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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Windbag

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

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

WTFism

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

The Scene of the Crime

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

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

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

Memory Game

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

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

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

What Just Happened? Mommy stole the fork.

Time-Bending

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

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

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

Word Association

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

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

And as long as i’m stretching:

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

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

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

See you at the jam!

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

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.

For at least a decade, all my game development endeavors had one thing in common: none of them were ever finished.

With these words, indie game developer Jacob A. Stevens established himself as my soulmate, and endeared himself to my heart forever. From this point forward, i will be there to peer into his kitchen through the shrubbery outside his house, as if locked in a trance.

That is to say, i can’t recommend Jacob’s Gamedev.net article Practical Tips for Independent Game Development highly enough. Our experiences and opinions are so common, i have to wonder if he actually dug through my trash and assumed my identity to write the piece.

Hang on a tick …

Alright, i’ve just looked out my kitchen window and have discovered that Jacob is actually peering through my shrubbery at me. i’ve waved to indicate that he can come inside, but i think he just wants to watch. Oo-er, missus. Soul mates indeed.

Jacob drops so many truth bombs throughout the article that i believe he should be arrested and tried for truth crimes. Here are a few salient points that stood out while i read:

Build the Game, Not the Infrastructure

It’s easy to get distracted by tasks that don’t directly contribute to the final product, like building tools and editors. Hardcode the levels.

i’ve spoken to many a fledgling game developer who’s said “our engine is 75% complete!” Good for you. How’s your game doing? We technically-minded perfectionists (myself included) are often so caught up in making pretty, slick tools that by the time we burn out on a project, we haven’t actually produced something a person can play. It’s far better to have something tiny, playable and rough around the edges than a slick level editor that you abandoned at 75%.

Are You Sure You’re Cut Out For This?

Lots of people think they want to make games.

To quote Jack Black, “i’ve got sour news for you, Jack. It’s not that easy. Are you willing to make the commitment to rock-hard tasty abs WASHER-BOARD STYLE, glistening in the sun??” The classic fable of the little red hen comes to mind – everyone wants to play games, and everyone wants to have made games, but very few people are actually equipped to deal with the mental and physical anguish involved in making games. At the end of the day, most of us are ducks, cats and pigs, rather than little red hens.

“Who will help me code the user interface?”
“Not i,” said the practically everybody.

Just because you enjoy eating ice cream, doesn’t mean you’d enjoy working for minimum wage in an ice cream factory! Try on game development in small doses, and decide – really decide – whether you want to play games, or make them.

Self-Propulsion

In trying to find the right people to partner up with, even if those people have never made a game before, Jacob says:

The key is to look for demonstrated self-motivation.

We have a saying in our family: the drive is the talent. None of us are particularly good artists, musicians, programmers, businessmen, jugglers or bow-hunters, but we do possess a heaping helping of drive, or ambition. That drive is what possesses us to go ahead and learn bow-hunting when it’s called for. And though we may not emerge the world’s best bow-hunters on the other side, at the end of the day we got it done. We’re like those characters in Heroes who can absorb other superheroes’ abilities. Or we’re like the writers of Heroes who re-trained to become accountants just to escape their jobs on that show, because it friggin’ stinks.

When i got my first job in the games industry, i was hired for my drive. It certainly wasn’t for my artistic or programming talent – i had neither. And i had never made a game before in my life. But there’s a lot to be said for motivation. i don’t know if this is an ingrained quality in a person, or whether it can be practiced and improved upon. Either way, i’d be more likely to partner with, say, a decent and motivated artist than a fantastic artist who was somewhat of a slouch.

U Ay-yi-yi

A common misconception is that a great game starts with a great idea. StarCraft, Zelda, and Resident Evil are genius games because their creators painstakingly refined the details of the games until they were virtually flawless.

