Our Arrival in LA-LA Land

IndieCade takes place in Culver City, a close suburb of Los Angeles California, the Most Horrible Place on Earth. i don’t care for it. Ever since getting dumped out of a cab at two in the morning somewhere in LA, and asking some nearby police officers to help point me towards my hotel, and being denied, i don’t much enjoy traveling there. Culver feels a little bit smaller and a little bit homier than LA proper, but it’s still carved up by vicious six-lane mini-highways threatening to Frogger you at every crossing.

i traveled to IndieCade with fellow indie game developer Michael Todd (@thegamedesigner), whose antics i hope you’ve been reading about on my Twitter account (@untoldent). In case you missed it, here’s a taste:

Good times.

Despite the chaos, Michael Todd managed to spot someone on the plane who was going to IndieCade as well, zeroing in on a guy who was playing SpaceChem on an iPad. That’s how we made friends with Matt from NVIDIA, who agreed to split a cab to Culver with us.

We stayed at the historic Culver Hotel, an early 20th century joint situated just up the street from the former MGM (now Sony) studios. Apparently Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr and Jack Haley used to whoop it up there while filming Showgirls.

Travel-weary and hungry, our first order of bidness was to beeline for the nearby In-N-Out Burger, which certain folks on Twitter can’t stop raving about. My hopes were high for what many were calling the best fast food burger in existence. My concierge told me to order a “double double, animal-style” from the secret menu. This being LA, i made absolutely sure that we were both referring to a burger.

Of course, no Earthly burger could live up to that amount of hype. You couldn’t find a more pedestrian burger. And American cheese sucks. i took special note of the burger wrapper:

If the very best thing you can say about a burger is that it’s been wrapped in paper since 1948, you’ve got yourself a shitty burger. Here’s a list of other bullet points the restaurant could have printed on the wrapper:

Since 1948, In-N-Out Burgers have been

• round
• legal in 48 states
• made from 100% stuff
• found only at In-N-Out
• edible

Aim high, burger joint. Aim high.

Spectacles, Testicles …

The night we arrived, IndieCade held its big awards show. It was much bigger than i expected it would be. The invite suggested we come dressed in “cocktail” attire. This was the best i could muster:

Many of the other indies, being primal savages, managed to squeeze themselves into pants for the event (which is more than i think most of us hoped for). At the awards show, we were met with a bona fide red carpet entrance.

You never really get to see a red carpet photo from the perspective of its intimidated subjects, so here you go:

Inside, the place was lit up like a Christmas tree. A … Chinese-lanterned Chinese Christmas tree from China.

IndieCade assembled a list of Hollywood actors from geek-related movies and shows to present the awards, which must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Freaks and Geeks actor Samm Levine (famous also for his leading role in Showgirls) brought his A-material, including “programmers never shower” and “gamers live in their moms’ basements and masturbate a lot”. i mean, granted, but i’m sure there were one or two folks in the audience who resented being lumped in with the rest of us.

At one point, two young starlets joked that they should start making out at the podium. i could feel the room bristle uncomfortably. Know your audience, kids.

Ponycorns got a few unexpected shout-outs from the mic, and was nominated for the Community Impact award, but ultimately lost to Johann Sebastian Joust. But it’s an honour just to lose bitterly.

As the party drew on tipsily into the wee hours, more than a few people asked me where my daughter – my five-year-old daughter – was. i had no response. My Twitter pal Ian Bogost cooked up an appropriate comeback:

“Fuck if I know. She got trashed and went home with some 8 year old.”

The Lay of the Land

Aside from the Santa Monica-staged awards ceremony, IndieCade took place within a 3-block radius of our hotel. In the parking lot across the street, they’d erected some neat puzzle buildings designed by a local artist, whose nearby gallery hosted some of the finalists.

One of the venues was the Ivy Substation, a local theatre:

The park on the way to the Ivy had a really kickass climbing tree, if you’re into that sort of thing. i mention it in the off chance that you are:

Most of the finalists’ games were on display at a nearby firehall which, to my surprise, continued to operate throughout the weekend.

Alienware donated the equipment for the showcase. Somewhat unfairly, certain developers were assigned desktop machines with proper monitors, while others of us were assigned little 14 inch laptops. Ponycorns was squished on to one of these diminutive little screens, and shared a cramped table with an interactive geology textbook. “HELL naw,” said i, and grabbed an extra table. Then i proceeded to pimp my table out, Untold Entertainment style:

After the first day, the IndieCade organizers shut down my merch sales, claiming that i couldn’t sell anything because the firehall was a public place and i didn’t have a vendor’s permit. At first, i was asked to remove the two price tags from the shirts and plushies, and was later asked to remove the T-shirt rack entirely. It was kind of a bummer, but one day of T-shirt sales was enough to pay for my cab rides and meals at the event. i can’t help but think that if i had produced a valid vendor’s license for the organizers, they still would have asked me to shut down my merch sales … but that’s just conjecture on my part.

Patty Wagon

i was asked to speak on a Family Friendly Games panel on Sunday, which was a real thrill. Soon after, some of us piled into a car with my friend Joel from Riot Games (@lowpolycount) to hit up the rarified East coast burger joint Five Guys.

Everywhere you go in California, there are these vague “shit be causin’ cancer” signs:

Conferences are exhausting, and IndieCade was no exception. After being on my feet for twelve hours on the concrete firehall floor, i was wiped. Thank goodness – three tall, frosty glasses of Cherry Coke came to my rescue.

Kids Play the Darndest Things

On Saturday and Sunday, the firehall was open to the public to just wander in, try out the games, and meet their creators. This was, by far, my favourite aspect of the festival. i just loved talking to Joe and Jane Community Member, and it was especially exciting whenever a little kid played the game:

Next to our booth was Johann Sebastian Joust, the game that edged us out in our award category. It drew large crowds with lots of clapping and laughter.

Each player gets a Playstation Move controller. The players must move around the arena in time to the Bach soundtrack – if you move too quickly, you’re out. So the game is all about swatting someone else’s remote to make it move too quickly and knock that player out of the game. It’s a neat idea, and people loved it.

i met a fellow wearing a paper tie whose father was the subject of Deepak Fights Robots, a Pac Man/Bubble Bobble mash-up that took home the award for best game design.

That’s a Rap

The festival concluded with the Audience and Developer’s Choice Awards. A stunned Jim and emilie McGinley accepted their Audience Choice award, but not before the crowd tried a few rounds of Local No. 12′s the MetaGame.

In the MetaGame, each player gets a deck of cards. Most cards depict video games, while some cards pose a comparison question, like “Which game is a better waste of ten minutes?” or “Which game deserves to be locked in a vault for 1000 years?” The challenger chooses a discussion card, and both players throw down a game card. Then they debate. It’s all very Socratic.

i squared off against Myles Nye here on the left, who wound up trouncing all comers. He later brought down the house while defending Parappa the Rapper by freestyle rapping his rebuttal.

IndieCade 2011 was capped with a backyard barbecue at Robin Hunicke’s house. Robin is a producer at That Game Company (Flow, Flower, and the upcoming Flowest: Flow Harder).

i sat down next to Richard to reclaim my key drive, which Phil had borrowed to transfer some music. He introduced himself, and then said “i loved Ponycorns.” i had to admit that i got stuck somewhat early in his game when i was shot repeatedly in the face. He assured me i could play Uncharted 2 without missing important plot details.

Richard is a very nice guy. Very British. This is confusing, because his last name is “Lemarchand”. He makes frequent, almost self-conscious references to Dr. Who. i have a sneaking suspicion he’s an imposter – a Frenchman posing as an Englishman for some bizarre reason. You can’t fool me, Lemarchand. Blood will out.

The Voyage Home

It was an exhausting five days. By the end of it, Michael Todd had learned that hotels not only charge exorbitant amounts for in-room phone calls, but also for in-room death threats.

When Untold Entertainment Inc. turned three last year, we were reeling from the fallout of the global economic collapse. It’s been a slow, difficult recovery, and we still have a lot of work left to do, but i’m happy to say we’ve nosed out of the tailspin. This was a landmark year for Untold; we are poised to have an absolutely incredible fifth year going forward. If last year was our Empire, this year is our Jedi. Bring on the Ewoks, baby.

Here’s a look at the Year That Was.

2010

August

Last fiscal ended on a dark note. We were struggling through Spellirium, our post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure game, as various production problems saw the budget sapped with very little to show for our efforts. The year ahead had us planning to complete service projects in the hope that we’d bank enough margin to continue working on the game.

September

My book was published! Unity 3D Game Development by Example: A Beginner’s Guide is a great introduction to game development, computer programming, and Unity 3D itself, which is a super-powerful game engine for creating on a wide variety of platforms. Thanks to you all for buying a copy, or for recommending the book to your friends.

Fall

We launched Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two on YTV.com. Jinx 3 was the first game to use UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System. It supported multiple playable characters, an inventory system, a subtitle system, game variable control, and a “puppet” guidance system, which enables the developer to write commands to build in-game cutscenes. Jinx 3 was the first UGAGS game we developed, but the second one to launch, after Heads.

i spoke about UGAGS at Gamercamp Level 2.0, a Toronto convention celebrating the joy of video games.

October saw the publication of a now-infamous article about the Vortex Game Development Competition, where the previous year’s winners were revealed to have never worked on the winning game.

i experimented with a feature called Linkbait Tuesdays, where i used the Linkbait Generator to spit out randomized titles for blog posts. It wasn’t much appreciated by my readership, and didn’t appreciably increase blog traffic, so i killed the feature.

On Hallowe’en, we launched our second free games portal called ZombieGameWorld.com. If you know the song about the old woman who swallowed the fly, you’ll understand our challenge with these portals. We built WordGameWorld.com in order to attract a word game-playing audience, so that we could control the site’s ad inventory and find an audience for Spellirium. When the site suffered from flagging traffic, i decided to build a network of game portals; ZombieGameWorld.com was ostensibly created to help drive traffic to WordGameWorld.com, which should drive traffic to Spellirium.

To round out the fall, i grew a beard to win hockey tickets, despite not enjoying hockey. i spoke at an interactiveontario luncheon. And i wrote an article for Mochiland.com on the disgraceful refusal by contracting companies to credit their Flash game developers.

Winter

As the cold weather set in, i took a position at a private college teaching Unity 3D game development. i had hoped for a better experience than i had at Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined, but no such luck: halfway through the course, which was dubbed Programming II (the students had supposedly been taught Flash/Actionscript for four months prior to my arrival), i had to dial everything back and re-teach programming basics to them. And by basics, i mean stuff like “What does the ‘=’ symbol do?” and “What is a variable?”

The class was only eight students, but i had no fewer than two of those students’ parents call or email me to ask why little Billy was getting low grades on tests. YaRly.

In this, i further proved the thesis in my contentious What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges articles (Part 1 and Part 2). Helicopter parenting and failure aversion have created a generation of non-functional kids, which i later dubbed The Most Useless Generation. My diagnosis is that many college undergrads have escaped high school without ever understanding How to Be a Student (an article i wrote while teaching last winter, which i’ve only just posted now that i’ve put some distance between myself and the situation).

In the interest of helping young people be more successful, i offered My Prescription for (More) Successful Students, which my students all ignored, and i wrote a serious of articles called Understanding Programming to explain programming basics, which my students also ignored. Oh well. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but sometimes you just have a retarded horse.

2011

Spring

In 2011, we launched an exciting blog series called Pimp My Portal, detailing our struggles to drive traffic to ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com. The hook here was The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget, a pot of just $100 that i spent on Fiverr.com to buy testimonial videos to promote the site, the rationale being that search loves video. The Old Lady who Swallowed the Fly reared her ugly head again, as i found that i had no audience to watch the videos to go to the portal to go to the OTHER portal to find out about Spellirium. The Pimp My Portal series is ongoing.

Around this time, we were commissioned by The Centre for Skills Development and Training to produce a series of games to help teach workplace skills to 15-30-year-olds. The resulting game, Summer in Smallywood, enabled us to make a number of improvements to UGAGS, including auto-save, debug tools, navigation meshes, saved game profiles, and threaded conversations. We’re looking forward to working further with The Centre in the coming year to expand our educational gaming experience.

