First of all, let me apologise for the title of this post, as it is a reference to a Wu-Tang Clan song. Phew, with that out of the way, let’s move on.

I will get to more news on the ongoing prototype work, but first I wanted to point you to Cliff Harris’s blog:

• Cliffski’s Blog (positech.co.uk)

Cliff has been on a lot of gaming sites recently because of his recent open discussion with game pirates. Cliff runs Positech Games, which is his one-man indie games company based in the UK. Recently on his blog he posted a request to people who pirate (steal) his games. He asked openly and honestly why they steal his games. He promised that he wasn’t going to get angry or try to press charges, he just wanted to know how to make his games better so that people would be more willing to buy his games. If you haven’t read it yet, I encourage you to check out the link above as it’s quite interesting.

You’ll notice that I’ve added a link to Cliff’s blog on my side-bar on the left. I’ve followed Cliff’s stuff for quite some time. I first started following his work after I played the Democracy demo, which I really enjoyed. The other reason I wanted to post a link to his blog is that Cliff is one of the most open bloggers in the games development community. He has frequently posted detailed sales data about his games and posts great little blurbs about challenges and problems he encounters in his day to day development. Not that I want you to stop reading my blog, but I wanted you to be aware of some of the people who are willing to share their experiences with the community.

So, back to the prototype!

In my last post I mentioned that my next steps were:

1. Adding mouse support to the prototype
2. Adding some simple animations to the prototype

Adding mouse support turned out to be much easier than I had expected. I already had the guts of the game accepting abstract events from the game controller (e.g. “Move Left” instead of “User pressed Left Arrow Key” to trigger an event), so connecting mouse movement to those events turned out to be quite simple. The Playfirst SDK also helped a lot in this regard. They provide easy access to mouse events.

With mouse control enabled I was shocked at how differently the game played. The gameplay is now much closer to what I originally saw in my mind. Using the mouse removes a barrier between the player and the game in this case. It allows the player to do what he/she wants instead of having to think about each keypress that will get them to that point. I’m very happy that I put this in at this point.

Animation turned out to be a bit of a bigger challenge. I spent the majority of my time (about 3 years) in the game indrustry as a lead user interface programmer, so I’m quite familiar with building 2D, sprite-based animation systems. However, it’s always a challenge. Here I kind of broke my rule of “fast and dirty” for the prototype and kind of architected something a little nicer. It took longer, but now I can drop animations into the game pretty easily. The animations are code based, but I should be able to make them data driven pretty easily with this system.

At any rate, the animations have helped make the prototype feel much more like a game. When “success events” (we’ll call them for now) happen, now the player is provided some feedback that something good happened. This allows time to take stock of what’s happened and provides the necessary feedback that allows the player to learn and become better at the game.

All-in-all it’s been a fairly successful few days. I also fixed a pretty major bug in the core game logic, so I was happy about that. I plan to spend most of the rest of today playing the game and taking notes on what needs to be done next. I’m hoping, within the next few days, to have a decision about whether this is the direction I want to pursue for the game or not.

Owen

I’ll have more on the ongoing prototype saga in the coming days, but I wanted to take a brief detour back into Business Land.

I’ve been talking to a lot of people about what I’m doing now (friends, family, colleagues) and the second question I usually get asked after “so…how do you make a video game?” is usually “and how do you go about marketing something like that?” This is an excellent question; one that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to, but one that I haven’t answered for myself yet.

In the world of “big games”, the EA’s of the world can spend millions of dollars marketing titles. They run print ads, TV ads, ads before movies, ads on gaming sites, and they have entire teams of PR/marketing people making sure that hundreds of millions of people hear about their game before it goes to market. In the indie world, things are quite different. I don’t have a marketing team or a PR team, and I certainly don’t have millions of dollars to spend on marketing. So how am I going to get my game out there and how am I going to get people to buy it? After all, even though I’m primarily doing this because I want to make games, I also need to make a living off it so that I can keep doing it.

