The wonderful announcement came amid some grumbling and criticism from certain elements of the indie game dev community, who called foul because we’ve been selling merchandise to happy Ponycorns fans across the globe (GET YOURS TODAY!). Macaulay Culkin’s name was actually invoked (referencing the way his parents hoarded all the acting money he made as a kid).

Rest assured, friends, that not only has Cassie earned more money through donations to her college fund than Untold Entertainment has made on Ponycorns altogether, but she also has a legally defined percentage stake in the project. By the time we make Ponycorns 7: Ponycorn Harder, Cassie will be drying her tears on a fat stack of trust fund cash. And as any of the hundreds of people who attended TOJam can attest, she had a great time working on the game.

As IGF (Independent Games Festival) adjudication continues, what’s more important is that Ponycorns rightly sweeps the entire awards show, winning not only the Moustache Craft honorarium, but also the Glorm Juerven Award for Most Obvious Weak Spot on a Mid-Level Boss. Even a single nomination means that i can justify bringing Cass to GDC, as the youngest ever game developer honoured by the IGF. Once Ponycorns pulls in an appalling number of nominations, we’ll happily suffer an angry Twitter onslaught from disgruntled indies.

The presentation i gave at Screens, titled Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar, was the third-highest rated talk at the conference. Here are the ratings and comments from the feedback forms that the attendees filled out:

Was the speaker knowledgeable on the topic presented? 9.68
Did the session meet your expectations? 9.59
Did the speaker present the material in a clear and well-organized way? 9.77
Please rate the overall effectiveness of the speaker. 9.77
This session will affect the way I work 8.18
Overall average 9.40

Attendee comments:

• Funny and Entertaining REAL
• Awesome Story
• Inspiring
• Hilarious Magical, Thank You.
• Funny and fun. Great way to end the conference.
• Inspirational! Thanks!
• Excellent way to close out!!
• Very enthusiastic. Great end to the event.
• Hilarious, entertaining. A great story.
• AMAZING!
• Hysterical with creative, fun and useful
• Interesting.
• PONYCORNS!

Huge thanks to the conference organizers and to everyone who came to hear me speak. i’ve submitted bids in to tell the Ponycorns story to attendees at GDC 2012 and the Flash Gaming Summit next year, and this can only help. Fingers crossed!

Wanna know who else made the list? Legendary Civilization game developer Sid Meier, who keynoted last year’s Game Developers Conference.

i Got All the Awards

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is an entrant in this year’s Independent Games Festival, so she has a real shot at winding up at GDC herself to accept all the awards, including Most Prodigious Use of Invisible Walls and the Hervé Velasquez Memorial Award for Digital Inclination. It’s very possible that if Ponycorns is nominated, Cassie can actually meet Sid at GDC 2012. That’s incredible! Wouldn’t you have wanted that opportunity at five years old? IGF judges: you can make this happen.

Cassie’s game enjoyed international fame and critical acclaim after delighting fans the world over. Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure has been featured in digital and print publications as far away as Spain, Japan, and Russia. The game was a finalist in the 2011 IndieCade Festival, and many games journalists have hailed it as an early contender for Game of the Year 2011 since its release in March .

I Fold

It was a stretch for me to arrive at Gamercamp for 9:30. It’s a good day when i can drag myself to the bathroom of my own house by 9:30. i’m not an early riser. But when i saw that the conference’s keynote speaker was Seth Cooper, who worked on FoldIt, i knew i’d have to strain myself and make it there on time. i’m a big fan of using games to do useful things. (Note: that’s NOT the same as “gamification”, which is an attempt to make mundane things more interesting using trophies and leaderboards.)

FoldIt is a game out of Cornell and the University of Washington’s Center for Game Science. It uses crowdsourcing (lots of people doing stuff for you, like the Egyptian pyramids) to solve scientific puzzles by squishing 3D protein models down to more efficient forms. This is a task where humans can produce better solutions than computers, because we have better spatial reasoning than our future Robot Masters (blessings and peace be upon them). i’ve known about FoldIt for a while now, but whenever i see it being played, i can’t for the life of me figure out what in the Hell is going on.

Cooper said the possible applications of crowd-sourced FoldIt research included curing diseases and discovering alternatives to plastic. Indeed, the big story recently was that FoldIt players solved in three weeks a problem that had scientists scratching their heads for ten years – something to do with AIDS research and monkeys. The other two Center for Game Science initiatives Seth talked about were Photocity, where people taking pictures of real-life buildings can contribute to point cloud models (the hope being that some day, we’ll have an insanely detailed 3D model of our planet), and Refraction, part of an initiative to use A|B game testing to discover the best way to teach fractional mathematics to young students. (Photocity was a bit of a bust for me … the resulting point cloud model of four buildings was largely unimpressive and missing huge chunks of geometry, and it took 3 weeks and 40 000 pictures to produce. A skilled 3D artists could have produced a far more complete set of models in less time. So i was left wondering whether the initiative was such a hot idea.)

i found the talk was decent, but a little self-serving. Cooper covered only UW/Cornell-produced projects, without ever talking about the myriad other projects that use game crowdsourcing to solve problems. In future iterations, Seth could give a nod to Google Image Labeler and reCAPTCHA to level out his talk.

Seth was shooed off the stage without taking questions in an effort to keeping the morning moving; i had a question for him that would’ve made me look like a complete tool (but what else is new?). With the proliferation of so-called slot machine games on Facebook, and companies turning huge profits “gamifying” mundane experiences, there’s a lot of talk about reward systems. Folks like Chris Hecker and Jesse Schell debate about extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation in games, and about the things that successfully motivate us; at least one study shows that for high-level knowledge work, monetary rewards just don’t cut it.

Using FoldIt results to develop an alternative to plastic, or to develop an AIDS vaccine (note: not a cure, because there’s no business model in a cure) are multi-bazillion dollar propositions. Everyone roots for initiatives like FoldIt when they think it boils down to the goodness of people’s hearts, but as soon as someone starts cranking some serious coin based on results garnered from these crowdsourced games, the participants will want to see their work rewarded financially. Just look at the story of Box2D creator Erin Catto, and wealthier-than-God publisher Rovio of Angry Birds fame.

The Remains of the Day

Most of the rest of the morning’s presentations were a joy. Jim McGinley gave the talk he’s been dreaming of, “Digging Through the Trash”, where he discusses game ideas that could be salvaged by modern game developers from the Radio Shack TRS-80 (AKA the “Trash-80″).

i loved the talk, and i really want to see more talks like it. i feel i have a distinct advantage over today’s younger crop of game developers because of my history playing ColecoVision, Intellivision and Atari 2600 games back in the day, because they were such simple games with simple mechanics that cut to the chase, and got to the fun FAST. One of my former students couldn’t even pronounce “ColecoVision” this afternoon. i firmly believe these kids should be made to sit in a room with guys like me and Jimmy, and forced to study classic home console games. Then we can pull our pants up to our nipples and tell them what’s wrong with the government.

Young Folks

i wasn’t all that enamoured with graphic designer Cory Schmitz’s presentation. It had a little too much pretentious hipster “Scene Kid” stuff going on in it for my liking, as Cory tore down design choices for various movie posters and video game box covers, providing examples of compositions that would have made them “better”. All of his examples had a real design smell to them, and he seemed a little too green to present his preferences as subjectively better, rather than objectively better. (If it doesn’t have a stark palette, odd angles, and gobs of negative space, it’s crap.) Still, there were a lot of art students in the audience, and they may have appreciated his talk.

There was a presentation by some industry up-and-comers about what they’re working on. While these mini-talks themselves tended to be rough, i enjoyed the effort as a whole, because it gave some of the student- and grad-level Toronto developers an opportunity to polish their public speaking skills. It’s an opportunity Prez Lesley Phord-Toy and i have been trying to give people throughout the year through the IGDA Toronto Chapter events like Straight Out TOJam and the Open Mic Night.

Building a Game (sorta) in Three Hours (ish)

The afternoon was a mish-mash of various workshops, including board game development, “physical” game design, playtesting sessions, and the Iron Game Developer Challenge. When i heard that Michael Todd dropped out due to ninja training or whatever, i jumped in and took his place. i wound up using UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), the same engine that powers Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure and Spellirium, to produce Frankentoy in just over three hours :

As with Iron Chef, the Iron Game Developer Challenge had a secret ingredient that we had to incorporate into our games: bug-eyed plastic wind-up chattering teeth, which rank on the Creighton Terrifying Toy Spectrum somewhere between Cymbal-Smashing-Chimp-On-A-Tricycle, and this little nightmare:

The game is called “Frankentoy” and it has a Tim Burton-esque aesthetic, likely because Burton’s first film was Frankenweenie, and with very little time on the clock, i was lazily free-associating. The game is based (only partially) on a true story – my mom, a single parent, used to leave me alone in toy and book stores all the time, and would occasionally not make it back in time to pick me up until after closing time. Terrifying.

We developed UGAGS to help us create graphic adventure games quickly, but it feels like three hours was a little nuts. i hadn’t even played the game by the time the buzzer went off, and it’s plagued by some bona fide jankiness. i have no idea why the kid walks backwards. i probably should have spent less time shooting Jon Remedios in the head with Nerf bullets. But whatever. Let’s see YOU make a game.

FITC Screens Festival

November 14-15 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre

Session: Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar
Time: Tuesday at 4:30 PM in Room 203 AC

When many speakers tell their success stories, they essentially talk about how they were struck by lightning. The take-away for the audience is to go out and somehow get struck by lightning too. With Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, game developer Untold Entertainment Inc. was struck by lightning. In this exciting and surprising session, Ryan Henson Creighton talks about how to turn your project into a lightning rod to attract success, and how to capture that surge of success without letting a single spark go to waste.

This is the hour-long Director’s Cut version of the talk i gave at the 100th meeting of the FlashInTO user group. It’s an absolutely crazy story that begins with me desperately craving attention at GDC 2010, and ends with a hit viral game with worldwide appeal.

DIG 2011

November 16-17 at the London Convention Centre

Session: Games: a Hit Driven Business
Time: Wednesday at 11:45 AM

This panel session features four small-to-midsize game companies in Ontario, including Untold Entertainment (THAT’S ME!!), Big Blue Bubble, Antic Entertainment and Red Piston, discussing the importance of developing a hit to sustaining a business. i’m especially interested to hear what Damir Slogar of BBB has to say … his company took the slow, deliberate “manufacture a hit” approach by essentially throwing a bunch of games at the wall to see what stuck. What stuck was Burn the Rope (not to be confused with You Have to Burn the Rope), which had its day in the sun at the top of the iOS charts.

Gamercamp Lvl 3

November 25-27 at the Toronto Underground Cinema and Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined

Session: Sticking The Landing—Strategies On Shepherding The Next Big Project
Time: Sunday at 4:30 PM at HVSDI

From big projects like X-Men: Destiny, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, Mega Jump and N+, everyone is wondering what’s next? Panelists will talk about those last project experiences and the lessons learned for their next big projects.

i plan to say less about Ponycorns in this session, and more about Spellirium, which is gonna rock your socks off.

Congratulations to Corus. Our trunks are crossed for a win!

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.

1. Ain’t no ladies in the games industry.
2. If there were, i wonder what kinds of games they’d make?
3. Let’s find out.

Mare is a lady, so her involvement is understandable. Jim Munroe, however, is definitely NOT a lady, as evidenced by the following diagram:

Jim is involved because of his work on the Artsy Games Incubator, a somewhat similar concept, where he led a group of non-programmers on an odyssey of game creation. One of the interesting things i learned when talking to Jim and crew about the Difference Engine: Ladies Edition is that it’s important to have only ladies in the room, because men – even only one man (see above) – can skew the dynamic in the room and tilt the power balance. Weird, huh?

EVEN WEIRDER is this photo from the article, where we can clearly see Jim, who is a man, in the room with the ladies. What i love about this photo is that the unshaven man-legs on the right likely belong to Jim, it actually looks he’s poking his head through that little cubby hole at the other end of the room, spying on the proceedings (perhaps because someone put a “GIRLZ ONLY” sign on the door?).

The other TIFF Nexus events this year include the Peripherals Intiative, which pairs game developers up with hardware hackers, and another mash-up involving “sequential artists”, as comic book folks sometimes call themselves just to make me giggle. Nexus kicked off last night at a swanky TIFF Bell Lightbox rooftop party in the midst of the film festival. Untold Entertainment was there. The tiny yorkshire pudding appetizers were to die for.

This is the story of how Izzy was two inches shy of the height cut-off, so we dropped Cassie off at the ball pit and took Izzy secretly to get a frozen yogurt cone to stop her from crying inconsolably. i was wearing my “I Am an Evil Lemon” shirt, one of the fine items we sell for fans of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. The cashier looked at it and said “cool shirt!” This was exciting to me. “Do you know what this is?” i asked. “No,” he said.

Oh. What a let-down.

i said “It’s from this game i made with my daughter.” His face brightened up. “You were on the news!” Then my face brightened up as well.

The World Over

What i found remarkable about the exchange was that he was a young guy, supposedly part of a generation that didn’t watch teevee any more – and especially not the 6 o’clock news (or the nation-wide morning show Canada AM).

But that didn’t beat my experience a week ago. We had rented a cottage in Haliburton, a patch of cottage country three hours Northwest of Toronto. The map to that area of Ontario has exactly one road running through it; the rest is very very green, and spotted with lakes. The village closest to the cottage was a place called Gooderham, which i hesitate to call a “one-horse town”, because i got the feeling they likely had to borrow a horse from the next town over. The only commercial buildings in Gooderham are a diner, a gas station, and a convenience store.

We went in to buy marshmallows, popsicles, and snow cone syrup – you know, all the camping staples – and i was wearing my Evil Lemon shirt. As with the IKEA story, the guy behind the cash register remarked at my shirt. “That’s a strange shirt,” he said. “Oh – it’s from this game i made with my daughter,” i replied.

And then, this guy who worked his parents’ convenience store in the middle of B.F. Nowhere in Ontario, three hours Northwest of Toronto, and three months after the fact, said “Oh – you were on the news!”

i’ve had people write to me to tell me how they’ve shared the game around. You’ll remember the teacher who dressed up as the Ponycorns game and went to an anime convention. At the cottage, we spent some time with an old friend of ours, who is also a teacher. Before school ended, he shared the game with his high school students, who went absolutely nuts for it. Come exam time, his students (unprovoked) doodled ponycorns fan-art on the backs of their papers:

Tiny Voice, Enormous Head

Many people ask me how Cassie is handling her notoriety. A few weeks back, we wanted to have brunch at a place downtown. The waitress politely told us it would be a five minute wait for a table. Cassie looked up at her and said, in a rehearsed manner, “Hi! My name’s Cassie. i’m five years old. i made a game called Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, and almost everyone in the whole world has played it.” Then she waited, expectantly. This, of course, was all to my utter horror.

“Cassie … are you trying to get us a table more quickly?” i asked. Then, to salvage the situation with humour (as i am wont to do), i chuckled uncomfortably and said to Cassie (for the waitress’s benefit) “No, sweetie – this is how you do it: you say ‘DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM??’”

i’m not sure the waitress appreciated that approach either.

Every so often, i’ll catch Cassie smugly saying to her sister “i’m the famous girl”, and i’ll bark at her from another room “KNOCK IT OFF. You’re NOT famous.” She just continues colouring, and humming to herself contentedly.

We’re far from having created a monster, but my wife and i do have to issue occasional reminders about humility vs. conceitedness. We told Cass that “almost everyone in the world” had played her game, only to help frame it for her. She wouldn’t have appreciated the scope of the game’s virality if we had said “GREAT news, sweetie! Your game is huge in Michigan, and in select parts of Western Mexico!”

Still, the fact that folks remember us from the news remains a thrill. It’s a far cry from getting mobbed in a shopping mall by squealing preteen girls, but hey … we can’t all be Wilford Brimley.

This November, i’ll be talking about the whole roller coaster ride of creating a viral game, and the steps we took to maximize our exposure and reach during the peak of the craziness, at the Screens festival in Toronto for my presentation “Ponycorns: Catching Lightning in a Jar“.

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.

To celebrate, we’re showcasing the work of some dyed-in-the-wool ponycorn fans.

Ponycorns at Anime North

Mike Barltrop is an educator who showed Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure to his high school students so they’d be without excuse – if a 5-year-old could pull off a game, he can expect a lot more from them. Mike enjoyed ponycorns so much that he painstakingly re-created a number of Cassie’s drawings and dressed up as the game for the Anime North nerdfest in Toronto:

To put Mike’s ponycorns passion into perspective, the game was released on May 25th. Anime North started the following Friday and ran the length of the weekend. And people at the conference recognized Mike’s costume. Awesomazing!

The Star’s Crayon Forgery Shenanigans

We spotted one piece of fan art that was no less hilarious than Mike’s costume, but unbelievable for a different reason. When the Toronto Star posted its story about the ponycorns’ meteoric rise to prominence, the online piece had two images in its gallery: a shot of Cassie playing the game, and THIS:

It doesn’t take a keen eye to see that this image is actually a forgery, created by an adult employed at the Star. When we saw this image on the site, we were a little baffled. We have a stack of original crayon art from the game that we could have sent to the newspaper at a moment’s notice. This kind of thing is in keeping with some of my other dealings with news media, like my interview with CityTV from a while back where they grabbed one tiny soundbite from me to prove the point they were trying to make, and completely discarded everything else i said. Hilarious! If you don’t already watch the news and read the paper with a cocked eye, i hope you’ll start today.

We asked the Toronto Star to correct the article, and the picture was removed in short order.

UPDATE

Now it’s ME doing the retracting. The wacky lads over at Shh-Mom.com have confessed to penning the offending artwork which, in its original context, isn’t offending at all. The folks at the Star must have grabbed it, thinking it to be genuine. i’m glad we got to the bottom of this. Has it restored my faith in traditional news media? No. Question everything!

Flannery’s Fanfic

We’re saving the best for last on Ponycorn P’toosday. 9-year-old Flannery, proud owner of a plush ponycorns mega-pack, sent us this fantastic storybook featuring the extended adventures of the ponycorns gang. Enjoy your face off!

Get Some

If this is your first exposure to ponycorns, pick up your copy on the iPad today! The game is also available on the BlackBerry Playbook and in your browser.

(any regular Untold reader will figure out how i commissioned such a great trailer voice-over without breaking the bank! :)

This is all in anticipation of the release of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on the Apple iPad next week, on a momentous date we’re calling Ponycorn P’toosday (July 12 2011).

Pricing and Strategy

The game is priced at $2.99. When pricing, i followed this reasoning;

• iPad versions of games usually sell for more than their iPhone/iPod counterparts. Why? Because. (you pay more money for your iPad, so you should pay more for its software? i guess? *shrug*)
• the lowest paid price for an iPhone/iPod app is 99 cents, so following the rule, that brings the iPad price to $1.99
• i have heard tell from people who have researched it more heavily that curiously, people don’t seem to differentiate between the $1.99 and $2.99 price points. If you go $3.99, they fly off the handle and you sell zero copies. But given the choice between selling at 2 bucks or 3 bucks, you may as well go with 3.
• Generally, it’s much easier to lower the price than it is to raise it, so you may as well start high. Some companies have claimed to launch at a low “introductory price” and have raised it from there – that’s really the only way i’ve seen of getting away with those sorts of price-raising shenanigans. (Although Tommy Refenes famously raised his price every time he got a sale. That was hilarious. And tough to duplicate.)

The average donation amount to Cassie’s Education Fund on the ponycorns website was $10, so it’s not such a wild stab.

Why Buy the Cow?

Now, of course, the real interesting bit will be to see if folks will buy the game on a mobile platform even though it’s available for free online. Here are a few reasons why the mobile version is more appealing:

1. it runs ad-free
2. there’s no download wait – the game instantly starts up
3. it’s easier for the kids in your life to access … they just have to tap the game icon (instead of you having to type in a url for them to play)
4. kids prefer touch interfaces over mouse-driven ones (and have more success with touch)
5. the touch interface even lowers the minimum play age down from 2 years old to zero years old
6. the audio is uncompressed and crystal-clear

The Importance of Being iOS

The indie game developers i know, who have had varying degrees of success on the iOS platform, have lovingly cautioned me that i’ve entered a lottery, and that i shouldn’t get my hopes up. i’m running somewhat of a different business than they are. It’s not crucial for an original Untold game to succeed on iOS, but it is crucial for Untold to have launched a product there.

The reason is that most of our kids’ production and broadcast clients are presently putting all their eggs in the iOS basket, for better or worse … i think that, as with most people, their eyes are all a-twinkle at the prospect of actually selling their kids’ games. Many of my clients treat these kids’ teevee brand extensions into video games as a marketing expense, and the interactive departments don’t generally turn a profit. When the axe comes down, as it often does, it comes down hardest on departments that are non-revenue generating. iOS represents a faint hope to many of these folks that they can become a money-making operation to gain more sway and security within the larger organization.

So! Now that Untold Entertainment can offer both online web game services AND mobile game development services (including Android, Playbook and iOS) to our clients, we’re very well situated. Don’t get me wrong – i’d LOVE for ponycorns to take off on the iPad and warrant an iPhone/iPod version. There are a whole lot of people out there whose days have not yet been brightened by the rainbow-coloured land of ponycorns, so we have some work left to do.

P’too Long; Didn’t Read

Did i mention the game comes out on the iPad on Ponycorn P’toosday, July p’12th? Mark your calendars!

Untold Entertainment is excited to announce the latest addition to its network of free-to-play game collections with the release of Tower Defense Game World. Over 120 games are ready to play, with new additions posted every week. Tower Defense Game World is the newest member of Untold’s suite of free game networks, which currently includes Zombie Game World and Word Game World.

“Tower defense” is a game genre that has become immensely popular in the past five years. Most tower defense games have the player protecting a fortress or base from incoming “waves” of enemies. The player can purchase and place turrets that fend off the hordes of invaders. Through careful placement and upgrading, the player can emerge victorious with an unscathed fortress.

Tower Defense games have proven to be one of the most popular game genres available today, with varieties that appeal to casual gamers, core players, and everyone in between. Plants vs. Zombies by Popcap Games is one of the most well-known tower defense games. Tower Defense Game World offers a curated experience, bringing the best free Tower Defense games currently available into one website.

