About a week and a half after we launched the paid version of Vex Blocks on Google Play, Yuhao Zeng of the Paris based App Turbo contacted me to ask if we’d be interested in promoting Vex Blocks with their “App of the Day” app. They expressed interest in our game and thought their users would too. The idea was simple enough. We make a full copy of our paid game available for 24 hours, free, and they’d promote it. As we had our hands full with free version of Vex Blocks, our app marketing had at that point consisted of a few press releases (where we could afford them) and emails to review sites who had historically ignored us. We received the details, talked them over among ourselves and ultimately decided on “What the hell?”

I don’t want to sound like an advertisement for their service, but I like when others share their indie development experiences and if I can help another dev in our shoes, I’m going to pass it along. Yuhao was fantastic throughout the process, quickly answering any and all questions I threw his way. The “App of the Day” app is regional, covering a good chunk of Europe as well as Russia, Canada, Australia, Mexico, Brazil and Japan. Prior to the promotion, the free version of Vex Blocks was managing roughly 100 downloads a day in the 2 weeks since it’s release. We were hoping that perhaps this promotion might give us a boost of a couple of thousand users and help us get the ball rolling a bit.

When all was said and done, over 90,000 users downloaded and played our game in the 24 hours the promotion ran this week, of which roughly 80% have so far stayed as active users. I’m sure that’s nothing to some developers, but for an indie team like ours this is a huge step forward. The next day, the free version of Vex Blocks jumped from it’s regular 100 a day to roughly 6000 where it’s stayed so far. The paid version of Vex Blocks is also experiencing a nice spike. For an English only game, I’m pleasantly surprised that so many decided to give us a try in non-English speaking countries and the feedback from users has been fantastic. The goal was to help Vex Blocks find it’s way into the hands of gamers and raise awareness, and in that this exercise was a complete success. It also served as an excellent opportunity to help narrow the list of the 2000 some Android devices that the game was available on and weed out a few devices that were incapable of playing our game.

There are a number of “Free App” type applications like “App of the Day” (http://appturbo.it/) out there but in our inexperience we didn’t even consider reaching out to them. Although I haven’t used a similar service to promote our titles, I’ll certainly contact the App Turbo team again for this type of service. If you’re a developer with a mobile app to promote, it certainly couldn’t hurt to send a quick email to Yuhao (yuhao@appturbo.it) and see what they can do for you. I know I’ll be partnering up with them again for the iOS release of Vex Blocks and hopefully for future releases after that.

We launched the paid, full version of Vex Blocks on Google Play first for the simple fact that it was finished first.  We knew the market for paid apps on Android was limited compared to others, but I don’t think we were really conscious of just how big a role piracy played.  Our first release, Itzy3d, marked our first steps into the world of mobile game development.  When we released Itzy3d, our plan was to have a full, paid version and then a free, lite version.  The paid version of Itzy3d was all but ignored on the Android marketplace, as we suspected it would be while the lite version was downloaded considerably more than its iOS counterpart, by roughly 5:1.  There was at least an appetite for our products on Android so skipping out on a Google Play release didn’t even occur to us with our follow-up title.

What we didn’t know with Itzy3d was actual numbers on how many copies of the game were installed on devices compared to how many we sold via Google Play.  With Vex Blocks, we’re able to see how many copies are out in the wild compared to how many copies we’ve sold.  These statistics don’t change our approach to Android releases.  The impact is more of an emotional toll when you realize the bulk of gamers out there on Android you’re trying to reach with your product don’t have any interest in supporting that product, even if they use it.

Over the years I’ve heard plenty of arguments trying to justify why piracy isn’t really an issue for developers.  The main one you always hear is, “Those people would have never bought the game in the first place.  No money is lost.”

The idea that certain people just never buy games is ridiculous.  Arguing that pirate gamers would just cease gaming if they couldn’t pirate is utter nonsense.  Add to that the cost barrier for mobile gaming is generally so low, and it just boils down to pirates are cheap.  Full stop.  Pirates who can’t spend half the price of a large cup of coffee to support a game they want to play shouldn’t make excuses or try to rationalise their actions.  They’re cheap and they’d rather open themselves up to malware infected copies found in the gutters of the internet than compensate developers for their work.  Now I’m sympathetic to the fact that in some countries, due to government restrictions, the only way you can access television shows, music and, yes, mobile games is through illegal sites, but the bulk of pirated copies we’re seeing of our game aren’t coming from these countries.

Pirates will argue that nothing is stolen as the product is only copied, so it’s not even a crime, but of course the reality is every pirated copy of a game removes that person from the pool of potential customers and with 95% of your customers not willing to pay for your product, that doesn’t leave developers much room to work with on Android.  So, the piracy ship has sailed and aside from becoming bitter old men who rant on blogs and shake their fist at kids who walk in front of their house too slowly, what can be done?  Price competition isn’t a factor.  The race to the bottom is already over and, surprisingly, no one came out the victor.  Daring to even charge a dollar your game is in itself an invitation to pirate now.  The ease with which pirates can copy a developers work has fundamentally changed the way developers cope and the end result is a diminished product for all.

There are numerous ways a developer can attempt to limit the impact of piracy issues.  You could simply avoid developing for Android, but there is still a market consisting of legitimate Android users out there and it’s not that other platforms are immune to piracy.  I love creating games for Android devices and I’m humbled by the support we’ve received from our players.  I wouldn’t ignore the gamers who do support our products.  Many of the other methods to deal with piracy involve lessening the experience for legitimate gamers on mobile (and on other platforms).  DRM is one route.  The general thinking is, the harder you make it to pirate your work, the more chance that some pirates might actually pay to play your game due to the effort involved in cracking or finding a pirated version.  There’s certainly some validity to that approach but as we’ve witnessed with a few recent, high profile examples of digital rights management such as launch issues surrounding Diablo 3 and SimCity, this has the potential to backfire and hurt your paying users.

You can require mandatory sign-up as well, but this has a tendency to alienate those who simply want to buy a game and play, hassle free.  That leaves the freemium method of releasing your game filled with upgrades, advertisements or both.  It’s certainly the route that more mobile developers are choosing, including ourselves, but again this can lead to a lesser experience as advertisements throughout a game become tiresome quickly, and an over reliance of micro-transactions can also turn gamers away.

Alternately developers can choose to embrace piracy.  There’s the chance that a happy pirate may promote your game simply through word of mouth.  For indie developers, creating a great product is job one, but getting noticed is by far the real battle.  The next great novel could be sitting in a pile of thousands of books but if no one picks it up to read it in the first place the author could very likely die in obscurity.  Similarly, great games need to be played in the first place for anyone to discover them and if they’re played as a result of piracy and discovered in that fashion, the argument can be made that the pirates did the developer a service.  Of course it’s only a service if the pirates tell enough gamers from the 5-10% of Android gamers who legitimately support developers – ideally before those developers are forced to close their doors.

But hey, why should developers going under matter to pirates?  By that point they’ve already moved on to helping themselves to the next game.

The late night adrenalin rush of fixing a bug on the eve of our self-imposed deadline had fired up my brain and my thoughts erratically leap from point to point like popcorn popping while anxiety knotted up in my stomach and settled in for a winter’s nap. I stared at my bedside table for an undetermined length of time before I eventually drifted off into a fitful sleep.

At some point during the night my wife woke up to comfort our baby girl, Hanna and had fallen asleep in her room. My day started when my wife came back to bed and informed me that our 3-year-old, Jake, was awake and calling for Daddy. I squinted, noticed the sun was up so there was no chance at another hour of sleep and rolled out of bed just as Jake hit the living room and started honking the horn of an obnoxiously noisy pink riding car meant for his sister. I settled him down with a cup of a fruit/veggie juice I have yet the had the courage to taste and turned on “The Cat in the Hat knows a lot about that” before heading to my office to launch our second title.

Launch day this time was different. With our first title, our core group hunkered down in my home office in a marathon of testing the ultimately cumulated with “Well. That’s it. Let’s launch.” Someone suggested we should have a drink so we did toasting each other and then that was it. Game launched. The next day I sat, staring at my computer screen knowing I needed to “market” somehow but not having a clue even where to start. This time out there was no empty void of “What the hell do I do now” waiting for me after launch. There’s no one else in the room. No one to raise a toast to. The artwork was finished months ago by very talented student artists. The testers I haven’t actually seen face to face in who knows how long. People complete their assigned tasks and then scatter leaving only us, the two founders of our indie studio, each waking up with their respective families on a cold, Canadian Sunday morning. There was still a long list of of objectives that needed to be completed to launch Vex on other platforms, in other app stores. There’s another team working on our third title that needs checking in on. There’s communications that have been piling up, unanswered while we pushed to complete. The gaping maw of uncertainty that greeted me after the first game released didn’t exist this time out. I know what needs to be done and we can’t afford to slow down.

So while the Cat in the Hat explains to my 3 year old the benefits to singing underwater with a whale I sat down to release our new game. The sun tries to poke through the clouds outside my office window but it just can’t decide whether it wants to clear up or add to the snow on my back deck. I noticed the time and remembered that Daylight Savings had struck again. I could almost feel that hour suddenly sucked away from me like a voodoo spell setting in as I lamented the time shift. I shook the sudden tiredness off and a quick check of my emails included a brief message from our other developer, my brother-in-law Will. No doubt he had a late night as well. If he wasn’t awake due to work, I’m sure his sleep would have been interrupted by their first child only weeks old, waking and bellowing his displeasure. I took the few cosmetic changes to Vex Blocks that Will had pushed up to our server, installed the new build and then uploaded the apk file to Google Play. Then I hit “Publish”.

That was it. I leaned back in my chair and despite being told by an online message that it could take hours to populate to Google’s servers, I punched in the url just to see if it was visible. It wasn’t. I went through my email and then checked a few links to press releases that were scheduled to go live that morning to herald the Vex Blocks release. I clicked refresh on the Google Play site again. Still nothing. I flipped back and forth between press releases, finding the announcements somehow comforting and real, like the launch of the game after ten months wasn’t just a dream. I’d then refresh the Google Play link. I don’t know how many times I did this before the baby monitor in the living room announced that Hanna was awake. I fired off a message to Will for whenever his sleep deprived old bones made his way into his office that morning, informing him that the deed was done.

The links to the game on our Facebook and web pages were live. The press releases were out. The game was published. I went to rescue my daughter from the confines of her crib. She smiled her huge, baby smile when I entered her room, just like she always does and I took her into the living room where she proceeded to make short work of some Cheerios I placed out on the coffee table for her to keep her occupied. My son jumped up on the couch beside me and we talked and watched TV, letting my wife sleep in a bit. Little Einsteins was on now. The rocket ship apparently runs off leg pats, so we patted our laps faster and faster to rev up Rocket as we were instructed, raised our hands as high as we could and announced together “Blast off!” Hanna turned from where she was standing, leaning against our ottoman, swaying a bit on her unsteady little legs. She giggled at us.

It was a good day.

When we started development of Vex Blocks, we set out to create a falling block style arcade game in the vein of Tetris that utilised a device’s rotation.  The job of the player was to chain together blocks on the screen by matching colors, symbols or both and tracing out patterns with their fingers to connect the blocks.  Random blocks would fall into the play area and the job was to clear as many as possible, rotating the device as necessary so blocks would fall into different arrangements.  Once we had created the basic gameplay mechanics, we set about trying to think of how we could change the rules of the game to create different gameplay modes and a “nice to have feature if we have the time” was puzzle mode.

So, as development moved along I ultimately found myself faced with the job of creating various puzzles for our puzzle mode.  I had never set out to create a puzzle before, but how hard could it be?  Start simple, right?

I started by recreating my playing area in Photoshop and went about duplicating the various game pieces so I could simply drag and drop to create the puzzles before coding them into our game.  My next step was to create something aesthetically pleasing before I even thought of how the puzzle would play.  I’d drop in blocks to create geometric shapes and patterns, often drawing inspiration from simple icons as I only had a 5×8 grid to work with.  Once I had a pattern on the screen that I was relatively happy with, I’d start thinking about how it would play.

Here’s where it really started to get fun.  The point of the puzzle mode was to solve the puzzle, clearing all playing blocks from the screen in as few chains as possible, with an upper limit on the amount of chains you could use before the puzzle would reset.  I’d have a look at the blocks in front of me and start tracing out the various options for chains.  If it was too straightforward, then I’d start to throw in obstacles by swapping out blocks that couldn’t be readily chained together, or could only be part of a chain coming from one particular direction.  Or, I’d start with a puzzle and then mimic a few phone rotations to see what I’d end up with.  It was a bit like messing up a Rubik’s cube.  As challenging as a Rubik’s cube is to solve, there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in taking a solved cube and mixing it up for another to solve.  For a few puzzles, that’s exactly what it was like.  Starting with a solved puzzle that was easy to chain together, then scrambling it.  Mmmm…satisfying.

From a design perspective, starting simple was really the only way for this project to evolve.  As I started to become comfortable designing simple puzzles, I’d gradually add in new game mechanics.  What if I add a block that can’t be chained and has to be surrounded?  What if I introduce blocks that stay fixed in one spot despite device orientation?  What if we throw in blocks that explode if you don’t clear them quickly enough?  What about using specific power-ups?  Adding one new gameplay mechanic at a time and exploring that mechanic fully before moving onto the next, then adding them together provided a nice progression in terms of variety and difficulty.  As I became more familiar with process, design started to shift away from the look of the puzzle and instead started with a particular challenge, and then I moulded the look around the puzzle.

Next up I assembled the puzzles in-game and turned them loose on our testers.  I quickly discovered that what seems easy to me after working on the game full-time for nine months isn’t necessarily as easy for gamers who haven’t spent that type of time with the product.  Test, test test.  Who knew?  There’s a fine line between challenging and “Nuts to this” with gamers.  Thankfully, I’ve received some excellent feedback and what was originally a “nice to have feature if we have the time” has become a challenging addition to the title that extends the gameplay options while offering us the opportunity to release additional content if gamers like what they see.

