The book includes interviews from the developers of these fine titles:

• Canabalt
• Sword and Sworcery EP
• Infinity Blade
• Angry Birds
• Words with Friends
• Plants vs. Zombies

It really is a remarkable collection of stories, and a very current must-read book for you if you’re currently embroiled in, or are considering, iOS development.

Ponycorns started life as an online Flash game, but now enjoys success on mobile platforms. For a lesson on how to port your Flash games to iOS, check out Flash to iOS: A Step-by-Step Tutorial right here at Untold Entertainment.

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 .

Eligibility

In order to apply, you must be a student at an accredited institution that can sign paperwork and sanction your internship and all that fun stuff. (Unfortunately, we’re no longer hiring non-students for internships.)

An ideal candidate will be someone who is awesome. These are qualities we’ve prized in past interns:

• Self-starter. Can you begin a task with minimal teat-suckling?
• Problem solver. Do you like facing an unending string of problems that you need to fix? Are you motivated by checking things off a to-do list?
• Life-long Learner. If you don’t know how to do something, is that an excuse not to do it? Or is that an opportunity to add a new skill to your toolbelt?
• Can-do attitude. How do you respond if you’re asked to do something you don’t particularly want to do?
• Humorist. If you’re looking for a respectable, corporate workplace environment, this ain’t it. Anyone caught wearing a suit will be shot.
• Ox. When faced with impossible odds, do you give up? Or do you roll an impossible-sided die?
• Google Master. Do you know the difference between a question that should be answered by your mentor, and one that can be more easily and quickly answered after a brief query to the electronic compendium of all human knowledge at your very fingertips? You should.

What Can You Do?

Here are some professional capabilities that interest us. (You don’t need to have all of these – this is just a list of individual skillsets for which we have an immediate need):

• Writing. We’re not talking about the Gears of War fan fic you wrote last summer. We’re talking about real, solid technical or creative writing skills, with a fanatical devotion to preserving the Queen’s English. Have you ever been called a “Grammar Nazi”? Come to Papa.
• Programming. Particularly Actionscript 3, but we have an interest in Unity C# or javascript, HTML 5, Haxe, and OBJ-C. (C++/Python/Ruby/Java, not so much.)
• Web Development. CSS, HTML and PHP. We constantly have big needs in this area.
• Art and Animation. Character design, animation, and background/layout, particularly in the classical 2D North American style (think Disney, Warner Bros. and Bluth.) Do you know how to make a moody 3D level with pipes and bricks in Unreal Engine? We don’t care.
• Business Development. Do you like cold-calling, tweaking SEO, posting spammy blog posts under assumed names, writing press releases, building relationships, and monitoring usage statistics? Good, cuz we don’t.
• Photojournalism. Are you handy with a video camera? Can you cut stuff together in Premiere with skill and style? We could use you.
• Defeat Ganon in the original Legend of Zelda with only five hearts. Just kidding. We couldn’t care less if you’re good at playing video games. We’re about making them.

What Will You Be Doing?

• Watering the plants. Plants don’t water themselves. (The plants and i both learned this the hard way.)
• Researching. If i want to know how to do something complicated or obscure, but i can’t be arsed to look it up myself, it falls to you.
• Patching the drywall. There are always little CSS/HTML fixes to be made across our sites. Tinkering is very useful to us.
• Tools Development. There are a number of features of our internal toolset that need building – recent examples include a heat map, and an xml “script stripper”.
• Pretty pictures. If you’re a good artist, be damn sure we have stuff for you to draw.
• Video Developer Diaries. We’d like to make some of these, but we’re afraid that cameras will steal our souls.

How Much Do i Get Paid?

This is an unpaid internship. Interns are compensated with soda pop and coffee (our notorious coffee maker has somehow fixed itself). You may occasionally be taken to lunch, if there are coupons.

This is an opportunity to gain great experience and to put some real game development studio work on your resume, along with the chance to get your name in the credits of a shipped title. Many former interns have remarked that they understand the business of game development and the entrepreneurial side of the industry much better after having worked at Untold Entertainment. Working at a small studio is a far different experience from working at a big triple-A juggernaut. As an additional perk, we offer No-Pants Fridays.

Is It Worth It?

Here’s what some current and former interns have to say about their experience:

Working at Untold Entertainment requires three things: Hard work, a willingness to learn, and HARD WORK. If you have these attributes, Ryan will look out for you. Trust me – in this industry it is good to have a friend like Ryan.

Also, pants required.

- Intern Sina Kashanizadeh, Fall 2011

I learned more about making games at Untold than I ever did at school.

- Intern Cale Bradbury, Academic year 2010-2011

The stuff I learned from Ryan is the stuff I’m currently getting paid for in California. The effort to reward ratio is incredible.

- Intern Mohammed Al-Sahaf, Winter 2011

Want to play games all day? Go home and play. Want to discover the stress, struggle, and ultimate satisfaction of making games for a living? Apply for this internship.

- Intern David S. Gallant, Fall 2011

Working with Ryan Creighton has been eye-opening. If Untold had taught me anything as an intern, it’s open your mind to new creative ideas.

- Intern Chris Aaron Broadfield, Summer 2011

How Do I Apply?

Email info [the curly at sign] untoldentertainment [the little dot thingy] com no later than December 9 2011. Please put way more attention into an interesting email and samples of your work than your resume. Give us a sense of your personality, and why you think you’re a good fit. Cookie-cutter applications with business-suit-wearing cover-letters and resumes describing your evening shift at Shopper’s Drug Mart will be stabbed and burned.

Successful candidates will be contacted for interviews in mid-December.

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!

Untold Entertainment produced A Lotta Dessert, a simple patterning game for preschoolers, for TVOntario’s TVOKids.com site.

The game design document, graphics of Lotta’s house and face, and her voiceover, were provided by TVO. Untold Entertainment produced the remaining assets and created the game based on TVO’s specifications.

UX Jr.

If you’re curious about the conventions of preschool game development, A Lotta Dessert showcases a few tricks:

1. This is a preliterate audience. The only text in the game is the title, and absolutely everything is voiced over.
2. There is no “play” button on the title screen. After a brief countdown, the game automatically begins.
3. Mice are lousy input devices for preschoolers, who often struggle to use them, so the game doesn’t require any drag n’ drop actions. Everything boils down to a single click with generously-sized hotspots. (See Mouse Control for a game we developed to help small children practice using a mouse)
4. Visual patterning is reinforced through sound.
5. The “answer” is entered twice, to confirm comprehension (otherwise, the player could just be clicking around and “winning” coincidentally).
6. Little-to-no chainsaw violence.

Untold Entertainment is an industry leader in preschool game development. Contact us to talk about your upcoming project.

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.

i still stand by my recommendation! Sword & Poker is a fun little toilet game in the spirit of Puzzle Quest and our own upcoming game Spellirium, in that it marries a casual game mechanic with some ideas from core games – in this case, RPGs and their hit points, levels, spells, etc. The mechanic itself isn’t actually poker, but a clever little puzzle game that uses the concept of poker hands for scoring. This game got me through many poops. Try it out, or buy the sequel!

Check out our shrine to classic LucasArts adventure games, our fabulous social media pillows, and the industry’s most unfortunate plantlife in Gamezebo Cribs: Untold Entertainment Edition.

Where It’s At

What the article doesn’t mention is that the Untold offices are situated in a very special building. Untold is directly across the hall from Capybara Games, who recently hosted and teamed up with Craig D. Adams (AKA Superbrothers) to create the iOS hit Sword and Sworcery EP. Untold occasionally shares space with world-traveled indie dev Michael Todd, creator of such arty fare as Broken Brothers and Silent Skies. Two levels up on the sixth floor in the same building is Jon Mak’s Queasy Games. You’ll remember Jon’s Everyday Shooter; Queasy is hard at work on Sound Shapes for the Playstation Vita.

So if you want to wipe out a lot of Toronto indie talent, send your angry anthrax-laced letters to our building. But better yet, if you’d like to be involved in the perfect storm of creative energy swirling around downtown TO, give Untold Entertainment a call to partner with us on your next exciting project.

A very interesting conversation very nearly broke out on Facebook today, when i made the wild claim that our upcoming game, Spellirium, is for the ladies, and that i think “chicks’ll dig it”. The game was designed from the ground up to be female-friendly, in ways i will enumerate shortly. But something was eating at me: recently, when i made that same claim to a colleague, he said “Women will enjoy it, eh? Why? Does it have any romance in it?”

The blood drained from my face a little. We’re still not too late in the game to pivot, but no, Spellirium does not actually have a romantic thread running through it, nor does it have a female lead. i wondered: would these two shortcomings doom it? Would women not be interested in my game because the lead character is a young white male who doesn’t romance it up at any point in the story?

Chick Magnet

First, a brief primer. Spellirium is a graphic adventure game, which means that the gameplay and the writing go hand-in-hand. It’s set in the future, after a cataclysmic event has left civilization buried under a thousand feet of earth. It tells the story of a young apprentice tailor named Todd living a sheltered life in a society where reading and writing have been outlawed, on pain of death. But Todd and the other tailors have a secret: they’re actually Runekeepers, secret curators of an underground library filled with forbidden writing. A short time after the Runekeepers set off on a mission leaving Todd alone, one of them turns up dead. Brother Todd sets out on a quest to find out why.

Spellirium was originally designed to be a casual downloadable game, the kind of title that a portal like Big Fish Games might carry. When we were making a case for the game to our funders, we had to demonstrate that Spellirium would be a hit with a female audience, because Big Fish and their ilk cater primarily to older female customers.

Here are the pro-female elements we felt the game had going for it:

1. It’s story-driven. If we compare games to porn, they say that women prefer story and character development, while men just enjoy visceral close-ups of gnashing genitalia. If Gears of War is analogous to visceral, visual man-porn, something like Spellirium is far more gentle and female-friendly, with a focus on why the pool boy is visiting on that particular day.

   

   Did somebody whose boss just fired her under suspicion of corporate espionage order a pizza?

2. It’s a word game. i’ve actually been warned against admitting this – indeed, Big Fish Games and friends dumped all over Spellirium at Casual Connect two years ago because it’s a word game. Some of the portal reps called it “too cerebral”, and others cautioned that women don’t like to think when they play games – they just want to sit down and zone out (hence 50 different flavours of bubble-popping, jewel-matching and hidden object-finding on those sites).

   But i can’t deny it: Spellirium is all about making words, Scrabble/Boggle-style, to solve puzzles. And my intuition was vindicated when we brought a very early build of the game to the Toronto Comic Arts Festival two years ago; every guy who swung by the booth said “my girlfriend/wife/daughter would really enjoy that”, while every girlfriend/wife/daughter who passed by did a double-take and stopped to check it out. And that’s when it was purely a word game, with no sign of plot or character development in sight.

   

   Women to letter tiles: like moths to a flame.

3. It’s dark fantasy. Fact: women enjoy this genre. They like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal and Pan’s Labyrinth and City of Ember and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and His Dark Materials and the Spiderwick Chronicles and Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and (perhaps unfortunately) Twilight. Women read those huge 10-book-long fantasy chronicles like Dragonriders of Pern. In particular, i think there’s something about dark fantasy that women prefer over straight-up elf-ridden high fantasy. Women are drawn in by stories that have an air of mystery, seduction, evil, or … for lack of a better word, purple.

