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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