August 17th, 2010
This post is part of a coordinated assault on the blogosphere by a number of indies – we’re all blogging today on the the theme of, “Size Doesn’t Matter”, either for or against. You can find a list of all the other posts at the bottom of this one.
Since not many indies are working in the social games space, we wanted to riff on that experience a little. We hope you enjoy.
Overall, the case can be easily made that game size doesn’t matter. Great small games have already been made – one of my favorites that pops right to mind is Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, a space exploration game where each game takes 20 minutes. We can also look at the AAA market, where games have been getting shorter for years, and people are still content to pay just as much for them. As indies, thank God for this. If the only way to succeed in finding fun was to crank out 100-hour experiences, few of us would be making games.
Something important changes, though, when you get into the social media space. If you want to make money in today’s social media (read: Facebook) market, you’ve only got a couple ways open to you. The biggest is virtual goods. But if your game is really small, how do you go about legitimately creating lots of content for it? If your game takes ten minutes total to play, good luck selling a bunch power-ups and decorative items for the experience.
The solution we see goes back to the basics of making a good game – come up with something with elegant, interesting, and simple core mechanics – and then enable your designers to create content that extends the game’s dynamics.
For those not familiar with the mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics model of game design, it posits that a game is made up of those three things. Mechanics are the rules the game operates with – like in poker, how many cards are dealt, if you can exchange some of your hand for new cards, etc. The aesthetics are the thematic and other elements that lend to the experience, but don’t directly impact the gameplay – such as what kind of poker chips you’re using, if you’re playing at a felt table, etc.
The dynamics – what I’m focused on in this post – are the gameplay considerations that arise with the framework created by the mechanics. So, again in poker, dynamics are things like a player deciding to bluff. They bluff by using mechanics in a certain way (for example, making a big bet), but the bluff itself is a result of the core rules, not a part of them.
With our unannounced Facebook game, we’re working on a small set of core mechanics that will support being extended as we add more content to the game.
So say, just hypothetically, that our new game was a steampunky mech game. It then makes a lot of sense to have interchangeable mech parts and a toolbox of different effects each attack and defense can have. The combinatorial possibilities of the parts help create many possible dynamics, just like deck building in Magic: The Gathering.
Most of this comes down to simply good game design. But in the social media space, this sort of thing becomes essential if your game is free, your team is small, and you are relying on virtual good transactions to pay the rent. If you don’t keep content in your pipeline, you can assume that revenue will dry up as well.
A small set of core mechanics means your development time to beta is shorter. The reliance on content to extend the game means your designer can contribute to the game’s bottom line on a regular basis with only light support from the rest of the team – something that you’ll all appreciate.
Please read some of the other great posts in this giant cross-blogging extravaganza:
| Tags: Game Development, game size
Posted in Uncategorized | 15 Comments »
August 10th, 2010
Last month, Boston Post Mortem (our local IGDA chapter, which I help run) did a second helping of the PAX East panel, Indies Will Shoot You in the Knees – Why We Don’t Play Fair. It was moderated by Eitan Glinert, the head honcho of Fire Hose Games, and the panel consisted of Damian Isla of Moonshot Games, Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games, and me.
If you want to watch it, you can find the full video of it here, courtesy of my good friend Darren Torpey.
“What is Indie” = Useless
During it, I got onto a good rant about “who is indie”. Eitan loves to get a good argument going with these panels – which is great, no one wants a snooze fest. So this time, he did a lightning round – all three panelists had to answer “yes”, “no”, or “maybe” to the question “Is such-and-such a studio indie?”
My stance, then and now, is that the question of “Who is Indie?” is utterly useless. And as a game developer, “useless” is one of the dirtiest words I can think of.
We cannot afford spending time on useless things. We have way too much to do, to create, to explore. We usually have way too little time and money. We must be ruthlessly utilitarian in pursuit of what we think is really important. Unproductive navel gazing and deciding who is not in our special club is useless.
Exactly like in film and music, there is an indie brand now – it’s a certain kind of game, a certain style of art, a certain set of people. That’s fine. But do not make the mistake of assuming that this is what you need to be as a game developer and artist. That brand will see its rise and fall, just like every other creative movement in the history of culture.
If anything isn’t indie, it’s the idea that your creative output should be forced to fit into someone else’s preconceived notions for it.
Indie is an Aspiration
To me, the indie is an aspiration. It is a desire. Indie is wanting to make your mark, creatively, to learn and grow and share something new and special with people. Indie doesn’t meant making a certain kind of game, fitting within a certain budget, or not sitting in a certain office.
I think there is a high correlation for successful people and companies not taking creative risks. This makes perfect sense to me – once you have something to lose, it’s harder to risk throwing it all away. But spending time trying to figure out if someone “is indie” makes no sense. How does that help anyone make art?
My Soapbox Manifesto
What does indie mean in video games?
Indie is the aspiration to create something new, interesting, or different. Something you as an artist find worthwhile.
That’s it.
It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, if you make any money on it, or anything else.