In March, i admit i was feeling a little bit desperate and squirrely. Work was trickling into the shop in fits and starts, and i was really wondering whether renewing our lease would be wise. Wild-eyed and hungry at GDC, i was overcome with the need to let the world know i am here, like the tiny Whos living on a speck on a clover stalk, who ultimately issue a resounding YOPP! to show the jungle animals that they exist (and to keep from getting boiled in beezlenut oil).

To that end, i pulled some shenanigans at the conference, which came to be known as the famous GDC Coin Stunt. The resulting press on most major online games sites greased the wheels for what was to be our greatest victory yet.

Over the years, we’ve found it so difficult to drive enough steady Flash game development work that we haven’t been able to bank enough time or enough money to do our own thing. To date, the only chance we seem to get is TOJam, an annual weekend-long Toronto game jam, during which we always produce a complete and original game. Indeed, nearly every title in the Original Games section of our portfolio is a TOJam game, completed in one weekend by me alone.

This year, we used UGAGS to create Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. i worked on the game with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra. It was no accident that i was wearing my “I have all the coins” T-Shirt in the TOJam group photo this year. After the game went live, it went viral, initially being featured on many of the same sites that covered the coin stunt. In the few months since its launch, the ponycorns game has gone on to become an international sensation (i just granted an interview to a Japanese newspaper this week!).

With the ponycorns game, we took a very important step to improving our viability as a dev studio by launching the game on the Apple iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook. On the third day of its launch week, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was featured by Apple in its New & Noteworthy section.

Ponycorns also drove us to develop our first alternate revenue stream based on our original IP. We launched the Untold Booty merchandise store with a number of different ponycorns-based SKUs, and have been very happy with the results.

Throughout the year, i remained active with the IGDA Toronto Chapter, organizing some well-received events including the speed dating-style Game.Set.Match, the Open Mic Night rant session, Straight Outta TOJam: Pint-sized Postmortems, and the Fund in the Sun workshop.

Through the spring, we developed a great puzzle/platformer game called Spladder, which currently runs on a number of kids’ broadcaster sites – YTV.com. TVO.org and CBBC.co.uk among them.

We launched a new games portal called TowerDefenseGameWorld.com and filled it with free tower defense games, because it’s difficult to prove a theory about a network of games portals lending each other traffic if you only have two portals. We also gave a major upgrade to ZombieGameWorld.com by expanding it to feature zombie games and goodies on other platforms.

i know an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course.

Summer. Future.

We’ve come full circle. Spellirium remains unfinished, but we’re finally spending time on it again. We poked Kahoots with a stick to see if it was still twitching. Thankfully, it is! We’ve made some creative changes to it to spare a fellow indie game dev company some unpleasant legal strife; look forward to a Kahoots-related announcement in the coming months.

i’m writing the 3.x update to my Unity 3D book, which will be ready shortly (send me an email and i’ll add you to our notification list when the update is released).

Going forward, our plan is to leverage the success of the ponycorns game to make major in-roads into game development and education for kids (see our article on CBC.ca). i’m preparing a pilot project with Cassie’s elementary school this fall. We’re preparing the unstoppable UGAGS engine for a business-to-business, and then consumer, release – expect it to have a kid-friendly interface. We’re polling people for their interest in an iPhone/iPod version of the game (send us an email!). i’ll be delivering my conference session Ponycorns: Lightning in a Jar at the Screens festival this fall, and at other conventions throughout the year. Ponycorns is being translated into Japanese in anticipation of the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Games Show.

Untold Entertainment’s fifth year will be filled with low-life panda bears, daily word puzzles, gamesByKids, and more great articles about game development and education, peppered with rude jokes and stolen LOLcat pictures. Thanks so much for your support, everyone! i’m really looking forward to writing an amazing recap next year.

Recently, the battery power on the iPod has been dropping dramatically. This week, it stopped charging altogether.

i took the device to the Apple Store, where the Genius™ in the back told me that the iPod’s battery “is consumable”, and that two years is pretty much the upper limit of use that i could expect from the device.

He offered me exactly one option:

1. Pay $69 (about a quarter of the price of the device) to swap it for a new one with a fresh battery.

All-Consuming

These two devices are the first Apple products i’ve ever purchased. i’ve been hearing for years about how user-friendly the company’s products are, and how they have a mind toward building green products (i believe their latest laptop is made from wood chips and rabbit pellets).

i can’t think of anything less user-friendly than a 21st century device which does not allow its owner to replace its battery. The battery is “consumable”, yes … but consumption implies that i can replenish the consumable, and consume it again.

i consume food on a daily basis, but once the food in my fridge runs out, i replenish it with new food – i don’t pay a quarter of the price to buy a new fridge.

Imagine a world where we were unable to replenish the power supplies in our devices. Car’s battery died? Pay a quarter of the price to trade it in for a new car. Video game controllers? After a few weeks, you need new ones. Watches? Remote controlled cars? Hearing aids? Despite it being a simple process to swap in a fresh power source, all of these devices would become defunct.

Green and Greed

There are two angles to this issue: green and greed.

Apple’s design decision to prevent users from being able to replace the battery is an environmental no-no. i’m sure they’ll do all sorts of wonderful things with my traded-in device (like throwing a new battery in it and selling it as refurbished, or planting it to grow an Apple tree or whatever), but because i feel like Apple is ransoming my use of the device, i have half a mind to throw my defunct iPod into the ocean, specifically aiming it at a dolphin’s face. Perhaps i’ll dip it in crude oil a few times first? Apple’s locked design of the device is environmentally unfriendly.

Perhaps more transparently, this is planned obsolescence at its ugliest. To specifically design a device that lasts only two years is irresponsible at best – insidious at worst. Apple knows darn well that after two years, an iPod customer will likely have made a significant temporal, financial and emotional investment in the device – purchasing iTunes apps and songs, sinking time and money into certain iOS games, and integrating the device into his lifestyle (public transit and toilet time, most notably). Squeezing another 25% of the device cost from the customer every two years is a solid way to pad company coffers.

Not a Fan

When i slide the back of my Nexus One Android phone open, there’s a replaceable battery staring back at me. When it gives up the ghost – hopefully beyond the 2-year mark – i can choose to purchase a new battery from either Google or a third party, at significantly less than 25% of the phone’s price ($10 or less on eBay – that’s 2% of the device price).

Apple has its fans, to be sure, but i’m not willing to sacrifice basic consumer control over the utility of my devices for a few shiny logos and a high-profile (yet environmentally irresponsible and ultimately consumer-hostile) brand.

UPDATE

i didn’t mention it in the original article, but things started to go South once i installed the iOS4 update for my device. Suddenly, the battery lasted one hour instead of the days of juice that it used to provide. i mentioned this to the Apple Store guy, who swore up and down that iOS4 has no effect on battery life. He actually made me feel like a bit of a fool for even bringing it up.

Enter the Internet:

• iOS 4 Severely Affects iPod touch Battery Life
• iOS 4 Causing iPod Touch Battery Problems
• iOS 4 drawing complaints about poor battery life from iPod Touch users
• iOS4 Battery Issue?
• iPod Touch Battery Issues in iOS 4
• iPod Touch battery life dwindled after installing iOS 4

So it appears that, non-replaceable battery notwithstanding, the iOS4 upgrade may have devoured whatever juice the “ancient” 2-year-old battery had left in it. i’ll pay another visit to the Apple Store tomorrow to see if i can’t get this sorted out.

ANOTHER UPDATE

Today i returned to the Apple Store, ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth. Craftily, i told the salespeople that i wanted to buy an expensive iPod Touch, but was concerned because the battery wasn’t replaceable. How long would the device last? One guy said “WELL over 2 years … possibly 4 or 5 years.” Hmm. But then a girl i spoke to said that it depends on my usage.

Me:Very well – i pay $400 for the device. How much usage does that get me, at maximum abuse? 3 months?
Her: Probably more than that, but i can’t say for sure.
Me: You can’t say for sure that i’m going to drop $400 on an iPod Touch, and it’s going to last longer than 3 months?
Her: Okay – probably longer than 3 months.
Me: How long? 6 months?
Her: i can’t say for sure.
Me: So $400 won’t even buy me 6 months with the device?
Her: It all depends.
Me: Depends on what? Don’t you have any benchmarks?

By that point, the “Genius” at the back was calling my name. As a (fake) new customer, though, i don’t think i would have made a purchase with such a non-committal answer. At least lie to me, lady. You’re in sales, after all.

i went in hollering and carrying on and telling them that the iOS4 upgrade had destroyed my battery. One Genius had to step in and, in his smoothest “i’m a very very cool dude who works at the Apple Store and check out my awesome tattoos but they’re too obscure for you to understand” voice, he asked me to calm down. Said that iOS4, while very hard on the battery and probably a bad idea for iPod Touch owners to install, had nothing to do with my device’s battery dying. Completely unrelated.

i asked him how an ill-advised upgrade that destroyed battery life could possibly be unrelated to a battery-destroying issue. He said it was pure coincidence that my battery happened to die after i upgraded. i reiterated that after i installed the iOS4 upgrade, my battery life began to rapidly decline over a period of two weeks, going from holding a charge for days, to holding a charge for an hour. He said that when the batteries degrade, they do so very quickly. i called bullshit.

They gave me options. A battery replacement was $99. The other guy jumped in and said they don’t actually replace the battery – they give me a new device, and that would cost me $89. Both numbers were a chunk higher than the $69 mystery figure the “Genius” had offered me one day earlier. i felt like i was paying The Price is Right.

The other “Genius” offered to wipe my device and install iOS 4.1 on it. “Genius” #2 told me that any time i used wifi on the device, i’d have to shut it down by putting the iPod into airplane mode before i pushed the Sleep button. There was still no option to disable the “always-on” wifi problem that iOS4 introduced.

“Genius” #2 also mumbled something to his colleague about there being a software bug on the recharge screen when it showed one red stick, which mine did. Funny – it was the first i was hearing of it.

So i told the guy to go ahead with the reset. He wiped the device, and upgraded to iOS 4.1. Suddenly, the device started to hold a charge. i went home and plugged it in, charging it fully. It took much longer to charge this time, instead of the half hour it took when it was suffering from iOS 4.0. Wifi is off. The battery is draining at a normal, pre- iOS4 rate.

Apparently, iOS4 is not an issue for older iPod Touch devices until Pope Steve says it is. Until then, ranting and raving and demanding satisfactory service in the face of a conflicting and ever-changing customer service response is the only way. You need to be a modern-day Galileo to convince Apple that the universe does not revolve around their company.

But now that my months-old Pocket Frogs saved game file is lost forever, there’s very little compelling me to use my iPod in the near future, charged battery or otherwise.

(huge thanks to @cartoondutchie for helping me save my breath)

We followed up on allegations made by CultureGET, a news blog that covered the event, and found that last year’s Vortex winners, Alex Quick and John Josephson, likely had nothing to do with the creation of the winning game.

The Facts

Here’s what days of online research turned up:

1. Colour-Coded, the winning entry, was created and developed by a team of five developers in the UK called the Pixel Pirates.
2. Colour-Coded won the UK-based Dare to be Digital competition in August 2009, two months before the game was entered at Vortex. As a result, the game was nominated for a Scottish BAFTA award five months after Vortex 2009, and also appeared at the Scottish Game Jam in early 2010.
3. Neither Alex Quick nor John Josephson are listed as members of the Pixel Pirates team on the Pixel Pirates front page, team page, or team photo. They are not mentioned at all during the team’s year-long development diary.
4. The plan by Alex and John to continue developing Colour-Coded in Toronto with a team of five developers, and the Pixel Pirates’ alleged sale of the game IP to Alex and John and detachment from the project, is similarly never mentioned on the team’s very public development diary.

Eligibility Doubts

These were the Vortex Competition 2009 eligibility guidelines:

II ELIGIBILITY AND APPLICATION REQUIREMENTS

1. Eligibility

a) An Entrant is:

i) An individual person or team of persons (with the majority of the group being Canadian citizens), who is or who are Canadian citizens or residents; or,

ii) A legal partnership or a corporation established under the federal laws of Canada or the laws of a Canadian province or territory, and which is resident in Canada.

If the two Canadian winners are (generously) considered team members, despite having no apparent involvement in the game, the team is still comprised of a majority of UK citizens, and so does not meet the first eligibility criterion. Of the five Pixel Pirates, only Murray now lists a Canadian address, in British Columbia. Vortex organizer Sari Ruda confirmed for us that Murrary is a UK citizen.