My opinion here may be due to the current struggles we’re facing with our games, but in my up-to-the-minute opinion, the very best strategy is this: start with a game concept so small, you figure there’s no possible way it could possibly stand on its own as a complete game. Then build it – that’s the easy part. Then go build the UI – the buttons, the title screen, the win and lose conditions, the log in, the sign-up, the high scores, the level selection screen, the error messages, the credits and the modal dialogues. If you fail anywhere, that’s where it’s gonna happen. You can always go back later and expand the game idea, but bear this in mind: 10% of the work is building the game, while 90% of the work is building everything surrounding the game.

i can tell whether i’m going to enjoy a free online game within the first three seconds. If care and attention have been paid to the intro logos, the title screen and the Play button, i know i’m in good hands. But if i see an unincluded font outline on that Play button, or an amateurish load bar, i don’t stick around long.

If you put together a complete game, with all the fixings that i mentioned above (registration and high scores are optional, of course), then you can go back and start building out your game’s features. In fact, if i were to teach game development to students, i’d be tempted to have them start with the front-of-house donut, and work in the actual gameplay once all that jazz was in place. Your appetite for feature creep will be a LOT lower once you consider all the UI you’ll need to support it.

Why Haven’t You Launched Any Games?

Case in point: both of our original games in our development queue, Kahoots™ and Interrupting Cow Trivia have been finished for months. We haven’t worked on the Kahoots™ gameplay since about February. This whole time, we’ve been programming the dozens of dialogue pop-ups and screens that facilitate the gameplay. And we just released a first look at ICT‘s graphics and theme yesterday – now we’re faced with the grim task of doodling up the scads of checkboxes, input fields, windows, prompts, scrollbars and messages that comprise the game’s visuals.

So you want to be a solo indie game dev? Start out by testing your passion for being an indie UI designer, and see where that takes you!

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!

But man cannot live by site traffic alone. With the advent of numerous microtransaction systems for Flash games, including MochiCoins, GamerSafe, HeyZap, and Nonoba, there now exists a simple framework that will allow us to take money from our players.

There are three levels of players in Interrupting Cow Trivia: Hobos, Members, and Owners. Let’s take a look at each in turn:

Hobos

These are the players who hop off the nearest freight train, bindle in tow, looking for a free entertainment hand-out. They’ve chalk-marked various areas of the Internatz where people are most likely to help them out with a hot entertainment meal and a warm barn to sleep in for an hour – namely free-to-play portals like Addicting Games, Newgrounds, and Kongregate. Hobos are not loyal to us. They’ll take their entertainment any way they can get it. Our primary concern is to convert these shiftless Hobos to productive Members of our game’s society.

There are two important points that i want to make here on the care and handling of Hobos. The first is that you should always relentlessly tease a Hobo. You should constantly remind a Hobo of all the fun he could be having if he became a Member. The benefits of Membership should be obvious, and compelling. The process of becoming a Member must be simple.

The second is that you should never make Members’ options invisible to Hobos. Members and Hobos should always see the same buttons, the same interface. If ever a Hobo clicks on a button to access a Members-only feature, that’s where you hit him with the “Sorry! This feature is for Members only!” This pop-up is a great opportunity to list a few other benefits of Membership, and to provide a fast link to the Membership sign-up page.

Hobos are our frontline – the bottom of the pyramid. There will always be far more Hobos hitting Interrupting Cow Trivia than Members. One big difference between a Hobo and a Member is usage: while Hobos represent a high number of unique visits, Members will account for a larger percentage of repeat visits. Members come back for seconds. Another difference is that Hobos are anonymous, but Members give us their email addresses. That crucial differences opens up a dialogue between us and our players – we can send newsletters and surveys, send special offers, and personally connect with our customers.

We mentioned in the last article how we turn a Hobo into a Member, but here’s a quick refresher.

Members

Both Hobos and Members can play the game for free, but only Members can:

1. Display their board avatar next to their names during the game
2. Be tracked on the leaderboards
3. Build a cumulative score across repeat visits
4. Quickly Challenge a Friend from their Friends/Foes list

There are two other features in the queue that leverage membership in a powerful way, but these are enough for now. Since Membership is free and compelling, it’s quite easy to convert a Hobo to a Member. But converting Members to Owners (paying players) is the real challenge.

