October 31st, 2011

Happy Halloween!

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October 30th, 2011

I recently started a new sketchbook on conceptart.org, which you’re welcome to check out here if you’re so inclined. There’s some game relevant things there, but nothing particularly awe-inspiring. My 2D skills have a ways to go yet, and the game concepting I’ve mainly done hasn’t exactly challenged me too much (at least as far as rendering technique is concerned). I’d like to get some more 2D art into my games, but bitmap works are pretty much limited to static subject matter and I’ve never really been an environment guy. Scrap Metal Heroes is still the only game where I’ve gone with drawn characters, and in all honesty they weren’t quite up to par. I’m still nowhere near to making anything as clean or consistent as my 3D renders. Of course that’s the main reason I enrolled in this UBC arts program, so there may be hope yet. I do feel like my old, worn in habits are being challenged, which can only be a good thing. Whether or not I’ll actually manage to learn something out of it remains to be seen.

- Peace and great art

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October 28th, 2011

So, I was at the Full Indie Game Showcase yesterday, with about a hundred other indie developers from the Vancouver area. Eight promising games got presented and played, while many a business card was handed out. Hell, I gave out no less than three of my own. If I keep up this rate every month, I’ll go through my stack in only another 25 years!

Here are some of the more interesting games from the meet:

Invasion Earth: 1953: Side-scrolling shooter meets ‘Destroy All Humans’ as your lone UFO must face Earth’s assembled military might. (http://invasionearthgame.com/)

Boomtown Takedown: Very impressive vehicle combat game from a team of three after only two months work! The only game I know that lets you toss people into a meat grinder on the back of a humvee. (http://boomtowntakedown.com/)

Waveform: Incredibly simple to pick up but tricky to master. In Waveform you have to modify the wavelength and amplitude of a light wave in order to save the galaxy!(http://edenindustries.ca/blog/?page_id=64)

Sky Pirates of Neo Terra: Looks like a pretty unique combat racer with some fantastic art. Make sure to check it out. (http://skypiratesneo.com/)

Sword of the Stars II: Personally, I don’t think this quite qualifies as indie anymore but it does look very interesting. I’ll probably pick it up eventually despite the somewhat high price. (http://www.swordofthestars.com/)

- Peace and good gaming

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October 28th, 2011

Yes, I know it’s been over a month since the last post but other priorities have gotten in the way. First among them of course is my latest game Arkeia, which is coming together a bit slower than expected but I think it’ll be worth the wait. The game’s fifteen different maps are largely done and a new battle deployment system is in place. With this system all battles start out paused in a deployment phase, allowing you to set up as many as sixteen units before the action begins. Total army sizes are much smaller than in Swordfall, so your initital deployment is typically about half your forces, with the rest sent out as reserves in the usual way. Units also walk a lot slower now and the kill rate is slower as well. The end result is much better pacing, focused on a single climactic engagement.

Right now I’m implementing a modified ability system that introduces active abilities, including spells and special attacks. Triggering these abilities at the right time will ultimately be the key to defeating all the nasty orcs, goblins and undead armies you’ll run into.

Time is admittedly getting a bit tight before I leave for Mexico on the 11th next month, but I’m still feeling confident I can get a beta out before then. It might be a little rough around the edges, but there should be plenty to see and test nonetheless. If anyone’s interested in trying it out, make sure to give me a message, either on here or on kongregate.

- Peace and well-paced battles 

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September 21st, 2011

To any other developers who might be lurking around here, I thought I might share a few of my experiences to date with the Mochi ad and micro-transaction platform. Now seems like a particularly appropriate time to do so, as I’m pretty sure to be moving on to other pastures.

I discovered Mochi while working on Gun Nomads, my very first one-man game project. At that point I knew nothing about sponsorships, and in fact didn’t even realize it was possible to make a living from flash games. Gun Nomads was at first meant to be nothing more than an exercise in getting my 3D work into something, and actually finishing a decent game (something that I never quite managed with my school projects). So with that in mind, making a couple bucks from this Mochi thing seemed like a no-brainer. Not knowing much about the flash world, the resulting traffic took me completely by surprise. Within a week Gun Nomads reached its peak of popularity, receiving 100,000 views on its best day. Of course, my return from ads (ecpm) varied between 10 and 20 cents per 1000 views, so I wasn’t exactly making a fortune. Those tiny fractions of a penny for each ‘customer’ just didn’t seem like much for the entertainment I was offering. So, I started reading about this new-fangled thing called ‘micro-transactions’. It seemed like another no-brainer. I only needed one person in a thousand to spend a trivial bit of change to start making some real money.