About Untold Entertainment

Untold Entertainment Inc. is a boutique game development studio in Toronto specializing in games and apps for kids, teens, tweens, and preschoolers. Untold developed Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure which was co-created by a five-year-old girl, and its upcoming post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure game Spellirium.

A graphic adventure game often adheres to these conventions:

• Third person perspective (you can see your character’s body), rather than first person (you can see through the eyes of your character)

  

  Full Throttle (left) is a third person adventure game, while MYST is atypically first person

• Emphasis on story and character
• Inventory system (the player can carry objects)
• “Puzzles” … these are choke points in the game which can be overcome through various means (read: The 12 Types of Puzzles in Graphic Adventure Games)
• Dialogue. Characters “speak” either through on-screen subtitles, or voice-over, or both.

  

• Conversations. Many graphic adventure games use branching dialogue trees for character interaction.

  

• Humour. This is one of the only video game genres that consistently uses humour as a selling point and main attraction.

Some famous examples of graphic adventure games are The Secret of Monkey Island, King’s Quest, and Simon the Sorceror. (Note that games involving adventure, like The Legend of Zelda, are often called “adventure games”, but the “graphic adventure” moniker applies only to this very specific genre we’ve outlined.)

The graphic adventure game genre suffered its demise in the mid-90′s at the hand of more popular action-oriented games like DOOM. The criticism of graphic adventure games, at the time, was that they were too expensive to produce and didn’t provide the player with enough replay value. Games like LOOM could be completed in a single day, and carried a $50-70 price tag.

Advantages of the Genre

The causes of the graphic adventure game’s fall from grace have, in a strange way, become its new strengths – particularly in the context of extending children’s brands to new platforms.

Replayability and Kids

Graphic adventure games are not very replayable for adults and older, because the experience is the same every time; adults are constantly seeking something new and challenging. But this is actually a strength when it comes to children’s entertainment. Young children will watch a movie or a teevee show again and again, with each viewing immediately following the last. In fact, certain teevee properties have acknowledged and leveraged this fact: Nickelodeon aired each new Blue’s Clues episode five times in a row from Monday to Friday, and test results found that this increased viewers’ attention and comprehension. Every episode of Teletubbies contains a live action segment of children performing an activity. This exact same live action segment is repeated within the same episode.

To a young child, everything is new and challenging. There’s a distinct comfort in knowing the answers. Just as a child will proudly repeat a newly-learned task to demonstrate his mastery (standing on one leg, clicking his tongue, drawing the letter “A”), children delight in playing and replaying graphic adventure games because they’re predictable. Children like knowing that they can play a game from beginning to end, predictably experiencing the same events and confidently overcoming the same challenges.

Development Costs

The entire aim of UGAGS is to reduce the cost to develop graphic adventure games. While it was once true that graphic adventure games have demanded high budgets for low value, the cost of developing games in other, more action-based genres, has skyrocketed.

Brand Extension

Very often, we see kids’ television brands being extended to other areas, most notably video games. The mistake people usually make is to figure “well, teevee shows are about story and character, while video games are about defeating enemies and jumping on platforms … so we’ll take our teevee character and make her defeat enemies and jump on characters.”

This errant thinking stems from a very narrow understanding of video game genres. The result is games like That’s So Raven for the Nintendo Gameboy Advance:

That’s So Raven was based on the Disney show of the same name. The game’s genre is best described as action … as Raven, you have to navigate the halls of your school, dodging book-throwing baddies and spraying your enemies in the face with perfume.

On the Disney site itself, you also have That’s So Raven Pinball:

What do these two games do to extend the That’s So Raven brand to video games? As a That’s So Raven fan, is this how you want to interact with the brand? It’s the equivalent of just throwing That’s So Raven on a sleeping bag or a pencil case and calling it a day. What does That’s So Raven have to do with sleeping, colouring, or pinball? Are there any moments in the show where Raven has to make it from one end of the school to the other, while dodging thrown books? Nope.

HERE is an excellent pinball game brand extension:

HERE is a great sleeping bag brand extension:

What’s That’s So Raven all about? Well, she can see the future. How about a That’s So Raven Tarot Card deck? Fortune cookies? A magic 8-ball?

As a fan of the show, i want to play as Raven (they got that part right), but i also want to do the things that Raven does. i want to talk to all my friends, crack jokes, use my future-seeing powers, and get up to zany hijinks. The Game Boy Advance game pays lip service to this, by relegating your hijinks to cutscenes (non-interactive segments that play between levels). This game treatment is the equivalent of slapping a logo on a toothbrush. It’s essentially a white label game with an irrelevant brand make-up job.

The good news is that you can extend the brand logically to video games with a That’s So Raven graphic adventure game. Instead of hijinks being tacked on superficially, the entire plot of the game can unfold like an episode of the teevee show, with the player as the central character. You can even produce a few games, and release them episodically, just like the show. It’s a mode of production that teevee people understand, and it can even employ the show’s writers and actors in its development.

Lost in Translation

When considering how best to parlay your teevee show into video game format, consider how your show’s fans may want to engage with your brand, and try to match the genre to the show. If you have a boys’ action series, it might make sense to do a top-down space shooter with lasers and power-ups. But since a majority of kids’ content is about story and character, a graphic adventure game is going to give the audience what they want, and will make for a much smoother transition into games if you don’t fully grasp their nuances.

Slaves of the 80′s

Again, here’s a scenario i see all the time, and it’s a perfect example of what not to do: your show’s lead character doesn’t ride a skateboard, but you once heard of a popular game franchise called Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (your nephew plays it … or he used to, a few years ago. You can’t remember – you don’t follow this video game stuff too closely).

So you cook up the idea to put your character on a skateboard, jumping pylons and ducking seagulls, because you figure you’d basically be producing the same effect as the Tony Hawk game and reaping that popularity for your own brand.

There’s a (hopefully) obvious disparity in development time and budget here (a Tony Hawk game costs millions, and has a bona fide cool factor, celebrity endorsements, and legacy of prequels wherein the gameplay was refined over the course of a decade). Then there’s the brand disconnect: you feel your character should ride a skateboard in the game, simply because it’s more “gamey”; your show doesn’t have enough video game-like action in it, so you need to manufacture some. The good news is that if you understand game genres, and are aware of the graphic adventure genre in particular, you don’t have to squeeze your characters into genres and scenarios that aren’t a good brand fit.

You’d never market a Smurfs Chainsaw. You’d never redraw Martha Speaks anime-style and have her punching and kicking as a ninja in feudal Japan. It’s just as inappropriate and off-putting to have a Suite Life of Zack and Cody Pac Man clone:

i know exactly what happened here: a group of folks who don’t fully understand video games got together in a board room to decide on a video game concept for the Zack and Cody. The most recent frame of reference they had was Pac Man (25 years ago), so that’s what the game was modeled after. i’ve seen this situation unfold time and again. By leaning more on the understanding and expertise of game developers, you can avoid this brand disconnect and still end up with a fun video game that engages and entertains your players. Building a graphic adventure game from a show property is the most straightforward way to avoid this brand disconnect.

If your show is about putting on shoes and going on adventures, like in Frannie’s Feet, you can do exactly that in a graphic adventure game. If your characters have to visit planets to learn new things, as they do in Rob the Robot, a graphic adventure game makes the perfect brand extension. In fact, i’ll go so far as to say that the genre works with any narrative kids’ teevee show on the market today. Give the graphic adventure genre a shot for your next teevee-to-game project!

For more information on UGAGS, please contact ugags@untoldentertainment.com.

Here is a list of games that have been made to date with UGAGS:

• Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two
• Heads
• Summer in Smallywood
• Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure

And here are some movies and teevee shows that have been logically extended into the video game realm within the graphic adventure game genre:

We’re running a lot of game jams in the city. In addition to TOJam, we’ve had Clam Jam, library jam, and the ongoing Game Prototype Challenge led by Jason P. Kaplan, which runs almost monthly. So a lot of small games and prototypes are getting made, but how are they selling? Are they even being sold? Who knows about them, or their creators? If you’re living outside of Toronto, how many Toronto game devs can you name?

Stop Building, Start Selling

i can’t remember who to credit this idea to, but recently someone suggested that instead of running game jams, Toronto should have a marketing jam. The need for us to get better at business was never more clear to me than when Jason announced the release of his first indie game, Flew the Coop, on iOS. i asked him “what’s your marketing plan?”, and he just kind of shrugged sheepishly.

i know where he’s coming from. The rule of thumb i’ve heard is that for every dollar you spend on game development, you need to spend a dollar on marketing. To begin with, very few indie devs actually bother putting a dollar value to their time. “What was your budget on that game?” “Nothing! It was all sweat equity!” Well, fine … but it costs you a certain amount of money to LIVE and EAT, Mr. Clever. From there, you can find out your annual cost of living. Factor in the number of hours you work in a week, on average, and you can determine your hourly rate. Multiply that by the number of hours you sunk into your game, and that’s the game’s budget.

Let’s say your game took $5000 to make. That’s $5k in sweat equity – “free” money – because you didn’t actually have to produce cold hard cash for development. But if the marketing rule of thumb is to be believed, you now have to cook up five thousand real, actual dollars to market the game … Facebook and iAds don’t accept a service barter. Cooking up that marketing cash is often beyond the ability or appetite of small indie devs. The result is that they release their games, hoping they will somehow magically catch like wildfire through word of mouth because they’re so good, and they’ll be the talk of the town. If you’ve spent even an hour reading articles on the success rates of iOS developers, you’ll know that there are thousands of devs out there still waiting for their ships to come in.

The Holy Grail of 3-Figure Sales

The challenge, then, is to come up with marketing plans that don’t cost any money. You’ve already seen what i’ve done to promote my game portals with The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget – a miniscule $100 pot and a LOT of sweat equity. My pal Matt Rix, the successful developer of Trainyard for the iPhone, set up a great David vs. Goliath battle when he asked the Reddit community to help him dethrone Angry Birds in the App Store. Zero marketing money paired with a good story (and a GREAT game) rocketed him to the top of the charts.

i took a look at Jason’s Flew the Coop and thought “if this was my game, how would i market it with zero dollars?” The game is a Canabalt clone that pits you as a baby chicken running away from a farm, bouncing on the backs of animals and avoiding the inappropriate grasping of farmers. The first thing that came to mind is the involvement PETA had with Super Meat Boy, where they created a parody game called Super Tofu Boy. So i tweeted PETA about Flew the Coop:

Make a Suggestion, Win a Free Game!

So! Maybe i’m not the free marketing master i thought i was. Or maybe i’m just not trying hard enough because it’s not my game. But have a promo code for a FREE COPY OF FLEW THE COOP for the reader who can cook up the best free marketing idea for the game by next Wednesday June 22 2011.

Can you really market a game with no money? Or are those who have done it just incredibly, incredibly lucky? Post your best idea in the comments section below, and let’s see what Jason can do for Flew the Coop on a … ahem … wing and a prayer.

Further Reading:

• Indie Gamedevs: You’re (Probably) Doing it Wrong

Our entry for TOJam 5 (the Toronto independent game jam) was Heads.

The jam theme was “missing”. Heads is about a fellow who wakes up one morning missing … well, his head. The first puzzle in the game sees you constructing a makeshift head before you can leave the house. From there, we introduce a somewhat novel mechanic where you can switch heads with other characters to use their abilities. The game was the second title we created with UGAGS – the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System.

Worth 1000 Words

Heads was one of the games on Untold’s “Games to Build” wiki. The intended scope was much larger than what we ended up with, but the advantage of creating Heads at a weekend game jam is that we finished it and got the idea out to the world. The innovation we attempted with Heads came directly out of the first UGAGS game we created, Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two. Jinx 3 had a LOT of character dialogue and was very wordy. Heads was a reaction to that; we tried to create a game with absolutely no character dialogue whatsoever.

The resulting challenge was that everything we needed to communicate to the player required a new animation. The unique Heads style required us to draw every frame 3 or 4 times to achieve a Squigglevision-style effect. This all added up to a very time-consuming process that tested the limits of what we were able to pull off in a single weekend.

Acclaim for Heads

Heads won “Best Use of Theme” at the public TOJam Arcade exhibition. It was featured in the START video game show at the Ontario College of Art and Design. You can play Heads for free on the Blackberry Playbook.

Cassie drew all the pictures, wrote all the titles, and recorded the voice of the main character. She also came up with the NPCs (including Mr. Turtle, the Mean Tiger, and the villainous Lemon), and designed some of the puzzles (including the one where you [SPOILER ALERT] have to read a sign to justify your need for a coconut to throw at the Lemon).

Send Cassie to College?

i used Mochimedia’s ad service to inject ads into the game, which is fitting, because Mochi was a TOJam sponsor this year. i threw ads in there with the hope that the game might drum up a little bit of cash, which i will put toward the education fund that Cassie’s grandma started for her. Wouldn’t it be cool if Cassie’s game paid for college? (Sadly, it won’t happen. See the Pimp My Game series for more reasons why.) For kicks, i added a PayPal Donate button beneath the game.

Alert Child Services

Dragging your kid to a weekend-long game jam, eh? Before you call Children’s Aid on me, please understand that i didn’t actually keep Cassie captive at TOJam all weekend long. She came in with me at 9:30 Saturday morning, and was the most excited i’ve ever seen her. We’d been preparing her for MONTHS so that she’d be emotionally ready for TOJam. After the organizers expressed concern that my rotten kid would be running around the place pestering people and making noise (an entirely likely scenario, if you’re familiar with my insane children and my lousy parenting style), i spent every evening coaching Cassie.

Me: Remember, you’re the first little girl who’s ever made a game at TOJam. And everyone’s worried you’re going to run around screaming and making noise and wrecking things.

Cassie: (shocked face) No i won’t!

Me: *i* know you won’t. (totally lying here – i was as nervous about it as anyone) But you have to prove to everyone that little girls can make video games too. If you’re very well behaved, then next year if another little girl wants to come and make a game, the TOJam people will say “the little girl who made a game last year was SO wonderful, we’d LOVE to see more little girls making games.”

Cassie: i’ll be have. i will!

Yes, Cassandra, There Is a Game Jam

The morning of TOJam was like Christmas for her. i’m not kidding. In the days leading up to the event, she told everyone she knew that she was going to TOJam. Naturally, they had no idea what she was talking about, but the strangers in the elevator and in the grocery store smiled and nodded politely all the same.

By the end of the day on Saturday, Cassie had spent 10 hours at TOJam, and was begging me to let her stay overnight. She had put in about 6 hours of actual colouring work, and sunk at least another hour into voice acting later that evening at home, where it was quieter. i tucked her into bed and returned to TOJam late Saturday evening, and then pulled an all-nighter scanning her crayon drawings and integrating them with the game logic using UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System).

Family Jam

Sunday morning after church, the whole family joined me at TOJam with a bunch of instruments in tow. My wife Cheryl and the two little girls sat together on the carpet down a quiet hallway. Cassie grabbed the harmonica, i took the drum, Cheryl took the ukulele, and little Isabel used the thumb harp and the Happy Apple. We recorded some music tracks together. The one that made it into the game intro is just Cassie and Izzy playing together. It was really nice to have everyone involved like that. Here’s the family track that didn’t quite make the cut:

Sunday evening, the family regrouped at TOJam. The game, while still unfinished, was set up in a hallway where Cassie excitedly ran up to any interested passers-by, snatched the mouse out of their hands, and said “I MADE THIS! LEMMIE SHOW YOU HOW TO PLAY!”

i think it was a really valuable life lesson for Cassie to see that all her hard work and effort went into making a product that brought smiles to the faces of her players. The next step is to brave the hairy Playbook process to get it on the device so that Cassie can bring it to school for Show & Tell.

Correcting History

i really hope you enjoy Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. In all of this, our goal as parents is to give our kids the kind of childhood we would KILL to have had. i can’t imagine how different my life would have been if i had made a real working video game with my father at age 5. In fact, i can’t imagine how different my life would have been if he hadn’t left when i was eight months old.

But no matter. Some day, the ponycorns will get him.

The PenIs Mightiter

“Who writes the plot for porno movies?” Nobody cares. That’s an old joke anyway. People who produce pornography obviously put a lot of unnecessary energy into their “craft”. i’m more interested in the people who don’t work in porn, yet have to somehow dignify pornographer’s efforts within a more respectable framework.

To be more specific, i noticed in passing (in PASSING!) that the adult titles in the pay-per-view listings all had plot synopses written for them. Forget the guy who has to write the plots for porno (he’s also the lead cameraman, and the horny mechanic from Act III). i want to know what poor schlub working at Rogers head office has to write the SYNOPSES of those already paper-thin plots – and partciularly in cases where the movies have no plots. i mean, how do you summarize a movie that’s just an hour of straight-up porking?

Here’s a selection of adult movies and their synopses from Rogers Pay-Per-View. One interesting thing to note is that while the movie titles are completely crass, the synopses are as (needlessly) puritan as they possibly can be.

5 Raunchy Rock Tails

Groupies give rock stars a backstage pass to their bodies.

5 Horny Blondes

Fair-haired beauties (Monique Alexander, Alexis Malone, Gen Padova) entertain randy men.

A Train 4

Hardcore harlots ride the rails to backdoor ecstasy.

American Cream Pie 2

Gorgeous women prefer sexy threesomes.

An American in Prague

Wild men enjoy intimate moments.

Anally Yours … Love, Rebeca Linares

Hot young women crave carnal encounters.

Asian Beavers

Exotic harlots find plenty of wood to devour.

Ass Deep 2

Juicy strumpets (Sandra Romain, Trina Michaels, Isabel Ice) take the plunge through the backdoor.

TOJam is not a competition. It’s rather more like camp … hot, sweaty nerd camp fueled by energy drinks and candy bars. Every year, the organizers suggest that each game feature a Toronto-specific sound effect, and a picture of a goat on a pole (rendered any way the game’s artist chooses). Here’s the goat in all its glory:

Here’s the goat’s appearance in some of the TOJam games i’ve developed over the years:

Each TOJam also features a suggested theme. Past themes have included “Cheese”, “Scale“, and “Missing“. This year’s theme is “What Just Happened?” As i do every year, i’d like to riff on the TOJam theme and explore its possibilities.

Windbag

The very first thing that comes to mind when i hear “What Just Happened?” is Fred Willard in A Mighty Wind:

Wha’ Happened?? Ha ha ha ha. This is one of those movie lines i repeat all the time, and no one knows what i’m talking about. What are its ramifications for game design? None! But Fred Willard rocks my world.

WTFism

Like “Cheese”, the “What Just Happened?” theme gives a lot of room for WTFism. You can pack your game with ton of nonsensical crap that leaves the player saying “What Just Happened?” This is kind of a cop-out. Or maybe it’s because i’m old. i used to watch terrible movies and teevee shows just to laugh at them, but when you get old enough that you really start to feel your time on Earth is tragically limited, you tend to gravitate more towards entertaining yourself with stuff that’s actually worth your time.

The Scene of the Crime

A much more literal interpretation of the theme might involve a game where the player is shown the aftermath of an event, and has to work backwards to figure out what caused the event. This would likely be a plot-driven graphic adventure-style game, maybe in the vein of Déjà Vu, where you wake up in a bathroom stall with amnesia.

Unfortunately these days, starting a point n’ click game with amnesia is a hackneyed trope used in nearly every free Escape the Room Flash game i’ve played. At the risk of calling every game contrivance a cop-out, i’ll happily call this one out too: amnesia is a tired device that should be given a 10-year breather in video games, or until somebody can do something interesting with it.

In the case of the Escape the Room games, the situation’s even more dire, because the games all begin with “You are trapped in a room and you don’t know who you are”, and end with “You got out of the room!” There’s no character or plot development whatsoever … just a key inexplicably hidden behind a scrap of wallpaper, and a VCR code in the breakaway leg of the couch.

Memory Game

The trouble with a graphic adventure game where you’re trying to figure out What Just Happened is that it’s probably not going to be very replayable, and it has a big spoil factor on it. Take something like The Sixth Sense by M. Night Shamalamadingdong: if you haven’t seen it, and someone spoils the ending for you by revealing that Bruce Willis has a penis, you may not enjoy the movie when you finally get around to watching it. You may not even bother watching it at all.

Same deal with our hypothetical graphic adventure game: once someone tells you that What Just Happened is that the Evil Dr. Douchebag created a murder machine that killed everyone over five feet tall, and that THAT was the mysterious detail linking all of the survivors, the game might be less fun to play.

Here’s a less plot-heavy, more replayable game that’s simpler to program in a weekend: there’s a child’s memory game that we play at birthday parties, where you lay out a number of objects on the table. Everyone stares at the table for one minute. Then you tell all the kids to close their eyes, and you take an item away. The kids have to guess what’s missing.

What Just Happened? Mommy stole the fork.

Time-Bending

The past-tense of the What Just Happened theme may lend itself to a game involving time-bending or time-travel, a la Braid, or Back to the Future Part II on the NES.

Picture Super Mario Bros., and you show the player the level AFTER he’s gone through it: certain blocks are smashed, certain goombas are squished … and the player has to run through the level smashing all the same blocks and squishing all the same goombas in an effort to re-create the endgame state he’s just seen.

It would be way more interesting if you did this with more of a puzzle platformer, where there are switches and doors and traps and contrivances, which would make the re-creation far more interesting (ie “How did i get the pile of blocks to fall on top of that platform? What order do i have to do things in to get that to happen like that?”)

Word Association

You could bend the “rules” a bit and play around with the words in the theme. “What Just Happened?” could be the title about a Marmaduke-like dog named What.

Your game could be about a crusading judge on an alien planet, and you have to determine the ways in which he’s meted out justice by learning the aliens’ legal system. “What Thing that is Just Just Happened?” Meh. It’s a stretch.

