Today has seen an avalanche of great indie news for the Boston area. Some of this isn’t completely current, but I wanted to lump it all together.
The Indie Game Challenge
Today we found out the finalists for the Indie Game Challenge. This is a contest sponsored by GameStop, SMU’s Guildhall, and the AIAS. We have FOUR finalists in there from our area.
And all this came just after I finished up being a participant in the Global Game Jam this weekend.
For those that don’t know, a game jam is when a bunch of people get together for a weekend and make games. Usually you’re given one or more constraints to work within. At the end of the weekend, you show off whatever you get done. The Global Game Jam in particular is put on by the IGDA, the International Game Developer Association.
All told, at these three sites we developed SEVENTEEN games in a weekend. Granted, a lot of our games are barely functional… but that’s not the point. The thing is, over seventy five people got together in Massachussets this weekend, made games in 48 hours, and then published them for all the world to play.
Way to kick some ass, folks. I’m extremely proud to be a member of the game development community here in MA, and I’m incredibly proud of all my colleagues and friends who are fighting the good fight – be that at big studios, small indies, at colleges, or anywhere in between.
* For the record, Marc Ten Bauch lives in Rhode Island. But until someone claims him for some RI located dev meetup, I’m totally lumping him in here with us.
Going to put together a state-of-the-game post soon, but in the meantime – the panel I submitted to PAX was accepted! Here are the details:
Indies Will Shoot You In The Knees – Why We Don’t Play Fair
Everyone is talking about Indie games — titles like World of Goo, Braid, and AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity are making press and making money. But they’re fighting against games with $200 million dollar budgets and 100+ person dev teams. How do Indies compete? Three Boston-based Indie developers will check their water-guns at the door and tell you why and how Indie games are kicking more ass, taking more names, and chewing more bubblegum than their AAA rivals. You will hear from the Ichiro Lambe (IGF Finalist Dejobaan Games, Aaaaa!), Scott Macmillan (Macguffin Games, All Heroes Die) and ex-Bungie AI wizard Damián Isla, founder of the new indie Moonshot Games. The panel will be moderated by Eitan Glinert, founder of Fire Hose Games.
Right now we’re scheduled for Friday March 26th from 8-9pm, in the Naga Theatre. Hope to see you there!
We’re going to be launching the “$5 Beta” of the game there!
Penny Arcade announced right around the end of last year that they’re going to also be doing a Boston Indies Showcase, something analogous to the PAX 10 from the west coast show, except that you need to live within X miles of Boston to be eligible.
The deadline for submitting to the showcase is this coming Friday, 1/15.
So we’ve been busting our butts to get the game working! Things are in overdrive. Graham is drawing like a madman when he isn’t working with the couple people we have helping write game events. Whitney has been coding like some sort of crazy proficient coder-person, doing the last couple features we want for the deadline and then working on tweaks and bugs. I’ve been switching from design to coding to getting the game events into XML, and whatever else. It’s kind of nuts.
This coming Monday morning, we’ll sit down at Betahouse and play the game for the first time. I’m extremely excited to do it, and I’ll be spending the rest of the weekend making sure we hit that spot. Then we have five days to get it into some sort of proper shape for Tycho, Gabe, Robert, Lindsay, and whomever else in the Penny Arcade crew will be playing it.
Macguffin Games has come a huge way in the past twelve months. What was originally me trying to figure out how to code in my guest bedroom has turned into a project with three full-time developers (more on that in a minute), over 11,000 lines of our own code, and an impending 1/15 deadline for PAX East that I’m 100% certain we’ll hit.
And speaking of three full time developers, I’d like to officially welcome Whitney Sternberg to the Macguffin Games team as our main coder. She is indeed related to Graham – they’re siblings. I’ve known her for over ten years now, and have always been impressed by how responsible and serious she was. As a note, this is in stark contrast to Graham… sometimes we wonder about his getting dressed in the morning. I personally think he has some sort of Wallace and Gromit contraption that catapults him into his fashionable clothing.
When Whitney was interested in working on the game full-time, I jumped at the chance to have her. It was a fantastic decision; in a nutshell, she’s one whole hell of a lot better at it than I am! Life may take her in other directions past PAX, but I will try to tempt her into staying with the huge wads of cash we’ll be flush with at that point.
Err.. yeah. Moving on.
As I’ve said in a previous post, I realize there isn’t a lot out there about the game yet… that’s a good thing, I think. Prior to the last couple months, there was way too much about the game that just existed vaguely in my mind. With the addition of Whitney and the looming presence of our deadline, progress has accelerated hugely. I expect that after our 1/15 deadline we’ll be able to talk intelligently about the game on the blog. And heck, maybe even in other media outlets. Who knows?
So – from all of us here at the Macguffin Games team, we wish you a Happy New Year! 2010 is going to be a big year for us. Stay tuned.