So I went in and expanded Gun Nomads, adding micro-transactable guns, mission content and cheats. It turned out even a trivial bit of change was difficult to get from flash gamers, but my ecpm did jump up to about a dollar. Although my daily traffic had slipped by then, so I only made forty bucks on my best sales day. A week or two afterwards I was down to making $10-$15 per day. A bit of welcome spending money and a sign of better things to come, but not quite a quick and easy fortune.

But the long tails in this business can still make such games worth something. More than two years after release, Gun Nomads is still making nearly two dollars a day, and has made over four grand to date. So with a bit of patience and a hefty portfolio of games there’s no doubt a potential living can be found in this territory. On the other hand, my other three micro-transaction games haven’t done quite as well. Swordfall is currently making more per day, but it’s also a much newer game. In the very long term it might still overtake Gun Nomads, but at this point that seems unlikely. In any case, the bottomline is that sponsorships have proven much more reliable and profitable. In my experience, it’s also difficult to combine the two, as sponsors seem to like fully free games about as much as the audience does.

There are definitely a few flash games that have achieved some impressive numbers with this business model, but I’m not convinced anymore that it’s worth pursuing. There are other, much more fertile avenues to explore, if paying customers are indeed the ultimate goal. Like the internet itself, flash is supposed to be free in the minds of most people, and it is nice to have this one place where anyone, anywhere in the world can play games without running into a paywall.

So, what would I recommend in Mochi’s place? If you like the micro-transaction thing, it can clearly work spectacularly well on facebook. Getting into that market can be difficult for the little guys, as there is no way to get noticed outside of marketing and viral spread. The right game can still get all the attention it needs from the latter, but it won’t work out for most. The typical time-constraint, spammy paywall techniques on facebook can also be a bit exploitative. That model really has no appeal to me as a player, nor as a developer, but it might be the right cup of tea for some. Although, if you’re trying to build an image as a ‘good-guy indie,’ just the fact you have games on facebook will hurt that reputation.

Currently, the most interesting market for me is mobile, which of course is hardly a unique opinion these days. The culture on the various app stores is really completely different when compared to flash. People celebrate iPhone games for being so cheap, while they groan and whine when similar flash games charge anything at all. It probably has a lot to with the downloading of apps into your collection, rather than playing through a public website, that makes the things feel like property. Perhaps the most interesting thing, at least to me, is how the mobile publishing model is now expanding onto traditional operating systems. Apple now sells apps for OSX as well as iOS, and by the sound of things Windows 8 is going to follow close on its heels. This could be the start of a revolution in how PC and Mac games are published. Even something as accessible as Steam still has some pretty high standards and a fairly arcane approval process, at least from what I’ve heard. Letting nearly everything in and allowing the gems to float naturally to the top is a wonderfully democratic approach in comparison. All this together with the recent explosion in multi-platform dev tools is opening up game development like nothing else in history. I can see a day coming when any twelve year-old kid can make a game and release it on every computing device in the world at the click of a button. That day is not today, but the walls are definitely beginning to crumble.

- Peace and broken walls

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September 17th, 2011

These runty little goblins will be some of the critters you’ll face in the new Swordfall successor, which for the time being I’m calling ‘Arkeia’. They probably won’t be too great a challenge though, unless of course they bring along the whole clan. But they’ve got some much larger friends who will likely show up in your future nightmares. In all honesty though, it may yet be a while before you get to fight any of them. Progress on this game has been rather minimal so far. To be fair, I do have a solid start on the assets, much of the unit concepts done and a healthy set of design specs. The code just isn’t there yet. I did take a version of Swordfall yesterday and started cutting stuff out of it in an effort to turn it into my new game, but now I’m not so sure I want to go down that route. The games seem similar enough to turn one into the other, but on closer inspection there are quite a few differences. Just taking out the old maps, units, techs and generals leaves my code with a ton of obsolete references that need to be hunted down and cleaned up. On top of that I really feel like I should merge some of the class structures, using new methods I developed for Rise of the Colony. Plus, it would be so much cleaner to start with a fresh, brand new application and just copy things in as I need them. Might take a fair bit longer to get running that way, but I’d likely end up with fewer headaches and a more efficient end result. Bottomline is this may all end up going into November, though I’d like to finish it by the end of next month. Just from a financial viewpoint I kind of need to get it wrapped up and sold by January, so at the very latest I will have it done by the end of November, leaving a month for auctioning and sponsor branding. Of course that would probably push back the actual release to January or maybe even February, depending on what the sponsor wants. I don’t think a Christmas launch makes much sense in the flash world; you can’t exactly stuff one of these things under a tree.