The Question of Incorporation

Failing the first criterion, the team needed to have a Canadian corporation or legal partnership to be eligible for the competition. I asked Alex and John whether such a corporation existed, and neither winner laid claim to one.

In asking the two winners and the competition organizer about the apparent eligibility error, I received conflicting responses. Alex told me that at the time of the competition in October 2009, he and John were speaking “on behalf of” the Pixel Pirates team in the UK.

For his part, John claims that he and Alex had been working with the Pixel Pirates to commercialize the Colour-Coded prototype for nine months, when development was supposed to continue in Toronto with five local developers. Given that the game’s prototype development cycle ended in August 2009, and that Vortex was two months later, it becomes difficult to see where these nine months could have fallen.

John said “The original members of the Pixel-Pirates had moved onto other projects and job opportunities, and would not be involved in the production of the game.”

I contacted Pixel Pirate Liam Wong to verify this. Liam initially agreed to answer my questions about Vortex, but later failed to respond. Liam’s Twitter message, in which he agreed to be interviewed, seems to have been deleted.

A Year is a Long Time to Remember

Vortex organizer Sari Ruda said, surprisingly, that Alex and John did have a Canadian corporation that actually owned the Colour-Coded IP. This is information that neither Alex nor John offered when I spoke with them, despite each being asked the question directly, twice. On my second request, Alex pleaded memory loss:

I’ve told you everything I can remember about the vortex competition last year. As I mentioned in my last email, I have been out of contact with John and the Scottish team (with the exception of my friend, Murray) since shortly after Vortex ended.

Despite having “moved on”, the Pixel Pirates managed to maintain the Colour-Coded production blog for an additional year, showcase it at the 2010 Scottish Game Jam, and appear in person to accept a Scottish BAFTA nomination for the game.

Responsibility

All of this raises the question of who was ultimately responsible to ensure Entrants’ eligibility. The 2009 guidelines state that by entering, Entrants warrant their own eligibility. As a check and balance, the competition organizers may request proof of eligibility from the Entrants. After organizers confirm eligibility, the competition’s judges have the final authority in declaring an Entrant eligible. Alex said:

“At the time of presenting Colour Coded at Vortex, we made it clear that we were doing it on behalf of the ‘Pixel Pirates’, which was the name of the UK team I had contact with. This didn’t seem to be an issue for judges and everything went ahead.”

In the email response from Sari, where she asserted that John and Alex had both a Canadian corporation and ownership of Colour-Coded, and were therefore eligible to enter, Sari unnecessarily added:

“We (the organizers) were not involved with the choice of the winners in any way. Only the judges were and we were not on the panel and had no influence on any of them during the whole of Vortex or spoke to any of them while they were deliberating at any time.”

Methinks the lady doth protest too much. If Alex and John were eligible, as Sari claims, I can’t fathom why she would then try to wash her hands of the responsibility to confirm the eligibility of the Entrants in her competition, leaving the high-profile final judges, including UbiSoft CEO Yannis Mallat, holding the bag.

Possible Outcomes

The worst case scenario, and the one that the online record and Alex’s own admission suggest, is that Alex Quick and John Josephson were not eligible to enter the 2009 Vortex Competition.

If Sari and John’s claims pan out, then the best possible outcome is this: in the six weeks leading up to Vortex, two Canadians bought an award-winning Scottish-developed video game prototype and presented it as their own game, and subsequently won the competition.

For a competition that Sari Ruda increasingly strives to align with the business affairs side of the game industry, this best case scenario may be acceptable to some. But for the small and struggling game developers of Toronto who, based on the site’s misleading promotional materials, expected a game design competition, Vortex is at best a profound disappointment, and at worse, a disorganized sham.

Limited Resources

Taxpayer dollars fuel the funds that made the 2009 Vortex Game Competition possible. These funds are limited, and should be spent on cultural events and activities that enrich and support the local and provincial game industry, including TOJam, the Hand Eye Society, the Toronto chapter IGDA, the Artsy Games Incubator, and newcomer GamerCamp.

The facts brought to light by the CultureGET article and which I expound in this article beg three results:

1. The results of the 2009 competition must be revisited by the event organizers to ensure that the $4000 first place award and accompanying benefits are re-awarded to one of the five finalists who met the event’s eligibility criteria.
2. Prospective entrants should give very careful consideration to their participation at this year’s event, which was rumoured yesterday to be canceled.
3. Where applicable, the involvement of the City of Toronto, the Ontario Media Development Corporation and other sponsors in the 2010 Vortex Competition should be strongly reconsidered.

UPDATES

Wednesday October 20th 2010

In an interview with Pixel Pirate Murray Sinclair, Edge Magazine reported in March 2010 (five months after Vortex) that following the game’s ProtoPlay debut in August 2009, the Pixel Pirates team received “an offer to buy the IP,” and that Murray had moved overseas and was “in talks to found his own indie studio”. Contrast this with John Josephson’s claim that as of Vortex 2009 he, Alex, and Murray controlled a Canadian corporation that owned the Colour-Coded IP, and were continuing production with a team of five Toronto developers. Since the article was posted in March 2010, well after Vortex (and indeed, mentions the Vortex win), one wonders why the article didn’t say that the Colour-Coded IP had been purchased, and a studio had been founded.

Thursday October 21st 2010

Alex Wiltshire, Online Editor of Edge Magazine, confirmed that by the time the article ran, Murray “had already moved to Canada and was working with a local company.” Looks like the Edge article had some future-tense responses about events that had already occurred by the time the article went live.

Thursday October 21st 2010

i had a chance to speak with the Vortex organizers in person today. They are aware of the issue, and are working to resolve it. i’ll be sure to post their conclusions once i hear about them.

The café is on Bloor Street West of Bathurst, quite nearby Honest Ed’s and the Pizza Pizza joint frequented by Scott Pilgrim and pals in the movie. i showed up on their second night of operation to find the place packed with people of (nearly) all ages. i’m not sure i spotted anyone over 45, but there was a surprising number of young teens and children in the place. Seeing children in Toronto is like sighting leprechauns – they’re so rare that you think you may have chanced upon some mythical creature that you need to catch up and strangle for its gold. (Unfortunately, despite my enthusiastic strangling, these kids were flat broke.)

i saddled up to the counter and ordered a hot cup of jasmine green tea, the perfect choice having just cycled through 30 degree heat with high humidity (i didn’t notice that they had cold pop until much later). The tea tasted awful, which is less a criticism of the café, and more a criticism of tea … the stuff is supposed to boost my metabolism, but it tastes as if i’m licking a tree.

For the first little while, i stood like a dope holding my mug. The joint was so packed, i couldn’t find a place to sit all by my lonesome, so i wandered by the absolutely enormous collection of board games and perused the titles.

This place has everything, from classic strategy games like chess, checkers and go, to well-known stand-bys like Monopoly (in many different flavours), all the way up to the kind of games i enjoy – European board games like Settlers of Catan (which is like Monopoly, except it doesn’t blow ass). The more “serious” Euro games sat on the shelves, in and amongst the well-known titles, lying in wait for some unsuspecting patron to say “Let’s try Agricola!” or “I wonder if Power Grid is any fun?” It’s a sly strategy of a clever pusher, like lacing cupcakes with smack.

i was pleasantly surprised to see a number of games i’d completely forgotten about, but which brought about a flood of nostalgia, including the two “toy” games 13 Dead End Drive from the 90′s, and Fireball Island from the 80′s, both of which got played while i was there.

Eventually, i accosted a couple at their table. They were playing Lost Cities, a two-player game that’s found its way to Xbox Live Arcade. i insinuated myself into their game, so i suppose the first game i played at Snakes and Lattes was “cockblocking”. Once they’d finished playing and i’d successfully killed the mood with my sweat-swathed face, now completely overheated from the bike ride and the tree-licking, we cracked open a copy of Ticket to Ride, another table-to-Xbox conversion.

The evening progressed delightfully from there. i ordered a gingerale and cooled down, while we laid track across a tabletop approximation of industrial America. The café officially closes at 11 PM on weeknights, but we didn’t clear out until closer to midnight. If you pay the shop a visit, be sure to leave enough time to finish your game. The good-natured owner, a friendly Frenchman named Ben, tolerated us and our suggestions for new games (despite his already killer collection), but it was apparent that his girlfriend and business partner Aurelia was tired and overworked from an apparently exhausting opening. i hope she lasts the week!

Ben will likely get very tired of people suggesting games he doesn’t have on offer. i found out that he doesn’t like expansions, which is a shame because some games only become playable with their expansions. Ticket to Ride Europe, for example, fixes a number of problems with the original game. When asked if he’d consider selling board games as well, Ben said he’d think about it.

i can see the fervor over Snakes and Lattes dying down as the café moves past the positive press surrounding its opening, but i hope it will develop a loyal enough fanbase to stay open through the bitterly cold winter months here in Toronto. i very much enjoyed my visit, and am excited about making a return trip.

To show your online love, you can Like the Snakes & Lattes Facebook page, or follow @snakesandlattes on Twitter.

So we shopped Spellirium around at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this past week, and the consensus was that the game was good … for them to poop on.

Category Exclusivity

i’ve been billing Spellirium as a “word puzzle/adventure game hybrid”, or “Jim Henson’s Labyrinth meets Boggle.”

To the casual games portals and bidnessmen i met at the conference, the phrase “word puzzle game” was tantamount to box office poison of Carrot Top-ical proportions.

Said one acquisitions director for a well-known casual downloadable games portal, “word games don’t do well.” He cited the only three word games he’s ever known that did do well: Scrabble, TextTwist, and “to a far lesser extent”, Bookworm. Apparently Bookworm Adventures, Spellirium’s kissing cousin, didn’t even rate.

i did my research before embarking on this project. i knew that word games don’t sell. i even wrote that fact into our business plan. i was quick – perhaps too quick – to point out to him that there are no other word games quite like Spellirium. i wasn’t just shilling, though – honestly, no other game i know has tried to combine an early-90′s LucasArts-style adventure game with a word puzzle mechanic. All other word games i’ve seen have been just the mechanic, and that can get old quickly. Even Bookworm Adventures, with its worm-on-monster battles and its levelling and inventory systems, didn’t do story. Story is not a blob of text you frantically skip after the title screen, or an explanation of how Character X has to retrieve the Magic Y.

i also tried to explain that Spellirium does word puzzling like no other game. We’re really stretching this simple mechanic to its farthest logical limits – you’ll be spelling words to paint pictures, navigate mazes, move objects, balance balls … in many of our modes, spelling words doesn’t even matter. It’s crazy, it’s creative, and i think players are totally gonna dig it.

Idiocracy

The casual games publishers do not dig it. “Anything that involves thinking”, they said, “is a non-starter.” The same acquisitions guy told me that one of our other games was “too cerebral”, and followed up by saying “i don’t wanna say that our audience is dumb, but … ”

And i won’t say that either. i’m sure that the Big Fishes and the iWins and the Gamehouses have more than their fair share of dim bulbs buying games from them. But i think the real challenge for us with Spellirium is finding the right audience. The casual downloadable audience is mostly female, and mostly older, and they play games to escape. Spellirium is not an escape in that clicky-gemmy, findy-object kinda way. It’s escapism in that “i’ve been transported to a fascinating and fun other world where there are characters who are more interesting than anyone i know, and places more vivid than i’ve ever visited” kinda way.

Luna-cy

i was never more dismayed during the conference than when i attended the talk by Luna Cruz from Boomzap, who talked about economizing story in her game Awakening: The Dreamless Castle. Look: i know i’m a wordy writer, and i know the Spellirium script could use trimming as badly as those ladies from the 1970′s skin mags. So it was with great hope that i sat down to hear Luna’s talk.

Early on, Luna said “We really needed to find a way to simplify this cut-scene and get the most important information out in as few lines as possible.” i was all ears. But then: “The original cut-scene had six lines of dialogue, which we knew was way too much for our audience, so we worked really hard and gave it a lot of thought, and cut it down to only two.”

You cut it down to – guh. What? How many lines? And you say six lines was too much for your audience to bear? i have to say six lines of dialogue before i can even establish one of my characters’ names. i was going to approach Luna after the talk and ask for her advice, but i began to worry that she’d look at one of our cut-scenes and start vomiting on me uncontrollably.

