Rich talks to Andreas Heldt of Z-Software about the making of the XBLIG title Solar Struggle.

Background

Where did you get the concept

In 2008 we met Sasha Kemper, who had the original idea, at the games convention in Leipzig, Germany. He was one of the guys who could show their indie projects at the “newcomer@gc” area at the G.A.M.E. booth in the business area. The project looked very interesting and already made a lot of fun, so we decided to help Sasha and provide him with original artworks and technical support.

How long did it take to develop

From the first concepts until release it took roughly 2 years to finish.

How many people

The game was developed by a single person for about a year. As the complexity of the game increased over the years, it became too much work for one person to do alone. As a consequence, three people joined the project in 2009. One was responsible to create tools which aid in building the campaign and the other two did new artworks for the space ships.

In 2010 another two people started working full-time on the project. Of course there were countless other people who helped throughout the project lifetime who did small pieces of artwork, helped with technical questions or did something else the project benefitted from.

How many were full-timers, and how many freelancers

At the end of the project three people were working full-time on the project. Two were working as freelancers.

Did you go over your planned development time/financial budget

Actually, we wanted to finish the game in April 2010. But we weren’t satisfied with the result at that time so we decided to postpone the release until August 2010. That was the right decision as the result is a lot more polished and the campaign benefitted greatly from it.

Development

What challenges did you face

First of all, there were a lot of technical challenges when we started to port the game to the Xbox. The game was developed for a long time on the PC only without minding about the limitations the Xbox has. For example we had to parallelize a big part of the game code to run smoothly on the Xbox’ three cores so we can stage bigger battles with more enemies. Another challenge was to show the game at the gamescom this year.

Did you run into any problems that slowed development and/or release

Before any indie game is published at the Xbox 360 marketplace, the community has to review it and give their thumbs up for the release. There are some conditions which can make you fail the review, like crashes. Then you’ll have to wait another 7 days before you can retry to submit your game. Unfortunately, we missed a bug in the game and (gladly) someone found out during the review process that the game crashes if you sign-out with a local profile during the loading screen. As a consequence we were forced to wait a week. The bug itself was fixed within seconds but we took our time and spend the rest of the week polishing the game even more – for example, the ship engine trails or the booster blur effect were re-done within this week.

As we re-submitted the game, we already were very very late – it was the Sunday before the gamescom week and on Wednesday, the game had to be on the marketplace so we could show it at the redspotgames booth. As the complexity of the game is fairly big, it took some reviewers some time to play the whole game and we passed review on Tuesday evening. But as every game has to be in review for 48 hours and we submitted it more on early Monday then Sunday, we had to wait until Wednesday morning until the game was finally “Approved”. Some more hours passed but finally the game showed up inside the marketplace at lunch.

Marketing investment

How much have you budgeted for marketing

We can’t tell exactly as our partner, redspotgames, was responsible for the marketing. They showed it at the gamescom 2010, so we think the marketing budget couldn’t be that low. We also spend some time doing marketing on Facebook or twitter.

Describe your marketing plan – i.e. which outlets are you hitting, what are you doing with each

A big part of the marketing was done by redspotgames, so we can’t tell you a lot about it. We made several videos and posted them to youtube and we also set up a blog for the game (http://www.solarstruggle.com/) and a Facebook fan page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/SolarStruggle/141640955866114/).

What social advertising have you planned

As I said before, we created a fan page for the game on Facebook. The Solar Struggle blog is also connected to Facebook. These were our first attempts at social advertising.

Are you doing any competitions

We don’t host competitions by ourselves (yet) but we support some community portals so they can raffle off free keys for Solar Struggle.

Who do you send freebie copies to

We send free copies mainly for reviews, so if you host a community portal, games blog or write reviews of Xbox 360 games and want to review the game, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Piracy

Do you have any plan in place to deal with piracy

The game is released on the Xbox LIVE marketplace, so we don’t expect any piracy of the game.

Sales figures

What are your sales forecasts

Our target is to sell about 5000 to 10000 units.

What is your breakeven point

Our breakeven point is pretty high, but we plan to release the game on the PC too and part of the technology used for Solar Struggle will be used in other games. The game is also kind of a “test” how high-quality games can perform on XBLIG and if it is a real alternative.

What difficulties do you expect with hitting decent sales figures

We think the price might scare some people of buying the game. 400 MS Points is the highest price for indie games. Still, we believe the game has the quality of an Arcade title   which sell for 800 MS Points or more.

Another point is the game demo. You really need some time to get used to the controls and the flight physics to experience real fun. XBLIG demo time is 8 minutes and it might not be enough to show people the potential of the game.

A big thanks to Andreas Heldt.

Game Project Postmortem by Gary Marples

Gary Marples, the owner of Suisoft, a small development studio based in Wakefield, UK put together this excellent Post Mortem for his game Gravity Core. A very illuminating read about the development process and how things went after release.

Game Information: Released: November 2007 Publisher: Suisoft Limited Website: www.suisoft.co.uk/gravitycore/ Genre: Retro Shoot-em-up / Inertia Platform: Windows PC Budget: Tuppence* Project Duration: Too Long** Team Size: One Developer Software: Microsoft Visual C++, Cinema 4D, Goldwave, Jasc PaintShop Pro (prehistoric edition)

* Realistically if assuming a small salary and business setup costs, around 20,000 dollars (10,000 pounds). In reality, I didn’t pay myself anything during development.
** 12-15 months, although only around 10-12 months full time.

Background

The initial spark of Suisoft (and Gravity Core) stems back many years to an eight year old obsessed with computers and arcade games. The concept of being able to write code into a machine and make it do ’stuff’ by itself was a concept much too intriguing to ignore. The typical modus operandi for family holidays would be to spend too long in darkened arcades playing the latest games (Ikari Warriors and Tiger Heli spring to mind) then arriving home clutching scribbled game designs and constructing imitations of the games.

Many years later, following an IT Qualification and 15+ years in the Information Technology trenches, a corporate takeover (with associated disgruntlement and voluntary redundancy) provided a time to reassess direction and ultimately choose a new path. Gravity Core already existed as a multiplayer gameplay prototype. Playing the game was a regular lunchtime pursuit in which normally peaceable colleagues brutally gunned each other down and rammed each other into walls. The gameplay was inertia based, in the spirit of home computer favorites such as Thrust and Oids, albeit with a more combatative, violent nature.

After much soul searching and weighing of Pros and Cons, I decided to form a company and develop my prototype game into something to sell. My very supportive wife agreed (and indeed encouraged – more on this later) my lunatic plan to take out the best part of a year and try to launch my company and first game.

What Went Right

Iterative Development Process

A core principle I stuck with throughout the entire project was to maintain a working, playable game all of the time and add one feature at a time. This really paid off because code quality problems were kept to an absolute minimum and playing a working game is fun. I would have lost heart with the project very quickly if the game had been in a broken state for most of the time.

Procedural Level Generation and Artificial Intelligence

From the very start, I set out to make the maps random. I’ve been fascinated by procedural generation of maps for many years. I created a dungeon game on the BBC during my school years. It was pretty flawed, as the map was generated as you moved around and corridors didn’t join back up. You reached the next level of the dungeon after travelling through a certain number of rooms. I love games that have random elements and emergent gameplay. My favorite game genre is FPS (first person shooter) but the majority of these games are scripted to a ridiculous degree, in that you can draw a bead on an enemy before he even walks around the corner. I could pretty much play the first few levels of Quake 2 blindfold.

With Gravity Core, I started out with a blue print generated from caverns (circles) with adjoining corridors and a mechanism to prevent overlaps. The map structure is then converted into a tilemap with contour tiles applied. Enemies can then be spawned into the rooms (caverns/tunnels). Some caverns are marked as special (for example Factories, Sphere etc) and are populated with more enemies. The number of enemies in a ‘room’ can be tracked to prevent them from clustering too much.

The blueprint is retained for enemy navigation. This allows the enemies to roam freely around the environment, rather than sitting and waiting for the player to turn up. The enemies randomly patrol around when they aren’t chasing the scent of the player.

Overall, I’ve been really pleased with the way the level generation turned out. I’m sure I will be able to take the concept much further in a future game.

Rendered Sprites

My approach to sprites (ships, bullets, explosions etc) was to create them in a 3D package and render them using a ray tracing engine. You may ask “why, oh why didn’t you just make a 3D game?” This is a perfectly valid point… for me, making a 3D game is much more time consuming and complex. The skills required to make realistic looking models and maps that will be efficient enough to be usable in a realtime 3D are far too specialised. As a sole developer, building every aspect of the game, I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew.

Creating the sprites using the 3D package, led to nicely shaded ships and spectacular explosions and particles that were complimented in some reviews. A fringe benefit, is the ability to resize the graphics very easily by adjusting the outputs and also render some of the graphics for use on the title screen.

Sound Effects

Although some reviewers criticised the lack of in-game music in Gravity Core, the reception to the sound effects was good. This is amazing really, considering I created all of the sound effects from samples of sounds in my home environment. Cap guns, fireworks, thunder, electrical motors from vacuum cleaners, gas rings, blowing into the mic, you name it. Looking back, this was pretty bloody-minded. My mindset with Gravity Core was to keep expense to an absolute minimum, to the point of avoiding spending a few hundred dollars on some sound effect libraries. I’ve enjoyed messing with tape recorders and sampler software since I was a kid. I think I enjoyed it a bit too much…

I recall getting up in the middle of the night and recording rain and thunder. This came in very handy when adding depth to explosions and gunfire but didn’t greatly amuse my wife at the time. (By at the time, I mean at the time of recording, rather than ‘wife at the time’ – she hasn’t left me… yet).

Support and New Contacts

I had a huge amount of support from my wife, Rebbekah. She had a lot to put up with, as I endlessly rambled on about the game and later stressed out during business setup and first release, not to mention financially supporting me. Friends and family were also extremely supportive. My Mum and Dad had fuelled my computer obsession since I was seven years old and continued to support my crazy endeavour. Paul “Guffaw” Turner played Gravity Core until his eyes melted and his fingers curled into crippled claws. My inlaws in particular never lost faith in their wayward son-in-law.

I received plenty of support from online gaming review sites, download sites and blogs. Support also came from unexpected quarters, such as other Indie’s giving me suggestions and feedback and Micro Mart printing several snippets of news and ultimately a review – my only review in print, I believe. Hopefully I will be able to build on this support with my future games.

What Went Wrong

Market Misjudgement

My greatest failure with the game has been my complete misjudgement of the gaming market. Gravity Core (in particular the first release) requires a certain amount of effort to become comfortable with the controls. This has led to many players giving up very quickly and never reach the point of enjoying the game. The conversion rate (sales versus downloads) of Gravity Core has been very poor, though there are some hardcore fans out there.

My next game will be much more immediately gratifying. I intend to start with simple, easy gameplay and pile on the toughness further into the game and on higher difficulty levels.

Mainstream Coverage

With Gravity Core, I have really struggled to get any mainstream coverage (i.e. printed gaming press). I think this is due to the traditional retro style of the game (i.e. it is not a quirky or original game that stands out) and distinctly average production values. These elements coupled with the lack of immediacy has made for a very pale blip way under the radar.