And as long as i’m stretching:

Whatever you decide to pull together for your TOJam game, just keep in mind the rules i’ve learned from four previous jams:

1. Keep it simple enough to finish.
2. Finishing is everything.
3. If you want to get any love from players, either on the final night of the Jam or at the public TOJam Arcade, your game MUST be fast to learn, and easy to pick up and play. If you have to sit next to the player and explain how to control the game or what’s going on or what that squiggly shape is supposed to represent, you’ve failed. So:
4. Very strongly consider reserving a number of hours in the jam to build some sort of in-game tutorial to help the player understand your game, so that you don’t have to hand-hold.

i can’t tell you how many times i’ve sat down to play a TOJam game and have thought “What Just Happened?”, as in “how did a team of six people just spend an entire weekend building a game where i can’t figure out what the heck is going on?” This year, let’s keep the mystery of what just happened thematic, and create a great crop of games where the goals and controls are clear as crystal.

See you at the jam!

The sophomoric outing of the annual event expanded to two days this year, and spanned two different venues: the Toronto Underground Cinema, and the Hernando Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined, both in Toronto. After hearing great reviews of last year’s event, i begged the organizers to give me a speaking slot. i heard they were looking for someone with experience building educational games, and we happen to be completing just such a project at Untold. Serendipitous!

Two Rad Dudes

As with any event, some things went off without a hitch, and some things were rough around the edges. Some ideas worked, and some didn’t. But you have to hand it to the two event organizers, whose background is in film, not games – their enthusiasm, winning personalities, and passion for the games community are infectious, and they give us all a real hope for the future of games-related events in Toronto for years to come.

Mark and Jaime got a lot of things right with Gamercamp this year. They did a lot of ground-level research, personally attending the events that already existed (like the Hand Eye Society socials). They made the right contacts, finding people around the city who were doing all sorts of interesting things with games … some folks i’d never even heard of, but was very glad to have discovered. And they put the right amount of effort into organizing their event. i can’t fathom the number of hours that went into running Gamercamp, but i can always tell that any event that has printed programs, and where the venue ceiling is not falling on the attendees, and where three or fewer people die or are irreparably injured, has had boatloads of effort put towards it.

The Right Way to Do It

Gamercamp stands in contrast to a certain other Toronto event, where the organizers don’t run in quite the right circles or grasp exactly what makes games enthusiasts tick. One of the Vortex Competition organizers actually attended part of Gamercamp on the second day, which was great to see! I hope she was taking extensive notes.

The key difference between the two events is that Mark and Jaime play games. They grew up with them. During my talk on the second day of the conference, i repeated the importance of this: for men and women who have grown up with video games as an essential element of their lives, there is a language – a common understanding – a culture in the truest sense of the word, that folks in the older non-game-playing generation just don’t get. i don’t think it’s impossible for them to get it, but it would take a lot of hard work and effort playing games, researching games, reading game magazines and articles, and striving to understand the culture like an anthropologist would try to dissect a newly-discovered tribe in South America (for whom there are extensive Wikipedia entries and funny YouTube videos).

If you’re not part of the culture, you need to put in that legwork and that effort in order to run a games-related event with any feeling of legitimacy or relevance. What Gamercamp has that Vortex currently lacks is credibility – a feeling that it’s genuine – that it’s motivated by a true understanding of gamer culture and a kinship with its people. If Gamercamp is run by natives, Vortex is run by missionaries.

Location, Location, Location

Of course, not everything at Gamercamp went off without a hitch. Jaime explained to me that he and Mark were throwing ideas at the wall like wet spaghetti and trying to see what would stick. For me, day two stuck. It far stronger than day one, which slid down the wall in places. i think the disparity was largely due to the venue. Toronto Underground Cinema was plagued with technical problems, most notably audio, and the in-house techs were frustratingly slow on the uptake when it came to fixing problems on the fly (including turning up completely inaudible presenters, and even simply turning down the house lights after one speaker’s repeated requests before an increasingly impatient crowd). This could be due to the fact that TUC is a relatively new venue. i’m not sure how many events of this type they’ve handled, so they could still be working the kinks out.

The building, though, isn’t ideal for a conference event. The upper foyer with its ticket window is just small enough to feel cramped with ten people. While the lower level foyer is larger, it still struggled to contain the attendees during break times. Certain of the day one talks were worth skipping in favour of networking, but the foyer wasn’t an ideal location for that. It felt more like a thoroughfare than a place where you could stand around and gab without being in anyone’s way.

Hernando Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined made a much better venue on day two, particularly with its nooks and crannies perfectly suited to stuffing them with game machines and teevees. Noticeably absent were bean-bag chairs (organizers: please be all up on that next year – daddy loves his bean bags). These areas reminded me of an excellent GDC party i attended, where Autodesk dolled up a hotel meeting room replete with an inflatable couch, swag lamps and a shag throw rug … and one big-ass wood-trimmed cathode ray tube teevee set with an Atari 2600 hooked up to it. These small details really made the space, and with (even) more effort, the game rooms could be taken completely over the top in a fantastic way.

Content with the Content

The content on day two exceeded much of the day one talks. It was agonizing to have to choose one out of four talks that ran simultaneously (scheduling only three talks together may mitigate this). i spoke to a number of people who said the talks i missed were “great”, “excellent” and so forth. i’m not sure there was a lemon in the bunch … the talks i attended were very good.

i think it comes down to venue again. When you put everyone in a large theater setting, it’s far less personal. The speaker isn’t making eye contact with you, or even speaking to you – he’s speaking out into this vast space. During some of the day one talks, the lighting was such that the speaker was in total silhouette. This made it easier to tune out, heckle, or completely ignore the day one talks.

Contrastingly, the intimacy of the day two talks, in their smaller rooms, was excellent. The rooms were just a hair too small, in fact … it’s a very difficult balance to strike. One possible solution to the big room problem is to have cameras projecting the speaker’s face on one or two secondary screens, but this requires a much more robust tech set-up for which TUC was likely unprepared. It’s possible next year’s budget might allow for hiring an events company to handle the fancier tech stuff (like mics that don’t sound like they’re down the speaker’s pants).

A fix for the smaller rooms is to stack the tables where you can, and add more chairs to the room. This would require volunteers to dismantle entire rooms, but as i’ll mention later, if volunteers can be trusted to “own” their rooms, it’s possible.

i was immensely impressed that all of the sessions were recorded – that’s Jamie and Mark’s film background shining through. It means that i can catch all the sessions i missed on day two, and that i’ll be able to make a portfolio piece of my own talk. This is a great incentive to give the volunteer speakers some sort of return on investment for their effort.

Volunteer pwnage

i think next year, provided the organizers continue (and i sincerely hope they do), i’d like to see them delegate certain aspects of the event to some devoted volunteers. For example, hand one of the game rooms to two volunteers. They can find the swag lamp and the shag carpet and the absolutely vital bean bag chairs, and they own that piece of Gamercamp – and it’s one less thing for Jamie and Mark to worry about. Let two volunteers own the Mortal Kombat competition. Let them make a trophy for it, and set up a mic with an amplifier and a sports commentator. Have them play wrestling-style theme music as the combatants enter the room. Hand over the retro cereal breakfast bit to five people who can go stock the room with couches and set up rec room mood lighting and faux wood wall paneling. Have the volunteers treat each element as its own mini-event, and challenge them to completely outdo each other. Since most of the volunteers were Hernando Velasquez students, throw some extra credit marks at it and make it a project. Event management is actually a valuable skill to have in the games industry – think game launches and corporate parties.

But all this is fine trim on an event with very, very good bones. It was inspiring and exciting to see an event pull together game developers, game enthusiasts, educators, press, trade associations, tool makers, and two rad dudes with the gusto to slam it all together so that the pieces fit. Gamercamp is a very good idea, and one that i hope will make non-Torontonians rabidly jealous. My only regrets are that it’s not longer, and that it doesn’t happen every weekend.

When i spoke at the Toronto FanExpo, one of the audience members asked me about value-for-money in these programs. i responded the same way i always do: if you are in a college video game development program, and you do not graduate with at least one finished game, demand your money back. (Bolded AND italicized … this guy means BIDNESS.)

Of course, a number of preventative factors could be involved in you not having a finished game. (YOU, for example.) But if it’s not the goal of your game development school to launch you with a final, playable game, i question your school’s priorities (and their motives in taking your parents’ and/or taxpayers’ heard-earned money to put you through the program).

Press Rx to Start

i have a prescription for graduating students: three simple things that many, many grads don’t have. By checking these three things off the list, you’ll be miles ahead of most of the other Ontario game dev grads against whom you’ll be competing for a very limited number of internships, entry-level positions and other opportunities. These three things are:

1. Your own website.
2. A finished game on that website, playable in the browser.
3. Business cards, to drive people to that website when you’re out at networking events.

1. Your Own Website

Here are a few DO’s and DONT’s for your own website:

DO

• buy a domain (many web hosts give you one for free with a hosting package)
• create an email address using that domain (example: pete@petesWebsite.com)
• make your CV/resume readily accessible on the site, BUT … despite what your college tells you in their “career preparedness” filler course, your resume isn’t really worth a damn in this industry. The proof is in the (playable) pudding – your finished work samples.
• have a prominent link that says “Contact” which, when clicked, displays your phone number and email address. (Afraid you’ll be harassed by stalkers? Get over yourself. You won’t.)

DON’T

• go with a free hosting solution (example: http://pete.awesomeSitesForFree.com)
• bury your best work behind more than one click (preferably, your reel or finished game should be front and center on the main page, playable in one click)
• hide your contact info
• prominently post your resume (Your resume doesn’t matter. Your work does.)
• post all of your school projects, down to your Illustrator colour wheel and your Photoshop person-removal exercise. Just pick two or three of your very best pieces, and leave the rest out. If you don’t have anything you can confidently show, go back to the drawing board and build something. Doesn’t matter if you’ve just graduated – your portfolio is never finished, and if it sucks right now, stop looking so hard for a job in the industry. Get a joe job to keep yourself occupied, and spend every remaining waking hour making your portfolio not suck.

2. A Finished Game, Playable in the Browser

By “playable in the browser”, we’re talkin’:

• Flash
• Unity
• HTML5
• … Java? (Is it playable in the browser? i *think* so. i don’t know enough about it to say for sure.)
• Shockwave (if you’ve decided to go back in time to 1998)

i may draw a lot of fire by stipulating that the game must be playable in the browser, but i’m standing behind it as stone cold fact: if your game is a downloadable executable file, it will not get played.

The last thing i want to do as an employer is spend time futzing around with a student’s (potentially) badly-built file that may do God-knows-what kind of damage to my system. Add to that the time involved in screening applicants. i just don’t have the hours or the patience, and i know i’m not alone in that. At the Indie Showcase event in Toronto, TOJam founder Jim McTellin’ItLikeItIs McGinley confirmed that the TOJam games that are not playable in the browser receive dramatically fewer (read: ZERO) plays than their playable-in-browser counterparts.

But if i hit a student’s site, and right there on the main page is a finished game with a big, inviting PLAY button, i will click and try it out for at least a few seconds.

No Game? Fake it.

If you can’t swing a browser-playable game, create a trailer for the game featuring gameplay. Watch different pieces on GameTrailers.com to get a sense of good pacing and high production values, and steal whatever techniques you can identify. And whether you have a browser-playable game or not, be sure to add a few clickable, biggify-able screenshots to your site in case the visitor can’t be arsed to hit that PLAY button on your video or game.

On a Role

Another tip: it’s preferable to have a game that you either built on your own, or where your role was very clearly defined (example: you created all of the background art, and programmed and designed the entire user interface). It’s fine if the game was a collaborative effort, but it becomes more difficult for a visitor to get a sense of your abilities. YOUR abilities – those are the things you need to be trumpeting on your site. If the game was a team project, clearly and prominently state your role in the project – the more specific the better.

GOOD:

I created the sprite sheets for the main character, and the warg and vampire villains. I also did all the sound design except the background music tracks.

NOT SO TERRIBLY GOOD:

I worked on this project with seven others. I designed some of it, and drew some of the art. I also did about half of the coding, and some of the animation. (wtf does “half the coding” mean?)

3. Business Cards

They say “it’s all who you know”, so a very crucial part of being a graduate is getting out there and networking. i guarantee you that if you impress someone with your personality at an event and ask him to remember to visit petesWebsite.com, it ain’t gonna happen. People at networking events have memories like sieves – you’re one of maybe thirty people they’re going to talk to, and you’re a recent grad, so it’s likely more of a challenge for you to make an impression. You’re gonna need business cards.

Here are a few things i recommend listing on your business card:

1. your name
2. your email address @ your own domain
3. your phone number
4. some kind of tag line that reminds the reader of your goals as a recent grad, and be specific (example: Peter Peterson – Seeking Employment as a 3D Texture Artist in the Mobile Game Industry)
5. your website address … make sure it doesn’t take too long to type, like untoldentertainment.com (what a bloody terrible idea THAT url was)
6. Some kind of call to action can’t hurt (example: Come see my dragon models! or Come play Super Jumpy Man!). If you put something like that on there, you may pique my interest.

And a few don’ts:

1. don’t bog the card down with a million phone numbers. One will do. If you really can’t be reached at that number all the time, you can put two phone numbers on there, but try to keep it simple.
2. i don’t recommend putting your mailing address on there. No one’s going to send you a letter by Pony Express. Not only that, but you risk looking like a hick if you’re applying for work in the big city, and your business card places you in some distant suburb or outlying area (it ain’t pretty, but i wouldn’t recommend passing around an Oshawa or Barrie business card at a Toronto networking event. You want to appear as if you’re local and available, and as if you have all your teeth.)
3. don’t don’t don’t don’t don’t list a hotmail address. You’ll look bush-league. i’d even say the same for gmail addresses … you own a domain, so you should use that in your address. If you like the gMail service, you can manage your @petesWebsite mail using gMail. Your public-facing address should be customized.
4. don’t cook up some bogus company name. If you’re looking for a full-time salaried position at a company, i think it’s better to present yourself as an individual. It’s more important that people know Pete Peterson, than “Layzor Virtutronic Game Design Systems Inc.”

i’d love to get your suggestions for web hosts and business card tips in the comments section! And feel free to complain about my browser-only stipulation for the games. i’ll just let you know ahead of time: you’re wrong.

[Read my interview with Lesley Phord-Toy, IGDA Toronto Chapter's new President]

Last night’s panel was stacked with three game production super-powers:

• Alex Parizeau, Producer on Splinter Cell Conviction at Ubisoft)
• Lesley Milner, Producer on Bioshock 2′s multiplayer feature at Digital Extremes in Toronto, and a former Relic employee
• Rhys Yorke, Producer on The Secret World at Funcom, About a Blob with Toronto’s own Drinkbox Studios, and formerly of Marvel Comics.

My capsule review of the evening is that the panelists played very nice, were careful not to dish any dirt, and generally didn’t say anything too alarming, surprising, or even insightful for much of the hour and a half. i much prefer solo speakers to panels, because soloists can give very personal, opinionated lectures. Panelists have a real challenge, because they can only dole out their wisdom in bite-sized nuggets, and there’s this constant pressure to wrap up quickly so that others have a turn to speak. As a result, much of the content on the panels i’ve attended is safe, pleasant, and dull.

The panelists had a challenging room. Despite the IGDA being a professional organization, the audience, when polled, admitted that over half of the standing-room-only crowd were not making video games professionally. About 10% of the people in the room were producers of various stripes. This was a great panel for the folks in the room to learn what a producer was, and to learn about the responsibilities that come with the position. But for professionals seeking more insight, and producers wanting more take-aways and tricks of the trade, the content was disappointingly lightweight.

i spoke with a colleague of mine whose producer pal said the panel was helpful in upholding staffing decisions they were considering. The panel revealed “nothing revolutionary”, but confirmed that they were on the right track with goals they were trying to accomplish.

For a very small business owner, a panel like this is a bit like a Cessna hobbyist hearing from three commercial airline pilots. But it was definitely good to hear the panel humbly admit that despite their massive teams and budgets, they didn’t have it all figured out, and still struggle with many of the same issues you’d have on much small projects. The plane still has to stay in the air, after all.

If you can stomach it, here’s a very rough transcript of the evening with each panelist’s responses, based on my amateur shorthand note-taking.

How do you divide your teams?

Alex: It depends on the game. I like to reduce dependencies between teams, and to create multi-disciplinary teams that can accomplish a piece of the project on their own.
Rhys: My teams are grouped according to discipline – concept artists, environment artists, animators, etc. Team sizes are from 8-10 people at their smallest, and 30 people at their largest.
Lesley: We take a hybrid approach of forming multi-disciplinary teams and specialists.

What is the size of your teams during different development cycles?

Alex: It depends. Pre-production is about 70-80 people. Concept phase has 40 people. Full-blown production is at about 200 people.
Rhys: Secret World was in pre-production for about 2 years. It started with a team of 5-8, and had reached 130 people by the time he’d left.
Lesley: Prototype phase is about 5 people. Pre-production is 20. Production is 60.

How do you decide what your team members work on?

Lesley: It’s mostly top-down. I supply tasks, and the team decides how to split them up (a good example is the concept art team). Programming is almost entirely top-down. Other teams can be self-directed.
Rhys: Top-down.
Alex: It’s a balance. Prioritized tasks come down from on high. The team is left to decide how to split up a task and tackle it. Giving the team input and autonomy like that increases morale.

Do you prefer Agile or Waterfall methodology?

Rhys: We used Waterfall, due to inertia. That’s the way it had always been done, so we continued in that vein.
Lesley: The AI group uses Agile, but the whole team is more of a mix. It’s Waterfall in general.
Alex: We try to create a generally Agile studio, but we have priority tasks that we know we must accomplish. If we don’t finish these, we can’t ship the game.

Does Scrum work?

Alex: Agile/scrum is common sense stuff. It’s a lot of confusing lingo to describe stuff we do anyway (e.g. stand-up meetings, prioritizing tasks).

Do you need a Certified Scrum Professional to train you?

Alex: I once talked to one, and I asked him how scrum works when you have 200 people. He drew a complete blank. He said you’d need to do a scrum of a scrum of a scrum of a scrum …
Lesley: I went through the same thing at Relic.
Alex: It’s not that tough:

• Have a backlog of features
• Give it to the team
• Define what they’ll do in a 2-3 week sprint
• Complete a task with measurable results
• Remove any existing roadblocks
• Hold daily meetings
• Achieve your objectives

How much authority do you have to hire and fire staff?

Alex: I have final responsibility for the project. I don’t make rogue decisions – I share a vision with my creative director Max.
Rhys: My role was advisory to HR – I wasn’t directly responsible for staffing decisions.
Lesley: We would hold operations meetings with the producers, HR, the company owner and the operations manager. Terminating someone is a pretty long process. I rely on my leads strongly for hiring recommendations, because I lack specific creative experience. I studied project management, not art.

What is your role as a producer?

Alex: Define a vision. Ship it.
Rhys: I ran meetings, I managed the Beijing team, I counseled the art team … (there was someone breaking down every week.) I kept the game director away from the team because he wanted to fire someone every week.
Alex: Job titles are a big problem. The role of a producer is different everywhere you go. There’s no consistency.
Rhys: My title was “Project Manager : Art”.
Lesley: At EA, Development Directors are producers, and Producers are actually designers.
As a producer, I oversee the entire project, liase with the publisher, give out tasks, remove roadblocks, give out coffee if people want coffee … i don’t do any design at all – that’s the Creative Director’s job.

What tools do you use daily?

Alex: Nothing ultra-fancy. Outlook, Excel, MS Project, Jira. Mind Manager works really well for mapping new ideas.
Rhys: Bugzilla, and Alien Brain for art assets.
Lesley: Excel, Jira, and a Confluence wiki for our game design documents. Anything but MS Project!

How do you handle time tracking?

Alex: We use Jira, but it’s a little like predicting the future. I’d have more luck calling up Jojo the psychic. I wish we did more in this area, but things change constantly. I have 13 years experience, but I feel like I should be a junior producer. Every time I work on a project, I need to re-think it. On each new project, you have to do better with more people.
Lesley: It’s definitely difficult to try to go back and learn from past projects. We use milestones. We have to predict the future in broad strokes. Everything’s different.
Rhys: I used to try to track time to the minute. Now I try not to sweat it.
Alex: Sometimes I wish I was in a job where I had a roadmap, like in film, where they know how long things will take.
Rhys: Or in construction. We’re in a young industry that is like film was in the 30′s and 40′s.
Alex: The most important thing, despite the change and the uncertainty and the volatility, is the people. Producers aren’t experts on anything. They rely on their people.

Are you more valuable as an employee the longer you stay at a company?

Alex: Outsiders can bring a lot of excellent experience and freshness to the group. We’ve built the Ubisoft Toronto studio with a lot of outside talent. I’ve learned more in the past 4 months than I have in the past 4 years.

What tools do you use to predict the future?

Alex: There are a lot of good psychics in Toronto.
Lesley: That’s not our job. We make the present go smoothly. I count on my leads to help me predict the future. I stick to milestones – broad stroked. I don’t want to promise anything I might not be able to deliver.
Rhys: Give the team ownership, and let your leads delegate responsibility.
Alex: It’s not about predicting the future, but one thing we’re getting better at is knowing where we need to be at the main gates of a project – measuring where we are vs. where we need to be.

How do you deal with conflicting game design ideas from team members?

Alex: It’s important to stick to a clear vision.
Rhys: Design by committee never works. You have to make people feel respected even if you decide not to go with their idea.
Lesley: Weigh all ideas against your core goals. Remember what it is you’re trying to make.
Alex: Sometimes we’ll give an idea a shot, and allow for maybe a month of experimentation. This happens more toward the beginning of a project, not the end.

How do you determine the value/return on investment on a new feature?

Alex: There’s absolutely no way to do that.
Rhys: I was just told to “make it more like World of Warcraft, and we’ll be fine.”

Note: At this point, i shot up my hand and said that metrics-driven companies like Zynga would whole-heartedly disagree with Alex. Alex was enthusiastic about the direction metrics-driven design was taking, and admitted it’s more difficult to do that with boxed products, but pointed out that it’s becoming easier with downloadable content. He referenced the kind of ongoing maintenance that companies like Valve put into their products through digital distribution.

What can you tell us about overtime?