But let’s compare. Here’s the entire story of Awakening:

*** spoilers ***

A princess who can’t wield magic wakes up in a magic-imbued world and must escape the castle, with the help of a magic mirror and some ornery trolls who were sworn to protect her.

And here’s just the backstory to Spellirium:

*** no spoilers ***

In the future, a young apprentice journeys with an ill-fated monster to find his missing guardians, using a dangerously magical device to battle enemies and to overcome challenges.

Luna can tell her entire story in the same space that it takes me to write a synopsis of Spellirium. We’re dealing with apples and oranges here. Which suggest to me that the audience, likewise, is like apples and oranges.

What Sort of Gamer Plays Spellirium?

The suggestion was repeated to me by a number of people at the conference, when i asked whether i should just scrap Spellirium and take up pork farming: i need to find the right audience for the game. So what sort of gamer plays Spellirium?

We tried to answer this question way back before production began by stating the obvious: people who play word games will play Spellirium. So we built a game portal called Word Game World and stocked it with word games leftover from the MochiMedia/Dictionary.com contest they ran last year. Here are the less-than-stellar results:

The trouble is that now we found ourselves with the challenge of generating an audience for TWO properties. It makes more sense to just bring people straight to Spellirium, than to drive them to the game via the scenic route. That, and many of the word games people have made have turned out less-than-scenic, if you get my drift. (Yet another nail in the coffin for the genre – too many people making it look bad)

Beer Covers a Multitude of Sins

i got a hot tip from my fellow Christian game designer pal Grant Shonkwiler (who you’ll remember from our earlier post on the impossibility of Christian gaming). These days, Grant designs games for tabletop bar cabinets (like any good Christian would … i forgot to ask if he got paid in hooch). He designed a word game for his company that was a smash success with the audience, and offered that bar patrons love word games. It reminded me of Norm MacDonald’s old SNL Weekend Update punchline: Germans love David Hasselhoff. You hit the right niche with the right product, and you’re sailing.

So what combination of Knight Riding and Baywatching will Spellirium have to pull off to find its Germany-sized pool of rabid fans? Here are some facts about what i *think* a Spellirium player is like. i think the game will appeal to both sexes, but i’ll use masculine pronouns for simplicity:

1. He can kick ass at Scrabble. Don’t mess.

   

2. He does crossword puzzles on his way to work. In pen. He may even feel that British cryptics are far superior to American-style.
3. He watches movies. Among his favourite films are Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Road Warrior, Twelve Monkeys, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn, Dragonslayer, and The Goonies.

   

   

4. He reads. He likes sci fi and fantasy. He may enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Lloyd Alexander, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Terry Brooks, and Neil Gaiman.
5. He plays games. He quite liked Puzzle Quest, Bookworm and Bookworm Adventures, digital versions of Scrabble and Boggle, Wurdle, TextTwist, LucasArts and Sierra On-Line graphic adventure games – possibly even Infocom text adventures or MUDs – as well as Out of This World, Beneath a Steel Sky and the Fallout series.

   

6. When he’s playing a game that has story elements, including dialogue or cutscenes or even blobs of text, he does not – does NOT – push the A button to skip. He becomes particularly upset if he accidentally skips story, even if he’s not particularly enjoying that story. If he’s gaming with a dumb jock fratboy friend who blithely skips past all the story sequences saying “let’s just play already, d00d”, he punches that friend in the throat. (Then he gets his ass kicked, because he’s a lover, not a fighter.)

i know, friends. i know. i’ve just described myself. (Or perhaps Jerry Holkins / Tycho Brahe from Penny Arcade – i’m convinced we’re the same person.) i am a little concerned that i have not paid enough attention to the needs and wants of the market, over the needs and wants of the me. i have not designed Spellirium as an ineffectual, casual click-fest with simple puzzles and two-line cutscenes. i thought, perhaps foolishly – perhaps arrogantly – that if i designed a game that i desperately wanted to play, there would be others like me for whom this game would be a breath of fresh air.

Was i wrong? Like chocolate and peanut butter, is our word puzzle/adventure game hybrid born of two great tastes that taste great together? Or is it born of two disappointments – an overly cerebral genre that repeatedly fails to perform in the marketplace, and an outdated genre that saw its best days twenty years ago? Should we finish Spellirium and bury it as quickly as possible, or should we keep working to realize our vision – the vision of a smart, funny game for well-read, literate players that melds two genres like no other game before it?

i defer to your judgment and expertise. If Untold Entertainment needs to become a Hidden Object Game developer, please tell me now so that i can go get a lobotomy and get myself fitted at the Vagina Depot.

Word.

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Because i’d really like to do more speaking, i jumped at the opportunity to share my accumulated nuggets of wisdom with the attendees. i actually agreed to come out before even looking for Miramichi on the map: it was quite far from the bustling metropolis of Moncton. i clicked “What’s nearby?” and Google Maps said “you’re kidding, right?”

The conference attendees were mostly students. The title of my talk was “I Know Kung Fu: 10 Years of Gaming in 45 Minutes”. The presentation had three sections: Tips for Students, Tips on Game Design, and Tips for Bidness. The bidness section was the weakest – i’m still figuring that stuff out myself.

The Tips for Students started out irrelevantly … since NBCC’s game dev program has been hammered out over 13 years, it doesn’t have many of the problems that the nascent Ontario programs seem to have. i found myself wondering why the Ontario colleges didn’t just visit Miramichi and do a straight lift of their entire program. Isn’t that preferable to letting batch after batch of students flounder through your half-baked program while you figure it out?

Here are a few of the game design tips i shared:

1. Mouse control trumps keyboard control for casual web games (source: Chris Hughes from Flash Game License)
2. Click and carry beats click and drag, especially for young players (click and carry is where you click once, and the thing sticks to your mouse until you click again to release it)
3. Control = fun.
4. Game jams perfectly simulate the Internatz. Big room full of games to try … if you don’t hook people in the first five seconds, they flit off to the next station. Just like on the weeb.
5. Inconsistent escalation increases player. Instead of making your game get progressively more impossible, every few levels you should ease up on the difficulty. This encourages the player to keep trying; if he blows a gasket beating level 5, he may think “to Hell with level 6″. But if you throw in easy levels to give the playe a break every once in a while, he’s more likely to keep at it. Final Fight used this concept very early on with its car-smashing bonus level.

i’m Also On a Boat

The Jalloo folks organized a boat ride across the mighty Miramichi to a banquet hall where they fed their guests from enormous buckets of crab.

River Jam

The conference ended with a 2-day game jam. You know me – i can’t resist a game jam. So with one hour to go before i had to leave for the airport, i coded up a very quick game structure and pulled out one of my game ideas from the backlog. The guys on the team took it and ran with it, and worked the next two days producing an absolutely demented little gem called Toes:

This was my fifth game jam, and it was the only one where i worked with other people – three talented graduating students, and their instructor, who actually invited me out to the conference to begin with. i met Martin Copp at the flawed Vortex Game Design Competition, which just goes to show that return on investment from certain events can really surprise you, even many months after the fact. So get out there and don’t stop networking! (tip #5 in the “Tips for Students” section of my presentation ;)

The plan is to take Toes further and polish it up, and then put it up for licensing closer to Hallowe’en. Answer the quick survey and let us know what you think! We’re looking for suggestions to take it from a quick, playable concept to something a little more … meaty.

The building is basically every film fan’s fantasy. The upper floors are comprised of luxury condo suites that TIFF does not own, but the bottom few floors are a tech and film freak’s idea of a good time.

Our tour guide Markus was the only one among us important enough to get actual steel-toed shoes. The rest of us signed waivers and minded our piggies. That’s Shawn from ][ steeling himself for a girder to land on his foot, while Miguel from Spooky Squid Games adjusts his safety glasses in preparation for a barrage of nail gun ammo aimed directly at his face.

We were all enthused about getting a picture with this thing, because it looks like a mid-level boss from Half-Life. That’s Paul from Forest Games preparing to rip its junk out with his bare hands. Relax! i have a feeling it just smooths concrete.

This is the exhibit hall, where they’ll be displaying props and posters from movies in installations like the Tim Burton show currently at MoMA. One of the earliest events the space will hold is a sort of “best-of” festival, where the festival will screen the best and most talked-about films from years past. In the foreground, Rob from Get Set Games treads lightly.

We were ushered (ha!) into the largest of five theatres. The variably-sized theatres are equipped to handle different film stocks, like 70mm. Our host Nick, second from the right, reminded me that Lawrence of Arabia was shot on 70mm. i nodded confidently, pretending i knew that. A short time later, i asked a Porky’s question.

One of the theatres is equipped with a roll-out piano so that live soundtracks to silent films can be performed. “Neat!” i exclaimed noiselessly, and waited for a title card to pop up telling everyone what i just said.

All of the theatres are equipped to handle digital showings. A master control centre, which we didn’t get to see because they worried our copious drooling would short the electrical equipment, can simulcast content into all five theatres at once. Master control also handles the numerous cameras embedded strategically throughout the building, which can capture star galas and other important events. There were no cameras eagerly eyeing our indie game dev tour, which i found depressingly appropriate.

Tessa eyes a pile of construction ouchies in the middle of the computer lab, wondering if she can MacGuyver it into something awesome. The Lightbox will host school groups for different activities. In the room down the hall, students will be able to film and screen their own movies; the lab will have machines running editing software so that visitors can splice them together.

i wondered if this place was the putting green, but it turns out this area will be used for offices. It’s right next to the scholars center, which will include viewing pods for screening films, and the TIFF’s collection of reels from over the years. This area was supposed to be a giant hole to let the lower-level atrium extend four floors, but cooler heads prevailed and claimed the space in favour of functionality over awesome emptiness.

Miguel and Paul grit their teeth, wondering what insulting caption i’m going to add to this pic once it’s published. (Uh … nice helmets, nerds? i got nothin’.) This open-air balcony has a great view of the CN Tower and the red-trimmed CBC headquarters. Nick points out that the building across the street hosts one of the event spy-cams like the others found throughout the Lightbox, to pull off some voyeur action on the roof. i wonder how the condo people feel about that?

i turned right from the last picture and grabbed this shot of these risers, where guests will sit and enjoy open-air screenings of movies during summer events. (And, presumably, where guests will NOT enjoy screenings of movies during winter events, because it’s hard to enjoy yourself in -30 degree weather sitting on a slab of concrete.) In the background, the Hyatt tries to sneak in free advertising.

So why was a gaggle of game nerds invited to tour the space? TIFF is looking for ways to involve related cultural groups in the goings-on at the Lightbox, and that includes the Toronto indie game scene. Nick has been astonishingly receptive to our suggestions. If half of what’s been discussed comes to fruition, the Lightbox is going to be an absolutely incredible boon to the little guys in the game industry.

i mentioned last week that we launched a free games portal called WordGameWorld.com. Here’s how that whole process works. i spend a few bucks buying a domain name, a hosting account, and a WordPress theme. Then i go to MochiMedia.com and started cherry-picking games from their list of thousands, at no cost. If i see a game that i like, i can just take it and put it on the site. Then i put ads on the site. Step 4: profit.

i didn’t have to pay for the content. The content is, theoretically, paid for by advertisers whose ads are injected into the games via the MochiMedia service. But as we’ve seen before, in a hit-driven business like Flash games, a non-hit is also a non-earner.

If you’re producing content essentially for free, with the hope of possibly earning fractions of pennies on advertising rev share, and perhaps a sponsorship or two for a few thousands bucks (when perhaps you sunk more than a few thousand bucks in labour into the content), i have a startling revelation for you: content is NOT king. Content is peasant. Content is plebian. Content is serf. The exploiters of content are closer to the crown than you’ll ever be.

Look Who’s Talking

There’s a lyric from a John Lennon song that frequently comes to mind whenever i hear someone chant the “content is king” mantra:

Keep ‘em doped with religion and sex and teevee
And they think they’re so clever and classless and free
But they’re still f*cking peasants as far’s I can see

i’ve been paying more and more attention to who is saying “content is king” and how they are saying it. The people pulling the strings, who are actually in a position to monetize content, say it more often and in a much different tone of voice than the content producers:

Content monetizers: (knowing that their livelihood depends on people constantly producing content that they can exploit) Content is king!