Owners

Both Hobos and Members can play Interrupting Cow Trivia for free. When you click to join a multiplayer game, you’ll to see a 15-second ad served up by MochiMedia. Then you get to play through x questions. i haven’t decided on this number. There are ten questions in a round. If you have any ideas here, please let me know!

After they play those x questions, Hobo and Member alike are unceremoniously BOOTED from the game back out to the lobby. If x questions were enough to show Hobos and Members a good time, they will click to re-join a game, at which point we show them another 15-second ad. And so on.

So in-game advertising is the first revenue stream for Interrupting Cow Trivia and, based on our past experience, the weakest. We’re including it in the game to make money in a very indirect way.

Fact: ads are annoying. i don’t like watching them, and most likely neither do you. But ads pay the bills. What do you do if you want to consume media without watching ads? You either steal it, or you pay for it. With its multiplayer integration, Interrupting Cow Trivia will likely be a hard game to steal, so that leaves paying for it.

Charge Once or Charge Often?

So an Owner is a Member who pays for the game. There were a few different ways we could go on this. Do we charge a one-time fee, or do we charge a monthly subscription? Well, the idea of a one-time fee doesn’t excite me because i know i’ll have to keep writing trivia packs to keep the game fresh. i’ll be sinking hours and hours of work into the game past the point of conversion, yet i’ll only ever have the x dollars that Player A paid me. What if the game really takes off and it’s popular for ten years? i can’t constantly sink hours of development into a game that doesn’t constantly sink money back into my bank account to fund that development.

The other problem with a one-time fee is that i don’t think people will pay it. What if i charge $10 for Interrupting Cow Trivia? That’s a total rip-off, because it’s a Flash game. And we all know that Flash games are free. Plenty of other games to play that don’t gouge me for my hard-earned money. Screw you, Untold Entertainment. How DARE you?

But let’s look at a subscription model. Let’s say we low-ball it and charge people a buck a month to become owners. A buck a month – that’s RIDICULOUSLY inexpensive. And we can even give them a month for free if they opt for a year’s subscription. So a year’s worth of Ownership on Interrupting Cow Trivia runs them $11. And i think that since we changed the player’s perception, and have hit that magical 99 cent mark for game content (even though we’re charging it multiple times), we’ve gone from an unattractive flat fee of $10 to a dynamic, monthly fee of $1, which comes out to $11 with the free bonus month, which is one dollar more than the flat fee would have been.

And with the short attention span of gamers these days, i sincerely doubt that anyone is going to stick with the game for over a year. But for those few adoring players who do, we’ll see a fresh, crisp $11 bill in our account when the year is up.

Let me stop myself, because i really want to hear your opinions: good idea, or bad idea? Is $1 a month too low, or are we hitting the nail on the head here? If it were your game, what would you do?

MochiCoins Subscriptions?

So we’ve begged the question: how do you handle subscriptions with one-off currency systems like MochiCoins and GamerSafe? i’m going to come right out and admit here that from this point on, i’ll be borrowing a lot of strategy from OOO (Three Rings) and their ground-breaking game Puzzle Pirates.

Picture a game where the player can buy a sword. The sword is time limited – it degrades every time the player uses it, and eventually it breaks and becomes unusable. The player is effectively renting that item with real money. In Puzzle Pirates, you buy a gamer badge that allows you to play certain mini-games for a month. Once the month is done, you have to buy the badge again if you want to enjoy unfettered acess to those games again. It’s the same concept as the sword, so as long as you’re set up to offer rentable/degradable items, you’re set up to handle subscriptions.

In this way, we can sell an item (badge, hat, medal, crown – whatever) that makes the player an Owner for a certain period of time. Interrupting Cow Trivia will likely sell 1-month, 6-month and 1-year items (remember: one month free when you commit to a year).

But why stop there? Three Rings shares their financial info, and it’s no secret that Puzzle Pirates has pulled in a lot of well-deserved booty for the team. So let’s borrow one more idea from them: a content schedule.