I realized the other day that we’ve pretty much been radio-silent since the lack-of-IGF announcement. Apologies on that! We’ve pretty much been busting our butts working on the game – so, yes, we’re still very much alive and kicking.
In part, what was at first an instinctual thing on my part became a conscious plan – I haven’t talked too much about the game and how it is shaping up mostly because it’s been changing a lot. The ideas we had on paper changed as they became functional features, which in turn changed as we moved towards integrating those features with each other, and then again as we are starting to create the first game content.
I promise we will be letting more information out as time goes on – we just want to time it properly and have decent odds the features won’t change in a day or two.
As far as work on the game is progressing: it’s going very well! Graham and I have been working hard on all fronts. We may not have something for friends-and-family to play in December, but that’s not a bad thing – we’re finding lots of obvious changes to make as we continue with what I outlined above. I’ll avoid saying what else I expect for our schedule for now, since I tend to immediately make a liar of myself.
In other news, we will be changing the name of the game. We have winnowed things down to a handful of favorites, but are going to sit on them and think about it for a bit. Sadly, “Heritage” is de facto trademarked by The Settlers, or rather the rebranded “Heritage of Kings: The Settlers“. Because of how trademark law works, they could pretty much argue that any video game title that starts with Heritage is a violation of their trademark. Somewhat a bummer, but so it goes – since I wouldn’t be surprised that they had to change that title because of friction with Settlers of Catan, I can’t get too bent out of shape about it.
Thanks for reading! Hit us with any quesitons you might have in the comments.
So, the last couple days slammed home several things that I’d already been considering. Graham and I post mortemed the May-to-now timeframe, and the biggest problem we saw was that we seriously lacked project management.
But wait! Scott, aren’t you a seasoned project manager? Haven’t you produced games before?
We’re going to skip entering the IGF this year. In short, the game just isn’t ready. Even with all the ass we’ve been busting, we’re juuuust now about at a first-playable state. Going through our to-do items left for the 11/1 deadline, there are just about as many high-level tasks left to do as there are days left in the month.
We could submit no matter what, and then update the build over the next few weeks after that. The downsides there are that it would be a poor initial submission that doesn’t technically meet the rules of the competition (you’re supposed to be feature-complete), and that I’d pretty much kill myself for the next 5 weeks getting a build I could live with. After talking with Graham, we decided that the best course of action is to keep focused on bringing the game along as best we can, as fast as we can – but without crunching like crazy to come up with what we would consider a substandard entry.
I’m pretty disappointed, frankly, that we’re not going to be able to make this work… but as all good project managers know, it’s not about what you get in a perfect world – it’s about the choices in front of you. And I still feel our longer term deadlines are realistic.
Tomorrow Graham and I sit down and do a soup-to-nuts review of the game. Our goal is going to be to set a deadline (probably 12/1) where we can have a fully playable alpha to pass around in the Boston dev community and get some feedback. I feel really confident that we can make that kind of schedule work – but we’re going to put in some good planning and analysis to make sure.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still incredibly psyched about everything that has been getting done on the game to date. We’ve come a terrific distance in less than 11 months – especially considering this is Graham’s first video game project, and the first that I’ve programmed or designed. I think our issue with the IGF deadline was in my not realizing we were biting off more than we could chew. As my good friend Patrick said to me today, “Think of all the ways you could have f***** this up, and didn’t!”
He’s got a great point.
So, yeahhhhh. Interesting day. It’s weird to have the excitement I’m feeling with how fast the game is coming along but head-to-head with the frustration of missing a deadline. I mentioned to Graham as I was dwelling on the whole thing today – I realized I had never missed a deadline in 8 years of making games. Every milestone I ever was associated with, every game, shipped on time. I’m not sure I was prepared to actually fail at getting the game into the IGF – I don’t think I’d ever really considered the possibility.
But, that’s fine. A good bit of the reason I wanted to go indie and start my own company was to learn about doing this all from top to bottom. And you can’t learn very well without failing a couple times here and there. So, learn we will.
And this game is still going to be pretty spectacular.
I know, I know. Who, exactly, do I think I am? What kind of person makes one introductory blog post and then is completely incapable of following it up with even one thing of real substance?
If you’re asking that question, then this is obviously your first time on the internet since 2004 and–just between the two of us–you’re going to need to toughen up a little before you go to any other sites or–god forbid–turn off SafeSearch.
That being said, today I -do- have a substantive post to make. BEHOLD: tantalizing concept art!
What we have here is a sketch detailing the player civilization’s capital city (showcasing the kind of unfinished door that’s very In this year.)
I’m looking at a few things in this image:
What time period is this particular civilization supposed to be evocative of?
What real-world cultures form a touchstone for this civilization?