Content producers: (wondering why the hell they’re not gaining any ground, despite being told on a daily basis by the content monetizers that content is king) … Content is king?

The Content Food Chain

i’ve developed a hierarchical chart to illustrate who’s actually in control here, and how the money flows.

Content Consumers

i hope we can all agree that consumers are at the bottom of the chart. Yes, technically they should be at the top, because they make the decisions and vote with their money and rah rah consumers blah blah blah, but who are you kidding? When i got into the ad-supported web world, working in the interactive department of a teevee broadcaster, we talked a lot about eyeballs – how many unique sets of ocular orbs were looking at our web pages. Not people, not consumers, but their actual eyeballs. We had reduced consumers as a commodity to their component parts! It wasn’t “how many human beings visited our pages”, but “how many eyeballs did we get”? “How do we get more eyeballs on this?” It’s a tiny bit ghastly. Consumers, you’re at the bottom of my chart.

Content Creators

Next up are the content creators. We content creators subjugate consumers. If we’re business-minded, we want to build games that get a lot of those eyeballs, so that we can command higher sponsorship deals and earn more fractions of pennies on advertising revenue share. Some of us want millions of eyeballs on our content just so that we can feel good about ourselves. As i’ve mentioned before, that drive tends to go away when you become a more advanced life-form with a mortgage and kids to feed.

Pickaxe Salesmen

In an offshoot segment of the chart are the pickaxe salesmen. In any Yukon gold rush, there are the people doing all the work and panning for the gold (game developers), and there are the shop owners selling ropes and pickaxes and whiskey. They are the tool providers. FDT, SmartFox Server, ElectroServer, and to an extent ActiveDen (who are, themselves, content aggregators) all make their money selling content producers the promise of becoming rich and famous through their gold-panning content creation efforts.

Content Aggregators

One step above content creators are the content aggregators. In the Flash games industry, these are the portals that pull all the games together in one place – Kongregate, NewGrounds, Big Fish, AddictingGames, King, Gimme5, WordGameWorld, etc etc. In publishing, they are the magazines that assemble and bind the individual articles. In the teevee world, they are the broadcasters who fill their programming hours with shows. Content aggregators treat content as a commodity to be shoveled into their wrappers, especially in the Flash games world, where you can set up an RSS interavenous drip to have free Flash games automatically pumped into your site with zero effort or cost. These people have a vested interest in repeating the “content is king” mantra – their livelihood depends on content producers believing it. Their goal is to get the best content possible for the lowest price imaginable, always.

Advertisers

Advertisers hold us all in thrall. They foot the bill for all of this stuff. Magazines and teevee shows are merely vehicles to sell advertising. That’s what games portals are as well: extended banner and video ads punctuated by the occasional match-3 game. Without advertising money, this whole ecosystem dies … which is why new monetization methods like microtransactions are given so much gravity. Like the United States weaning themselves off oil dependency, it’s in the best interests of content producers and aggregators to develop new sources of energy (money).

Aggregator Aggregators

Above the advertisers are the aggregator aggregators: those who aggregate the aggregators. i can’t think of any examples in the Flash games world, but i’m talking about cable providers in the teevee world. These are the people who pull together the aggregators – the teevee channels – into one big package of aggregators, and charge a fee for access. i don’t *think* one of these has emerged in our industry quite yet, but correct me if i’m wrong.

Lord Jesus

Floating high above all of these and seated at the right hand of God is Jesus, who is awesome.

Do You Feel Like a King?

And there it is. With so many strata of folks making money from the lowly piece of content you produce, it’s clear that just as players are a commodity to you as a game developer, your content is a commodity traded in bulk to a higher power skimming off the top. Those higher powers, in turn, are a commodity to someone higher up the food chain.

Clearly, “king” is not an appropriate word to describe the games you’re producing. i’ve never known anyone to trade in large sacks of kings. Perhaps “content is lynchpin” is more fitting: yank the content out from this structure, and the whole thing comes crashing down. But the same thing happens when you pull advertising: you’re removing the wealthy benefactor, the rich uncle, who fuels the whole operation.

i’ll stick to my original claim: content is peasant. Kings can’t be kings without someone farming their crops, cooking their meals, and buffing their toenails. Whose toenails are you buffing? Because if you’re creating Flash games, selling them for a song, and scraping fractions of pennies on advertising revenue share, news flash: you ain’t the king. You’re somebody else’s bucket of eyeballs. You’re responsible for producing a pinch of salt in a barrelful, and it’s the people shipping the salt who are really in bidness.

i’m not saying any of this to upset the applecart, or to suggest that Flash game developers storm the castle and steal the crown. i just want to put it out there, so that the next time someone who makes money off your back tells you “content is king”, you can sock him in the snoot.

To recap:

1. Jesus is king.
2. Rogers cable answers only to Jesus.
3. You’re getting screwed.

i didn’t have the luxury of taking notes because i was too busy yapping, but here are a few insights that came out during the panel that i reproduce here for your edification and Great Knowledge:

Work Somewhere Else First

Of the five panelists, only one started his company straight out of school. The other panelists endured 6-10 years in the “salt mines” of game development. Ryan MacLean from DrinkBox Studios said that he learned a lot about running a business by working at a small studio. i didn’t get to say it, but i had a different experience: the company where i cut my teeth was very large, and the boss’s door was always closed. i didn’t see the day-to-day operations up close, so much of the businessside of things remains a mystery to me. The up side is that i trained entirely on the job. A small studio likely doesn’t have the resources to hire someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Don’t Jinx It

No single panelist was brave enough to say that he’d achieved sustainability with his company. Josh Druckman of Dark Matter Entertainment told the tale of how he grossly underpaid himself for the better part of a year. Ryan MacLean admitted that his team is still earning below scale, while i coughed up an actual figure – i paid myself $20k in 2008, while doling out far more cash to the employees and contractors that i hired over the year. (Note to our readers in Kuala Lumpur: $20k might sound like a fantastic wage, but it doesn’t go far here in Toronto)

i was worried at that point that we’d have a riot on our hands – angry attendees demanding refunds for their free admittance because we failed to deliver on the “sustainability” portion of the panel topic. i guess this is how it goes: if you manage to keep a game studio in Ontario afloat for over a year, you’re doing something right. You may not have a sustainable bidness, but you just lasted a year in the industry on your own terms, and that’s admirable, if anything.

Government Cheese Comes in Different Flavours

As at any gathering of Ontario game developers, there was talk of government incentives. Here are a few notable points that were brought up:

• There’s a difference between loans and grants, as Frozen North Productions‘s Julian Spillane explained. Certain funds, like the OMDC Interactive Digital Media fund, aren’t repayable. They’re grants – free money. Other funds, like the (national) Telefilm fund, are loans. You have to repay Telefilm as you earn money on the project. If you earn no money, you pay no money.
• Rich Hilmer of Dark Matter noted that the terms the government lays out for its loans and grants are far more lenient than anything you’ll find in the private sector through publishers and other investors, who opt for a “first in, first out” arrangement (ie they get repaid immediately, and in full)
• Josh reminded us that the government’s mandate is jobs. Repayable or not, a successful applicant is one who can create industry jobs while creating the product
• i pointed out the obvious: even though the pressure to succeed financially is low, you’re more likely to be funded for successive products if you were financially successul. The funders have their reports to write too, and any degree of success will vindicate their decision to give you money.
• i assured the audience that the government employees i’ve spoken with don’t have a high tolerance for or high degree of faith in people running start-ups, unless (as Ryan M pointed out) the pedigree of the team members is notable (DrinkBox Studios is comprised of former Pseudo Interactive employees, while Chocolate Liberation Front was founded by Dan Fill and Shawn Bailey, two well-regarded guys from broadcast)
• Julian let everyone know that the Ontario game industry stakeholders are trying to alter the Ontario Interactive Digital Media Tax Credit (OIDMTC – sheesh!) to more closely match the Quebec incentive. Currently, the OIDMTC is paid out after a project is completed, which could take a number of years. Or, if you complete your project a month after your fiscal year end, you have to wait an entire year to file for the credit. The proposal is to pay out the credit annually, while a project is being developed, so that developers get the much-needed cash more frequently.

Diversify

One important point that came up again and again, particularly in light of the collapse of Pseudo Interactive, is that teams have to be carefeul not to bite off more than they can chew, and not to put all their eggs in one basket. In Pseudo’s case, as Rich explained, they took a large contract that required every single resource to be devoted to it. The company wasn’t able to do anything else, so that when the plug was pulled on that contract, they had nothing on the back-burner, and down they went. For our part, we kept the gene pool too narrow by relying on one or two key clients who fed us a steady stream of work in our first year. When Year Two rolled around, and those clients put their focus elsewhere, we found ourselves flailing. Lesson learned: it may be better to take multiple smaller projects from a diverse swath of clientele than to land that huge honkin’ contract that has you punching above your weight class.

Everything is a Red Flag

Someone in the audience asked which red flags you should watch out for when taking on a contract. The panel unanimously declared that when you’re green, everything is a red flag. Julian admitted that his team may have given up too much in their excitement to sign a deal with Majesco for their Wii game Flip’s Twisted World. He said that if you’re a new team and it’s your first contract, expect to get screwed. Good negotiation is learned through experience.

For my part, i offered up three deal-breakers: salvage jobs, rush jobs, and bank jobs. If a company says they’d like you to work on a project that’s 50% complete, it’s because the original programmer ran out on them. If you really want to take the job, multiply your rate by five, because you’re in for a world of hurt.

If the same potential client says that the first guy got four months, but you get four days, that’s a rush salvage job – the worst of all worlds. Multiply your rate by ten.

And if that same job is for a bank, head for the hills. We actually took a job during our Year of Famine last year that had all these red flags, but when you need the money, you’re willing to grimace and bear it.

Too Cool for School

All in all, i worried that the panel was playing it too coy when it came to the admission of fault and error. i find that people in general, and especially in bidness, like to pretend everything is rosy when it isn’t. We had a terrible year last year, partly due to the economy, and partly due to my own bidness mistakes and growing pains. i admitted as much during the panel. When i watch panels like these, it’s of no use to me to watch a bunch of CEOs spout off about how great they are and all the awesome things they’ve done. i want to hear problems. i want to focus on flubs, so that i know what pitfalls to avoid.

i would have liked to have seen a less guarded panel. i think a more human approach would have provided the crowd with more take-home tips that they could put into effect. The numerous panels i’ve seen with this very same topic, seeded with CEOs of multi-million dollar companies instead of us small-time Ontario studios, yielded far different advice … and not coincidentally. The points i’ve taken from those more high-profile panels still resonate with me today:

1. When building your team, surround yourself with senior-level talent first.
2. Your company’s reputation and potential for success is due in large part to the team you assemble to found your company.
3. If things aren’t working out, nip the problem in the bud. Fire early, and fire often.

If you were at the panel last night, i’d love to hear your opinion about how it went. Was the information useful? What would you like to have seen more or less of? Did the talk encourage you to follow your dreams and start your own studio, or did we scare you off? Let me know!

These are Mason’s tips, with my own input straddled betwixt:

1. Respond Quickly to Calls and Email

It seems like such a small thing — answering client emails within an hour, instead of within a day or within the week — but it actually makes quite a difference in how potential clients perceive you and your company.

This one’s huge – so huge that we made it one of our five corporate operating policies. When i was working at a broadcaster, towards my departure they began to outsource more and more work to external game studios. The project manager would wail and moan and pull her hair out, because the studios wouldn’t respond to her calls and emails. Living my sheltered payroll existence, i had never heard of such a beast. What was this mythical “not-answering-emails” creature all about, anyway? How is that even possible??

The more experience i gained, the more i learned that one of the biggest problems with freelancers and vendors, not least of all Flash game vendors here in Ontario, is that they don’t communicate well. So when i started my own company, i made sure that “constant communication” was high on our list of principles.

2. Negotiate on Scope, Not on Price

Lowering a price for your client, in most cases, will make you seem more desperate and less confident.

Agreed. Indeed, when i outsource work to freelancers, i know the quality of service i’ll receive by the way the freelancer prices his work. If the price is too low, i know i can’t expect to see the work arrive on time and on spec.