So go make a game. Make something new, even if only to you. Learn something. Then challenge yourself to go make another.
| Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »
August 5th, 2010
With as swamped as I’ve been, I have done very little to promote Boston GameLoop, the game development unConference that Darius Kazemi and I run every year. Since we now have final t-shirt art to post, I figured now was a great time to rectify that – look below if you want copies of it sized for desktop backgrounds.
GameLoop is on Saturday, August 28th in Cambridge, MA. It’s a self-organizing game conference, and it goes something like this:
- 9am-10am: People show up and spend an hour getting to know each other’s shared interests
- 10am-11am: We informally vote on proposed sessions and put those up on the big board
- 11am: the conference begins!
There are rooms for people to meet in, and a big board with a schedule grid to coordinate it all. Last year’s GameLoop was a huge success: we had about 90 attendees from about 35 companies, including local companies like Irrational Games, Harmonix, and Rockstar New England as well as developers from places like Bethesda Softworks, EA Mythic, and Vicarious Visions.
The signal-to-noise ratio at a conference like GameLoop is pretty astounding. The big thing here is that it’s just developers talking about stuff they are interested in. It’s a refreshing change of pace if you’re starting to feel like the big conferences are the same people saying the same things every year.
We’ve had sessions about procedural animation, ethics in rulesets, distributed version control, iPhone shaders, illusionary gameplay, prototyping, and many others. Some sessions are incredibly small and focused – just three really passionate people that just met, discussing a topic they care about. Other sessions can be more like standard conference lectures or roundtables. You can see the whole 2009 schedule along with some audio and notes from the sessions.
Registration for the event is $40. Via our generous sponsors Gamespy and DINO Interactive Studios, we will provide lunch, and a T-shirt – we’ll also have breakfast if we can find a sponsor for that. After the conference groups of people head to dinner to hang out.
To register, go here: http://gameloop.eventbrite.com. We accept PayPal and major credit cards, as well as cash at the door (but you still need to register).
We hope you can make it! We also hope you’ll pass the word on to other industry types that you know, maybe even send a note to your company’s internal boards or lists.
I’ve gone ahead and resized the image for some desktops – enjoy!
And please, sign up now!
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July 16th, 2010
Have a great weekend, everyone!
| Tags: brain-in-a-jar, Dev Blog, game art
Posted in News | 2 Comments »
July 6th, 2010
Thanks to Boston tech blog BostInnovation for including us in their 4th of July article about independents and games.
Things are coming along fantastically with the new game – we’re waiting on announcing it in part to get the logo. More as soon as we have it.
| Tags: Boston Indies, business, indie
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June 21st, 2010
I’m really glad Alex Schwartz wrote this up – I wanted to, but didn’t manage it. In Alex’s words:
Without prior planning, FOUR of the articles written for the newsletter were authored by Boston-area indie game developers. As a member of this awesome group of individuals, I take great pride in seeing Boston Indies in the spotlight.
Amen, brother! Check out Alex’s post at the link above, and the IGDA newsletter here.
| Tags: Boston Indies, Game Development, indie
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June 15th, 2010
(And yes, it’s for Facebook.)
| Tags: annoucements, Dev Blog, Macguffin Games
Posted in News | 3 Comments »
June 8th, 2010
It is with very mixed feelings that I announce we are suspending development on All Heroes Die.
The quick summary is that AHD is a huge game, and we are nowhere near done. With the resources and time we have, it’s also one that currently can’t support the company. Graham and I have both been working without drawing any pay for our entire time on the project, and we’re at the point where we can’t continue doing that.
We very much want to return to it when we can, but we don’t know when that will be. Right now, we’re just going to take things one step at a time. We still believe in AHD, and we want the finished game to see the light of day.
This isn’t the end of the road for Macguffin Games, either. In fact, the reason we’re halting development is so we can work on another game – this one in the Social Media space. I’m sure some of you will be disappointed to learn that; I understand. We think there is an opportunity to make great games there, make enough money to live, and to do it in a reasonable time frame. Our creative goal with this new game is to make something that we can be proud of, something unlike most of the offerings out there. We’ve begun prototyping the design and art direction, and we are all extremely excited by it. We hope you will be, as well – more details will follow as things shape up.
Thank you so very much to everyone that has supported us for the wild ride that has been All Heroes Die. I started development on it just a bit over 2 years ago, teaching myself how to code, alone in our guest bedroom. Since then, I’ve met literally hundreds of people whose support, enthusiasm, and good will made it possible to keep going. Two people in particular must be mentioned: my wife Anya, without whose support (both emotional and financial) this never would have happened, and Graham Sternberg, the man who created most of the AHD setting, most of the art, and who talked me off the ledge on more occasions that I’d like to admit. I’d also like to mention Heather Wilson, Mike Faulk, and Phil Krzeminski for their work on game events, game events, and art respectively; thank you folks for all your excellent work.
Finally, thank you to all of the wonderful people in the Boston Indies community; because of them, I seriously believe that Boston is the best place in the world for someone to be an indie developer.