What are the overall cultural attitudes that are being expressed by this image?
Time Period
I’m trying to work within a time period that is somewhat later than a lot of fantasy–straddling a line between the heavy nautical themes of Colonial era Europe and the rougher architecture and more militarily utilitarian design of medieval cities. Since creating a compelling, flavorful and interesting visual aesthetic for a game-world involves being very specific about the choices you make, the historical middle ground of these two time periods isn’t entirely useful in this instance. Both components of each time period (focus on sea-travel and trade / claustrophobic fortressing) are important for the player civilization in a way that they just weren’t during the bulk of the Renaissance.
Touchstone Cultures
This issue is really a lot more complicated than I’m going to get into here, and is likely to be the subject of a future blog post (in 2010, if my previous track record is any indication.) So, assuming that I’ll talk about the difficulties (and necessity) of real world touchstones in world building later, I’m just going to quickly discuss the choices that we -did- make.
In order to provide a somewhat grander setting than the dark and hunched castles of medieval Europe, while maintaining the sense of isolation that they do so well we decided to expand the enclosed city in the one direction available: up.
This meant that we were taking cues from a lot of coastal and mountain cultures; in particular towns in Greece and Italy. You can see that influence in the way that buildings are clustered together (although that also speaks to the influence that came from London) and in the way that they hug cliff faces. On the other hand, the aforementioned London influence (courtesy of a trip there back in May) is evident in the construction of the buildings themselves. There’s something briny about all the stone in England that, to me at least, is indelibly associated with the more dangerous aspects of maritime life.
I suppose what I’m saying is that the water of the Mediterranean is just too inviting for our purposes. It’s nothing personal.
Overall Cultural Attitudes
Clearly, we were looking for this architecture to describe a strong maritime bent to the culture without resorting to ham-fisted representations of an oceanic theme. Frankly, we’re creating a nation of ex-sailors, not Aquaman’s Atlantis. In addition to this, however, we want to communicate that the culture the player is going to take control of is traditionally fairly formal and backward-looking. In that end, we went with architectural styles that, while not reserved, was less than ostentatious (sturdy stone and wood over filigree and flash).
Conclusion
So, there you have it: a sneak peek into our art direction. Next time, we’ll talk about the difficulties that arise when you try to create a fantastic world while maintaining your progressive street cred.
(Note from Scott – when he talks about having progressive street cred, he’s on his own. I’m lucky I can spell that term correctly.)
The last couple months have been crazy! Apologies on not getting more info up here.
Graham and I are working hard towards the November 1st deadline to get Heritage into the 2009 IGF. I’m coding like crazy on the core systems, and Graham is completing the look-and-feel exploration of the art style and Heritage’s world. Yesterday we sat down and scoped out our content needs for 11/1 – overall, I’m very pleased. Things look realisticly do-able. Which, based on my previous experience in making games, probably means we’ll crunch like hell all of October, but get something done we’re pleased with.
This weekend is Boston GameLoop, the game dev unConference I co-run with Darius Kazemi – so I’m hoping (praying!) that my time can be 100% focused on Heritage after that. We’ll see.
In the meantime, Graham has a piece of our concept art that he’s going to be getting up online some time tomorrow, along with some commentary on its creation. We’ll catch you tomorrow!
Recently Microsoft made a couple changes to the Community Games section on Xbox Live. The first was that they changed the name to Xbox Live Indie Games. The second and more significant change was to their pricing structure.
Previously, you could charge$10, $5, or $2.50 for you game. The new structure will be $5, $3, or $1.
There are a couple things to see here, from an indie perspective. The upshot for me? I’ve never felt better about my decision to not create a game for the Xbox.
I think in the longer term, this price change hurts indies in general… but the big question mark here isn’t the price point, it’s how much more exposure the Community games channel will get to the public. One thing is for sure – Microsoft doesn’t want developers like me making Community games.
It was already extremely difficult for an indie to make a living or run a company off Community games – the numbers we started seeing earlier this year confirmed that. From what I saw, people mostly put this down to a lack of marketing and exposure for the channel to the Xbox 360 userbase. Much like we see on iPhone game sales, if you’re not a big hit, you’re not going to sell enough units to cover your costs. But on the iPhone, this is because the channel is so incredibly crowed and noisy. On the Xbox, it’s because no one knows the channel exists.
The price change brings Community games more in-line with the iPhone game prices. This could help some indies sell more games on the Xbox, because the pricing is just that much more trivial to the user. But really, it still comes back to getting more people playing and buying Community games.
Longer term, this kind of pricing is a “race to the bottom”, as Jeff Vogel describes in an excellent series of posts on his blog. In enforcing this kind of price structure, Microsoft is saying that more complex, longer games don’t have a home in Community games. That’s the message I’m getting, at least.