I was never around children from the time I left home until nearly 20 years later when I had kids of my own. When I was faced with other people’s children, I often found the experience awkward and a bit uncomfortable. I had no idea how to relate to kids of any age or how to interact with them. Now with children of my own I can hardly remember a time where I didn’t know how to play with children, and in return my kids have opened my eyes to why we find certain things “fun”. I hope I can describe this idea in a way that could prove useful to aspiring developers.

Playing video games in my twenties and thirties I think I lost some of the understanding of why I found games fun to play when I was a kid. Video games to me were about roleplaying or they were about competition and if you had asked me why video games were fun even three years ago, I probably would have described some combination of those two factors but over the years I’d forgotten something. Perhaps not forgotten so much as overlooked. While roleplay and competition can be factors in why games are appealing long term I think what makes video games fun is much more fundamental to the way we learn. Watching my children grow and play has helped me remember what drew me to video games as a child and what still keeps me coming back now. It has to do with learning and the feeling of accomplishment when you finally master a challenging game.

From a very early age, babies love patterns. Nothing quite locks an infant’s gaze like faces and patterns. As they get older it doesn’t stop. We find patterns all around us all the time even when confronted with something that doesn’t seemingly have a pattern. We see shapes in clouds and we instantly look for some sort of familiar arrangement in a jumble of letters or numbers. I watched my son stare at a wooden puzzle, then progress to dumping the pieces and creating chaos only to then restore order. He would continue to play in this manner until eventually it’s no longer challenging to solve that particular puzzle and suddenly that toy is forgotten for good (or until his little sister picks up a piece). He moves onto the next challenge and that’s his day with the exception of naps and meal time.

To me, right there I see two fundamental pieces of what keeps us coming back to a good video game. One factor is some sort of pattern recognition mechanic and the other is a challenge. When I started looking at the video games I enjoyed as a kid and that I enjoyed now they all have, at their core, some sort of pattern recognition element and they all had increasing levels of difficulty. I’d play until I either mastered the game and it became too easy or until the difficulty became such that I grew frustrated and no longer found the experience entertaining. I see the same behaviours in the way my toddler plays. It’s fun unless the task is too difficult, and it’s fun until the task becomes too easy.

When I was a kid I remember spending quite a bit of time on Space Ace, among others games at my local arcade. Space Ace was a cartoon, laser disk based game along the lines of Dragon Slayer. A series of events would play out on the screen and a visual cue would signal the move to make with the timing becoming more challenging as the game progressed. Mastering a game like this in a time before strategy guides and the internet took trial and error, a good memory and a pocketful of quarters and I loved that game. That was, until I beat it. Shortly after I memorized the patterns, I moved onto the next game only occasionally popping in a quarter to feel important when throngs of kids who would gather when they’d see “that kid who can beat Space Ace” start a new game.

Whether it’s timing involved in arcade fighting games or if it’s strategy in an on-line shooter, when you break it down video games are all about recognizing patterns and using them within the confines of the game’s rules.  It’s an understanding of game development that in retrospect I feel I poorly implemented in the first game my team released in our efforts to appeal to a wider audience. Each level of the game was unique, but the challenge of the game, the pattern required to win didn’t vary enough and looking back at the testing, our players enjoyed the game but the question we didn’t ask was “for how long will they enjoy it?” It’s a choice we made in the interest of appealing to a broader base, but I think this choice didn’t do us any favours and by the time we realized this and updated the title with different ways to play our window of opportunity had already closed. It’s something that seems so basic a notion in hindsight but hopefully by bringing this up I can encourage other new developers to take a look at their product differently.

Playing games with a two and a half year old also helped me rethink control schemes as well. My son loves to pick up a controller and ask “Sack-boy, Daddy?” but a Playstation 3 controller and LittleBigPlanet is a bit beyond him currently. However, I sat him down with Angry Birds – Star Wars and within seconds he was flinging birds at piggies and loving it. The same goes playing “Digit Chase” on the Playstation Vita, a quick demo that has users tap numbers on the screen in sequence. There’s something undeniably intuitive about touch screen input as illustrated by how quickly children take to them, but often mobile developers try to shoehorn controller type controls into their mobile games. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with modern game controllers, but controls needs to be intuitive. That doesn’t mean they have to be toddler approved simple, I just think the basic controls should be straightforward. This was a lesson we learned developing our first game and reaffirmed by watching my son play. Just because you have variety of ways to control your game doesn’t mean you should just throw everything in because you can. It’s tempting to do. I know because I did it.

I can thank the time I spend playing with my little guy for bringing me back to the basics and helping understand why we find games fun. It’s not about simplifying the games themselves, but it’s recognizing that under everything we’re always searching for patterns and looking to challenge ourselves, because that’s how we learn. It’s not about making controls dead simple, but it couldn’t hurt to imagine a scenario where your game is being played by a gamer who’s never gamed before. Will your controls confuse or will they help the player become comfortable before becoming challenging? It’s easy to lose focus on basic game-play mechanics underneath everything else that makes up modern gaming, especially for experienced gamers. Watching children play and learn helped me realize this and I look forward to gaming with both my kids for years to come, and I look forward to what they have to teach me.

Now as an innocent kid sneaking a peek at the latest review scores from a magazine at a rural pharmacy, it never occurred to me that companies could be paid for these review scores. Certainly, over the years and with the rise of the internet there’s been much more talk of review sites and publications taking money in exchange for their reviews. It’s hard not to look at a review score on a site that’s pretty much one giant advertisement for this game or another and wonder how much money has exchanged hands prior to the review being written, and how could that not on some level influence the review in question. The internet seems to be in general agreement. Accepting money from game makers for reviews could potentially compromise that review and is, to put it bluntly, a bad thing. Then there’s app review sites.

After launching our first mobile game, Itzy3d, on Android and Iphone in Jan this year, I next set about the daunting task of trying to get our little game noticed. I wrote up a press release, sent this to various PR sites and then set about contacting as many review sites as I could find in the hopes that someone would have a look at our game and, for better or worse, inform their readers of their opinion of the title while the rest of our team started work on our next title. Over 200 emails went out with a short blurb about who we were, what our game was about, a few screen shots and our desire to have our game reviewed.

Almost immediately I started receiving replies from sites, and the average reply would go something like this. “We have a lot of submissions and may not get a chance to review your game. Send us money and we’ll be able to do something for you.”

Now at first I was dead set against this. Paying for reviews? The entire notion just struck me as wrong. I thought reviewers had a lot of testicular fortitude to even suggest I spend money on their opinions. But then more emails came, with more offers for “expedited review services” for a fee. Some offered up advertising as well as a review to add value, but when questioned about click rates, monthly visits and the like, the information I would require in order to make an informed decision on where to spend my advertising dollars was almost never forthcoming. Just send us money. At some point I realized that this wasn’t just a few sites looking to cash in on desperate app developers, asking for money in exchange for app reviews seemed to be the norm. After waiting for weeks for someone, anyone to review our title, reluctantly I opened my wallet and paid for a few reviews. Obviously, I had to pay if I wanted to play their game. The reviews from users on the Apple and Android app store had been very positive, but what we were hoping for was a detailed, well thought out review that could give us some feedback and maybe boost our visibility. I paid for 4 reviews. Two were helpful, one was ok, one just took our blurb from the press release, put it up on their site and slapped 3 stars on it. Of the $100 out of my own pocket spent for reviews, the 200+ initial emails sent out, the follow-up emails and the odd correspondence between myself and review sites, we ended up with 6 reviews, 7 if you count the site that simply slapped a score on our press release.

I resigned myself to the new fact that app sites generally existed to fleece ignorant indies out of their money and given my experience vowed that I would not waste my hard-earned dollars on review sites ever again. Last month, I happened across AppyNation’s: Hall of Infamy. It was a list of sites that engaged in the practice of accepting money in exchange for reviews and encouraged developers to add to the list as they came across sites doing the same. All I could think was, “But don’t most app review sites do this?” Certainly based on my experience with the hundreds I contacted, sites taking money for reviews seemed rather the rule than the exception. Pay or we’ll ignore you completely.

App review sites. Like headcrabs for your wallet!

In a months time (fingers crossed) when we’re ready to launch our next title, Vex Blocks, I’ll still put out a press release, I’ll still attempt to raise awareness of our title anyway I can but you can be sure I’m not about to hold my nose and shell out for any more “expedited” reviews ever again. It didn’t improve my game’s visibility, it didn’t push more downloads – it was simply a waste of money. It shouldn’t be the norm for review sites to ask for money for their reviews. As the indie development community grows, these sites will continue their parasitic ways by preying off developers desperate enough to throw what limited funds they have away in the hopes of giving their game a better chance of success. If a site is reputable and getting decent traffic in the first place, they don’t need your money from reviews. I was fooled by thinking this was the norm simply by the sheer amount of sites doing this. Don’t prove another willing host as I did.

…almost…there…

I swear I can see the finish line up ahead.  If you squint, you can just make it out.  It’s there, I assure you.  As we approach the launch of our second mobile title, Vex Blocks, I can’t help but get excited at the prospect of putting our finished product in front of people.  Now I know…I know – there’s still a never-ending amount of work to be done from testing to marketing, to more testing, continued marketing, then the tweaking followed by testing, then some testing…but my point is we’re nearing that final stage before our launch.  There’s light at the end of the tunnel and I swear the faintest scent of cinnamon buns.  The burndown chart and the task list is at the point where you can at least realistically imagine the launch day, even if it’s still a few weeks away, instead of just dreaming about it happening at some point in the future like flying cars or super-intelligent, faithful monkey servants.  It feels good, like an imaged back rub from said imaginary monkey servants.

Our first title, Itzy3d was and still is well received by gamers even if it didn’t exactly race up the charts.  However, our inexperience developing games led to a bit of a rollercoaster ride creating the title.  Initial performance hurdles, an over complicated control scheme and simply learning the pitfalls of Unity3d/IOS/Android development made the experience of working on Itzy3d a rocky one.  Still, despite it’s shortcomings I can to this day sit back, fire it up and lose myself in the game and take pride in our first outing as an indie game developer.

Vex Blocks’ development wasn’t nearly as up and down and even though I still thoroughly enjoyed working on Itzy3d I find I’ve had much more fun working on our upcoming action/puzzler.  If I’m going to lock myself in my office and gamble mine and my family’s future working on videogames full time, at least I know I’m doing it with a smile on my face.  The anxiety filled nights haven’t entirely gone away, but I’m far more confident in what we can accomplish this time out, and there’s a few reasons for that.

The first is a matter of scope.  When we started Itzy3d we had no idea how long tasks would take us to complete and as such, creating Itzy the spider’s world became a much more ambitious project than we had anticipated.  When planning Vex Blocks we were able to estimate what we could accomplish in our given time frame with far more accuracy than we had with Itzy3d.  We started with a simpler concept so the development schedule didn’t become like Crawmerax the Invincible….lobster-like, purple, one-eyed and nearly impossible to beat at our current skill level.  Feeling that our goals were attainable within our time frame from the start did wonders for the ole confidence level.

The second major boost to all around enjoyment levels on Vex was having the artwork more or less completed when we started.  Vex Blocks was a concept I dreamt up a couple of years ago and it was initially given to a group of students consisting of three artists and two programmers from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology to build a prototype for us while providing them with a final project for graduation.  Having a willing group of artists working under my instruction provided us the opportunity to start with a completed list of art assets when the prototype was eventually turned back over to our team.  In contrast, Itzy’s artwork hit a wall when our main artist found himself unable to contribute the time necessary to create the assets required for 3 of our 11 huge levels.  It also left us with zero assets for our menus and ultimate left us with menus that looked like they had been designed by programmers.  Starting the project with almost every art asset we could conceive was a huge load off my mind as I knew my Maya and Photoshop skills would not be tested as rigorously as I scrambled to fill in the blanks with my limited artistic ability.

And the biggest difference this time out was experience with Unity3d.  We know what works, what doesn’t, where our graphical ceiling is for mobile, how to implement sounds more efficiently, how to create an asset pool, the GUI bottlenecks, the performance tweaks, the ongoing mobile testing during development to make sure our mobile performance is where it should be and isn’t biting us in the ass, lighting, texturing, shaders…you name it.  Having the ability to predict where we may run into problems and addressing those issues before they became serious instead of charging full ahead into the unknown is a much more relaxed way to develop a game in my opinion.  Who knew?

So this time out it’s all about making the game fun, challenging and having a blast doing it.  As our cycle on this game nears it’s end I can’t wait to see how the game will do in testing and it’s eventual launch.  The thought of others enjoying our work as much as we enjoy building and playing ourselves is all the reward we need.  Well…and monetary compensation.  All the reward we need is seeing others enjoying our work and money.  That sounds about right.

What choice did we have?

When we started Itzy Interactive a little over a year ago, we were already too late. Developers has already undercut each other’s prices on the app store to the point where all games were already pretty much in the $1-2 dollar range, and the freemium pricing model of giving away a game for free and earning revenue from in-app purchases had already taken root. It was a bit like pulling up to the starting line after the race had started and you’re informed that everyone has already piled up in a spectacular crash in the middle of the racetrack but you go ahead anyway. There we were, all shiny and new, ready to go and determined to make our mark and hopefully pay our bills in the process. When we launched Itzy3d we knew right from the start that freemium was the direction we would go with this and future releases. Our second title, Vex Blocks, is also planned as a freemium release.  The reasons just made sense to us and still do.

As a small indie team our resources are limited. When it comes to marketing our products we simply don’t have a lot of options available to us due to our financial constraints. We’ve spoken to other developers who have been successful in the mobile marketplace and a few of them maintain that paying for ads simply doesn’t pay. Certainly the response we’ve seen to the ads we ran in an attempt to test the waters back this up. The increased visibility and downloads we received when running our mobile ad campaigns simply did not pay for the money spent on those ads. Social marketing through our Facebook, Twitter and blogging efforts probably put just as many eyes on our products and didn’t cost us anything but our time.