I’ve had far more success with niche Indie review sites and somewhat bizarrely (but much appreciated) in the gaming section of Micro Mart.

I think even if Gravity Core had received a four page spread in PC Gamer, an interview and a run of full page ads, the game would still have been a slow seller.

Inability to Give Up

Once I had released Gravity Core and a couple of online reviews had been published, I acted on the feedback received and began a series of releases with selectable difficulty levels, alternative control schemes and significant work on balancing the difficulty. I spent months improving the game but without making fundamental changes to the style of play I never managed to make it accessible. I had gone way beyond tenacity and drifted into obsessive (something of an OCD computer programmer stereotype).

In retrospect I should have written off Gravity Core and started another game. Even now, more than two years after the first release, I am still tempted to create a sequel and tackle the shortcomings. That way lies madness…

Multiplayer Complexities

Because Gravity Core grew from a multiplayer game / engine experiment into a full game, I put an enormous amount of effort into coding and testing the multiplayer aspects of the game. Testing a multiplayer game is much more labour intensive, as the number of situations and glitches are much increased. Additionally, in order to carry out proper testing, you need to pull together a group of players. Throwing this into a test/fix cycle really drags out a release. Unfortunately, the majority of players never tried player versus player or co-op and the game received much criticism in reviews over the lack of matchmaking, internet and wireless performance. My efforts would have been much better redirected to content and variety.

Too Many Hats

Every bit of code, graphics and sound in Gravity Core was my own (with the exception of music – I love listening to it, but Rob Hubbard I aint). Additionally, I had a business to set up, website, marketing, support and anything else that goes with developing and releasing a piece of software. This lead to a lot of stress and 3am moments. On several occasions I laid awake in the middle of the night with my head refusing to switch off, wondering why I would want to do this to myself and not just crawl back into an office job.

Having battled through to the bitter end, I feel a sense of achievement having finished Gravity Core and booting it out of the door. The weakest area (aside from immediacy) is probably the art direction, both music and visuals. The ships and explosions look nice enough but the title graphics and backgrounds and pretty plain and underdeveloped. The maps were described as ‘lacking a sense of use’ in one review, which is pretty apt. I had piles of sketches and ideas for mining equipment, buildings, crystals and wall decorations that never made it into the 3D package or paintshop.

The Future…

In terms of commercial success, Gravity Core has been a misfire. On the plus side, there are a number of fans out there enjoying whizzing around the caverns and revelling in their skills and that’s something I really get a kick out of.

The end result has been a huge (often brutal) learning experience for me, proof to myself and others that I can get a game out there and a stack of re-usable code and business bits.

I have lots of ideas (more ideas than time, like most game developers) and have a hybrid retro game coalescing in my brain. Something may well emerge next year.

In the meantime, you can try out Gravity Core here: www.suisoft.co.uk/gravitycore/

Vex Studios are developing a fantastic looking game called Jeklynn Heights; and although only at the early stages of production it is looking very special indeed. We are very pleased to report that Ryan at Vex has put a Making-of article together for us, and it’s a good ‘un. Read and enjoy…

My name is Ryan Wenke and I am the Executive Producer/Lead Designer for Vex Studios, LLC. We are making a bizarre dark fairy tale multiplayer game set in the town of Jeklynn Heights; a quirky place that turns violent and unsettling once the sun sets. We are still very early in development, reaching our one year landmark this coming August. Below is a little bit about our title, our development, and this fun (and goofy) journey we’ve all committed ourselves to!

Exclusive in-game shot

Where did you get the concept?

The concept for Jeklynn Heights derives from Tim Burton and American McGee inspirations, amongst many other people and pieces. We are huge fans of quirky and colorful environments, so from day one we knew that our art direction had to showcase that vision. Once we got our style perfected, we started designing a game that would work in that type of environment. Our original intention for this title was to make it a single player game, but unfortunately due to budget and resources it just wasn’t feasible. Therefore, we came up with the brilliant plan to transform the world into a multiplayer game in order to build a community and raise awareness about the project quicker!

Concept Artwork

As mentioned, Jeklynn Heights is not exactly the town you want to stay at during your honeymoon. While it may appear beautiful and friendly during the day, the town is painfully deceiving. Right after the sun sets, those once friendly people turn into violent maniacs, and those once beautiful buildings turn into unstable and disgusting structures. There are two playable teams, the “Town Square” and the “Slums”. The square consists of all the rich characters in the world, while the Slums consist of the loners that no one wants to associate with. The objective of the game is simple: to escape the town. Each side has a main area that holds the “Orb of Egression”, once this structure is captured, the game is over and a new match is played. Throughout each map there are Ability Orbs and Sanity Posts. Ability orbs provide weapons, spells, and other useful abilities that will aid each team to victory. Sanity posts act as forward spawn points to the team that captures them. Each structure can constantly be captured and recaptured, making each game unpredictable. Teams will have to figure out which abilities/forward spawns they want to capture first, in addition to making sure those captured structures are properly protected. Losing them could be costly, and give the other team a distinct advantage.

All playable characters consist of people who live and work in the town. Playable characters include maids, barbers, and inventors amongst others. Each character has a unique starting melee weapon, ranged weapon, and special attack. Special attacks are granted to players who fill up their sanity meter. Sanity meters can be filled by capturing/protecting posts/orbs, in addition to killing other players. More information about the combat and other game specific details will be posted once our game website is released!

How long is it taking to develop?

We are just entering our first year, and anticipate many more months of fun. The amount of time this will take to complete entirely depends on whether or not we receive funding and/or publishing. We are always open to learn about opportunities with investors and publishers, and all matters should be discussed by emailing info@vexstudios.com

How many people are on the project?

Right now we have 8 individuals working on this. We want to continue maintaining a tight knit group of whackos.

How many are full-timers, and how many freelancers?

Very interesting question! Technically, everyone is a freelancer besides myself (it’s lonely owning a company). However, everyone has taking the liberty of making this project their full time commitment, so I am very grateful for that. Everyone here works literally every day producing content, and we wouldn’t be where we are now without that attitude. Again, once we acquire funding/publishing, it will be easier to make everyone officially “a full time” employee.

How much did you budget for development?

Right now everything is single handedly paid for by myself directly from my bank account. I won’t discuss actual numbers, but if you see me in a refrigerator box on the street in a few years, you know why!

What challenges do you face?

The biggest challenge is not having one central location to work from. We are doing a remarkable job communicating, but the office space would really speed things up even more. Obviously, financial obligations are always a burden, but since the passion of video games overrides the passion of living, then there’s no worries there!

Game Shot

Are you running into any problems that slowed development?

Production has been pretty smooth sailing since we started. We did switch engines about 10 months ago, so that sort of put us behind schedule. However, due to our full time commitment attitude, we have been able to keep on track for most of what we do (which is not easy in game development).

Do you have any closing comments?

We encourage everyone to check out Jeklynn Heights at http://www.vexstudios.com. We have a lot of interesting cool stuff coming your way, so please make sure to keep yourself updated. We are currently accepting donations via Paypal on our website (just visit the Contact Us page). Donations that are over $10 will instantly grant you an invitation to the private beta. Donations that are over $20 will give you the private beta access in addition to credits. Additionally, we are seeking investors and publishing opportunities. Email us if interested or even just for a chat – we would love to hear from you. Thank you!

Background

Blimp Wars (www.blimpwarsonline.com) is a browser based multiplayer action game where players fight in the sky at the controls of steam punk blimps. The game was developed by indie developer Dave Toulouse and veteran game developer Brian ‘Psychochild’ Green who provided game design and business advice, as well as moral support.

Over to you Dave…

In 2007 I started to work on what became my first game, Golemizer (www.golemizer.com). It was probably a bold move to work on an MMO for a first game (and a sandbox one) but I was badly in need of a challenge that my day job (which I still have) wasn’t able to provide. I started from scratch and coded everything myself only based on my experience as a web developer and how I thought such thing should be built.

I decided to use only Javascript to code the client. Not to prove anything to anyone but just because that’s what I already knew. Flash would probably have been a wiser choice but I knew I was in for a long ride and learning something completely new wouldn’t probably be helping me. Besides there were already some interesting Javascript games around so I thought that with my 9 years of experience as a web developer I should be up to the challenge.

It was clear then that I was first developing a framework that would allow me to build very different games. I decided only 6 months later that the first project would be Golemizer. As you can imagine, I encountered many issues and my abilities were challenged on a regular basis. It was a wonderful learning experience but many times I thought I reached the limit of my capacities. It went to changing the AI system one month before release to just learning how to configure the server properly to support a virtual world with thousands of active NPCs at the same. All of that while keeping a day job that felt more and more in my way but was still paying all the bills.

One year later I released Golemizer without any fanfare. Not having released a game before I knew nothing about how to “try” to do a proper release. With still a lot of work in the year following release the game managed to get over 30,000 registered accounts and even started to make some money even though it was far from enough to leave my job.

So still stuck at my safe but not inspiring job I had 2 choices: Deal with it and look for another job or use the safe side of my current one to start working on another game and try to do better this time. Of course I choose the second option. The point surely wasn’t to become rich or maybe not even to quit my day job but at least to do better and hope for more. My two years of work on Golemizer taught me a lot on many levels and I knew I was ready to take things more seriously and set more ambitious goals.

I’m a big fan of KDice (www.kdice.com) and was wondering what kind of game I could build that would allow people to have the same kind of 10 minutes of multiplayer fun while reusing the framework I already built. Blimps were introduced for some time in Golemizer and have always been popular since then. That’s when I thought that the best thing to do would be to stick with the same IP and expand it a bit. I could have just introduced this as a mini-game in Golemizer but I needed a fresh start which would allow me to avoid some mistakes based on everything I learned so far.

Blimp Wars was to become my second game.

Development

The hardest thing about game development for me is far from being anything related to coding. It’s do to so only about 3-4 hours per day while skipping Friday and Saturday for social life. Still, with a now stable framework, the development of Blimp Wars took only about 5 months part time. I must say that it’s only then I could really tell that this framework I built for Golemizer really achieved its goal of being easily used for something completely different. In only a few days I had a working prototype and was able to play a quick game against myself.

Having spent quite some time fleshing out my idea on paper and based on how fast I was able to come up with a prototype I immediately started to look for artists. I wanted to keep the game simple so my needs for graphics were clear right from the start. While Golemizer was mostly built with free graphic libraries there was no way I would be doing the same for Blimp Wars. I knew I’d be able to release and I knew some people appreciated my work so I needed to set the bar higher this time. Original art was a no brainer this time even if the money made from Golemizer wasn’t enough to finance this new project.

I found developing a multiplayer game alone very tricky. Nobody around me is quite into gaming and even less into game development. That’s why I knew I had to get to a beta release as soon as possible to receive feedback I badly needed. That’s when I encountered the second hardest thing for me about game development, promotion.