Rhys:I’ve found that buying people beer and pizza works quite well.
Lesley: We’ve had a revolt against pizza, but yeah – beer works. At our studio, OT is not mandatory, but sometimes you have to make it mandatory. (What in bloody Hell? – ed.) We run activities, special dinners, and parties to compensate the team. We offer time in lieu, and we shut down the studio between Christmas and the New Year.

How do you get people to work overtime?

Lesley: This industry is known for its long hours and OT. We hire dedicated, pro-active people who automatically put in OT because they’re passionate about the project.
Rhys: In Norwegian culture, people go home every day at 4 PM. It wasn’t unusual for me to stay until 10. It’s important to maintain morale, and to work with passionate people.
Alex: It’s a sensitive topic. We try to work with passionate people who love video games. It’s not just a job. People have to believe that their project is run well, managed well. I strive to be transparent with the team so that there are no surprises. You have to communicate. You can’t just spring crunch on people – you have to have a goal. OT cannot be mandatory. Some employees are students with no girlfriend and nothing better to do, and it’s nothing for them to put in the extra time. But other employees are at a different stage – they may have three kids, and have to arrange all week for Nana to pick up the kids and babysit them, and they can only put in that extra four hours.

When do you decide to pull OT, cut features, or push back on the client’s deadline?

Alex: It’s a judgment call. If you predict that a push will achieve your goal, do it. Otherwise, review it. You don’t always predict it accurately. If you let people down again and again with a push that doesn’t end up achieving your goal, you start to lose the trust of your team.

How do you recruit your leads? Are they usually internal or external?

Rhys: You need to take the time to get to know your team. We may promote someone who is not the best programmer or artist on the team, but he’s well-organized, confident, can communicate well, and holds up in a crisis.
Lesley: Leads must be well-rounded, and good communicators. We promote leads internally because trust is already there, and they’re already friends with the team. You don’t get that with an external hire.
Alex: We look for qualities of leadership, organization, good communication skills. We have three types of leads at Ubisoft:

• Managing Leads – these people are well-organized
• Technical Leads – they understand tech well and can teach it to others
• Content Directors – they show good judgment and organizational skill

Organizational skill is very important for a lead.

How do you communicate with your team?

Lesley: It depends on who I’m communicating with. I use MSN, email, face-to-face time, team meetings, some ad hoc meetings, and I have weekly meetings with leads.
Rhys: For best results, I prefer to meet face-to-face.
Alex: I got this link from the IGDA Production SIG, and have been reading an article about how proximity improves communication.

Do you use middleware?

Alex: Yes. Havoc, ScaleForm.
Rhys: Yes. Havoc, SpeedTree. We write our own game engine, but we use middleware whenever possible.
Lesley: Yes. We have our own engine as well, but we do use middleware.

What was your biggest unexpected hurdle in your role as a producer?

Rhys: I didn’t know that managing hundreds of people wouldn’t be the same as managing a small team. I had no experience with that, and no background in business. I tried to micro-manage everything.
Lesley: Communication. I can’t name all the people on my team. I wish I could.
Alex: You start losing track. Things start out small, and then they grow and grow and grow, and suddenly one day it’s a few hundred people. It’s freaky. You think, “am I a bad manager?” It’s more like you’re building a business or an organization.

How to you keep from over-polishing a game to the point where you polish out the charm?

Rhys: It’s very difficult. Make sure you follow the Creative Director’s vision.
Alex: We never really have the problem where our product is too polished! Bigger games don’t tend to surprise people. It happens sometimes, but more risks are being taken by smaller indie studios – those games have charm – and then bigger games start to incorporate those ideas and innovations, in much the same way that indie movie ideas make their way into big blockbusters.

How do you incorporate testing and act on testing results?

Rhys: Test early and often.
Lesley: We do QA from day one. We get as many people involved as possible. We try to get fresh eyes on the game all the time. We put the game in front of friends, family, and focus testers.
Alex: We’re starting to put metrics in the code to replace purely observational playtests. We can figure out what people are actually doing in the game, and whether they’re favouring one weapon over another, or missing this or that pick-up or game area. It’s worked well.

When does audio come into play in your projects?

Rhys: Audio is the forgotten love child of the video game industry. You need to get audio in early.
Lesley: You need to consider audio from day one. It’s hugely important.
Alex: We solved the problem by hiring the tallest sound designer in the world, so you can’t ignore him. Get audio in early. We consider a whole sound strategy, instead of doing integration right off the bat.

By this point, time was up. We all got up and stretched our legs, and then about half of the attendees went across the street to crowd into the Elephant & Castle for a tall mug of sarsaparilla.

The Anatomy of Failure

So it was nice to be asked, but humbling to speak on the topic: “I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now” … AKA “here are all the ways in which i’ve botched it as a small business owner.” i joked that it was a difficult task because they’d only given me fifteen minutes. i also felt very junior. i’ve been making games professionally for ten years, but have only been running my own shop for three – the other two panelists (Jason Krogh from Zinc Roe and Deborah Esayian from Emmis Interactive) had each been running the show for a full ten years.

As expected, i did a lot of listening. Jason and i build games for the same kids market. i have watched his company very closely, and dream of one day running a studio as well-regarded as his. The difference between us is that i’m sure Jason has never used the word “wang” on his blog. Conversely, i have a corporate mandate to fulfill a wang quota by the end of each fiscal quarter. Wang. (sorry – just maintaining my output.)

The one piece of advice Jason gave that stuck in my mind and has loomed there ever since is that you need to value your time, and you need to be wary of people taking your time for free. Deborah was of the opposite mind: she says she meets with everyone and anyone, never knowing when that seed she sowed will turn into a business opportunity years down the road. i’ve been more of a Deborah for three years, but it’s getting to the point where i don’t have nearly enough time and money to be a Deborah for very much longer.

Let’s (Not) Do Lunch

i try to be a very nice guy, and i like to share my knowledge with people. But i’ve come to realize that i’m being nice to the severe detriment of my bottom line. Since the iLunch – not yet two weeks gone – i’ve spent an entire morning answering interview questions by two researchers from the University of Alberta, i’ve given a phone interview and have written two longish emails to a reporter from KidScreen, and i’ve spent hours discussing an unfunded spec project by phone and by email. i’ve been wise enough to turn down 3-4 people for lunch/coffee meeting requests. But just this week, someone said to me “we wanna make a Facebook game – come meet!” and i, because i’m dumb and did not heed Jason’s advice, said “sure!”

This is how that scenario should play out:

THEM: We wanna make a Facebook game – come meet!
ME: Very well. My consultation fee is $x/hour.
THEM: …. …. we’re not so interested in meeting any more!

But i didn’t do that. Instead, i said “sure!” because i wanted to be nice and helpful, and who knows? Perhaps it will turn into some business.

It will not.

Will You Build my Game Idea?

This is how those meetings always, always go – and i’ve sat through enough of them to know:

“We don’t know much about games. We don’t play them, and we’ve never made them, but we’re applying for government funding, and we need to present some kind of interactive component attached to our teevee show, or we won’t get funding.

“So based on the articles we’ve read in the Globe and Mail and the daily commuter paper, we’ve come up with this game concept. It’s a cross-platform game that you can play on Facebook, the Twitter, the iPad, and the Kindle. It’s an ARG. It does that alternate reality camera thing. It uses quick codes. And 3D glasses. It’s like Avatar. And Farmville. And Angry Birds. It’s social. It’s real-time. Here are some mock-ups of gameplay.”

Shouting Into the Void

If you could see me right now, you’d see me holding back a pressure headache behind my eyeball with my right palm as i type. At the iLunch, i just HAD to get this message out. It was a complete non-sequitir, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, but i had to say this to anyone who would listen:

The interactive industry is its own separate industry. It has its own experts who play games, make games, and are very well-versed in all things game. These people can help you with your project, but you have to involve them in the creative process early (Jason might have added “and compensate them for their time”, but i was on a roll).

If the last game you played was Pac Man, and the freshest data you’re getting about the industry is from mainstream print media like a newspaper, you need to 1. recognize that you are not an expert, and 2. hand the task over to someone who is. Here are the questions you should ask:

1. Is a video game or interactive application an effective and appropriate way to extend my brand onto other media?
2. If so, which platforms and genres should i be considering? This is who i am trying to reach, and this is the kind of return on investment i’d like to see.

That’s it. Find a vendor, pay his consultation fee, and ask those two questions. Any capable vendor – and this country is FULL of capable vendors – will be able to run with that question and give you all kinds of options that you probably haven’t even considered, because you are not the expert.

The Areas of My Expertise

In order to drive that point home, i repeated this familiar refrain … you know, the one i’ll be chanting when this industry finally kills me and i become a ghost haunting the foyers of future transmedia conferences:

If you want to build a teevee show, go to the experts: people who make teevee shows. If you want to build a game, go to the experts: game developers.

At the iLunch, i took it even farther, and said that a game developer can build a teevee show better than a teevee person can build a game. Why? Because linear media is just one component of video games. We have cut-scenes in games that use the exact same visual language and storytelling technique as film and television. Add to that the fact that game people actually watch teevee. But teevee people – the ones i’ve met – do not play games. Their kids play games. Marc Saltzman writes 100-word capsule reviews of games in FutureShop flyers and on pre-show slides that flash before the movie starts at the Cineplex, and teevee people read those and figure they’re pretty much up on all this technology stuff.

i … it’s depressing. It makes me alternately sad and angry. i don’t know how to deal with my emotions over this. Maybe i’ll make a little doll and confess my impotent feelings of rage to it? Maybe Jason Krogh with let me rest my head on his lap and he’ll stroke my hair and say “there, there” as i quietly sob?

Or maybe teevee people will figure out that we can build far cooler projects if we work together? And then maybe all the bad people will throw their guns and bombs in the ocean, and …

… wang.

The Toronto IGDA committee, hand-picked by Josh in recent years to help keep the ball rolling, recently elected a new president at the wild-eyed urging and general rabble-rousing of TOJam founder Jim McGinley. The new prez is Lesley Phord-Toy, an Ubi Soft employee and Montreal ex-pat who officially takes over in 2011. Lesley will be speaking at GamerCamp Lvl 2, discussing her plans for the IGDA Toronto chapter, and eliciting feedback from the attendees on what they’d like to see from what is arguably the most well-known video games association in the city.

Lesley’s been taking the time to meet with each member of the IGDA Toronto chapter steering committee one-on-one. We had a cup of coffee at Toronto’s new board game cafe Snakes and Lattes, and I took the chance to ask Lesley a few questions to help introduce her to Toronto.

[distraction: check out my review of Snakes & Lattes]

Q: What’s your role at Ubi Soft?

I am a Producer at the Ubisoft Toronto studio for an unannounced project. As a Producer, my primary responsibility is to ensure the successful delivery of a high quality game, and to build and foster a team of people who have the skills, experience, and talent to execute on that objective. In the special case of the new studio in Toronto, I am also involved in areas associated with studio-building such helping to define policies and processes, and establishing and promoting our values as a studio.

[read all about the Ubi Soft Toronto grand opening shindig]

Q: Have you always worked at Ubi?

I’m actually pretty new to Ubisoft. I joined in February as (I believe) the first official production employee! Prior to Ubi, I worked at Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) in Montreal for 6 and a half years. And before that, I was a software engineer at Sony Electronics in the special effects industry in Los Angeles.

[Did U Know? According to the characters in Clerks II, you never do A2M.]

Q: Why did you run for IGDA president? Was it a directive from Ubi, or was it your own initiative?

I’ve been a member of the advisory board of the Montreal chapter for the past two years, and I’ve always felt that a vibrant community of peers is a valuable part of being a game developer. I really enjoyed sharing with, and learning from others in the Montreal community, and I was hoping to find something like that in Toronto.

After attending a few IGDA Toronto meetings, I was left both pleasantly surprised, and disappointed at the same time. On the positive side, I met some really interesting people, and it was clear that there was a contagious enthusiasm for making games. On the negative side, it seemed that many of the local game developers don’t actually go to the IGDA, thereby creating a huge gap in the local community.

Knowing that the committee was looking for a new president, I felt it was a great opportunity to try to mend that gap. Together with the committee, I hope that we can strengthen Toronto’s IGDA so that it can become a valuable resource for the community, and be inclusive to all who are interested or involved in game development.

Q: There has been a lot of uncertainty in the Toronto game community – especially the indie community – about the ramifications of Ubi Soft moving into Ontario. What do you think the move means? How do you think Ubi’s presence will affect the Ontario games industry?

A healthy industry is one that is diverse, sort of like a natural ecosystem. Speaking with people at Ubisoft, it’s clear that there is a motivation to learn about what is already in place so that they can add to the diversity, and continue to help strengthen the local industry. I’m really excited about that idea because I feel that when there is a stronger industry, it can lead to a stronger community. With a growing population of game developers, there is an increased potential for our community to be more supportive of each other, learn from each other, and collaborate together. It’s really more a question of whether the community will be able to embrace this idea, capitalize on their diversity, and apply it to their craft of game development.

Q: If everything works out perfectly, what will a typical IGDA Toronto chapter meeting look like?

In the most ideal case, you would show up at a meeting and feel a sense of awe that you belong to this great community of peers, all sharing in the same passions that you do. You would also have a sense of relief that you are not the only one struggling to make your project work, and that everyone has similar challenges as you. You would spend an hour or so learning about something that could help you in your own project, and maybe be able to share a little of your own wisdom with others. You might make some new friends, but you would definitely catch up with some familiar faces. And at the end of the evening, you will come away feeling lucky for being a member of an incredibly diverse game development community.

(Ryan says: i have a slightly different vision of a successful chapter meeting…)

Q: You’ve lived in every major city in Canada, and you’ve seen this industry from different angles. What are some of the differences between the Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto game scenes?

I can’t really comment too much on Vancouver. When I was working there in the late 90s, there was really only EA and Radical and maybe a few other small companies.

For Montreal, one of the unique things is that many of the studios are actually within walking distance to each other. In the case of Eidos and A2M, they practically share a wall! With that kind of close proximity, it makes it easy for individuals to get to know each other. You always get this feeling that everyone knows everyone even though there are in fact thousands of developers in Montreal! There is competition between companies to attract the best talent, however, there is also a collective sense of grief if you hear that a company or project is not doing well.

Considering Toronto, the geography is vast in comparison, and everyone here faces some amount of commuting. Despite this, there seems to be a shared passion for games here that I had always thought reserved for only a few select hard-cores. I think it’s really a defining characteristic of the Toronto game industry and it really is contagious! On the down side, it simultaneously feels like the community is very divided between some indie hard-cores, and others who are also trying to make a living while pursuing their passion.

Q: What’s your favourite game of all time?

Of all time? It would have to be Super Mario Bros. on the NES. In terms of modern games, however, the games that have captured my imagination the most are Bioshock, Portal, Braid, and Limbo.

Q: What are you playing right now?

<sheepishly> About 150+ hours of Bejeweled Blitz. </sheepishly>

Do you have a dream game that you’ve always wanted to make? Can you tell us anything about it?

There are two diametrically opposed games that I would love to make. One would be something silly and funny (kind of like the humour from those old LucasArts adventure games). The other would be some sort of intense psychological “game” that would make you question whether you were actually sane or not in real life. Ultimately however, my dream project would have a strong focus on creativity and be something unique and different from the status quo.

Q: What non-game-related things do you do for fun?

If I had the time, I would be traveling the world. Short of that, I like visiting modern art galleries and installations and getting lost in their surreal environments. If I could, I would spend a whole afternoon squishing my feet into those millions of sunflower seeds at that new exhibit at the Tate Modern.

Have Your Say!

Catch Lesley Phord-Toy, 2011 president of the IGDA Toronto chapter, at GamerCamp Lvl 2 in November. Don’t forget to check out the IGDA in its new and improved format, and thank Josh at the next social for all the hard work and effort he’s put into the group for the past ten years!

i’ll never make that mistake again.

People came back positively RAVING about GamerCamp. i knew this year that i just HAD to be involved.

Thus Spake Ryanthurstra

i am thrilled that Jamie and Mark, the awesomazing organizers behind the event, invited me to speak (after a teensy bit of grovelling). (… from me, not them.) They wanted someone with experience in educational game development, and Untold Entertainment’s got it. In addition to the educational preschool games we’ve built for Sinking Ship Entertainment, we’re currently working on a project funded by a high-ranking ministerial body of educational governance. i admit it sounds a little dull, so i wanted to spice it up a bit.

Here’s the advice the event organizers gave on titling my talk:

You can call your talk whatever you want and by no means self-censor. Try and make your title a declarative statement or provocative question.

(For example, Dragonette has a song called “Get Your Titties Off My Things” and if they wanted to speak at Gamercamp and call it that, I’d high-five them.)

So without very much deliberation, and because i absolutely love high-fives, i decided to call my talk “Get Your Titties Off My Things : Adventures in Educational Gaming.”

Titties and Education Don’t Mix

In updating the site, the organizers had a last-minute change of heart and decided to censor the talk title. Since it didn’t make much sense any more (not that it made any sense to begin with), i decided to re-title the talk “SCUMM-Sucking : Adventures in Educational Gaming“.

What do you do when you LOVE building LucasArts and Sierra-style graphic adventure games, but you have to take boring educational service work to pay the bills?

>Get MONEY.
>Use MONEY on GAME.
>Give PRESENTATION to GAMERCAMP.

The educational project is an experiment in teaching deadly-dull guidance counselor material by speaking the students’ language – the language of video games!

i’ll also be talking about how i leveraged the educational project to add features to UGAGS (the Untold Entertainment Graphic Adventure Game System), which is my attempt at building a Flash version of the LucasArts SCUMM engine. (They used SCUMM to make Maniac Mansion, The Secret of Monkey Island and others.) The client benefits from our increasingly feature-rich engine, we get a better product that we can use to make awesome games in the future, and everybody wins!

Including you! Come out to GamerCamp in Toronto November 13-14 to hear the tremendous line-up of speakers, eat some cupcakes, jam out to a crazy nerd party, and battle your hangover to hear about UGAGS the afternoon following the big bash.

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.

Update

Mark Rabo of Gamercamp shot this fantastic piece at the event. Among the video’s revelations: Ryan is badly in need of a shave and a haricut.

When i heard that the Hand Eye Society needed indie companies to sponsor a collection of arcade cabinets for this event, i knew i had found a better option than lighting my money on fire or sending it straight up my nose. (Never understood sending money straight up my nose, btw … i can only ever cram a single bill up there at a time, and it’s rather uncomfortable. Why do Bay Street types enjoy it so much?)

What Is?

So here’s the deal: Nuit Blanche (French for “beach noogie”) is a Toronto public art exhibition that takes place throughout the downtown core on Saturday October 2nd, all night. The Hand Eye Society is the Toronto indie game developers association. HES asked indie companies like mine (including, but not limited to, Spyeart, ][, and Metanet). The event takes place from sundown to sunrise at the TIFF Bell Lightbox building, which as you know is completely overrun by the spectral remnants of Irish potato famine victims.

Truth be told, it’s been kind of a lousy sponsorship activity. Sponsors aren’t mentioned on the event flier, on the HES announcement page, or on the Nuit Blanche site, which are all very easy places to throw a logo or link. i’ll admit i’m a little disappointed about that. However, when it’s all said and done, the Untold offices will actually host the cabinet… WHICH MEANS i will get absolutely no work done as i continually try to beat my high score on Boong-Ga Boong-Ga.

Come out to the event! Join the Nidhogg tournament, which will be a blast, especially if you don’t know what Nidhogg is. And swing by the office if you want me to take a plaster cast of your lower extremities for my Boong-Ga Boong-Ga cabinet mod.

Alex told me that his friend had a great “studio space”, and he wanted to throw the event there. For some reason, my brain parsed that as “gallery space”. i was wrong – the event was actually held in a dude’s studio apartment. After a week of attending events at the swanky Carlu, the OCAD Great Hall, the TIFF Filmmakers’ Lounge, and the new Ubi Soft studio, it marked a profound change of pace. i stepped onto the astro-turfed, slightly ramshackle balcony strewn with mismatched patio furniture and random power tools and happily declared, “now THIS is indie.”

The event housed two points of interest: a number of indie games were demoed on various machines around the apartment, and four indie developers gave short presentations. The event never quite lived up to its promise of “projecting games on a 40-foot wall” (rather more like a 6-foot bedsheet), but Alex bought everyone free beer. If you like beer, that’s got to count for something.

i thought the presentations were mercifully short – more like informational snacks – and was happy that they covered a variety of topics. Here were the speakers and their topics:

• Robert Segal from Get Set Games talked about the phenomenal success of their new game, Mega Jump, and the path they took to achieve 5 million downloads.
• Nathon Gunn of Social Game Universe and Bitcasters talked about IGAPI, a cross-promotional toolbar that helps indie developers increase their games’ visibility.
• Ryan Henson Creighton of Untold Entertainment (that’s me!) talked about the advantages of developing games with Unity 3D, and shamelessly plugged his new book, Unity 3D Game Development by Example.
• Michael Todd gave a theoretical talk about art games, and the emotional imprint a developer leaves on his game during a short development cycle.

i thought the event was a good low-key wind-down to a preposterously packed week. Unlike the other events i mentioned, the atmosphere here felt very supportive, tight-knit and communal. We were mere moments from breaking into a round of Kumbaya, for real.

Were you there? Did you enjoy the Indie Showcase? Did you despise it? Let me know by leaving a comment!

Is Heads art? It’s got kind of a different art style, and it’s a little weird. Does being different and weird make something art? Does it matter? Do we care?

One of Us

Those are my reactions whenever the topic of Games as Art crops up. i don’t care. And i especially didn’t care to hear the evening’s two panelists on the OCAD side expound over the history of pop culture in art, and the legitimacy of video games as an art form. It smacked, once again, of another industry trying to claim video games as its own. The teevee folks in town are doing it, the film folks are paying attention … i half expect the pulp and paper industry to take note soon. i feel like a broken record by pointing out, again, that the interactive entertainment industry is not an also-ran or a tack-on marketing tool for other creative industries.

Talking Heads

The two panelists from indie gamedom, Ben Rivers and Jim Munroe, held their own for the latter part of the discussion, when the moderator’s questions became coherent. The topic of the “Toronto style” of indie games was mentioned. Ben rejected the idea, and said that if anything, Toronto indie games reflected the personalities of their creators. (Moreso than indie games from other cities? i’m not convinced.)