Puzzle Pirates has a few mini-games that are available to Hobos right off the front page of the site – no need to download the game client. Inside the client, there are a number of mini-games that are available to (non-paying) Members on a rotating schedule. For example, the Drinking mini-game is playable on Tuesdays and Fridays. The Poker mini-game is playable on Mondays and Saturdays, and so on. What the Puzzle Pirates gamer badge actually does is it allows Members to play any mini-game on any day, breaking players free from the content schedule. Of course, there are leaderboard hooks and in-game money-earning incentives that make this an even more attractive item to buy.

We will build the same type of content schedule for Interrupting Cow Trivia by splitting the content packs across different days: Music Trivia will be playable on Tuesdays and Fridays, Movie Trivia will be playable on Mondays and Saturdays, and so on. The secret to keeping traffic up is to offer your most popular content on both your highest- and lowest-traffic days. If Movie Trivia is the most popular, we need it available on the site so that the biggest number of Hobos can enjoy it. We also want it on our lowest-traffic day, so that it will boost traffic on that day.

So now there are three compelling benefits to converting from Membership to Ownership:

1. No annoying ads
2. Play for as long as you like without being interrupted
3. Get access to all trivia packs on all days

And it’s a realtive cinch to add one more benefit: when we release a new trivia pack, Owners get to play it first for, let’s say, two weeks. (Maybe a month? i dunno. You tell me.)

So the benefits of converting from a Hobo to a Member are clear and compelling, and conversion is easy. The benefits or converting from a Member to an Owner are clear and compelling … but there’s obviously that enter-your-credit-card-and-part-with-your-hard-earned-monays barrier that we have to overcome. But all of us Flash devs eyeing microtransactions are facing that same problem.

Brother, Can You Spare a Die?

If you’ve had any experience with Hobos, you’ll know that most never pay. And especially in the free-to-play Flash free-for-all, i think there are many Hobos who have a tremendous fear of commitment. Can i really expect them to plunk down a whole shiny dollar for an entire month’s worth of play? Hobos are moths that will flit from shiny game to shiny game. If i really want to make a go of this thing, i need to come up with a way to take money from shiftless Hobos.

My limited research into micropayments has turned up evidence that offering multiple types of payments will net you more cash than one rigid payment system, like our subscription scheme. So alright – this is a little nuts, but try it on for size:

Hobos and Members click to join a multiplayer Interrupting Cow Trivia game. They’re served a 15-second ad. They get to play through x questions before they get booted back out to the lobby.

BUT … there is a die. The player rolls this die to earn bonus questions.

Let’s say that watching the 15-second ad buys you 15 questions. You play 15 questions, you get booted out to the lobby. But after the ad and before you jump into the game, you click to roll the bonus die. The number you roll adds to your question count. So if you roll a six, you get to answer 15 + 6 = 21 questions before getting booted out to the lobby.

Suddenly, Hobos feel that they’re getting away with something. If they roll a high number, they can buck the system. They’re really only allowed to answer 15 questions, but one sweet roll will keep them in the game longer than they’re supposed to be in there. This ability to stick it to the man will really resonate with Hobos.

So what are we going to sell to Hobos and Members? More dice.

Hobos and Members can, for a nominal fee, purchase another die. Suddenly, players have the potential to roll a 12 – max 6 pips on the standard die, and max 6 on the purchased die. 15 + 12 = 27 questions before getting the bum’s rush. A die will cost maybe fifty cents. That’s HALF the cost of the extortionist monthly subscription fee. Players can buy multiple dice – we may even sell three dice for a discount in a bundle – to stay in the same play session longer.

Dice, of course, are degradable.

I Second That Emotion

The folks who are really raking in the dough with micropayments are the ones who build up the player’s passion and sting him for cash at the most fervent, crucial moment: Alright, i’ve spent two hours playing this game. i have ZERO continues left, and i NEED to buy the Implausibly Large Gun for $1.50 to get to the next level where there’s a Save Point.