But It’s a Straight-Up Sausage Party

The two main characters in Spellirium are male. One is a young man. The other is a big blue monster. The third member of the group is a woman – a hard woman they call The Hunter, who dresses in the pelts of the animals she kills and skins. She has a big red scar through her left eye, because i was self-conscious about making her too pretty. She’s self-sufficient and vindictive, and is motivated by revenge. She doesn’t take any crap from the main character. i wrote her this way because i wanted a strong female character who isn’t subdued by the boyish charms of the male lead, and who doesn’t succumb to his wily advances, and who will put a bullet up his nose if he tries to come any closer.

Will women like her? i have no idea. Will they still enjoy the game, even though the two leads are male? No clue. Will they be less interested in Spellirium because there’s no love story? i really don’t know. That’s kind of why i’m writing this article. i want to hear from women who play games. Is any of this stuff important to you?

The only other significant female character is The Mystic, who is an old fortune-teller, which i do realize is the female equivalent of the Magic Negro. Part of the fun of Spellirium is that it breaks the fourth wall on a regular basis; any time i (the author) introduce a stock character, Todd and company are going to call me out on it in the game dialogue.

Indie dev Michael Todd introduced me to the Bechdel Test today while we were discussing this. In order to pass the test, your script has to have:

1. at least two women in it,
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.

As currently scripted, Spellirium fails the Bechdel test at point #2. Women: have i fallen out of your good graces, or is there still a chance that you’ll play this game and others like it?

Word.

Sign up for the Spellirium Newsletter. The newsletter contains new screenshots and juicy game gossip that you won’t find anywhere else. Tuesday is Ladies’ Night.

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.

(Rest assured, all will be revealed in due course.)

One great tip i heard for getting along with people and resolving problems is that people don’t do things for no reason. Almost always, there’s purpose behind our actions, even if it’s a bent purpose. Here, then, is a little glimpse at my ongoing strategy to market Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure on mobile devices.

P’thetic

i named the launch day for the iPad version of ponycorns “Ponycorn P’toosday”. This is an absolutely ridiculous name. It doesn’t really make any sense, and probably sounds stupid to most people. The reason i gave it a frustratingly insipid name is not because i thought the name itself was terribly clever. It’s because i wanted something memorable, and stupid can be memorable. That’s the clever bit.

It’s the same premise behind subtitling Alvin and the Chipmunks 2 “the Squeakquel”. That’s an absolutely retarded word that everyone i know absolutely despises. But it’s memorable. And people repeat it, angrily, while fighting back smiles. It’s detestably dumb. And oddly likable.

So i released the game on the iPad. It took a lot of backflips and crying and asking friends and strangers for help, but it finally launched on Ponycorn P’toosday as planned. i reconfigured the Twitter hashtag to #touchPonycorns, which is still cute and weird, but i may have diluted my message. “Pocket Ponycorns”, keeping with the “P” alliteration, is the move to put the game on the iPhone. Enough people wrote to me during the iPad release claiming they’d like to purchase the game, but gosh-darnit, they don’t have iPads.

Putting ponycorns on the iPhone requires some extra work, because i have to resize all of the game’s graphics down to the smaller format. i have to do a bunch of testing, because the memory profiles of the phones and music players are slimmer than the tablets. And i don’t own an iPhone, which makes testing more difficult. i could buy one, but all of this of course takes time and money – time and money i’m not keen on spending unless i can be assured i’d at least break even on my efforts.

Have Me Committed

i read a famous book last year called Influence by Robert Cialdini … if you’ve read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, you’ve read many of the same case studies Cialdini talks about; the books cover a lot of common ground (although Cialdini predates Gladwell by decades).

In Influence, the author lays out six “weapons of influence” that advertisers, marketers and salespeople use to control us. The book’s conceit is that if we understand these weapons, we’ll have power over them. It always struck me as a spurious excuse to teach these techniques. “i’m going to teach you how to build a bomb, so that if you ever see one on the street, you’ll know how to dismantle it.” Yeah, right.

So being an advertiser/marketer/salesperson in the context of the ponycorns game, i decided to use one of Cialdini’s weapons of influence to ensure i don’t waste any time on an iPhone game that nobody buys. i’ll quote directly from Wikipedia here:

Commitment and Consistency

If people commit, orally or in writing, to an idea or goal, they are more likely to honor that commitment because of establishing that idea or goal as being congruent with their self image. Even if the original incentive or motivation is removed after they have already agreed, they will continue to honor the agreement. For example, in car sales, suddenly raising the price at the last moment works because the buyer has already decided to buy. Cialdini notes Chinese brainwashing on American prisoners of war to rewrite their self image and gain automatic unenforced compliance.

My bright idea was to create a “petition” that people could sign, to convince us to release the ponycorns game on the iPhone and iPod. Really, it’s just a mailing list sign-up form, but i like the connotation that the word “petition” bears. i’ll have people commit to purchasing the iPhone version. Then i’ll know if there’s enough interest. If there IS enough interest, i’ll build the game and send everyone an email. Cialdini’s Commitment and Consistency principle promises that those people will buy the game, having committed. It’s like a small-scale Kickstarter program, which is the digital equivalent of bumming change.

In For a Penny, In For a Ponycorn

How’s it gone so far? Following the initial announcement on Twitter, we’ve had 14 sign-ups. Do the math with me:

14 purchases (best-case scenario, if Cialdini’s claim is bulletproof) @ $0.99 = $13.86
Subtract Apple’s 30% cut: $9.70

Is nine dollars and seventy cents incentive enough to resize all the graphics for the game, do a bunch of testing, and possibly purchase a testing device? No. No it is not.

So! As it stands now, unfortunately we won’t put the game on the iPhone or iPod.

… or i could use another one of Cialdini’s weapons of influence:

Social Proof

People will do things that they see other people are doing. For example, in one experiment, one or more confederates would look up into the sky; bystanders would then look up into the sky to see what they were seeing. At one point this experiment aborted, as so many people were looking up that they stopped traffic.

Rewriting History

(ahem) Holy cow! Our Pocket Ponycorns petition has been SO POPULAR, we’ve had to upgrade our hosting account to keep up with demand! Sign up for our mailing list NOW so that you, along with so many other people, will receive an email on THAT GLORIOUS DAY when Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, beloved of millions, is released for the iPod and iPod touch.

YES! I WANT TO JOIN THE RANKS OF HAPPY iPHONE OWNERS EAGERLY AWAITING THE GAME!
NO! I DON’T WANT TO BE LEFT OUT. TAKE ME TO THE SIGN-UP PAGE NOW!

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:

One Life, No Continues

One of the best things about being a game developer (aside from having a job that’s ALL FUN ALL THE TIME, with NO HARD WORK INVOLVED WHATSOEVER), is that all of my heroes are still alive. If you’re a mathematics fan, most of the biggest names in your movement have been pushing up daisies for centuries; if you’re into philosophy, your guys have been gone for millennia. (But what is death, really?)

We’ve lost a few folks: there’s Gary Gygax (but i was never a big D&D player), and Dan Bunten (but again, i could never figure out how to play my friend’s cracked C64 copy of M.U.L.E. without an instruction manual). Whenever i mention this, my 1337 gaming friends bring up a Japanese designer whose name escapes me … i only really follow Miyamoto, who’s still alive and kicking, with that almost unnerving Peter Pan grin.

Da-Doo Ron Ron

One of my favourite developers is Ron Gilbert, who created Maniac Mansion and The Secret of Monkey Island (as well as The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, which happens to be my favourite game of all time). He went on to develop a number of kids’ games with Humongous Entertainment. That makes us both kids’ games designers, so i feel there’s a certain affinity there. He worked on the first Penny Arcade game and designed DeathSpank with Hothead Games. After leaving Hothead, he eventually fell back in with Tim Schafer, a former LucasArts intern who worked with Ron on the Monkey Island games.

Back at Game Developers’ Conference 2011 a few months ago, i shamelessly geeked out when Ron delivered his Maniac Mansion postmortem, and he agreed to pose for a picture:

What’s more, he even deigned to sign my two original Amiga 500 Monkey Island game boxes from the games i actually played as a kid in the early 90′s. They’re hanging on my office wall right now:

… opposite the gigantic plaque-mounted Monkey Island posters:

It Began, Fittingly, With Piracy

What’s the big deal about Gilbert’s games? As i explained to him, here’s how it went down:

i didn’t have my own computer growing up in the 80′s because we were cash-strapped, and at that time home computers were toys of the idle rich. In one of the few times when i saw him, my father bought me an Atari 2600 for my birthday a few years after the crash, when 2600 shovelware was filling the bins at $1/cartridge (it’s actually not far off the situation in the App Store, actually. History repeats itself.)

i got a lot of play time in at The Twins’ house … that’s where i’d go to fill in the gap between the end of the school day, and the end of my mom’s work day. The Twins had a C64 and a massive treasure trove of over 400 pirated games. i used to love flipping through those big plastic floppies, reading the cryptic names written to the disk labels in the handwriting of multitudes of mysterious people, using a variety of pens.

Me: What’s ‘Whirlinerds’?

Twin #1: (from the other room, where they were playing with G.I. Joes) Oh – it’s this game where you’re a guy with a propeller on his head. It’s really hard.

(flip flip flip flip)

Me: What’s ‘Transformers’?

Twin #2: Sucks.

(flip flip flip flip)

Me: What’s ‘GEOS’?

Twin #2: Educational.

Twin #1: Sucks.

From there, it was just a quick LOAD *.*, 8 (load load load) CTRL+CURSOR UP,CTRL+CURSOR UP,CTRL+CURSOR UP,CTRL+CURSOR UP, LOAD, CURSOR OVER, 8, 1 ; , (load load load load load) (rainbow vomit-coloured pirate screen) (glitch) (load load load load load) (title screen), and i was playing a game!

Twitch games were okay (Whirlinerds was actually pretty difficult), but the games i really took to were the text adventure games. There were a bunch of them in that disk tray. i didn’t get to play any of the best-in-class Infocom titles (The Twins had Leather Goddesses of Phobos, but we weren’t allowed to play it. Here are a few games i came back to time and again:

The schtick was the same with all of these games:

> get shovel

(wait wait wait)

You pick pup the shovel.

> dig hole

(wait wait wait)

(slow-ass graphics refresh)

You dig a hole in the ground. There is treasure here.

> get treasure

(wait wait wait)

I don’t understand “treasure”.

> well, sssssuper.

Enter the Maniacs

i’ll never forget the day The Twins came home from their friend’s house, breathless and sweaty, and recounted the incredible things they’d seen on another C64.

Twin #1: It’s this GAME, and you get to pick like three people …

Twin #2: from a list of TEN …

Twin #1: Yeah, and you have to break into this mad scientist’s house and rescue your girlfriend …

Twin #2: and you get chased out of the house by this nurse with a knife …

Twin #1: … and later you have to call her on the phone and she teaches you how to make a dirty phone call …

Twin #2: … and you have to ring the doorbell and this guy comes down to the front door while you hide in the bushes, and you have to switch to another kid and break into his bedroom …

Twin #1: … and steal his hamster and put it in the microwave …

Twin #2: … and it’s totally …

Both Twins Together … AWESOME!!

It was pretty clear to me that The Twins had been enjoying some hallucinogens at their friends’ place. What they were describing wasn’t even possible in a video game.

Me: So you … so you type out your commands, and all this stuff happens in text descriptions?

Twin #2: NO! It actually happens on the screen. And it’s like …

Twin #1: It’s like animated, and stuff.

Twin #2: It’s like playing a MOVIE.

Me: (after a long, thoughtful pause) … You guys are full of CRAP.