Jim Munroe said that the Toronto community is very warm and welcoming, and that there are no cliques. It was an interesting thing for him to say – i was just talking to someone at the Ubi Soft party who complained that the scene was very cliquey. It’s hard to see that view when you’re deep in the clique, i suppose. But barring a few certain folks in our community who act like they’re too cool for school, i think what’s at play is that programmer types are shy and introverted. It’s very easy to mistake introversion for snobbery.

One Note

The rest of the evening, like the rest of the exhibit, consisted of playable games projected on walls. i’d be interested to hear if the uninitiated found it interesting; for the rest of us, it seems like every event lately has been quite samey. TOJam Arcade did it, Fan Expo and TCAF did it, the Indie Showcase did it, and the upcoming Arcadian Renaissance exhibit during Nuit Blanche is gonna do it too. It’s super-great to see the Toronto indie star rising. i’m really interested to hear what Joe Public thinks of it all. And what’s the goal? Do we want more people playing Toronto indie games, buying Toronto indie games, or making Toronto indie games? We’ll figure it out, i’m sure. i think the chips are still falling where they may. Let’s let the spaghetti stick to the wall first. With a little more traction, the industry may finally gain its well-deserved reputation for being a separate schtick from film, teevee and pulp & paper.

UPDATE

Peep this clueless Toronto Star piece from Kate Taylor, who apparently missed the week’s goings-on in the city and decided to pen this alarmist piece on the ‘Mericans taking our tax credits (and our white women), and on video games apparently struggling for artistic cred:

Canada’s video game industry is a going concern

The video game is a medium still searching for cultural legitimacy, but neither critics (who tend to review it simply in terms of how well a game plays) nor parents (who bemoan their children’s addiction) are likely to oblige it any time soon.

i’m going to take a wild guess that Kate is either 52 years old, or lazy. Play some games, Kate, Attend some events. Last week was packed with ‘em. Comment on stuff that was made here in Toronto (being that you write for the Toronto Star), instead of highlighting a Vancouver studio. And get those facts straight:

Canadian companies are often being bought by multinationals in a field were there are no restrictions on foreign ownership.

The implication is that there are no restrictions on foreign-owned companies accessing Canadian government funds and tax breaks. i assure you there are. And as for whether video games enjoy cultural legitimacy … when’s the last time you saw a person under 30 buy a newspaper?

Here are some fast facts:

• CMF, the Canadian Media Fund, is a $350 million dollar chunk of change announced recently by the Minister of Canadian Heritage.
• The Fund is administered by Telefilm.
• The CMF is split into two streams: Convergent (which requires a broadcast license to access), and Experimental. The lion’s share of the funding goes to the Convergent stream.
• The Fund recently went through its first round, with a second round coming up this fall.

The purpose of the consultation, the second such meeting in as many days, was to discuss the results of the first round, and to ask about how the Fund could better meet the needs of its applicants in the next round. This time out, the Convergent stream did not show a huge clamour for interactive content funding; contrastingly, the Experimental stream was hugely over-subscribed.

Cheap, Accurate Data vs. Costly, Fake Data

One of the answers the CMF was hunting for was how to measure “viewership” for online games, sites and activities. They worried that tools like Google Analytics are untrustworthy, because they are fed their information by the first party. They suggested that they lacked the expertise to understand a tracking tool like GA. They wondered whether something like ComScore or Nielsen, being third parties, would be a better option.

i say that despite its faults, Google Analytics is a much better approach. Companies can directly share their GA data by adding profiles to their accounts. Anyone worth his salt can sniff out whether a company is gaming the system by adding too many calls – all of the data is laid bare. Not only that, but it’s free. Compare that with ComScore/Nielsen, which are 1. not free, 2. based on survey samples instead of real data, and 3. comparatively opaque their data collection methods.

Equity vs. Security

i mentioned at the consultation that the game studios around town were not thrilled with the CMF’s plan to take up to 50% equity in the IP of approved projects. (i used the term “collective freak-out”, which apparently shook up the proceedings … i guess when the entire room is half-asleep, it doesn’t take much) It makes sense for the Fund to want to recoup, but as one of my colleagues points out, there are other ways for them to guarantee royalty payments without having to take actual legal ownership in the project. i’d love for them to look into this.

The Areas of My Expertise

When i thought about it, i wondered if the Convergent portion of the fund had a lacklustre subscription simply because teevee people, in my experience, are resting on their laurels instead of seeking true partnerships with digital media companies. Digital media is so often seen as a component of teevee – as simply a way for teevee people to feebly extend their brand presence online, rather than as a way to really explore and leverage their IP in an exciting, participatory medium. Perhaps the Convergent folks weren’t pursuing the Fund to the degree that the pure Experimental (interactive-only) folks were, because they themselves couldn’t think of great ideas for digital media? i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again: if you want great teevee, ask teevee people. If teevee people want great interactive content, they need eat a slice of humble pie and recognize that it is a separate industry with its own experts. People born and bred in the interactive industry are best equipped to create great interactive content.

To that end, the other part of my long-winded question was this: if i’m a teevee prodco, how to i find interactive companies to partner with? Is there a list somewhere, or … ?

A lot of shrugging and lost looks filled the room. Someone weakly offered “well, you come to conferences like this one, and …” But “NO!”, i countered. The province’s great indie game companies don’t attend these conferences. There are many companies who would make great partners – actual partners, not merely people to execute your half-baked vision – but you don’t know about them, because you’re not in the industry. (Again, let me stress that there are two different industries here – teevee and interactive. One is not a subset of the other.) It left me with the sense that we could really use a nation-wide directory, or some kind of speed dating service kind of like Game Connection, except closer to home (and without the four thousand dollar price tag).

In Summary?

Anyway, those are my thoughts – scattershot as they are. i didn’t apply for the first round of funding, and i won’t apply as long as the over-reaching equity requirement is in place. i know i’m not alone in that.

If you’re a prodco looking to partner (truly partner) with an interactive agency, give me a call! There are many of us, and if Untold Entertainment isn’t a good fit, i’m very glad to introduce you to one of the many other fantastic studios here in town.

It never used to be this way. Canada, the friendly and primarily Englsih-speaking neighbour to the North of the USA, used to get all the same stuff that they got stateside, at roughly the same time. Movies would be released on the same weekend, Canadian stations would broadcast big teevee shows on the same night, and all was right with the world.

Lately, though, this wonderful system has been falling apart. It became personal when the hotly-anticipated video game Rock Band was delayed a number of months in Canada – ostensibly so that the company could produce the bilingual French and English print materials. (i never bought that excuse … the game was published by EA, who have had ample experience writing French and English game manuals over the years). CTV, the primary Canadian carrier of American teevee for the masses, started pre-empting and re-scheduling certain top-tier shows like LOST, because they’d ordered hit shows from two competing American networks. Geo-blocking is rampant; Canadians can’t access Comedy Central, we can’t watch Hulu, and we don’t have TiVO. And the biggest cultural carrot that’s been dangled in front of our noses for years has been Netflix.

Netflix is a video rental service that charges a flat monthly fee, and provides subscribers access to a library of DVDs. More recently, they’ve added a video streaming service. As this service has been rolled out to numerous gadgets and gizmos that we Canadians own (iPods/iPhones, Xbox 360′s, PS3′s, Wiis), and the Yanks have made a huge fuss over it, we’ve been positively salivating at the prospect of the service coming to the Great White North.

Well, Netflix is here now. And what do we have, after the long wait? Imagine if, for just eight dollars, you could watch any movie – ANY MOVIE YOU WANTED – from that discount DVD bin next to the cash register at Home Hardware. ANY MOVIE. You’d just have to pay Rogers or Bell the extra fifty bucks a month to increase your bandwidth cap, and this world of Earthly pleasures would open up to you.

Supreme Netdown

i haven’t counted the number of movies on the Netflix Canada service, but i think it’s roughly twelve. Twelve movies, and i’ve already seen three of them. The movies are grouped into pretty granular categories, with a LOT of repeats between genre listings. Let’s take a look at the Netflix Canada offering of “Classic Sci-Fi & Fantasy” movies. But before we do, quick: what are the top ten Classic Sci Fi & Fantasy movies that come to your mind? i hope you could name ten, because Netflix Canada only offers seven. Seven movies. And classic, they ain’t:

• Mad Max (no Road Warrior, no Beyond Thunderdome)
• Godzilla’s Revenge (no original Godzilla, which has an IMDB rating of 7.3, to Revenge‘s 4.0)
• Ghidora: The Three Headed Monster (i’m no monster movie fan, but where’s Gamera? Mothra?)
• Fahrenheit 451
• Silent Running
• Red Planet Mars
• King of the Rocket Men

Did you perhaps think of Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or THEM? Or did you conjure up more recent classics like Blade Runner, Alien, Willow, The Abyss, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Well tough nuts. They don’t have ‘em.

BONUS: Can i get an American subscriber to list the movies in this category on American Stream Instantly Netflix? Kthx.

The Hits Just Keep On Failing to Come

Netflix Canada’s twenty-two selections in the pure “Fantasy” section include stinkers like The Golden Child, Bewtiched (the Will Ferrell bomb), Cool World (??), and the Uwe Boll schlockbuster In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.

“Cult Comedies” (thirteen movies in total) has a few decent picks like The ‘Burbs, Being John Malkovich and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but really stretches the category with Teen Wolf (which is also inexplicably found in “Teen Horror”) and Big Top Pee Wee. No Election, no Rushmore, no Living in Oblivion, Ghost World, The Big Lebowski, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Heathers, Very Bad Things, or any other cult comedy I can think of.

(You’ll find Jeff Dunham and Joe Rogan in the Stand-up Comedy section, incidentally, which also stretches the genre category beyond its reasonable limits)

Flame On

i’ve complained about it a bunch on Twitter, so i think i should just post this last rant and shaddup about it. Here goes: Netflix Canada perfectly recreates the depressing feeling you get when you go to a Blockbuster Video store closing to buy some discounted DVDs and the place has been picked over, and all that’s left are twelve copies of Jim Carrey’s The Number 23. You try to convince yourself that your wife will really like the romcom Picture Perfect (starring Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Bacon), or that $6.99 is a small price to pay for all the fun your kids will have watching the animated feature film The Missing Lynx, with the voice talents of … no, seriously – WTF? The Missing Lynx? What the hell is that? MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes don’t even have entries for it, and the IMDB folks put it at a 5.6. Based on my viewing preferences (i spent an hour or so rating movies on the Netflix site – movies that Netflix Canada doesn’t even have in its library), Netflix itself thinks that i’ll rate The Missing Lynx at about a 2.4/5.

My American friends to the South speak of a land flowing with milk and honey – of a Netflix that has absolutely everything you could ever want to watch, streamed to every digital device you own short of your pocket watch. Now either the Yanks have a peculiar predilection for bargain bin trash, or we hosers are, once again, gettin’ hosed.

That person turned out to be Lesley Phord-Toy, an Ubi Soft producer, who we recently voted in as the new IGDA Toronto Chapter Prez. i knew Lesley from the chapter committee meetings and the Fan Expo panel we attended together. She invited everyone on the IGDA committee. Was the invite a crafty campaign tactic? Not sure. Invite notwithstanding, i think the chapter is well-served to have Lesley heading it up.

The Ubi party was very reminiscent of an E3 shindig, and felt oddly transplanted from La-La-Land to the Great White North. That makes sense – Ubi’s no doubt thrown their fair share of E3 parties, and this one hit all the prereqs:

• Coloured tube lighting – check
• Very loud music – check
• Smoke machine – check
• Free booze – check
• Games projected on walls – check
• Horse doovers – check
• A lounge area with two chocolate fountains that nobody friggin’ told me about until two days later so thanks for nothing – check

Since this is Canada, what was largely missing from the party was that L.A. attitude – everyone acting too awesome to talk to each other. The atmosphere was much more friendly, convivial, and … Canadian, really. Everyone was approachable. No one was off-limits. It was a nice change from the cold pricklies you get at E3.

Through the studio’s main corrider, there were these little plexiglass cases housing game and technology throwbacks, like little museum pieces. They prompted me to write a Very Special LinkBait Tuesdays article on some of lesser-known or oft-forgotten aspects of retro gaming.

Tickets to the Gun Show

One big surprise is that Ubi Soft is working on a Laser Tag-like toy (no relation to Lesley Phord-Toy). They had a full course set up, replete with (inexplicably American) mailbox props, park benches and garbage cans.

It took a little effort to pull off a full guns-blazing action hero cartwheel in my suit jacket, but i managed it. Shame that nobody grabbed a picture of it. Hmm. You’ll have to take my word for it.

The Outsiders

Many people have expressed concern about the Ubi move into Toronto. i can see their point – it was extremely costly, and i wonder if that money wouldn’t be better spent building up small local developers until they’re Ubi-sized. Let’s face it: Ontario can’t lay any claim to the success of Ubi Soft, and Ubi’s really only here as long as the tax incentives are here. There’s no kinship, no loyalty, no local pride or deep Toronto roots – it’s all about the green. It’s almost like when you went to high school prom and paid that super-pretty girl to be your date. The moment she went off the clock, you found her making out with that guy from metal shop who had his own car.

Still, now that they’re here and the money’s spent, i want to see what good can come of it. The Ubi folks have made appearances at the recent IGDA and Hand Eye Society meetings, which i think is great. i hope Ubi’s presence will, at the very least, endow us with a certain professionalism and standard of excellence that can often be overlooked when smaller groups run events. At the very least, Ubi Soft has taught us a few new party tricks.

The panel, moderated by former IGDA big cheese Jason Della-Rocca, was a two-parter. The first-half lineup included:

• Ian Kelso, head of industry association interactiveontario, who snuck away from io’s IN10 convergence conference which was presently taking place uptown at the Carlu
• Mare Sheppard from Metanet, co-creator of N+ on XBLA
• Alexandre Parizeau, a senior producer at Ubi Soft
• Trevor Fencott, CEO of Bedlam Games

Indie Indeed

This first group was reasonably well-balanced. i was very thankful to see Mare on the panel representing indies, and Trevor, representing bigger-budget console game development. (i won’t say “triple-A”, because i worry the term is rather liberally applied in many circumstances). In one interesting exchange, Trevor drew a comparison between Bedlam and Metanet, calling both companies “indie”. i think Mare may have swallowed her gum at that point. Jason jumped in quickly to clarify that the “independent” label did indeed apply to companies like Metanet, Bedlam and the 400-employee strong A2M (Ass to Mouth) in Quebec, because regardless of size, none of these companies are owned and operated by a publisher. Contrastingly “indie” (and with that, Jason made air quotes) refers to an aesthetic or a cool, chic independent and off-the-grid philosophy of game-making.

The panelists sometimes struggled, but sometimes succeeded in defining the differences and similarities between films and games. One audience member asked whether games needed actors and script writers and production designers just like films did, and the unanimous answer was “yes”. i would have liked to have heard a more accurate “it depends” – it really depends on a game’s genre and its particular needs. Many Facebook games like Farmville involve writing, but no voice acting, and the discipline of writing game prompts is quite different from writing linear screenplay-style dialogues. A game like Bejeweled really has no writing to speak of, save for button labels and an instructions screen.

I Was Asked to Be Nice, But …

Ian revealed his true stripes as more of a film guy than a game guy, which may be at the root of my growing dissatisfaction with interactiveontario’s offerings. i’m concerned that their conference content appeals almost exclusively to the convergence teevee crowd (a teevee company delivered the keynote at their recent kids’ interactive conference INPlay); video games and dyed-in-the-wool interactive shops are dramatically under-represented. As long as we’re throwing around air quotes, i’m wondering if i should start calling the association “interactive” ontario?

SORRY, FRIENDS … IF IT’S GOTTA BE SAID, THEN I GOTTA SAY IT.

(see Correction!)

One important game-vs-film distinction that Trevor brought up was that while films are about stories, games are about worlds. He used the examples of Knights of the Old Republic, which takes place in the Star Wars universe, and World of Warcraft, which is light on story but heavy on interaction with other players. i thought his point was very well-made, but it was immediately one particular panelist in the second shift:

• Jade Raymond, Managing Director of Ubi Soft Toronto
• Jon Landau, Producer of Titanic (the one with the boat) and Avatar (the one with the preaching)
• Jordan Mechner – Author, screenwriter and video game creator behind the Prince of Persia Franchise

Jon immediately jumped in to refute Trevor’s claim that games are all about worlds. He contended that games were rather all about stories. (Once more, i think the more honest reasoning is that different types of games rely on different degrees of storytelling – from lots, all the way down to none.) Jason delicately asked Jon whether or not he recognized that Avatar was also very reliant on its fictional world. Jon huffed “People didn’t go see Avatar fourteen times because of its world – they did so because of its story.” It’s at precisely that point that i think i swallowed Mare’s gum.

Hollywood Boll

i asked the panel why they though that most movie-to-game adaptations stunk, and why most game-to-movie conversions were similarly horrible, invoking but not daring to name Uwe Boll in case he was in the audience and came over to punch the ever-loving shit out my my beautiful face. Jon nailed it here – it’s all about the time-to-market, and getting your game in development early enough. You can’t treat game development as solely another marketing/merchandising opportunity, like a T-shirt. He described how his production company and Ubi Soft were in lock-step development on the Avatar game, sharing set assets (which you’ll recall were mostly 3D models), and even going the opposite direction; the art team designed a vehicle that Ubi needed for the game, and Ubi’s resulting model made it into the movie. That’s obviously some great synergy, but i hope it’s obvious that it can’t happen with every movie.

Jon obviously subscribes to the George Lucas vision of future filmmaking, where actors roam around vast green screen sound stages wearing ping pong ball unitards and reacting to crudely-crafted Muppet heads on sticks where digital characters will eventually materialize. i doubt we’ll reach a point where most movies are made that way, which i thought was the biggest disservice the panel did to the discussion. Avatar is an extraordinary film, Ubi Soft is an extraordinary company, and their partnership is far outside the norm of over 99% of bread-and-butter film-to-game licensing deals. It might have been more beneficial to the audience to hear about more commonplace arrangements, but of course, commonplace doesn’t put bums in seats when it comes to festival content.

Through a Lens Darkly

On the subject of 3D (the 1960′s drive-in gimmick, not the computer-generated imagery), Jon foresaw a future where every home had a 3D teevee. He called Microsoft Windows a poor man’s 3D experience, due to all the flat layering of windows and icons. That was an interesting take, i thought. He said that Joe Average consumer usually can’t tell the difference between HD and SD – if he has a giant teevee, he automatically assumes it’s HD. Jon said that glasses were the biggest barrier to 3D gaining consumer acceptance, and wants to see the tech integrated into standard prescription glasses and sunglasses. People wear glasses to the beach, he said, and that’s not a barrier to them visiting. Jon expects the technology to make strides in one-man “personal” 3D (a la the upcoming Nintendo 3DS handheld) until they can sort out the glasses issue.

i thought to myself that the difference between the beach and 3D teevee is that glasses aren’t required for a visit to the beach. If i don’t wear my sunglasses, i don’t end up getting a headache and barfing all over my sand castle.

Jade affirmed that Ubi is very much a supporter of 3D tech. She spared the audience the technical discussion of the problems of developing 3D games (apparently, you forfeit half of your processing power because you’re rendering two separate images at once), and instead made the more pop-cultural comment that she hopes this technology leads to the development of the Star Trek holodeck – controller-free and totally immersive.

Tears for Fears

When the panelists began talking about emotional engagement in games, Jon rather audaciously wondered whether we could make a game that could make players cry. Jason swooped in diplomatically (but defensively) and offered up a number of examples of games that already had made people cry. His examples were Ico and certain Final Fantasy games. i reject the inference that tears are the truest indicator of emotional engagement. Why don’t laughter, fear, exhilaration, excitement, hatred and envy also rank? Games have successfully invoked all of those emotions and then some.

Jordan gets my award for Smartest Guy in the Room. He clearly understands games, and has undoubtedly had more experience in film than most of his video game colleagues. He said that there was a distinctive (but hard to articulate) difference between crying while watching a movie, and crying while playing a game. There’s a peculiar pleasure in crying during a movie. You’re crying because of the events unfolding on the screen, and you’re powerless to change those events. Those things are happening to other people, and you have no control. In a game that makes you cry, you do have control. It’s a distinctly different peculiar pleasure. Jordan couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but it’s an interesting point he was trying to make.

Let’s Get Ready to Humble

The crowd was comprised of mostly film people. i noticed a difference in these folks, for whom this was perhaps their first window into the two similar-but-different worlds of film and games, which set them apart from the convergence teevee crowd that i fall in with at many local conferences and events. The difference (dare i say it? Oh yes, i dare) was humility. The people asking questions were freely and graciously admitting that they did not know very much about games, and seemed to be genuinely interested in learning more. Convergence teevee people tend to project a more haughty, we-know-what’s-best-for-our-industry attitude, which i worry is preventing a lot of great and innovative ideas from seeing the light of day. Teevee people would do well to acknowledge and to lean more heavily on the expertise of interactive studios. The projects during which i’ve enjoyed the most creative freedom have had noticeably better results.

There exists a cultural barrier between teevee and interactive, at least in Toronto, that i desperately hope does not develop between film and interactive. i see events like today’s panel as a refreshing, mutually-beneficial approach to respectfully pairing these two similar-but-different industries.

The panel was moderated by Jason MacIsaac of Electric Playground fame, late himself of a small Ontario game studio from the Niagara region called Cerebral Vortex Games.

