This is my first blog post with #AltDevBlogADay so I thought it’s proper to introduce myself and tell you about Flowerpot Games. It’s not only the cordial thing to do but it also sets up context for future #AltDevBlogADay postings. I’m Ed Bartley ( @FishFPG ), coder and managing partner of Flowerpot Games (FPG). I got my start in the early 80′s on a TRS-80 Color Computer II coding games in BASIC and ASM and sharing them with friends. One of my most awesome TRS-80 games was a vector graphic dungeon crawler named Mines of Minco where the player picked up gold and silver and fought mine monsters in turn-based rounds. It was very crude but was all the rage in my small circle of programmer friends. The other 5 or 6 games I coded on the TRS-80 were clones of coin-op arcade games like Missile Command and Asteroids. In the early 90′s I bought a used IBM 386 clone and taught myself C and C++. I duplicated a few more coin-ops on the 386 and wrote a handful of utility apps.
About 4 years ago I got a chance to work with the team at Prairie Games to help make Minions of Mirth into a more awesome game. We (the team) meshed so well that some of us decided to form an Indie Game Studio called Flowerpot Games.
Who Is Flowerpot Games
Go ahead, click the Flowerpot Games link and look around, I’ll wait for you.
Welcome back! Those of you who have been around the block a few times in the game industry, especially on a small Indie team, are probably rolling your eyes and thinking, “An Indie MMORPG? Seriously?” But we’re really not that naive and there is a method to the MMORPG madness. While Shadows of Nightside, an MMORPG, is our ultimate goal we realize that getting there is going to take a massive amount of work … and money. So early on we laid out a simple strategy that will allow our small team to make steady progress toward that goal. But first, it would be exceptionally rude if I didn’t introduce the team that *is* Flowerpot Games (FPG).
Citrine – A strong community influence and fellow developer of Minions of Mirth, Citrine is an RPG veteran who has explored the depths of many games and game systems including (in no particular order) D&D, EQ, Fallout, Munchkin, Settlers of Catan, Illuminati, Shadowrun, and many more too numerous to mention. Citrine lists Sid Meier and Steve Jackson as strong influences. Citrine also crafted and managed numerous play-by-mail and play-by-email RPGs. Citrine brings a wealth of keen insight into what exactly makes an RPG work, fun to play, and especially how to balance them. In addition to managing the FPG websites and being a continuous source of game ideas, Citrine is also coding the browser RPG, Flower Battles – Where Crudely drawn flowers battle for your enjoyment. Citrine is a managing partner of Flowerpot Games.
Stefan ‘Llarlen’ Walter – Stefan is a masterful coder skilled in C, C++, Python, Java, PHP, and many other languages. Not only does he bring programming skills he is a dynamic source of unique game ideas. An engineer at heart he has the technical skills to understand and code advanced systems that have never been coded before. Stefan is a managing partner of Flowerpot Games.
Jérôme ‘grom‘ Aubry – grom is a seasoned artist skilled in international branding and advertising. He understands what it takes to design customer-facing content such as logos, web-spaces, and GUIs in a way that will appeal to an international audience.
Shoshanna – With her southern charm and exceptionally quick wit, Shoshanna knows how to grow a vibrant and engaging community around a game. Shoshana is The Voice of Flowerpot Games.
John ‘Dorje’ Hoffman – John is a creative writer. His broad imagination is a fountain of quest and quest item ideas. To date he has written volumes of quests and quest items for Shadows of Nightside and Flower Battles. John is the Light of Flowerpot Games.
Can’t Get There From Here
It would be foolish to think that 2 coders can make an MMORPG with the scope of Shadows of Nightside within a reasonable time-frame and without burning-out or running out of money. We all know that aspiring coder who started an MMO project and put a gawd-awful amount of time and energy into the game only to see it fizzle-out 8 to 12 months later. Or the small team of volunteers who got off to a good start creating a nice code-base, but then suddenly found themselves faced with procuring a massive, MASSIVE, amount of content. They add up the cost, hit five figures, paralysis set in, and the project stalls – “Where are we going to get the money?”
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not belittling the people who have seen their project fail. We have all had failed projects and it’s really quite healthy to fail and make mistakes as long you learn from them. What’s even better, and way more productive, is to learn from the mistakes that other people have made.
What I’ve found that’s common between many failed MMO projects is they started with an idea and a goal. They had plenty of passion and spirit, enough to attract others to the cause, but something that’s typically missing is a strategy: How do we get there from here? What exactly is the scope? What is the time-frame? Without a strategy all you really have is luck and passion.
FPG’s Strategy
Shadows of Nightside is a goal but we, like many other aspiring developers who lack a VC, don’t have the financial resources to sustain development focused exclusively on that goal. So we adopted a strategy to build smaller games that help us incrementally build the MMO. (As an aside, if a VC wants to step up to the plate, we’ll change strategy in a heartbeat.)
This build-up strategy has a number of positives:
- The smaller games incrementally add code that is also needed for the MMO.
- The smaller games allow us to test the game engine and work out bugs.
- The smaller games help to sustain FPG activities and help fund the content needed for the MMO.
- The smaller games help us to explore new/emerging platforms.
There are also some negatives, of course:
- It will take longer to release the MMO because we are working on other games.
- There is a risk that the smaller games fail to sustain FPG activities and cause FPG to fail. But FPG would most certainly fail if we bet everything on the MMO.
Smaller Games (read: Strategic Significance)
When we say ‘Smaller Games’ we’re really saying ‘less resource-intensive games that are fun to play but add a significant component to our overall strategy’. So we’ll take each of our games in turn and highlight the strategic significance.
The smallest of the smaller games is Mobile Montessori for the Android platform. Mobile Montessori is not really a game, it’s an educational app for children age 2 to 6. Mobile Montessori has Strategic Significance because it gives us experience with a mobile platform and helps us to know exactly what’s needed to ensure that Shadows of Nightside will translate to mobile platforms.
The next game is Flower Battles. Flower Battles is a browser based RPG that has Strategic Significance because it gives us much needed practice using remote databases and providing dynamic content via the web. Flower Battles will also have in-app purchasing.
Lastly, we have Canyon of Desolation, a 3D Tower Defense RPG game set in the world of Nightside. This game has Strategic Significance because it adds code necessary for Shadows of Nightside, gives us practice with HTML POST/GET transactions in C++, helps us polish our content generation pipe, and allows us to put the Shadows of Nightside world lore to use. It also allows us to purchase, use, and offset the cost of art assets that will be reused in Shadows of Nightside.
What’s Next?
Now that you know who we are, what we are doing, and why, what can you look forward to in future posts?
- Some of the lessons we’ve learned while coding our games and game engine.
- Things that we are struggling with (in code, business, or otherwise) and how we plan to solve it.
- How to develop your own strategy for your new (or old) Indie Studio.
- And more!
I’m really excited to be part of this community and I look forward to sharing more. But most of all I’d love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a comment and let me know what you think.