Macguffin Games

Dev Blog: The Story To Date, Part One

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.

Tags: Dev Blog, heritage