Legacy of the Tentacle

As it turns out, they weren’t full of crap. It was some time later that i actually got a chance to play Maniac Mansion for myself, but since that day, i’ve been enthralled with the graphic adventure genre and the possibilities it pioneered. Now, nearly a quarter century later, i run my own video games studio making games in the same style, using UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), a tool very similar to SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) that ran those wonderful old games.

We just released a game that i made with my 5-year-old daughter called Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. It’s a graphic adventure game that went viral, and eventually found its way to Ron Gilbert, who talked it up on Twitter:

Friends … dear readers, you have to understand … i’ve never cried tears of joy in my LIFE – not even on the day that Cassie herself was born – but when i saw that tweet by Ron, my living game dev hero, my face leaked. If Cassie’s ponycorns day in kindergarten was the best moment for her in all of this, Ron’s shout-out has been the absolute highlight for me.

i wasn’t the only one at Ron Gilbert’s GDC Maniac Mansion postmortem to credit him with my career in the games industry. He heard the same story numerous times that day, and whenever someone would tell him “you’re the reason i got into the video games industry!” his response was always the same: “i’m sorry.” Don’t be sorry, Ron. It’s largely because of you that i’m here to begin with, making the things i make, and striving for the things i strive for.

i touched Ron Gilbert, and he touched me.

i mean, i don’t want to kiss the guy on the mouth or anything. i just wanted to say thanks.

Visualization FTW

Have you ever imagined how a scene in your life would play out, and when you reached that moment, everything went exactly as you envisioned it, as if you and everyone around you were following a script?

When i originally had the idea to work on a TOJam game with my daughter, i knew the ultimate pay-off would be the day she walked into her kindergarten class with our Blackberry Playbook, and showed the game off to the other kids. Short of “Daddy and i built a jetpack”, it’s probably one of the coolest show n’ tell sessions ever.

In the days after TOJam and all the fun Cassie and i had there, she would excitedly tell her classmates about the experience. True to form, her fellow five-year-olds actually started mocking her, saying “TOJam isn’t REAL. You’re making it up!” They even doubted the existence of “The Boss”, TOJam co-founder Jim McGinley, who took on a Santa Claus-like mystique following the jam.

Eat THIS, Five-Year-Olds

All this doubt floating around at school, and Cassie’s Snuffleupagesque insistence that it really did happen, paved the way for a truly magical show n’ tell session today in her kindergarten class. There we were, just as i’d pictured it, showing the Playbook version to a formerly disbelieving group of kids as they sat, spellbound, on the storytime carpet.

Wit a grown-up telling the class all about it, there was no way the little TOJam-deniers could object. We told them all about how you get to stay up way past your bedtime there – even overnight – and that lots of people brought pillows and slept on the floor. We told them about the kitchen full of candy, where you could grab as much as you wanted and still go back for more. Cassie regaled them with the tale of how she ate two and a half bagels, and they made her fart, so i told her to stand in the designated “farting corner” to keep our work area bearable. (This is a story she gleefully repeated this evening when we were interviewed by BulletProof Radio.)

The kids watched, transfixed, as Cassie showed them how to collect the first two ponycorns. We left it on a cliffhanger, but i wrote a little note that will go into each student’s Wednesday envelope that tells their parents how they can access the game to play the rest of it with their children. i also wrote that if the parents were interested in making games with their children, they could check out the fabulous Scratch.

Games for Change

To wrap it up, we did a “question” period. The questions were “Um, Cassie, i like the green ponycorn,” and “i like the colour purple that you used in your rainbows.” Then Cassie showed the children the plush ponycorns that her mom made for her, and we gave each of the students a little ponycorn button.

i really, truly hope that this will spark a desire in the kids and their parents to get more involved in technology, an area which is tragically stagnant in elementary-level education due to the age of the teachers and a lack of funding. This is the same school where i’m working with the principal to offer Scratch instruction to the grade three class, which may yet become a lunchtime program that all of the students can enjoy.

The ponycorn revolution is turning out to be more than just the story of a little girl making a game … i’d like it to be the story of kids, everywhere, using technology to create – not just to consume.

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.

Seriously, if you want to attend TOJam and you haven’t signed up yet, i don’t know why you’re over here reading this crummy blog. Space is limited. Go sign up now. Like, right now. i’ll wait.

Party of One

This’ll be the first TOJam that i haven’t done all by my lonesome. After creating Two By Two, Here Be Dragons, Bloat., and Heads single-handedly, i’ve finally roped someone into spending an entire weekend with me in a room full of sweaty nerds building video games. And better than that, she’s a girl. How did i do it?

i’m her legal guardian.

This year, i’m teaming up with my five-year-old daughter Cassandra to create a game called Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure, which is a magical adventure game featuring ponycorns. (At this point, i usually have to stop and explain to people what a “ponycorn” is, which dismays me … a ponycorn, clearly, is a single-horned pony – a pony/unicorn. A ponycorn. You see? Was that so difficult?)

Cassie, who is a great little artist, will be drawing the game’s pictures in crayon, and i’ll be scanning them in and trying to shoehorn them into a sensible game experience. Because the handicap is so high on this one, i won’t be building the whole thing from scratch. i didn’t approach my first TOJam this way … i was determined to build Two By Two from “scratch”, starting with nothing and using Flash to build the game from the ground up.

Having proven that i can do it, over the years i’ve grown less and less dogmatic about TOJam. For last year’s game, Heads, i used UGAGS (the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System), as a sort of proof that the time and money we spent building the engine wasn’t a total waste. (It wasn’t! Heads was our very first release on the Blackberry Playbook, and we’ve gone on to use UGAGS in other projects). When i got thinking about it, even using Flash is a bit of a cheat. i didn’t write that software, and it does a lot of heavy graphics lifting for me. i also didn’t build the computer, or smelt the metals used in its creation. There’s only so much “scratch” that you can start from.

So this year, Cassie and i will be using the Citrus Engine to make our ponycorn-themed puzzle platformer game. i’m not even starting from scratch with the Citrus Engine – i’ll be re-skinning an existing game that i completed for a client. i’ll even be using some artwork that Cassie already drew months ago, because it’s adorable. (“What’s that, honey? An alien? A slug? A jelly bean?” “No – it’s you and me and Mommy.”) As is required for any weekend game jam, we’re keeping our ambitions reined way in; if we come out the other side of this thing with a title screen and one functional level, i’ll be happy.

i’ve also got Cassie slated to do some voice acting for the game, which will toally rock. Unless someone’s planning to one-up her, Cass will be the youngest developer ever to attend and work on a game at TOJam.

And i’ll be the sexiest elf in the room.

Over the years, YouTube has developed a number of tropes: cat/dog/hamster on a piano/skateboard/hot tin roof, young girl talking about herself, fan-made movie trailer, dude getting hoofed in the gonads, and on and on. One of the most pervasive of these is the song cover.

i have spent hours on YouTube looking up covers of songs i enjoy. This was much better sport before YouTube removed the star ratings from their videos – it was easier to key into the good performers, and to only investigate the 1-star folks when you wanted a good wince.

My Fiverr adventures turned up a girl named Christina (AKA Tinatural/ChristBaby124) who vowed that she would sing any song i wanted, videotape her performance, and upload it to her own YouTube account with a shout-out to my site for, of course, five bucks.

One of the things that improves your site ranking is a stream of high-quality links pouring in from “respected” sites. Since YouTube is owned by Google, and i’m trying to improve the Google siterank of ZombieGameWorld, i figured Christina’s gig was a no-brainer.

Standing in the Shadows of Fauxtown

But what song would i have her sing? i could go with “Re: Your Brains” by Jonathan Coulton. But no – this girl clearly wanted to sing soul and R&B. i couldn’t waste her on Coulton’s novelty nerd folk.

i racked my brain trying to come up with a Motown song about zombies. “My Girl”? Isn’t that about a guy who gets raised from the dead, and … no. No, it’s not. “I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)”? Isn’t that about two lovers who have to hole themselves up in an abandoned farmhouse, and … er … no. i’ve got that one wrong too.

If i wanted to go with a soulful song, i’d have to either write it myself, or change the lyrics of an existing song. Here’s what i came up with:

True to form for Fiverr folks, Christina delivered:

i took her rough cut and cleaned it up a bit. i synced the music under her voice, chopped it short enough to get the point across without letting the video overstay its welcome, and tacked on the tagline. Then i animated the “follow the bouncing brain” sequence to help hold the viewers’ attention. Here’s a link to the original if you’re interested.

For five dollars, i’m happy with it. i think it’s got juuust the right amount of “wtf sauce” drizzled on it. Since the Isley Brothers song isn’t very well known (i’ve discovered), it comes off as though this girl just decided to sing a funk song about zombies. And why not?

With this video, the ZombieGameWorld library slowly grows. The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget slowly dwindles:

Original investment: $100

Spent:

* ZombieGameWorld tagline voiceover – $5
* Show Us Yer Bewbz! – $5
* Zombie Funk – $5

Remaining: $85

And Now For Something Completely Different

As the old proverb goes, man cannot live by video testimonials alone. i purchased one non-video gig on Fiverr that you’re gonna have to see to believe … and that the people of New Jersey, Delaware and Pennsylvania have, with any luck, already seen!

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.

ZombieGameWorld.com is the newest portal in Untold Entertainment’s growing Game World Network, a group of sites packed with free-to-play web games catering to niche audiences. The key difference between ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com is quality: WordGameWorld.com is a curated site, where we hand-pick only the best or most enjoyable word games available online.

But we’ll throw any old piece of trash on ZombieGameWorld.com. Our reasoning is that zombie fans historically have a lower quality bar than the rest of us. With a few notable exceptions, their favourite movies and books are largely low-budget schlocky affairs where concept trumps execution. An audience accustomed to consuming entertainment that’s a little rough around the edges may be interested in the more … strained attempts of amateur game developers trying to cobble together a zombie game. The Featured section of the site highlights the rare online zombie games that are good-looking and great fun to play.

All new game content is cross-posted to the ZombieGameWorld.com Facebook fan page, as well as the ZombieGameWorld Twitter feed. The Twitter feed adds zombie-related news that gets cross-posted back to the main site.

Future plans for the site include community-based game-on-game elimination battles, badges, and possibly even an online loyalty system. The current model is advertising rev share through MochiAds and Google Adsense. Our immediate business goal is to earn enough ad revenue to cover hosting – both ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com are currently operating at a loss.

If you know zombie fans, or you have a GREAT idea for how we can promote the site without spending any money or digging up any corpses, i’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment and tell me if you think ZombieGameWorld.com has any potential, or if we’re just not using our braaaaaains.

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!

Of course, the cover is still a work in progress. i’ve made a few suggestions to the publisher of what i’d like to see. For example, here’s a mock-up of the cover with a cat singing karaoke:

i’ve written a FAQ for the book. At last, all your burning questions will be answered:

What is Unity 3D?

Unity 3D is a game engine that’s been around for only a few years, but is rapidly gaining steam. It’s a tool that enables you to create your own 3D (or, with effort, 2D) games. You can deploy your games to the browser. That’s right: after a quick ~3MB plugin download, people can play your full 3D game right inside the browser, without having to download and install an .exe. If you want people to visit your portfolio site and play your games instantly, Unity 3D is the tool for you.

Can I Only Deploy to the Web?

No – the main Unity engine allows you to create standalone game files that will run on PC and Mac. If you purchase additional licenses, you can target the iPhone/iPod/iPad and WiiWare. Upcoming support has been announced for Android and Xbox Live Arcade (but keep in mind that you’ll still have to be a developer in good standing with Nintendo or Microsoft to develop for their consoles – it’s not a path you’ll likely take if you’re a hobbyist.)