Sure Golemizer’s players were a good crowd to contact first but few players are actually willing to test or are good at it. I did sent mails to some websites in the hope of receiving some attention but me being still an unknown face mixed with poor marketing skills my call remained mostly unanswered. I ended up to run some ads here and there and finally gathered enough testers.

The coding process went particularly well without any big problems similar to Golemizer’s development. I was using code I knew very well and all the small bits I learned in the past years made this a smooth sail. The AI system is probably the feature I’m the most proud of. Each NPC is running dynamically compiled code so I can easily hop in a game in progress, activate the AI editor and make changes to the behaviours of an NPC. In fact the whole framework is allowing me to build a world, a room while actually “playing” the game. It’s similar to the powers a GM might have in an MMO but will full control over any pieces of the world.

Release

As much as I was having fun to build the game I knew that sooner or later I’d have to face the release of the game. Not that I was afraid the game would crash on the first day but because I knew I was releasing a multiplayer game as an unknown indie developer. How do I get enough people online at the same time at first so they don’t just close the browser because they’re alone? Well to be honest I still don’t know the perfect answer. There are a lot of articles around on how to write press release, how to contact the press, how to do a successful release, etc. All good but no guarantee of success here. You can follow advice to the letter but advice is cheap and until you have somehow proven you are worth it your calls may remain unanswered. Now most indie developers are facing this same issue so the only thing one can do is to keep working and keep doing better each time until you reach your goals. Nobody’s getting a free pass here and you have to prove you are up to the challenge which is what I’m trying to do and planning to keep doing until I get where I want to.

So to help to spread the word about Blimp Wars I built my first Flash game. Distributing a Flash game could not be any easier even if you haven’t built the “next big hit”. I developed a simple shooter called The adventures of Bret Airborne (http://www.kongregate.com/games/Over00/the-adventures-of-bret-airborne-episode-1) built on the same theme as Blimp Wars. While I could have probably spent more time on this little game the goal has been reached: spread links to Blimp Wars that were previously out of my reach. Besides I kept a door open by adding “Episode 1″ next to its name so there’s always the possibility to improve my Flash skills and come back with Episode 2!

While it’s still early and getting enough players online at the same time is not completely achieved there is now a bit more than 500 persons that have created an account on Blimp Wars. With more time and as the game receive more coverage I’m sure there will be soon plenty of players to keep the game running 24 hours a day.

Could I have done a better release? Probably. Did I learn? Constantly. Do I give up? Surely not!

Budget

The game cost $1,000 to develop (most of that money went into artists’ work) and there is recurrent expenses of $140 per month for the server. The advertising budget is still not completely settled but I expect that it might possibly exceed the development budget.

For now I have the luxury to consider the money I put in these projects the same as anyone else that would be spending money on some hobby. Hopefully Blimp Wars will be able to cover the expenses of my next game and I hope even more to allow me to spend more time on game development.

If you’re curious to see if I’ll succeed you can follow my progress on www.over00.com!

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Gratuitous Post Mortem

Background

Gratuitous Space Battles is an indie space strategy game that aims to bring to life the role of a spacefleet designer / admiral in classic sci-fi movies such as star wars or star trek. The game was developed over the course of one year by lone indie developer Cliff Harris (Positech Games).

The original design for the game was totally different. it was not even set in space, or a war game, but was a ‘virtual dictator’ style game where the player had the role of a ‘virtual saddam’ trying to desperately cling on to power. When I started working on the code for that games map, I ended up experimenting with using space and nebula backdrops instead of maps of the middle east (I don’t know why), and pretty soon the dictator sim was morphing into a space battle sim, almost as if it had a mind of it’s own.

I’m a big fan of strategy games, but find that many of them suffer badly from the feeling of lack of control during a battle. Although naturally we enjoy playing big impressive looking battles with huge armies, it’s actually close to impossible to control large numbers of units in real time.

When thinking about this, I decided to try and design a game where that frustration was ‘designed-out’ by deliberately making the lack of control a core game mechanic. Could I make a game where the whole point was to give up control of the actual battle, but put in place everything you needed pre-battle, to ensure victory? The online challenge possibilities were a natural progression from designing non-interactive battles. The game’s name sort of jumped out at me. I hate games with generic sounding games, especially sci-fi ones, and cliches such as using ‘Nemesis’ or ‘Redemption’ or other over-used words. Gratuitous had not been overused, so I thought it would be ideal. I don’t have a billion dollars to use to tell you what my game is about, unlike movies such as ‘avatar’, so I had to use the name to say where I was coming from.

Development

Like many indie gamers, I’m basically a one-man company, so at the start, before I knew what I needed I was using any old spaceship sprites to try out the ideas. I also used coder-art for all the UI and backdrops, so the game itself looked terrible, but the basics of hands-off gameplay could be tested and seen to work well. I was originally using a fixed size map, but pestering by a fellow indie who happened to be staying at my house persuaded me I should support zooming in and out as well. (good call!).

Although eventually I decided to go with a semi-realistic look using 3D models rendered out flat, I did experiment with a Tron/Darwinia style neon retro look, the idea being that the whole game was played out on a strategic viewscreen of a space admiral. Eventually I discarded that, although it did look cool.

GSB was self-funded, and was a full time job, so with one eye on the budget I was very tempted to use stock spaceship models. I bought the licence to use a number of 3D models and did some test renders and playtesting, but they just didn’t look the part. There was the dual problem of them being ships seen in other indie games, and them being very low poly models, because they were designed to be used in 3D, not rendered as 2D sprites. With custom-made models, I could basically go poly-insane, as they would be rendered to sprites anyway.

The Search for Art

A long, long search for the right artists ensued. Eventually I found a guy (Joshua combs) working on a freeware Masters of Orion clone who produced excellent quality background nebulas for the game. A long while later I finally found my starship modeler, Charles Oines. I got quotes from a number of artists, and ended up going with the most expensive one. A pretty scary decision when you are self-funding an original game and your income from previous games (which is what I’m living on) is going down and down every month…

Anyway, it turns out to be well worth it, the spaceship models were perfect, and looked fantastic in-game. Originally I had planned on re-rendering out many variations of them, but as luck would have it, the models were done in Lightwave, I only have 3D studio Max, and learning + buying lightwave was not an option. Converting between the two proved extremely fiddly. I also had the task of doing the damage textures myself, which involved about 10 different layers in photoshop and using a clone brush and a picture of an oil rig at night to get the right ‘burning spaceship insides’ look. I also spent hours taking hundreds of still frames from a Star Wars DVD to get the right textures and effects and style for laser effects and explosions. I ended up writing a whole particle system configuration and testing program to get better explosions. (see img)

This takes us about 9 months into development, and I had a semi-finished working game. I then showed it to some people to gauge their reaction, and got tons of great advice on how to improve the ‘flow’ of the UI, which was frankly a disaster. You had to build ships, then build a fleet and save it, then load that fleet into a deployment, then fight a battle. The fleet composition UI was fiddly and silly, it all belonged on the new deployment screen.
I’d also coded a semi-multiplayer asynchronous online challenge system for the game, which I thought was a great idea but was wary of assuming anybody else would. Eventually, I found out people loved it.

Once the UI was improved and a decent logo done (thanks to a separately hired UI artist) and the excellent music was delivered (from Jesse Hopkins, who I’ve used for several games now), it was time to put GSB into beta testing, something I’d never done before. I decided to sell pre-orders for the game at a discount, and open up the beta to everyone who pre-orders. This was great because it meant getting real unbiased feedback from players before release, and meant I didn’t have to panic and rush-release the game to pay the bills, which was becoming a real threat.

Release Day

The beta went on from August 31st 2009 to 4th November, and was invaluable. About 12 days later the game became my first title to be launched on Steam, and had already been available through pre-order on a number of other sites such as impulse, gamersgate and direct2drive.

The minute all the bug fixes were under control (there are always bugs!) I threw myself into getting an expansion pack ‘the Tribe’ put together for the game. this was another first for me, I’d never released an add-on for a game before, and that seemed to work out well too, acting as a useful test of how moddable the game could be at the same time. In between doing the pack, the game continued to expand and get improvements, with the current total being twenty eight updates since release. In the middle of all this, I moved house, which added to the general chaos and panic and lack of sleep around that time

In total, GSB took about a year of full time work for me, plus help from various contractors. I work pretty long hours, so I’m wary of working out eh hourly income in case it’s tragically low . The source code for the game comprises 581 source files of C++ for a total of 76,048 lines of code for the game and a further 20,852 lines of code for the base engine. The game was developed using Visual Studio and Visual Assist, and uses directX9 in a custom-written engine designed around the game. The size of the code is roughly double that of my 2nd best-selling game which is Democracy 2. There is also a bunch of php and SQL code that runs on the server, outside of the main game, and piles of config data for all the ships and weapons.

Budgets

In terms of budget, the rough cost of everything outside my own time is $14,000 for the basic game. I add to that the cost of advertising so far which is about $5,600. The game is actually making money, which is a relief, because my games take a year to make, so the plan is to have another game ready by the time the income from this one runs out

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Rich talks to Magnus Rosén of Ouch Games about the making of the XBLIG title Tank-Tastic!

Background

Where did you get the concept

We thought of a smaller game that was fun and easy for everyone to just pickup and play together with your friends at home. The concept comes with inspiration from a mini game in Wii Play and old NES classic Micro Machines. Our thoughts for the graphics were to have the look of a school desk with a writing block and the whole game was a drawing on it.

How long did it take to develop

It took us around 2 months to develop.

 How many people

We were six persons working on this. One graphics artist, one music/sound designer and the rest were programmers.

 How many were full-timers, and how many freelancers

 No full-timers, all work was done as much as possible on peoples spare time.

How much did you budget for development

Nothing

Did you go over your planned development time/financial budget

Yes we did go over our development time plan. Mostly because of redesigning some stuff and that the testing period took longer than expected.

Can you break the budget down into components – i.e. Art, Code, Music, Testing

Not really because we didn’t have budget. But game play and to have fun when playing was prioritized.

Development

What challenges did you face

When we thought the game was finished there was a lot of testing that was needed. More than we thought.

Did you run into any problems that slowed development and/or release

Release was delayed because of a lot of testing and some bugs that we didn’t expect.

Also is the submitting process on Creators club a bit frustrating when you have to what one week after a submit until you can submit it again if have failed.

Marketing investment

How much have you budgeted for marketing

Nothing

Describe your marketing plan – i.e. which outlets are you hitting, what are you doing with each

Nothing fancy, just email press releases and info about the game to a lot of different sites and newspapers. The difficult thing is to know which ones that needs to send to, because there is no real reason to send to the biggest papers and sites if they don’t really care about indie games. And it’s also difficult to know when to boost the marketing plan because on Xbox Live Indie Games you cannot control when the game is released. It would be better if when you get your game approved, you can decide for yourself when to release it to the public.

What social advertising have you planned

We have a Facebook company page (Ouch Games). And also we have a company homepage, which suppose to have a development blog later on. And of course is a twitter on its way. We also have made a trailer that is released on YouTube.

Are you doing any competitions

Not with this game, but with another game we have won one prize and nominated in another and also entered that in Dream build play and the Independent Game Festival (IGF).