A price point of $5 doesn’t make business sense for us on most any platform. And for one where people aren’t showing up in large numbers it’s even worse. What Microsoft is saying with these changes is, a) we only want games that you can make for about $3 a copy and b) trust that we’re going to publicize the channel a bit more.
I like Microsoft a lot – I used to work with them as a publisher, and I’ve always appreciated their excellent attitude on supporting their developers. But I’m going to need a bit better of an offer to prove out their business model for them when I’m taking all the risk.
Many of you may have heard of the current bruhaha over Tim Langdell. If you haven’t, here are several links to stories relating the ongoing trademark issues bsetween his company Edge Games®:
The short summation is – Mr. Langdell is being accused of legal but unsavory practices in the arena of trademark / intellectual property litigation. The case that blew this up in the dev community is regarding the French indies Mobigames and their iPhone game Edge.
Besides a general outpouring of condemnation towards Mr. Langdell and Edge Games®, this whole incident has been another black eye to to IGDA… Tim Langdell happens to be on the IGDA Board.
A lot of people have criticised the IGDA for not doing anything about this – well, the board doesn’t have a lot of good options. They possibly could try to oust him, but I think that would trigger an even bigger mess over bylaw interpretations and, who knows, even lawsuits.
On the other hand, we (again meaning the members of the IGDA) can indeed do something ourselves. Corvus Elrod has put together a petition to call a special IGDA meeting to remove Tim from the board. His blog post linked above explains his reasoning, and you can find the petition directly here. You’ll need to have an IGDA membership number to sign it.
My personal interpretation? Regardless of how stinky Langdell’s tactics may or may not be, and regardless of the merits of his trademark claims, the current mess is another blow to the IGDA’s credibility. If Tim cared much about the reputation of the IGDA, I think he would step down voluntarily. Since he is not doing so, I think we have a duty to get him out before his presence does any more damage to the organization. In the greater world of politics and corporate governance, heads would have rolled long before this point in time.
So, please read some of the above info, dig up whatever else you need to feel like you can make an informed decision, and please then go sign that petition. You can vote either yes or no for calling that meeting, so if you think he should stay you can make your voice heard via the petition that way as well.
But if you’re in the IGDA, please care about this and take action – one way or another.
Via my buddy Darius Kazemi (and originally the IGDA Tools SIG blog, Toolsmiths) – a great site that lists and ranks game dev tools that come with an indie price tag.
I was happy to see the language I use, BlitzMax, gettin’ some props. It’s a great language for my needs – high level Visual Basic style code, supports Object Oriented Programming (with a few minor exceptions), and has a great community of people who write lots of open source toolsets for it. The most prolific of these is Brucey, who has singlehandedly ported an incredible number of libraries to Blitz, including wxWidgets, libxml, Box2d, a MySQL database driver… that man is my hero, and getting mad props in the Heritage credits.
Heritage has now been entered to the 2010 Independent Game Festival. The IGF takes place at the Game Developer Conference in March of each year. The submission deadline is November 1st.
I meant to put this in the day the entries opened, but I had to wrangle a couple things together. Even as-is, I’ll need to update some stuff in my entry info before November. Steve Swink and the crew were very cool to let us do so.
The game isn’t remotely in shape to be a proper entrant right now – but one of the best tactics I found for getting things done with Macguffin Games was to sign up for hard deadlines and then tell everyone about them. “Ruinous Bets” is the term my friend Patrick Clapp and I use for them. In essence, you can’t let yourself fail because it would be too amazingly embarrassing.
In the words that Mr. Sternberg often uses, “#$@% just got real.”
Kellee: … I’m really interested with this Six Days in Fallujah project that keeps getting picked up and dropped and dropped…
Well… Have you actually seen the gameplay?
Kellee: Nah, I don’t know.
That’s the thing. A a lot of indies are coming out to stress the importance of Konami, but having seen it, it didn’t look very complex to me — like just another male power fantasy video game.
On a related note, I recently got Prototype for my birthday – I started playing it Monday night, and I’m perhaps 3 hours into it. I’m finding the game both fantastic and laughable, at the same time – the fact that you get to play some cross between a demented superhero and the original alien monster from Alien has been really compelling for the obvious male power fantasy reasons GSW alludes to above. At the same time, I’m laughing as I play because of Alex Mercer’s amazing lack of personality and dimension. He is a tone-perfect copy of the misunderstood, angry loner – it shows in his body posture, his dark-and-mysterious dialog, and the game’s purposefully ambiguous feedback on the killing of innocent people. Hell, he even has his hoodie up!
So – this idea of “male power fantasy video games” has been on my mind. Nothing really new here that makes it worth relating, except that I realized last night – I’m embarrassed that I’m enjoying this game so much.