How Much Does Unity Cost?

There are two versions of the core engine. Unity is free, while Unity Pro costs. Unity lacks a few features of Unity Pro, most notably real-time shadows and video playback support. (note: this lack of features is definitely not something that would get a beginner in much of a twist.) Games created with Unity are prefaced with a Unity-branded splash screen. You can check out a Unity license comparison grid here.

Beyond those restrictions, you’re free to make as many games as you like with the free version of Unity without paying a single cent to the engine authors. This is in contrast to UDK (Unreal Development Kit), Unity’s main competitor, which starts clawing back cash at (comparitively) alarming rates if you sell a certain number of copies.

I like Flash. Will I Like Unity?

Oh, yes! There are many similarities between the two programs. The biggest difference is that Flash is a content creation tool that people manhandle to the point where you can make games with it, while Unity 3D is a dedicated game engine. That means that it includes a lot of game systems right out of the box: physics, collision detection, 3D rendering and particle systems, to name a few.

Check out our Five Common AS3 to UnityScript Translations article in our Unity Nuub section.

What’s in the Book?

Unity 3D Game Development by Example contains lessons, code and art assets to build four very simple games in the engine: a keep-up game, a catch game, a memory game and a space shooter. These lessons are written in very plain language with lots of analogies and plenty of pictures, so that readers who have never coded or used a game engine in their lives will be able to get these projects off the ground. Certain elements, like the three countdown clocks in Chapter 7, are presented as standalone pieces that you can integrate into your games as you like. The book teaches you how to build standard game bits – title screens, buttons, timers, collision scripts, sound effects triggers, and endgame scenarios – that you can remix into your own projects.

Is This Book Appropriate to Use as a Text Book for my College or High School Game Design Program?

Absolutely. Please contact Packt Publishing for volume sales.

Is It Available As an e-Book?

Yes.

I Enjoy Murdering Trees. Is It Available as a Book Book?

Yes.

What Language is the Book Written In?

English, currently. All code examples are in javascript. Unity supports three different languages: javascript, C# and BOO. i chose javascript for the book because most of the online examples and tutorials i’ve come across are in javascript. It’s probably the best choice for a beginner.

What’s the Difference Between This Book and Unity Game Development Essentials by Will Goldstone?

Will’s also written a great beginner book – the first Unity 3D book on the market – that you should definitely check out. Will’s book contains one large open-world project with a number of smaller activities inside of it. My feeling was that open-world games open a whole can of worms that could potentially overwhelm someone new to Unity (what happens when you walk out into the water? What if you get stuck inside a volcano?). My focus was on keeping things simple and manageable, so that you can start with a very controlled and fully-functional project, and ramp up from there as your skills increase.

What’s the Difference Between This Book and an Riding Down an Exhilharating Waterslide on the Back of a Unicorn?

Not much.

Preface and Chapter Listing

By request, here is an excerpt from the book’s Preface:

“Game Developer” has rapidly replaced “firetruck” as the number one thing that kids want to be when they grow up. Gone are the days when aspiring developers needed a university education, a stack of punch cards, and a room-sized computer to program a simple game. With digital distribution and the availability of inexpensive (or free) games development tools like Unity 3D, the democratization of game development is well underway.

But, just as becoming a firetruck is fraught with perils, so too is game development. Too often, aspiring developers underestimate the sheer enormity of the multidisciplinary task ahead of them. They bite off far more than they can chew, and eventually drift away from their game development dreams to become lawyers or dental hygienists. It’s tragic. This book bridges the gap between “I wanna make games!” and “I just made a bunch of games!” by focusing on small, simple projects that you can complete before you reach the bottom of a bag of corn chips.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, That’s One Fancy Hammer!, introduces you to Unity 3D—an amazing game engine that enables you to create games and deploy them to a number of different devices, including (at the time of writing) the Web, PCs, iOS platforms, and WiiWare, with modules for Android and Xbox Live Arcade deployment in the works. You’ll play a number of browser-based Unity 3D games to get a sense of what the engine can handle, from a massively-multiplayer online game all the way down to a simple kart racer. You’ll download and install your own copy of Unity 3D, and mess around with the beautiful Island Demo that ships with the product.

Chapter 2, Let’s Start with the Sky, explores the difference between a game’s skin and its mechanic. Using examples from video game history, including Worms, Mario Tennis, and Scorched Earth, we’ll uncover the small, singular piece of joy upon which more complicated and impressive games are based. By concentrating on the building blocks of video games, we’ll learn how to distil an unwieldy behemoth of a game concept down to a manageable starter project.

Chapter 3, Ticker Taker, puts you in the pilot seat of your first Unity 3D game project. We’ll explore the Unity environment and learn how to create and place primitives, add Components like physic materials and rigidbodies, and make a ball bounce on a paddle using Unity’s built-in physics engine without ever breaking a sweat.

Chapter 4, Code Comfort, continues the keep-up game project by gently introducing scripting. Just by writing a few simple, thoroughly-explained lines of code, you can make the paddle follow the mouse around the screen to add some interactivity to the game. This chapter includes a crash course in game scripting that will renew your excitement for programming where high school computer classes may have failed you.

Chapter 5, Game#2: Robot Repair, introduces an often-overlooked aspect of game development: “front-of-house” User Interface design—the buttons, logos, screens, dials, bars, and sliders that sit in front of your game—is a complete discipline unto itself. Unity 3D includes a very meaty Graphical User Interface system that allows you to create controls and fiddly bits to usher your players through your game. We’ll explore this system, and start building a complete two-dimensional game with it! By the end of this chapter, you’ll be halfway to completing Robot Repair, a colorful matching game with a twist.

Chapter 6, Game#2: Robot Repair Part 2, picks up where the last chapter left off. We’ll add interactivity to our GUI-based game, and add important tools to our game development tool belt, including drawing random numbers and limiting player control. When you’re finished with this chapter, you’ll have a completely playable game using only the Unity GUI system, and you’ll have enough initial knowledge to explore the system yourself to create new control schemes for your games.

Chapter 7, Don’t be a Clock Blocker, is a standalone chapter that shows you how to build three different game clocks: a number-based clock, a depleting bar clock, and a cool pie wedge clock, all of which use the same underlying code. You can then add one of these clocks to any of the game projects in this book, or reuse the code in a game of your own.

Chapter 8, Ticker Taker, revisits the keep-up game from earlier chapters and replaces the simple primitives with 3D models. You’ll learn how to create materials and apply them to models that you import from external art packages. You’ll also learn how to detect collisions between Game Objects, and how to print score results to the screen. By the end of this chapter, you’ll be well on your way to building Ticker Taker—a game where you bounce a still-beating human heart on a hospital dinner tray in a mad dash for the transplant ward!

Chapter 9, Game#3: The Break-Up is a wild ride through Unity’s built-in particle system that enables you to create effects like smoke, fire, water, explosions, and magic. We’ll learn how to add sparks and explosions to a 3D bomb model, and how to use scripting to play and stop animations on a 3D character. You’ll need to know this stuff to complete The Break-Up—a catch game that has you grabbing falling beer steins and dodging explosives tossed out the window by your jilted girlfriend.

Chapter 10, Game#3: The Break-Up Part 2, completes The Break-Up game from the previous chapter. You’ll learn how to reuse scripts on multiple different Game Objects, and how to build Prefabs, which enable you to modify a whole army of objects with a single click. You’ll also learn to add sound effects to your games for a much more engaging experience.

Chapter 11, Game #4: Shoot the Moon, fulfills the promise of Chapter 2 by taking you through a re-skin exercise on The Break-Up. By swapping out a few models, changing the background, and adding a shooting mechanic, you’ll turn a game about catching beer steins on terra firma into an action-packed space shooter! In this chapter, you’ll learn how to set up a two-camera composite shot, how to use code to animate Game Objects, and how to re-jig your code to save time and effort.

Chapter 12, Action, takes you triumphantly back to Ticker Taker for the coup de grace: a bouncing camera rig built with Unity’s built-in animation system that flies through a model of a hospital interior. By using the two-camera composite from The Break-Up, you’ll create the illusion that the player is actually running through the hospital bouncing a heart on a tin tray. The chapter ends with a refresher on bundling your project and deploying it to the Web so that your millions of adoring fans can finally experience your masterpiece.

What you need for this book

You’ll need to be in possession of a sturdy hat, a desk chair equipped with a seatbelt, and an array of delicious snack foods that won’t get these pages all cheesy (if you’re reading the e-book version, you’re all set). Early chapters walk you through downloading and installing Unity 3D (http://unity3d.com/unity/download/). A list of resources and links to additional software can be found in the appendix.

Who this book is for

If you’ve ever wanted to develop games, but have never felt “smart” enough to deal with complex programming, this book is for you. It’s also a great kickstart for developers coming from other tools like Flash, Unreal Engine, and Game Maker Pro.

What’s Next?

Got any more questions? Drop me a line in the comments section and i’ll answer them here.

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!

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!

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

Category Exclusivity

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

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

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

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

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

Idiocracy

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

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

Luna-cy

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

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

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

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

*** spoilers ***

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

And here’s just the backstory to Spellirium:

*** no spoilers ***

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

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

What Sort of Gamer Plays Spellirium?

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

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

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

Beer Covers a Multitude of Sins

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

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

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

   

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

   

   

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

   

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

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

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

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

Word.

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This was my second time at the conference, and like most repeat visits to places, the show lost a lot of its lustre for me. i’m just going to offer my Monet-like, impressionistic view of the show without going into gory detail like i usually do, because you’re very busy and you have awesome things to do.

Hive Mind

Casual Connect is a conference of singularity. The show itself hosts mostly casual game industry companies – these are the folks who pioneered the “pay $20, download a match-3 desktop game” model in the early aughts. They were essentially riffing on the shareware model, where they’d offer a free time- or feature-limited trial, and the customer would pay to unlock the full experience. Companies like Big Fish Games, Pogo, and GameHouse/Real Networks became content aggregators, the game-centric equivalents of TUCOWS and Download.com, and they grew massive audiences of mostly soccer moms who lapped up games and genres that are largely derided by “real” gamers. These were games like Match-3 (Bejewelled), HOGs/Hidden Object Games (Mystery Case Files) and other light, friendly and very dumbed-down puzzle games engineered to have wide appeal to the lowest common denominator of players.

i say the show is singular, because the casual games industry really gets on these kicks. Once the industry is riding a wave, it’s all you hear about. Five years ago at GDC, it was the casual downloadable model that i just mentioned. Last year, everyone was nuts about social games on Facebook. It’s all i heard.

This year was interesting. The conference had one common focus: lack of focus.

Agreeing to Disagree

The buzz this year, even more than last year when social was exploding, was that the casual downloadable payment model is either dead or dying, depending on who you talk to. Companies like Big Fish Games, who made their millions on that model, naturally begged to differ. They attempted to show that the model was actually growing by 20-30% every year. In one talk, Big Fish’s Sean Clark interestingly turned it back around on social, reminding everyone that in there was a massive disparity between the money Zynga was raking in, and the money that the other 9 companies in the top 10 were earning … and that once you leave the top 10, the drop-off is precipitous. Big Fish’s corporate line is now to call social a “red herring”, or as two Big Fish employees repeated to me, a “distraction”.