Who do you send freebie copies to

Bunches of gaming sites and hopefully get reviews and some marketing.

Also some local newspapers around here for building on the company trademark around here.

Piracy

Do you have any plan in place to deal with piracy

No, Xbox Live Indie Games is hard or even impossible to piracy.

Sales figures

What are your sales forecasts

We don’t have any forecasts. We have seen that Xbox Live Indie Games doesn’t sell a lot and it is too bad people cannot make a living of it. Our hopes were that if you release one game every third month it would make a good start. But obviously Xbox Indie Games is not really there yet, but hopefully it’s getting better. The quality of the games is getting better and better.

What is your breakeven point

Every sold game is on the positive side.

 How accurate do believe them to be

The game has sold less than we expected so far. But hopefully it will get better.

What difficulties do you expect with hitting decent sales figures

Xbox Indie Games has a bad quality stamp on their games, but I think the games getting better and better and hopefully it will get even better.

 

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Kicking off a new section for indievision; ‘Making Of’, we talk to Mark Inman of Honeyslug about the making of the rather splendid PSP (& Flash) title Kahoots.

Where did you get the concept

Kahoots started out as a weekend prototype of a pursuit concept, in which the player had to direct a mouse to an exit door, whilst avoiding cats, by swapping the tiles that formed the world, akin to the gameplay of Bejeweled or Zoo Keeper. It originally had a sepia-tone pixel art style, but whilst this looked cool, we wanted to try something a little different, use Nat’s plasticine stop-motion animation background, and also try to keep the art budget low. As a result we decided not to hire an artist, and instead headed down to the local charity and haberdashery shops to hunt out potential graphics, returning with armfuls of candy, buttons, beads and plasticine, as well as being lucky enough to borrow some beautiful vintage fabrics to use for backgrounds – our entire collection of art assets fitted into a couple of plastic bags!

How long did it take to develop

The original flash version took around 2 months, the conversion to PSP which followed took around 2 months.

How many people

How many were full-timers, and how many freelancers

Honeyslug are a core team of three: Ricky Haggett (code, design, music), Nat Marco (design, animation) and Mark Inman, (project management, testing). Ricky’s brother Rob did all the music on a freelance basis, as well as patiently recording Ricky’s Pegbeast songs and Nat’s Kahoot voices.

How much did you budget for development

We try to keep the cost of development as low as we can without compromising our ability to make ends meet. We’re not particularly driven by making technologically cutting edge stuff, focusing our energy more on innovative look and feel, something we still believe we can achieve successfully in 2D. As such, for a game like Kahoots we had a very unique look to the game – but on an art budget of £35! In terms of budget, the flash game was funded by our friends at Gimme5Games.

Did you go over your planned development time/financial budget

No. Obviously moving onto unfamiliar platforms there were some elements which took us by surprise, but nothing that affected the development either from a budgetary or timescale perspective. We were helped out a lot on the PSP side by Sony’s dev support, who turned around solutions to our problems in no time at all.
 

Development

What challenges did you face

Did you run into any problems that slowed development and/or release

Finding a good process for treating the scanned or photographed elements to produce the final game assets in Photoshop was a little fiddly, and with a small office, trying to create a workable animation space proved quite challenging – and animating the foil wrapped limbs of the Cardborg turned out to be a substantially trickier affair than we first imagined. From a technical point of view, there was nothing major – we made day 1 launch for PSP Minis, so while we did hit several obstacles (which is inevitable on an unfamiliar platform) the dev support offered by Sony helped us successfully hit our launch target without too much trouble.

Marketing

How much have you budgeted for marketing

Describe your marketing plan – i.e. which outlets are you hitting, what are you doing with each

What social advertising have you planned

Are you doing any competitions

With Kahoots, we had several strands to our marketing strategy for launch:

We targetted the main online spots (IGN, Gamespot, MCV, Develop, Eurogamer, etc) and a lengthy list of additional well regarded sites to hit with press releases and review codes. We also had some support for the PSP version from Sony getting some of the higher profile websites and mags to review the title, as well as giving us access to their PlayStation Blog so we could preview the game in the run up to minis launch, and have just had a video feature on the main Souny Europe site (http://uk.playstation.com/games-media/news/articles/detail/item249610/In-Kahoots-with-Honeyslug/).

We also have a regularly updated website/blog and maintain a Facebook group, Twitter account and Youtube channel whenever we have something new to share with our fans. Kahoots also has its own website – www.savethekahoots.com -  which holds the Flash version, our growing list of reviews, news stories and various other items of Kahoots related stuff we think people will like, including a promotional photoshoot where we took the Kahoots on a picnic in the run up to the PSP launch (http://www.flickr.com/photos/43546320@N04/sets/72157622458679529/).

We’ll be releasing a new Pegbeast song / music video / trailer for the game in early 2009, as well as a bunch of additional content on the website, such as music downloads and desktop wallpaper. And hopefully Sony will feature some more Kahoots content on the blog.

As a small, self-funded developer, when it comes to meaningful marketing spend, we try to make sure that we do something which accentuates what makes us and our games unique and fun.

Piracy

Do you have any plan in place to deal with piracy

Piracy isn’t something we spend time worrying about. All indications are that any efforts directed at preventing the cracking, distribution and downloading of your game is effort wasted – the people who are inclined to crack and distribute games are determined enough to get around any protection you can put in place, and those who download pirated games are unlikely to buy them anyway. We prefer to concentrate our efforts on making our games as good as possible, to ensure the decent people who happily pay for games get as good an experience as possible.

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About

• Name: Mark Morris, Director
• Time operating: Since 2002.
• Location: UK.
• Staff: 8.
• Discography: Uplink (PC/Linux/Mac), Darwinia (PC/Linux/Mac), Defcon (PC/Linux/Mac), Multiwinia (PC/Mac), Darwinia+ (XBLA-out soon), Subversion (PC-in progress)

Introversion Links

• Web: www.introversion.co.uk
• Blog: www.introversion.co.uk/blog/index.php

Mark Morris

» About the history of Introversion…

At the end of Uni Chris had this game (Uplink) and we thought we could commercialise it on the internet and see how much we could make – (we expected) a bit of pocket money. But we made quite a bit of cash and we thought, wrongly, that we had made it and we were rich and successful. So we carried on with the business.

» What’s your personal interest in it? Have you always liked games?

I’m much more interested in the entrepreneurial activity of running a business and seeing if I can turn this into a long-term sustainable enterprise. I’ve become interested in games as artistic media; I find the whole process of games to be very interesting. But it’s taken years from running Introversion, it’s not a natural affinity to me. I played a lot of games when I was a teenager but drifted away at Uni.

» That split you had right at the start (dev / business people) is that something you realised right at the start when you had Uplink

It came from an entrepreneur competition so we had to write this plan to win 10,000 pounds. In order to win, we were quite aware of the differences (in ability) we had to bring to the table. I thought Chris had the game, Tom had the commercial talent, and I was the one who walked past the competition entry.

When we launched the business we carried over these roles, and Johnny (who hadn’t been with us in the competition) we really wanted to be on board as he knew so much from an engineering standpoint. It wasn’t quite as simple as “we need to put this skillset together to run a business.

We’ve now got 4 directors, 2 developers, dad does shipping, and one other doing sales and marketing. Chris and Johnny (the directors) are acting as full time coders; they do more coding than they should. Tom and I don’t do any coding.

» But that’s still only half the company doing developing…

Yes, it’s always been like that, and I believe that’s the key to our success. We haven’t just been a group of coders that got together. Right at the start it was just myself, Chris and Tom, and Chris was the only coder, and Tom and I did the business development so that looked even more skewed. And for a lot of time Chris would sometimes jest “what the hell do you guys do?” We’ve always gone down a self publishing route right from the beginning – also in terms of the deals you do with other companies – if you entirely focused on the game at a coding or even a production level you don’t have the capacity to grow at all. All you end up doing is putting all your eggs in one basket and you hope desperately that it sells.

Small indie teams who have just launched a game and it’s done nowhere near as well as they thought it was going to do, and they realise it’s not sustainable as they don’t have enough revenue coming in to sustain them in the future… and that’s a result of being far too focused on one project. If I have a couple of programmers come up to me at Uni or when I’m doing a talk and they ask my advice, the first thing I say is go and find a person from the business or management schools and join up with them. You need someone with good negotiation and communication skills, who can draw the business plans, and stay on top of the finances, and who wants to be quite far removed from the day to day activities on a project.

A lot of teams might find that surprising but I think it s crucial to running a business that is sustainable.

» About trademarks…

There have been a couple of iPhone games called Defcon. We own the worldwide trademark for Defcon. It’s a game we are very proud of on the PC and we are hoping to exploit on PSN and hopefully XBLA and iPhone. The legal team are quite keen for you to protect these trademarks, and there are interesting discussions that go on within the company. There’s a bit of “this is one guy on the other side of the world, why are we being so mean to him?” but equally “this is value that we’ve got and we might be on the back foot at some point and need to put out an iPhone version in the future”, and what we’ve found is that when we’ve got in touch with the developer they’ve just changed the name. I was impressed with how easy that’s been, considering the number of trademark infringements there must have been and how apple have handled that.

» Tim Langdell didn’t do it that way… I hope you didn’t send out letters demanding all their money

The legal stuff when it goes out can be fairly terse and quite threatening, but what we start with is fairly relaxed. I don’t want to be seen as the guy who takes sides in this, but I’m seeing some interesting stuff with us. Recently we’ve had to take out IP insurance because Microsoft require us to have a certain amount of cover (so that if we release a game and Microsoft are sued for any IP infringement they can claim on our insurance) so we pay every year for this, but whenever you are notified of an IP infringement issue or someone attempts to make a claim against the company, the power to deal with that is removed from you, you have to pass it over to the legal team at your insurer.

If we deal with it we are pretty relaxed, but as soon as it goes out into that big corporate world it escalates so quickly into nasty letters from one legal team to another. It was interesting how we had inadvertently placed ourselves in this position so we could get bigger and onto XBLA. It was an interesting ramification of a scale increase that I’d not foreseen.

» Looking at that increase in costs from releasing onto the bigger platforms – how many of these “slight increase costs” are there?

It’s not huge, but it’s substantial.

» Nobody wants to take the first step saying “I paid 20k for IP insurance” only to find they could have got it for 5k.

People get a bit upset about giving that info – but we are pretty open. Our quote was 4.5k for 2 million pounds worth of cover. But it would be interesting to see how that compares to other companies getting XBLA cover.

» Where are you with Darwinia+?

Microsoft have about 6 milestones to go through, and we are at the last one – the release candidate. You complete it, once it passes your external QA it then goes off to Microsoft for certification. Once they have certified it they give you a launch window, which can be up to 2 months from the cert date. Even now the guys are testing our second release candidate. We will be certified in about three weeks – if not it will come back to us. It might take a few more weeks on that. We were hoping to be certed in September – but it’s taken a while to get through.