Emotional impact. Impulse buys.

One way we could do this with Interrupting Cow Trivia is to offer some kind of incentive – say, a Double Points day – on certain trivia packs. Answer questions from the Music Pack and earn double points. Of course, today is Friday, and the Music Pack is only available to Hobos and Members for free on Saturday. But man, i just GOTTA get in there to earn those double points to increase my player rank and overtake Member markergreen in the leaderboards.

i click the Music Pack, and the pop-up tells me that i can pay the subscription fee to access ALL trivia on ANY day of the week. But who am i – Ritchie Rich? i can’t afford a subscription.

But wait – there’s one more option available to me. Apparently, i can pay fifty cents – HALF the cost of a month’s subscription – for a Day Pass. That’ll get me into the Music Pack to earn my double points. Deal of the Century!

Of course, this might have the opposite effect on the discerning consumer. “i can pay fitty cents for a single day, or one dollar for an entire month? A month is, like, thirty-five days or something. That’s a way better deal. And who knows what other double points promotions they’ll have this month? i’m going to pay the buck.”

And then:

“Waaait a second … you mean i get one month free if i buy an annual pass? That’s, like, a 40% savings!”

And finally:

“HOLD ON! There’s a DONATE button?? So i can actually dump two months’ salary into this game to show my gratitude and appreciation to the amazingly talented developer? Well clearly, that’s the best deal of all!”

You should come live inside my brain. It’s a good time.

Armchair Presidents

i’ve lovingly detailed all this strategy to you because i’m lucky enough to have some of the smartest people in the industry visting this blog. i’d really like your feedback on whether this plan is solid, or whether you think we’ll crash and burn. i would, of course, be thrilled if you knew of any brilliant ways to monetize Interrupting Cow Trivia that i haven’t thought of.

And if this article has spurred any thoughts towards how you can monetize YOUR upcoming game, superb! Our game world may be filled with Hobos, but curiously, there’s an awful lot of money stuffed into those bindles.

Moo.

i was a little surprised that no one went for the broader definition of cheese, a la “camp” or “corn”.

This year’s theme is SCALE, which offers many more possibilities. i thought i’d run down the different uses of the word to provide this year’s Jammers with some inspiration:

1. To Climb

Make a game about:

• scaling a building (Rampage, anyone?)
• scaling a wall (like Achilles in the Trojan War! … or Spider-Man, for you plebs)
• scaling a rock face of a mountain

2. A Horny Skin Plate

Make a game about:

• a snake!
• a lizard!
• a fish!
• a pangolin! Because they’re weird.

3. To remove plaque from the teeth.

Make a game about:

• An amateur dentist (i think Adult Swim already did this, but i can’t find the link)

4. A device for weighing things.

Make a game about:

• Weighing things! (the best example i can think of is at VectorPark – click the icon with the snowman)
• the astrological Libra sign is a pair of scales. Some kind of horoscope game/
• the figure of blind justice holds a pair of scales
• the Wii Balance Board is a (barely) high-tech bathroom scale

5. A representation of proportionate size.

This is the one that comes to mind most naturally, i think. Make a game about:

• things that are big and things that are little. (yawn)
• i dunno. This is the most obvious one, so it’s the least appealing to me.

6. A graduated system of wages or rates.

As in “pay scale”. Do a game about:

• Santa’s elves viciously competing for corporate bonuses
• a union worker bumping off employees with more seniority so that he can earn a higher wage
• a tycoon game about managing the wages of sweatshop workers

7. An ordered progression of musical notes.

Make a game about:

• That scene from the Sound of Music where Julie Andrews teaches the children to sing “do re me”. ACTION-PACKED!!
• Some crazy avoid-the-obstacle game that takes place on top of a gigantic piano keyboard. Remember Bumble Boogie?

There are other definitions, i’m sure. My point is that before you do some take on Shadow of the Colossus this weekend at the Jam, consider your options! They are many and varied.

TOJam is this weekend, May 1-3 2009 in Toronto. Spots are limited, so sign up now!