I know why I’m enjoying it, and that’s why I’m abashed – it is really fun to just cut loose in the middle of Manhattan by throwing a taxi at some random people, eating one of the terrified passers-by, and then running straight up the side of a building. I thought that the allure here would be playing a superhero; that was incorrect. The allure for me is actually getting to be the thing that goes bump in the night. Alex Mercer is really terrifying – something that is aided by his two-dimensional characterization.
I’m not sure how to react to this. I’ve spent a lot of my life being at least vaguely embarrassed that I’m a gamer in general. This is partially the product of a youth spent being told to get off the computer and go outside / do my homework / come to dinner, and partially the product of an adulthood mostly spent being asked when I would grow up. For the most part these days, I play a lot of strategy and story-based games, and I tend to focus on the more obscure (or in the case of some indie games, high-brow) titles… mostly games I can defend via their complexity, their topics, or their pedigree.
Now I find myself embarrassed about my gaming again, but this time the criticism is from people within my community. And this time, I agree with the issues they raise! I firmly believe that we need to move past the tired old power-trips and find the greater breadth and depth in the medium.
But wow, it sure is fun to be a superpowered jackass in Manhattan.
Saw this sad news this morning that Manifesto games, fronted by long-time and storied game designer Greg Costikyan, is shutting down.
I’ll owe a debt to Greg and his partners for starting Manifesto, even though I never had a game on there. To me, their effort was an energizing symbol of the potential of indie games. I wrote Greg around then and asked if they were looking for money – he told me thanks, that they were, but that it would be incredibly risky to invest with them at that point. In retrospect, he was obviously right… but I didn’t care much about a return; I just wanted to tangibly show my support. In the end I should probably thank him for warning me off – that money is essentially being used to build Heritage.
Greg’s post is worth reading – he notes that while indie games have taken off since they started Manifesto, a great deal of that success is on proprietary channels like XBLA, WiiWare, and PSN, and the iPhone app store. I agree completely with his assertion that the continued viability of indie games requires breaking out of these walled gardens – otherwise we’ll see a repeat of the commoditization that has occurred in the casual games channels – and hell, is occurring right now in the iPhone app store.
Thanks for fighting the good fight, guys. I wish you the best of luck with all your future endeavors.
In the first dev blog post, I talked about some of my previous attempts to get a game made and a game company going. After getting my “training wheels” project finished, I turned my attention to making Heritage. The idea for Heritage evolved greatly in the time between conception and around January of this year.
Heritage started as an idea from my very good friend and college buddy Luke Jacobs, the Director of QA at Harmonix. Luke is the kind of guy who tends to have 3-5 designs kicking around in his head at any given moment. One of the designs he’s had kicking around for at least 8-9 years is for what he called Adventure, Inc.
Luke envisioned a game something like X-Com in an open fantasy world. Your people would start a small settlement and expand out, late in the game encountering the Big Bad that they needed to defeat. The process from start to finish would take generations; a central part of the game would be managing these families of heroes through those generations.
We looked at working together on the idea, but life continued to get in the way; both of us were putting in way too many hours at work to make a go of it.
But once I was full-time on Macguffin Games – well, that was different. Luke gave me his blessing to take the idea and run with it, and I started wrestling with turning this concept into a game.
From the start, my take on Adventure, Inc. was pretty different. While most of the elements above were still intact, it wasn’t a turn-based tactical combat game like X-Com at all. I wanted to take the game more in the direction of Crusader Kings, one of my favorite titles by strategy game maker Paradox Interactive. In Crusader Kings, you control a medieval fiefdom and, somewhat indirectly, the noble family that rules it. Characters in that game are described through traits – so your rules won’t have an 18 Strength, but instead might be Strong… or a Brilliant Tactician. Or in my favorite case of the nobility inbreeding, a Hunchbacked and Schizophrenic maniac.
So, this game – which I started calling Heritage - was going to be a grand strategy game, but capitalizing much further on the idea of a ruling family of heroes. The design was sketchy and so were my programming skills. In retrospect, I fell into the same trap I had warned so many people about: don’t bite off more than you can chew for your first game!
From around May of last year through to December, I went on a roller-coaster ride of exploratory game design and programming. The design slowly evolved over that time, as did my understanding of the scope of this massive project. All this time, I was working at home alone – not a situation that really suited my temperament, in the end. I came to a point in late fall where progress was slowing down tremendously. Although my coding skills had come a long way, it had become obvious to me that I could not create this design on my own.
I started talking with a pro programmer I knew who had made strategy games before and was a huge AI geek – a perfect pairing! We met several times, and he was interested in the design and in working with me. Towards Christmas vacation we decided that he was going to take some time and review his personal codebase of strategy game AI, figure out what we could use, and be ready to rumble in January. He figured he could spend about 20 hours a week working on the game.
This was huge! With that kind of expertise, this game could get made! He also had a ton of experience with strategy game design that I lacked.