My fellow guests on the panel were (from right):

• Ian Kelso, head of interactiveontario
• Leslie Phord-Toy, a producer at UbiSoft’s new Toronto Studio
• Ryan MacLean, formerly of Pseudo Interactive and a founder of Drinkbox Studios (also both the second Mac and the second Ryan on the panel)
• Philippe McNally, from Longbow Digital Arts, who recently released their PC RTS Hegemony: Philip of Macedon

i was thrilled to see that the line-up for the talk was substantial. A Fan Expo staff member asked us if we were okay with people sitting on the floor when we ran out of seats. Of course, Ubi Soft was the big draw, as many of the audience members wanted to know how to get a job there working on their favourite triple-A console franchises. i made a point to mention that UbiSoft also developed the Nintendo DS Babiez/Petz/Horsez games, as well as a number of cash-in movie licenses that have failed to pull in the same acclaim as their more well-known blockbusters.

i’m doing my best to end this (apparently prevalent) notion that working in the video game industry is the ultimate fulfillment of this masturbatory Tom Hanks in BIG fantasy everyone has. Bills gotta get paid, and you may be asked to (gasp!) work on something you don’t like, such as a (shock!) video-heavy bank website instructing visitors on the various retirement products available to them (as we did last year).

Half-Remembered Q & A

i admit, i’m having a hard time remembering what went on at the panel. There was a girl in the second row wearing an incredibly distracting Slave Leia costume, so i think most of what i had to say was along the lines of “hummina hummina hummina.” (Slave Leia costumes don’t usually do it for me, but this one was worth strangling your hutt over.)

So the pro reporters will definitely cover the panel better, but here are a few questions and answers that i can recall:

Q:Why develop games in Toronto?
A:Lesley’s answer was no secret – Ubi was attracted by the tax credits and government funding. Ian hinted that interactiveontario and the government are trying to secure at least one more “whale” to move into the province. For the three small developers, the answer was “intertia”. Our families are here, we live here, and for folks like me who have young kids and ties to grandparents, it’s very difficult to seek our fortunes elsewhere. Ian added that the work they’re doing to attract big companies helps heal the brain drain; if Lesley were to leave UbiSoft (for example), he wants enough studio muscle here to retain top talent in the province.

Q:Does your choice of school make you more or less employable?
A:Ryan M seemed to be more impressed by educational pedigree, saying that it was not the only thing he looks for, but that it is an indicator of a qualified applicant. The only “good” Ontario schools mentioned were Waterloo, Sheridan, and University of Toronto. There are many, many schools that aren’t on that short top-of-mind list, including yours. Reflect on that.

i took a few digs at the International Academy of Design and Technology, saying that nearly everyone i’ve known from that school – both students and faculty – bad-mouthed the place (and forgetting that the moderator had been an instructor there – oops). Despite the school’s rock-bottom reputation, i’ve hired two programmers in my stint as a studio owner, and they’ve both been IADT grads. For me, individual excellence beats a school’s bad rep.

Q: Why aren’t more studios embedding themselves in schools to cherry-pick the best talent?
A:(no one really weighed in on this, but i gave it a shot at a local community college this year with disastrous results)

Q:How do you get a job in the industry?
A:The panel agreed that portfolios were really important. Ryan M said that demonstrated capability trumps a fancy CV. Philippe liked to see evidence of problem-solving ability. i said i’d much prefer a candidate with a portfolio of a few finished games he’d created himself, rather than a student project he completed with a number of classmates.

Q:Why don’t more companies take interns?
A:The three indies – Philippe, Ryan M and myself – said that interns were a risky proposition for small studios, due to the resources they demand. Leslie said that Ubi takes interns (theirs was in the front row taking pictures), but that the intern would have to have something valuable to commit to the organization.

One thing i didn’t get a chance to say was that people should be very wary of schools that offer internships. Picture it: you’re a college program head, and your school has guaranteed this placement program. You’ve got a few great students, a handful of middling ones, and two or three absolute morons who have barely managed to squeak by. Do you really want your school’s reputation stymied by those guys? Do you really want to risk damaging your relationship with industry by sending them out on a placement? No, you don’t.

Add to that the fact that there are very few shops in town, compared with the number of schools cranking out game-trained grads (Humber, Waterloo, George Brown, Durham, U of T, UOIT, Ryerson, Trios, Sheridan, Seneca, York, and Max the Mutt off the top of my head). Some schools churn grads as often as every six months. There’s a clear internship supply-and-demand problem here.

That’s why in my personal experience (and from what i’ve heard anecdotally from others), when you enroll at a school that promises a great placement program, they’re lying. It’s often a marketing ploy to get you in the door. You’ll certainly have to complete a placement to earn class marks, but you’ll have to hunt down the placement yourself. When i was a student at Seneca College here in Ontario, the school had two or three placements in industry for their favourite sons, and the rest of us scrambled. One girl got a job at her uncle’s trucking plant. i found an internship on my own at the Durham Board of Education, working in the computer lab with students in junior kindergarten. This was the final program requirement for 3D computer art and animation students.

The type of school you really want to attend is one that has high entrance standards, and that fails students early and often. There are very few that do this, but i heard an apocryphal tale that Sheriden will refuse to graduate a 4th-year student with a weak portfolio/art thesis presentation. (Note that Sheridan was on the panel’s very short list of prestigious schools.)

Q:How do you choose the right school?
A:Most of the panelists were too political to answer frankly. i don’t toe the same line, because i feel that many of the schools in this province – particularly the community colleges – are doing the industry and their customers a great disservice, and should be held accountable. i warned against schools with very new programs (which is most of them), because they often work out the kinks at the expense of their initial student intakes. i also took issue with schools whose teachers have very tenuous connections to industry. i was speaking to a colleague of mine not long ago, who suggested that every two years, the colleges should kick their instructors back out into industry to ensure they’re keeping their skills up to date.

Ian mentioned that organizations like io in other countries have partnered with (bullied?) schools into an arrangement where the trade association has to approve its course offering in order for the school to earn a passing grade from industry. As a prospective student, you just look up which schools the association recommends, and apply there. i like that idea, but i worry it’s prone to abuse in the name of politics and playing nice.

Party On and Be Excellent to Each Other

If there was one main takeaway from the conversation, it was to focus on personal excellence. The very best stand out, while everyone else falls to the wayside, as in all things. You wanna make games? Then the barrier to entry is so low, as Jason said and as Ian reminded us, that you should already be making games. Don’t wait on UbiSoft or some small indie shop to give you your big break. There’s a golden opportunity for you right here, right now that didn’t exist when the rest of us were getting our start.

The panelists spoke about a number of groups, technologies and resources. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

Groups

• Hand Eye Society Where Toronto’s indie developers meet.
• IGDA Toronto Chapter This group places more emphasis on professional development than the HES.
• Artsy Games Incubator Artists who want to make games, but have no programming ability, get together to … make games! Closely tied to Jim Munroe’s efforts at the HES.
• TOJam The Toronto Indie Game Jam, an annual event where the city’s pros and hopefuls get together over one weekend to make games. A fantastic event.
• FlashInTO The Toronto Flash user group.

Technologies

• Unity 3D Create 3D video games in the browser, with a (comparatively) low learning curve.
• Adobe Flash A relatively inexpensive program for creating 2D and quasi-3D browser games. Lots of books and tutorials – join our ranks of over two million developers!
• Game Maker A free game creation tool, and the favourite of many indies.
• Scratch An easy-to-grasp game creation tool from MIT
• UDK The consumer version of the Unreal Engine. i don’t recommend this one because of its eventual high cost (despite an initially free download)

Resources

• Unity by Example, a book written by me that is coming out very shortly. It’s a great resource for new game developers that teaches you how to make small, simple games, and how to approach your game dev career so that you don’t give up on it. Send an email to info [the at symbol] untoldentertainment.com and i’ll send you a note once it’s available.
• MochiMedia, Kongregate, FlashGameLicense, HeyZap Four places (of MANY) to distribute and monetize games you create with Flash.
• Wooglie A unity game portal.
• TIGSource The de facto site for indies.
• Pimp My Game Our own series on making money (or not) with Flash games. Includes tons of sites that spill the beans about the financials on their games.

Were you at the panel? Do you have anything to add? Was there anything you wanted to ask that you didn’t get a chance to ask? Leave me a comment and we’ll have a great discussion.

Thanks to dendritejungle and Jason MacIsaac for the pics!

There were plenty of people in costumes, and that’s fine. But you only ever see pictures of people who are dressed up, and you rarely get to see images of the people walking around beside those people. These are the people who hold the cosplayers’ stuff – who adjust their straps and re-adhere the little foam skulls to their papier maché battle axes … the people who help tuck all their bulging bits back into their belaboured spandex confines.

Here, then, is my gallery of non-cosplayers: the unsung actual heroes of any comic book convention.

And i do! i want Toronto to have a really first-rate, world-renowned game design competition, but Vortex falls so far short of its potential that its participants, speakers and volunteer staff come out scathed every year.

Some of the problems plaguing the event in the past have included an impossibly short six week development time frame from funding approval to event date, lack of interest/commitment from industry (as the competition demanded too much commitment), and an outrageously imbalanced judging process that would make Middle East elections officers blush.

Here’s hoping that this year’s event improves on past transgressions. These are the changes i noticed from touring the new website:

Site’s Set High

The new Vortex website has much higher production values than in previous years. The design is far brighter and more Web 2.0-looking than the black and pink (??!) morass it once was, but the old design lingers in the occasional corner badge and logo treatment. It’s easier to find crucial information, like dates and prices, on the new site.

DIG Didn’t Get Buried

The Vortex site now partners with DIG (Digital Interactive Gaming), a mostly student-focused conference in London Ontario. Last year, presumably due to the six week ramp-up, the Vortex event was scheduled right on top of DIG, and the two events had to fight for speakers and attendance. It’s heart-breaking to see that happen – i’m very glad that this year, the two events are not only co-existing, but cross-promoting. The Vortex semi-finals take place in London at DIG this year; semi-finalists will be ferried for free to the event in a special Vortex shuttle (read: the organizer’s car ;)

The Calendar is Roomier

Last year’s competition clumped three days back-to-back at a rather nice venue near the train tracks, just East of Parkdale – the former site of Mildred Pierce, across the street from Famous People Players (that’s the one where mentally challenged performers put on a black light show – i recommend a visit!) The event felt like a bit of a death march – partly due to some incredibly dull speakers and drab presentations by entrants – so i’m not suprised that Vortex is parceled off into four separate dates, spread out across four months and (technically) two years, on into February 2011. (The site says “ONE room, FOUR days”, because “ONE room FOUR days THREE months TWO years” makes it sound like a sentencing hearing.) i hope this will make it easier for the organizers to source speakers and to get the kind of commitment they need, now that the ask is a little more bearable.

Likely owing to organizer Sari Ruda’s TIFF ties, this year’s event takes place at the new Bell Lightbox building (which may or may not be haunted by the souls of dead Irish immigrants who fled the potato famine, and on whose graves the building was constructed).

Inflation

The fees are jacked, to the tune of a 135% increase for industry entrants, and a 65% hike for students and individual industry team members. There is a multi-tiered pricing schedule (perhaps too multi-tiered?) that enables participants to experience the event’s three big dates a la carte, or as a complete package. Despite whatever lofty goals the organizers put to this event, it’s no secret that Vortex intends to earn money from its participants. i’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but let’s just call a spade a spade. Even at $235, Vortex is a great deal less expensive and contains potentially more (and certainly more game-focused) content than, say, an interactiveontario event like IN10 ($695!!), their recent INPlay conference ($899!!), or the amount of power required for the DeLorean to travel through time (1.21 jiggawatts!!).

FUN FACT: Last i checked, Vortex is a registered charity. That’s right – you don’t actually have to cure diseased orphans or nurse roadkill dolphins back to health to call yourself a charity in Canada.

It remains to be seen whether the price hike will scare students away. i felt last year that one big improvement would be to cull the entrants far more mercilessly, to avoid these drawn-out days where groups of ten college students would cluster around the podium mic, not saying anything, while their ordained leader would mumble something incoherently about the year-end project they (barely) completed.

i’m not saying that students shouldn’t be involved, but i think there must be a better way to help train and inform mediocre presenters during the boot camp phase of the event. i’m picturing something like an interactive presentation workshop (rather than a podium sermon) where participants get to stand up and practice their public speaking skills in front of the group. We did something like that two years ago with the feds when they ran a GDC preparedness seminar. It was a video conference between Toronto and Montreal delegates, and we were each asked to give our “elevator pitch” – a one-minute spiel on ourselves and our companies in case we met Rich Investor von Jinglepants travelling between the 4th and 18th floors or whatever.

Clarity

The Vortex Competition has vastly improved its stated intent. Here’s what the main page of the site said last year (i’m recounting this from memory, mind you, because i couldn’t find an archived copy of the site):

Hey, kids! Do you love to FRAG N00BS with your BFG on your PS3 while GETTING CRUNK?? Do you have a GREAT GAME IDEA that came to you while you were HUFFING GYM SOCKS? Super! Give us $100 to enter our game design competition and you could win $2000 and an Xbox 360! Daaaaaaaaamn, son!

In stark contrast, here’s how the site frames this year’s competition (emphasis mine):

Enter with your submission for a game concept or prototype. It will be reviewed by the stellar Vortex industry panel from whom you’ll receive feedback. Some of you will then get the opportunity to actually pitch your concept or prototype at the Vortex competition. The Vortex Conference and Competition is the only place in Canada where emerging game designers and developers can present their concepts to an outstanding line up of international industry honchos, financiers and venture capitalists in the hope of winning the competition and along the way getting their creation to market. Think a kinder, gentler “Dragon’s Den” with massive networking opportunities and prizing, coupled with industry sessions and coaching from the most successful entrepreneurs in Canada.

“A kinder, gentler ‘Dragon’s Den’”. That’s the key, folks. That’s what Vortex was supposed to be all along, and only now is it being made crystal clear. Gone is the phrase “game design competition” from the site. That’s because Vortex isn’t a game design competition. It’s much more about the bidness of games. Successful entrants and presenters will have their entire gameplan worked out, from timeline and budgeting, to development and marketing costs, to actual marketing and launch specifics. This is a presentation of a game concept as a business proposition. If you’ve ever applied for one of Canada’s content funds, or pitched a game to an investor like a VC, angel, or the Bank of Mom, you’ll know that the actual game idea is only one component in the complex machinery of your proposal. i’m very glad to see that the intent of the event is being made more clear, and i hope word spreads about what’s expected of entrants.

Final Words of Warning

Am i going to enter this year? i’m actually amazed Vortex hasn’t shown up at my office with a pipe bomb by this point. i’m not their favourite person. If i enter, i’ll likely be burning my $235 entrance fee, because it sounds like they’ll be culling their entrants. And man, they’re probably itching to “cull” me.

Take a quick look at their Privacy Policy, where they admit they’ll share your personal details to “like-minded organizations” and possibly hit you up for money. If you’re not cool with that, make sure to opt out, and to wait their two business days (!!) to be removed from the list.

Finally, i find it amusing that Vortex claims to be “only place in Canada where [you] can [present your game] in the hope of winning the competition”. So … Vortex is the only place in Canada where you can win the Vortex competition? That’s most likely true.

However awkwardly written, the sentiment that Vortex is the only place in Canada where you have access to industry “honchos, financiers and venture capitalists” is a bit off the mark. Thankfully, there are a LOT of great game-related events going on in this country. Here are just a few (and i’ve highlighted those that are free to participants):

• FITC
• Hand Eye Society
• Montreal International Game Summit
• Unite
• FlashInTO
• FlexCamp
• IGDA
• DIG
• Jalloo
• GDC Canada
• Gamercamp

Go forth and game!

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.

This year’s event, the fifth annual, was held at the new George Brown campus on the second floor of the Autodesk building, where i taught Flash in the school’s new game development program before opening my big fat mouth. The facility is brand-spanking new as of January, with four classrooms filled with obscenely powerful computers running Maya, Max, Flash, Photoshop, and all the other goodies you could hope for. Jammers had the choice of using the school’s computers or bringing their own. i was tucked into one of the two classrooms where the monstrous monitors had been removed, and we set up our own equipment.

The turn-out this year was huge. The 180 slots were handily packed up, with another 20 or so on the waiting list. The sponsors, including Tall Tree Games and Big Blue Bubble, kept jammers stoked with junk food – candy bars, energy drinks, chips, Chinese food, and pizza. Two jammers brought in their own baked goods, including chocolate chip oatmeal cookies and 200-odd cheese tarts. My body was screaming for a sprig of broccoli by the end of it -i nearly ate the foliage outside the building to keep from passing out. But cheese is a definite crowd-pleaser.

Exodus from ScaryTown

There were some misgivings, including by the organizers themselves, that the Jam had lost its soul by moving out of Innovation Toronto, a terrifying warehouse in the rapey-est part of town where the last two Jams were held. i disagree – i think the only thing we lost by not being in that building was the constant threat of tetanus. This year, the toilets worked, the stairwells were devoid of dead rodents, and no one had to climb on the roof to secure a tarp over the skylight to keep the rain out. The only real drawback was the classroom layout of the campus, which meant that we couldn’t all be together in the same room. But as the Jam gets bigger, i think that’s just going to be a necessity … unless and until the organizers attain the legendary goal of booking the Toronto Convention Center for the event.

Every year, the organizers choose a theme to guide the teams’ creative output. This year, the theme was “Missing”. Apparently, what i was missing was the focus and wherewithal to produce a decent game. i found the theme really challenging this year, and i’m so focused on our current project that i worry my heart wasn’t completely in it.

But some teams’ hearts WERE in it, in a big way. Here are a few of the games that i enjoyed playing during the Sunday night wrap-up:

Throw That Fight!

This was my fave game at the event. It was very clever. It had a 1930′s theme and style. You play a pugilist who has to throw his boxing match for some reason involving an orphan … the story copy was a bit screwed up at the beginning so i missed the rationale, but what followed was my favourite line from the game from your trainer: “Remember your signature punches: up, left, and right.” (HAHAHAHAHA!)

So it was a rhythm game with the exact same mechanic as Elite Beat Agents, except that you weren’t allowed to play it properly, because you’d accidentally win the match and punch the other guy out. And you couldn’t play like ass either, because the game would say you made it look too unconvincing. You had to screw up the rhythm game just enough to throw the fight, and to not let on that you were playing badly on purpose. FUN.

It wasn’t an incredibly compelling game that i could play for hours, but it was a perfect snack-sized experience for the Jam. i got the concept from the title alone, and figuring out how to play properly was a joy. Good work!

Rider Saves the World

Crazy French-Canadians. This game was from a visiting Montrealer (was his name Rennault?) who created a pretty uninspiring obstacle avoidance game that was delightful in spite of itself, thanks to its ridiculous writing and theme.

You play Rider Motorcycleson, a 70′s-style biker with an afro and a red headband, charging through space astride an angry-looking missile, on his way to save his love. In the second level, you have to take down an alien mothership. The cut-scene introducing that level includes the line by the aliens “We are going to destroy you etc.” i laughed HARD. The cut-scene for the third level is a one-liner where your girlfriend simply says “i’m pregnant.” Again, it had me in stitches. But maybe i was overtired?

The game had some nice touches. When you died, each Continue screen borrowed the mechanic from the level that preceded it. The graphics were very silly. The gameplay was varied. The creator was insane. Lots of pluses there.

i guess i’ve learned that i really favour games with funny writing. Hmm!

Platform Game

i didn’t catch the name of this one, but it was fun. It’s 2-player game with one black character and one white character. You have to co-operate with the other player to reach the top of the vertically-scrolling screen by jumping on platforms. Platforms are either black, white, or beige. The black and white platforms are transparent and you fall right through them, unless the black or white character is standing on the platform. So the black guy could jump up and stand on a transparent black platform to make it solid, so that the white guy could jump up and join him. It was a constant back-and-forth between the players, who essentially had to open doors for each other throughout the level to reach the top. Very nice! And in a few instances, you and your partner had to communicate to time a jump together so that you’d both wind up on the same platform at the same time. It was just pure, wholesome, playable fun. Well done!

My hat’s off to so many people this year – from the organizer who put on this incredible event with NO CHARGE to the participants (??!), to the teams who turned out some great (and many horrendous) games, and to nine of my former students who showed up to give it a shot. (It was great to see them taking the initiative that i accused them of lacking!) Thanks to everyone i met this year, and i hope we can continue to foster a relationship through the monthly Toronto Hand Eye Society meetings until the next jam.

The TOJam Arcade, the public exhibition of the games that were created at the event, is coming up next month. Be there!

Further Playing

The TOJam 5 games will be up on the site eventually. In the meantime, here are the titles i created in past jams:

TOJam 2: Two by Two

Related articles:

• Pimp My Game

TOJam 3: Here Be Dragons

Related articles:

• Pump Up the Jam
• Veni, Vidi, Video Game
• Jonesin’ for Indie-ana
• Stop: Jammer Time.

TOJam 4: Bloat.

Related articles:

• De Fine Balance
• TOJam 4 Closes Its Doors
• The Making of Bloat.
• The Torontoist Tackles TOJam

TOJam 5: Heads (coming soon!)

• Something’s Missing at TOJam 5

In addition to that, you have to draw up a very meaty, very challenging document explaining what you’re going to do with the non-refundable grant. (A whole entire document?? The nerve!) The mandate of the OMDC is to divvy the cash among companies who will create jobs in Ontario – preferably, jobs that will stick once the project has ended.

Oh Frabjous Day

For us, the project is just beginning: after two unsuccessful attempts across two different OMDC funds, i am VERY happy to announce that we’ve been approved for funding on our upcoming word puzzle/adventure game hybrid, Spellirium!

You may remember playing a very early prototype of the Spellirium game mechanic last September. (It’s still up for playtesting in the Rubber Room). Despite the rejections, i remained convinced that we were going to build Spellirium with or without funding. Given the choice, we can probably produce a much better game with.

My earlier criticisms of the OMDC still stand: it’s still too difficult for small start-ups to get funded, and the organization should still consider parceling the funds into much smaller amounts, making them available year-round, and spending less money adjudicating them. But i’ve got an opinion on how a LOT of other people should do their jobs. Don’t get me started on those pastry chefs over at the bakery.

Overall, i’m happy and nervous, as if i have butterflies in my stomach before performing my grade 4 bassoon recital for the Royal Conservatory. The OMDC was quick to point out that our application was far from perfect, our budget was possibly unrealistic, and that all in all, it wasn’t a “slam-dunk.” i’m totally fine with that. The application may not have been a slam dunk, but wait til you see the game! :)

I Can Play Too?