» I don’t think people are fully aware of the effort required to get their own game through the certification programs of one of the major platform holders. Even XBLIG is a bit of a shock and that’s a cut down TRC list. You’ve got a primarily PC background. What’s the process been like for you – did you expect it to take this long?

No we massively, massively underestimated this project. From the time we started Introversion we shipped 3 PC games, so we already had a track record of getting things out the door that were scoring well (Uplink, Darwinia, Defcon) so we knew what we were doing and we really thought the port to XBLA would be quick. We knew we’d have to change to DirectX from OpenGl and do some stuff with leaderboards. On the Darwinia+ website I’ve put all the old plans down so you can go through and look at the plans and see when they changed. I host them as I thought it would be good for other indie devs to see how wrong we got it. The project got extended by massive, massive amounts. Even now, things like the complexity of the Microsoft sign in process, whether you are using a local or a live enabled profile, or whether it’s on the memory unit or the controller, whether the controller is active or not… there are huge matrices you can draw of the state that the Xbox can be in at any point. We just didn’t understand that, and even now, at the 11th hour on the project we are still having revelations about the philosophy Microsoft have used to architect this system, and how we need to write our systems to fit in with it. It’s taken four years to get it out on the platform.

» I’ve been in charge of getting games through final submission before so you have my sympathy. The TRC and Lotcheck system – when you read through them you feel “this is ridiculous, this is ridiculous” but it is a philosophy of putting the customer and their whole experience first, and I’ll begrudgingly admit it makes sense. Trouble is that excited people coding will write in a way that is productive for the game, but makes retrofitting compliancy to the already completed project hard. Will you do anything different for the next project?

I’d love to say yes, we’ve learned our lessons, but we probably aren’t doing it quite as good as we should. Chris is the creative director and he’s off prototyping Subversion. Trying to work out what it should be. The start of the games process is trying to isolate where the fun is in the game. Without the fun there really isn’t anything else going on downstream. Chris is very heavily focused on that. Johnny should really be providing the check to that to make sure it is architected to make sure it is amenable to XBLA or PSN, but he’s got his head down on Darwinia+ so he’s not really having that influence.

Chris has been making sure the interface he develops is amenable to a controller – it’s a big problem we had moving from keyboard / mouse when moving from Darwinia / Multiwinia. This time you can see he is designing in a way that would make a console port easier from a control point of view. He had the massive ball ache of working out how that port was going to happen. He spent four months solving that problem. He got there eventually, but on the eve of Multiwinia PC launch we took the game down to PC Gamer, and we made a big interface mistake with our keyboard / mouse implementation. Almost on the week before Multiwinia went into production we were doing more interface rewrites.

I’d like to come back to this concept of me not being a developer – sitting above Chris and Johnny. I’m very aware there are bits of Subversion that are architected correctly and some bits that aren’t, because Johnny’s focus is elsewhere. I can add value by compensating for that.

» There is a compromise to be had between reengineering your products to make easier money in the future, versus getting the progress now so you have a product for the pc consumer. People don’t want to make these compromises and I think some aren’t even aware they are there to be made. A lot of the indie developers are just eager and talented, so they pile in without the business concerns.

People make mistakes all the time. What you need is to identify those failures and correct them very quickly. And that’s about sustainability and how robust you are. One thing we got wrong was not talking to anyone about the XBLA port. Quite often you have to learn lessons the hard way, to be able to put something in place that works for you. If someone had told us how hard the ride would be, we wouldn’t have gone down it, and we wouldn’t be having a game out on XBLA and a nice future ahead. We probably would have carried on with a pc game, and who knows; if that doesn’t make enough cash and you have enough capability you can exploit it on XBLA, to have a second crack of the whip. But if you’ve never gone down that route then you shut off that avenue of growth of your business.

» Your blogs mention quite a few things: working with Channel 4, Introversion losing their way…

Chris had a real problem. He doesn’t like working with other people. He likes to work off his own back, his own timescales etc. He didn’t like the pressure of having C4 as a customer. At the same time I think we took a huge step forward, as we got paid a reasonable amount of money that meant we didn’t run out of money. Introversion has run out of cash a few times before. Chris’ job is to be the creative one, and I have to keep him in check. We did a huge amount of work on the prototype for Chronometer, and we weren’t entirely happy with that at the end (and C4 saw that). But if we do decide we want to do a similar type of game or use any of the ideas that came up there we’ve already been down that route once, so next time it will be easier and the game will come out and be stronger for it.

» In a lot of work for hire places you’ll do a lot of speculative pitch work for free because contracts can take six months before you see any money. Did C4 pay you up front?

Yes. I’m sure Alice (from C4) won’t mind me saying that. She’s very keen to get a lot of engagement from the UK indie seen. One of the things C4 were very good at was paying for the work and paying on time. We were in a preproduction / scoping phase; we got some at the start and got the rest at the end. Even though the project wasn’t commissioned we got paid and that’s a testament to C4 working with lots of small indie production companies in the TV domain, so they are quite sensitive to the cash flow situations of small organisations. Small organisations tend to be more creative and that’s what they want to foster.

» A quote from your blogs on Darwinia+

“It was the first time a massive company had effectively told IV what to do and we didn’t like that all. It was also months of work and the concept of open ended polish and iterations with a company several orders of magnitude larger than our own didn’t hugely appeal.”

Going through the submissions process, after you’ve probably practically rewritten Darwinia and Multiwina anyway to fit in the different control scheme; if you were to go through the same process again, are there business practices you could have put in place to minimise these unknown, open ended…

Yes. We just underestimated it. That was the first part. The problem we made – we just thought “how hard can it be to convert the control scheme over to a controller” – the answer is “fucking hard”. The lesson is to not assume the controller port is easy. How hard can it be to implement a menu system on a console – that took six months. The reason that was difficult was Microsoft had a very different idea of what they wanted it to look like than what we submitted. It took them quite a long time to convince us of what they were after. So when we looked at doing work in the future one thing we do is design work up front. This sounds really trivial (like gaming 101) but in business a lot of the answers are simple, you just don’t see them. We are submitting as part of our concept work both the menu artwork and control scheme. So if there is a problem Microsoft or Sony can turn around and say “we don’t really like this concept” and you can fix those and crack on with it. Really we underestimated every portion through technical to look and fell. The only thing that stayed the same is the game itself. Darwinia hasn’t really been touched – it’s all of the huge wrapping that goes around it.

All those things we thought would be simple to operate with (the wrapping, menus etc) actually have proven to be very difficult. Strategically, the process change that we need to make is to spend a lot more time de-risking the problems and doing the design work at the pitching stage.

Regarding Microsoft – I want to stand up and support the guys; they really, really helped us – they provided designs for us to work from that we were happy with. They donated a lot of usability labwork so we had this enormous 50 page usability doc that came out of them, that detailed every usability problem with the game and there must have been hundreds of hours testing. They were being really clear on what they wanted and communicating it in a good way. I think there wasn’t a single decision that we’ve taken on Darwinia+ that we didn’t 100% believe made the game better, so although it was difficult sometimes as it’s been a long project, everything improved the quality of the final project.

» All your games – they don’t look the same, but have a style. One thing I notice in games is a trend towards more and more realism but this is incredibly resource hungry. Have you made a deliberate strategic decision to keep the graphics far more stylised, and in my opinion making them simpler to create and implement?

Yes, it’s important to get the scope right. I do a great event in Newcastle (like the dragons den) – where Codeworks get 4 of us to criticise the pitches of new game designs that people are thinking of working on. And there have been a few indie studios set up on the back of that. Scope is where they tend to fall down. They want to make Halo, but ok that’s going to take a team of 400 people, where will you get the money for that? It doesn’t fit. Making sure the scope of the game is amenable to team size and the marketing reach you have is crucial to being successful. In terms of the graphics – we don’t have any artist but in terms of keeping our costs down it’s a decision to go for this programmer art. There’s a lot of Chris in it – he’s quite a talented artist in his domain; he’s got a very good eye for a look and feel that appeals to us so we tend to just move down that particular route that he’s taking us. We spend a lot of time on procedural generation. There’s no point in us trying to compete with AAA games in look and feel so we don’t deliberately bother.

» My take is there’s any number of WW2 FPSs and I can’t tell the difference, but if someone looks at a picture of Darwinia they recognise it; so that has value. Personally I’m always looking for that sweet spot – between a unique good look and being cheap to produce.You’ve returned recently from PAX. How was it?

We came back a few weeks ago from PAX, and I’ve never been before. I’ve tended to head over to GDC a bit more, and at PAX the atmosphere was incredible. At GDC it’s always tended to be a little bit of whinging developers and undercurrents of discontent in different fields; not in a negative way as they are always good fun, but there does tend to be an “us and them” dev / publisher vibe. But at PAX there was just pure unadulterated energy from gamers and fans. It was just amazing. When they opened the door people sprinted to play halo and Left 4 Dead 2 and Forza. It was just wonderful to see the sharp end of what we do and how much fun there is in this industry. The PAX guys gave us a booth and Microsoft gave us a booth and we had Darwinia+ on display and I remember going to one of the booths and this guy had come back with a friend, and he’d never seen Darwinia before and was absolutely blown away by it. It was so good to see that passion and fire from someone; the last time we’d seen it was four years ago when we launched Darwinia and to see it again in this one guy… I hope there are lots more out there with their 360s who are going to get it.

» There are quite a lot of conferences and shows that indies can display at. But these have a cost; is it possible to quantify the benefit to your product and sales.

It’s very hard. Sometimes it’s quantifiable because you go and meet people. We met Valve at one GDC and did a deal. But you never actually know who you are going to meet or what opportunities will present themselves. If I was talking to someone new who was price sensitive who wanted to know which one to go to; I would say go to GDC SF. In terms of getting all the major players you might want to see together in one place, that’s SF. You’ll be able to meet all the other developers / publishers / outsources / indies. You know you’re not going to get bored.

» If I’m a new developer and coming to the end of my product – it’s getting ready for launch in a few months; there’s so many avenues to spend time and money- going to trade shows; adverts; getting in with print mags; there’s a lot of costs. What do you think is the most cost-effective thing you’ve done to help sales?

I don’t really believe in print advertising. We haven’t really done any online advertising. A few years ago we just worked with the UK mags and a few of the major websites. We were really lucky – when we started “3 guys from Uni making games” was incredibly new and we got a huge amount of press attention and love for going down this path. For Multiwinia this had gone, and it went because there were many other small indie games studios that had started up, and so we weren’t in any way novel or new, and we learned the hard way that we are only as good as the game we are launching. We launched at exactly the same time as World of Goo and of course WOG did phenomenally well, an incredible game, and kudos to 2dBoy, but we were shocked. We were expecting to get a WOG-sized response to Multiwinia because that’s what we’d always had in the past.

I think marketing for the indie has now got more sophisticated than it used to be as you can’t just rest on your heels and send out a few press releases. If there is an indie studio and you are launching a game and don’t have someone entirely responsible for PR then I think they are missing a massive trick. They need to be working on all these areas: talking to magazines, talking to websites, checking Google analytics, make sure the company is selling from own site, make sure that Steam is in place; managing campaigns… what do you need to give to Valve to make them happy to give them added value. It’s a full time job to come up with the ideas and assets and measures of effectiveness to launch a game. I think that’s a whole interview in itself, and a full time job.

