Forums » Everything else » How serious are you?

Hi guys, how much effort do you guys put into making games? Would be cool if we can get a sense of commitment levels.

To start off, I spend at least 4 hours a day to work on games. My day job is actually related to games too ( game analytics ), so I find it 'easier' to transition immediately to game dev after work.

Right now I'm doing it in between other things (which means that I spend a lot of time not doing it!) but the grand plan is to transition more into doing it more, ideally moving towards a 50/50 balance with the other stuff I do, instead of the current 95/5 balance I have...

I'm in full time and up to my neck in it, as an accidental* indie. Have yet to make my first dollar (first product not completed yet), but if not now then when, I say.

* I teach game programming in China (Canadian expat). Now that the first (4 month) cycle is over, I granted 2 internship positions, bought some MacBook Pros, and the 3 of us have been working on an iOS game full time, slated for release in a month or so. 2 more interns (from the second training cycle, last summer) are knocking at the door and if their game proposal is good, I'll buy more MBPs, bring them on board, and help them bring their games to completion.

@alexandre you probably have the biggest on-site team working on ImpactJS!

@alexandre what're the popular HTML5 gamedev frameworks in China besides ImpactJS?

I should have clarified. Our current project is for iOS and uses cocos2D. The next one may use Pixelwave, a framework that I start the training classes with (easier for fresh minds than cocos2d).

I wouldn't want to do team-based development with ImpactJS yet for a few reasons: cost (though low, one seat per team member would eventually add up), code protection (it's JS after all), and fear of "accidental leaks" of the ImpactJS core (I try to lead by example by buying everything I use, but this alien concept doesn't seem to catch: the interns take great pride in finding cracked apps and are quick to share their "discoveries" with others; ImpactJS would be no exception were I to introduce it to them).

So for now, I keep ImpactJS for myself. Team size: 1. :)

@fugufish
I'm not sure. None of the students (all Computer Science University majors in their 4th year) have heard of HTML5... It's a bit scary actually. Other than a base of C, I'm not quite sure what else they've learned during the past 3 years.

But they learn fast, though creative approaches to problem solving seem, again, alien. Only one shines in that she rejects the conventional approach (copy/paste the documented or reverse engineer the popular) and actually thinks and tries new things. But again, that crazy idea doesn't seem to catch with the others.

side note...

I'd love it if there were some events similar to Ludum Dare's here in this group. Perhaps a monthly "code an Impact game in 1 day" sprint. Nothing like a nasty-short challenge to get the juices flowing.

I promise I'd participate were one to be held.

@alexandre very interesting observation! tell your students that Kingdom Rush For iPad was made with Cocos2D. They're good friends of mine, and their coder virtually started learning Cocos2d just 4 months ago! It's getting close to Top10 on the App Store.

Alright I sure will. 4 months, eh? that will inspire them. :)

PS: did you say "coder", as in singular?

yes singular. But the game was already successful in its flash days. The coder just had to learn Cocos2D and redesign it ( with a lot of memory management troubles along the way ). Team of 3 ( one other game designer, one graphics dude )

That's something I keep worrying about: team balance. The game market rewards, I think, looks over innovative gameplay--probably the same as in life: opportunities tend to first be granted to those (people and products) of good looks. I'm afraid that our team, with its 5:1 coders ratio (I design half of the time + lead/code along with the other 2 guys the other half), is out of balance. The product (and resulting sales) may suffer from that. I outsourced some of the (audio) work to a friend of mine, but I tend to change my mind often (can you say project death), which makes the working relationship unstable.

I've come to conclude, 8 months into this training+coding project, that games are hard; in fact, I think they are much harder to do than serious apps (I've got 2 of those under my belt and I don't remember them ever being as hard as this one game).

@alexandre you're right. plus we haven't even discussed marketing aspects. making games is like the Californian gold rush , still is. People dream of being app store millionaires. Guess who made more money? The people selling pick-axes to miners.

but i'm still optimistic about indie game dev. we just need a kickass game + kickass marketing idea.

selling pick-axes... good analogy. I like it. :)

hi,

really nice talk, so i hope its okay if i join :-)

im a developer in a small (10 employees + 3 freelacer) agency.
im coding for ios, android and the web of course with a big bandwith of technologies.

game developement is my freetime after work and a satisfied girlfriend, so the time is sadly very small.

i started with impact because in my opinion the native languages on mobile devices are outdated soon (10 years? ). every mobile device is going to be a browser and everything takes place in the browser. googles chromebook is the first prototype. and the options of node and socket.io are such a great way to have a full realtime backend for unlimited interactions and multiplayer games.

i have a lot of new ideas and one of them is a funny little unnamed webgame ive started a few weeks ago.
because of all the crossdomain restrictions, its a greasemonkey plugin and for firefox only (for now)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oK0hvXYnq6M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VIfT5vs3G0
http://www.drailing.net/webgame/

a very interesting talk about marketing and the strategies for indi games was this year on devmania ( http://www.devmania.org/ the videos about OpenDevMarketing and GooseGogs )
unfortunately in german.