So that leaves really only two other factors that we have any control over as indie developers: the game we’re creating and the price point we choose for that game. Now game quality is an interesting topic. We’re not so arrogant as to assume our games will be of the same calibre as games made by more experienced teams, or made by larger teams with millions at their disposal. So we endeavour to make the best games we can possibly make given our talents and the resources available to us and that’s all that can be expected of us.

We’re not operating under any illusion that we’ll create the next runaway hit. Something that always strikes me about people I speak with in the industry and developer interviews I see from successful indies is that they never know if what they’ve created is any good. There’s always that nervousness as they release their product into the wild when you simply don’t know how you’ll be received. You’d like to think that you’ve made a game people will enjoy, that you’ve made something that stands out but what you think and what the reviewers, other developers and ultimately gamers think can be completely different. Opinion is opinion. The notion that if you simply create an excellent title people will flock to it is contingent on something you have no control over.  People’s opinions of what constitutes a great game. So you do what you can.  You set out and make the game you want to make and you make it to the best of your abilities. Then you learn from your mistakes and hopefully don’t go broke in the process.

So the only option left to us, the only other thing we can control is the price, and against the hundreds of thousands of other games out there – what chance do our little, independently made games stand against juggernauts that are already charging nothing right out of the gate? Freemium isn’t the only option for mobile developers, but realistically in today’s marketplace – what choice do indies really have? Convert or die. The notion that your games are super special and people will recognize this fact and line up to throw money at you may work in rare instances where the planets align just so but that’s like putting a video of yourself singing up on youtube in the hopes of being discovered.  Sure it happens, but so do lottery wins.  For us it makes more sense to level the playing field as much as possible to maximize our chances of success. That’s why we went freemium. There’s simply too many free games available in today’s mobile marketplace to risk alienating users by asking the price of a cup of coffee for our hard work. At least, not right off the bat.

Making the decision to go freemium doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve sold your soul to Old Scratch either. Freemium games receive a lot of grief from “core” gamers for some very good reasons. There are companies out there that use freemium and combined with habit forming hooks they keep gamers addicted to apps that more than a few gamers would turn their noses up at. There are companies that try to obscure the actual price of in-app purchases. Other companies offer multiplayer games with the option to purchase powerups to gain an advantage over other players. All the above give the freemium model, in my opinion, a bit of a bad reputation but it doesn’t have to be this way.

I prefer to approach freemium games the same way people approached shareware. “Here’s the game to try and if you like the game, please support us by purchasing some of our other options.” No tricks.  Nothing hidden.  If you like it, please support us.  I view the the freemium pricing structure no differently than offering a demo version, but the key to me (and to my conscience) is to not waste gamer’s time with a mere taste but to make it worth their while.  There are a lot of products vying for gamers attention and I always keep that in the back of my mind to make sure our products are offering up enough gameplay that I would be satisfied, as a gamer, with the amount of play I’ve received.  Then, hopefully, gamers will like what they see and respond by opening their wallets.

For the love of god, put on some clothes

You wouldn’t walk into your office dressed in sweats and a t-shirt and even if this was acceptable, you probably still shouldn’t do it. There’s been a few days when I’ve rolled out of bed and stumbled into my office, but I’m never as productive as I am when awake, showered, had a good breakfast and dressed for work.  I’m not talking about dressing up, I’m mainly talking about things like…putting on pants.  It may sound a bit clichéd but feeling good about yourself makes you more productive and until I’ve cleaned myself up and dressed first thing in the morning I just don’t feel like I’m ready somehow. If you’re content to work in your tighty whities all day with the windows open and your retired neighbours aghast, maybe just try cleaning up one day, spraying on some Axe body spray and getting dressed to see how you feel in comparison.

Regular hours

Set yourself regular work hours. The nice thing about working from home is you can usually be flexible with your working hours but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still have set hours. I found that having a schedule was valuable for maintaining my sanity and improving my productivity. For me, it’s like a switch flips on in my head. “Time for business!” If for some reason I find myself off my schedule it’s hard for me to get into my work groove when I do sit down at my desk. I’m sure there’s some behavioural scientist somewhere that can back me up on this one, but I’ve really found keeping a regular, scheduled work day improves the amount I can accomplish compared to days when I just “wing it.”
It’s also nice to have that end time to look forward to as well, and having a family it’s good to have that moment when “Daddy is available for play now!” You’re not a machine and you can’t work all the time. There needs to be a point where you can stop and focus on yourself, your friends and your family. Also, take breaks and take a scheduled lunch. I’m terrible when it comes to this and by the time my day is done my brain feels fuzzy. Taking a break keeps me from burning out, stressing out and helps me gain my bearings.

Office Rules

If you’re working from home, it’s also a good idea that you lay down some ground rules for the other occupants of your home. It’s hard to get anything done when you’re being interrupted by pets, parents, spouse, children, etc. My wife is currently at home on maternity leave and it’s nice to be available if she needs assistance with the new baby or our 2 year old son but I need time to do my work. You wouldn’t be able to work a regular office job with a toddler on your lap, yelling for Elmo videos so it’s understandable that there needs to be generally uninterrupted work time. So far having my family at home has worked out pretty well, with even our headstrong 2 year old grasping the concept that when Daddy’s office door is closed he’s working and he’ll be able to play later. My son even says “Bye!” to me now and waves when I’m going into the office to start my work day.

Separate work environment and minimize distractions

It’s also useful to have a designated work space. A “zone of work” that you can enter and exit. For myself, I’m lucky enough to have an office in my home but even if you don’t it’s not a bad idea to create a separate space that’s specifically setup for work. Even though it should go without saying, make an effort to decrease distractions. If you’re a PC gamer and you don’t have the willpower to not fire WOW up every couple of hours then perhaps you need a work machine that doesn’t have any games installed, or create a unique login that doesn’t have access to programs you may find distracting. I find it useful for my PC to be work only while receiving my gaming fix on the consoles setup in our den. It’s helpful for me to have that separation.

Don’t limit human interactions

After working in a busy office, this is something that I didn’t think would be an issue but it was. I found the transition from always being in communication with others to working primarily by myself to be a bit jarring. By the end of the work week I found I craved human interaction; that I’d even go a little squirrely without it. As I mentioned in previous blogs, regularly scheduled meetings with my team helps to break up the monotony of this lone programmer’s existence while keeping the team on task. It can never hurt to keep up communications with your team, even going so far as to have a voice chat session running in the background while working occasionally. This may hinder productivity in the short term, but in the long run I find it helps keep me from experiencing cabin fever. A change of venue from time to time couldn’t hurt either. If you can, take a laptop down to your local cafe and get some work done. Again, in the long run this will be beneficial to your working well being. At least it was for me.

These methods have all helped me over the past year and a half I’ve been working from home. Hopefully you find some of these useful as well. Cheers!

Email communication only can sometimes lead to unintended consequences

Itzy Interactive is, at its core, three primary individuals working from their home offices.  We’ve found it useful, and cost effective, to contract out specific work around the world but the main group consists of three.  Myself, the ex-financial guy, Will, my brother-in-law and friend of almost 20 years who’s been programming the last 15 years and Cole, a 20 something programmer and designer I met and worked with while re-training for a career outside of the brokerage industry after losing my job with an economy in free fall.  You wouldn’t think that managing a three person team would present many problems, but without the financing for a centralised studio, the challenges presented managing a team working from their homes using email as their primary communication became apparent quite quickly.

Managing our projects this way produced unique problems.  During development of our first mobile title, Itzy3d, the main issue was one of communication.  From the start we were using Mercurial for our version control while we managed our project using Acunote as our project management software.  This enabled us to keep track of our task lists while letting each member know what the other members of the team were currently working on in hopes that we didn’t trip over each other or duplicate work.  The thought was that by using version control and tracking/reporting our progress would keep everyone moving forward together.

The problems we ran into were decidedly human problems.  They were issues of miscommunication that quickly lead to bruised egos.  As all of us can attest to, email is a limited means of communication and the longer we went without speaking to each other, the more issues would simmer.  We quickly came to find that using only email was detrimental to the well-being of the team.  Often recommendations were taken as criticism, omissions made team members feel like their comments were being ignored and issues that seemed straight forward to one team member would be misinterpreted by another.  Added into the mix, the delay between emails due to work load or different working hours often left comments to fester in the minds of team members to the point where they would become blown out of proportion by the time clarifying emails arrived.  As much as we’d like to think we were all professional enough to address these types of issues rationally, the reality was steps needed to be taken to mitigate problems before they grew into more than they needed to be.

Luckily we were always able to address the challenges as they arose, usually by initiating a group voice chat.  This helped us maintain our team dynamic but we certainly couldn’t spend an hour each day chatting about what we were currently working on to make sure everyone was apprised to limit confusion.  There had to be some sort of balance.  While working on Itzy3d we decided that to make sure everyone was moving forward in the same direction we would endeavor to meet, face to face at least every month and a half.  These meetings were always informal and we would alternate the location.  What we found was the meetings enabled us to not only make sure that we were all on the same page on the project, but they also served as a useful break from the monotony of the solitary coding existence we had condemned ourselves to during our regular working week while helping us become more at ease with each other.  In the same room we could work on our “common ground.”

Just a regular, weekly scrum

Now as we’ve recognized the benefits of these types of face to face meetings, we’ve taken steps to have more regular meetings without taking the day off required to meet each other physically.  Starting with the development of our new title, Vex Blocks, we’ve mandated a regularly scheduled, weekly meeting via webcam using Google Hangouts.  During these scrum meetings, despite continuing to track our tasks and progress using Jira for our project management software, we still take the time to recap our weekly progress and outline what we plan on working on in the coming week.  Then we take time for a quick brain storming session to share ideas we had during the week.  While many may balk at the thought of using video in these chats due to an aversion to video in general, we’ve found team members are more likely to pay attention to what’s being said when you can see that everyone is paying attention.

So far this seems to have completely eliminated the type of conflicts we experienced during the development of Itzy3d.  We still try to have our physical meetings due to the much needed break it affords, but the weekly scrum meetings have proven invaluable in keeping everyone on track while helping build upon our existing team dynamic.

Gaming culture has a problem and that problem has a lot to do with gamers themselves.  To be clear, I’m not talking about all gamers but rather a subset of gamers whose antisocial behaviour and habits drive people away from gaming.  Analysts at Piper Jaffray recently conducted a survey that found nearly 66% of high school students surveyed across the US claimed they were losing interest in traditional videogames with slightly over 66% stating they were interested in social, mobile games which was an increase from 34% who answered the same question the year prior.  Gaming as we know it is changing for a variety of reasons and one of those reasons is gamers have chosen to turn on each other as well as the people who make the videogames they play.  While gaming culture tries to evolve and leave the primordial seas, certain gamers are busy running along the shore with sharpened sticks trying to force us all back in.

The problem lies with the internet and the anonymity it affords its users.  This effect certainly isn’t limited to just gaming circles but as gamers tend to be a largely wired group of individuals the impact is pronounced.  Gaming has always had a social side but over the decades that’s changed, and you could certainly argue, not for the better.  Back in the 80’s and 90’s, gamers would flock to arcades or journey to friend’s houses to partake in the hottest, latest releases.  To illustrate how it’s changed, imagine four friends over for an afternoon session of GoldenEye sitting in their family den.  Now imagine one of those children lets loose with a barrage of profanity laced, racist, homophobic rants aimed at his fellow gamers.  Or imagine someone’s little sister is also invited to play and subjected to a stream of masturbation and rape jokes.  There’s a very good chance that the child would simply never be invited back for another GoldenEye marathon.  There’s also a chance that little Jimmy’s mother, having overheard the obscene rant would never allow that child in her house ever again and would make a quick phone call to inform the offending child’s parents of their unacceptable behaviour.

This type of antisocial behaviour infects network gaming and social interactions across the internet and therein lies the difference between gaming culture now and gaming culture then.  There are few, if any, social repercussions in gaming today and the impact of these behaviours eats at the fun factor of gaming for a large number of gamers, children and adult alike.  It doesn’t matter if you’re looking to game socially on your console or if you’re looking to partake in a general gaming discussion on the internet, odds are your experience will be sullied by another gamer hiding behind their internet pseudonym.

Researchers refer to this as “toxic disinhibition”.  The anonymity the internet and online gaming networks offers often results in the complete abandonment of social restrictions that would generally be present in face to face interactions such as in the days when we gamed locally with other people in the room.  The result of this “trolling” is we see more and more gamers being turned off of gaming, or seeing their enjoyment of games lessened, thus inhibiting the growth of gaming culture.  The impact of this online disinhibition also affects developers who can find themselves loathe to engage their own fan base for fear of fanboy backlash through internet flaming.

Recently, gamers made headlines for their disproportionate backlash against Mass Effect 3 developer Bioware.  The actions of certain gamers painted all gamers as whiney, entitled children prone to screaming fits when denied their pacifier.  Bioware found itself facing a FTC complaint while its writers and staff were targets of hate campaigns and death threats as some found the end of their latest game offering to be unsatisfactory.  Other gamers and non-gamers alike shook their collective heads in disbelief.  Blizzard also suffered a ridiculous backlash from gamers when screenshots of their now released Diablo 3 title were deemed “too bright” by some prior to the game’s launch, prompting Blizzard to mock the users by releasing screenshots containing unicorns shooting rainbows from their posteriors.  While Blizzard used the experience to have a bit of fun, the example illustrates a growing trend among gamers to instantaneously and viciously attack developers and other gamers alike for even perceived slights and as a whole, the gaming community becomes a less inviting place.