» You set up an ecommerce site (Glengarry). What have you learned from it?

When we started we were just processing credit cards way back then. Our web presence hasn’t really evolved and it’s not a particularly good sales site. It’s very good for informing the customers about games so if you want to find out about Uplink come to our site. (It’s not good) in terms of tracking footfall around the site, and that you get redirected to our sales site which doesn’t look the same so there are potential trust issues. We identified we aren’t doing our ecommerce well. I was hoping that Darwinia+ would launch this year so our website can be reworked so we can be much more effective at selling the game. Then we’ll take some of these principles and putting them into practice with a whole new website.

» Is Google analytics sophisticated enough to give you the info you want?

There are too many of our sites. Uplink has 70 odd pages added over time. Google analytics is great but we aren’t set up for it. Our domains are different so it finds it hard to track people across these entry points to the store. One of the key specs of the new sites is that it works well with Google analytics so we can run marketing diagnostics.

» You said on one of your blog posts you were putting a break on growth. This was about 6 months ago. Are you just trying to get stable to continue to make games with roughly the size you currently are, or is it an absolute goal to grow to get 2, 3, 5 teams.

Personally I want us to get bigger. I want to be bigger and put more games out the door every year. I don’t want us to lose our ability to be fiercely creative, and they must have high “production standards”. For me this is why I sit in this chair, to make this company bigger and to be able to replicate what we’ve done in the past on an ever increasing scale.

What I think will happen ultimately is if were successful is we’ll get too big, and we’ll be sat in a board meeting one day, all driving up in our Ferraris, and Cliff will say “I want it to go back to the old days when I could actually write games, when I could spend my time making games and not being in production meetings”, and we’ll probably resize the company. At the moment I want us to be able to put out at least one game per year from Introversion and that includes ports. Defcon PSN would count. That’s the first step, but I want to be able to put out new IP once a year.

» Is there a big plan to carry on with these remakes and new platforms? What happened with Defcon DS?

No one was interested in publishing it. We might do a DSi version but it depends on how much cash we get from Darwinia+ and whether we think there is a market there. We’ve learned a lot from our experience with XBLA and we think Defcon is a really successful game on pc, and getting it out on PSN and XBLA are nice projects from us given what we’ve spent 4 years learning. They are quick to get out and hopefully lucrative so if Darwinia+ does well we will be looking at that, however that’s not a sustainable as there are only Darwinia+ and Defcon we can take across, and that’s why subversion is so important.

» Sequels don’t have to be double the effort to release a new game in a shorter time. Are you quite prepared to take creative cuts just so you can get a better rounded portfolio out?

That’s a very interesting question. If we need to do that (take creative cuts) then we’ve not grown in the right way. I.e. we haven’t put the process in place to manage the games. Above everything else it should be about the game, not the portfolio, being worked on. If that means it takes a bit longer, like we don’t get it out in a year, but in 18 months then fine, we’ll roll with that. A company I’ve got enormous admiration for is Pixar, because Pixar have made… I can’t even remember how many films they’ve made…, but each one has been a stunningly high quality work of art. Apart from Toy Story 2 and 3 they tend to avoid going down the route of milking IP and sequel after sequel. I want us to grow in the same manner that Pixar grew. With Subversion we have lots of cool ideas for Subversion 2 and Subversion 3 if you like, but they are more like features we want to put in now, but we won’t be able to finish for when we need to launch it. It’s kind of like we can come up with this massive project but we might be able to divide into three different tranches of release. I don’t mean this in an episodic way, but its more if we believe we can do something very cool within the subversion environment after we’ve released it then we won’t have a problem doing it.

» I’m torn myself. I’ve read a lot about maintaining your IP; it’s the IP that is valuable. I do wonder though; for new companies dealing with publishers they have nothing to barter so you end up giving away your IP anyway. For myself I feel I need to be business focused and I should be set up to make sequels not because the IP has value, but because it’s a cheaper route to trying to make money.

It does depend on what you want to do. Introversion is kind of an experiment in some ways of whether we can make the kind of games we are interested in making. Some companies set up saying we are going to make 4 Xbox games a year and make an engine that takes away all the problems we came across because all the games fit into their framework. Now we want to go down that route but those that deliberately set up and sort of churn the handle by releasing 4 or 5 smaller XBox games – they’ve probably got a slightly better business model because they minimise tech risks by reuse; if one game doesn’t hit the niche the next one might, so there are lots of reasons for doing it that way.

But fundamentally what it comes down to is as a group of people – is that what you are going to be happy spending your life doing? As entrepreneurs that run business we need to be happy with our day to day activity.

And so for Introversion and for Chris in particular sequels and ports are not his thing. So if Introversion denies his ability to make new games that will be it; he will be out the door. Similarly for me if Introversion doesn’t offer ever increasing teams and salaries then I’m off. So there’s a balance between the two of us that keeps us on the right path. It’s not always easy but I think we are stronger for it

» How much should finances occupy the company?

It’s the lifeblood of the organisation. If you do not have complete understanding of your complete financial situation you will suffer. However, decisions don’t always need to be governed by the bottom line. It’s a very difficult questions to answer. If you ignore them you are a dead man, but if you are entirely ruled by them then you are a banker.

To put a slightly different spin on this; games are creative people based businesses. And neither creativity nor talent that comes from people reduces well to a balance sheet. So if that’s all you’re managing, purely by looking at the numbers, then your games company will suffer. The flip side; if you’re not keeping an eye on your numbers and your predictions are unrealistic and your not throwing out a cash flow for the next 2 or 3 years then you will also fail. So I think finances are important but they aren’t everything

» I want people to have the best chance of making their game and having the finances to make the next one. I’ve heard of several high profile projects that came out on something like XBLIG and iPhone after taking a year and a half and having no sales. A new unknown team, a long project, no marketing; there’s too much risk taken on there.

I had a wonderful quote from a guy, “if your iPhone game takes more than a month to develop you are wasting your time; you’re taking too much risk”, because iPhone in particular is just crap for making any money, imo. It’s just rubbish. There are just two successes and millions of failures. There are so many people quitting their jobs and becoming iPhone developers it is ridiculous. If you take someone you should ask them a few simple questions:

• “Whats your burn rate?”
• “How much do you expect to sell on iPhone?”

So if they expect to sell more than 20,000 units then they are probably in the top 5% percentile of games / apps from the iPhone store. So I think that’s when you’ve got to be realistic about your finance and numbers. It’s the same with XBLA. We are predicting the minimum number we need to continue the business is 28,000 and we think that’s eminently doable, bearing in mind Space Giraffe has been quoted as doing about 26,000 and that was the worst ever selling game, so we are quite comfortable we can survive off the back of this. But you’re right, if someone came to me and said I’m setting up a team of five people to make iPhone games I wouldn’t back them.

» What is your competitive advantage?

I think our refusal to have our creativity shackled in any way. As soon as you even begin to put Chris anywhere near something where he doesn’t think he has freedom, he starts to kind of whinge publicly. Just the fact that Chris does seem to be able to make games that people really love and that sell, this seems to keep Introversion going. And the mix of the team (is important).

» If you could travel back in time… what advice would you give yourself?

When we took the XBLA deal we should have talked to a lot of other XBox devs and get a more realistic plan definitely.

» If its 4 years on Darwinia+ it’s quite hard to work on. But with PAX I hope that motivates you again; that you can enjoy your child a second time.

It’s been a long ride but it’s still a great game. When they test and play MP they are still laughing and enjoying. We started in 2002 so it’s been 7 years of working on little green stick men, but the fact these guys still play and laugh and enjoy Darwinia is really heartening. If we can love it then the Xbox audience will too.

» What have you done you wouldn’t change? What would you hold up to others as an achievement?

The diversity of titles that we’ve gone for. We want every game to be different and unique and stand on its own as a wonderful example of creative brilliance. That’s very grandiose but kind of summarises where we want to be, and that’s what we’ve done well in the past and where we will continue to be.

Next…

As of 16 Nov 2009 Introversion are next to release Darwinia+ on XBLA. Keep track here.

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About

• Name: Alex May, joint developer.
• Project Started: May 2008.
• Location: UK.
• Staff : 2: Alex May and Rudolf Kremers.
• Discography: Eufloria “the game formerly known as Dyson” (PC – just released)

Eufloria Links

• Web: www.dyson-game.com
• Blog: www.dyson-game.com/blog

Alex May

» How much of your time on Eufloria has been actual development, and how much on other things?
That’s varied over time. For a while non-development tasks were taking up a considerable amount of my time, up to 40%. Rudolf was always more active on that side of things as well, and that only increased as we approached release and the design and content were complete.

» So with bug fixing etc. as the busy release deadline approached you also had other concerns rearing their ugly heads. That must have been stressful.
Yes, and coordinating between distributors for a simultaneous release was rather trying. Also again, community support is very time consuming and being present online before release I think was quite important. In terms of time sinks… I spent a bunch of time on the web site, which was definitely worth it, and on the community, which is also worth the time as I say. Going over contracts was a pain, and kind of risky without a dedicated lawyer. Luckily we had some good input from people we know to get us through the first couple.

» Did you chase these people for advice as you entered into a trcky area, or was it more by chance?
The former; we know a lawyer or two between us. It’s no long term substitute for having a dedicated paid lawyer but it got us going. We were lucky in that respect.

» Were there any incidents that quantified how useful having proper legal advice was?
The one big thing was changing the game’s name. We wanted to avoid any of the kind of badness that Mobigames recently experienced with Edge, and so we had a good check around and asked a trademark lawyer friend about it, who gave us some sterling advice. It was quite sad as we liked the original name, but if we’d kept it we would have been leaving ourselves wide open to claims of infringement. Luckily we managed to turn the name change into publicity via Direct2Drive, who offered to run a competition to change the game’s name. That was really cool.

» I thought it was incredibly smart; to turn a bad situation into a good one is fantastic. After the release of Eufloria could you sit back and relax or has there been a load of other work for you to do on it?
We did a beta test with a group of public testers, and squashed a lot of bugs in the process, but we did end up shipping with some howlers in there. We’ve still got an intense graphical bug that is stopping many laptop owners from playing the game, so we need to fix that ASAP. There have also been plenty of things to do like interviews, promotion, new contracts for download sites, etc. I expect it will die down soon though.

» I ask as post release work is something that should be factored in to schedules. The idea of “moving straight onto the next game” probably doesnt exist.
Quite, yes. Not just things like bug fixing but also community support and other aspects of game production that aren’t limited to development can take a lot of time even before release.

» How did you manage to maintain your interest over the past year and a half?
It was difficult at times, both when the heat was off and when it was full on. Sometimes pressure can work as a motivator and sometimes it can be really demotivating – I guess the latter happens when the pressure is too high. One excellent motivator was public feedback. Since we’ve been freeware for a long time we were always able to get feedback, and monitor download rates and news buzz. It was cool to see people were still interested.