As days go by, we’ll put together a designer diary for Spellirium, and we’ll hit you with more mechanics to try out. If you’d like to be involved in shaping the game and determining its outcome, or if you’d like to hear first-hand accounts from the trenches (the good, the bad and the ugly), we’re happy to share that all with you.

Big thanks to the OMDC for giving us a boost, and to our adjudicators for having faith in us. We won’t let anyone down!

Word.

Sign up for the Spellirium Newsletter to go even deeper into the creative process behind the game. The newsletter contains a first look at exclusive artwork and juicy details about Spellirium that you won’t find anywhere else!

The story continues today. A new client – an animation company – asked to partner with us on a Request for Proposal. They asked me to provide a credits list. i had never heard of such a thing. i told them that i could provide a list of games and projects we’ve worked on, but i confided that i hadn’t actually been credited on anything. This was despite over two years of operation as Untold Entertainment.

Disavow All Knowledge

A prospective client, a broadcaster, contacted me a few weeks ago and asked me to bid on a project. i came back with a very competetive price, but one of my stipulations was that i wanted to link to the finished project from my website, and to host a video of gameplay on my site in case the client’s link ever went down. The prospective client adamantly refused to allow this. “Media Conglomorate X is a self-contained, self-sufficient entity that does NOT outsource work to vendors (even though we do).” The issue was a sticking point for me, and i declined the contract.

Still another teevee client made it a make-or-break condition of a contract on a six-month job that we didn’t link to or mention the project on our website. We could talk about the project in any medium other than web, including (presumably) film, teevee, physical sell-sheets, and interpretive dance. They allowed for these, knowing that the only place we promote our work is on our website.

i have taken work from teevee clients who have revealed to me that they’re no longer hiring a colleague of mine, because he has started asking for credit on final projects.

The Credit Double Standard

This all leads me to believe that while those of us who have been involved in video games all our lives see it as a legitimate medium, the Old Guard – particularly teevee people, and especially Canadian broadcasters – don’t. Everyone who works on a film, down to the seemingly most insignificant person who holds the lunch platter (the “sandwich grip”), gets credited by name at the end of the movie. And in cases where animated movies or special effects-heavy flicks outsource shots to other production companies, you see those production companies listed by name, with all of their employees individually credited.

Ever read the liner notes on a music album? The guy who played the triangle gets a credit.

Ever watch the credit roll at the end of a teevee show? The Executive Producer on the broadcaster side who had nothing to do with the conception or production of the show gets a credit – usually top-billing.

But what do they give a web game developer who handles the art, animation, programming, writing, voice-over, sound effects, music composition and performance, bug testing and sandwich holding? Bupkiss. No credit. And worse – the threat of a lost contract to anyone who dares ask for credit.

Disgrace

i know many of the posts i write here are rife with griping, ranting and finger-pointing, but in this event it’s justified. Old Guard teevee types who pack a show’s credit list with names, but who refuse to acknowledge that a single soul (and in my case, ONLY a single soul) worked on a video game supporting that show, should be publicly shamed. So here i am, publicly shaming them.

For shame!! The people who work on a project must be credited for their work on that project. Vendors must be permitted to showcase that work on their own sites, so that they can successfully contract more work. And the medium of video games – web games included – must be treated as a significant one. The creators of web games are worthy to be recognized to the same degree as producers of film, teevee, music, and radio.

Yesterday was a deadline day here in Ontario for the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Interactive Digital Media Fund. That’s a lot of words, so let’s just shorten it to “OMDC IDM”. Of course, that’s a lot of acronyms, so let’s just shorten it to “OD” … as in, “i just OD-ed on application writing, and now i need some detox.” The IDM Fund adds a “D” to the end of the word “FUN”, rendering it completely UNFUN in the process. Every time i finish one of these applications (this was our third), i feel like i’ve been sapped of my vital life force like the podlings from The Dark Crystal:

i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again: there are problems with this Fund. To put it succinctly:

1. It requires you to request too much money.
2. It does not move nearly quickly enough.
3. It requires too much needless documentation.

To put it far less succinctly, let me expand on those points individually. Please keep in mind that i’m approaching this from the perspective of a small causal games studio. If your company name starts with a “U” and rhymes with “Boobysoft”, you may not agree with everything i posit.

1. The ask is too large.

When we submitted Spellirium in the Spring OMDC IDM round, we were told that the $19.99 price point was too high. At least one juror suggested that we were incapable of producing a game of sufficient quality for that price point, which galled me. Nonetheless, this time we reduced the price point to $9.99.

On the other hand, the OMDC suggested that we were one of the smaller applicants, and that our $40k ask was pretty insignificant. It put us in competition with a number of other small companies, and our app simply wasn’t the best of those competitors. The notion here is that a three dollar hamburger will receive harsher criticism than a nine dollar hamburger … if you pay nine dollars for a hamburger, you already know it’s good. The price tends to say a lot about the quality, even if it doesn’t play out in reality. So we needed to lower the price point on the game, while increasing the budget, so that we could ask the OMDC for more money to look better on paper.

We also took a hit because we were only creating roles for four people. The first time we submitted Spellirium, they asked why we didn’t support the iPhone. The second time we submitted Spellirium, we added iPhone support, and the OMDC asked why we didn’t support Facebook. So this time out, we said FEKKIT. We moved Spellirium from Flash to Unity 3D, which gives us PC and Mac downloadable, web, and WiiWare/iPhone/Xbox 360 with the purchase of engine add-ons. Take THAT. Since a 3D game is often more costly than a 2D game, our production schedule was packed with more people: 3D modelers and animators, texture artists, UI designers, and a gaggle of others. This is what the OMDC wants to see for its investment. Our project will create jobs in Ontario.

But what do we end up with? A bigger budget at a lower price point. That means we’re even LESS likely to break even, so we have to re-visit our sales targets. The only way to make it work is to crank up our projected unit sales. We discovered that we’d need to sell ten thousand units to make a go of it, which is a challenging number, especially for our first outing. But i feel this situation was kind of forced on us by the suggestion to lower the price point and increase the budget. We need to ask for enough money so that the OMDC won’t just dismiss us out of hand, but it has to be an amount of money that we can realistically recuperate through sales. Rock, meet hard place.

i would much rather work with a modest budget and a realistic sales target. But as James Weyman from the OMDC said during an info session (and i paraphrase), “Why would we spend $40k reviewing an application when the ask is only $30k?”

i agree, James, and i counter with this: Why are you spending $40k reviewing my application?? Give me a fund where i can ask for a small amount of money to take baby steps on my way to becoming one of the Big Guys, instead of requiring me to put on one of daddy’s suits and pretend that i’m one of the Big Guys already.

2. The Fund does not move quickly enough.

The IDM Fund has two deadlines each year. It takes many weeks after the submission date to find out whether or not you’ve been funded. It’s a number of weeks after THAT before you start the project. This latest deadline was yesterday, November 16th 2009. The project has to begin within a number of weeks of funding approval, which puts us at March 2010. That’s three and a half months from submission to project. Any small, lean developer like us could complete one or more high-quality games in that time.

And i don’t quite understand how scheduling is supposed to work. Are we supposed to book that project time off? If a client comes to me and offers me a contract that starts in March, am i supposed to say “no thanks … i think we might get OMDC funding in March”? A much larger company might be able to work like that, but little guys may only be able to run one or two concurrent projects, max.

You need to cook up at least 50% of a project’s funding on your own. The bare minimums are 20% deferral (working for free), 20% in-kind contributions, and 10% cash. We have to scare up as much cash as possible, because 1) ain’t nobody gonna do nothin’ for us for free (except my wife and me), and 2) we have no partners. So if the IDM application happens to fall on a dry spell when we can’t show a lot of green in the account, we essentially can’t apply. It’s another six months until the next application. Who knows where we’ll be by then? Selling our toenail clippings for enough money to buy the leftover cookies from the blood clinic, perhaps.

i would like to see a fund where, instead of two hard deadlines a year, there is a perpetual submission window. We could submit whenever we had the cash, time, and project to submit. If any OMDC folks are reading this, they’re probably angrily tallying up a massive list of why this can’t work. So let’s play the “Ryan is the New Ontario Minister of Culture” game, everyone: i come to the OMDC because i won the position of Minister of Culture by defeating the former Minister in a bare-chested steel cage match or whatever, and i say “Here’s how it’s going to work: structure a Fund with a perpetual submission process, or i disband the OMDC and sink all the money into a new prime-time variety special starring the cast of the 1972 smash hit The Beachcombers.”

Now, throw out all your reasons why something like that can’t work, and let’s brainstorm how we can build a fund to solve this problem.

3. The app takes too long to prepare.

The kind of company that can reasonably apply to a fund like this on a regular basis is large enough to employ a dedicated app writer. The application requires sixteen different sections. Some of these are copy/paste – throw your Articles of Incorporation in there, your shareholder info – no problem. But the majority of the required material poses an onerous task to a small studio like ours. Required elements include a business and marketing plan, a development schedule, and a detailed budget. Those are all nice to have, but the OMDC grossly underestimates the difficulty a small company faces in producing those documents.

And funder, please. Don’t get me started on the budget. The Excel files provided by the Corporation are ripped from other funds (Bell and Telefilm). They are extremely teevee- and film-focussed, including line items for things like location scouting and talent. They have very few formulae built into them, so you end up having to hand-calculate many of the cells. There is a labelling error on the Minimum Schdule of Ontario Expenditures that the corporation knows about, but they haven’t bothered to fix it yet (it’s only been six months since the last application round, after all …) i have no idea why the OMDC would spend $40k reviewing one of these apps without spending two hundred bucks paying a CA student to add formulae to their spreadsheets and fix the errors. No – instead, we all have to waste our time struggling with these files.

The cost of physically producing the app is higher than it needs to be. The app must be printed as four separate copies. This year, we purchased four red binders and four sets of binder tabs to bind the app. That put us out seventy bucks. We don’t get the binders or the tabs back (i think the OMDC and the jurors secretly eat them … monstrous bureaucrats who are fueled by delicious life-giving stationary supplies). We spent another thirty bucks on printer ink, and maybe another ten on paper. i can’t imagine what the cost would have been to have the thing professionally printed and bound. i believe some applicants do this, but again, those are the applicants who can afford to have an app writer working on this thing.

Those companies are also large enough to pay for pre-production artwork to make the app look really good. i do what i can to add screens from movies and games that convey the feeling i want to invoke in the final game, but i have no artists on staff. i can’t afford to hire a contractor to create spec art for an app. We’re just too small to do that.

The apps i write come in somewhere between 60-80 pages. The OMDC has suggested that other successful applicants have had much smaller apps (30 pages?) but i don’t see how that’s possible with sixteen required sections. The time it takes for me to write an 80 page document could be much better spent scavenging for food from the floors of fast food restaurants to feed my family.

If i could make any suggestion about how to solve this problem, it would be that the expectation should be proportionate to the ask. Small game, small budget, small application. Lowered expectations. An app submitted by a company with two employees should not be compared with an app submitted by a much larger company. But since the ask is necessarily high (see above), the app needs to be thick. Jurors will say “why aren’t there any images of gameplay?” and “why doesn’t the budget list a production assistant for four days in July to help oversee this aspect of the design?” Simple: because you’re looking at a PROPOSAL, not a post-mortem of a finished game. The game isn’t built yet. i need money to build it. And here i am asking you for money. If i HAD the money to pay an artist to create images, i wouldn’t be grovelling at the feet of the Ontario government for funding. If i KNEW that i needed a production assistant for four days in July, i’d be visiting you FROM THE FUTURE.

Cry Me a River

i know this griping has probably moved many of you to tears. Thank you for your empathy. For my more jaded readers, i suggest only that this IDM fund money is my money. It’s your money. It was taken from our pockets specifically to be paid back in this initiative. The OMDC is not being kind or benevolent by handing it out. They exist due to a mandate from the Ontario government, by our elected officials. If we elect officials who decide that this funding is not important, the OMDC ceases to exist. i can kiss ass with the best of them, but i draw the line here. Neither do i beg Canada Post to deliver my mail. It’s a service paid for by tax dollars – my mailman is not doing me any favours by giving me mail. The OMDC does not deserve a philanthropy award by making a calculated decision to fund my project.

One piece of good news is that we WERE approved for one OMDC initiative, the Export Fund. They’ll throw a few bucks our way to lower the cost of attending GDC and Casual Connect. ROI is measured by the number of sales leads we generate, among other things. Don’t get me wrong – it’s great to have that assistance. But it would be more useful to us if we actually had a project to show at those conferences. i don’t see how i’ll ever be able to get project funding money if i’m competing against console companies with armies of partners and multi-million dollar budgets.

It’s a big-company, small-company dichotomy in this province, increasingly so. Big companies present no-brainer, lower-risk proposals than small companies often do. They can simply hire more people and spend more money. When it was recently announced that the OIDMTC (an interactive tax credit) would be claimable every year, rather than only on the year that a project was completed, it was GREAT news. Then came the stipulation that only companies who paid out one million dollars in payroll were elligible for this increased claim frequency – in other words, only UbiSoft.

The Ministry of Culture and the OMDC need to realize that UbiSoft and other big successful companies were not birthed from their mamas’ wombs as big successful companies. We begin life as whiny, squealing infants, both in our personal lives and our corporate lives. We all start somewhere. Untold Entertainment remains in the whining and squealing stage: this is me, whining and squealing, asking the government to supply child welfare, in addition to what they regularly pay out to old and fat companies.

That’s right, other companies: i’m calling you fat. Whatcha gonna do about it? Chase after me? i got those nimble little baby legs. Hiiii-YAH!

I Can Haz Beer?

i don’t drink, but i have it on good authority that some among you do. Everybody i knew put in an application for this last IDM round, including my mom, who doesn’t even make games. It’s always an enormous burden off my already-burdened shoulders when i hand the thing in, and i know i’m not alone in that. i hereby decree that the next time there’s an IDM submission deadline (20 months from now, or something like that), we should all meet somewhere and have a post-app evening to unwind. OMDC, you’re invited.

Word.

Sign up for the Spellirium Newsletter to go even deeper into the creative process behind the game. The newsletter contains a first look at exclusive artwork and juicy details about Spellirium that you won’t find anywhere else!

NASA As They Wanna Be

Decode Interactive, the “digital” arm of the company (don’t get me started) collaborated with NASA to produce Apollo 11: The Game for the iPhone. i have it on good authority that the Decode Interactive team visited the actual sound stage where NASA faked the original moon landing. Think of the game as an advanced Lunar Lander, the one where you have to gently land your rocketship without blowing it up. Except here, you have more true-to-life NASA-esque controls, and “blowing up” is more analgous to “wasting millions of dollars of American taxpayers’ money.”

The team obviously strove for authenticity to hit a niche audience of NASA-enthusiasts – otherwise, the surface of the moon would have been a little more colourful, and the lander would have been able to fire spiky blue turtle shells to knock out competing lunar landers from other countries. You can’t please everybody, so in trying to please space nuts, the game may alienate players looking for something more candy-coated and fun. But if you are a HAM radio operator, and you used to play with an erector set, and you own Red Dwarf on DVD, this game might be just your speed.

And Now, de Codes from Decode

The title was authored in Unity 3D with the Unity for iPhone add-on. Unity is the little-game-engine-that-could that recently took the piss out of Unreal Engine’s consumer-grade product launch by offering their engine for $FREE. The Decode Interactive team has a number of other Unity-based projects in the works, and they sponsored the first Toronto Unity Users Group meeting earlier this week. If you come out to one of our upcoming UUG Toronto events, be sure to shake hands with these guys – they’re a great resource, and they’re keen to help developers wrap their brains around the Unity 3D technology.

Jean-Guy Niquet, a regular contributor to our conversations here and an erector set fan in his own right (oo-er!), heads up the merry band of Decode Interactive programmers. He’s been kind enough to offer us a batch of FREE CODES for the game – first come, first served. As usual, here’s the drill: the codes are good for YANKEES ONLY. If you DON’T live in God’s America, they’re not going to work for you. (Thanks, Apple!) And if you successfully redeem one of these codes, please let us know – we’ll strike it from the list.

Here are the codes for a FREE copy of Apollo 11: The Game:

1. RYMAEX3X7N9M – Redeemed by segra!
2. 4RLEWLX67XEP – Redeemed by Brennon!
3. 9PPN3FTE6W4T
4. 9YJL4R4766NE – Redeemed by Abdullah!
5. XRKJXH4TYPKL – Redeemed by Gabriel!

And if you do give the game a shot, please let us know how you liked it!

Eagle out.

So while i sat in the session, which was quite full of mostly teevee industry folks (and a small but extremely vocal and TERRIBLY worried-looking group of documentary filmmakers), i heard the word “digital” thrown around to describe what we do here at Untold Entertainment. The suggestion came up more than once that the “Experimental” stream, the one that was not concerned with teevee, be renamed the “Digital” stream. “Balls to that”, i say. Here’s why:

You Crazy Kids With Your “Rock n’ Roll” and Your “Hyperlinks”

The consultation really got me thinking about nomenclature. i see the term “digital” being thrown around all the time to describe what we do. The people using this term are mostly my parents’ age – baby boomers who have evolved from calling the computer mouse a “whatsit”, and are in positions of power at various places. These folks comprise the Old Guard of the entertainment industry. They’ve wrapped their minds around all this “new media” stuff to the point where they’ve siezed upon a catch-all term for any kind of content that wasn’t around when they were watching Howdy Doody on their 6-inch teevee screens in their costume chaps: digital. They must be so pleased with themselves.

The Messenger is Not the Medium

The trouble with the catch-all term “digital” is that it doesn’t do a damned thing to differentiate between linear, one-way communication like radio and teevee (phone-in shows excepted), and true interactive content that you find in video games and on websites. “Digital” describes a method for delivering content – breaking the material down into discernable ones and zeroes (“digits”) and pushing those numbers through a pipe (cable, phone line, airwave) to the end user, where the numbers are translated back into pictures and sound. “Digital” is the evolution of “analog”. “Psycom” may be the evolution of “digital” for all we know – content transmitted directly to your brain. It STILL doesn’t help us describe the type of content that is reaching the end user.

It’s as if you were trying to differentiate between horses and cars, so you choose the term “commuting”. But then in many parts of the world, people start riding horses to work. Suddenly your term does nothing to differentiate the two concepts, because it described a method of consuming the thing, instead of describing the thing itself.

Oh No He Di’in’t

So don’t call me digital. Teevee is digital, and i deplore the comparison. Teevee is also unidirectional, dumb, and on death’s door. And that’s fair – i’m sure teevee people resented being lumped in with radio, while radio didn’t appreciate being mentioned in the same breath as … i dunno. The Pony Express? At any rate, it’s all fruit, but when we lump teevee in with interactive, we’re comparing apples to pictures of apples.

Call me “interactive”. i feel it’s the best term that differentiates linear content from the amazing things we’re doing to involve and engage our audiences. If you’re part of the old guard and you’re clinging to your burning, sinking teevee ship with a tear in your eye, and you’d like to keep calling anything that follows teevee “digital”, be my guest. i promise we won’t put any Playboxes or X-Stations in your retirement home.

dimeRocker is seeding a number of Unity 3D user groups across Canada, including one in Toronto and one in Montreal. The Toronto and Montreal events are both evening user group meetings, with hands-on workshops the following day. Here’s what the schedule looks like:

Toronto November 10th – 11th

November 10th: Social Networking Event

• 5:30pm – 6:30pm Reception, drinks & appetizers at the Gladstone Hotel
• 6:30pm – 7:30pm Keynote followed by Q&A with Unity Team
• 7:30pm – 9:00pm Networking Social, raffle – Unity 3D License

Speaker: Tony Garcia – Business Development

Tony Garcia is a seasoned 26 year industry veteran having held senior positions for such
companies as Electronic Arts, LucasFilm Games, and Microsoft. In 1991, Tony founded the
games division at Microsoft and grew it over a period of six years to establish the company as a
major player in the videogame space. In 1998 Tony was the General Manager for Electronic
Arts Seattle where he oversaw the development of such leading franchises as Need for Speed,
FIFA Soccer, and Motor City Online. Tony has also been responsible for a string of successful
startups and won a diverse set of industry awards for many of the products that he has been
involved with.

November 11th: Course and VIP Sponsor Dinner

• 12:30pm – 1:00pm Registration & refreshments
• 1:00pm – 3:30pm Unity Skills Workshop
• 3:30pm – 4:00pm Workshop Q&A
• 7:00pm – 10:00pm VIP dinner – Unity Team & Premium Sponsors

Speaker: Amir Ebrahimi – Developer and Field Engineer TORONTO WORKSHOP

Amir comes from Naughty Dog, Activision, and Flagship Studios, where he wrote tools, graphics
code and gameplay scripts on Jak II, Jak 3, Jak X, X-Men, Tony Hawk Project 8, and Hellgate:
London. Occasionally Amir writes for Game Developer magazine and teaches at the Art Institute
of California, San Francisco.

Montreal

November 16th: Social Networking Event

• 5:30pm – 6:30pm Reception, drinks and appetizers
• 6:30pm – 7:30pm Key Note followed by Q&A with UT
• 7:30pm – 9:00pm+ Networking Social raffle off Unity 3D License

November 17th: Course and VIP Sponsor Dinner

• 12:30pm – 1:00pm Registration
• 1:00pm – 3:30pm Unity Skills Workshop
• 3:30pm – 4:00pm Workshop Q&A
• 7:00pm – 10:00pm VIP dinner – Unity Team & Premium Sponsors

Speaker: David Helgason – CEO

An entrepreneur, visionary, and ex-programmer, David’s job is to lead the team to stardom,
while making sure that each step is taken with love and care.
In the past David founded and participated in startups in fields such as news & community
integration, music distribution, and consulting. David serves on the boards of several games and
technology startups.

Sponsors

• Telefilm Canada (who are funding dimeRocker’s whole initiative)
• dimeRocker (surprised?)
• Unity (doubly surprised?)

Strategic partners include:

• alliance numerique
• interactive ontario
• Montreal International Game Summit
• George Brown College

Unrealistic?

