue working there, and I’m certain that The Amazing Society would welcome an extension of my contract, but it’s time for me to get back on track.  In the past few months, there has been a remarkable demand for my design work, and there have not been enough hours in the day for me to handle it all.

It’s a good problem to have.

And it represents an opportunity to reactivate 4 Bean Studios as a design company.  It will slow down the work on Traders’ Tales (which is looking less like a social game and more like a mobile app now), and it will most likely entail doing the paperwork for a real corporation rather than for a self-employed individual, because I’m going to need to hire at least one other person to keep on top of demand.

Solving the Money Problem

In June, Tintash and I finished taking “Traders’ Tales” to a playable alpha state. Based upon what we saw, I decided that much more iteration was called for. However, I was out of discretionary funds, so it was time to find a way to pay the bills.

For the past three months, I have been contracting at a great company, rebuilding my finances and working on a few moonlight projects.

But work on Traders’ Tales will resume in November 2010!

Things are Picking Up

It’s true! There’s work to be done!

I have to take some steps to truly turn the studio into a legal corporation now, as the months I’ve spent laying groundwork have now led to business agreements:

• I am negotiating a contract to design a social, casual online role-playing game themed to the Arabian Nights.
• Next week is Casual Connect Seattle 2010, a trade conference for the casual games industry.  I will be there as a representative of another company that could not physically attend, and stand to make a commission off of any deals that I help strike.
• I have a contract position programming a mini-game within a children’s online Role-Playing Game
• I have an opportunity as a contract designer to work with the highly unusual collaboration of an Indian company and a Pakistani company to make a cricket (the game) themed social game.
• I’m hard at work making a prototype for a social logic puzzle game.
• I’m still hard at work redesigning Traders’ Tales to be a better, more accessible game.  I had a realization a few weeks ago about how to shift the focus of the game to make it better, and that requires some redesigns of the interfaces.

While the cricket-based game will be for cash up front and the children’s MMO will be regular contract work with regular payments, the other projects are all currently revenue-share projects, meaning the studio doesn’t get paid until later, and the amount of the payment depends upon the scope of the project.  But it’s business, at last!

Moderation of posts

I don’t post much here.  There’s not much going on about forming or running the company these days, but lots going on with the development of the game.   You can track it over here, on the Traders’ Tales Development Blog.

However, I’ve seen about ten comments showing up with the format “great posts thanks” that all appear to simply be redirecting traffic to another site.  It looks like an attempt to hijack google’s search engine optimizations, so just be aware that I do moderate comments.  I don’t intend to be draconian or censorious, but I am not paying for someone else’s advertising!

Take care, and I hope to hear from folks really interested in what we’re doing here

Sprain is in the air!

Well, that was unexpected.

About 3 weeks ago, I sprained my toe.  It was really stupid.  I was walking barefoot in my living room, and tripped over my own pair of shoes and stumbled, with my big toe snagging on the shoelace and ending up bent underneath my foot as my entire weight landed on it.

There was a moment of searing hot pain as things broke and tore inside me, but I thought it was no worse than stubbing my toe, and that I’d walk it off.  It seemed to be recovering slowly for a couple of days, then began to progressively worsen.  I was unable to sleep for more than 30 minutes at a time at its worst.  A week later, I visited the doctor’s office.  The strain of limping and hobbling had also been destroying the rest of my foot and lower ankle.  And then, the hip started hurting from all the strange positions I was trying to sleep in to avoid anything touching or hurting my foot!

I used the painkillers sparingly.  That was a mistake.

Today, nearly 3 weeks later, I can share some lessons learned:

• I definitely heal faster when I get lots of sleep.
• Therefore, If I can use painkillers to ensure sleep, I should use them in order to hasten the healing process.
• Pain is distracting and upsetting, and definitely does impair my ability to think clearly and act quickly.  In a larger company, there is often someone who can pick up the slack.  I didn’t have a backup plan for what would happen when I am incapacitated, and the game lost a few days of momentum because of my inability to focus.

I bet these are all true of you, too.

Some days you’re the windshield…

…and some days, you’re the fly.  Today was a “fly” day.

This isn't really me in the picture. If it was, the wall would be moving towards me much more quickly.

There is drama every day while trying to start your own thing.  When there are no stakeholders in the success of your product or our business other than yourself, then all of the panic, all of the urgency, ends where you end.  It’s simply not anyone else’e problem.

I have contacted an overseas company for whom I have a very high regard, and we are eager to work together on a project.  I thought they would be a great match for Traders’ Tales, after the impressive work they did on the Flash version of Coconut Queen.  They had also made a flash port of another game that I did at a previous studio, so I had been pleased on two occasions.

I expected development to begin with this company on Sunday night, which would be Monday morning, their time.  No sign of them.

On Monday night, I didn’t see any of my contacts online at their studio, so I contacted another high muckymuck at the studio and asked when/if they had started work.  He said no, that work would begin in about five weeks.

Oh.  Oh, dear.

I quickly re-read all of my correspondence with the company.  Sure enough, they said that they would have a team ready by yesterday, but at no time did they say that they would begin work once they had a team.

This is bad.

Without income, I can only afford to develop this game for a certain amount of time before I have to either abandon it (and get an honest job) or release it as-is and hope for revenues.  But I had attached myself to a studio that, while eager to work with me,  hadn’t been entirely clear on the timing.  If they couldn’t start for a month, I could very well be out of money before they got halfway through development.

I calmly explained that the game is costing me my life savings, plus the hefty royalty that I would be giving them for providing the labor.  And if development didn’t start for a month, then (1) my life savings would be several thousand dollars less than it is right now, and (2) if the game was not completed, then they wouldn’t get their royalty.  And since they were already eating costs to get that price and not getting royalty, it would be wasted money and time on both of our parts.

Ah, drama.

Luckily, two things came of this conversation in the middle of the night.  Well, three if you count my inability to get to sleep.

1. The studio still believes in the project.  Their Biz-dev guy, who was the person I was talking to, believes that if they joined forces with me for fundraising, we could find an investor willing to cover development costs.  That would be a serious win-win, as they could make more money and I could breathe a little easier by trading some revenue for a genuine chance at having a polished game launch quickly.  But more importantly,
2. The CEO contacted me in the morning to explain that the Biz-dev guy was not privy to the details, and that a team had indeed begun work on the game that week.  And he and the project manager were ready to work out milestones and feature sets.

The past 24 hours have been fairly emotional.  It wasn’t the end of the world, by any stretch.  Every project that I’ve been on for the past two years has had hiccups like this on a weekly basis.  It’s the hidden cost of not having a full-time team, the cost that producers and project managers pay, but which never shows up on the books.  Except, perhaps, as medical bills.

But now I just spent a day working on staffing, project management documentation and fundraising documentation instead of designing or programming the game.  It’s work, and it’s progress that pays off in the long term, but today, no code was written.

It was a fly day.