» You are also working full time as a games programmer. How did the well known ups and downs of regular games projects compare to that of Eufloria?
Eufloria has been much more sporadic – full time employee games work is much more regular. The studio I work for (Curve Studios) has been crunch-free since they started, so it’s been really good for working on side projects. It’s topsy-turvy I guess. With each burst on Eufloria I would take a week or two off the project to recover, so that was much more like the traditional view of game development.

» You and Rudolf are just known as “the guys wot done Eufloria”. What happens next… will you leave full time employment? will it depend on the financial success of Eufloria? You might not want to say if you’re thinking of leaving your job!
Heh, they asked me that themselves a few months ago. I’d like to work with Rudolf again, as we work well together and have a well-meshed skill set between us. It’s too early to tell what will happen though. I have a bunch of projects I would like to do – who knows? Obviously one of the ideal aims is to be able to do this full time, so if Eufloria can bootstrap that then that’s great, and to keep full creative control.

» Have you thought about the cost of what the two of you have invested in Eufloria? “free time” still has a cost.
Yes, there has been a massive cost, not just financially but also with life in general. Rudolf’s story is slightly different as he went full time indie some time ago.

» Would you recommend to other people that they do what you did (to develop ion spare time)?
I think you have to really want to. The main points for me are:

• to know you are allowed to release something. Check your employment contract; have a clause written in and make sure it’s there when starting a new job.
• to know you will have to spend some large chunks of time on it if you plan to do it commercially.
• not to get too sidetracked with other projects.

So a lot of people do hobby development, with possibly the idea of going pro one day. You can force the issue and start a project specifically for it, or wait until you make something that is pretty popular and develop on that, I guess. Either way going pro is a lot of work and if you don’t realise that going in, you will end up hurt.

» With Steam – can you log in at any time and see up to the minute sales data? I figured you can’t say your cut (of each sale)
In terms of sales, we get a lot of data yes. The rate we get on Steam is comparable to other similar services, and we didn’t have to negotiate it. And while I can’t speak for others, I haven’t heard anyone complain, besides that Gearbox chap. I think in general you can expect a cut of around 30% for any DD service at the moment, aside from some of the casual portals I believe.

» Eufloria has kept up peoples interest for the past year. What gives you a competitive advantage over other products / companies?
I think updates, and originality: the fact we have a kind of atmosphere no other game has.

» If you could travel back in time to when you started Eufloria; what advice would you give?
Put in multiplayer from the start, and be more professional with things like error handling and build management. And don’t feel bad about taking breaks.

Next…

As of 28 Oct 2009 Eufloria has just gone on sale, and can be bought from the Eufloria purchase page, or from Steam.

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About

• Name: Cliff Harris, Positech Games’ owner and main developer.
• Started: 1997.
• Location: UK.
• Staff : 1 fulltime with external music and art.
• Releases: Planetary Defense (PC), Starship Tycoon (PC), Kudos (PC), Rock Legend (PC / Mac), Kudos 2 (PC), Democracy (PC), Democracy 2 (PC / Mac), Gratuitous Space Battles (PC – out soon!)

Positech Games Links

• Web: www.positech.co.uk
  
• Blog: positech.co.uk/cliffsblog

Cliff Harris

» You started 10 years ago – why did you do that?
Well that was before I’d actually worked in the normal industry. I was working in IT support, and had programmed many years earlier on the Sinclair ZX81, and just started making games as a hobby, rather than as a business. It just happened that people seemed to buy my first game.

» Did it immediately appear you could earn a living from it?
Well it wasn’t quite a living at the start, but it was certainly more appealing than IT support, and it was possibly a bit easier back then in some ways. There wasn’t a big indie games industry and you didn’t have all the web portals, or web advertising, you could just submit your games for free to the big download sites like download.com and people would just buy them. That’s all changed now. Its much more complex and there is way more competition.

» Were you also doing your own games while employed (at Elixir and Lionhead), and how hard was that running two jobs?
It wasn’t too bad, because I love working on games, and I wasn’t one of those maniacs who works till 4am every day just because their employer is a games company, so I did have the time to do my own stuff. It used to take me much much longer to do a complete game in my spare time, and they were not as good, but it can be done, even though paradoxically most companies forbid it contractually.

» Were you open and up front about your extra-curricular work?
At Lionhead I was, and they were pretty Ok about it. I think in general companies aren’t though, which is just insane. They would rather employ coders who spend their evenings watching soap operas than honing their coding skills. If you have game ideas your employer isn’t working on, you can either work on hobby projects, or quit and start your own company, which is MUCH worse for your employer…

» What made you take these full time jobs? And what made it the right time to go fulltime on your own stuff after?
I was indie fulltime ages ago, but I just didn’t make enough money and had to get a proper job, which is how I started at Elixir. Going full time again was an easy choice, because I had two things: I had a side income from my games which actually exceeded my salary, plus a job offer to do contract work from home for Maxis, so it wasn’t much of a battle.

» Did they find you because of your work on Kudos? (sorry if I’m getting the timeline wrong!)
No, it was amazingly starship tycoon they spotted ages ago. Kudos was done later.

» Your games were widespread enough to warrant interest from another commercial company. Had you realised you were making an impact on people?
No not at all. This happens now and then, you get emails from people you’ve heard of who suddenly turn out ot like your games. It’s cool.

» Was it the enthusiasm and feedback (like from maxis) that motivates you as well? Is it also appealing to run a business?
Oh I’m massively passionate about games. Its not about making money, I’m sure I could make better money elsewhere. I used to work on the UK Stock Market, and that’s rolling in money. I love making games. I take the business part very seriously because you *have* to, to stay doing what I love doing.

» How did it feel when you ended up having to go fulltime with Elixir? were you convinced even then you’d carry on in your spare time?
No, not really. It was quite grim to run out of money, but I had this list of 3 companies I would love to work for, which was Elixir, Lionhead and Ensemble, so to work at Elixir was extremely cool and exciting.

» How did working on bigger games and indie compare to you?
Well it’s very surprising how much creative freedom as a coder you have at a place like Elixir or Lionhead, especially if you are a senior coder. So it wasn’t as bad as you might think. I’ve always primarily been a designer/coder, so to be able to work on big games with a huge codebase was very interesting. I also learned a huge amount about programming from those huge games.

» I can see there’s a sim-like thread through your games leading up to GSB, but you’ve really gone to town on the visuals for this one. What got you to design the game the way it is?
It just evolved, it used to look very iconic with sort of retro graphics, and originally it wasn’t even set in space. My games change massively as I work on them. There is probably a subconscious desire to point out that I am capable of doing graphics programming too, because people assume I did sim games because I could only code AI.

» I saw the early vids for GSB before I knew what sort of game it would be. The epic space battles really look exciting. From what I’ve read on your blog the gfx are taking a large part of the development time – do you think this higher development cost has a big impact on the profitability for the game?
Well I love working on the GFX, and to be honest I tend to do all of the gameplay and UI stuff, and get that as good as I can, and I only work on the graphics as a treat when I’ve earned it. I’m not doing the gfx as a way to market the game, but because I really love super detailed and gratuitous looking space battles. It’s a labour of love.

» Gratuitous Space Battles is quite close to release. Who is the game for and what’s cool about it?
The game is for a cross section of gamers, people who just love sci fi battles, tower defence players, and people who enjoy RTS or sim games. What’s cool is it takes a genre that is normally 3D and real time, and takes away the arcadey confusion so its true strategy rather than arcadey. And doing it in 2D means you can have near-infinite poly spaceship models rendered out and draw hundreds of them! If I did GSB in 3D the poly count would be reduced by a factor of fifty at best.

» …and the assets would be more expensive to create as well.
To some extent, but they are all complex 3D models anyway

» Ah, I hadn’t realised that. Are you doing the modelling for them as well?
No, I pay a very talented guy to do that. He has done all sorts of high end modelling for big games companies and some TV stuff too.

» How is the beta period going?
It’s going very well, people really like the game, and I get a ton of really handy feedback, especially people pointing out UI niggles which I get used to and stop noticing. People get VERY good at the game. I have to cheat to even get in the top 100 on some of the missions.

» Ha, that’s a really good sign of people enjoying and being dedicated to the game. With GSB do you have a fixed release date?
Not yet, but its only a matter of weeks at most. Maybe another week.

» And how long have you been working on GSB? What keeps your momentum going?
Its about a year in total. Momentum is basically wanting to see and play the finished game myself. I’m always thinking of new stuff I want to add to it. The only limitation is the number of hours in the day, and the fact that I am the sole programmer on it.

» I’m interested in any patterns for development and sales that you’ve noticed over the long course of your games dev. Have you found anything (demos / sales / price promotions / certain portals / platforms etc…) that correlates closely to numbers of units sold?
It’s very very complex. The slightly refreshing answer is that I can see a direct correlation between the quality of a game and its sales, regardless of everything else. When I make a game that’s much better than the previous one, it tends to sell better. I think people are far too obsessed with price now, assuming cheaper games make more money. I’ve tested that theory, and at least for my genre, it’s not true.

» Price is very high on the agenda these days, particularly spurred by the iPhone. So you’re pretty set on the (approx) 14 GBP price point. What stops you going higher?
I’m not sure, I think that is the sweet spot where people will compare the game favourably to what else is around. I think the game competes with stuff like Sins of A Solar Empire and galCiv II, so I tend to look at what they sell for, given that my game is smaller in scope and development budget.

» How much did you plan the development schedule (one year) of GSB?
Well my games tend to take a year, so it was just the standard thing, but it worked out good, because it went up for pre-order just as the income from my earlier games had sarted to seriously dry up and I really needed the money. That’s what is good about the beta, it means I’m not trying to rush finished a buggy or half complete game.

» From what you say your previous profit last approx 80-90% of the dev of the next game – do you have strategy or long term plan to change / improve that?
Well I don’t ever intend to do anything but make the best and most popular game I can. I have a theory that the more effort you put in, the more the payback, on a non linear scale, and I’ve never put more effort into a game than GSB, so I’m hoping it might do well enough to cushion the business slightly so I can actually relax one year!

» You do direct sales yourself – was that easy to set up, and what are the benefits / downsides to it?
Its actually trivial to do, I use payment companies that handle orders, and tax and all that stuff, so you literally just stick a link on your website and they wire you the money each month, it is very very easy to do. I think people go to Steam for the audience and the publicity, more than because it’s that involved to do yourself. PR and marketing are the real problem with direct sales.

» What has been effective for you as marketing?
Oh god, it just takes tons of things, sending hundreds of emails, trying everything, talking to everyone, it’s a huge huge area of business. I could literally write a book on the topic now, there is so much you need to do and get involved in.

» Have you got much of a fanbase, and does your back catalogue of good games help create sales for the next one?
Yes definitely, a lot of people buy every game I release, which is surprising because they do differ in genre and style a fair bit.

» With Kudos you were encouraged to do reskins for it, but developed Kudos 2 instead.
Well a publisher wanted a reskin, but I ended up pretty much recoding the entire game. Rock legend didn’t do as well as it should have, because I wasn’t very clear about whether or not it was a hardcore or casual game, so it ended up being neither one.