That’s actually how i’ve long felt about social. You hear these fantastic success stories about the space, but you really only hear them about three or four companies. i don’t run one of those companies. My best strategy there is to release something on Facebook, trump myself up and hope to get bought by Playdom or some other social company. That’s not what i want out of this life. Very early in the show, i had a brief chat with Erik Bethke, whose company was bought by Zynga. i’ve heard Erik talk about his game GoPets for years at GDC and elsewhere, and i found it really sad to see him swallowed up by Zynga, and to have his game shut down. When i expressed that sentiment to a few folks at the conference, they said “it must have been worth the money.” i remain conflicted about it.

The gatekeeper issue is the single largest factor keeping me from charging into Facebook game development. Just before production stalled on Interrupting Cow Trivia a few months ago, we were working on adding Facebook Connect integration to the game. Not long afterward, Facebook yanked the feature entirely. And enough articles have been written on the 30% drop in traffic social games receive in what the Casual Connect crowd dubs the “post-viral era”, after Facebook changed its policies around how game devs can tap into the graph to spam the users about their games. Very shortly, we expect Facebook to cut out all external payment providers and force devs to use Facebook credits. i run a really small shop, and simply lack the money and time to constantly tune my games according to the whims of a gatekeeper.

Robotic Game Design

Beyond downloads vs social, the other big argument going on this year was data-driven design vs what i’ll call “organic” design. If you can coin a better term, please let me know. Data-driven design is like flying a plane by the dials. You release something half-baked to the audience, load it up with tracking hooks, and build out the rest of the game using heavy A/B testing to figure out what they players are interested in.

Organic game design is old-school. You come up with an idea for a game that you think people would like to play. Then you build that game and hope for the best.

Nowhere was this issue laid bare more than at the six-person panel i attended on day two, which was stacked with head honchos from Sandlot Games, Playrix, Large Animal, HipSoft, Last Day of Work and Shockwave/MTV. The panel was called “Taking Your Games to the Next Level: Investing In Your IP”, but it should have been called “Sassy bitch slap-fight”. i like a contentious panel discussion, and this one didn’t disappoint.

The thread running through the talk, punctuated by the terse exchanges between George Donovan of Gogii Games and Last Day of Work’s Arthur Humphrey, was this data-driven vs organic design debate. George is all about spending as little money as possible to develop games that ride the wave of whatever his metrics tell him is most popular on the casual games portals. Arthur is about developing games passionately, and sinking a lot of money into them to make them the best experiences possible.

i assume both approaches have merit, because both of these girls remain in business. It won’t surprise you to know that i side with folks like Arthur on this debate. i make video games because i like video games. i don’t want to fly by the dials and develop dramatically dumbed-down experiences to please Midwest soccer moms desperate for an escape, for whom casual games have become a substitute for Harlequin Romance paperbacks. No thanks. Design-by-data has made a lot of money for a lot of people, but it’s also ruined a lot of stuff (read up on the test audience that demanded a happy ending for Little Shop of Horrors. Why i oughta …).

Call me a terrible, irresponsible bidnessman, but i’m led by my passion. i would much rather create build games by my gut, intuition, and love of the medium, hoping that i find that perfect mix of creative ingenuity and luck, than to deliver rote me-too experiences according to what the top ten charts told me was popular a month ago. If i wanted to do that, there are plenty of service jobs that demand far less time and mental energy from me.

Buy Our Crap

i may as well raise this post to full-fledged rant status by calling out the (many) speakers who used their sessions solely to promote their companies (Joel Breton of Addictinggames, i’m looking at you). Google ran a Trojan horse session where they roped everyone in ostensibly to talk about their upcoming Google Chrome Marketplace, and used scant information on that to house a long-winded ad for HTML5.

This is starting to annoy me far more than speakers who leave the mouse cursor in the middle of a video during a presentation. i don’t spend thousands of dollars and fly across the continent to attend hour-long commercials for your products. Put in a quick plug, point me to the brochures at the back of the room, and then tell me something useful. Or shut up.

In Summary

So there it is: Casual Connect Seattle left me with the impression that the chinks in the industry’s armour are showing up all over the place. Confusion, conflict and uncertainty reign. It’s an industry dominated by business types paying passing lip service to the creative work that fuels the money flow, and whatever scant creativity does exist is being eroded by a hit-driven, top 10 sales chart mentality.

And then we die.

Spellirium has two main modes: the lightning-quick Blitz Mode, where you try to rack up mad pointz with a 3-minute time limit, and Story Mode, where we’re putting the bulk of our efforts. i thought i’d take today to talk about our storytelling technique in the game.

We have a BIG story to tell in Spellirium – so big that it’s becoming a real creative challenge to convey it within our budget. Here’s a list of common storytelling techniques in video games. i’ll tell you which ones we’ve settled on for Spellirium and why.

In order of el crappo to awesomazing, they are:

1. Ugly-Ass Block of Text

Visit any free-to-play Flash game portal and you’ll see this one in full effect: just an omnisciently-written big ugly block of copy that no one’s ever gonna read (much like this blog post). If you really want to punish your players, you’ll drag this on for multiple pages. This is the least expensive way to tell a story in your game. Spend a few bucks and spruce it up by making it crawl up the screen a la Star Wars, and/or by adding some voice over.

2. Comic Book Stills

Tell your story in comic book-style panels. You can add some animated touches, or pan the camera around to keep things interesting. Again, voice over might really spruce this one up.

3. 90′s-Style RPG Dialogues

Throw all your dialogue and exposition in a little blue text box at the bottom of the screen. Add the speaking character’s name and a colon so that the player knows who’s saying what. For authenticity, make the text spell itself into the box letter by letter. If you do this, for the love of all that is holy, add a mouse click or space bar event to speed things up.

4. Aughts-Style RPG Dialogues

The 90′s style dialogues evolved to depict static close-up character artwork instead of names and colons to indicate the speaker. Most often, these dialogues slide in from the left and right edges of the screen. With a slightly higher-budget game, multiple static close-ups are drawn in case the character needs to show emotion. i have never seen this technique add lip flap (randomly animated mouth charts) to make it look as though the character was speaking. This would add a whole lot more visual interest and personality to the technique, without a very large cost. Slide-in lip-flapping dialogues have been on my radar for Spellirium for a while, but they’re still too ghetto for my taste, and i hope we don’t have to resort to using them.

5. Graphic Adventure Style

This method requires you to build animated puppets of your characters. You tell the characters’ mouth charts to randomly cycle as they “speak”, and it helps to give the heads a little random tilting to add personality. Copy is displayed at the top of the screen, and each character gets his or her own colour to help the player sort out who’s speaking, but it’s not crucial. Adding voice over clears up that mystery, of course. To use this technique efficiently, you have to build a scripting system to make your puppets walk around, play discrete animations, and face different directions.

6. Full-On Animated Cutscenes

The pinnacle of straight-up non-interactive storytelling is the canned cutscene, which is essentially just a video you play between the interactive parts of your game. We’ve been working on a few of these, but the process is very expensive and time-consuming. Here’s the process:

1. Write the script
2. Draw some storyboards
3. Cut a leica reel together using the storyboard frames (a leica reel is where you play the static frames in sequence with rough timing)
4. Record scratch (temporary) voice over and apply it to the leica
5. Draw and animate on top of the static shots, and lip-sync all the mouth charts
6. Add the backgrounds
7. Re-record the script with the pro voice actors
8. Integrate the final audio and adjust the lip sync and shot timing

Yikes, for real. It was clear from the get-go that we wouldn’t be able to tell our entire story this way, and it became even more clear as we progressed through development. We’re still aiming to complete a few key scenes using this full-blown cinema-style technique, and they’re looking great so far! But in the interest in actually completing the game, we’ve fallen back to the graphic adventure-style technique of storytelling.

The Verdict: Adventure-Style Storytelling FTFW

This makes a lot of sense for the game, because you bounce around between Travel Mode and Challenges/Battles. In Travel Mode, you click to move your characters around the screen, traveling from location to location and clicking on points of interest, much like you do in a graphic adventure. It made perfect sense, then, to spend the last few weeks building a scripting system so that we could control the in-game puppets to make them walk around and talk to each other.

Will we have to fall back further to even more efficient (but additionally crappy) forms of storytelling? It’s possible … it all depends on how quickly we can bang out scenes using our wonderful new scripting system. i have a lot of faith that we can effectively convey most of the game’s scripted scenes this way, and that you’ll really enjoy them.

Some of you may be thinking “why don’t they just cut down the story?” Because we’re billing Spellirium as an word puzzle/adventure game hybrid, we want to make sure that the “adventure game” aspect gets its full due. When Spellirium launches, you’ll be treated to a game with a rich, exciting and well-told story, with lots of innovative tricky word puzzly fun. Prepare for a good time, and tell your friends by clicking the “Retweet” button at the top of this post, or with our Share and Enjoy social media toolbar beneath this post. Thanks so much for your help in getting the word out!

Word.

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i have cooked up two monetization plans for this magical mystery game – two separate versions of the product that i am considering releasing simultaneously, in an effort to maximize moneyification, which is absolutely not a real word.

Here they are:

The game has 50 levels. In both options, the player gets to play the first five levels for free. That’s where the two plans diverge.

Option 1

You pay 99 cents to access the remaining forty-five levels. The game includes a shop where you buy items that essentially serve as cheats. Buying these items is optional, and you will only need them if you kind of stink at the game. These items will be sold via microtransactions. More powerful items will cost more money. They are single-use consumable, which means they disappear after one use. Prices range perhaps between 10-50 cents.

Option 2

You pay five whole dollars to buy the remaining forty-five levels outright. All purchases from the shop are made with the currency you earn in-game, so they are “free”.

Yes, there are lots of other ways we could do this. Conspicuously missing is Option Greedy, where we charge five bucks AND charge for items. There’s also Option Risky, where we don’t charge for the game at all, and hope to make it up on virtual item sales alone. Finally, there’s Option Stupid, where we don’t charge for anything and keep our fingers crossed that Mochi Ads will really start paying off in a few decades.

So i’ll put it to you! If i release these two versions of the game simultaneously, which do you think will perform better? Of course, if you think this is a terrible plan, please speak up in the Comments section.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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

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

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

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

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

i’m Also On a Boat

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

River Jam

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

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

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

TOJam, you may know, is the Toronto Indie Game Jam, where sweaty nerds spend a weekend building games. The fifth anniversary of the event was my fourth time attending. If i could go back in time, i’d definitely attend the first one. i’d also give Hitler a purple nurple.

A month or so after TOJam, the organizers put together a public exhibition of the games called the TOJam Arcade. The game creators can use that time to fix whatever didn’t work by the end of the original weekend (which is usually everything.)

Beer.

This year’s arcade was held last Saturday night at the Imperial Pub near Yonge and Dundas Square. We succeeded in putting out the older barflies, who were pissed at not being able to watch their horse races, and the inebriated college crowd, who came precariously close to sloshing house draft on the data projectors.

Prizes.

At the end of the evening, they held a raffle with prizes comped by Big Blue Bubble, and some guy named Andy. They called my ticket number, and i was stunned to find i’d won the big prize of the evening – an Xbox 360 Elite bundle with Halo ODST, Forza 3, and a copy of Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia. It’s been over a decade since i’ve won something in a raffle, so it was a nice surprise. Thanks, Big Blue Bubble!

Soon after, they announced the People’s Choice Awards. Our game Heads was voted “Best Use of Theme”. The TOJam 5 theme was “missing”, and Heads is about a guy who wakes up to find that he’s literally lost his head. It was a really nice and unexpected win, but i think some other teams came up with far more subtle and clever uses of the theme. (Don’t get me wrong, though – i’m not complaining!)