3. Show Off Past Success

One of the best ways to give your clients this confidence in your work is by showing off previous work and successes. A portfolio, testimonials, and case studies are all good ways to show off your previous work.

There’s obviously a huge “duh” factor to this one. Suffice it to say, when i receive a resume from an artist or programmer (especially an artist), i need to see that portoflio link at the very top, and it needs to be an actual clickable hyperlink. Then i need to see evidence. If i like what i see, i go back to the resume and read the part with words on it. If the link is at the bottom of the resume, you’re flirting with disaster. If there’s NO link, i delete the resume.

But in addition to just showing off your work, consider case studie and testimonials, as Mason suggests. Wherever contractually possible, we try to give an insider’s look at what it was like to create our projects. i find it frustrating to look at someone’s work, and to not know who the client was, and why the project existed to begin with.

4. Use Pretty Things

Even Mason admits that this one is obvious – put your best foot forward. But to put a finer point on it, he talks about paying attention to detail and the trim that you put around your work:

Using a collection of professional and visually appealing materials will make your business seem more established, credible, and attractive to potential clients.

If you professionally frame and matte a photo of a turd, it’ll be a very nice-looking turd. Every supporting material you use, from your site to your business card to your letterhead to your invoices, should be polished, tight, and consistently branded. We could stand to clean up some stuff on our site because we’re not exactly putting our best foot forward. The problem is that when you have a very small body of work, you don’t always have the luxury of displaying the best stuff and enough stuff.

5. Be Personal

Take an interest in your clients, their situation, and the overall well-being of their business. If you care about them, chances are they will start to care about you — and before long you’ll have a lasting freelance relationship.

This is one area where we excel. i find that if you humanize your business relationship, you’re much more likely to extend grace to your client in difficult situations, and to have that grace extended to you when you make mistakes. But if you give no quarter, no quarter will be given.

i was at a conference earlier this year, and met with a woman from a casual games portal. We shot the breeze for much of the meeting – i joked around, and was very relaxed, and tried to be that bright spot in her day when she could let her guard down and enjoy an easy hour. When we shook hands, i saw that the next guys in line for a meeting were a very bidness-oriented game studio: two fellas who wear daddy’s suits and run a meeting like they’re representing Iran and Pakistan at the Model UN.

The studio rep sighed and asked me what i thought of the next two guys. i said “they could stand to loosen up a little.” She gave me a forlorn, rueful look, and then shook my hand and thanked me for a wonderful meeting.

Lesson affirmed: people are people. We all need a break. We need to be loved, looked after and paid attention to. We need people to take an interest in us – in our well-being and our state of mind. And those rules don’t fly out the window just because you’re doing bidness.

Nexon’s Min Kim was recently interviewed by Gamasutra about the company’s upcoming virtual world Block Party. During the interview, Kim rattled off a list of the eight types of items you can sell in an online game.

When it comes to items, they can serve eight purposes, says Kim: function, envy/prestige, recognition, collecting, rarity/scarcity, competition, friendship, peer pressure. These are the keywords, he said several times, that you should be thinking about when designing your items to sell.

With the likes of MochiMedia, GamerSafe and HeyZap offering Flash microtransactions, i thought it would be worthwhile to explore Kim’s list, and to provide examples to flesh out his examples. Some of these item classifications bleed into others. Most of them need to hook into some sort of multiplayer game, because they’re driven by social interactions. But there are ways to structure your game to leverage feelings of envy and aspiration that don’t require a live multiplayer server, which i’ll explain in this article.

1. Function

The first item type is one that affects gameplay, like the downloadable tracks in Rock Band 2. Other, more generic examples are things like guns that provide extra firepower, and winged mounts that let you fly clear across a virtual world. Often, these items have the most perceived value to a player because they actually do something. Occasionally, they’ll even give a player an advantage over other players during gameplay.

The danger is that by selling functional items, you risk alienating your player base, creating a class system of haves and have-nots. When poorly designed, functional items can actually exclude players from playing together; in the case of Rock Band, all four band members have own a downloadable track in order to play through that song together. It’s not long before a group of online strangers have to default to the songs that shipped with the disc, because none of them own identical set lists. Electronic Arts faced a lot of flack when players learned they would be charging extra money for in-game weapons in Battlefield: Bad Company that many people thought should have been included with the experience.

2. Envy/Prestige

Virtual clothing fits nicely into this category. In a multiplayer game, everyone wants to stand out. We can all recall the pain of spending half an hour tooling up a character for a virtual world, only to jump into that world to find that half the game’s population chose the same hat, boots and skin tone. Finding your twin online isn’t quite as annoying as wearing the same dress as another girl to prom, but it’s up there.

Some games are even designed so that all of the free players (or “hobos”, as i like to call them) look just similar enough as to annoy the player. A quick hit with the credit card is enough to straighten that out – one dollar buys you a new wardrobe item that no one else has. That is, until everyone else spends a dollar to have it, in which case you need to keep ponying up the real-world cash to stay ahead of the fashion curve.

The Xbox Live service recently added an Avatar Marketplace that consists solely of Envy/Prestige items.

3. Recognition

Recognition items that are based on player achievement, like trophies, banners and crests, are difficult to sell. These are most often freebies that a player unlocks by accomplishing something in the game. One way that i suppose you could monetize this type of item is to enable the player to pay to turn a free achievement into a concrete item.

Let’s say, for example, that they player can buy a statue of himself to put in the town square, but ONLY if he kisses seventeen muskrats. The player goes out and accomplishes this amazing feat, but has no real way to show it off – no one is going to go digging through the player’s mission log to uncover that particular accomplishment. So the player pays $23.95 real-world dollars to convert his achievement into the statue to brag about his prowess with muskrats.

Another option is to charge players to unlock badges, trophies and achievements that other players come by honestly. This kind of thing can go on in an after-market area – for example, while researching this article, i found a site that purports to sell you Pogo Club badges for $5 apiece.

Of course, players who spend a million hours mastering a game to unlock the Magic Whizzwang cry foul if you start selling Magic Whizzwangs to players with more dollars than time. There are a few strategies you can adopt here:

1. Do it anyway, and cry yourself to sleep on a bed of money.
2. Run the after-market site yourself, but don’t put any corporate branding on it, so that it looks like some shady fly-by-night site is selling badges, but you get all the profit
3. Don’t do it, and risk losing out on a potentially major source of revenue.

There’s not a lot of difference between selling achievements and selling powerful in-game weapons. In both cases, you’re monetizing “time-poor, money-rich” players over “time-rich, money-poor” (AKA hobo) players. The difference is purely psychological: we think of awards as something to be earned, not bought. Of course, graduate to the Real World and you’ll find that most things in this life are earned with money, awards included.

4. Collecting

This is one of my absolute favourite item types to design. When i was working on The Sitekick Proejct for Corus Entertainment, i designed a number of often complex item collections, where certain items had to be combined like Voltron to unlock other items. i didn’t quite reach that Mecca where i had kids combining their Voltron uber-items to unlock Super Mega Ultra items, but i can see that’s where my career would have gone if i had stayed. :)

Of course, the natural progression for The Sitekick Project or any game like it, with its big empty Pokemon-inspired list and it’s 1000 some-odd items is to charge players for items so that they can fill in gaps in their collections. While it’s a reasonably compelling prospect for an adult, you have to understand that maintaining complex collections is a psychological attribute of your people, and completing that sticker album or plastic pony set becomes absolutely crucial. It might be worth a few bucks to mom and dad to stop junior from having the DTs and just buy one or two missing items.

5. Rarity/Scarcity

The Sitekick Project also had its share of rare items, but of course it picked up its cues from other games – most notably CCGs, or Collectible Card Games. And CCGs owe it all to baseball cards.

The very best way to monetize rare items, incidentally, is to follow the baseball card model: items are sold in packs. Some items are rare. The player must continue to purchase packs filled with mostly mundane items and “doubles” in the hopes of stumbling upon a rare item. You can even produce rareities in tiers: you can go from “rare” at .01% probability to “legendary” at 0.001% probability. Rare items are usually shiny.

Depending on your scruples as a designer, you can also charge your players a large fee to flat-out buy a rare item. Just make sure the price is high enough to deter most players, who will likely end up spending more than the cost of the buy-out price fishing for rare items. This is the crane game principle that leads you to spend $35 trying to snag a $2 stuffed animal out of the machine, when the same amount of money could have gone towards a perfectly nice Gund bear at the Hallmark store down the street.

Another way to sell scarcity is to release a series of items and to arbitrarily limit their quantities. Of course, since the items are digital, scarcity is entirely artificial. Imposing an item quantity on them or selling an item for a limited time only is a great way to see completist players snapping stuff up like it’s an End of the World Sale. And once a player buys a limited item and the sale expires, it becomes both a Rare and Prestige/Envy item in one fell swoop.

6. Competition

i had trouble interpreting this one, and discerning it from Prestige/Envy items. There are a few ways i can think of to charge for competition:

1. Sell tickets or entry fees to competetive events
2. Build in a competetive aspect and charge players for the item with which they compete (a friend of mine bought a lot of Xbox games so that he could get a higher GamerScore than me. The Achievements are free [with purchase of game]. The purchase of game isn’t.)
3. Sell the game itself and let players be competetive on their own. For example, you can see an air hockey table as a furniture item for a player to store in his room. The player can challenge friends to come to his house and beat him at air hockey. You can even build in a “home advantage” to an air hockey board that a player owns – perhaps the owner of the table always gets to go first?

7. Friendship

Korean game Cyworld popularized virtual gift-giving, and went so far as to make those virtual gifts expire, which blew my mind. This was years before North American designers were even thinking about virtual item sales, and the Koreans were already pioneering a virtual sofa that you could buy with real money and give to a friend that would vanish in a puff of smoke after two weeks. It boggles my mind.

8. Peer Pressure

Again, this is a subtle thing to distinguish from a Prestige/Envy item. i think the difference is that a Prestige/Envy item is something that one person has that you want. A Peer Pressure item is something that EVERYBODY has. You want it not because it’s a particularly attractive item, but because you don’t want to feel left out.

Here’s how i see this working: throw a toga party in your virtual world. Hype it HUGE. Have everyone mail away (in-game) for a toga, and cut off mail-in toga orders at a certain point. Then just grind away on the hype machine for a week, while the players can’t order a toga. On the day of the party, everyone who sent away for one receives a free toga via in-game mail. You can also find other ways to give away togas for free on the day. Make sure it’s well known that EVERYBODY must have a toga to properly party.

When over half of your players have a toga, and the other half do not, make togas available as an impulse item for x real-world dollars (or cents). Then, sit back and watch people snap up those togas.

This is a good way to avoid pissing off your players: you gave them every opportunity to get a toga for free. The players who have to buy togas have only themselves to blame.

Here are a few additional categories of virtual item types that i’d like to add to Min Kim’s list:

Sustainability Items

These are items or services that constantly suck players’ resources to keep them playing. Picture a car combat game where you have to keep buying gas. Tamagotchis were essentially giant drains – you had to keep feeding and playing with your virtual pet, or else it would die and you’d brick your device.

The Sims characters are on constant drains – their hunger, happiness, fun and social lives are constantly sapped as you play.

If you build out a lot of gameplay beyond keeping your virtual parasite happy and emotionally well-adjusted, completing mundane tasks like feeding and watering your online identity becomes a bore. So you can sell players items like auto-plant feeders, dog-walking services and extra gas tanks, instead of making players drill for their own crude.

Charity Items

i very much like the idea of virtual items that are tied to some sort of charitable cause. The red movement pulled this off with their Facebook gifts, and i can see it working elsewhere as well.

Insurance

You haven’t yet seen a virtual world where a tsunami hits your virtual house while you’re away and wipes out all your tchotchkes. That’s because i haven’t designed my own virtual world yet. But in my dystopian vision, you can buy fire, theft, flood and gigantic lizard insurance to protect your goodies from various Acts of Ryan.

Feature Locks

At the beginning of most virtual worlds, you design your avatar and choose a house. The designer can then lock these two features, and others like it, forevermore. Once you choose your look, that’s it. It’s done. Once you choose a neighbourhood to live in, you have to abide by that choice. Once you choose your character’s name, it’s locked in for all time.

This enables you to charge a lofty real-world price for a key game feature that you’ve already built. Charge the player a “plastic surgery” fee to go back into the character creator tool. Good fun.