Sadly, this fell apart come January. The demands of his day job were escalating, and what had been 20 hours a week turned into, “Let’s talk in a couple months.” Although this was incredibly disappointing, I wasn’t completely surprised. There had been signs that things would go this route, and 20 hours a week always seemed like an amazingly high number!
So, that’s where I was at the beginning of 2009 – picking away alone at an unworkable game design, going nuts in my house, and overall in a disheartened state.
My response here was defiance. This was just about my only chance – I was going to make this work, come hell or high water.
In part three, I’ll talk about how I started working with Graham and how we turned this things around.
The conventional wisdom in the AAA games industry is that there is a sweet spot to hit with your content creation. You want to create a rich game experience for your players, but at the same time you want to make sure not much of your content remains unseen – unplayed content in your game is tantamount to wasted time.
Personally, I’ve been moving away from that thought in the Heritage game design, and this morning it hit me how to enunciate the exception to this rule. In essence, unseen “stuff” can keep your game fresh to your older players. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve been working at starting my own game company since shortly after I got into the industry, in 2002. My first attempts were, I now realize, typical of the super-sized ambitions that most people new to this industry have.
My first attempt involved a unworkably complex design of dubious saleability. The rest of my small prospective team had roughly the same amount of experience as I did – a year or two in the industry, a minor game or two under their belt if anything. With these things, I was going to try to secure a publishing deal of some sort. Natch, this fell apart very quickly; it was way too big, way too ambitious, and no one really got anywhere with it because of the ridiculous crunching we were doing at work. We never even tried to talk to a publisher, and I doubt that we would have gotten to in any case.
Over the next several years,I had several other abortive attempts. I don’t regret any of them, though – each one got me a little further along and taught me something new. And each year I learned more about the games business… and got a little more desperate to get something done before possible marriage and children made doing so a lot more difficult.
In each iteration, the game designs’ scope got smaller – as did the potential team sizes and budgets. I learned that very few people are going to care about your project as much as you do – and when you lack the money to pay people for their work, you need them to be invested in the work. I also got a rude education in all the ways a project can blow up: partners flaking out, your own flakiness, too big a design, too poor a design, too boring a design – the list goes on and on. Finally, I learned that (at least for me) going the traditional 3rd party developer route is a recipe for ulcers. Unless you make out like a Bioware or Valve, you will find yourself needing staggering sums of cash to pay your developers and making devil’s deals with publishers to get it – deals that leave you in the same precarious position at the end of each project. Some people may want to do that… I’d rather make games.
In large part, I was hobbled by my inability to program. For those that don’t know, my college degrees were in Theater and History, and my game industry experience was in QA (both testing and management) and in Production. Although before getting into games I had taken a couple intro courses in programming, I had never gotten much farther than that. This meant that I was dependent on finding someone else to program the game – a situation I don’t recommend to any independent developer. When you are the driving force behind your project and you cannot advance it to reality, it can be really frustrating.
Then, last year, I got laid off from my job as Producer. My wife Anya and I talked about it, and we decided that I should go for it – get the company started. There wasn’t going to be a better time. I spent the next few months teaching myself how to code – I coded a simple card game based on my friend Joe Freemer’s design. It was a terrible implementation, and I knew it would be going in; I just wanted the chance to take a game and code it from start to finish before I did something I hoped would make money.
I had a plan in mind for the game – I’ll talk about that in part II.
Cory Doctrow has a very interesting article up on Internet Evolution. In it, he puts out an idea he thinks could help resolve the issue of internet makers creating things that infringe on other people’s intellectual property, said IP holders then bringing onerous lawsuits to bear, etc. His idea is to do a hybrid Creative Commons license for your content.
At GDC this year, GamaSutra news editor and blogger Leigh Alexander issued a challenge to game developers. During the Game Journalist’s Rant, she asked us to be open and forthright about the process of making our games. She made the case that a lot of the static between the press, developers, and the public is the result of devs hiding behind PR people and double-speak.
She has a good point.
From my experience in AAA games, she’s right. Sometimes it’s because the publisher is controlling marketing and PR, but a lot of the time it’s because the developers don’t trust the people interviewing them. These developers have talked frankly to the press in the past – but then what got printed ended up making them look bad. After something like that, of course they stick hard to their talking points – give very little away and admit no weakness unless forced to do so. If that feature you were going on about earlier on gets cut, well, just pretend it didn’t happen.
The situation for indies, on the other hand, is a little different. An indie doesn’t have a marketing department sitting over their shoulder, so there is no one to tell them to shut up. And for an indie the maxim of any press being good press is absolutely true – since no one has heard of you, you should take almost anything you get.