» Are reskins a route that developers should leave open? Admittedly, it still relies on the game being targeted well…
Well I think its a bit of a quick-panic-cash-in thing when they do that. A lot of casual games are such a blatant copy of the last game with different graphics and sounds that I wonder why they aren’t sued by angry buyers, sometimes its just embarrassing to see.

» How much should finances occupy a company?
You dont really have a say in the extent to which finances matter. Either you stay in the black or you go to McDonalds and start frying burgers, so you have to keep an eye on the money at all times. I treat it more like a strategy game than a chore.

» What gives you a competitive advantage over other products / companies?
I think the competitive advantage I have is that I’m one of very few small indie companies that do simulation games. It just seems most indies are graphics or gameplay coders, and I’m a real simulation / AI guy, so that means my games have a different focus to most other ones.

» If you could travel back in time to when you started the company; what advice would you give?
If I could go back in time, I’d change a lot of technical things, to do with what languages or software I’d use, but I wouldn’t do different games, I’ve learned something from every game I’ve done. Maybe I’d quit my last job a year earlier, apart from that, no change.

» What technology did you use and could have used instead?
Well I use C++ and know it very well, but its quite an awkward language for doing stuff like UI and network code. Ideally I’d use java or C# or something less fiddly than C++. Ideally I’d be using some GUI middleware too, this would speed stuff up a lot.

Next…

As of 19 Oct 2009 Positech Games’ next release is the PC game Gratuitous Space Battles, with a street date of “imminent” and a playable Beta already available.

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About

• Name: Chris Walley, Director.
• Started: Feb 2009.
• Location: Guildford, UK.
• Staff: 2 fulltime and 3-4 part time / contract.
• Releases: World Clock (XBLIG), World Clock 360 (PC), AtomHex (XBLIG), Platypus (XBLIG, to be released)

Escapist Games Links

• Web: www.escapistgames.com
• Blog: escapist-games.blogspot.com
• YouTube: www.youtube.com/profile?user=RiskjockeyX
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=94996297109&ref=ts

Chris Walley

» What was the reason behind you going indie?
Well, I guess I wanted to make my own games. Which is a little ironic considering we’ve mostly been doing ports But no, it’s also probably the same as most start-ups; we wanted to see if we have what it takes to go it alone. It takes guts and it’s not been easy but so far, I have to say it’s been a lot of fun so I don’t regret leaving my secure job to go it alone. I quit EA almost exactly a year ago actually. My original plan was to take 6 months out and make my own game. It’s a game that I tried to make at EA that got quite far but ultimately couldn’t be made, called “Jumpfight”. It’s still in development and I still plan to release it. I was going to make it for PC and then probably go back to full-time employment but things didn’t work out quite as expected…

» How so?
I wrote a JumpFight prototype in a simple but quite cool language called Blitz3D. My initial plan was to port it to C# XNA and then I could release it on the Xbox360 and PC. However, instead of going for the brute-force approach I decided to write a convertor first, which would do the job for me. So I did that and everything was going to plan; then I met San Shepherd (who is now my business partner). He suggested that the convertor could be used to convert existing games over to XNA and so we started looking into this with existing commercial games, written in Blitz Basic.

Hence, we found Platypus and AtomHex and loads of others. We have contracts signed with various other people, ready to go; 5 products including Platypus in the space of 9 months or so, and it’s all mostly thanks to my convertor. It gets you about 90% of the way there. Then you have to massage the code and fix the errors and hey-presto; you hit build and it’s quite a minor miracle when stuff magically appears on the Xbox, and you have no real idea how! In the end, with both Platypus and AtomHex I got to know the code pretty well of course because we upgraded them and added features etc. but it gives a great starting point.

» I can see why your plans changed – what you’ve described to me has set my mind off thinking about interesting possibilities.
Yeah, it is an exciting piece of tech. But we have yet to see if it makes for a financially viable business model, which is why Platypus is such a big deal for us right now. Because, I’ll be honest, XBLIG has not paid for itself yet. I think unless you get your game in the top 5, or even 3 you’re not going to see a great deal of money.

» I’d heard good things about the new ratings helping games sales – and thought AtomHex was up there.
It is. It’s high in the ratings but it doesn’t seem to be translating directly into sales I’m sorry to say, because AtomHex is a great little game, it really is. We have people writing in to us telling us how much they love it.

» Do you have any insight on why it might not be succeeding?
That is a tough one. I think we learned a lot from AtomHex’s launch. Firstly, it’s not possible on XBLIG to set a launch date, unlike the iPhone store for example. So, when it passes peer-review, it’s live a few hours later and you don’t know when that will be. It could fail, then you need to wait another week to be able to resubmit, or it might pass after a day or two. So we learnt that you really need to make a concerted push with the publicity as soon as it launches and we didn’t – we were caught a little off guard. Those first 24 hours are vital – because it’s at that time when it has the best chance of succeeding. You really need to pull out all the stops. Having said that, I’d say AtomHex is a bit of a sleeper though, no, what’s the word? “ever-green” something or other. It consistently sells without any publicity. We had a 25% conversion rate in September. 25% is better than most Arcade titles, so it’s very good – those that find it love it, but it would be great if more people knew about it.

» How long had you spent on the AtomHex conversion, and how much of that was trying to get it through peer review?
About 2 months on the conversion. About 3 weeks on top getting it through.

» Can you give me figures for how many copies it sold? I’m thinking that a game that takes (roughly) two months and needs to support two people for that period to break even needs to sell X copies. X might be quite big
Let me just say, its not done as well as we had hoped. It made a lot less than X.

» Are you doing anything different with Platypus to increase sales?
Yes – everything! AtomHex was a real eye-opener. This time we have a much clearer idea of what to do and how to publicize it.

» Doing conversions – you have other parties involved. What agreement do you have with the rights holder? Their cut will make the sales feel worse…
I would recommend that anyone doing something similar should ensure that they have a provision for making back a certain initial sum before any royalties are paid which will cover all or some of the dev costs.

» Excellent idea. Did you find dealing with an individual for AtomHex, and a company for Platypus gave different results?
Indeed. The agreement we came to for AtomHex with Marc Incitti… was quite straightforward to hammer out. He’s a nice guy, very reasonable. When dealing with companies I’d expect it to take a bit longer, and it did.

» In putting all your info together – you’ve got a great product (the converter) that is hampered by the delivery mechanism (XBLIG), and where the traditional second sales route for those games (PC) is already fulfilled. Do you think it is feasible to get to a stage where your ability to quickly port games is enough to offset low sales?
Well, we’re waiting and seeing now. If Platypus is a success then our business model will be validated. If it’s not, then I really don’t see how to make money from it (XBLIG) without commiting to a serious gamble. ie. you need to be very lucky and hope your “big” product hits a sweet-spot with consumers. But – that’s hypothetical right now. We think Platypus *will* be a success because it’s such a great game. To address your point about the PC platform not being a second avenue of sales… the convertor converts from Blitz Basic into C# using custom XNA functions to replace the Blitz commands and that’s an attractive proposition to anyone with some old Blitz code lying around; it allows you to have much more optimised code, is much easier to expand upon, can use all the latest technology (like graphics shaders etc) and quite simply you’ll be able to to do a lot more with it. You can convert your old PC game and it will work much ‘better’ under XNA on the PC. But of course the cherry on the cake (and it’s a very big cherry) is that it will also run on the Xbox.

» This makes the software sales of the converter sound pretty appealing. Perhaps the cost to handle the conversions yourself are too high, but for other people to get a second chance at income for old projects – they have less invested in it (in a project’s success) so could do it themselves.
Yeah, as I said, we are certainly considering it, and we can use Platypus and AtomHex as examples of the fact that yes, the tecnhology does work.

» For Platypus – will you be doing any promotions for it? how will you use your 50 free game tokens for it? (50 free copies of your game donated by MS for distribution to review sites or friends)
Many of the tokens are already spoken for: press. We issued a pre-release press statement this time (again, learning from AtomHex) and so we’ve had quite a few responses from people eager to review it when it comes out. And yeah, some will go out to friends.

» Ultimately there’s quite a lot of opinon that XBLIG isn’t the way ahead though – does that seem fair given your involvement in it?
I actually think it *is* the way ahead. Just maybe not the way ahead from a standard business point of view. So, for your average hobbyist, it’s an incredible outlet but as a business venture, it’s a gamble and I’m glad I didn’t (haven’t yet anyway) bet the house on it. But I do believe in the idea, and I’m looking forward to the platform maturing and gaining wider recognition.

» Do you think changing the instant releases to a staggered one would help?
I’d actually like to see Microsoft implement a system that lets the developer set their own release date once it passes peer-review, so it passes and then you get the choice of when to release it – say, any time in the next 3 months. (I’d also add gamer-points for Indie games, but that’s another kettle of fish, ie. they’d have to be vetted. But I think just doing that would see sales increase dramatically)

» Even if AtomHex had been a massive success there is a lag until you get paid. How have you survived financially?
I had some savings, I’ve sold the car and I have a very supportive wife. Starting a new company is never an easy thing I guess – there’s a certain amount of pain at the start to get through, but I’m very optimistic about the future.

» And finally… how much should finances occupy a company?
You need to make money otherwise you won’t be a company for long… so of course they are important but if you believe in your products… then hopefully they’ll be financially successful. Personally, I do what I love: I make video games. The finances are a very necessary evil.

» What gives you a competitive advantage over other products / companies?
Between me, San and the various other people involved, we have an awful lot of experience: we know good games, we have an eye for quality – everything we’ve done so far I’m proud of and I believe that we are all really, really good at what we do. And you’ve got to believe that, haven’t you?

» If you could travel back in time to when you started the company: what advice would you give?
Tricky one. I’d probably give myself very specific advice, but nothing like “don’t do it!” or something more exciting. Actually, I’d probably take back a sports almanac, if I was thinking straight! I wouldn’t change any of it really – I’m not a person who has too many regrets, I guess. So everything we’ve done so far has been learning, and yes we’ve made mistakes, and I know that we’ve learnt an awful lot from those mistakes. You’ve got to make them, in order to learn from them.

» At what point would you give up on the company?
I’ll give up when I don’t think we’ll make any money and that I can’t afford to keep it going. So far we have no debts – and I plan to keep it that way.

» My own opinion is there’s quite a lot of people who can make fairly good games. But can they make them in a financially viable way? Your case is incredibly interesting. I’d almost go so far to say that if you can’t make money reliably out of XBLIG then no one can.
Well, that’s my thinking as well actually

» You can develop high quality, already known games quicker than people creating original games and no one else can really emulate you – so I’m hoping it works out! Can you say what game you are working on after Platypus?
There are a few possibilies right now but actually I will be cryptic… and say that no one should put all their eggs in one basket…

» Joypad Massager 7?
Oh if only I could – if only my conscience would let me.

Next…

As of 19 Oct 2009 Escapist Games’ next release is the XBLIG conversion and upgrade of Platypus, with a street date of “imminent”.

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