The online disinhibition effect certainly isn’t limited to gaming forums either as the development community itself isn’t immune from unprofessional behaviour.  I’ve seen my own personal blog postings regarding my development experiences targeted by other developers leveling harsh and often unfair criticisms.  For example, I’ve had a developer lambast the simply inclusion of our company logo on a splash page because “no one cares about your company”.  I’ve even had a local developer I didn’t know and had never met criticize my company online for the slight of not consulting with their group prior to launching our first game.  This type of challenging behaviour is far more likely to be witnessed online than in face to face interactions or official business communication and unfortunately it is becoming more prevalent.

They say in general you need a thick skin to blog but backlash I received from a recent blog post made me question the value of blogging my own experiences as a developer.  I posted a personal blog listing some of the complete, all in one game engines available that may be of interest to independent developers.  While researching game engines for my company I would have found such a blog useful as I looked for a game engine that offered features I required, such as Android and iOS porting and clearly the blog was not meant as an in depth review piece.  As I had not the opportunity to try each engine I listed, I made sure to note that where I was unfamiliar with the engine I was simply relaying information and opinions from various reviews I had come across and I provided links to each product so users could conduct further research.  Rather than promote a thoughtful discussion on the merits of various game engines as I had intended or to provide a starting point for further research, the resulting comments were almost all attacks against myself personally and my attempt to inform other indie developers.

The comments included people calling me a liar, posters comparing my blog to vulgar activities, writers incensed that I didn’t whole heartedly endorse their particular favorite engine.  I even read claims that I was intentionally trying to harm product reputations despite the fact I noted these opinions were sometimes not even mine but were simply being passed along when I lacked particular knowledge of the product being discussed.  I was frankly shocked by the lack of decorum I witnessed in response to a personal blog intended to simply inform and facilitate further research, and if other developers hadn’t contacted me directly to offer their support (with one commenting he would have done it publicly if not afraid of being “flamed” himself) I most likely would have never written another blog regarding my game development experiences.  This general lack of professionalism in a workplace environment would never be tolerated.  Indeed, when gamers and developers are afraid to share ideas due to fear of reprisal it’s time to take a hard look at the current situation and what repercussions this could have to our industry as a whole.  As a community, this type of behaviour should not be allowed to propagate.  I’ve been subjected to all manner of hate mail and threats from casual gamers and stalking fanboys alike over the years writing opinion pieces regarding the games industry, however the lack of professionalism I’ve witnessed since becoming a developer myself truly surprised me.

Gaming culture is suffering due to experiences like this, due to experiences like those Bioware recently endured and due to the ongoing profane, racist and homophobic behaviour tolerated every day in online gaming matches and in internet gaming forums.  The anonymity of the internet mixed with complacency among gamers and developers has led to this situation and the associated cyberbullying that goes along with it but as the genie is out of the bottle with regards to the internet, there is little that we can do to curb its impact.  The removal of anonymity in online gaming by the companies that operate these networks could potentially result in fewer incidents as people are less inclined to act in socially unacceptable manners when their real names and locations are attached to their actions, however this system would still rely on reporting tools that already exist are underutilized by the majority of gamers.  Most prefer to simply ignore the problem, and this does nothing to stem the rise of anti-social behaviour in the gaming community.

As more teens are turning towards social gaming where they can exercise more direct control over their social interactions through use of things like Facebook friend lists, as more potential gamers are turned off by what they see of gamers in the news and more core gamers turn away from online gaming and game forums based on the sliding social environment, today’s gaming culture must change or it will face decline.  We’re already seeing traditional game sales slide as gamers look elsewhere and a shift towards mobile games is evident.  Partial blame falls on gamers themselves for creating and tolerating an increasingly toxic game culture that runs contrary to the social spirit that videogames created for many of us while gaming in the 80’s and 90’s, and even some developers themselves are letting professionalism standards slump in their online communications which itself is the start of a slippery slope.  We can never go back to the way gaming was, but we can shape the future of gaming culture for the better by being conscious of where it went wrong and why.

UDK

http://udk.com/

Most are familiar with the Unreal Development Kit.  It’s a proven engine that’s been used in a tonne of AAA titles, but how does it fare for indie developers?  The first thing you’ll notice with UDK is the learning curve.  It’s steep.  Developers I’ve spoken to have all expressed this same sentiment, and my own experiences with UDK left me feeling that UDK seemed needlessly complicated.  I had taken a few courses using the UDK in the past and while practice makes perfect, even when I became more familiar with UDK I found I simply didn’t like using it compared to other alternatives.  The second strike is the need to learn Unreal Script.  It’s a fairly straight forward language in my opinion however just that you need be confined to Unreal Script can take away from valuable development time when you’re starting off.

UDK is capable of delivering high quality graphics out of the box but it seems geared towards First Person Shooters (much like CryEngine).  I’ve heard some complain about the difficulties involved in trying to bend UDK to other genres.  FPS games developed with UDK also have a tendency to end up feeling like Unreal Tournament clones.  UDK now supports iOS development in addition to Windows but don’t expect to port your projects over to anything else.

UDK is free for non-commercial use.  Plan on selling your game and you’ll need to fork over $100 with no royalties to worry about until $50,000.  After that, expect to pay a 25% royalty, which when you consider IOS development and the 30% Apple takes, can certainly add up.  UDK is a bit of a sacred cow for some in the development community, but for indie developers it’s big, unwieldy and just limited in supported platforms.  If you’re looking to add your shooter to a saturated shooter market, UDK may work for you but I wouldn’t recommend for smaller teams of developers.

Notable title:  The Ball

Shiva3D

First, I’d like to say I understand some fan disappointment.  Without going into spoiler territory, Mass Effect has always been about choices and the choices the player makes throughout the game brings with it a very personal connection to the characters and events as they play out.  It’s the interactive nature of our media that differentiates the consumer experience of videogames from that of other media such as movies or television.  Bioware has never been shy about discussing and promoting the impact of the moral choices in their games, however those familiar with the series know that when it came to player decisions versus main plot points, plot points won out every time.  This should not have surprised anyone when it came down to the series conclusion.  Criticisms regarding plot holes and the lack of a satisfying ending may be warranted, but the fan reaction seems completely out of proportion.  We’ve all been disappointed by the ending of something or another and the more complicated a plot, the harder it is to wrap everything up into a neat little package.  This may come as a shock to some fans but you can’t always get what you want.

Good stories have a beginning, middle and end.  Not “ends.”  I feel it is unrealistic to expect writers to create a strong, complex plot and then be expected to create multiple, satisfying endings.  I’m happy with one satisfying ending but many would argue that Mass Effect didn’t even give players that.  Many also think the ending was just fine.  I feel the gamers being the most vocal need to ask themselves, what would actually make you happy?  If there was an update tomorrow and when you replayed the game the ending was completely different, would that erase the memory of the original conclusion you received and leave you satisfied?   If the new endings still didn’t satisfy a certain amount of fans would you demand they do it again?  What are the rules on how many fans need to be vocally dissatisfied with an ending before you feel a company should be forced to change their artistic vision for a game?  What consideration is given, if any, to those happy with the current ending and what gives you the right to change the experience for those gamers?

You can’t please everyone all the time.  Whenever anything becomes popular, there will always be a subset of fans that find a reason to hate simply because they can.  There is no pleasing them.  It doesn’t matter if it’s videogames, music, movies or television you’ll always have a vocal minority that will hate what you’ve created just for the sake of hating, especially if something becomes popular.  We saw fans turn on Rockstar after their masterpiece Grand Theft Auto 4 was released; we’ve seen a backlash against Infinity Ward despite consistently shipping an excellent product.  We’re seeing it now with Bioware.  To cave into these vocal fanatics sets a dangerous precedent and takes creative control away from the artists to see their creative visions realized.  I firmly hope Bioware doesn’t touch the ending.  All it does is teach the entitled among us that if they scream and cry long enough and loud enough, they can get their way and as a parent I can attest, that’s a recipe for future disaster.  Give in and it will never end.   Bioware needs to stand by their work and continue their strong stand against those targeting their staff directly.  If gamers don’t like it, let them vote with their wallets.

Fans have often influenced their favorite series and if a writer wishes to remain popular it is important to listen to fans to an extent, but ultimate creative control needs to reside with creators.  Sherlock Holmes appeared to be famously killed off only to be resurrected at a later point due to fan demands.  Spock met his heroic end in Star Trek 2, only to be brought kicking and screaming back from the dead in the terrible, terrible Star Trek 3 but some Mass Effect fans are asking for a complete do-over of the ending.  Bioware has commented that they were willing to possibly have loose ends addressed in upcoming DLC (and I support this move as should fans) but imagine Star Trek 2 edited so Spock makes it out alive and pops out of his coffin at the end to yell  “Hiyoooo!” because it would be more pleasing.  Expecting Bioware to simply rewrite their ending is carpet chewing mad and Bioware shouldn’t even entertain the idea.  Already we see Hollywood taking fewer and fewer risks with story-telling trying to cater to everyone.  The end result is often bland and generic.  This happens to an extent currently in the games industry with developers and publishers erring on the side of caution in an attempt to protect the massive investment associated with developing big titles.  Gamers always rally against this effect but here the message Mass Effect gamers are sending resoundingly to the game industry is “Don’t take risks and don’t upset us or we’ll turn on you in a heartbeat.”

I have your new ending to Mass Effect 3 right here.

I’ve heard others draw parallels with Stephen King’s Misery where a crazed fan holds a writer captive and submits him to numerous tortures because she’s unhappy with his recent book’s ending.  She forces him to write a follow-up novel bringing the main character back to life to continue the story.  I don’t think this is a fair comparison.  Even in her madness, Annie Wilkes never expected the author to rewrite history and change the ending as some Mass Effect fans are demanding.   For the good of games as a truly creative medium, this movement needs to be squashed.  #ChangeTheEnding

Failure to Launch

Launch is vital for indie developers and here you can be your own worst enemy.  If you’re trying to make as big a splash as possible on the Apple marketplace, you need to hit the ground running and that means making sure your game is ready.  Test, test and test some more.  Making a minor change?  Play through the game again.  If you fail to build momentum off your launch, expect your app to become invisible shortly after.  It’s possible to pick it up from that point but it puts you at a serious disadvantage.  You need to have all your ducks in a row and hit your launch with everything you have.  You can’t do that if your game isn’t ready.

In January, when we launched Itzy3D.  Our game was running fine and we launched on the Android Marketplace while waiting for approval on the App store.  While we waited we received useful feedback from our Android users and, as the Apple binary was pending, we made a few modifications (this will also set you back in Apple’s queue.  Beware).  When our game finally launched on the App store, we noticed that a seemingly minor change had borked gameplay in every level but the tutorial.  So, no problem, right?  Just fix, update and move on.  Not so fast.  By the time our updated version was approved by Apple, 3 weeks had passed with a broken version of our game sitting on the App Store.  When the game was fixed, our visibility on the app store was next to zero.  With no momentum from the initial launch, there was no chance for our game to rank in any of Apple’s charts.  Test, test, test.  Make sure you’re ready.

Then, there’s the icon.  Your first chance to make an impression is with your icon.  That’s the first thing people see.  You can have the best game in the world but if no one feels compelled to click on it in the first place you’re not going to make any money.  In Feb, 148apps estimates that 823 apps are being added into the Apple marketplace every day.  Will you stand out?

Marketing, reviews and money

So what can you do to get noticed?  Well, you can spend money.  Want to run some ads?  That’ll cost you.  Want to get reviewed?  Reviewers are buried under a tonne of games all wanting the same exposure that you want.  So they’ll either ignore you, get to you in a few months – or you can always pay them for expedited reviews, and it can cost you.  Want to issue a press release?  Oh, there’s free ways to go about this too, but if you want to get noticed, if you want pictures, if you want to hit more media outlets?  That’ll cost you.

If you don’t have the money for all these things you’re already at a disadvantage because you can bet the established companies have no issue with spending money on marketing their products.  They’ll be noticed with their established advertising networks and partnerships.  Most likely, you won’t.  Make sure you have a plan.  $1000 to start your marketing at launch couldn’t hurt, and expect to reinvest a percentage to keep the ball rolling after that.

The Apple Fix is In

I had a chat with successful mobile game developer awhile back and he told me something that made my stomach knot.  “If your game doesn’t take off on its own, you can always pay the Russians.  That’s about the only hope you have.  And if your game doesn’t stick after that, pull the plug.”  That’s right.  If your game doesn’t go viral, his recommendation was to spend between $30-50k for one of these chart manipulating services to artificially elevate your game to the top of the Apple charts.  Once it gets there, see if it stays and if not, move on.  Those with the money can pay others to manipulate their way to the top slots.  Can indies compete in an environment where the top slots are bought and paid for?  It’s possible, but not probable.

This rigging of the Apple charts came to light recently in the Touch Arcade forums where a developer explained that he was approached by a company offering these services.  The company pointed to 8 of the top 25 games that were at the top due to their machinations.  Apple issued a statement that these types of services were frowned upon and could, potentially result in your developer account being closed; forcing some to potentially pay new Apple fees to open a new account.  Forgive me if I sound a bit cynical but I’m sure if these companies don’t mind paying tens of thousands on chart manipulation, the fees associated with setting up a new account aren’t much of a concern.

Android hide and seek

I’ve touched on this a bit in the past but the Android Marketplace certainly isn’t the answer either.  Developers I’ve talked to have all tried to crack the Android market but even when they have a measure of success it usually pales compared to what they’re able to achieve on the Apple App store.  Many I’ve spoken to have simply given up on the Android platform or weren’t interested in the first place.  For indies, it’s even harder.  On the Apple App store you can at least expect a small window of visibility at launch due to the “What’s New” section.  The Android marketplace no longer has even a basic “What’s New” section.  This means that if your app, god forbid, doesn’t instantly sell enough to be featured in a Top category, no one will ever find you unless they’re specifically looking for you.  Of course, you could always win the “Staff Pick” lottery just as you could win the App Store’s “Featured” lottery.  Someone has to win, but for an indie looking to seriously start a small business revolving around making mobile games, hoping for a lottery win isn’t usually considered a sound business plan.