EDIT: When I originally published this, I forgot to mention, we are planning two more builds for now – one to fix a number of bugs that came up in the last build, and another with Warfare in it. The first will happen sometime in the short term – the next several weeks – and the Warfare one some time before or around fall. I’d like to give a better estimate, but it all depends on how everything else is going.
EDIT EDIT: I’m an IDIOT! I didn’t thank Whitney. This game would not have gotten 1/4 as far as it did without her, and it sure as hell never would have launched for PAX. Her fantastic and awesome coding skills were all that got us to that first Beta build. Whitney, thank you so much for you amazing work.
| Tags: All Heroes Die, annoucements, Dev Blog
Posted in News | 9 Comments »
May 17th, 2010
The Warfare build is progressing, but has been slowed somewhat by our current programming bottleneck. Our programmer for All Heroes Die, Whitney, recently took a full-time day job. She’s still working on the game, but at a much slower pace. So, we’ve rejiggered our schedule slightly. We had Whitney take a slight detour from Warfare to put in something Graham has been dying to see – a more robust secondary targeting system for game events. This allowed Graham and the event writers to proceed with redoing some of our old events and adding some new ones while she continues to work on Warfare.
The new plan is that we will be putting a build out next Friday, May 28th, come hell or high water. How much of the Warfare stuff it contains is still up in the air, but it will definitely have new art, new events, and a number of improvements based on the revamped targeting system. We also found a really nasty inefficiency in our load sequence, and have lopped off 20 seconds of load time and 3/4 of our used memory (!!).
So, what is this targeting system, you ask? In order to explain that, I’ll give you a really brief overview of how game events work in All Heroes Die.
A game event in AHD currently targets one of the heroes (the player controlled members of their noble house), and consists of text describing the situation one of your hero faces, a piece of our event art showing the scene, and several text choices for how to resolve things. You might think of it as a computer-enabled choice in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, where your choice is hooked up to the stats of your hero and everything else going on in the world.
Under the hood, we do a number of things in order to select what event will be run (I gave a more detailed explanation here in the forums). One of the first ones is to make sure we have a valid target. If an event requires that the hero we run it for has the trait, “Star-Blooded”, then we test all your heroes to see if one fits that bill. If not, the event is discarded; if yes, we run it with that hero as the primary target.
But then, what do we do if you have more than one target in the event? What if the game event is, say, between a parent (the hero) and their child? Up until recently, we only did this kind of event very rarely. It used a hacky implementation that only could deal with hard-coded targets. This is thing we shifted Whitney over to working on – now we have a for reals system for secondary targets.
We’re really psyched about the possibilities here – this sort of further control allows targeting setups like:
- An older hero and their young spouse.
- A hero and their non-hero parent.
- Two family members, neither of which are player controlled heroes.
- A hero and their magically talented niece or nephew. (to be more specific)
- An intolerant hero and their mentally unstable family member. (to be very specific!)
This system will eventually be expanded to tertiary and further out targets.
One of those scenarios above – two family members, neither of which you control – really excites us. This allows us to have events that target two people around you, giving a better sense of the world not just revolving around your main characters.
So, this is where we’re headed. We’d love your feedback and thoughts on what’s going on, either in the comments or the forums. Thanks!
| Tags: All Heroes Die, Dev Blog, game events
Posted in News | No Comments »
May 12th, 2010
If you haven’t heard, there is currently a thing called the Humble Indie Bundle. It’s now officially a Big Deal. No pun intended.
The HIB, as we’ll call it, consists of all the following games: World of Goo, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru, Penumbra, and Samorost 2. They usually have a sticker price of something like $100.
Remarkable Thing One: All these folks got together and said, pay us whatever you think it is worth. You can go and get all this for as little as $.01.
Remarkable Thing Two: You can then split the money you pay up between the developers and two charities – The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child’s Play.
Remarkable Thing Three: The bundle was on sale for about a week, and now has been extended a couple days further. To date, they have had almost 125,000 separate contributiors and made over $1,140,000 in revenue, about a third of which is going to those two charities. Several of the developers are also now releasing their games as open source, with Lugaru already out there.
Holy crap.
As Jay Barnson pointed out on the Rampant Coyote blog, they’ve shown how powerful some indies working together can be. Without no marketing budget to speak of, they’ve galvanized over 125,000 people to pay money for their game. These numbers don’t even include the pirates downloading it off BitTorrent and such! Repeating this exact thing event would be difficult (if not impossible), but this should encourage all of us indies to be audacious and to try big things.
Another big thing to note is, they were really frigging smart about this. They set up something that was pretty easily doable with out-of-the-box technology + the web skills they possessed. For a minimum time investment, they set up what may turn out to be the most significant business event to date for game dev indies.
I’d encourate everyone to go buy the Humble Indie Bundle. If nothing else, you’re getting some seriously kick-ass games at whatever price you think is a good one.
| Tags: business, indie
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