Blurst Now Open to Other Developers

The awesome indie developers at Flashbang have opened up their website Blurst (http://www.blurst.com) to submissions of Unity games from other developers.

Hopefully this will be a big success, since we as developers really need more Unity portals out there.  I’ve been working on a couple small Unity games myself and have been a little uncertain if I would be able to shop my games around much.

I even considered e-mailing the guys at Blurst to propose putting something on their site, but it looks like they’ve already done the work required to set something like this up.

More and more, it seems like Matthew Wegner and Steve Swink at Flashbang are becoming the father figures of the indie games scene.  The IGF, the IGS, an indie games portal… What’s next, indie games philanthropy?  An indie games school?  At any rate, I salute the fine gentlemen of Flashbang for their work at building the indie community up.  A Blurst portal is simply the next step for them.

Here’s my problem with Fun.

I love fun, but after we made Gray, something went off in my head. So now I’ll rant about that. :)

Me

“This is actually kind of easy. It’s not perfect or even great, but making a game with a message is a relatively simple pursuit. So why is making a fun game so hard?”

After some thinking and a few late night discussions with people smarter than me I’m pretty sure I know why.

Fun is a dead horse

When it comes to games, that’s the one trait of a game that people gauge. Sure reviewers will throw in ratings for graphics and music, but that’s mostly naive. Their response to the game directly hinges on if the total package was entertaining. If the art style is horrendous, but the game is fun/engaging [Sexy Hiking] then all is forgiven. The fact is, people have been perfecting the art of making fun games for the last few decades. They’ve gotten pretty amazing at it. Though, take a step back for a moment. Why are we still going after Fun like it’s the Holy Grail?

Golden Developer

“It’s simple. Make a good game.”

That sucks. Not because it’s untrue, but because it doesn’t help at all. Well how do I make a good game?! What is a good game? Well, for the most part, a good game is a fun game. Right? Gray was a game we made that completely ignored fun. In fact we didn’t want it to be fun at all, if it was, it would have muddled the message. But yet, to a fair amount of people, Gray is a good game. As I said earlier, it was fairly easy to make. Certainly much easier than making something like Dinowaurs or even Fig. 8 because those chased Fun.

F • un

What is Fun anyway? Well it’s engaging. Often a challenge of just enough difficulty to be compelling but not enough to be frustrating with enough variety to maintain interest. At least that’s how I see it. Fun is about learning new skills and using those skills and being rewarded for using them. The rewards vary. In WoW, rewards come by way of numbers. Other times rewards are more intangible, such as “skill” in a hand-eye-coordination game like Halo. That’s really it though, and it’s not easy. Designing a game that does this well is no small task.

Though, designing the first Fun video game was probably a bit easier than designing a Fun video game today. Why? Well, we’re spoiled. We get Fun thrown at us from all directions to the point where we have an incredibly high tolerance for it. Each new game must do something slightly different, but not too different or it will be too frustrating/confusing for the players. In the beginning, games were hard. Kid Icarus hard. But now, designers have learned that doesn’t hit the Fun sweet spot, so we’ve altered things to capitalize on the Fun.

Look at Valve. Perhaps the best game developer in the universe, but they don’t have a roadmap for Fun even. They know when they have it, that’s a skill in itself, but they spend years play testing and tweaking a game in order to get it to that point. Do a couple guys with laptops have that kind of time and resources? That’s where we’re at right now. Surely we can still compete through the Fun angle with interesting new ideas even today, which is pretty incredible when you think about it, but it is most certainly rare.

Video games are porn

I love this quote, though this isn’t verbatim.
John Carmack

“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important”

Carmack isn’t wrong, but he succumbs to the same notion that all of us have. If film was invented and the only thing we did with it was make porno for 30 years, it’s clear that people would start associating film with porno. Of course there’s a lot more that you can do with film than show people having sex. Why not video games as well?

Well, some of folks are trying. Beyond “art games” plenty of Fun games have nuggets of message in them and they always will, but for those to work they’ve had to have a healthy dose of Fun, and often times having a mechanic that is Fun and provides the right message through gameplay leaves things muddy for the player. They’re focusing on the entertainment, not the meaning. The UnFun games movement isn’t a dead horse at all, in fact it can barely walk! Eventually, though, these will grow and mature into a market that will challenge the traditional video game market. Carmack is right, video games are porn. That might seem outrageous, and it definitely sells Fun video games way too short, but it wouldn’t be a wake-up call if it wasn’t annoying, right?