So I find myself exactly one week away from presenting Heritage to a pile of people, most of whom I won’t know, many of whom may be from the press. It’s an intimidating proposition. On the one hand, any press I can get is fantastic. On the other hand – this is terrifying!
The whole process of getting the game to this point has been pretty uncomfortable at times. Prior to to last year I had only dabbled in game design, and now I’m often asking for advice from friends and acquaintances who have worked on some of the biggest games out there. It can be difficult not to feel like an idiot. And next week I’ll be presenting this fledgling game to people from major publishers and the press? Yeah, it’s a little intimidating.
I think I see a way forward through this, though. Here’s the trick – I am indeed an indie. In the end, the only thing on the line with the game here is my personal reputation* and savings. There’s no giant company that stands to lose $15 million on my game, no boss back at the office who will be upset. When I really look at what I’m worried about, it comes down to people not liking what they see. My thought is that if I lie or am more evasive about the game in order to cover its flaws, I’ll just squander whatever good will I had coming into this for being a plucky underdog.
So here’s what I’ll do. I’m taking up Leigh’s challenge. The best possible thing I can do for myself and Macguffin Games right now is to be totally up front and honest about where the game is at. Instead of papering over or apologizing for its deficiencies, I’ll just explain where we are at in the development cycle. Ask people for their thoughts and advice.
In the end, it still sucks to be vulnerable and to put your half-done creation out there for the world to see… but that isn’t going to change. So I’ll do my best to face it head on.
*Graham’s reputation is out there as well, but since he’s a newcomer to making games, he’s a bit more on the sideline regarding this whole industry ridicule thing.
Cranking away hard on the May prototype, and it is REALLY exciting. With exactly two weeks until IGC Demo Night, it’s coming together well – Graham’s art is now going in and is quickly transforming the feel of the game completely. On my end, the disparate features I’ve been coding are all getting sewn into a coherent whole.
In lieu of a longer (and more informative) post, I’ve got a picture we did not make. Graham and I had a eureka moment about a month and a half ago was when we decided to use this picture as one of the foundations for the art direction:
The piece is called The Defense of the Sampo, and was painted by a Finnish artist named Akseli Gallen-Kallela in 1896. Image courtesy of Wikipedia, which has a great couple of articles on Gallen-Kallela and the Finnish epic poem The Kalevala that this picture is based on.
Not sure if this is helpful to anyone, but here is a print version of what I said:
I wanted to discuss the recent controversy over crunch time that sprang from the Leadership Conference panel. I feel the IGDA cannot afford to equivocate at all on this issue.
Although as an organization we need to be inclusive as an umbrella for all developers, having a “live and let live” policy on hard crunch with any company makes the organization look like a complete paper tiger, and robs us of any credibility on the issue with the larger overall development community.
While the attitudes and practices of Epic may work well in their culture, a lot of development houses make the same arguments simply in order to compensate for a lack of rigorous process in their production cycles.
I would urge the board to take a stance that, while acknowledging some studios have a culture of crunch that has their employees’ buy-in, that it is not something the IGDA can condone in light of the abuses other studios will commit with that same reasoning.
If this isn’t possible, I think that as an organization we should reconsider our advocacy around working hours. If the IGDA cannot be credible to developers on this front, we should instead focus on things where we can.
There may be small variations from the video in there – this was what I wrote down beforehand.
I’ve been somewhat reluctant to open my mouth any more on this topic… mostly because the immediate response from board memeber Tom Buscaglia and outgoing chair Jen Maclean (paraphrasing here) was, “Thank you, we hear you – and we could use your help if you care about this issue.”
The reality is that I can’t take that time. It makes me feel like a jackass, because I’d like to be fighting the good fight on this one. But looking at it? I’m in the middle of starting a company and trying to get an ambitious game from scratch to the IGF in about eleven months. Not only can’t I find that time, but I don’t have any of the enthusiasm for this fight that I know I’d need to really do a decent job at it. And that makes me reluctant to shoot my mouth off anymore.
So… why am I posting? Because I realized today that the call from Jen and Tom to help was NOT something I should read as, “Jump in or shut up.” In fact, I’m sure that they would both be appalled at that thought. That was just the connection drew on my own.
The IGDA does need its members to step up and help out in greater numbers. It also needs to know what we think, what’s important to us, and constructive thoughts on how we’d like them to represent us. These two items both stand up just fine on their own; while both are needed, one doesn’t flow from the other. While it behooves me to try and help, I shouldn’t keep quiet just because of that.
The only thing I’d add to my above statement, from my perspective as a producer in a previous life, is that I feel some crunch is inevitable in most game development. There are number of reasons; I think the two biggest are that our processes are still immature, and often our amazing ambitions often exceed our time and capabilities. A lot of this will go away with more practice, but yeah, sometimes we will all work overtime. God knows I’m doing it right now on Heritage.