There are primarily four distribution models out there for indie games that I’ve come across so far. Keep in mind that I’m concentrating on games built for a PC or Mac, not console games; that’s a whole different ball of wax. For each of the first three methods it’s standard practice to distribute a free demo version of the game that entices the player to pay to play the full version of the game. The fourth method changes that quite a bit.

1) Self-Distributed

With this option the developer is responsible for all marketing, advertising, and costs associated with hosting and bandwidth usage. The big upside to this type of distribution is that most of the revenue generated by game sales comes back to the developer. Small percentages of revenue would go to whatever credit card payment system is used, but the majority of the money goes to the developer. However, because the developer is also responsible for getting the word out, sales numbers might be much smaller than through other methods.

2) Publisher-Distributed

There are publishers out there who specialize in indie or casual games. If you can land a publishing deal the publishers handles marketing and advertising and getting the word out. However, they often take a substantial cut of all sales revenue generated. However, say you get 35% of sales (and the publisher keeps 65% – I’m basing these numbers on what I’ve heard Microsoft takes if they publish your game on Xbox Live Arcade), but you’ll sell five times the number of copies of your game, then it’s a better deal. There are other potential downsides with this model, depending on the publishing deal: the publisher might want ownership of the product, for example.

3) Portal-Distributed

There are a lot of casual games “portals” out there (e.g. Playfirst – whose free SDK I’m using for my prototype, or Big Fish Games). I don’t know a lot of details about how these work, as publishers and portals don’t like talking about specifics of deals, but my understanding is that they work similar to a publisher. You give them rights to distribute their game on their site. They may (or may not) promote it on their site depending on whether or not they think it will sell. They keep a percentage of each sale and the developer gets a percentage. That percentage can change based on whether or not they have exclusive distribution rights for the game or not. Often games are sold to several portals at once (the main difference between working with a portal or an individual publisher). The big downside with portals is that there are hundreds (or thousands) of games on them, with several new games being posted every day. I’ve read elsewhere that you make almost all of your money in the first 1-2 weeks of being listed on a portal. Things rarely stay in the top 10 longer than that, and it’s the top 10 that really make the money.

4) Micro-Transations

This way of paying for games is huge in South Korea right now, but hasn’t really caught on big in North America and Europe yet. In this model the entire game is given away for free. You can play the whole thing without paying for it. However, there are usually countless aesthetic things that you can customize in the game…for a fee. Say you want a red hat for the character in your game; that’s $0.25. Now you want a cooler looking sword; that’s $0.50. The transactions are all handled online, so there’s virtually no way for piracy to take revenue from the developers. However, in North America, gamers tend to like to pay once for a product and then fully enjoy it, so it hasn’t caught on like it has in Asia.

Like I said, those are the four main ways I know of to market and distribute indie games. There may be (and probably are) other ways that I don’t know about or haven’t thought of.

For now, I’m letting all of this settle in my mind. I think I need to figure out more about what the game is going to end up being before figuring out how I’m going to distribute and market it. Once I know the product more intimately, I think I’ll know better how I need to sell it.

If you have any thoughts on the models I’ve described above, or you think I’ve left something out, please feel free to post in the comments.

Owen

It’s hard to write about the progress of the prototype without giving away specifics, which, at this point, is not something I’m willing to do. However, I will give it my best shot and hope that I don’t confuse everyone.

I spent yesterday and this morning adding things to the prototype to make it more “game-like”. The stage I was at when I started yesterday was one where the core mechanic was implemented, but there was no game. I sat down and gave some thought to what needed to be done…

1) The player needs to be able to lose

This one was easy to implement, and so I tackled that first. I implemented my loss condition. At this point the game says “Game Over” and you are given the option to restart. Alright, it’s already looking more like a game.

2) The player needs a challenge

At that stage I was at yesterday, the player was free to do whatever he or she wanted and there was no real penalty for mistakes. There needed to be something in there that challenged the player, that forced him/her to make choices and face the consequences. This one was a little more tricky, and this is what I’ll probably be refining for the next few days (or the rest of the project). This is where the real meat of the game will come from. This is what will make the game fun.