Now there is huge blank canvas for people to experiment in all kinds of ways. If you cross Fun off your To Do list, then you free yourself as a developer to search an almost endless amount of emotions/responses. That’s really what fun is isn’t it? It’s just a response. There are hundreds more we can look into.

So let’s go do that.

Don’t Compete

If we don’t compete with Fun games, we’ll save ourselves the enormous burden of honing in on that special formula of fun. If few people have really been making any games about honor [right Clint? :P], loss, or obesity, then we don’t have to trump the last guy. The bar is lower and that’s not a bad thing. That’s a great thing!
Kyle Gabler

“AAA game companies have hundreds of people with millions of dollars that allow them to produce high caliber games and would be incredibly daunting to compete with. So don’t.”

Is Hiatus the Correct Word Here?

I’m having a tough time giving a title to this post because I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to cover. There are a lot of things shifting at Intuition, there’s been a lot of change this year already and it looks like we’ve still not found a real “groove” that we’re comfortable with.

Greg and I have gotten a lot of inspiration in the past couple weeks from going to Indiecade and TIGJam, and we’ve more or less realized that we don’t feel comfortable continuing work on Liferaft, which is a very difficult decision this late in development. We started production back in March and we’ve been investing our time in the project since then, giving a little time off for Fig. 8, and that’s a lot of work to just put aside because we’ve gotten tired. I think the source of the problem isn’t that we’re incapable of doing the work or that we don’t like the game, but it is the constant creative challenge and the pressure we’ve put on ourselves to create an amazing game which lives up to all the games we love. There are so many design challenges with a somewhat open 2D platformer which we have never encountered before that we just have no idea how to create the best levels and encounters, and we don’t have the time or money to just keep iterating it until it’s perfect.

I’ve spent a ton of time trying to create tools which would allow us to create a rich living environment, but that simply shifts the problem to actually creating that environment. Building rich levels which really give a sense of place and meaning is incredibly difficult, and fitting that into a series of encounters which gradually push the learning curve is a huge challenge. I believe that we could overcome this challenge if we were rested and excited (and if we had a lot of cash to burn on iterating), but the reality is that we’re too tired to continue pushing.

This obviously doesn’t mean our time on Liferaft was totally wasted, we may still pick up the project if we feel we can return to it, and we’ve also learned a lot during the production. Part of the problem of such a big project is that it becomes very difficult to implement lessons learned into the early part of the project, which isn’t a problem with the development of small games like Fig 8. The thing about our small games, Gray, Wild an Free and Fig 8, is that they’re not perfect and that’s OK. We have the crutch of saying “Well, it’s just a 2 week game, it’s good enough,” which is something we can’t really say with Liferaft. This allows us to create something pure and quick, and we don’t have to worry about perfection because we’ll do better the next time.

So we’re working on two new small-ish Flash games, and Intern Rob is actually doing a third game in Unity, which I’ll be helping with as well. It may seem counter-productive to take on three separate projects when we’re supposedly too exhausted to work on Liferaft, but the reality is that working on small games is really energizing for some reason. Perhaps it is the thought that the end is in sight from the very start that keeps us pushing harder, but Gray and Fig 8 were more like vacations for us than actual work. We truly believe that we’re good at making small games, so it seems natural that we focus on that for a while.

To be honest, I still love Liferaft, and I sincerely hope we get a chance to return to it with a stronger focus and confidence. We haven’t worked very hard to promote interest in it and yet a lot of people have told us how awesome they think it is, which is really gratifying. The response on Kickstarter has been great as well, and it’s really awesome to see people coming out to support us, but the reality is that development over September has been pathetically slow, and we’ve lost a lot of the vision of where to go.

Expect some new stuff from us soon, and hopefully a lot more experimentation. We need to keep trying new things if we’re ever going to make this company work. We’ve got some really neat ideas we’re working on with other indies and I’m really excited about the games we’re doing now, hopefully we can start releasing some info about them soon :)

EDIT:
OH, forgot about the Kickstarter side of the issue. Everything donated so far through Kickstarter has been a pledge, which means no money has changed hands and nobody has actually given us any money yet. We’re going to cancel our project which will make all of the pledges null and all that stuff. We always viewed the Kickstarter page as an experiment, and it’s been a pretty interesting thing to watch, but if we’re not sure we’re going to complete Liferaft then there’s no way we could take any money from our fans. We would much rather just cancel it before we got the money than take your money and then fail to make the game.