After struggling to balance the Xbox home on my bike through rain-slicked streets, i went to lock up in the bike room and found a ten dollar bill on the floor. True. That actually happened. It all made me feel bad for kicking that kitten in the face earlier in the day.

Other Non-Me Winners

The top three Peoples Choice games included Nom Nom Nom Nom (a Hungry Hungry Hippos clone with three cats and a goat), MonoClimb, the black-and-white co-operative platformer by prize-donating Andy and friends (i mentioned it in my last TOJam article), and Last Hadron Collider, a two-player simultaneous obstacle race with randomly-generated levels and great-looking character sprites. You’ll be able to play all these games and more at the TOJam site once everything is uploaded.

Once the games are up, i’ll write another post listing my own People’s Choice picks with some undiscovered gems. In the meantime, i’ll try not to let our productivity on Spellirium take too much of a hit, now that we can finally put those extra Rock Band instruments to use at the office.

NEW to Spellirium: Introducing the Dictionary Feature

We released a new playable prototype today with a cool Dictionary feature. Head on over to the Rubber Room and give it a shot!

Pictures, as Promised

i’m living out my boyhood fantasy of working at a studio with storyboards and concept art up on the walls. i can die happy. i’d like to share some of that artwork with you today.

New Newsletter

Newsletter #3 was sent out today to our subscribers. It contains a first look at exclusive artwork that you can’t see anywhere else. It contains concept sketches for one of the game’s main characters, and the design evolution of one of our creatures. Head over to the Spellirium website and sign up for insider access.

The latest newsletter also contains our first Meet the Team featurette:

Meet the Team – Phil Chertok

Phil Chertok is the talent behind the great Spellirium prototypes you’ve been playing. Phil joined Untold Entertainment in late April as our game programmer, and he’s been banging out code like a champ ever since. Every new feature that winds up in the game is thanks to Phil, so … thanks, Phil!

Fun facts about Phil:

• He’s a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu blue belt
• He’s fluent in French and English
• He’s a two-time competitor in the Toronto 24 Hour Film Challenge
• He’s a Flash instructor at Ryerson University
• His highest-scoring word in Spellirium was a solid yellow QUIZ

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!

We ran two different pieces on the monitor. The first was an art reel, with work by three members of the art team (who you’ll meet in future diary entries). The team graciously allowed us to use pieces from their personal portfolios to generate interest and excitement – the team begins work on the actual game art starting today. The second piece was a refresh of the two-headed dragon battle (you may remember playing it?) using the new touch-friendly game mechanic.

The difficulty of the two-headed dragon battle was cranked WAY up, but that didn’t stop people from playing and having fun regardless. Only one person at the show actually defeated the creature, and he told me that he actually enters crossword competitions, so he’s obviously some kind of super-human wordie. (If you’re reading this Mr. Super-Human Wordie, add a comment to this post – i’d love to give you props on the website for what you accomplished!) We were really happy with the response we received from passers-by. It wasn’t uncommon for people to stroll by our screen and stop in their tracks, saying “that looks like my kind of game!”

Your Kind of Game

We continue to develop Spellirium based on your excellent feedback. We’ll be rolling out a new build with more monsters to challenge, and at least one environment puzzle to solve. And now that the art team has started in earnest, we’ll have pretty pictures to show off soon. TCAF helped us double our newsletter sign-up list, so the word will get out that we’re building something pretty special. If you’re jacked up about word games, creatures, epic quests, magic and humour, and you haven’t signed up for our newsletter yet, pop over to the Spellirium website and sign up!

And remember that if you’re jonesing for word puzzle games, we’ve got you covered in the meantime. We’ve packed WordGameWorld.com with more word puzzle games than you can shake a stick-like object at.

Word.

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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

Have you ever created something – poured your heart and soul into it – only to have someone say “Oh yeah! i saw that same thing done in The Maltese Falcon!” or “that’s exactly like this Vonnegut book i read once!” or “Simpsons did it!”? Sometimes you rip stuff off without ever knowing it. Other times, to your horror, you realize you’ve ripped something off and you’ve seen/read/heard/played the source material. You were subconsciously ripping it off. And other times, you just plain rip stuff off because it’s awesome, and you want your thing to be as awesome as that other awesome thing, with all its awesomeness.

This is a very honestly true story, for realz: when i was in college, a few whole years before Futurama came out, i was planning a graphic adventure buddy comedy game that took place in outer space called Orbit. One of the two main characters was named Bender. i composed the main title theme myself, and i played it with bells – the very same instrument used to play the Futurama theme. No joke. i’ve got a million stories like this one. i’m a very firm believer in the collective unconscious.

i’m very easily influenced by the media i consume, and i consume a LOT of it. i even know a lot about movies, teevee shows, comic books and video games i’ve never even consumed. i can answer entire trivia rounds about stuff i’ve never personally experienced. And now, i’m writing a video game called Spellirium. The game will show my cultural roots – i can’t help that. And instead of waiting until it’s released for everyone to say “Seen that somewhere before!” or “Simpsons did it!”, i’m writing this article to pre-empt you.

This is a list of all the great stuff i’m planning to liberally borrow from, pay homage to, or downright rip off as i build Spellirium.

LOOM

Brian Moriarty’s awesomazing graphic adventure game did something super-cool: it looked like it took place in the Dark Ages, but it was actually set in the distant future in the year 8021. i wanted Spellirium to be high-fantasy and quasi-medieval (in the same way A Knight’s Tale was quasi-historical), but it’s a word game, so you’re going to be spelling things like “radio” and “rocket”. It would be kinda dumb to spell words that described things that didn’t exist in the game world.

So i’ve decided to pull a LOOM. Spellirium will be post-apocalyptic, set a few hundred years after a mysterious cataclysmic event that busted humankind back down to medieval city states. The key difference here, though, is that the people have access to plastics and technology by scavenging through the landfills. Everything they have, from their clothes to their houses, is made from found objects. Call it “trashpunk”.

The Chronicles of Prydain

You may know that Disney released a total Tim Burton-directed bomb in the 80′s called The Black Cauldron. You may NOT know that the movie was based on a series of children’s books by Lloyd Alexander that completely kick ass. Alexander himself ripped a lot of his stuff off from Welsh mythology, and a number of familiar archetypes pop up: three prophetic witches, evil zombies, a foundling, winged minions, etc etc. There’s a lot of Tolkien in Alexander, and there’s a lot of other stuff in Tolkien.

Alexander begins the Prydain chronicles with a young man stuck doing menial tasks in a tranquil cottage estate called Caer Dallben. He’s overseen and instructed by Dallben, a kindly old man with mystical powers. Re-read this paragraph again, because you’re going to see all of those archetypes repeated in Spellirium.

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords

When i go to describe Spellirium to people, i have to bring up Puzzle Quest. i loved the idea for that game: take a fun, replayable casual mechanic, and wrap it in RPG/story elements. In Puzzle Quest’s case, it was a Bejewelled/match-3 mechanic; in Spellirium, it’s a word puzzle game.

i didn’t particularly enjoy the execution of Puzzle Quest, though. i made it halfway through the game before quitting out of sheer boredom. i decided that if Spellirium was going to keep people playing, it had to mix up the formula a bit. And believe me, it mixes up the formula a LOT. More on that point of difference in another post!

Super Mario Galaxy

A great many Mario games have done a great many things very well, but Super Mario Galaxy was pitch-perfect when it came to flaking gameplay off into tight little digestible chunks, while throwing enough variety at the player to keep him from feeling like he’s stuck doing specific challenges in a certain order.

One way they did this was with the comet. The comet travels randomly to different galaxies (collections of challenges). The comet itself has a few different modes to it: beat the challenge with one hit-point, race a ghost of yourself to the finish line, or complete the challenge with all of the enemies moving at twice the speed. When you thought you were long-finished with a given galaxy, the comet would show up and bring you back in to face a remixed challenge.

LOST

As i bite my nails through the final season, i’m starting to pay very close attention to the way the writers of LOST parcel out the show’s secrets. There are many secrets and revelations in Spellirium which, when handled improperly, will fall flat and fail to excite the player. But i think what they’ve done with LOST is they’ve cooked up a big batch of secrets and surprising moments, and have picked the perfect moments to do their big reveals to drive the story forward.

If i do this incorrectly, i’ll have a long-ass boring block of text trying to establish the story and the world of Spellirium off the title screen. If i take a page from the LOST scripts, i’ll keep the player plowing through those levels and challenges, dying to see what happens next.

Home Movies

If i have my wish, the dialogue in Spellirium will be reminiscent of Home Movies. The voice actors sound like they’re improvising (indeed, in the first season, they were!). They step on each other’s lines. A lot of what they say is understated, thrown away, or muttered under their breath. It makes for some very funny stuff, and it’s an unadorned, wry style i don’t think i’ve ever seen in a video game.

Terry Gilliam

i think i’m specifically referring to Twelve Monkeys and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen here. And while they’re not Gilliam movies, i’ll throw The Princess Bride, The City of Lost Children and Delicatessen into the mix. These movies all start with well-realized worlds with some very somber events happening in them, and they just spackle humor and imagination on top of that. And if there’s one game that did this very, very well, it’s my favourite game of all time: The Secret of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge.

The first two Monkey Island games, like the movies i listed, are very very dark. MI2 is extremely dark in theme as well as in setting. The game has you robbing graves, building voodoo dolls, and coming face to face with the earthly remains of your own parents. Dark dark dark! But then, on top of that, Monkey Island 2 is completely ridiculous. There’s not a serious bone in its body. It’s still one of the only games that has made me laugh hysterically out loud. You wouldn’t think that a game about extortion, torture, shipping embargoes and subjugation of island nations could do that.

Spellirium will present its world just as seriously. There are very dark things afoot in the game world, and you’ll have to make some tough choices as you progress through the game. And then? Fart jokes.

You’re Insane

Maybe you’re thinking “this is the craziest word game i’ve ever heard of.” You’d be right. i LOVE word puzzle video games, but none of them have ever held my interest long enough (no, not even that wretched Bookworm Adventures mess) because none of them have ever told a story, or challenged me to do more than one thing with my monstrous vocabulary. i’ve heard from many game portal owners that word games aren’t top-sellers. Play through some of the word games on our own portal, WordGameWorld.com and you’ll see why: some of them have great little game mechanics, but there’s nothing to hold the interest of a traditional gamer.

You might say that word games are a niche genre, and that they’ll only hit with a small segment of the gaming population. You might have said that about sci-fi in 1976 … and the next year, Star Wars came out. Now let me be clear: Spellirium may not do for word games what Star Wars did for sci-fi movies. But now that i think about Star Wars, there are a few things in there that i might want to “pay homage” to …

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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!

… for ONE WEEK ONLY, while we take in the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco!!

Lost in La Mancha

This will be my fourth year at GDC, and my first time to the now sophomoric Flash Gaming Summit. i tried to hit the FGS after-party last year, but somehow had a REALLY wrong address. i arrived in San Francisco from Toronto after a 5 hour flight, dropped my bags at the hotel, and jumped in a cab for what i thought was the FGS venue. The place was so far-flung that the cab ride cost me twenty buckaroos, which is what Americans call their money. After wandering around for an hour in a bad part of town, asking people to help me find a bar that had apparently shut down the year before, i gave up and took a second twenty buckaroo cab ride back to my hotel.