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake

There are tens of thousands of indie developers out there just like you and me.  When the new, digital frontier opened up and suddenly developers were striking gold in the App store it opened the floodgates for every would-be developer out there to take a crack at the mobile market.  Now, publications that would like to take us seriously are swarmed indies looking for exposure.  Reviewers have to simply ignore the large majority of requests due to time and resource constraints.  And worse, our customers are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of new applications being added to the application marketplaces daily.  So what can indies do to survive when the odds are clearly against us?

We can support each other and persevere.  Our first game, Itzy3D exists due to the support we’ve received from others.  Gamers and developers offering their feedback, indie developers raising awareness of our product via social media, indie Facebook groups and forums who were always there to offer support and advice based on their own hard learned lessons, and talented folks like Reuben Cornell who reached out to us via Twitter to offer his musical talents to help get us off the ground.

The worst thing an indie developer can do is isolate themselves.  United we have a better chance at improving our products and learning from the experiences of others.  Maybe your first game doesn’t take off, but you learn.  Then your second does a bit better.  Then your third does better still.  Talk to people, talk to other developers, talk to publishers.  Engage your peers and you’ll find that you don’t have to do this alone.  The odds might be against you, it can be discouraging and you need to be aware of the realities indie developers face but don’t discount the support of the indie community nor their willingness to help.  Use them and let them help you make better products.  In the end this makes all indie titles look better and together we can change the game.

“It looks like a grave yard” 

Itzy3D was always about creating from the beginning.  The central idea that the entire game was based on was that users like to create things, they like to draw, they like to make patterns, and they like to feel like they have an impact on the game world they’re part of.  In Itzy3D’s case we gave the player the opportunity to create spider webs of various shapes and sizes, enough to complete a level and advance in the game.  However our core group is made up of programmers, not artists and as we looked at other indie games like Feist, Limbo and Pixeljunk Eden, we liked the idea of a muted or shades of grey color scheme and the plan was to bring color to the levels with multicolored fireflies and spinning multicolored webs.  The webs were quickly ditched.  They looked awful.  Rainbow spider-webs seemed so good in my head, but in reality it just didn’t play out.  Add to that, our 3D, shades of grey layout made it nearly impossible to distinguish the background from the foreground which made it hard for users to figure out just where they should be making their webs.

Itzy3D Before

Itzy3D After

“Give me a way to kill those buggers”

Another idea we had from the onset was that Itzy3D should be a relaxed, casual and user-friendly title.  We didn’t want users to feel they had failed playing the game.  We wanted each play through to be fun, but relaxed fun rather than hectic fun.  One of the main enemies in the game is the wasps which zoom around each level before spotting Itzy and attacking.  Rather than take away a life or lead to a game over scenario, we simply had them knock Itzy down if he wasn’t hidden and remove a portion of his available web.  So we threw in an enemy that could never be defeated, much like the old Qix arcade game that had inspired Itzy.

We had no idea just how frustrating gamers would find this decision until our demo was released and we started to receive feedback about the inability to mount any offense whatsoever.  And it was from this feedback that Itzy received a system of power-ups based on the color of large fireflies caught.  Now, aside from other power-ups such as improved speed and web stretch, Itzy could also freeze his enemies in place, listening to them buzz furiously or actually take the fight to the enemies for a limited time much like Pac-Man powering up, but instead of eating the wasps he incapacities them temporarily with his mighty, Kung-Fu Punch!

“Monkey Factor 5”

I had the opportunity to sit down for coffee with a game industry vet and ex-Bioware employee who offered up this piece of gaming wisdom that has stuck with me.  When discussing game controls, ease of use is king.  While we thought our controls were simple enough, he asked “Yes.  But are they Monkey Factor 5 simple?”  The answer was a resounding no.  For the sake of variety we built-in a few different moves for the player to interact with Itzy’s world.  One problem, that was pointed out to us more than once was that we had two different controls for web spinning.  A swipe started Itzy spinning a web strand; a tap on Itzy anchored the web strand.  Watching people play Itzy, what we thought was straight forward always seemed to trip up players.  They would swipe to start and then swipe, expecting it to anchor the web to an object.  Or they’d swipe, then figure out the tapping, but then try tapping again when starting a new web.  There was no reason to have two separate motions for web spinning.  The two moves seemed simple enough, but they certainly weren’t “Monkey Factor 5” simple.  Now, spinning webs is easy.  You simply tap Itzy to anchor the web strands, stretch them out and anchor by tapping again.

“I’ve been playing for a minute already and I haven’t even seen your main character”

We struggled with the tutorial.  Like the controls, we thought our game was simple enough yet realized that we had a lot going on that needed to be explained somewhere.  We originally weren’t even planning on including a tutorial, but no one would read our instructions included and ultimately would play the game without any idea as to what they were meant to do.  So we included a small tutorial level that the player needed to complete to move on to the meat of the game.  We included our instructions as slides within the tutorial and we felt the need to explain absolutely everything.

We realize now, there were so many things wrong with that idea.  No one likes to read walls of text, first off.  They just skip through so we might as well have not had anything.  Secondly, it’s not a game at this point.  As a helpful developer offered, when you begin the game you’re immediately hit with walls of text.  Games should make an impact immediately and our game had you reading text before we were even introduced to the main character.

The tutorial never satisfied any of us but we just couldn’t put our fingers on what was wrong and through the feedback we revamped the tutorial to encourage the gamers to explore and learn the game mechanics through play, not through walls of text.

We’re indebted to our fans and to the developer community for their continued feedback on our games.  Time is a valuable commodity for everyone, so it means a lot to us to those of you who have offered your time to help us create better products.  Cheers!

Damn you, Roadblock!

The learning curve so far while developing our first mobile title, Itzy3D (try the game, plug plug plug), has been steep to say the least.  We knew the task in front of us wouldn’t be an easy one but to actually live through the stress and sleepless nights of it all isn’t anything I imagined it would be.  Casual games as a small business plan makes sense to us, but creating our first product offering has proven to have unique challenges none of us had considered.  It was in the interest of sharing that experience that I sat down and outlined my first two Performance Anxiety pieces.  Those dealt with the specific hurdles we encountered making Itzy3D.  Now that Itzy has been unleashed upon the world a whole new set of performance issues have cropped up.  Road blocks – from trying to get our game to market to making people aware our game is available.  It all rather makes me long for solving the performance issues related to the game’s development that I at least I felt I had some control over.  I’ve recently shared some of the marketing techniques we’re employing to get our little game noticed but now I thought I’d comment on two of the road blocks keeping me up at night.

Apple – When will this frustration end?

Yeah, I feel like throwing a sledgehammer too

Our inexperience on Apple’s procedures launching to the app store have been maddening, as has been Apple’s support.  When we finished the game in early January, it took one button press and we were live on the Android Marketplace within minutes.  With Apple, that button press turned into a yellow “Waiting for review” button.  So we waited.  And waited.  Over a week went by and during this period we made a few upgrades based on feedback we had received.  Since the app hadn’t yet been reviewed, we updated the binary file to the latest version.  That action resulted in resetting us in Apple’s queue.  The waiting started anew.  Eight days later, we received the exciting message that our app was finally being reviewed!  A few hours later, rejected.

The reason Apple gave us was we did not include our in-app purchases for review.  When we contacted Apple to clarify as we had setup all our in-app purchases and submitted them as far as we could tell, a day later they informed us that if we went to the very bottom of the details section of our app (not the actual, in-app setup section), expanded a closed menu, all the in-app purchases were listed there and we simply had to tick off the boxes and resubmit.  We followed the instructions and in another day, we were approved and Itzy3D was live on the App store after roughly two weeks since we initially submitted.  It was then we realized that a seemingly innocent change we had made to the tutorial took away a significant gameplay function in other levels.  We discovered and fixed this error within the day.  Embarrassing, but these things happen.  Surely it wouldn’t take long to have the fix submitted and approved now that the initial review of our app was complete?

It’s now over a month since we submitted our first binary and we still do not have our fixed version of the title on the Apple App store.  The wait for review again seemed about 6 business days, and again our binary was rejected as Apple claims we did not include our in-app purchases for consideration.  The difference is, this time we were submitting an update and the option did not present itself to check off the in-app purchases which have already been approved and are available for sale.  Apple has not yet responded to a single one of our requests for help.  It’s been over a week since we asked for help.

Reviews – I can’t get arrested in this town

Come on! It'll just take a second to have a look

As much as I fear what reviewers will have to say about our first title I’m also excited to finally see our work in the hands of others and hear what they have to say.  It turns out everyone has an opinion until you need them to have one.  I’ve crafted a mailing list which is still a work in progress, I’ve researched review sites and press release agencies and put together a nice little review package and a month after Itzy3D’s launch, not a single reviewer has offered their opinion.  I have had two reviewers contact me and let me know they plan on reviewing Itzy, one contact me and ask to see the iOS version when it’s ready, but of the over hundred reviewers I’ve contacted so far, we have yet to see a single review.

There is an option with many sites to pay for reviews, but given our limited budget I can’t simply throw money at sites to review our game when I don’t even know how many visitor their site see in a day or if we’ll see any impact.  Already, based on the results we experienced with our first advertising campaign I know my money would most likely be better spent on ads than reviews, but it would still be nice to hear something…anything from the review community.

I find what’s eating me up at this point is the feeling that I have so little control.  One of the reasons we went into business for ourselves was so that we could have some measure of control over our ultimate fate for good or bad, but I can’t force Apple to make our updated binary available on the app store.  I also can’t force review sites to skip over their review backlogs and rush to give our game a look.  As much as it was a challenge to overcome some of the performance issues we experienced developing Itzy3D, at least those were challenges we could meet head on.

Update Feb 14:  Apple has finally approved our update for the iOS store as of last night.  No explanation as to what went wrong or what we could do differently.  Just suddenly approved.  Try Itzy3D on your Apple devices today!  

Currently, I’m working through a marketing campaign for our first title, Itzy3D, which is available on the Android Marketplace and seems to be in some state of limbo awaiting review and approval on the Apple App store.  I thought I’d share some of the marketing I’m currently undertaking in an attempt to get our little game noticed.  Later on, I’ll follow-up with the results from our marketing endeavours and what we learned in an effort to help others of the development community who may be struggling through the same thing.

Action:  Blogging

Impact:  No idea

Everything I’ve read about marketing your indie title recommends building a following through regular blogging and so early on in Itzy3D’s development; I started to write regular blogs which I posted up on our website.  I’m sure this generated negative hits to the website, as traffic not only refused to increase, but left a hit deficit that future generations may have to contend with.  Blogging on our site obviously wasn’t the answer.  It’s like playing hide and seek when no one is looking for you.  So, I began to reach out to the blogging community and post to other blog sites and it was during this process I found #AltDevBlogADay.  So here I am.  I can’t see that it’s generated any sales for me at this point, but certainly it hasn’t hurt our exposure, and the opportunity to converse with other developers from all walks of life has been invaluable to us during the course of creating our first title.

Action:  Facebooking

Impact:  No idea

I had also read that it was smart marketing move to establish a Facebook presence.   We were able to put up an early, beta demo to gauge feedback and built a company Facebook page.  All the way through our development I posted quizzes, looked for input, kept the page updated with screenshots and art and again the result was a like hide and seek without a seeker.  We still sit at around 60 “likes” for our page which consists almost entirely of our own friends and family.

Itzy3D itself incorporates Facebook features as well, offering to share game achievements by posting cute little sayings and original artwork to the users Facebook wall to help raise awareness and bring users to our game site.  Hopefully this will prove useful in the long run but currently the results of our efforts are hard to quantify.

Action:  Twitter

Impact:  No idea

Over the past 8 months of development I had also been tweeting regularly.  I attended a talk at a developer conference last spring that taught how to use Twitter for marketing by establishing a personal presence while finding creative ways to tie in what we were doing to current trending topics.  So far this has proved a great tool for networking within the industry, but not so much generating sales.  Still, following the adventures of Drunk Hulk always brings a smile to my face.  Oh, Drunk Hulk!  What will you say next?

Action:  PR Releases

Impact:  No idea

So how do you get your game noticed?  You have to tell people, and PR releases do exactly that.  This is the phase that I’m currently the most focused on.  After researching examples of PR releases related to game launches, I wrote our PR release for Itzy’s launch and away we go!  I’m currently sending my release to as many gaming sites as I can possibly imagine in the hopes that they’ll either review our title or pass along our release to the public.  So far I have no idea how effective this has been.

Action:  Throw money at it

Impact:  Oh hey!  There we go!

Bootstrapping a project like this has been stressful, to say the least, but in for a penny, in for a pound.  Installs of our free, ad and in-game purchase supported little game were dead on arrival on the Android Marketplace, and how could it be otherwise when there’s no way for users to find our content unless they were specifically looking for it.  As an experiment, we’ve now clicked the “advertise your app” option on the Android Marketplace and through Ad-Mob, our initial $50 investment magically turned into almost 1000 installs.  The problem is, how much do you need to invest to get noticed on the Android Marketplace and make any money?  I’m sure this is exactly the reason why the “Just in” option was removed.  So in order to be noticed, developers would have little choice but to spend money to do it.

Conclusion

The task of getting our product noticed is one I can’t see ending anytime soon.  Unlike programming, there’s really no way of gauging how effective each marketing action is which is understandable, but certainly more than a little frustrating for a programmer accustomed to seeing immediate results from his hard work.  It’s certainly discouraging at this stage not being able to measure the impact of your work but the hope is it’ll all be worth it in the end.  Or at the very least, we’ll know better for next time.