So yeah, I have been a tad lazy these past couple weeks, and a little busier with other things than usual. Mostly this is due to starting my visual arts studies at the University of BC, though with only two courses I’m not exactly feeling overworked. And they are artsy courses too; not anything serious like ‘Advanced Human-Computer Interaction’, a course in which I naturally dealt with motion tracking and brain interfaces. Or more likely it was an introductory Java GUI course, but no one has to know that. Anyway, my homework for next week involves dripping ink on two sheets of paper… and nothing else whatsoever. I think I can handle that and still make some games.

So aside from taking my first steps to becoming a true artiste, what exactly has been on my mind lately? Well games of course, that goes without saying. Has there even been an entire day in all of time when that was not the case? Although these days I almost feel like I’m growing out of games. At least the playing them part; I’m as thoroughly fixated on game making as I’ve ever been. It might just be a lack of good games, but there’s been very few in recent years that I’ve managed to really get into and actually finish. Starcraft 2 is the only example I can think of right now. That definitely entertained me for a few months, but the ladder matches ultimately got really repetitive and hectic. Then there’s been some fantastic open world shooter games like Red Dead Redemption and Deus Ex, which I haven’t managed to finish but feel like I should. In the case of the latter I haven’t even finished my first mission yet. The high regard for it makes me feel an obligation to give it a chance, but all the crawling around vents just isn’t triggering the right neurons.

I could of course tell myself that I’m just picky with my genres, that I’m only really into deep RPGs and strategy games. Then again, I haven’t finished a single player RPG since Final Fantasy X and only reached level 35 in World of Warcraft. The latest iterations of classic strategy series like Civilization and Total War also leave me cold. In the case of Total War the reasons are at least clear enough. Empire covers a period of history that really doesn’t interest me much, and I found the ‘line up dudes into lines and wait while they shoot each other’ gameplay a bit on the simple side. Shogun seemed like a return to the glory days at first, but it’s just such a small game. There’s barely any units and all the factions are effectively identical. Then of course there’s a certain lack of attachment to it, having virtually no background knowledge in the machinations of feudal Japanese clans. Leading the mighty Chosokabe clan to victory just doesn’t mean a whole lot to me.

Civ 5, on the other hand, seems like it should be great but hasn’t been able to hold my interest very long. There’s definitely features in there that I don’t care for, but they don’t seem major enough to put me off the game by themselves. The reduced ability to optimize cities definitely does have some role to play; building the wealthiest or most productive city in the world was a major hook in the Civ 3 days. I also hate having land units turn into boats when they hit water; that just makes seas way too trivial of an obstacle. But surely that’s not enough to ruin the entire game, is it?

That naturally leaves us with the sad fate of the revered Age of Empires series: the cruel abomination known as Age of Empires Online. Okay, that might be a bit too harsh of an expression, but a healthy dose of scorn at this trend-wallowing, facebooky, freemium MMO-ification is definitely called for. Sure, the core game is essentially just AoE 2, which is a fine and safe way to go. The art style is heavily casual, but nonetheless pleasant to look at and pretty unique. No real complaints there. But the MMO frippery piled around this core doesn’t entirely work. It takes way too long to unlock a decent roster of units (meaning something akin to AoE 2), making the game feel awfully grindy as you slowly bash through one enemy camp after another with the same few unit types. This of course isn’t helped by the lack of enemy diversity, virtually nonexistent story, and the complete absence of any type of challenge, at least for the eight hours or so that I played it. But at least now all the casual players like three year olds and the mentally handicapped can feel like they’re winning all the time. Oh joy, what a wondrous gaming age we live in. Then of course there’s the afore-mentioned frippery: the endless stream of shiny gear you can put on your little warrior men. Admittedly, an interesting idea at first. In all honesty, I do like the idea of customizing and upgrading an army, considerably more so than doing the same with a single character. This is after all something that has barely been explored in games, and I do still like strategy games, at least in theory. AoEO’s approach might be a bit too much of a cut-and-paste hybrid, but still I think it deserves a few points for originality.