Another glance at my notes, and i realized that the venue was actually a block from my hotel.

i hiked three minutes to the place, and everything was shutting down. There were angry-looking men with thick eyebrows unstapling signs that read “Best Conference Evar”. The floor was littered with wilting confetti. In a distant corner of the room, a sad-faced circus clown was cutting himself. i had missed it.

i managed to tag along with a rowdy group of devs who had overstayed their welcome, and we had a decent meal together at a nearby diner. There, the regaled me with tales of what i had missed: free Flash pants for all attendees, a special preview version of CS4 that didn’t crash every five minutes, and an exciting round of ultimate fighting-style mixed martial arts between MochiMedia and GamerSafe, during which Mochi’s sr. staffer Jameson Hsu lost an arm. It had been AWESOME.

So, protip: always check your notes before you leave the hotel and hallucinate some random address in the barrio that’s a 20 buckaroo cab ride away. Write that down.

Let’s Be Temporary Friends!

If you’re reading this and i follow you on Twitter, or if we’ve talked on LinkedIn or Facebook or some other site, please let’s shake hands and have a chat. Very few people put pictures of themselves online, so i know you all as “that guy with the dog in a party hat avatar” or “that lady with the posterized picture of her three-year-old as her avatar.” If i put a human face to your ridiculous social media handle, i’ll be more apt to treat you like a human, rather than … well, rather than a dog in a party hat.

(All this from the guy with a red monster doodle for an avatar)

If you’re looking for me in San Francisco this week, this is what i look like, plus or minus five pounds:

i’m the one in the picture who isn’t a monster.

…

Er … to be more specific, i’m the white guy with the dark eyebrows.

Vengeance is Yours

If i’ve publicly berated you for running a crappy college video game program or stealing your game graphics from Star Wars or controlling your microtransaction service like you’re the mafia, this is your chance to shank me, prison style, in real life. Don’t blow it!

As i did with last year’s GDC, i’ll write some articles reporting on what i did, who i met, and what i learned, so that you can save yourself the buckaroos and learn the same amount from the comfort of your Fat Chair. After i get back, i have a few weeks to finish some service projects before diving into a new original Untold Entertainment game, with the help of grant and refund money from the OMDC and the SR&ED.

i don’t know much about acronyms, but i do know what i like.

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!

Here’s the feedback we keyed in on, based on what you wrote on our survey:

• The game is too punishing. It stinks to type in the correct answer milliseconds too slowly. (one player described this as suffering a “headshot” the moment he entered the game. Well-put!)
• Most 10-player games ended with 3 players on the scoreboard, and everyone else with zero points. That’s no fun!
• You should be able to accomplish something in the game even if you’re not the fastest typist.

Ch-ch-changes

So since this is a fun game and not grade eight gym class, we took your suggestions and made some changes. Here are the Rules of Play for the next iteration of Interrupting Cow Trivia:

How to Play

• You’ll see a hint and up to three clues fill the screen.
• After the clues are finished, the letters in the answer start to fill in.
• When you know the answer, type it into the blue box and press the ENTER key.

Answer Order

• Everyone has a chance to answer. As your opponents answer, green checkmarks appear beside their player names.
• When all players have answered, or the question times out, we’ll give the Streak to the player who answered first.
• All players earn points according to how quickly they answered.

Scoring

• All questions are worth 1000 points.
• The longer the question stays on the screen, the fewer points it’s worth.
• The first player to correctly answer a question gets the Streak – a multiplier that boosts a question’s point value.
• The Streaker’s multiplier increases with every question he answers first.
• Any player can break the Streak and become the Streaker by answering first.

BIG thanks to Squize at Gaming Your Way for specifically suggesting these changes, and to all our other testers who suggested similar tweaks. We’ll try these rules out in our next multiplayer test. If they’re great, we’ll keep ‘em! If they suck, we’ll chuck ‘em!

Everybody Wins!

Our next scheduled multiplayer beta test, “Everybody Wins!”, is on Thursday January 14 2010. We’ll do two tests:

• Everybody Wins! at 4:00 PM EST
• Everybody Wins! at 8:00 PM EST

If you’ve played the game before, we’d LOVE to hear what you think of the new rules. If you have a friend who’s never played, here’s a fact: WE ADORE VIRGINS. Invite that special someone along to play with you.

The doors open at 4PM and 8PM sharp at InterruptingCowTrivia.com. See you in the game!

Moo.

PROTIP (and something i didn’t realize until now): soliciting directed feedback from people gives you far, FAR more useful advice than asking for any old feedback.

BAD:

Q: What do you think of my dress?

A: You should be wearing a pantsuit.
A: It doesn’t make your ass look as fat as that other dress.
A: Let’s talk about your shoes instead. They’re terrible.
A: Get an entirely different dress. That shade of blue makes me think of the Korean War.

GOOD:

Q: How would you tailor this dress to make it fit my body better?

A: i’d take it in at the waist slightly.
A: Needs to be tighter at the waist – perhaps lower the neckline.
A: I think it fits pretty well.
A: A bit loose around the middle. Maybe shorten the sleeves.

Ah, this – THIS feedback is the stuff of my dreams. i’ve had a rough road this week with catastrophically bad news at the office, and a steaming pile of terrible feedback from certain game developers who should know better (but of course i’m not talking about you, dear reader). No one was having fun in the game alone, so we rounded everyone up and scheduled two play times for Interrupting Cow Trivia. Everyone popped in, the test ran for an hour, and we locked up the game again. Then we asked players to fill out a short survey. The difference in the quality of feedback was like night and day.

Or rather, it was like the difference between getting shot in the gonads with a crossbow at night, and day.

Lobbying for Change

One mystery that remains to be solved is the feedback we’ve received about the game’s lobby. We may not have asked enough directed questions about this, but general consensus is that the lobby UI stinks. Without more pointed constructive criticism, i don’t know how to address this.

So let’s tackle it together! Here’s a shot of the Lobby that players saw in our recent playtests:

Here’s a list of the things you can do here:

1. The “down” arrow next to “High Scores” expands that box. Player scores are listed there, along with your ranking (if you’re logged in).
2. The blue arrows scroll the High Scores list.
3. Filter the list by Friends, Foes, Members, Guests, etc. by using the drop-down.
4. Click on any player name to see the Profile Pop-up (as long as the player is a member)
5. Roll over the tables to see the table name and category.
6. Click the “PLAY” button beneath any table to join a game.
7. Click on a table to get the Table Details Pop-Up, which tells you who’s playing at the table and what the table settings are.
8. Click to see a list of who’s online.
9. Click to start your own table.
10. Click to refresh the table list.
11. The blue arrows scroll the table list.
12. Click to return to the Game Options screen.

It Was Fine Until People Had to Use It

Here’s a summary of feedback:

1. Many players suggested we build a High Scores feature. This, despite the “High Scores” label in a 22-point font at the top of the screen, with a sparkly pink udder crown next to it.
2. Some players sat at this screen and waited, expecting something to happen. They did not know that action was required on their part to join a game.
3. Some players did not recognize the large circles under the heading “Tables” as tables where games were taking place. The metaphor was, perhaps, unfamiliar.
4. The three icons went unnoticed.
5. A few players came to this screen in private beta when no one else was playing, and concluded that the game could not be played solo. They complained that they should be able to play by themselves. (i admit, this one mystified me … just join a table if you want to play. Doesn’t matter how many other players are online.)
6. Generally, enough players came to this screen and were confused as to what they were supposed to do.

During the private beta, we thought the problem was that the screen contained too much text, so we tightened it up in a number of places, and changed some textual buttons to icons with text pop-ups to remove visual clutter. Here’s a before and after comparison:

We’re Giving Her All She’s Got, Cap’n

Apparently, based on our more helpful feedback in the multiplayer tests, we haven’t done enough. Can you help us play detective and figure out why this Lobby screen causes people so much grief, and make specific suggestions to improve it?

One idea we have already is to actually add text – a call to action that tells the player something like “CHOOSE A TABLE AND CLICK ‘PLAY’”. Something like that.

Idea #2: kill the “tables waiting” text, because it’s not that useful.
Idea #3: redesign the arrow buttons
Idea #4: Put the category in the middle of the table, instead of the word “waiting”. Perhaps players wait at this screen because they see the word “waiting” everywhere?

Is there anything we’re missing?

You Should See the Other Guy

To digress, it amazes me that we’ve had so many complaints about the lobby. For your amusement, please take a quick look at the game selection screens for these competing trivia products:

And before you ask, no – i didn’t go scouring the Internatz for the worst interfaces i could find. These games enjoy the top slots on a Google search for “multiplayer trivia”.

… but not for long. ;)

Moo.

And since the game is a thousand per cent more fun with other players, we’re scheduling two MULTIPLAYER PLAYTEST-A-THONS:

• Thursday January 7th 4:00 PM EST
• Thursday January 7th 8:00 PM EST

That’s tomorrow!! Unless you’re reading this at some point in the future, in which case, YOU MISSED IT! What’s the future like, space man? Don’t you wish they’d invent a time machine so that you can go back and play in one of the MULTIPLAYER PLAYTEST-A-THONS?? … What’s that? They already have?? Wel, then! See you tomorrow!

What’s New?

If you’ve been following our Designer Diary for Interrupting Cow Trivia, you know that we’ve lined up some amazing background artwork for the game. Tomorrow, you’ll see the full monty. The game is fully skinned with a fabulous 50′s look. There’s new content, new features, and a new cow. Here’s a run-down of what you’ll see at 4PM or 8PM tomorrow:

New Cow!

As endearingly brain-damaged as our old cow was, we’ve put her out to pasture. Our new cow has been specially formulated to appeal to Japanese pre-teen girls and gay men over 40, which we count as a win/win. Plus, she wears ROLLERSKATES!

New Trivia!

A number of testers have complained that our current content is too difficult. To these whiny bitches, we humbly recommend nutting up. There’s plenty of pasture in Farmville to let your brain slowly go to mush. To the rest of you smart cookies who were BORN to school sucka MCs at trivia, we offer these awesome new question packs:

• Movies – Actors We give you the genre, year, and three actors. You tell us what movie they starred in.
• TV – Actors Same deal as Movies, but the screen is smaller and the actors make less money and usually die tragically.
• TV – Characters Given three character names, can you name the TV show they were in?
• Music – Lyrics We’ll give you a band name and the lyrics to a famous song. What’s the song called?
• Wordplay – Idioms This one sounds like it’s for nerds, but it’s fast and easy and super-fun. Finish the popular phrases:

  Too many cooks ***** *** *****.
  A stitch in time ***** ****.
  Crazy like * ***.
  Mad as * ******.
  Two heads *** ****** **** ***.

New Features!

Get a load of our lobby, where you can check out high scores and join games. You can create a custom table with the trivia YOU want to play. Your XP bar is now front and center, so you can keep a better eye on how you’re levelling. And, as before, you can click any player’s name to see his or her stats, and add that player to your Friends or Foes lists.

DID YOU TOTALLY KNOW? Your Friends and Foes lists persist across the Untold Entertainment message boards. HOTSAUCE!

Join the Herd. Follow the Cow.

We’ve created a special Twitter account for the game, and are working on some great Twitter features for you Twits to enjoy. Follow @ICTrivia for reminders about when the MULTIPLAYER TEST-A-THONS are starting, and the cow will keep you in the loop. and hook you up with the link.

See you all tomorrow at 4PM or 8PM EST!

Moo.

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.

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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!

This week, we’d like to show you another shot of the game. This is the background for the game selection screen, where you can choose to play a Multiplayer Game, Challenge a Friend, or tackle your awaiting Challenges. We pan down to this shot from the game’s logo, a big neon sign flickering against a starry backdrop.