George Brown’s participation is interesting. The school is planning to use Unity in the third and fourth year of its Game Development program, where most Ontario schools are using Unreal Engine 3. Interestingly, Joystiq suggested last week that a consumer-grade version of the Unreal Engine 3 was in the works, as a direct competitor to Unity.

Become a User

Here’s where to sign up:

• UUG Mixer Event, Toronto November 10th
• UUG Course Toronto November 11th
• UUG Mixer Event, Montreal November 16th
• UUG Course Montreal November 17th

For more articles about Unity 3D, check out our Unity Nuub feature.

He

That’s right, He – none other than Yannis Mallat, Chief Executive Officer of Ubi Soft Montreal. Yannis, with his lush beard and flowing mane of silky shoulder-length shampoo commercial hair, riding on a cloud against a blinding host of heavenly flood lights, to the blast of a thousand heralding trumpets. Yannis – with an olive branch in his left hand and a Wii controller in his right, a halo of light framing his face. Yannis Mallat, draped in the finest gowns, with sandals of bronze and a crown made of tickles. This is the very saviour who’s bringing his multi-bazillion dollar juggernaut game studio into Toronto some time soon, his way made smooth by a path paved with hundred dollar bills, courtesy of the Ontario Government. Yannis! Angels sing! Yannis! Elderly women lose all bowel control! Yannis! And every game developer in town swoons at the mere mention of his name.

Stop: Mallat Time

The Vortex Competition landed Yannis Mallat as one of their top-tier judges, and the excitement is palpable. And disturbing. Palpably disturbing.

Since the Vortex “grand” prize of $2500 is nothing to write home about (and indeed, a drop in the bucket of the many thousands of buckets it takes to fund game development these days), many of the people i’ve spoken with about the competition say the same thing “i don’t care about winning – i care about the networking. i get to present my game concept to Yannis Mallat. You know – the Ubi Soft CEO? And if he likes it, well … this could be my big break.”

For serious. Grown men are actually saying this to me. And not just idealistic, adorably naive students – i’m talking grown-up professionals who should know better. There seems to be this sense that Yannis Mallat, who heads a company packed with video game professionals, all of whom have at least ten game ideas that they’re dying to make – that this guy is going to show up to a low-rent competition like Vortex, watch a presentation, and say “This guy. This guy’s our next STAR.”

i wish i could say that i hate to burst everyone’s bubble, because i actually really enjoy bursting bubbles – especially big, ridiculous and implausible bubbles like this one. Yannis Mallat is not judging the Vortex Competition so that he can fill a senior-level game developer position at Ubi Soft. The 2007 competition felt a lot like the first round of American Idol, except that it was filled with people who were too retarded to even make the first round of American Idol.

Hollywon’t

This desire to “get discovered” betrays sort of a disturbing hidden desire among the game developers in this town. As video games resemble Hollywood more and more, these folks seem to think they can hang out at Schwab’s Pharmacy (Vortex) and look pretty (have a good game idea), when in walks Cecil B. DeMille (Yannis Mallat) who sees that they have that spark – that je ne sais quoi – and he signs them to a multi-million dollar ($80k/year) contract at Paramount Pictures (Ubi Soft).

Of course, we all know how that Hollywood dream really ends up. Some pretty young thing hops a bus from Idaho to Los Angeles in the hopes of being discovered and making it big, and she ends up doing porn.

Here’s where my analogy breaks down. i’m not too sure what the video game industry equivalent of porn is. Gold farming? Interactive bar-top poker games? Something like that.

i hate to say all this. i really do. But it just blows my mind that everyone i’ve spoken with who’s entering this competition thinks they’ll be hob-nobbing with Yannis, his buddies, and a couple of loose broads over martinis at the Boom Boom Room after the competition is over. It’s like getting tickets to a Rolling Stones concert and thinking you’re going to go backstage and meet Mick and Keef, and they’re gonna do a few lines with you and listen to your demo and set you up with a sweet record deal. It … holy crap. i can’t express this to you. It boggles my already mostly-boggled mind.

Back to Reality

Here’s what i think is a healthy outlook for the Vortex Competition, and one that a sane person can hinge his hopes on. You’re going to go there, and you’ll have ten minutes to speak. This is a golden opportunity to practice, practice, practice, distill your game idea in a VERY tight presentation, and have it evaluated by someone other than Mom. And keep in mind that you won’t be evaluated solely on the merits of your game concept. Your manner of speaking, your grooming, your preparedness, your graphic design (if you choose to use slides) – in short, your personality and work ethic and branding – will all be judged with far more scrutiny than your game idea.

i dare say, your game idea is not what will make you stand out. Your ability to present, your market research and budgeting legwork, your fact-based revenue projections – all of these are part and parcel of an excellent and prize-worthy presentation. Any schmuck can have a game idea – and that’s exactly what you’ll see at the competition: a parade of schmucks with game ideas. The extra preparation, practice and personality you infuse into your presentation will set the doers apart from the dreamers.

And if you put in that required amount of effort – that level of hard work, effort, intelligence and professionality – then maybe at that networking event after the competition, Yannis Mallat will come to you?

But seriously, don’t bet on it.

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!

So what have they done lately? The company is pretty busy releasing games in the App Store. i took an “iPhone for Flash Developers” course last year with zr programmer Luke Lutman, but Luke’s such a clever fellow they were already well on their way by that point. Among their earliest entries is Arctic Shuffle 2, which combines the very Canadian sport of curling with the very un-Canadian animal of penguin (it’s cold here, but penguins live near the opposite pole – the ANTarctic), with a healthy dose of mini-golf thrown in just to mix things up a little.

i confess that i didn’t play Arctic Shuffle 1, so there may be some major plot revelations that i’m missing out on. But in the sequel, you tap a golf-style mechanic at the bottom of the screen to launch your penguins toward a curling/crokinole-type target ring. If a penguin comes to a rest safely inside the ring, you’re onto the next level. Unfortunately, penguins more often than not ricochet off of glaciers and into gaping ice holes. In later levels, you have to creatively bounce penguins off each other to get them into the ring safely.

The game’s production values are very good. The team has taken a page out of the Game Escalation Playbook, where instead of ramping the challenge up in a straight line, there are peaks and valleys where you’ll finish a very difficult level, and then breeze by the disconcertingly simple next level. This is a technique that encourages people to keep playing, and it works very well for a game like this.

Sure, But Is It Free?

Studio head Jason Krogh was good enough to offer three codes for the game. The codes are only valid with a US iTunes account, and they’re not reusable. If you get a FREE copy of Artic Shuffle 2, please let the rest of us know which code you redeemed so that we don’t waste our time punching it in. And if you feel so compelled, please throw a mini-review over in our What Are You Playing? forum.

Here are those codes:

1. 6YXTXJL93XL3
2. FMMH7ETF6P77 – redeemed!
3. AAWW9LHENTR4 – redeemed!

Enjoy!

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.

We’ve reached a milestone. This past Saturday, with little paper party hats and a room full of imaginary monsters, Untold Entertainment celebrated its two-year anniversary as a Toronto game studio start-up. Let me tell you, running your first start-up in the midst of a global economic collapse is like …. well, it’s like running your first start-up in the midst of a global economic collapse. It hasn’t been easy, but we’ve survived. i thought it might be nice, for posterity, to look back at how our last fiscal year played out:

Stuff We Did

2008

• July – July was our busiest month evar. Still a one-man shop, we were spinning out three game projects simultaneously, through a complex process of outsourcing and human cloning.
• August – We expanded from 1 to 2 people, and secured office space in Yorkville, one of Toronto’s most expensive neighbourhoods. (Read: The Unboxing of Untold Entertainment) We went with a serviced office space provider, who nickel-and-dimed us for a year. This proved to be a bad business decision, but with a packed July, a second baby on the way, and no time to look at property (AND with brokers hanging up the phone because we were looking for a small space), getting an office close to home and on the subway line made a lot of sense. But if i could go back in time and assassinate myself, i would.
• September – We redesigned our site to make it teh awesome

  

  untoldentertainment.com versions 1 and 2

• November – The Ontario Media Development Corporation rejected our funding application for the Screen-Based Content Initiative
• December – Business was booming! We expanded from 2 to 3 people. Our office space provider was full of money-gouging shenanigans, so we had to cram all three of our hot, writhing bodies into our 110 sq foot closet of an office.

  

  i hope my coffin is more spacious than this

2009

• January – The economy went down the toilet. Uncertainty surrounding Canada’s Telefilm fund spooked many of our clients. Service projects took a nosedive. With nothing left to do but twiddle our thumbs, we started work on our first significant original property.
• March – We downsized from 3 to 2 people. :(
• April – Disheartened, i clung to satire for warmth and comfort (read: Embattled Game Developer Makes Impassioned Plea for Government Assistance)
• May – Some folks don’t appreciate satire.
• June – The Ontario Media Development Corporation rejected our application for the Interactive Digital Media Fund
• July – Still hanging in there, we began to expand our client base. We signed a new lease for an office space in Toronto’s downtown core. New office is five times the size of our current joint, and costs less per month. And it offers us a lovely, panoramic view of the corner of Dodgy and McStabs-a-lot.

Stuff We Made for Other People

Our service workload was lighter in year two, but we still managed to complete a variety of great fee-for-service projects:

• A selection of games for a kids’ travel show, Are We There Yet? World Adventure : Flag Tag, Train Track, Viking Ship, Eye in the Sky. These were tricky because we had to work within the show site’s established look. As you can see, we departed from the look considerably with Eye in the Sky. (Great work, Mark!)

  

• Various on-camera digital props, mock-ups, storyboards and proposals for kids’ teevee production companies (those are seeeecret! Shhh!)
• Game design and development for a kids’ online collecting/trading game called The Nara Tree for eco-site Earth Rangers, which unfortunately had its plug pulled. (i think they were just trying to save energy :) Don’t worry – the Earth Rangers have a lot of exciting stuff in the queue.

  

• Two great games for Best Ed, a great new kids’ cartoon show by 9 Story (Peep and the Big Wide World) in the spirit of Eek! The Cat. We’ve been dying to show these games off, but the broadcasters haven’t launched them yet. Stay tuned!

  

• Ok, this one’s weird: a comedy script for a corporate West 49 awards show, hosted by reknowned skateboarder and troublemaker Bam Marghera, host of his own reality show Viva La Bam. Honestly.

  

  i’m really not joking. i’ll post video of the event once i get my mitts on it.

• A Flash video-intensive project for BMO Bank of Montreal extolling the virtues of retirement planning – Take Charge of Your Retirement
• A SUPER COOL movie creation tool for pre-schoolers which, due to contractual obligations, we can’t actually show on the website. Bummer. (Anyway – great work, Jeff!)

Stuff We Made for Us

• Bloat., a testament to what you can do in twenty-two hours with only a dream in your heart, a dabble of child-like optimism, and a film canister full of uppers
• a global high scores system for all our games, none of which use high scores … a realization i made AFTER the system was completed. Ha!
• Message boards, where you can talk about our stuff or your stuff, or just stuff in general. Participation is dismal at the moment, but we expect it to pick up once we start launching more games
• a neat-o Twitter Flash widget (the blue bird in our global nav bar – look up!). Learn how to build your own with our tutorials (Read: Pull Twitter Updates into Flash Part 1 and Part 2)

Stuff We Started

• Kahoots™, a fun crime-themed puzzle game modeled entirely in clay
• Interrupting Cow Trivia, a real-time multiplayer game that hMOOOO!!
• Balloon Shooter (working title), a simple but fun shooting gallery game to showcase our global high scores system
• Sp… Oops! Almost spilled the beans on that one.

As you can see, we pack a lot into a year. Consider Untold Entertainment Inc. for your next rich media application, advergame, show support site, or Bar Mitzvah!

You can find the article in this month’s edition of KidScreen. Or, if you’ve become so accustomed to reading your computer screen that your eyeballs can no longer make sense of words on printed paper, check out the digital version of the article here:

KidScreen June 2009: iPhone game innovates with stop motion

Feeling Testy?

The first round of the Kahoots Closed Public Beta is over, and we’re working dilligently to get the next version up online for our testers. We’ll likely extend a fresh invitation to help us test at that point; all beta testers get their names in the credits of the final version of Kahoots, and eternal life in heaven with Jesus. (No guarantees on that one – please consult your holy scriptures for up-to-the-minute information). Keep up with our daily Kahoots progress on our message boards:

Thrill to the Spectacle of: Kahoots Beta Tests Updates

(Team photos were all taken by the super-talented Brendan Lynch, and unceremoniously snaked from his Flickr site. Environment photos come courtesy of Benjamin Rivers, who expertly captured the quirkiness of the Innovation Toronto space. You can see his whole collection here)

TOJam is the premiere game creators’ event in Toronto. A group of local developers – professionals, hobbyists and students – cloister themselves together for a weekend to make games. People work as individuals, as teams, or as floaters. Floaters are hired guns, mostly artists and musicians, who are drafted via sign-up sheets to create title screens, character animations and background tracks for the games. A late sign-up announcement and scheduling conflict with student exams brought the participation down this year, but TOJam 4 still drew ninety game devs for a weekend of full-frontal nerdity.

Teams, Themes and Lucid Dreams

Every year, the organizers choose a theme to help guide and unify the games. This year’s theme was “scale”. Before the jam, i brainstormed a number of uses of the word, and i received some flack from the other jammers when i suggested that “big stuff/little stuff” was the most uncreative deployment of the theme. And then i went ahead and created a big stuff/little stuff game. But i’m a worthless hack, so please don’t ever listen to me.

This year, it seemed like people were really playing fast and loose with the time. The jam space was largely empty for huge pockets of the weekend (most notably Saturday and Sunday AM), and as a result, it seemed that a much larger number of the games didn’t get finished. At the Sunday night show n’ tell, i got around to seeing most of the games. There were a few stand-outs:

Cheeseohol 2: The Actual Game

Team Happy Rainbow Panda Bears couldn’t let go of last year’s “Cheese” theme and created a sequel (read: finished last year’s game), calling it Cheeseohol 2: The Actual Game. You play a block of Swiss cheese scaling a mountain, throwing pick axes at bouncing goats-on-poles. A unique mouse-wheel control had you carefully metering out the number of shots you could fire, requiring you to carefully preserve your ammo for tougher goats. The game has a silhouetted Patapon-inspired look.

Pandemic! You Have Gone Viral

Team Awesomo, comprised largely of snaggle-toothed street vagrants, created Pandemic! You Have Gone Viral. It’s a four-player XNA game where your ammo buzzes around the screen using a flocking algorithm. You run around trying to catch the bird-like bullets to fire them at other players. The feedback was problematic with this one – it didn’t seem like i actually had control over whether the bullets stuck to me or not, and there wasn’t much visual feedback signifying that the characters were taking damage. The real hook with this game was a eye-poppingly gorgeous artwork, displayed on a five million-inch LCD monitor.

Scale Mountain

Team Stinker created a game called Scale Mountain, where you play a mountain climber collecting inexplicably mountain-strewn gems (?) while avoiding such perils as hawks, bears, and spiders. It reminded me of a scene from the Sierra Online adventure game The Black Cauldron, where Taran scales the castle wall on the way to defeat the Horned King. The team included a grappling hook mechanic and multiple levels with different graphics … i think they said five? Wow. The game is very large (i spent five minutes working through level 1), and punishingly difficult! Often, there was a large gem sitting right on top of an enemy. Harsh. The graphics and sound are rough, but Scale Mountain was still one of the most playable, enjoyable games at the jam.

Ass-Smashingly Awesome Ball Game

My absolute favourite game at TOJam 4 is a 2D game where your character is a ball. You click the left button on either side of the ball to roll in that direction, and right-click to jump. The level has a series of ramps and platforms that you have to get the ball through. The real innovation here, and the best use of “scale” i saw at the whole jam, is that you can roll the mouse wheel to scale the level bigger or smaller, but the ball stays the same size. So if there’s a tight gap that your ball can’t fit through, you scale the level up until the opening is wide enough. If your ball reaches a monstrous chasm, just scale the level down and roll over the tiny gap. Awesomazing! This was the only game at the jam that really surprised and delighted me, particularly when i thought i had made it through the whole level – my ball just stopped at a dead-end wall – and the developer said “now zoom in really close”. i spun the mouse wheel, and a complicated network of platforms and ramps grew up all around my ball, a whole level section that had been shrunk down to 1/100th of the size. Amazing!

Mothering

This year, as every year, i have to hand it to the organizers, who pull off this amazing organizational feat purely out of the goodness of their hearts (and to pay off their debt to mafia-connected bookies). The amount of self-sacrifice involved in every TOJam staggers me, whether it’s a toilet that needs plunging, a fuse that needs fixing, or an underslept developer who needs a ride home. At one point, i saw organizer Jimmy McGinley tear open his shirt and suckle a crying baby. The personal care and attention that the organizers provide is one key reason why they can announce an event so late, and still pack the place with ninety people. In my estimation, this was the best game jam evar.

Bloat.

Look for our new game, Bloat., on the site later this week!

Untold Entertainment Inc., the Ontario-based start-up, has been creating online Flash games for a year and a half. Prior to starting the company, Creighton worked a cushy job at a large Canadian media conglomorate, creating web games that sold sugar cereals to increasingly obese children. When we interviewed Ryan Henson Creighton a month ago, the cracks were already starting to show.

“I started this business to find myself, you know?” The video game designer tapped his foot nervously against the secondhand Herman Miller Aeron chair that he purchased from a seller on Craigslist. “But, I mean, if you run out of money, what are you supposed to do then? I see banks and car companies lobbying the government for assistance, saying if they don’t get the money, they’ll go out of business. Is that what the government wants? Do they really want me to go out of business?”

Looking around Untold Entertainment’s Yorkville headquarters, it’s easy to see where Creighton went wrong. High overhead costs, coupled with an apparent penchant for shelled pistachio nuts – the carcasses of which littered the floor of the tiny 110 square foot office – have driven the game company’s profit margins into the red. The insistence of Untold’s clientele to use their own internal artists, many of whom were hired directly from art school or enticed from the street with half-eaten bag lunches, strip Untold Entertainment of control over the games they produce. The result is a portfolio comprised of client-led game designs propped up with lacklustre junior-level artwork. Many of the company’s finished projects are notably absent from their portfolio site.

A Focus on Original Content

When the client worked dried up due to the economic downturn in early 2009, Creighton devised a new strategy. “We’re going to develop original content,” he said with an unsettling flash in his eye. The company’s only original content to date has been comprised of a handful of titles built for the free-to-play online model, where the game developer either releases the product freely without receiving compensation, or scrapes ad revenue leftovers from various online monetization schemes like Kongregate and MochiAds.

Creighton’s trademark ambition quickly materialized as he described his upcoming game. “It’s called Kahoots!” he said wildly, his left eye twitching as he pronounced the “K” in the game’s title. “And it’s all made in clay, see?” At this point, Creighton held up a lump of modelling clay that resembled a folding chair – or a dragon – and continuned, “We’re gonna release it for the PC and the iPhone. And the main character is going to be voiced by this African choir, all talking at once, so it sounds all freaky, you know? Then we’re going to film some explosions and put them in the game in spots where you earn extra points. Cause regular games, they use particle systems, right? But we’re gonna use real explosions, ’cause real explosions are better.”

The increasingly enthusiastic developer went on to describe Kahoots for an additional two hours, explaining the symbolism behind the game characters’ moustaches, and his justification for importing all of his modelling clay from Iceland. When we finally left the tiny office, Creighton was still talking, and apparently didn’t notice we were gone.

Request for a Bail-Out

By April 2009, Creighton’s ambition remained strong, but his funding well had run dry. Somewhere between hiring a famous troupe of New York kickline dancers to record foley sound effects for Kahoots, and starting into a full-scale clay model of the city of London, one of his cheques bounced. It was the first tangible sign that Untold Entertainment was in dire straits.

We caught up with Creighton in front of the Ontario Legislative buildings at Queen’s Park in Toronto, where he had asked us to meet him to cover what he called his “bold gesture”. Within minutes, the frail and defeated mass of Creighton’s body laid shivering on the cold stone steps. A protest sign, scrawled with the slogan “Please give me $3047.62″, sat discarded on the lawn.

No one else seemed to take account of, or even notice, Creighton’s break-down. At one point, an officious-looking man in a camel hair coat strode from the front doors of the building and stepped over Creighton’s body without noticing he was there; when interviewed later, he explained that he had been there applying for a photography permit for his daughter’s wedding on Saturday.

A Social Responsibility

Ryan Henson Creighton’s request for government funding – a sum totalling in the thousands – raises the question of whether or not it is the Canadian government’s responsibility to provide assistance to tiny, arguably insignificant companies, even as it faces pressure from the media and automotive sectors. Despite his request falling on deaf ears, Creighton has resolved to bring the dispute as far as Ottawa, where he’s pledged to bring a box of tissues to carry him through his next daring indictment of the flagging Canadian free market economy.

As the website states, “the audience will be required to interact, and the only goal is excitement.” To that end, i’m planning to punch every audience member in the face.

Come out and see what the fuss is about. Paparazzi alert: i’m liable to show my beav climbing out of a limo.

The Jam is an event where 100 developers crowd into a dodgy warehouse on the edge of town – the kind of place that makes Jokers out of Jack Napiers – to spend one whole weekend creating a game. Participants can work individually or in teams. Folks who stick solely to programming can get help from art or music “floaters”, odd-jobbers who roam the room looking for places to help. It’s not rare for an art floater’s work to appear in half a dozen finished games, which then get featured on the website, so it’s a great place for coders and non-coders alike.

At the end of the weekend, everyone sets up their (hopefully playable) games with paper instructions on how to play, and the participants bounce around the room trying out the various creations. After three days of exhaustion, frustration, and occasional exhileration, it’s amazing what this game-crawl does to energize the crowd. It’s just plain fun, in its purest, most unfettered form.

The Five-Second Countdown to Fun

The game crawl is also an excellent microcosm of the greater games market. The games that are played and enjoyed and talked about the most are those that you can just pick up and understand immediately, and start having fun with in the first few seconds. The games that don’t do so well are the ones with lines and lines of instructions and exposition scrawled on the accompanying sheet, or those with confusing controls. It’s absolutely