Step Right Up

As you can see, you need to be a bit of a PT Barnum type in order sell virtual items online. We’re talking about selling something that has no inherent value, that costs you zero dollars to reproduce, and that lives or dies on the human psychological foibles you’re able to tap into. The morality of all this may be questionable, and i’ve heard some folks call virtual item sales downright evil, especially when it comes to selling virtual items to children. But i have another perspective:

1. Having been a child myself (and, in fact, remaining so to a large extent), i know first-hand the real joy that a virtual thing can bring. Some of the most amazing places i’ve been, some of the most interesting people i’ve met, and some of the funniest things i remember have all been from video games, while many of my real-life experiences have fallen far short of my virtual experiences.

   And when i laid that last sticker down in my Panini He-Man and the Masters of the Universe sticker album, i knew that the scads of allowance money i’d burned collecting those stickers had been worth it. In my own small child universe, i had accomplished something. i had followed through, and i had achieved.

   And today, employing much of the same determination, focus, and vision, i continue to achieve.

   

   Thanks to He-Man, i am also aggressively homosexual.

2. If rich people are so well-off that they have nothing better to do than to spend their money on non-existent items, more power to them. i willl gladly take their money and build out the charitable arm of my company, so that real people with real needs can eat real food.

This way to the great egress!

It’s enough to make you wonder what kind of impact people are having on the Internatz if they’re all about marketing, linking to paid content, and building up massive, meaningless lists of people tricked into following social media accounts. Well, enter one clear victim: LinkedIn.

MyFaceJob

LinkedIn is a social network targeted at professionals. It’s like Facebook with a tie, or MySpace with socks and a shirt. You’re probably already familiar with it. You create a profile, and instead of bragging about how many cases of beer you consumed on the weekend, you write down your most up-to-date work resume lies and harass former employers into writing something nice about you.

i didn’t really appreciate LinkedIn until i discovered Groups. Groups are like LinkedIn email forums where the members share a common interest. i’ve belonged to a number of groups since late last year:

Since then, i’ve seen the quality of the content on these groups nosedive to the point where i can’t tell the difference between a LinkedIn group and a Snuggie commercial.

Here’s a sampling of the posts i’d see a year ago:

• Is the Casual Game Space Recession-Proof?
• LA Games Conference – looking for panelists for the topic below
• Other earning models: Is revenue share an interesting model among developers/designers?
• The Good and Bad of Strong Game Sales in Dreadful Economy
• Call for Papers: The Philosophy of Computer Games

And here’s what i see piling up in my inbox these days:

• One dollar one dollar one dollar over here one dollar
• Watches! i got watches!
• Sucky sucky! Me so horny! Me love you long time!

Is this what the new media d-bags have wrought? Is this the natural evolution of all these “1001 SEO Tips” and “Gain A Million Followers in a Minute” articles? Nearly every single post on my LinkedIn groups is a plug for a product release or service, often veiled with a headline that makes it sound like legitimate discussion. Things started going downhill on these groups when one poster would throw up headers like “Is the iPhone Gold Rush a Boon or Bane for Game Developers?”, and the ensuing post would be a recruitment scheme to get people to join his scam iPhone developer network. And the same guy posted and re-posted the same thing with different headlines and slightly re-worked wording. When i took him to task on it, he said he couldn’t help himself – he was getting so much business from LinkedIn that decorum be damned.

Now, to be completely honest, i’ve let fly the occasional self-promotion on LinkedIn. But i’m always careful to temper my marketing with useful comments, opinions and assistance. There has to be a little give with your take. My rough formula is 80% helpful, insightful community participation, 10% self-promotion, and 10% links to videos with chimpanzees riding on Segways.

And that’s the way the Internatz should be, dammit.

As i mentioned in my post about the contest last week, it can be difficult for a small shop to afford all of the awesome software it needs to do Awesome Things. And putting a game on the iPhone is, indeed, an Awesome Thing. It’s not that we’re going to make a ton of dough on the platform or anything, but here in Toronto, there’s a definite cachet attached to companies who create content for mobile devices.

There’s a hierarchy to the impressiveness of the tech you use, and the more street cred your tech has here in Toronto, the more cool stuff you get to do – speak at conferences, advise the government, talk on television, hookers plus blow, etc etc. It doesn’t even matter if the cool tech makes you any money. In Toronto, just by saying you’re going to develop triple-A console games, you get mentioned in every single newspaper article, industry whitepaper and ribbon-cutting ceremony our fair province of Ontario has to offer. But if you’re a multi-millionaire toy mogul adding to his boatloads of cash by creating an online virtual world for your customers’ stuffed animals, you don’t rate – probably because your virtual world was build in Flash. And, like smoking or doing drugs on Saturday morning in the 1980′s, Flash isn’t cool.

But HOO BOY! Just wait until we launch a failed iPhone app, folks. We’ll in the “it” crowd then!

My apologies to our international readers. The Toronto people know what i’m talking about.

Learn On Me

After a botched attempt at completing Unity’s platformer tutorial, which taught me nothing except how to mindlessly link pre-written scripts to pre-fab 3D objects, i’m excited to learn Unity 3D in earnest. And like i’ve said before, the trouble with teachers when they get to know something really really well is that they forget what it’s like to know nothing. i will likely have Unity3D lightning bolts shooting out of my fingertips by this time next year, but i am committed to writing down every bump, snag, roadblock, and WTF that crops up while i’m learning, so that when and if YOU decide to learn Unity, you’ll have one more good resource to turn to. So watch this space for Unity tutorials!

And i hope the pioneers who have gone before me will throw me a life preserver if Unity ends up sinking me.

It all makes me wonder how the guy who wrote the first book on How to Write a Book ever managed. Very chicken/egg.

i love big lists of articles like this that are grouped by topic! We’ve made a few of our own here on the site:

• Flash and Actionscript 911 – An ongoing series of articles and tutorials, including common error messages and what to do about them
• News For You ue_newspoodle compiles a daily list of interesting stories on game development and related topics. Feel free to add your own links!
• Pimp My Game Our feature about monetizing Flash games has been updated with a GREAT list of articles on the subject – scroll to the bottom of the page to find them
• Conjure, a group of ETS students in Montréal, maintain a whopping pantsload of great game industry links (thanks @jeanpierflash!)
• Smashing Magazine offers 35 Excellent Wireframing Resources (thanks @danmartell!)
• Flash Game Blogs – A Who’s Who of the Flash game dev world and links to their blogs, maintained by the folks at GamerSafe/Flash Game License
• Top Indie Developer Blogs – We were delighted and honoured to find ourselves among such great sources on this list, which was posted by the buys at Gambrinous
• How to Raise Start-Up Financing – We prefer to bootstrap wherever possible, but Ben Yoskovitz has a series of articles on building a bidness with Other People’s Money
• Blender Resources – lanzoma composed a list of links to help developers who are new to Blender, a free 3D software package
• Business Resources for Startups – a FANTASTIC list of links across the full spectrum of concerns for start-up companies, game studios included
• Awesome Sources for Game Music – a list of links and mini-reviews for various music stock & service providers
• 50 Awesome Open Courses for Web Writers – Make your corporate game blog sing!
• All the Developer’s Books You Ever Wanted – A great list from Jeez.com of free pdf instructional books on a variety of languages and technologies.
• Indie Game Developer Links – Gaming Horror maintains his own superb list similar to this one.

If you have lists of links that you want to share, leave a comment and i’ll add them to this list!

But i’m hoping that all of this research and planning and thinking and fretting will pay off for our company. One of our bidness goals this year is to release at least two products that will earn us some residual income. “Some” residual income is our barest minimum goal, with “lots” as a preferable target. (All estimates are approximated.)

If you’ve been with us all year, you’ll know that we’ve been working sporadically on a fun crime-themed puzzle game called Kahoots™, which we’ve modelled entirely in clay. After a lot of reading, attending conferences, and talking to you, our awesome readership, we’ve developed an ambitious publishing plan for Kahoots™ that is both revolutionary AND awesomepants. As many of the readers here are game developers themselves, i encourage and entreat you all to comment on this release strategy, give us your feedback and input, and help us handle the launch of Kahoots™ later this year with the utmost amazingosity.

Our Three-fold Release Strategy

With Kahoots™, we’re attempting something that i think no one’s ever done before. If i’m wrong, please correct me. i’m not trying to get into Guiness or anything – i’m just trying to maximize our ability to profit from the game. We’re going to try to make Kahoots™ available in three forms at launch:

1. On casual downloadable portals
2. On free-to-play Flash portals
3. Via direct sales on the Untold Entertainment website

Casual What-Now?

A casual downloadable portal is one where players download a time-limited trial version of the game – usually an executable (exe) file. At the end of the hour-long trial, the player can opt to purchase a license to play the remaining x hours. The big players in the casual downloadable space include Big Fish Games, iWin, WildTangent and RealArcade.

The big fish in that pond is definitely Big Fish. After a recent price war with Amazon Games, Big Fish has tuned its pricing down to $6.99 for all of the titles it distributes. (BFG also has a free-to-play section on the site, but let’s keep this simple.)

Since BFG has such enormous distribution, they should be a major factor in any release strategy in the casual downloadable space. When i heard the gents from 2D Boy (World of Goo) speak at the Game Developers’ Conference 2009, they strongly advocated a worldwide simultaneous launch with a consistent price tag. Since BFG are rock-solid on their pricing, that means that for better or for worse, the full version of Kahoots™ will cost $6.99 USD, everywhere.

(Naturally, we’ll have to develop a different release strategy when Kahoots™ is published to the iPhone, as gamers there refuse to pay more than seven cents per title)

(Formerly) Free-to-Play

Why not have our cake and eat it, too? Since companies like GamerSafe, MochiMedia and HeyZap have released virtual payment platforms specifically for Flash games, we can also monetize Kahoots through the free-to-play networks.

The process on free-to-play portals will look identical to the casual downloadable portals, except without the exe download: play a limited version of the game, and pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the full version of the game using a Flash virtual currency transaction. i cooked up this plan when it dawned on me that microtransactions didn’t actually have to be micro.

One of our readers, Paolo (AKA GameDevigner), gave me the idea of building a downloadable AIR app to better mirror the experience players would have on the casual downloadable portals. Pay your seven bucks, and you can “have” the game. This is certainly something worth considering.

Direct Sales

Kahoots™ will be available on UntoldEntertainment.com for $6.99 USD. i’m still not sure how to pull this off. The trouble is with DRM (digital rights management). i can very easily just provide the exe link and put the game behind a PayPal wall, but that does nothing for me if people want to share that exe around.

So there are a number of companies who offer “wrappers”, which are like digital soft taco shells that you roll around your content, and they take care of the whole serial number/version lock/DRM thing for you. The trouble is that these wrappers are either

• hella expensive in the short run, requiring large up-front fees
• hella expensive in the long run, taking a 6-10% cut of profits (in addition to the payment provider’s fee)
• both. Some products charge the fee AND take the cut. Then they slap your mama in the face.

Another intriguing and inflammatory thing the 2D Boy guys said was that you should not worry about DRMing your game. They said you shouldn’t waste precious time and money cooking up a protection scheme, because every game in the history of foreverville has been pirated, and once the protection layer is cracked, it’s like having your unprotected exe floating around out there anyway, so why waste your time?

When i see the business models for a lot of these sharky wrapper companies, i’m tempted to follow 2D Boys’ advice.

i’ll Buy THAT for $1.00 (plus $5.99 USD)

So the other part of the direct sales equation is payment provision. There are a great many payment providers out there who will hook you up, enabling you to offer a myriad more payment options to your site beyond your standard PayPal offering (and those of you who aren’t in North America can attest to the fact that PayPal is not an international phenomenon). The trick with these payment providers is, again, money. The percentage they take on each purchase starts high, and goes down as you sell lots of stuff, but between the wrapper sharks and the payment sharks, you can wind up giving away a good chunk of your gross income before the money even hits your account.

If you don’t go with a payment provider, the other option is to roll your own service by getting an Authorize.net account and an SSL certificate. But the problem there, again, is money. i know i want players to be able to buy Kahoots™ right off my site, but i’m obviously struggling with the logistics. If you want to chime in on this, now is the time!