@drailing in welcher Stadt wohnst du? Habe 3,5 Jahre in der naehe von Stuttgart, plus 1 Jahr in Muenchen gewohnt.

could you summarize some strategies from the GooseGog video?

@drailing
Spot on about keeping the girlfriend/wife satisfied. Games are easy compared to that so maybe I've been asking the wrong question. :)

I can see that mobile platforms are ever more pervasive, but I have problems reconciling myself with the idea of making apps the code of which, Javascript or otherwise, can be ripped in a minute. That, plus a dearth of copycat ethics, justified by hunger by some though they may sometimes be, is why I still remain anchored to the "safer" environments for now.

Impact for now remains a new thing to play with in the near future, and I think that so much can be done with it. I just haven't taken the time to explore it yet, committed that I am to finishing my iOS game ASAP hence avoiding all distractions.

But a monthly Impact marathon, now that would be awesome. I think I could justify that to my wife. :)

@fugufish
habe in darmstadt studiert (Hesse ♥ ) und bin vor ca einem jahr zurück in die schöne pfalz (nach landau), also auch gar nicht mal soweit weg von stuttgart :)

the GooseGogs video in summary:
- dont sell your game to big publisher, they just want a done game as fast as possible and dont take care about the indi developers and the origin idea.
- if you want to have sucess with your game, you need a publisher. a publisher has the money to run the marketing machinery and has the connections to gameing shows/magazines.
- if you have the choice TAKE A COPY PROTECTION, the 2 days the game isnt cracked, people will buy it, without a protection your sales will drop a lot

@alexandre
everything related to classic singleplayer games, i agree.
no one releases a game on steam and offers the code open source.
im a big fan of paid work :-)
but if you have a good idea you can be sure, someone will copy it (e.g. angry birds) and its more annoying we have no option to protect our javascript-code.

but in my opinion impact is perfekt for multiplayer games, it needs a browser and as usual a browser is online.
you can integrate it in classic browsergames or you can start asynchron competitions or true realtime games (and the serverside code is safe from copies).

i hope a good idea / implementation with a nice community can no one steal that easy and i hope im not horribly wrong :-)

- if you want to have sucess with your game, you need a publisher. a publisher has the money to run the marketing machinery and has the connections to gameing shows/magazines.

I take it you've never heard of the little phenomenon known as indie developers, then? There are quite a few popular indie titles that have made people a lot of money. I mean, Minecraft, Braid, Bastion (they only have a publisher because XBLA requires them to have one, they wouldn't have a publisher if they could have avoided it)... these are popular, successful games.

I also take it you haven't heard of the Humble Indie Bundles? The last one took in over $2m in revenue over two weeks or so.

no one releases a game on steam and offers the code open source.

It's rare but it has been done, sadly only twice to my knowledge. Lugaru (Wolfire) and Revenge of the Titans (Puppygames) are both on Steam and both have had their source code released in the past.

- if you have the choice TAKE A COPY PROTECTION, the 2 days the game isnt cracked, people will buy it, without a protection your sales will drop a lot

We're not quoting that old chestnut again are we? I have yet to see a copy protection that actually stands up to scrutiny. Especially since what it ends up doing is screwing legitimate customers - every DRM system that is used disallows the customer from doing things while the pirates have no such limitations.

Spore is probably the best example in recent times, where legitimate customers had a 5 install limit, plus the game installed a 'copy protection' that worked in a way much as viruses do by injecting themselves into your computer.

Legitimate customers bought a product that installed a piece of software into their system that modified the drivers for the CD/DVD drives on the computer. In some cases, it merely prompted the machine to have to be reconfigured to work properly afterwards, in others the same copy protection scheme has been known to physically damage drives. (SecuROM is a wonderful thing. NOT.)

