Archive for October, 2010
Your Time is Valuable
Sunday, October 31st, 2010
I’m back! If you’re a regular iDevBlogADay reader, you may have noticed that I was off the last two weeks. My wife and I had our first baby almost three weeks ago, and the other members of iDBAD were nice enough to let me have some “paternity leave” to get used to life with a new member of the family.
Now that I’m starting to learn to cope with very little sleep, and our new son is starting to find what might be described as the beginnings of a routine, I thought it was time to get back into the saddle and write up a post. Since I haven’t done any work in the last two weeks, a technical post seemed out of the question. And given that my life has been turned upside down, and I’m learning what it means to have no free time, I thought I’d talk about the value of our time as indie developers.
There seem to be three kinds of indie developers: those who treat games as a creative endeavour first and business second; those who treat games as a business first and a creative endeavour second; and those who think about both the art and the business carefully when building games. I’ll admit, I’m one who thinks about the creative aspect first and the business second, but I do think of this as a business. I’m not a hobbyist. I need to make money to be able to keep making games.
A year and half ago I wrote up a controversial blog post that talked about the relatively slow start that my first game, Dapple, got off to in a post called “The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty)“. The post was meant to show another side to all the Instant Millionaire stories that were running about the App Store at the time. However, one thing that surprised me was that I received a lot of angry mail (some of it extremely angry) in response to the post. One of the things that people got most upset about was my calculation of the budget for the game.
In my breakdown I had called out my own time as part of the budget for the game. This upset a lot of people. But let’s consider this first. How many times have you been at a conference or an iPhone dev meetup and heard a conversation like this:
Dev 1: “So how much did your game cost to make?”
Dev 2: “Well, I paid $200 for sound effects from WebsiteX, but I did the art and programming myself, so that was free.”
I know I’ve heard that a lot. Hell, I think I’ve even said that at one point or another. What bothers is me is that so many of us have this attitude that our time isn’t worth anything. Why are the two months you spent programming and drawing “free”? It’s not. Your time is valuable. Your time is money.
Let’s think about it this way. If you had hired a programmer and an artist to build the game for you, how much would it have cost you? Would it have been free? If you had taken on a two month contract instead of building your own game, would you have done it for free? No. We are professional developers. Yes, we’re indie. Yes, we work for ourselves. But our time is not free. We need to start thinking about the cost of our time when we’re considering the cost of making a game.
Now, I’m not advocating avoiding a game you desperately want to make because you know it will lose money. What I’m trying to get at is that you should at least be aware that it’s going to lose money. If you still need to make the game, make it. We’re professionals. Our time is valuable. Let’s make informed decisions. Let’s take ourselves seriously.
Owen
P.S. Happy Halloween, everyone!
I’m Indie, and I’m Proud
Sunday, October 10th, 2010
I had been struggling to come up with a topic for this week’s #iDevBlogADay post and @frederictessier suggested I write about a day in the life of an indie, and that sparked a post I keep meaning to write.
I want to talk today about why I’m indie. As many of you know, I come from a games industry background. I worked two years at Electronic Arts, and almost three years at Propaganda Games (a Disney studio) in Vancouver. I worked on PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, and PC games as a lead user interface programmer and senior gameplay programmer. I loved my jobs in the industry. I loved the people I worked with, and I loved the games I got to work on. And yes, I enjoyed the regular, decent pay cheque. So in the summer of 2008, when my wife and I decided to move back to Ontario to be closer to our families, I had a decision to make: I could find an industry job in Ontario, or I could follow my dream of being an indie developer and start making my own games. Obviously, I chose the latter. But why?
To me, the most alluring aspect of indie life is the idea of taking an idea and making a game out of it. Not a game designed by a team of designers, level designers, artists, programmers, audio designers, audio programmers, animators, etc, etc, but a game designed and created by me, the way I see it in my mind. The opportunity to tell my own stories, to share my own thoughts and emotions with players. The chance to express myself in game form. I view game creation primarily as a craft or artistic expression, not just as a business. Being indie offers me the opportunity to explore concepts that I wouldn’t otherwise have the chance to explore.
My time in the console industry, while I wouldn’t trade it for the world, also involved some heavy amounts of long hours and weekend work. I did more than my fair share of crunch. My wife and I are starting a family and I didn’t want to be working 80 hours a week while my child grew up without me there. Working for myself allows me to set my own hours. It allows me the flexibility to work when I want and not work when I want. If I want to work 80 hours a week, that’s fine. But if I don’t want to work 80 hours a week, then I don’t work 80 hours a week. If I want to work in the evenings and spend the mornings with my family, then I can do it. I can work however I want! As self-employed indie developers, we get to choose our own hours. We get to choose our own work-life balance. This is not something we should take for granted.
Finally, I love being an indie games developer for the same reason I like cooking: I get to understand every step from start to finish. If I want a physics system in my game, I need to learn how it works. If I want sound effects in my game, I need to teach myself how to create them. If I want graphics in my game, I need to draw them. I love programming, that’s my professional background, but I enjoy all the parts that go into making a game. I love being able to learn about it all. Being an indie developer means that I’m constantly learning about a whole variety of new things, from math, to movie editing, to 19th century artistic movements, to 8-bit square wave music generation. What could be more awesome than that?
Yes, there are hard parts about being indie. I’m not pretending otherwise. It’s incredibly hard at times. I miss the social aspects of working in an office. I miss having a regular pay cheque. And yes, sometimes I even miss having someone else telling me what to do, instead of having to make every decision myself. But you know? I still love it. Because if I want to make a game about mixing paint colours, monkeys in space, or about terraforming, I can, damn it. I’m Owen Goss. I’m indie, and I’m proud.