However, it is completely unacceptable to me when studios encourage a culture of crunch being utterly necessary and intrinsic to game development, but are not up front about what devs are signing up for, don’t compensate their employees for their extraordinary efforts, and make no serious efforts to improve how they make games in order to eliminate that crunch. If crunching is part of your up-front deal with people like apparently it is at Epic, great. If it’s a relatively extraordinary measure for a company & they try to mitigate the need for it, I have no problem. If it’s an excuse to keep your profits high and you can’t be bothered to innovate your way out of it… that’s sad.
Whatever stance the IGDA takes on Quality of Life, I feel it needs to address the problem children of our industry – not Epic. And if Mark Rein, Mike Capps and company get upset because they’re left out in the cold, they should suck up and deal. I’ve seen Capps go on enough about how Epic is a bunch of rock stars… well, rock star away. I don’t think not having the IGDA Seal of Approval is going to hurt their recruiting much, given the buckets of money they are apparently lobbing around. And having that seal actually mean something might start to help with the problem children.
Just wanted to note – the dev blog is still planned, it is just holding off a little bit.
Right now Graham and I are crunching pretty hard to hit our May 7th prototype demo at the IGC East. Once we either get out ahead of that, or the demo is done, I have a number of posts planned, starting with a mercifully short bit on why I went indie, then some of the underpinnings of the game design.
Part of the problem I’m running into with jotting off a short bit about the state of development or the state of the design is that things keep changing, right now. A lot of what was in my head is now making firm contact with Graham’s workflow (No, Scott, really – what is this UI going to look like?) or with game code itself (Well… no, I don’t know how that works. I hadn’t gotten around to figuring that part out yet…?).
So, since the likelyhood of us finishing a polished demo game before the deadline are slim-to-none, it is likely I will start getting some posts up right after the May 7 demo. This may mean that I don’t properly capitalize on any press we may get at demo night, but it’s better than the alternative – a crappy demo.
As some of you probably know, I’m pretty active in the game development community in Boston, and am a member of the board for Boston PostMortem, the Boston chapter of the IGDA (International Game Developers Association).
Recently, several things came to a head in the IGDA – some controversy over board member statements regarding developer quality of life, not reaching quorum for elections for another year running, and some controversy over the search for Jason Della Rocca’s replacement (Jason is the one full-time employee of the IGDA as its Executive Director, and handles the majority of its day-to-day operations).
I’d encourage anyone who is a member of the IGDA and thinks this organization could be improved to take a look at the petition and sign it if you are so inclined. I’m not sure what will come out of all this, but I’m damn sure that if we don’t get all get more active, the IGDA will never become much more than a shadow of its potential.
For anyone that’s interested, I’ll be at GDC as of Monday afternoon and staying the whole week. If you’re out there and want to say hi, please feel free to drop me an email or hit me on Twitter at @MacguffinGames.
While we are not showing off anything officially at GDC, we may have a piece or two of concept art that Graham has been working on. My plan is to print a few of these out as calling cards for people interested in the project. We’ll also be posting it to the blog at some point – but hey, if you want that early collectors item, find me at GDC.
Hey there, The Internet. You might remember that back when Scott announced Heritage he made some vague allusions to having another blogger join him in the next several days. Well, those days came and went, and I was eyeball deep in making sure we had some quality images to show off at GDC next week, and with hardly a blog post in sight. It’s not that I -wanted- to start things off this way, but you know how it is.
Last night, one of my friends treated several of us to an early showing of The Watchmen – it was connected to a promo his friend’s company was doing. Here are my thoughts.
I’m writing this in two chunks – the first with no spoilers, and the rest with them. You have been warned.
The past couple years has given us a growing chorus of people cajoling game makers to take it up a level, imploring us to make Great Art – and a growing number of indies are doing it. Games like Passage and Flower, amongst many others, are making us think. This is A Good Thing.
Paying attention to this zeitgeist as an indie dev, though, can screw you over hard. Here’s why.
Paul Graham, for those that don’t know him, is one of the founders of Y Combinator, a venture capital firm that specializes in giving small amounts of money and lots of advice. He is also something of an essayist, with a number of really thought-provoking ones on his site.
His latest essay is an attempt to boil down the most important pieces of advice he has for startups. Coincidentally, every one of these things is applicable to someone starting an indie games venture.
Welcome, everyone. At long last, the Macguffin website is live! I’ll be endeavoring to keep a regular blogging schedule while we keep rolling on our first game; click on the Blog link to check it out, or the “recent posts” widget on the right.
Please bear with us if anything (the forums in particular) aren’t quite working right – and let us know!
The past couple years has given us a growing chorus of people cajoling game makers to take it up a level, imploring us to make Great Art – and a growing number of indies are doing it. Games like Passage and Flower, amongst many others, are making us think. This is A Good Thing.