Execution though is another matter. The first problem is that the upgrades are too trivial to really notice, and seem terribly simplistic and arbitrary to boot. +5.1% damage output on one unit type is hard to get excited about. And these numbers just seem so strangely precise; some of the percent bonuses have two significant digits after the decimal. I’m not sure if this is evidence of highly tuned balancing or just an effort to make sure you won’t forget the whole thing’s just a shallow illusion built on meaningless numbers. And despite these upgrades resulting in a barely perceptible sense of power progression, they’re still enough to make fair matches with friends difficult to arrange. On top of that you have to level up for a while just to unlock the ability to even play multiplayer. Too bad for those who erroneously believe multiplayer to be the whole point of the genre.

Being the somewhat ill-considered, cut-and-paste job that it is, the game is riddled with muddled metaphors that make little sense. The crafting system is really the most glaring misfit of them all. You craft items out of planks and ingots like in any old MMO, but then those items are equipped on unit classes and mass-produced in battle using generic resources like wood and gold. It would all make much more sense if it were presented as developing new technology, but logic has very little place in this game. AoEO is not interested in finding new and clever ways to represent real world systems. This is simply an exercise in cutting successful pieces out of existing games and then nailing them together. A trendy Frankenstein concoction if ever there was one.

- Peace and better games

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August 31st, 2011

After much pondering, I have at last decided to go ahead and make a successor to Swordfall. As flaw-ridden as it is, Swordfall does have some solid mechanics that could support a much better game. And with the core mechanics remaining in place, the time investment required to build a new game should be relatively modest. Although, admittedly, I am a bit hesitant to make that claim, having failed at project time estimates so many times before. But even with that said, I can’t see it taking more than two months, unless I get incredibly lazy or busy with other things.

So, what should you expect out of this new bastard child of a game? Well, it’ll definitely be different enough that I wouldn’t call it a sequel. The art style is somewhat more cartoony, the setting is fantasy, and there will be long term progression, with a story that takes you through a series of small maps. Think Starcraft 2 single player, if you need a structural comparison. I’m aiming for at least ten hours of gameplay to complete the main campaign and unlock all units, of which there will be many. Each unit will also be highly upgradable and customizable, with a number of different abilities to choose from.

Another thing I’m looking into improving is the battle system, though I’m not entirely clear on the details yet. Armies will definitely be much smaller this time around, preventing the slow attrition of late-game Swordfall battles. Generals are also gone, as I don’t think they added all that much. Active abilities on units would definitely be much more interesting, and would help make the battles feel more controlled. I’ve also toyed with the idea of introducing a turn-based deployment phase that let’s you ponder your army’s arrangement in peace before all the hectic fighting begins. This could work nicely if the battles were heavily based around the use of active abilities, perhaps a bit something like Warcraft 3.

One final thing I can guarantee is that the game will be entirely free. I’m definitely done messing around with Mochi.

- Peace and fair battles

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August 14th, 2011

I’ve recently discovered a game called BattleForge. Well, it’s really  more of a re-discovery; I remember hearing about this game back when it was still new, but then it just seemed to fall off the radar screen. After playing some ten PvE matches and reading some of the comments on metacritic, I can see a lot of the reasons why. The game has a ton of flaws and I’m pretty near burned out with it already, but the concept as such is still pretty unique.

Long story short, BattleForge is an RTS where you build decks out of various unit, spell and building cards. There are no actual card-like mechanics in the game, like drawing or discarding, which somewhat makes you wonder why they went with the card metaphor in the first place. And it really works hard at that metaphor, with cards flapping and bending almost convincingly when you mouse over their little icons. I suspect the only reason they went with this card system is the money bags they saw Magic: the Gathering pulling in. Now that the game has gone free-to-play, it’s business model is identical to your standard CCG. Like every other deck building video game I’ve seen, BattleForge makes you buy all your cards after giving you a small starter deck. Fortunately, it’s not nearly as expensive as Magic. Fifteen bucks should get you all the cards you really need, unless you absolutely must have all the rarest cards. There’s less than 400 cards in the whole game anyway, so there isn’t all that much collecting you can do.