The room was warm after the long day of testing and at some point the sun had gone down.  I’d turned on two lamps giving the room a drowsy glow.  Our coffees were emptied or cool to the point they were forgotten and I realized just how good a job my wife had done keeping our toddler occupied as it had been at least a couple of hours since he’d last come into the room and demanded a Youtube Elmo marathon.  After 8 months of living Itzy3D’s development we had come to that point.  There was really nothing left to do.  I suddenly felt terrified.

There was a certain comfort for me in checking my task list each morning, pulling the latest updates down from the server and proceeding to move forward with the game development.  It gave me a sense of purpose and confidence looking at that list.  These were tasks I could handle, broken up into manageable, bite sized chunks.  Finishing the game – admitting that we were ready to put our product out there meant a whole new type of work as I shifted from programming and design to marketing.  None of us had any prior experience working on game titles and the learning curve was steeper than any of us had anticipated in the beginning but we had each fallen into our own routines.  Often, we’d speculate as to when the game would be ready for launch and those deadlines would quietly pass by as if they never existed as what seemed like simple programming and design tasks revealed themselves to be much more complex, multi-headed beasts then they had appeared months prior.  Then we somehow reached the end and once again we found ourselves staring out over dark uncharted waters.  The abyss stared back at us.

“I feel like we should have a drink or something,” Cole suggested somewhat quietly.

It seemed like the thing to do and I went to the kitchen and poured three glasses of flat champagne left over from a punch we served for Christmas dinner the week before.  We clinked glasses and I don’t recall anything being said.  I swivelled in my office chair and began uploading our build to the Android Marketplace.  I remember the butterflies in my stomach as I hovered momentarily over the “Publish” button.  Then I clicked, a rather unceremonious action, and that was that.  We packed up our little Mac Mini, our tablets, our phones, finished our champagne and called it a night.

I remember after everyone had gone home sitting down with my wife after our son went down to bed and feeling the fluttering nervousness in my guts as my thoughts began to race.  What if there was some catastrophic error we overlooked?  What if phones start to spontaneously combust?  What if no one likes it?  After being laid off from a decade in the brokerage industry in 2009 and spending 2 years to retrain and switch careers the stakes have never been higher for myself and my young family.  Nothing’s certain and we’ve all sacrificed the last year for this project but none of us were turning back now.  How could we?  After this long, we’re committed.  Or maybe should be committed?

I’m proud of our accomplishment but this isn’t the launch I had envisioned.  I didn’t really have a picture in my mind of what it’d be like but when I imagined the launch of our first title the feelings I had expected to experience weren’t the anxiety storm I felt  then, or feel now.

And so the marketing stage of Itzy3D begins.  With zero budget it just comes down to us getting the word out anyway we can while attempting to entice reviewers to have a look.  While we’re doing that, work starts on our next title as do our plans for Itzy’s continued long term support.

Itzy3d is currently available for free on the Android Marketplace while the Iphone/Ipad version sits in the App store, awaiting review.  If you’d like, our first 4 levels are also available to try for free via our website.

So this is indie game development…

Ah.  One of my many, self-imposed deadlines that made almost a sighing sound as they wooshed by.  I guess that’s something to be thankful for.  As an indie, no one is breathing down our necks to meet a deadline, pounding on our desks and demanding that we make games faster, especially not our ever-understanding and loving wives.  It’s a good thing too because any progress goals we set ended up being absolutely meaningless.  The truth of the matter is, as we put the finishing touches on our first title we really had no idea how long anything was going to take us.  We thought we did, but we didn’t.

I remember not that long ago (has it really been 8 months?) sitting down with the group, putting together a task list and estimating how long each task would take.  We then threw the entire list up on Accunote as we all started tracking our progress, making sure we weren’t stepping on each other’s toes (or scripts) and away we went!  We had roughly 100 tasks to complete before we could launch the game and I was optimistically shooting for a late Aug, early Sept launch.

Now, I know what you might be thinking.  Scope creep or laziness.  We’re indies, after-all.  If we weren’t lazy, we’d be employed, so we must be lazy.  To you I say “Nay!”  We’ve been working our asses off and neither of these ended up being our particular hurdles.  As dangerous as scope creep is, we didn’t fall victim to it.  We’re now 8 months into our game’s development with 100 tasks in addition to the 100 we thought we needed to complete the game at first.  I was asked after a presentation how our team handled scope creep.  Right from the word go we had a set vision for Itzy3D, a set list of gameplay functions and add-ons and we never strayed from what we stated we would include.  I had read often to “Watch for Scope Creep”, “Scope creep, like the rhythm, is gonna get you”, “Scope creep ate my baby”.  There was no way we were about to be hindered by scope creep before we ever started.  So we knew pretty much exactly what functionality was going into the game at the start.

So why are we now 8 months into the game with none of us seeing a pay-check yet?  What happened to our late Aug, early Sept – no Oct, no..early Nov…surely to god in time for Christmas launch?  Simple.  We didn’t know how long anything would take.  Basic tasks and simple concepts while developing our game proved to be much more involved than even the experienced programmers on our team estimated originally.  My advice to other indies concerning timelines would be this:  Unless you’ve done this before, don’t expect to have any inkling into how long development is going to take.  You won’t know what challenges are going to pop up until they’re staring you down.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t set goals and targets, but when you miss them make sure you learn from that experience.

There's nothing funny about this.

I hope everyone has a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year.  Itzy Interactive will have a completed game for you shortly.  Maybe next month some time.  Probably by the end of February.  You know what…it’ll be done when it’s done.

Cheers!

Bullying hurts the gaming experience.  Full stop.  We’d like to think of gamers as a great inclusive bunch but bullying among gamers whether on gaming forums online or via gaming networks is a huge issue, especially among children.  It’s not simply a matter of switching off, as online gaming itself is socially relevant in kid’s lives – so what exactly can be done to curb this issue by gamers, parents and developers alike?

Attitudes need to change.  The biggest thing we can all help with is to create awareness of the problem.  Bullied individuals suffer from low self-esteem, depression, feelings of insecurity, anxiety and in some cases these have contributed to suicides.  As parents, know the signs.  Bullied kids often spend more time at the computer or console, trying to have their voice heard.  Are your kids evasive about internet use?  Have their habits changed?  Are they fearful or emotionally distraught after a gaming or online session?  And for the love of all things holy, know what your kids are playing and become involved.

So what can be done?  For starters, as gamers we can do something!  The biggest problem currently aside from the harassment itself is the apathy towards the situation.  You might be fine with just muting someone, but what if it’s someone you care about who faces the same harassment next, or their children, or your family?  Use the reporting tools available.  I’ve voiced this concern multiple times on multiple forums, and inevitably someone will comment “That’s what the mute button’s for.  Duh.”

If I go to my local grocery store and a staff member or random stranger follows me around flinging insults at me, I could just put in earplugs or shop elsewhere – but why should gamers who just want to play or express their opinions be the ones who are silenced or forced to move on?  Educate yourself on what you can do.  If someone is constantly harassing you online or cyber-stalking, know your rights and know what steps you can take to address the issue.  No one is anonymous on the internet.  If a site’s being used for bullying, escalate the issue.  If the site refuses to address the issue, talk to your service provider.  Service providers often have strict terms of use agreements and they have the ability to see and notify of crimes committed on other networks, including harassment.  There are steps you can take so you don’t have to be a victim.  Ignoring the issue helps no one.

As developers, we need to discuss the issue and come up with new ideas for improving the gaming experience for all players and we can help raise awareness.  Gamers tend to listen to developers.  This platform should be utilized.  We can use our websites, blogs and twitter feeds to help promote the message that no one should have to endure bullying in any form.  Gamers shouldn’t face bullying alone.  We can make a difference and the first step is to stop ignoring the problem by hitting the mute button and moving on.

Show up early – Nerves might keep you outside until the last-minute.  You might want to rehearse your speech in the washroom.  You might want to belly up to the local pub for that final shot of liquid courage.  Don’t!  Get there early and make sure you’re setup.  Nothing makes a crowd as restless as watching you sit there, fumbling with a thumb drive, waiting for the projector to heat up, organizing your notes.  Be ready to go.  In one of my recent presentations, no one knew the login for the PC I was slated to present on.  We had to wait for a runner to go find someone in the know and report back to us, and that took some time.

Practice – Run through your presentation in its entirety before.  Do it a few times and make sure you’re comfortable with your visual media and the source material.  At my first presentation, I forgot my notes sitting beside the computer at home.  Thankfully, I knew what I wanted to say without my notes having run over the presentation earlier that afternoon and was able to just wing it with my slides acting as my guide.  Which leads to my next point…

Remember to bring your notes – Seems like a no brainer, but hey!  I forgot.  In fact, why not make a checklist of everything you need?  And check your files.  Make sure you actually remembered to bring your presentation materials, and don’t forget to bring the appropriate materials.  Has anyone seen a presenter prepare to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to find the machine he’s presenting on doesn’t have PowerPoint?  They were picking bits of that guy out of the ceiling ventilation system.  Save as a PowerPoint Show, or why not bring both file versions, just in case?

Do you like the walls of text?  Neither do we – Keep your visual presentations simple.  No one likes to sit through a presentation with a never-ending wall of text.  Break it up, simplify, add graphics.  And for the love of god, try to limit your presentation to about 20 minutes or so…

Don’t Memorize – No one likes to sit back and listen to a scripted speech.  Know your material, stick to your key points and have a conversation with the audience.  If you know what you’re talking about, keep to the key points and just wing.  It’s much less stressful than remembering your lines and helps you connect with your audience.

Have fun – With any luck, you like your job.  Bring that enthusiasm to your presentations.  Neither of my presentations went perfect this past week, but the experience of talking about a subject I’m passionate about sure as hell beats talking about something I have no interest in.  I’ve given many presentations over the years during my decade in the brokerage industry and talking now about my company and the game we’re working on instead of talking about mutual funds or what online brokerage platforms are best for you, that has to be the most fun I’ve ever had doing a presentation.  I was nervous at first, I always am and you will be too but don’t let that get to you.  Enjoy what you do, and it’ll be enjoyable for your audience.

A lot of these points might seem pretty straight forward, but when you throw in the extra stress of presenting suddenly the straight forward can be elusive no matter if you’re presenting to the public or just a room of your co-workers.

Good luck on your next presentation.

You're already missed, Graham.

We all made it to where we are today through the support of others, be it a loving wife, a caring parent, the understanding of close friends or the encouragement and knowledge passed to us by our mentors and teachers.

I woke up this morning to the sad news that the world had lost just one of those people.  In April of this year I graduated with honours from the Digital Media and IT program offered by the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology in Edmonton, AB Canada and it was there that I had the privilege of being a student of Graham Miller.  Last night, on his way home from the school, Graham died in a motorcycle accident.

I consider the impact my teachers have had in my life immeasurable.  When I entered into the Game Programming stream at NAIT, the course was in its infancy.  Graham was handed a book on Game Development Essentials and asked, “Can you teach this?”  Although Graham was a programmer, he took the class on.

The course itself was a useful examination and discussion on what makes games playable, what makes them fun, the importance of story and characters and how to organize these ideas in a way that you could then use to create a development plan.  Graham introduced students to the excellent series, Firefly, as a starting point so we all had common ground from which to discuss the theories introduced by the course.

But that’s not what I took home from this course.  Any teacher can pick up a text and discuss the general ideas with a class.  In fact, a cynic might point out that Graham, having never developed a videogame maybe wasn’t the best choice for the job.  That cynic would be wrong.

What Graham brought to that class was an enthusiasm for the subject matter that was infectious.  It filled the room each class and that’s what made this course stand out for me.  Not the subject material, the man presenting it.  Graham as an instructor made me want to push myself.  I wanted to hand in assignments just to see his excitement at the new ideas presented in front of him.  Graham’s confidence in us mixed with his exuberance made me feel that I could make videogames that people wanted to play.  He pushed me to do what I’m doing now in his belief that I could do it and he probably didn’t even realize it.

I didn’t really know Graham as well as I would have liked personally.  Even as an older student at the school, I’d stand just as transfixed as the teens and twenty-somethings when Graham was taken off track and started sharing stories of his English rugby days, or his tales of drinking with Australian field medics in seedy African cities while there as a chopper pilot.  I often came to him for advice or help in other classes and his no-nonsense attitude and candour was always appreciated.  When my son was born prematurely and I needed to spend a great deal of time at the NICU, Graham was always making inquiries as to his wellbeing, and my own, while probing to make sure no instructors were giving me a hard time or working me too hard.  And now, he’s gone.

I wish I had thanked Graham for his belief in me, and the support he showed when I hit him with the idea of starting my own game development company.  I’d like to think that he knew that his encouragement helped me take the chances that I did, but I wish I had said it.  I’ll fondly remember that last day of classes, hoisting a pint with him after it was all said and done and discussing the new company and where we felt gaming was going and how I needed to start watching “Game of Thrones”.  He gave me his card with the offer that if I was ever stuck with a programming issue to not hesitate to use him as a resource.  I didn’t know him long, but that was just such a Graham thing to do.  I wish he’d seen our first game completed because I know he would have been proud.

We’re all so indebted to the people like Graham who support us as we each make our way.  It’s said that teachers open the doors and we walk through.  Let’s make sure we don’t forget to give them our thanks.

My last blog entry on #AltDevBlogADay was concerning my road to becoming a game developer (although, according to my wife, I shouldn’t be calling myself that until I at least make a dollar off a game we create).  I thought I would take this opportunity to share a bit of the history behind what will be Itzy Interactive’s first release.  It’s a mobile game titled Itzy, and we’re excitedly working toward an early November launch.

School Daze

After my breakup with the brokerage industry, I ended up back in school fulltime at 35, studying programming and enduring the chatter of a class full of 18-20 year olds (apparently, manga isn’t that new thing the kids are into.  Oh, they’re into it, they’ve just been into it for a while).  As part of the new program I was enrolled in, after the first semester we were able to specialize our course selection.  I rolled the dice, crossed myself and chose game programming against my better judgement, knowing I’d hate myself if I didn’t at least try.