[Update (2010-11-14): I just posted a companion piece to this entitled "Indie Challenges", that looks at the other side of being indie.]
Owen
P.S. Happy Thanksgiving to my fellow Canadians!
Creative Block
Sunday, October 3rd, 2010
After failing to meet my deadline for #iDevBlogADay on my second week, I was put to the end of the waiting list. Just over three months later and my turn is back up! I’ve taken the Sunday slot, which has a history of not lasting very long, so we’ll see how many weeks I can keep this up…
For my (triumphant?) return I’ve decided to not write a technical post. I was going through a list of technical things I could write about, but I just wasn’t feeling it. I decided I’d rather write about game design today, and perhaps more generally, about the creative process in general. Specifically, I’d like to talk about the problem of creative block.
What I’m talking about is getting stuck on a creative problem; being paralyzed by creative decisions. It happens to everyone. And if it hasn’t happened to you, then, well, I envy you. The block can happen in a number of ways: you have too many ideas and can’t decide which one to look at first; you have lots of ideas, but now they all seem terrible; you have no ideas at all; you have a few ideas, but they all seem equally interesting; and on and on.
For me, I run into these problems most commonly at the start of a new game. I’ve just wrapped up a previous game where I’ve spent the last month or two dealing with the tiniest minutia of polish and wrap-up and marketing. It’s been a while since I’ve had to do “big picture” thinking and come up with a new concept. It’s usually at this point that I’m also in my post-release “blues” period, coming back down to reality from a post-release high (perhaps I’ll devote next week’s post to this alone). I start going through my various notebooks and sketches looking at all the ideas I’ve written down and looking for those few that scream out for more exploration. It’s at this point where I’m most likely to become stuck.
“What if all the ideas I have written down are terrible?” “What if none of these are doable?” “What I spent several months building this game and no one buys it?” “What if…” “What if…” It’s easy to get sucked into a place where you can’t make a decision and spend all day reading twitter and other iDevBlogADay posts in an effort to avoid actually doing something. [wink]
Of course, this sort of paralysis can come at other points in the project too: you’ve got a working prototype but you’re uncertain how to take the next step into starting to turn it into a game; you can’t decide whether your game data structure would be better represented as a graph or as a b-tree; you can’t decide whether the game should feature zombies or pirates or both; you can’t decide whether your pause button should be green or red; and on and on. So off to twitter and your favourite RSS reader you go to avoid the problem.
Now I should probably state that I don’t have a solution. Oops, maybe I should have said that before you started reading this far. But honestly, if I did, I’d be on the motivational speaking circuit instead of making indie games. However, I have a few tricks that I try, and usually one or two of them will help me push through a rough spot and let me get on with it:
1) Make a Decision and Go
This is probably the hardest of the things I’m about to say, but this is probably one of the most useful. Flip a coin, write the options down on paper and draw one out of a hat, or just pick whatever seems most reasonable, then start working on it. Often after a few hours of working on anything it’ll get you out of your own head and the ideas will start flowing again in some kind of helpful way. The process of building something instead of thinking about it may also expose problems you hadn’t thought about, or even better, solutions you hadn’t thought about.
Got too many game ideas you like? Pick one, build an eight hour prototype, and see how it feels. If you don’t like it, try another one. Repeat as necessary. Don’t know if your pause button should be red or green? Try both and see how they feel in the game. Can’t decide on a data structure? Pick one and start coding. Five minutes in you may realize that the one you’ve chosen won’t support the API you need and you can start over. But at least you’ve moved on.
2) Use Tools
In 1975 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt came up with a deck of cards to help get through creative block called The Oblique Strategies. The idea is that each card has a bit of text on it to help you think about a problem in a new way. When you’re stuck on something, you draw a card at random from the deck and it might say something like “Only one element of each kind.” The idea is to force your brain to think about the problem in a new way.
There are Oblique Strategies iOS apps available in the app store if you search for them. I’m not sure which ones have the actual rights to use the text and which are in violation of copyright, so I’m not linking to any of them.
3) Think About Something New
If I’m stuck on a game idea and I’m just not sure if I can make it work, sometimes it helps me to think about a different game for a few minutes. It’s a similar strategy to using the Oblique Strategies. Except in this case, I have a little script I go to that generates a random game idea. I’m making this script available on the site now. You can find it in the right-hand sidebar under the Pages header, called “Game Idea Generator“. Go play with it for a couple of minutes and come back…I’ll wait here.
Back? Good. Moving on.
4) Talk it Out
Still stuck? Talk it out with a friend. Even someone who knows nothing about what you’re trying to do. In fact, sometimes that helps. They might be able to offer suggestions you wouldn’t think about. Even just saying the problem aloud to yourself can sometimes help (though can also lead people to believe you may not be right in the head). Talk to a friend, your husband or wife, your cat or dog, or post a question on twitter or your blog and see what people say.
5) Take a Break; Do Something Inspiring
If all of the above don’t work, maybe it’s time to take a break. I like to try to find something to do that will inspire me in new ways: play a video game, watch a film, read a book, do some sketching, go to a life drawing class, listen to music, go to an art gallery, go for a walk in a forest, go for a bike ride, talk to someone you love, grab a coffee with a friend. The important thing is not to dwell on the fact that you’re stuck. Get your mind onto something else. Have fun. Be inspired in new ways and the block will become unstuck. Just remember: you do need to come back to the problem at some point. Don’t let taking a break become taking ten breaks.
Fin
Making games is hard work. We all know that. But we also know it’s the best job in the world. We make games because we love what we do. But we often don’t talk to each other about the hard parts, about the frustrations of getting creatively blocked, the financial challenges, and the emotional ups and downs. Maybe it’s time we started doing that a little bit more so we can help each other out.
Owen