As a concept there really isn’t anything else like it out there. There aren’t all that many RTS games to begin with, and none let you customize a faction before a match. Sadly, BattleForge fails otherwise on so many levels that it’s likely to accomplish little besides frightening away other devs from exploring this territory. Purely as an RTS its just not a very good game. There is some entertainment to be had in the singleplayer campaign, even though the story is complete nonsense. But at least it does present a decent challenge on the higher difficulty settings. I haven’t had much experience with PvP yet, but it doesn’t look particularly promising either. The players have full map vision at all times, and this design choice alone destroys a lot of potential for strategy. With full map vision there can be no sneak attacks or unexpected comebacks. The map design and node capturing mechanics also serve to simply funnel the players into each other. And of course there are the inevitable balance issues, with rarer cards being more effective and late game monstrosities crushing all life out of earlier units.

What enjoyment there is to be had isn’t easy to get at either. The UI design is downright embarrassing and many cards are overly complicated. Pretty much every unit has 3-4 different abilities, often with descriptions that go on for five lines. With a dozen different critters in your deck, you won’t remember much about what they can do. The game doesn’t really provide any context for the units either, so you won’t really end up caring much about them. Another part of this disconnect problem is some unnecessarily high stat numbers and a certain degree of abstraction that makes it difficult to compare units and figure out how much damage they can do. Each unit card in the game has an attack and defense value, starting in the low hundreds for lowly units, and going up to 4000+ for late game beasts. The defense score seems to translate directly into hit points, but it’s a complete mystery how the attack value relates to actual damage being dealt. Of course, additional stats like attack speed go completely unmentioned.

All in all, BattleForge is largely a lesson in what not to do. But it is interesting to see someone exploring this particular hybrid. I just wish more devs would try out customization models in strategy games, hopefully without blindly sticking to all the established conventions of CCGs. But that’s enough flogging of that tired old horse. I’ll come back to it only once I have something new to add, perhaps even a game of my own that revolutionizes the whole genre. Perhaps.

- Peace and calm seas

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August 13th, 2011

My last posts might have given the impression that I’ve been sitting on my thumbs for the past two months, moping about the tragic failure of Swordfall. Fortunately, that’s not quite the case. In fact, about two weeks ago I finished a new flash game, another one of my ‘Rise of the’ defense games. It was approximately a five week project and I ended up landing a sponsorship for a bit less than Rise of the Tower’s five grand deal. Pretty typical as far as my sponsorship experience goes, but I’m pretty happy with that result. It’s a very welcome cash infusion after two big games that haven’t produced anywhere near a decent wage for all the work that went into them.

Also, now I once again feel like I know what I’m doing. Sure, I got stuck for a while there on some over-ambitious, hugely flawed visions, but I’ve learned my lessons and now it’s time to move on to smaller and better things. So yeah, looks like I don’t need to go out hunting for a real job after all. While I do plan to return to strategy, I’m going back into it from a much more casual and goal-oriented angle. I’ve been working the past few weeks on some interesting ideas in that direction, keeping the iPhone as my main target platform. It brings back many of the battle mechanics from Swordfall and Scrap Metal Heroes, but with escalation and deployment mechanics that should keep it all from turning into one long cycle of attrition. Also in my mind are some elements of collectible card games that have intriguing possibilities. Deck building and card drawing, to be specific. I played MTG for a few years back in the day, so I know full well how addicting deck customization can be. The trouble is I have yet to see any decent attempt to translate that concept into a computer game. The likes of PoxNora just have no appeal to me. I feel like they’re all aiming for a needlessly exact translation of card games, with apparently no one interested in re-examining the genre’s structure in light of a digital platform. For me the biggest turn off in these digital CCGs is the turn-based battles, which I got tired of back in the Age of Wonders days. Another is the typically lackluster graphics, and a major third peeve is the genre’s obstinate refusal to budge from the micro-transaction model. As soon as you require people to buy cards with real money, the whole affair turns into pay-2-win. This goes hand in hand with the card rarity spectrum that everyone just has to use, which neatly breaks your game into tiers of crap cards, decent cards and good cards. Back in my MTG days easily 80% of my card collection was useless filler material that no serious player would ever touch. In some cases there are good cards that give you the exact same thing as a crap card, but for half the cost. Any RTS with that kind of balancing would be laughed out of the room.