During the summer break after that first year our instructors asked us to give some thought to game ideas we could put into practice for the next year.  Being an older gamer, I thought back to the games that had resonated with me growing up and decided to take inspiration from the games of my youth.  I created a proposal for a spider themed game based loosely off the Taito arcade title, Qix.

For those not familiar with Qix, the objective of the game was to fill a rectangular playing area by drawing a line with your player across the screen until you finished, at which time the enclosed area would automatically fill in with a solid color.  Drawing the line left the player exposed.  If an enemy touched the line or player while drawing, it would kill the player character and abort the line.  As a kid, I loved this game and I’m not quite sure why.  There was something strangely rewarding about something as simple as drawing a line across the screen and seeing a huge area fill in.

My idea was to take the same principle, but apply it to a spider and create environments to fill that fit that theme.  A spider isn’t going to spin webs across a blank rectangle; it’s going to spin across tree branches or over your garden shed.  And if we’re going to follow a spider across multiple environments, would it kill us to tell a bit of a story along the way?

Artistically I wanted to keep the color’s limited – using dark colors and shades of greys as we’d seen in such games as Limbo or Pixeljunk Eden.  The web fuel that keeps Itzy spinning would be collected by eating a multitude of brightly coloured, alien fireflies that would also influence the color of his webbing, and using these two ideas, the fireflies and the webs, we would bring color to a bleak landscape.  As it turned out, rainbow webbing looked terrible, but my core ideas had found root.

What’s in a name?

So, Itzy, as a concept, was born.  I wanted to keep the game casual and light-hearted and I wanted to keep the controls and gameplay straight forward so the player could easily sit back and enjoy spinning giant webs across multiple environments.  For the life of me though, I couldn’t think up a name for my spider hero.  I had intended from the start to name the game simply after its title character, but what to name it?  I also wanted the character gender neutral if possible – but Pat the Spider?  Drew the Spider?

Frustrated, and a little hungry, I turned to Facebook.  I asked my friends and family to come up with a name for a cute spider.  The wife of an old, university friend suggested Itzy, and I felt it was perfect.  It was cute, easy to remember, played off the whole “Itsy, bitsy spider” nursery rhyme.  I had my character’s name.  Later on, it also stuck with us as a company name after our initial, Canadian themed studio names such as Angry Beaver Studios were ruined by Urban Dictionary (thanks for nothing, Urban Dictionary).  Itzy, again, seemed catchy, cute and memorable and Itzy Interactive came into being.

To breathe life into my character, I enlisted the help of my six-year-old niece who graciously agreed to give up an afternoon to spend with her uncle saying “Ok, again.  Now again.  A little higher.  Not that high.  Ok, that’s great.  …and once more.”

I’m still happy with the results and I’m especially fond of the sound she came up with when asked “What sound does a happy spider make?”

Apparently, it’s “Weew!”

Growing Pains

My team at school were able to start on the first level for a little over a month as part of a school project and Itzy started to take shape.  After graduation, Itzy Interactive began working on Itzy in earnest and we faced down a myriad of problems.  Our game was slated for the phones so Itzy needed pathfinding to move to where the player pointed on the screen.  With our limited understanding of game programming, our pathfinding didn’t seem able to search for paths “up”, only on the ground.  We overcame this problem by rotating the entire level when Itzy approached the base of a climbable object so the climbable object was now the “ground” we were scanning.  That opened up a world of physics related and performance issues, not to mention the transition between ground and tree while the world rotated was, to put it mildly, awkward.  Also, we struggled with making the webs and creating the meshes to fill the webs dynamically to correspond to Itzy’s created web shapes.  Then there were the terrible performance issues initially on both mobile platforms.  No one likes to see a game tested run at 0.7 fps.

All these problems were overcome in the following 6 months and as we tightened up the mechanics of the game we were then able to switch focus to the gameplay itself.  Building webs didn’t pose as much of a challenge as we hoped, so we introduced enemies and big fireflies that, when stuck, can ruin existing webs if not eaten in a timely manner.  Itzy’s enemies force Itzy to use powers of camouflage to continue web building after the danger has passed.  This led one programmer’s father-in-law to exclaim while playing “Give me a way to kill these buggers!” and a power-up system was born.

The game, Itzy, hardly resembles the game that ended up on that proposal document during the summer of 2010, but that’s a good thing.  Through the efforts of talented artists and programmers, many of whom worked as volunteers, Itzy has changed and I’m proud of the product we’ve created.  That pride I feel is more rewarding than anything I accomplished in my decade slinging mutual funds and placing trades.  I just hope it adds up to monetary compensation as well as a feeling of pride (pride, while great, doesn’t pay our mortgages very well) so we can continue to do this, and I can meet my wife’s criteria for being able to call myself a “game developer”.

I invite you all to try an early, online beta of Itzy that we created to encourage feedback on the project on our website at www.itzyinteractive.com.  We’ve taken much of that feedback to heart and we look forward to releasing the full game soon in the coming weeks.  Also, head on over to our Facebook page and give us a like.

In the late summer of 2008, I had dedicated nearly a decade of my life to the brokerage industry in Canada and was working as an Associate Advisor for the brokerage arm of one of our largest banks.  It was my job to become my boss when they were not in the office, which was often.  I balanced account holdings based on investment and risk profiles, advised on individual stocks and looked after our client’s general financial needs.  I was personally responsible for a book of clients worth about 28 million while I assisted with a larger book somewhere over 90 million in assets.  I had a nice office on the 24^th floor overlooking an airport, a bottle of office scotch, my wife and I were starting a family and had I had just received my first professional designation, my FMA, which cumulated years of study in various, related correspondence courses.  Then it all hit the fan.

The market crash of 2008 was hell.  My phone rang off the hook with panicked investors trying to make sense of the sudden downturn just as brokers and analysts scrambled to do the same.  For the next few months my boss went MIA, either vacationing overseas for weeks at a time or choosing to “work” from home, with firm instructions to not be disturbed by clients, myself or our assistant.  In the meantime, I held the front line, trying best to advise clients I had come to care about in my years working with them on how to protect their family’s savings.  The emotional toll of absorbing their distress mixed with the responsibility involved in protecting their investments left me broken on more than one occasion when I arrived home to have my wife ask “How was your day?”

Axed

In the winter of 2008-09, with revenue down over 30% in our practice, my boss in a rare office appearance first commented “I don’t know how much longer I can afford you.”  In March of 2009, I became unemployed and saddled with a tremendous guilt at no longer being able to help those families I had come to care about.  Another broker reminded me over coffee that they were never my clients in the first place and the responsibility of managing their affairs rested on my boss’s shoulders, not mine.  So with a baby on the way I moved on and set out to find new employment.  I had no shortage of job interviews but all ended with “..and when the hiring freeze is over, we’ll take this up again.”  The whole financial services sector, like many sectors, seemed to have locked their doors to new hires.

I searched all spring and summer for employment in my field but without avail until late August I received a letter regarding eligibility for a temporary, government initiative to retrain “long term, tenured workers” who found themselves adrift in the economic uncertainty.  I crunched the numbers with my wife and found that we could survive with the assistance offered while I retrained though at the cost of most of our savings and returning to debt.  In the fall of 2009, at 35 I went back to school full-time embracing my inner geek and entering into a 2 year programming related diploma course.

Already accustomed to working an 8 hour day and then coming home to complete industry correspondence courses in my spare time, school was like a vacation for me.  The work didn’t seem like work to me compared to the past 10 years of my life.  Programming concepts came very naturally and as part of this new program I had the opportunity to specialize in game programming.  I knew my prospects locally within the games industry were limited, but as an avid gamer all my life I felt I’d regret it if I didn’t take the chance.  I loaded up on as many courses as they would let me take in addition to the game courses offered, making sure I had a well-rounded skill set in the likely case that I may not find employment in the gaming industry when I graduated.

In late January of 2010, I received the call at school that something had happened at my wife’s work and she was taken to the hospital.  I met her there and after a few terrifying hours our son, Jake, was delivered via emergency c-section, 2 months early but thankfully alright.  At the end of my first semester for nearly two months, my life consisted of school, then straight to the hospital to spend time with my son and wife, then home alone to finish my school projects usually until 1 or 2 in the morning.  Then I’d do it all over again.

Mmm, that's good retro gaming!

During that period, my long time friend and brother-in-law, a programmer having recently dissolved his partnership in a company creating financial software, sat down with me over coffee and discussed forming a company to make video games after my wife made the suggestion.  In April 2010, Itzy Interactive became a registered company.  I graduated with honours from my program shortly after and bringing a few like-minded programmers and artists onboard, we started the task of creating our first mobile game in the hopes of a fulfilling experience of an eventual paycheck.

Try an early beta of Itzy on our website here and checkout our Facebook page for updates or simply to wish us luck.  It has been a strange road that leads me to this point but despite the uncertainty we’re staring down I feel oddly at ease and more in control than I’ve ever been.  I feel thankful for the opportunities I’ve been presented with and the love and support of those who believe in us and what we might accomplish.  I’ll let you know how it turns out.  

There’s no denying that the Wii was a runaway hit, however with Wii sales beginning to fade Nintendo has readied its replacement in the Wii-U.  The Wii-U looks to match other current gen consoles graphically, but it will use both Wii controllers and a giant, expensive looking iPad like controller.  Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but does anyone else see this as an issue?  Growing up with three other siblings, I can only imagine the chaos in presenting us with the choice of one giant, special controller with everyone else receiving regular controllers.  I’m all for teaching children the value of sharing, but let’s be realistic here.  Analysts have also expressed their concerns and investors began to dump Nintendo shares en masse after the Wii-U’s reveal.  Does the Wii-U even have a shot at the Wii’s level of success, or will it be passed up as being nothing more than the Wii HD with an ipad attachment?

And what if the Wii-U doesn’t match the Wii’s success?  Nintendo has faced struggles with home consoles before and pulled through.  Many considered the Gamecube a blunder with complaints of it being too “toy-ish” and for not offering the technical advantages available from their competition, but Nintendo pulled through.  What’s different this time?

I think the main difference this time, and the real reason we need be concerned for one of the industry giants is due to changes in the portable gaming market.  Portable games have been Nintendo’s bread and butter for some time.  Even back when the GameCube was attempting to wrestle out a corner of the market, Nintendo leaned on excellent sales from their GameBoy and GameBoy Advance platforms, both for hardware and software sales.  The GameBoy Advance didn’t even begin to decline until its replacement, the Nintendo DS, became available and the DS picked up the Nintendo revenue torch and ran with it despite what many considered a lacklustre launch.

Unlike the GameBoy Advance, however, the DS has begun its sales descent well ahead of the launch of the 3DS, which is a large part of why Nintendo found themselves forced to slash their forecasts.  The DS’s sales decline coincidentally (or not) coincided with a surge in another device.  The Apple iPhone.  That’s why as a long-term industry watcher I think Nintendo is in trouble.  The DS’s replacement, the 3DS, has already received a massive price drop to spur sales while agencies like Reuters are describing the device as a “flop” amidst complaints of a lacklustre software line-up and confusion regarding the safety of 3D displays and children’s eye development.  Industry analysts are already predicting far fewer 3DS units sold compared to the DS’s accomplishments, so where does that leave Nintendo?  If the 3DS is unable to find a foothold in a new market where casual gamers can find their gaming fix via their cell phones and if Nintendo is hit with a double whammy if the Wii-U fails to capture consumers – where does that leave Nintendo?

It was heresy in the past to even suggest that Sega might be forced to withdraw from the console market, but we all know what happened there.  Could we see Nintendo become a software only company with Mario and Link making appearances on Sony’s Playstation?  Might a partnership with another company to create a unified console take some of the burden off Nintendo when it comes to the enormous costs associated with new hardware development?  Might we see Nintendo apply their portable gaming expertise to the Android and iPhone markets or will Nintendo merely weather this storm?  No matter what happens, my gut tells me we may witness a shift within the games industry sooner rather than later.

I don't know what you're trying to do, but I'm pretty sure you're doing it wrong

Well, it turns out I was right to be afraid.  Despite erring on the side of caution, dumbing down models and textures, limiting sound size and being cautious resource wise, it wasn’t enough.  In the ways of Unity3d on mobile phones it turns out we were trying to drop a jet engine inside a soap box racer.

So rather than simply walking by us wretched souls, shielding the eyes of your children and whispering harshly “Don’t look at the poor developers,” I advise those just starting to develop for the phones using Unity3d to heed this cautionary advice lest you find yourself well into development asking “0.7 frames a second?  Bu-bu-but…our polys are low!”

Tip number the first:  Keep your polys low, but your enemies lower

Ok, the last bit makes no sense, but keep your polys down.  I’ve read before that for the older iPhones you should keep your poly count limited to around 10k-15k.  I’ve heard the iPhone 4 can handle 40k, but what use is that unless you’re only releasing on the iPhone 4?  Also, keep in mind that the more memory you use for graphics, the less you have for physics and gameplay.

Tip two:  Draw Calls

Try to keep your draw calls between 20-30 if targeting the phone market.  For us, a problem we didn’t realize we had until later was our meshes for our character, enemies, etc were not combined.  Our main character used 16 draw calls, slapping a material on each piece of geometry individually.  Combine your meshes whenever possible, reuse materials for better batching and be mindful of your overall draw count.

Tip three:  That damned, dirty GUI

The Unity GUI is not your friend.  Full stop.  I understand they are aware of this and are working on it, but in the meantime the GUI is going to slow things down like a fat man riding a pony.  For our little game, two progress bars, score text and a pause and mute button ate up 13 draw calls and would often use 40-50% of our processing power according to the profiler.  Turning off GUI elements would sometimes boost us up by 10-15 fps.  The research we’ve done suggest a simple alternative; don’t use Unity’s GUI functions.  Instead, try some middleware, like EZgui.  We recently added EZgui to our arsenal.  As of the time of writing I’m unable to say if it’s made a real difference to our overhead, but EZGui bills itself as being a more efficient means of implementing your GUI on mobile platforms, so we’ll see if our $200 spent will give us one less thing to worry about.