To everyone who did support us, thanks so much! Even though we’re not actually going to get your money, your support really does mean a lot to us, it’s awesome to know some people believe in us enough to give money before the game is even done :)

Des Moines Parties Relevant to Iowa Game Developers

I would like to invite any Iowa game developers to two upcoming parties here in Des Moines.  The first is a Wes Anderson-themed costume party entitled I Always Wanted To Be A Tenenbaum. Since a friend or two from 8monkey Labs will be showing up, I figured I would invite any other devs in the area to stop on by and hang out.

We’ll probably be playing Pong in tennis outfits. Actually I don’t know what would be appropriate – maybe Eliss on a Tablet PC? But I have neither an iPhone nor a tablet, so how about you show up and bring something cool.

Also, if the concept on its own wasn’t enough to bring you here, FLATFORM, an awesome DJ/VJ duo will be doing an audio-visual mix-up of the films along with records of music from the various soundtracks. Even more notable is that ReadyMade magazine will be at the party documenting how awesome it is. If enough of us show up, I bet we could convince them to publish an article about how DIY hipsters should decorate their rooms with indie gaming merch from Attract Mode.

I Always Wanted To Be A Tenenbaum is October 17th at 8pm at 1705 Pleasant St, Apartments #1 & #2.  There will be rooms themed to each film, lots of quality free food, free drinks, and free prizes. Cover is $5 if you get a freaking sweet ticket (pictured above) in advance. Send an e-mail to iheartwesanderson [at] gmail [dot] com. I’ll be going as Bert Fischer, Max Fischer’s dad in Rushmore.

The second party is called MOVEMENT BASH, held at Impromptu Studio (300 SW 5th St) on October 22nd at 6pm. The idea behind this party is to celebrate the local entrepreneurs that are doing cool stuff in the area.  Other people from around the Midwest will be coming to Des Moines for Highlight Midwest, so this is intended as a party to get them warmed up.

I figured we should show up to let them know there are devs around making games.  Like the previous party, there will be free beverages, free food, and free entertainment.  No cover either.  My friend Matt Shwery hand-screenprinted the posters I designed for MOVEMENT BASH.  It was a fun project, and I hope to put those skills to use on some game posters in the future.  Maybe it’s just me, but I fantasize about guerilla marketing antics plastering posters and stickers of indie games all over the city.

We just got back from IndieCade and it’s Mike’s birthday.

Wow.

Mikengreg just returned safely from IndieCade to the gray plains of Iowa and we couldn’t be happier. It’s Mike’s birthday [wish him well on twitter] today and we’re both charged full of IndieCade. Countless memories, so many new-old friends, it was an unbelievable gathering of intimate and heartfelt personalities that we will never forget. We love you all.

Mike was so happy he dusted off his stripping skills for you all.

While I was considering on writing more of a reflective post on how this has transformed my life, I think right now there’s simply too much to talk about and the message would get lost. For now, here are some videos that capture a little bit of the tone of our experience.

Also check out my flickr set for all of the [crappy] pictures I took during the festival.

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How I find good folks to collaborate with.

I just got off the phone with my friend and intuition collective member, Ted Martens, and we were talking a bit about collaborations. Being that game development is rarely the product of just one person, [some exceptions being: cactus, eskill and mossmouth] collaborations of some kind are often useful. But when I talk to people interested in finding a deal like this with someone else, regardless of expertise, they are often lost on where to begin and what to look for.

To be clear, a collaboration is a type of working relationship where all parties agree to some kind of revenue split on a per-project basis. This has nothing to do with hiring employees, contractors or anything else. Anyway, here’s some of what I learned about finding good collaborators.

When I start to look for a collaborator, I go through a series of steps to get to the actual point of making the game. It’s my vetting process. But before that, I think it’s important to understand the nature of a collaboration. How it will work for you and the other person[s] and why.

Partners v. Collaborators

Usually, when someone thinks of making they start with The Almighty Game Development Company. It’s how I started. But truthfully, that’s a whole other mess. Finding a partner is a serious commitment, like marrying someone. A collaborator is more of a girlfriend/boyfriend situation, and rarely includes living together! ;) Distinguishing the two is important for a number of reasons.

Short-term commitments

By eliminating the idea of a long-term, serious commitment to a partner you can afford to fail. That’s incredibly important because you will fail a lot in your search for the right collaborator. The trick though, is to fail in short bursts, wasting as little time as possible.