The cool blue hue and lonely atmosphere of this shot deliberately juxtapose the warm, bright and busy interior of the diner. The party is clearly inside, after you click the “Multiplayer” button.

Next week, we’d like to show you the game’s 50′s-riffic user interface design, which you’ll definitely recognize if a) you’re over 60 yrs old or b) you’ve ever bought pants at Old Navy.

If you haven’t played Interrupting Cow Trivia lately – or ever! – be sure to give it a shot while we’re still in alpha. We’ll be rolling out advertising along with these newfangled graphics, so take a moment to enjoy the game for free without ads.

Moo.

So we’ll space them out. This week, it’s the interior shot of the Interrupting Cow Trivia diner.

More to come next week, as we slowly transform our graphics-less game into a veritable visual wonderland!

If you haven’t played Interrupting Cow Trivia yet, or lately, be sure to jump in with a couple of friends and try out the new features while we’re still in alpha. We love to hear and implement your feedback!

Moo.

Well, oh ye of little faith – feast thine eyes on THIS!

We Need Your Help

Many months ago, we commissioned character artist Kelly Conley to draw a cow for our game. His only direction was to “draw a retarded cow”. After many revisions of cow facial expressions that ranged from inane to confused, and from bewildered to aloof, he finally nailed that elusive retarded cow look that everyone wants but no one can have.

We’ve been sitting on this cow design the whole time, wondering whether or not the world was ready for it – wondering whether society was willing to accept such a free-wheeling but intellectually-challenged bovine. So after much deliberation (and a desperate need for new content now that we’re writing daily posts), we decided to leave the deciding up to you.

If you feel passionately either way about this cow, please indicate on our poll whether you hold this cow character design to be totally Awesome, or udderly N’Awsome:

As with our previous poll about fake British town names for Kahoots™, your feedback could decide whether this cow becomes the unfortunate face of Interrupting Cow Trivia, or whether it’s back to the (literal) drawing board.

Not Your Father’s Cow?

And if you have played the game but don’t really like it, we don’t really care what you think! Go show the cow to someone who’s into trivia games … your dad, for instance. Yes – please show this cow to your 40+ year old father and ask him what he thinks, because we have a hunch he’s our target audience. You can go back to your tower-defending and zombie-shotgunning once you ask dear old dad to answer our cow poll.

(note: be sure you possess the strength to pry your laptop from your father’s white-knuckled death grip once he starts playing Interrupting Cow Trivia and gets hopelessly hooked, ’cause that’s gonna happen.)

Moo.

Spellirium will do for word games what Puzzle Quest did for Bejewelled. You will play in a fantastic dark fantasy world armed with a small wooden grid of letter tiles – the SpellCaster – which can change reality with the words you spell.

Spellirium has been in our development queue since we founded Untold Entertainment. We were so booked up with contracts that we couldn’t get cracking on it.

Budge It

In fall 2008, we applied for a provincial government grant called the Screen-Based Content Initiative.

Me: i can haz munny?
Government: Noz.

The jury rejected Spellirium for a few reasons:

1. the $150k (!) budget was too large for a casual game prototype
2. we failed to adequately assess market risk
3. we did not include project oversight in the budget (ie we didn’t include a role for a producer or a project manager)
4. we weren’t clear enough about what we were building

I Get Knocked Down, But I Get Up Again

Later the next year in Spring 2009, we came back with a 70+ page document for Spellirium and applied for the Interactive Digital Media Fund, also offered by the Ontario government. This time, our project description was meaty and picture-laden at 25 pages. We included time and money for a producer. We wrote a solid market analysis. And we reduced our budget to around $80k, half of which the government would front if we were approved.

Once more, our application for Spellirium was rejected. Here are a few of the reasons:

1. the budget was too small
2. the jurors were not confident that we could produce a game of sufficient quality at the $20 price point we proposed
3. one juror played the very early proof of concept version of the game, and didn’t like it

Needless to say, it takes a considerable amount of time and effort for a little two-man shop to keep itself going and to write up enormously demanding applications like these. The government invited us to re-submit Spellirium for another review some time in November. The prospect of going through this process a third time is harrowing, and we could use your help!

Introducing the Rubber Room

We want to address that one juror’s concern about the Spellirium prototype, so we’ve made it available to you to play in the Rubber Room, the new section on the site where we’re putting all of our gameplay experiments and half-baked ideas. We would LOVE for you to try out the prototype, and then give us feedback. Let us know if you like it or if you don’t like it, and give us details either way. If you are a lurker, now’s the perfect time to stop lurking and post a comment, because we could really use your help!

Your feedback will help us decide whether or not to carry on with Spellirium. And if we DO decide to keep at it, your comments will help shape our next application to the IDM Fund.

Thanks so much, everyone!

Try our new game Spellirium and tell us what you think!

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!

What’s MOO (<- did you see that? That was it.) In Interrupting Cow Trivia

Our unstoppable (except with bullets) game developer Jeff (ue_jeff) found a break in our current contract to add some HAWT new features to Interrupting Cow Trivia. If you haven’t played the game lately to check them out, check them out:

Join a multiplayer game and you’ll see a new in-game leaderboard ranking you against the other players. Each question you answer earns you experience points (XP). By some cruel fluke, i don’t rank very highly on this list. Stop laughing.

Click on your player name in Multiplayer Mode to see the Player Profile. You can see your current XP, and the number of points you need to level up to the next rank. We’re also tracking the number of Challenges you play, the type of trivia you like the most, and your questions seen/questions answered/accuracy stats. We’ve even installed a tiny camera in your shower so we can watch you clean that filthy, filthy body of yours. Oh yeah. That’s it. Clean that body.

Click on another player’s name to see a similar profile page. The difference here is that you can add other players to, or remove them from, your Friends and Foes lists. We’re piggybacking on the Friends and Foes list in our phpbb membership system, so the same lists you maintain on our Boards are the same lists you see in-game. And they’re the same lists you’ll see in future Untold Entertainment games, so this is a great time to start curating your list of fast friends and bitter rivals for the coming gameplay apocalypse.

But It Still Looks Like Ass

These scoring features were next in our feature queue for ICT. As designed, there are two more crucial (and much more involved) features to build before the game is ready to launch … and then we can follow our previously-posted launch plan (see Cash Cow Part 1 and Cash Cow Part 2).

But the other missing “feature” is, obviously, sound and music. i divided the game’s graphics into three different concerns:

1. Character design
2. Background art
3. User interface

i’m taking care of UI myself (unless you can recommend a good freelance UI artist in Ontario?) A few months ago, i commissioned an artist to design our cow mascot for the game, and i’m excited to show you that design NEXT WEEK OMG PANTS ON FIRE. And the week after THAT, i hope to show you the game’s background art, which is guaranteed to blow a hole in the back of your brain and land me in the slammer for long-distance Internatz MURDER. For realz. Prepare to have your brain exploded.

We’ve also been writing more trivia packs that you Movie and Music fans just HAVE to check out. Keep it glued to THIS BLOG RIGHT HERE to see ICT blossom into the best online multiplayer trivia game on this here planet Earth.

Moo.

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

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

Our Three-fold Release Strategy

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

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

Casual What-Now?

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

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

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

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

(Formerly) Free-to-Play

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

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

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

Direct Sales

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Value Add

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

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

Ads

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

True Microtransactions

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

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

OR ….

He can buy munnypence.

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

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

Multiple Languages

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

Multiple Platforms

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

Charity

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

<RANT-O-RAMA>

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

</RANT-O-RAMA>

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

The Game is Afoot

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

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

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

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

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

One of the most-repeated tips i heard at the Casual Connect conference a few weeks ago was to develop a strong brand. Customers like strong brands. Strong branding unifies all your … your stuff under one label. Strong brands are about striking, professional-looking logos, consistent use of colours and fonts, and maybe even some sort of manifesto or feeling that you emit.

Our over-arching brand is called Untold Entertainment. The word “untold” means “lots”. Lots of entertainment.

Our Brand’s Origin Story

It bothers me a little when i go to a conference or a function, and i’ll meet a few new people in a huddle, and someone will say “who are you?” And i’ll say “i’m Ryan Creighton. i run a small game design studio in Toronto called Untold Entertainment.” And the person will say “Oh? What type of work do you do?” And this jackass over here – the one in the sweater vest – will say “It’s untold! He can’t tell you! RAH HA HA HA!” Then he’ll slap his knee and go out and kill someone while drunk driving.

But it doesn’t happen all that often. Most people know what the word means. And most people have heard someone use the wording “untold entertainment” in casual speech, usually to describe something outlandish. Example: “So i was at the fair today, and they had a duck balancing on a ball juggling chainsaws. Untold entertainment.”

In fact – and i’m not kidding – our original company logo was a duck balancing on a ball juggling chainsaws.

This was my Facebook avatar at the time (and still is, actually):

i’m not a big comic book fan, but i had this idea of creating a corporate website that looked like one of those junk pages in a comic book, full of special offers for useless and exaggerated products like “moon shoes”, “secret decoder rings”, and “asthma inhalers”:

This is as far as i got before my friends and loved ones (thankfully) stopped me:

Thinking that the saturation was the problem, i kept the logo and moved to a completely black design, and continued to flounder:

In my former life working for a broadcaster, i illustrated a few games using a crude, sketchy style that a lot of people found enduring. (Like Dr. Seuss, i drew things all silly-looking because i’m not very skilled at drawing things for serious. UNlike Dr. Seuss, i toil in relative obscurity.) So the logo evolved into a hastily-scribbled monster gnawing on a cardboard sign, which tested very well with 18-35-year-old women who are married to me.

With our first published Untold Entertainment website, we tried to convey the outlandish “untold entertainment” theme. We had a cartoonish bomb that dropped sausages, and other strange things. Everything was in a doodly, sketchy style:

The Brand You Know

When we hired our first (and to date, only) devoted artist, Mark Duiker. i asked that he stick to the established art style. He seemed a little dismayed. But he eventually pulled off the fantastic-looking ornate marginalia you see around the site today. These doodles are also found on our company letterhead and invoices.

The official company colours are red and browny yellow. These are also the colours i painted my bedroom, a few years before starting the company.

Through the carefully-drawn but careless-seeming visual branding, i hoped to convey a devil-may-care, mischievous, even dangerous attitude that was nevertheless playful and whimsical. The blog monster in our nav shouts too loudly. The gigantic tongue menu that appears when you roll over our About button is completely inappropriate for a professional site. The Twitter bird at the top of each page is just a little out of control. And if we ever get around to launching it, the monster that plucks letters from the project abstracts on our main page to spell naughty words will delight and outrage you. (i’m not making that up either. It exists.)

The Principle of the Thing

The company has five stated principles which, if you haven’t read them, i’ll repeat for you here:

• uncompromising honesty
• constant communication
• the sanctity of childhood
• non-violence in gaming (barring the presence of zombies)
• the use of entertainment to improve, rather than degrade, the human condition

“Constant communication” is in there to give us a competetive edge over game vendors who, i’ve heard, don’t return emails or phone calls to their clients.

We list “uncompromising honesty” because i don’t think many other studios can commit to that. i’ve also heard word that our competitors will pretend that everything’s going smoothly until deadline day, and the reason they weren’t answering phone calls or emails the whole time is that the project went to pot two months ago and they were too lilly-livered to fess up.

We’re courageous enough to fess up. If something’s not going to work, or we’re not going to deliver on time (whether through our own fault or otherwise), we’ll say so. Uncompromising honesty, constantly communicated.

And the other three points stem from my own worldview. i believe in the sanctity of childh