3) The player needs to be able to plan ahead

Once I had a first pass at step 2, I realised that it was frustrating that I never knew what my next goal after the current goal would be. I was only able to plan for the current goal and never set myself up in a place to be in a good position for the next goal. So this morning I implemented a system that lets the player see what’s coming up next. This allows the player to make strategic plays that aren’t necessarily related to the current goal, but that allow for a deeper gameplay. This adds a level of complexity to the game for players who want to play at that deeper level.

At this point, I now have a game. I can play games and lose and see what’s fun. The game is definitely starting to get fun. What is causing the most trouble right now is good old step 2 up there. I’m trying to find a balance between making the game too easy and too hard. It needs to be easy enough for new players to get into the game, but difficult enough for experienced players to feel challenged. Ay, there’s the rub.

I think one of the big problems I’m having with the game is the input system. I started with keyboard control, because it was the easiest to implement and get running, but now I’m thinking that I really need to try the mouse for control and see if it feels better.

I also think I need to put in some basic animations. When game events happen they happen immediately, which is confusing. There’s no reward or pay-off for the user. Not only that, but you’re not quite sure if you’ve done something good or bad. I think I need to put some simple blinking animations in when things happen to provide more feedback when something important happens.

This is fun!

Owen

I’m back! The unpacking isn’t finished, but it’s close enough that I need to start doing some work again.

Last time, on Streaming Colour Blog…

It’s been two weeks since I did any coding, so I’m looking forward to getting back to the prototype. When I left off I had the prototype to the point where I was able to test the core gameplay mechanic. If I were building Tetris, then I’d be at an equivalent stage to being able to eliminate rows when they’re complete, but not actually have the blocks fall yet.

At this point, it’s not much fun to play, but that’s OK. I know that I need to get a few more gameplay elements into the prototype in order for the fun of the game to start to show through. Really, this is what the prototype is all about. In another few days I should start to see the fun emerge. If it doesn’t, then I’ve only spent a week and a half on it and I’ll have time to start playing with some new ideas. I have several ideas that I want to test, so I’m excited to see how things turn out.

Apart from unpacking, I’ve been playing through Braid. I want to talk about it, but I want to finish it before I start discussing it. I think I’m pretty close to the end.

I think that’s it for now, I really want to get some coding done.

Owen

I can’t believe that I’m still unpacking. It’s all I’ve been doing all day, every day, since our stuff arrived from Vancouver last week. Granted, my wife and I were out of town for 3.5 days over the weekend for a friend’s wedding, but still. I’m getting really sick of boxes. The end is in site, however! The rooms of our apartment are starting to look like rooms. Hopefully only another day or two of unpacking to go, then back to work.

Speaking of work, Gamasutra ran an article this morning on the State of the Casual Games Industry in 2008:

• The State of the Casual Games Industry in 2008 (www.gamasutra.com)
  

They interview 3 people in the industry: one from Popcap, one from Playfirst, and one from Reflexive. These are guys who ought to know the industry better than most others. It’s interesting to see that they’re seeing trends in the casual space that the “hardcore” industry went through in the last few years. Namely, the drive towards more story and character in the games. The three argue that you couldn’t distribute Tetris today (as a new game) because it doesn’t have a story that drives the player through the game.

I found the article interesting, but also a little disappointing. There is a lot of doom and gloom talk about the future of puzzle games. I’m working on a puzzle game right now and I’ve been debating about whether or not it needs a story to drive the main gameplay. These guys seem to be saying ‘yes’, for the most part.

However, what I found most encouraging was Jason Kapalka, from Popcap, saying that they’ve always just made games that they want to play. This is what I’m trying to do, too. I figured that if I manage to create a game that I really enjoy playing, there are bound to be other people who will enjoy the same game.

I didn’t decide to set out and start an indie company so that I could follow the trends and make clones of whatever games happen to be selling well on a given week. I started doing this because I want to make the kinds of games that I love to play. Hopefully there will be a market for them when they’re done.

Owen