You’re allowed to be desperate

If you were to form up a partnership with someone that would presumably last for many years, you wouldn’t want to go in signing that contract with a shred of desperation. Would you? Put your feelers out, lay yourself out for everyone to see. Sure, the search for a partner/collaborator is very similar but the emotional impact of people abusing your investment is much, much less.

Know what you want

By talking to people with the intention of creating something with them you’ll figure out your own turn-ons and turn-offs and what you’re looking for in someone else. There is a lot of complexity within anyone’s personality so it’s up to you to find out what values are most important to you. For instance, perhaps you need someone that aligns with your style of brainstorming, or you can’t work with people who want to make RTSs [or any other certain kind of game].

I’ve been able to isolate a number of these traits that clash/mesh when working with someone closely on a creative project.

Work style

This is a tough one to pin down because you need to work together first to truly understand how the other works, but that shouldn’t stop you from asking. Ask about their hours, when they are most productive, what’s the usual? The thing about these questions is that they all infer that they work regularly. If they come off as sporadic or unorganized, that’s pretty telling that they haven’t developed a style at all. If that’s the case, I’d recommend moving on since it means they probably haven’t been doing this for long enough anyway.

If they do have a style, know what you can tolerate and what you can’t. Usually this isn’t a large problem if you can understand it early enough. That way you’ll know how to work best with that person. If they need false deadlines, set them. If they binge and do 90% of their work in the space of one manic day, don’t hound them the rest of the week.

Creative Process

Not everyone wants to be a game designer, but most do. Finding a common ground on how to come up with a game idea can definitely be a challenge on its own, let alone two strangers fumbling around trying to agree on one. I think, more than anything, this is what trips up most collaborations. Too often, one person has a really strong attachment to an idea [or type of game] they bring to the table and can’t let it go. It’s important to allow for wiggle room, be lenient and let the idea be owned by all people involved. Even if one person came up with a single area or story idea, that’s still an important contribution. Get excited about the idea and riff on it, don’t obsess about owning the seed, you’ll get nowhere fast.

Demeanor/Personality

This is something that’s often a chemistry issue. While it’s ideal that you meet someone in person to truly gauge whether your personalities blend well, I think with a healthy chat via Skype or something else you can get a good idea for how the person generally is. This is a gut thing, so any further explanation is a bit ridiculous. Just make sure you get that “good feeling” from the other person.

Mission/Goal

Make sure you are both doing this for similar reasons. If halfway through you realize that your collaborator is doing this purely for profit, disregarding any possible creative ideas you have about design or awesomeness for the sake of pandering to a canned audience, things will go South very quickly. Again, know who you are and why you’re doing this. If you’re in it for the money, find someone else who’s in it for the money.

I’ve been watching Dexter and there was a really good moment in a recent episode [season 1] where he asks a married couple a very interesting question.
Dexter

Why do you love each other?

Married Couple

Because we share the same dream.

Even though they were killing smuggled Cubans and dumping them in the Pacific, they still shared the same dream. I found that comforting. The dream isn’t important, what’s important is that you share it. There’s someone for everyone.

Conflict Resolution/Breaking Point

This may be one of the hardest things to vet out as nobody [sane] wants to initiate a conflict for the sake of finding out how eachother reacts to it. Though you can definitely understand how someone deals with mini-conflicts by criticizing their ideas/design. If a prospective collaborator were to fly off the handle after you mentioning something about your apprehension to including real-time weather patterns in your game, you might want to step away.

Conflict is a very real and necessary element to any kind of team effort. They will arise and they must be dealt with in one way or another. If they cannot be handled in a reasonable way, that can be a leading cause to a game’s death or some other terrible outcome. Definitely think ahead as much as possible to how someone might respond to adversity.

The Vetting Process

Ok, so that’s some general things to look out for, now for the process itself. In step-by-step form!

STEP ONE: Put the feelers out

What you’re looking for is someone who is everything you’re not. Maybe it’s two people, maybe it’s five. Whatever it is, if you’re an artist, look for games with programmer/amateur art. If you’re a programmer, look for artists with game mockups, paintings and the like. You’re not necessarily looking for amazing games here. Those are games that already have the total package. You need to find half-baked games preferably mocked up or programmed by one person.

Alternatively, it’s important for you to put your best foot forward. If you’re an artist, provide a link to your portfolio that showcases your best and most relevant work. If you’ve made games before, point directly to them. If you’re a programmer, do the same. It’s not enough to simply be interested, you need to prove why you’re going to be awesome to work with. Make your intentions clear. More on that later.