Value Add

Big Fish rules state that your game has to exist within their “walled garden” – that means no injected ads, and no server calls. And no server calls means local (same computer) high scores only.

If i play my cards right, people who buy Kahoots™ from our site will be funnelling more money directly to us. So there’s an incentive to make a direct sale worthwhile for our customers. Since it’s our site, and we can do as we please, we can offer a version of the game with high scores in it. Come to it, we can offer the same to customers on the free-to-play sites as well.

Ads

There’s no reason why the demo version on the free-to-play sites shouldn’t be prefaced with CPMStar or MochiMedia ads. It’s not going to pay any big bills for us, but it makes sense to include ads.

True Microtransactions

As long as we’re implementing one or more microtransaction services into Kahoots™, we may as well add a few more ways for players to pay. As it plays out, it appears that games that make the most money on microtransactions are the ones that a) offer multiple items at varying price points and b) sell items transparently, and at the moment when engagement and investment are at their highest.

The currency in Kahoots™ is called munnypence. You earn munnypence by playing levels, and you can spend munnypence on items in the Curio Shop. These items are essentially cheats that help you get through the more difficult levels (if you need the help). A lousy player won’t be able to beat the more difficult levels, so he’ll be forced to grind earlier levels for more munnypence to buy cheats.

OR ….

He can buy munnypence.

And dig this: Kahoots™ also has “QuickPlay” modes, which are the same game types that you find in Story Mode, except the rules are tweaked slightly and the games are tied to high scores. i want prospective players to experience all the relevant content in the game, so i don’t want to lock them out of QuickPlay. So i’ll make QuickPlay cost munnypence. And each time you play a QuickPlay mode, it gets exponentially more expensive to play next time. So the non-purchasing players (or “hobos“, as i like to call them) can either

• grind the early levels in the demo to earn munnypence to play QuickPlay modes
• pay their $6.99 USD to unlock the whole game and play the QuickPlay modes for free
• buy munnypence with real-world dollars so that they can keep playing the QuickPlay modes

Multiple Languages

Kahoots™ was designed from Day One to support EFIGS languages – English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. (No Southeast Asian languages, because they frighten and confuse me). This will enable us to get a much wider reach for the game than an English-only version.

Multiple Platforms

Since Kahoots™ is being developed in Flash, we can produce Mac and Linux downloadable versions fairly easily (he said, never having done it before). Multiple platforms and multiple languages will hopefully translate to multiple money.

Charity

i want to donate 10% of the profits on the game to charity. It’s partly because customers may be more likely to buy a game if some of the cash goes to charity, and partly because i’m a Christian and i want to help the helpless. But to that end, i don’t really know how to handle the charity-choosing … i don’t want to offend or scare people off by choosing a Christian charity, but i’m also uncomfortable sending the money to DonorsChoose.org, where the it could go God-knows-where. (For example, i’m far more sympathetic to charitable causes that benefit humans rather than animals. Sorry, puppies and kitties.) i would likely want to send money to an organization like Compassion International, a child sponsorship program.

<RANT-O-RAMA>

And let me just say this: if folks are so hung up despising Christianity that they’d rather see a child starve to death than see him clothed, fed, and taught Bible lessons once a week, it’s all up for humanity. Many opponents of Christianity themselves were clothed, fed, and taught Bible lessons once a week, and they somehow managed to escape the seductive power of a faith that demands a difficult, disciplined lifestyle. Don’t worry: sponsored children in Haiti have all their lives to reject Christianity just like you have. Let’s please make sure they survive to see that day. Buy them some rice, for God’s sake.

</RANT-O-RAMA>

Please note, lest i be accused of shady dealings, that i’m committing 10% of profits on Kahoots™ to charity. The game has to break even first. 10% of any money we receive after that point will go towards charity. If we break even, we live to code another day, and can pull in more money for charity with our next game.

The Game is Afoot

So that’s the publishing plan in a nutshell. i’ve kept my cards close to my chest regarding numbers, because as it turns out, Kahoots™ really was a rather expensive game to build. i don’t want people to see the budget and to say “for what??” Suffice it to say that our Art Director was very fond of gold-dipped fruit, and that i would commute two blocks to work every day in my private jet because city sidewalks make my feet itchy.

But when Kahoots™ is released, i am committed to maintaining a thermometer on the site to keep you abreast of how close the game has come to hitting the break-even point.

A simultaneous release across casual downloadable and free-to-play portals, with an identical price tag attached to both streams. Has that ever been done before? If it has, please clue me in! i’d love to know whether it was a good idea or a bad idea, and whether we’re marching to meet our doom.

And if you have anything to say about or plan, for good or for ill, please speak up! Now’s the time for you lurkers who have their Masters degrees in finance to come out of the woodwork and post.

To read more about Kahoots™, be sure to check out the Kahoots™ Designer Diary.

A thread erupted on the FlashGameLicense community boards surrounding this post by free-to-play Flash game portal owner Yinan Chen, AKA “Archbob”, who runs FlashGameNinjaClan (which we “featured” in our recent post Why Don’t You Host Your Own Flash Game Portal?):

Mochi Leaderboards and Mochi Coins

Understandably, members of the developer community took exception to a few things Archbob had to say:

I don’t care how much the developers earn. The ones that make good games can easily make several thousand or tens of thousands per game.

and this gem from another unnamed portal owner:

I am sure Flash Game Developers make a lot of money already. [Microtransactions are] kind of greedy.

Hulk … rage … building. Sigh. Don’t get me started.

In the article, Archbob does voice some valid concerns about the implementation of MochiCoins and competing services from his industry perspective. He also goes on to shock some Flash game devs by detailing his practice of paying developers $100-200 for full source code to a game. This has led to a number of threads and posts on the subject of selling source, not least of all this post from the Vortix Games Blog:

Thinking about selling your source code?

Your Question, Answered

At the end of the day, Archbob is just a bidnessman looking to make a buck and doing it the most efficient way possible. If some devs are willing to part with their code for a pat on the back and some lunch money, it’s on them, not on Archbob.

But now that we’re all here, Flash game devs, let’s talk about this whole source code issue. What’s the deal, anyway? Should i sell my source code?

The short answer to that question is “no.”

The long answer is “no.”

The answer, translated into French, is non which, loosely translated back to English, means “no.”

The answer in the African click language Mbukushu is “nglOCK”, which – you guessed it – means “no”.

So a new question arises: have we, Untold Entertainment, ever sold our source? The answer there is actually “yes”, but to understand why, i have to take you back to a simpler time.

Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

Picture it: the year is 2007. George W. Bush is in the White House. “Fergalicious” by pop chanteuse Fergie (featuring will.i.am) tops the Billboard Hot 100, a popular music chart of the day. And the star of the Flash game development scene is a high-level programming language called ActionScript 2.

“AS2″, as it was known in jive-talking developer circles, was not a full Object-Oriented programming language. You could, with a little facial straining and a lot of undocumented wizardry, shoehorn it more towards an OOP mould, but most of us with a day job and one-week-long game production deadlines couldn’t be arsed. Those days, creating a new game meant coding it largely from scratch, or keeping a folder full of code snippets to copy-paste into a new file. Reusable code was a tale told by futurists and mad-men. Chaos and disorder ruled the day.

When our clients would request our AS2 source code for a week-long game like Eye in the Sky: Spot the Differences, it was hard to kick up a fuss. Many of our clients are kids’ television production companies who convince themselves that they’ll have the time and money to repurpose these games later, but nothing ever comes of it. If a different client were to come to us and ask for a nearly identical spot-the-differences game, i’d probably code it from scratch. The new client’s concept would probably be just subtly different enough to warrant a re-write.

But then along came a stranger to the scene, a wild-eyed and vivacious newcomer with a mane of saffron-coloured hair and a tight pair of rhinestone-studded spandex pants. “Actionscript 3″ was his name, and the industry would be changed forever.

The difference between AS2 and AS3 is that Actionscript 3 has really lived up to its promise of code reuse. Problems that used to take us days or weeks are reduced to literally a single hour, leaving us to catch up on our knitting in those long, tranquil stretches of Wednesday afternoons. AS3 has also changed the way we negotiate our contracts with clients.

AS3′s Impact on Contract Negotiations

The clients will always ask for source code, and we will always say no, for these very valid reasons:

1. By selling your source code, you are selling the right to use that code. You can’t (contractually) sell your code to someone and then turn around and re-use it in a new game.
2. With each new project, we re-use and improve upon libraries that we used in past projects. If we sold the code in those libraries, we couldn’t (contractually) use them in our next project, so our profit margins would shrink because we’d have to [technically] re-write the code.
3. The time and effort we put into some of our libraries is very valuable to us, and can represent literally years of development. We’re not going to let that fly out the door for the cost of a few weeks’ development.

To use an industrial analogy, selling your source code isn’t like selling a car. It’s not even like selling the plans or the autoCAD blueprints for the car. It’s like selling a machine which, when you push a button, makes a car.

So no, clients cannot have our source code. But this presents us with a problem: what happens when the client’s database guy needs to integrate the game into the high scores system, but he’s only available in November, and we’re finished with the game in October? Or what happens when the game is a component of a much larger website, and the client requires source code to integrate the game? Or what happens when the style bible changes and the client wants to make a character’s hat blue?

These are all real-world examples from our actual experiences. You hard-lined developers might say “if they want the hat blue, they can pay us to make that change.” But our policy has always been to enable the client to make reasonable changes after the fact, without having to pay an expensive Flash developer for simple modifications. That’s why we try to link copy decks in xml files outside the project. The client shouldn’t have to pay us more money because they want the Registered Trademark symbol added to a product name. (And, honestly, we don’t really want to halt production on a new project to make such a small change to an older project anyway).

We’re currently building a music game. What if the client finds out down the road that the rights to the songs have changed? Should they have to pay us to put different songs in the games? In my opinion, no. So we’re building the game so that it’s easy to change the playlist externally.

And the hard-line approach does nothing to solve the problem of site integration. Clients simply need source code in that case.

So what is the solution?

Enter the Shared Source Agreement

Since we started developing games in Actionscript 3, we’ve signed a Shared Source Agreement on nearly all of our projects. That’s where we can:

• Re-use
• Re-configure
• Re-sell
• Re-skin

the source code, and our clients cannot. But we do give our clients the source code, with a license to modify that code within the current skin. That means that if we’re making a game about bears who love the delicious crunchy taste of Goorman’s Cookies, the client can’t turn around use the source code to create a game about a bee who can’t get enough of the satisfying crackle of BingBong’s Peanut Brittle. They can do whatever they want with it, as long as they stick to that bear with those cookies.

The Honour System

“But if you give the client your code, aren’t they just on the honour system?” you ask. Sure they are. The client could turn around and do a variety of things with the code that weren’t contractually permitted. But as human beings, we rely on the honour system a great deal. The honour system is what keeps you from walking down the sidewalk and stabbing someone in the face. It’s what dissuades you from veering your car over the yellow line on the road and into oncoming traffic. i like the honour system. Let’s stick with it.

If it helps you with your own contracts, or if you’re one of our competitors looking to get an edge on us, here’s the kind of wording we use when we work with a client on a fee-for-service basis:

The source code for this project is licensed to [Client] under a Shared Source agreement. Untold Entertainment Inc. retains the exclusive right to modify, reuse, re-skin and sublicense the source code, and any non-brand-identifying multimedia assets. [Client] may modify the source code solely for the purposes of [project]. Untold Entertainment retains the know-how and materials to this project.

Know-How! (Contrariwise!)

When i first saw a client try to retain “know-how”, i actually had it stricken from the contract. How could someone else own my knowledge of how i did something? Did i have to erase my memory or try to blot knowledge from my mind? (Of course not. Apparently, i’m pretty good at naturally forgetting how to do things.)

i came to understand that retaining “know-how and materials” is strictly legal language pertaining to a research grant (SR&ED) here in Canada. He who writes that language into the contract gets to apply for the grant.

Let Us Retire to the Sitting Room

So this post is meant to help you out if you’re looking to do some fee-for-service work (we geev you the Flash, you geev us the monay) and you need this kind of help with your contract. i hope this post doesn’t serve as bait for an army of hobbyists telling me how great it is to sell your source code. As always, i welcome lively discussion either here or on the boards. And if this post has taught you nothing and you’re still interested in selling your source code to me for a few hundred bucks, please drop me a line. :)