You're also assuming the same fallacy that advocates have been pushing for years, which is blatantly false: a pirated copy will somehow magically turn into a sale if the copy protection is good enough. It won't. Never has, never will. It's also known that a number of people who 'pirate' a game do actually go on to purchase them if they enjoy it enough, particularly if they have a pirated copy and the original has some nefarious DRM on it that makes playing it legitimately a bad idea. (See SecuROM, Starforce)

Getting more back to the point, monetising a web game is difficult. The two approaches of doing so are either to use ads or put it behind some kind of paywall/subscription service. That's not impossible, I recently set up a site that allowed me and a friend to work on Impact games, where both of us have an Impact licence - so the game isn't available publicly.

Building a game based on Impact into a 'native' app for mobile devices is relatively easy, on the other hand, and that's where a lot of money can be made with a suitably well implemented, well promoted etc. game.

Alternatively, you turn it into a service where the game is part of the overall package and that people need to pay to do something else; this model works for Kingdom of Loathing, Evony and plenty of other games, where the client itself is not enough of the puzzle and merely copying the client wouldn't really achieve much. (I'd also note that KoL is only 'multiplayer' in the broadest definition.) But note that being 'multiplayer' isn't necessarily a pre-requisite of success in the web world, primarily it's about having something that can't readily be handled locally, and running it as a service rather than a product is the way to do it.

@Arantor all valid points. Publishing ( and licensing) does have a few strong points. It's how the flash game industry got to big.

The Flash game 'industry' got big because of two things: 1) Facebook, 2) the ability to inject ads meaningfully into games.

Mostly between those two, there have been a few big successes financially and a lot of people chasing the dream and copying or cross-licensing files, but the thing with Flash games is that it's not that hard to make them and it's very easy to make a bad game.

From what I've seen it's harder to make a bad game in Impact than it is in Flash, mostly because it's trivially easy to follow a tutorial and craft a bad knock-off in Flash, while for Impact (and generally in JS), that actually doesn't happen yet.

Also regarding 'copying the source', what people forget is that the source is only part of the story. You also need the graphics and other assets - and even then anything reusing them is likely to be an imitator rather than real competition.

@Arantor
i wrote a small summary of the points in the video about goosegogs and the experience the developer made. this is not my personal statement.
but you are absolutly right in most of your points.

nearly all classical browsergames are running a free to play strategy, where everyone can play and its an optional feature if you want to pay.

perhaps is my personal illusion, but i like it to buy pick-axes etc in a game i like, althought its free to play. and i think impact is predestined to make those webgames/browsergames a lot more fun.

I wasn't implying that it was your statement or not, more that I'm rather fed up of hearing the 'YOU MUST HAVE COPY PROTECTION' myth being thrown around and the more it's repeated, the more people come to believe it, despite the fact it's really not true. I'm sorry if you thought I was having a dig at you; I wasn't, I was just digging at how wrong the argument really is and how much it's repeated as truth.

Yup, you're entirely right about browser-games running a freemium model, it's about the only way they can run other than ads, and ads don't pay the bills for anything dynamic.

There are two models of freemium I've seen and both have their proponents and critics, but I have to be honest, the one where you buy bolt-ons that significantly give you a gameplay advantage against other players irritates me. I accept the need to make money, but to do so by giving players with deeper pockets an instant advantage over free players is pretty galling.

I've seen games where you can actually put in vast amounts of real cash (even with the game giving you options to drop hundreds of US $ in a single hit, not even it being something you had to do over several operations), purely to make yourself more competitive. Such games have two problems: 1) you get idiots with more money than social skills being absolute ass-clowns because they think their money entitles them to be jerks and 2) people who can't afford to pay as much, even if they're more skilful and/or at least as enthusiastic about the game are penalised and made into second or third class citizens in the game.

I think games like that should just come with a built-in option where you can drop a ton of cash and simply get a big red "I WIN THE GAME" button. It'd make the point.

very passionate views! hope it gets channelled into awesome games. Will definitely check out both your games

i can understand both sides.
the goosegogs developer found his game on usenet just 1 hour after launch... so i can understand that his next game will have a protection.
and because of these damn protections i buy games exclusively on steam. goosegogs (and his next geme?) is not on steam because steam wants a meta score to publish, so i wont buy it...

@freemium
completly right: its hard to make a balanced game where everyone can be sucessful and money plays a secondary role, but not that impossible :-)

Eh, I remember hearing about Spore being available for download before release. If you don't want it pirated, don't release it, simple as that. But it still doesn't change the fact that it won't drastically improve sales.

There are even free and open source packages downloadable on warez sites...