This being the internet, there are loads of places to find people actively looking for collaborators. Though, because of that, things are pretty competitive. Here’s just a few. If you have any suggestions on other places let me know in a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

• TIGForums COLLABORATION THREAD
• Kong’s Collabs
• Kong Collab Forum
• Newgrounds Artists
• Newgrounds Programmers
• Pixelation Job Board
• FlashGameArt Artist List
• FlashGameLicense Collaboration Thread
• DeviantArt suggested by Colm

Now this list is focused around finding someone with experience in making Flash games. That’s where my experience lies, but surely there are other places, if you have one and you’re reading this. Please let me know so I can add it.

There are definitely other places to find collaborators. I met Andy Moore at the 2009 GDC in San Francisco. I found Jiggmin through his game Platform Racing 2. None of those happened based on a post from a forum, I found them by emailing with them directly.

STEP TWO: Set a course

Once you’ve got some prospective collaborators on the line, you’ve got to hook them. I’d encourage you to try and foster an environment that is as creatively open and fair as possible while also maintaining a very small scope for your first collaboration together. There are a few ways to do this.

1. Do not come in to a collaboration with a preconceived game idea
2. Split any future profits equally among original collaborators [for the most part]
3. Define a basic timeline. eg. “Let’s make this game in two weeks.”
4. Go further and agree on a mini-milestone such as: “Game ideas by tomorrow.”
5. Chat with them at length

All of these agreements will tell you a lot about the other person and definitely bring up a good many red flags if they exist. If someone misses the “game ideas by tomorrow” deadline, then that’s probably a red flag that they may not be as committed to this as you are. Alternatively, if they have Idea A that they really want to make and you’re just not into it but they keep pushing, well that’s another red flag. The reason you’re setting a course is so that you both have to follow it.

Frankly, a large part of this is about your gut. If you get a good vibe from the other[s] then move forward. I’ve had a fair amount of collaborations never get past this stage due to a whole host of problems. Many of them are completely understandable. Most of the time, it simply doesn’t work out. It’s nobody’s fault, just a bad combo.

STEP THREE: Fast Prototype

Once you’ve decided on an idea it’s important to get something up and running ASAP. Don’t get entrenched in a series of game design documents and planning schedules. Those can be useful, but if you spent a month doing all that only to find out that when it actually comes to making the game it’s not going to work out, then that’s time wasted. The main idea here is to fast forward to the good part so you can find out if it’s really going to work or not.

STEP FOUR: Communicate and Develop

Decide on a chat program/account that you will both use to keep in touch daily. If you are going on vacation, let the other person know. Since most of these happen remotely this kind of feedback is really important for motivating the other member[s]. Sometimes simply not knowing what’s up with the other person will coerce you into slowly losing hope that the project will actual be completed. If you’re wondering, shoot them an email! If they go AWOL, they go AWOL and that sucks, but at least you know, learn and move on.

It’s a bit ludicrous to reduce this stage [certainly the bulk of the time] to a couple paragraphs, but game development is its own animal all together. The best advice I can give is to communicate throughout the development process, even if it’s just saying “Hi” in the morning. It’s enough to let the other person know you care, which is a lot more important than most people think it is.

STEP FIVE: Profit

Once you’ve finished the game, regardless of the platform, there will certainly be a lot more work to do in order to distribute the game. Even if it’s a Flash game, you’ll probably want to find a sponsor, set up ads or even use some kind of microTX system. Whatever the case, the work continues and it’s important to realize that.

I hope my haphazard brain-dump helps a few folks out there, if you have comments or criticisms please post below. I’d be curious to hear other folk’s experiences with this practice.

Gray is in IndieCade and Fig. 8 will be at the Eurogamer Expo.

So we’ve known about the IndieCade thing for awhile but haven’t gotten around to announcing it officially just yet here. Though, we just found out Fig. 8 will be across the pond in the Eurogamer 2009 expo so I figured we’d get two announcements with one stone! It’s a pro PR move by us, to minimize our number of press releases. ;)

Anyway, for the IndieCade dealio we’ll be in LA for the entire thing, October 1st – 5th. Mike and I are doing a “salon” of some sort on Friday morning. They tell us we don’t need a cosmetology license or anything like that so I think it’s just us talking. Come and see to find out!

Also, the folks over at IndieCade wanted us to record a little video interview. We didn’t really know what to do but when we were recording my Mom called and saved the day by asking us some hard-hitting questions. Diane Sawyer is one of her idols and I think her influences really shine through in this revealing exposé. Watch it after the jump.

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