Tip four:  What’s that sound?  It’s the sound of your game bogging down under your audio

Holy mother of Cthulhu, but sound seems to slow down the mobile phone build of our game.  Our PC build of the game featured a musical track, sounds for each firefly, sounds for each enemy, environmental sounds and the main effects for the player character.  Add that all up and on our test phones it sounds like suck.

How many are too many sounds?

Deleting each of these sounds seemed to increase performance by nearly 5 fps despite the tiny size of each sound clip.  At this point we do not have a workaround.  So this one is more of a cry for help than it is a tip.  The tip is, “Watch your sounds.”  The cry for help is, “How on earth does anyone implement sounds on the Iphone, period?  Are we really limited to only 2 audio sources per game if we want the game playable?”

Testing on the iPhone

Those are the main performance issues that we experienced as new Unity developers.  Hopefully this will help someone become aware of the dangers of mobile phone development.

Elite

It feels like I spent a lifetime playing Elite on the C-64.  Elite was the first space fighter/trading game I played using glorious 3D wireframe graphics and viewed from the cockpit of your own spacecraft.  This space trading game came out in 1984 with its own novella to set the backdrop and it included somewhat of a moral system that I hadn’t experienced in games before.  Trade in illegal goods in some systems and you’ll become a wanted man!  Is it worth the hassle?  I remember playing with an eye occasional cast over my shoulder so my mother wouldn’t stumble in and exclaim “You’re trading narcotics to that poor planet?  The authorities are right to hunt you from system to system.  I have no son!”

Giving options and consequences in a game left a mark on me as a gamer.  I hadn’t experienced this before.  Usually I played as the good little trader, occasionally saving others from pirates myself, but sometimes you just have to walk the line.  Surprisingly, I didn’t grow up to become an arms dealer.

Raid on Bungeling Bay

I was surprised this morning to learn that one of my early favourites was the first game designed by SimCity’s creator, Will Wright.  Raid was also available on the C-64 about 1984.  Raid was a top down helicopter shooter which had you taking out radar stations to avoid detection in an attempt to bomb one of six factories.  What I loved about this shooter is that things happened off-screen.  Many arcade shooters at the time centered only on the player and the rest of the world simply didn’t exist until the player stepped into the screen.   With Raid, supply boats made their way to factories and if left to their own devices they’d build themselves up and be that much harder to take out.  It reminded me of one of my arcade favourites Sinistar.  If you left Sinistar alone for too long while you were off mining asteroids, he’d later become a huge threat, but Raid seemed to have so much more depth.  If that weren’t enough of a challenge, your aircraft carrier would often come under attack and you’d have to rush back and switch to defensive mode.  I remember that almost sick desperation as I limped my chopper back to the carrier after taking a beating.  I really hadn’t experienced this level of challenge before.  Also, it’s fun to blow things up.  Later games like “Desert Strike – Return to the gulf” provided a satisfying ratio of shots fired to things blowing up, but few shooters provided the challenge of Raid on Bungeling Bay.

Castle Wolfenstein/Beyond Castle Wolfenstein

Forever will I think of these titles when I see the word “Achtung!”

The first and second title came out between 1981 – 1984 and had two features that have become videogame staples today.  Stealth play and Nazis.  You wouldn’t get too far in Castle Wolfenstein to approach the game with guns blazing.  You had to bide your time, hide around corners and then, when the time was right, blow a hole in a wall with a grenade and burst out with pistol a’blazing!  Beyond continued the same gameplay, but this time the game focused on a plot to bomb Hitler.  The stealth tactics ramped up.  Guards were more easily alerted to your presence.  Gunshots brought the entire bunker down on top of you.  Bodies needed to be hidden out of sight.  Playing games like Metal Gear Solid over a decade later reminded me of just how much the stealth and survival horror games owed to games like Wolfenstein.  Nothing quite ratchets up the tension to a 10 year old like limited ammo and the sudden appearance of a nigh unstoppable foe.  I can hear the audio cue of the SS’s arrival in the back of my head to this day when I’m playing a game and a difficult enemy makes a sudden appearance.

Archon I and II

More from around 1984, the Archon games combined strategy and action and successfully kept myself and my younger brother at each other’s throats for at least a couple of years.  You moved various player pieces around a game board, but instead of one piece taking another piece automatically, player pieces would be transported into an arena where they would engage in often lopsided battles.  There were a number of two player games available that would pit brother against brother.  Spy vs Spy, GI Joe, Front Line, but none had the variety that Archon offered at the time.  None offered the same type of strategy.  I can think of no other two player games from my childhood that brought my younger brother and I together while simultaneously driving us apart like these two titles.

Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder is the most recent game on this list (1990) but it is one that sticks with me as it was my first, real role playing game.  I was never really into D&D as a kid.  It wasn’t something that my parents approved of as they were sure, like many parents of the time, that D&D would turn their children into sword wielding maniacs with a lust to consume human flesh, or devil worshipping blasphemers with a lust to consume human flesh, or some such thing involving cannibalism.

Eye of the Beholder offered a world to explore, multiple party members and better visuals right at a time when I was just discovering books like Lord of the Rings and the Shannara series.  EOTB gave me a chance to really get my geek on in a way that previous games had fallen short of.  Huge dungeons hid a plethora of mystical artefacts and mythical creatures and I spent days plumbing the depths beneath Waterdeep.  Unlike many role playing games of the time, Eye of the Beholder also offered that first person perspective, even though all enemies seemed to conveniently fit into your field of view.  Dungeon crawls today like Dragon Age or Oblivion take me right back to those pixelated corridors.

There are many more games that shaped my love of videogames over the years, from Monkey Island to Black Tiger, Doom to HalfLife – but there’s something undeniably powerful and influential about those games you discovered as a child.  My hope is the games I develop will, for someone, resonate like these games have with me, or will on some level connect with those feelings I still have when I look back on my favourites.

Recently a question was posed on the Facebook page of my local game industry special interest group, GameCampEdmonton.

“If you were to list what you need to help grow your indie game studio here in Edmonton in regards to talent levels, assistance, business options and so forth, what would you want to see and why?”

I’ve had a couple of days to ponder this notion and it certainly got the ole noggin a churnin’.  As we near completion of our first title, in terms of resources – what is it that would have made our lives that much easier?  What resources do we still need?  (Itzy!  Try the demo!  Ahhhh…plug, plug, plug!)

Talent isn’t really the problem.  The pool of artists and programmers who can dedicate their time without any idea of how much or even if they’ll be paid may be a bit shallow as we start up but for talent we’ve been able to manage.  I find what we are really lacking is a voice of experience.
The internet is home to not just porn, funny cat pictures and tales of Xbox hardware issues, it’s also a place where people can share their thoughts and experiences on numerous other topics as well.  The problem is, in relation to starting up an indie studio, the thoughts and experiences shared are often from people who haven’t actually achieved the feat of starting up a successful, indie game studio, let alone turning it into a viable business.  Combing through online blogs and articles on the subject, I’m often left feeling like I’m a runner taking advice in marathon running from a writer who watched half a marathon on tv once, or from a writer who created the laces for a popular running shoe.  Genuine advice from people who have run my particular marathon seems to be a bit hard to come by.

Soft advice is another problem.  It seems I’ve come across countless articles with advice to indie studios like “Don’t lose sight of your goals!” or “Focus on your passion” or helpful nuggets like “if you fail it will not only affect your family, but your team member’s families too.”  Wow.  How did these pearls of wisdom never occur to me?  /s

Attending a developers conference in Vancouver a few months ago, I was also left frustrated by the lack of information I could use.  While there a couple of useful talks, most talks seemed geared towards helping established developers land the funding required to keep their teams of 20-50 employed and working on their next PSN/XBL release in a dynamically changing marketplace.  Not much thought seemed to be given to those that dare try to start up their own companies.

Why is it that finding specific, useful information on the internet is like trying to find sunlight by digging a hole?  How hard is it for indie bloggers to share specific information regarding their wins and losses?

In this day where anyone can self-publish their titles, what do publishers really bring to the table?  What are effective social media marketing strategies for indies with a marketing budget of zero?  What type of games are the most successful in the mobile marketplace and why?  Are free games littered with ads the way to go?  Clicks or impressions?  Who do you turn to for ads?  Or are in-game transactions the cat’s pyjamas?  Budget titles?  How do the numbers compare?  Who’s tried them all?

What indie studios like mine need are mentors.  We need someone successful who has gone through this type of process recently and can speak to the specific trials they faced and share that wisdom over a pint of Guinness or through some sort of correspondence.   Articles from people who haven’t actually made it in the industry, or articles from people who made it 10 years ago when you had to fight for shelf space in retail stores, while well intentioned, don’t offer up much in the way of useful information that the indie studios of today can wrap a business plan around.

It’s at this point that I was suddenly struck by near crippling performance anxiety.  What if the game flat-out doesn’t work?  Then what?

Now, I need to step back and explain.  I am proud of my team and proud of the work that we’ve done, however, mobile games are something new to us.  We each have our personal areas of expertise.  I have the pleasure of working with some amazing programmers but in the game space we remain untested.  There are certainly some different factors at play here and despite the decade of programming experience we currently possess, moving a 3D spider around, eating glowing, animated alien fireflies and creating web meshes on the fly for our character to traverse is a different task from linking to a database, searching through files and updating information based on specific search criteria while producing user based reports via the internet.

Put simply, we don’t know what we’re doing but like a rhino in a mine field we’re charging forward.

However as I sat at my workstation the other day I was suddenly distracted by the Nattering Elf of Doubt, or Neod as I’ve come to name him.  Neod hopped up on my shoulder as I was trying to work and exclaimed “Sure and begorra…”

Neod sounds like a leprechaun.  I’m not entirely sure what that’s about.

“Sure and begorra!  Do ya not see those verts, lad?  Sure it runs fine on your PC – but how can you be sure tis not all arseways when you put it on ya ‘droid?  You daft?”

As much as I don’t want to admit it, that little chattering imp sounding strangely like a cross between Bono on helium and my regular voice in my head going on about “Videogames?  They’re gonna cut off your power!  Go back to selling mutual funds!” had a point.  We’re competent programmers and designers, but we really have no idea at this stage if our game will actually run half decent on the Iphone/Android platforms.  I’ve read so many conflicting comments about vert budgets, size restraints, texture limits that I really don’t know where we stand in the performance department.

At this stage in development our touch screen controls have not been implemented, so even if I did create a build for the iPhone/Android platforms – my spider character, Itzy, would just sit there – staring at me lazily, waiting for input that will never come and asking “Forget about something there, champ?”

We’re attempting to remain conservative and mindful of the finished platforms but for all our talents we really don’t know how it’ll end up.  So I’m left with the option of forging ahead with the rest of the team and hoping that everything will work itself out in the end and we won’t blow past our deadline so quickly I’m left staring out the car window saying “Was that the deadline we just passed?  I can’t tell.  Shouldn’t there have been a sign?  I didn’t see the sign…”

I guess that’s just the fun ride between “no idea” and “ok, we sorta get it now”.  It would just be a more pleasant journey without these damn elves.

Obscurity has to be the number one hurdle for Indie developers.  Like a lot of Indies, we’ve got our website, we’ve got our blog up, we’re tweeting like hell, but how do you get your audience to care a chicken’s whisker about what you have to say or your small, indie game?  My conclusion is you have to show them.  Now, bear in mind, I don’t know what I’m doing.  I spent the past decade in the brokerage industry before finding myself jobless during the worst economic recession we’ve seen since the 30’s.  What the hell do I know about making games?

Well, that’s the fun of it!  You all get to gloat when I follow-up this blog in a few months with “Game Demos, what a huge waste of everyone’s time.”  Or, choice to release a game demo will end up being the right one and I can wistfully look back on this blog someday and remember when I started every day looking myself in the mirror and asking “Games?  Really?  What the hell am I doing?”

Now there was a bit of a debate among my team to release a demo or not and I have to admit that initially I was in the “No Demo” category.  The reason was fairly simple.  Our first game, Itzy, isn’t done yet.  Our efforts should be directed towards completing the game, not sending a half-finished, drooling monstrosity out into the world (hey, that’s an idea for a game).  The focus needs to be on finishing the game so we can unleash it upon the masses and then bask in the glow of gamer adoration.  And money.  Which doesn’t glow so much.  Because, baby needs a new pair of shoes.  No, seriously, my baby needs shoes.  He’s outgrowing those things like crazy.

However, a talk at a games conference in Vancouver recently changed my mind.  The presenter put forward the notion that Indie developers need to get their games out, in any shape – and they need to get them on Facebook.  The idea was that as long as you make players aware that the game is now in development, and invite their opinion, they’ll be more forgiving of the games flaws and you’ll establish a following of gamers connected to the game because they helped shape it.

And it’s brilliant!  This was a problem we did not even realize we had.  Having played the game to death, we know exactly what we’re supposed to do at any given point.  It’s hard to test a game, to break a game and even to objectively look at what’s working and what isn’t when you have been a slave to the game for the past few months and your wife can’t remember what you look like anymore apart from old pictures on your Facebook profile.

So it’s been a week since our “Itzy – Alpha Demo” went live on both our website and Facebook and already the feedback we’ve received has started to shape the game mid-development.  I’m already glad that we decided to go ahead and release our first level for all to try.

And a small following has started and I’d like to pass along the message to them.  SHARE THE GAME ON YOUR GODDAMN WALL!  WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!  IF YOU LIKE IT, CLICK THAT YOU LIKE IT!  IT’S ONE BUTTON PRESS.  Also, that we appreciate your support and look forward to getting the completed game into your hands this summer.

Please, feel free to try our demo on our website at http://itzyinteractive.com/?page_id=258

Or on Facebook by clicking the icon.