I’m hoping I can topple some of these old standbys, at least in whatever limited way my resources will allow. And naturally, it won’t be anywhere near the complexity of a traditional CCG like Magic. With a casual target, the mechanics have to be pretty simple and the card count reasonably low. Now, this is all early days still of course. I don’t even own a Mac yet, so any plans for iPhone development are little more than whispers in the wind. I’m pretty confident though that this game will happen eventually. I like the concept and I’m having a lot of fun right now with the fantasy setting. It’s such a refreshing change of pace to just come up with whatever the hell I want, instead of hunting through history articles on Wikipedia. I’m actually working on a little flash side-scroller on the side as well, which I’ll probably finish before I get serious with this fantasy strategy thing. I’ll try and keep this blog up to date on any major developments.

- Peace and fair trades

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August 3rd, 2011

So now that I’ve covered some of the key problems I see with Swordfall, I’ll just take a moment and cover some of the hard-won lessons I’ve gained in the process.

Lesson 1: Don’t Make Games For Yourself

Now, I’ve definitely heard this one several times before, and I always thought it a rather stupid rule. I mean, if you love to make games, obviously you’ll want to make something that lines up with your interests. And yes, I absolutely agree that you should. You’re likely to do much better work if you deeply care about what you’re making. But here’s the kicker: don’t imagine you’ll actually end up playing the thing in the end. Whatever connection you have to the game’s idea, art or mechanics gets pretty thoroughly explored during development, especially if you’re working solo. By the time you’re ready to launch, you’ll know every nut and bolt so well that the very idea of playing it fills you with absolute boredom, or perhaps even loathing. The only exception, I think, might be a highly procedural game, like Minecraft or Civilization, where generative algorithms can still throw surprises at you on the umpteenth playthrough.

So what exactly is the harm in making games for yourself? Well, for one thing it’s terribly difficult making a living out of an audience of one. Or ten. Or a hundred, or however many people there might be out there who happen to be just like you. Early playtesting can help here, especially if you can get a variety of people to sit down in front of the game. Preferably people who aren’t afraid of hurting your feelings. Also, don’t rely on enthusiastic fans as an accurate representation of the audience. Fans that actually go to the trouble of contacting you are only the tiniest sliver of a minority among the potential player base. And if you make a game just for them, you’ll once again end up with an awfully small audience. To be fair, this may work with some types of games. If you’re involved in crafting an intricately detailed simulation of medieval banking, you know you’ll have a small audience to begin with, so you’ll need a hefty price tag that only the most enthusiastic fans will swallow. But small audiences don’t really work in the flash world. This market is all about quantity. If you want to make serious money in flash, you need to reach millions of people and put out games at a brisk pace. Which, of course, nicely segues into my next point…

Lesson 2: Don’t Make Five Month Games

The simple fact is that flash games tend not to make much money. Most of them make next to nothing, the decent ones make a grand, the good ones make $5000, and the truly exceptional ones might reach $25,000. And then, of course, you have Fantastic Contraption, which made over a million. But Fantastic Contraption doesn’t really count; even though it was made in flash, it really is more of a traditional pay-to-play indie game. That is naturally a much stronger market for those games that can attract a dedicated paying audience, but it’s not an easy place to break into.

As far as the flash sponsorship & ad market goes, 25-30 grand is pretty much the best you can hope for. And that kind of money only goes to the absolute cream of the crop. Unless you’re making a sequel to a highly popular game, you really have no right to expect anything like it. No matter how brilliant your idea might be or how gorgeous your graphics, it’s still incredibly difficult to predict whether your game is worth 3,000 or 20,000. Naturally, a fair bit of the equation depends on your reputation, how well your vision aligns with the tastes of high-budget sponsors, and on whether you have established sponsor relationships. And regardless of your business skills, the audience itself is a fickle beast, out looking for a quick bit of fun amidst an endless torrent of content. In that choked up jungle some straightforward production quality will raise you above the the herd, but the thing that takes you from good to great isn’t always so obvious. The point of it all is this: hedge your bets. Don’t sink all your time into an elaborate tree that may not bear sufficient fruit. Spending five months on a game and expecting to make a living means all the stars need to align perfectly. Even if you manage to pull off that trick once, can you really make a consistent show of it? Oftentimes, popular games come about through dumb luck more so than brilliance. Novelty is a big part of this business, and the Next Big Thing can land in your head almost by accident, never to be repeated again. Case in point: Alexey Pajitnov, the developer of Tetris, has now worked some fifteen years in the US games industry without coming up with another breakthrough hit. Chances are that Tetris will be all he’s ultimately remembered for.

So, the secret ingredient in the flash sauce is to find a happy medium. One to two months is about ideal in my book, perhaps going down to as little as two weeks if you’re working with a fair number of existing assets. If you’re incredibly brave or don’t need sleep, you might try out a one week game, as long as you don’t make a habit of it. It may just work for something with a very simple core concept that’s playable after a day’s worth of coding. But you need a strong sense of fun and novelty to back it up; at least something that’s likely to fetch a couple grand for your efforts. You will not be able to live on $1000 games, at least not in the developed world. Trying to make fifty games a year that anyone will actually notice is a fool’s errand.

Lesson 3: Depth is Overrated

Sure, most of us like a bit of depth to our games. Variety in level design, different kinds of enemies, lots of meaningful choices, and perhaps a large serving of elaborate upgrade trees. Ultimately, what exactly is depth? It can be a few different things, really. Lots of novel things to discover, plenty of variety in gameplay, and perhaps most importantly a sense of gaining mastery of a difficult but rewarding set of skills. Depth is generally bought at the cost of complexity, an especially important point to keep in mind when developing strategy games or RPGs. You want a system complex enough to support a range of meaningful choices, sufficient variety and a multi-pronged sense of progress. You’ve got to have your leveling, quest completion and your gear drops. You’ll also want some strategic building construction, marching armies and advancing technologies.

At the same time any system you build has to be easy to learn and make some kind of intuitive sense. So using what your players already know, both from other games and the real world, will make your rules much easier to swallow. Naturally, it goes down much easier still if you lead people in gently, taking care to point out all the individual actions that make up the basics of your game. A few might be frustrated enough by this hand-holding to seek fun elsewhere, but that’s a small price to pay.

If you happen to be a new developer and a fan of AAA strategy/RPG games, you might want to scale back on your initial plans for scope and complexity, perhaps by an order of magnitude at least. No flash indie team can go head-to-head with the big boys, and there really isn’t much of a middle ground in this industry anymore. There are small games and big games, but very little in between. Small teams make casual games, and casual games are a very different beast from the giants of the industry. Your players will not have spent months or years reading through all the hype generated by your marketing department. They will not have invested a day’s paycheck in order to play it. They will come in as blank slates, attracted by little more than pretty colors, googly eyes and a catchy title. The moment they encounter frustration or confusion is the moment they’ll go find pretty colors elsewhere.

Angry Birds. Plants vs Zombies. Fruit Ninja. Cut the Rope. These wild success stories did not come about because there’s a lot of meat on the bones. They happened through a touch of novelty, cute characters, a good deal of polish, and a title that instantly reveals the game’s entire premise. In this arena, a pretty surface is worth more than all the deep dark depths in the world. The trick here is to have a strong core, both mechanically and thematically, one that’s easy to both build and communicate. For a month-long project the mechanics should take less than a week to implement. The rest is all polish and testing, with some extra polish on top.

Lesson 4: The Last 10% Will Take Half Your Time

Put another way, you’ll first make 90% of your game, and then still have the other 90% to look forward to. To be fair, I haven’t found this to be true with all my games. With some simple projects and reusable code assets, I have managed to come in at just slightly over schedule. But with anything a little more complex, perhaps something with a synopsis that doesn’t quite seem to fit into a single sentence, all bets are out the window. Two months can just as easily turn into five. There are just too many features and interacting systems to really grasp all the little knobs and widgets you’ll have to make. And the more complex your creation becomes, the more potential there is for things to break, more hidden corners for game-killing bugs to hide. On a five month project the last two may be spent making sure everything still works. You will play your game a lot, you will have to tweak, adjust, fix, and rejigger every little thing. Approximately once every hour you will curse yourself for being an idiot. You’ll remove the evidence of your idiocy, and then compile the game yet again. And again. And then again. So make small games, people. Spend more time with ideas, less time with bugs. Both you and the bugs will be much happier in the end.

And now I believe it’s time to head out to today’s life drawing session, over at the local university. I’ll reveal more about my future plans soon.

- Peace and fair winds

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