1. Hitler Has Escaped and is Disguised as Sigmund Freud

According to Wikipedia’s Diguise entry, the United States secret service circulated a Wanted poster throughout Germany in 1945, depicting a newly made-over Adolph Hitler. The fear was that Hitler may escape capture or defeat by the Allies, and was one haircut away from getting away scott free. It’s amazing how much more like a bitter, angry college professor he looks with that altered mustache and haircut, rather than the … you know … mass murderer of millions of people.

2. Keeping a Stiff Upper Lip During the Zombie Apocalypse

YouTube user SimCal demonstrates the cheat code in Plants Vs. Zombies that gives all the zombies mustaches:

3. Former Con Man Helps the FBI Catch a Crook

Wired Magazine tells the tale of a former con man who ratted on a young hacker interested in defrauding automated teller machines. The FBI stepped in and, with the help of a fake mustache and the alias “Leo”, were able to catch the crook red-handed.

4. Hair Transplant Goes Horribly Wrong

As payback for some past pranks, this YouTube user fashions a mustache from his short n’ curlies and convinces his girlfriend to wear it.

5. Tiny Clay Hooligans Terrorize Fake England

Serendipitously, this randomly-generated headline dovetails nicely into one of our original projects. Kahoots is a fun crime-themed puzzle game modeled entirely in clay, in which tiny mustachioed villains commit modestly heinous acts.

Is there an outrageous mustache fraud i missed? It’s very likely. Let me know in the comments section!

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!

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:

[poll id="4"]

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.

Enter New and Better Technologies

One of those technologies that you’ve likely heard of is Unity 3D. Unity (for short) is a game creation tool with a similar schtick as Flash – players accept a one-time download of a web player plugin, and from there they can download and display content created for the player. In this case, the content is THREE-DEE, baby. And i’m not talking about Flash 3D, which is like drinking non-alcoholic vodka, or even Papervision 3D and its ilk, which is like trying to turn a car into a plane by stapling cardboard wings to it. i’m talking all three dees, in glorious Technicolor, with … Blast Processing and 64 … i dunno … blytes of processing and render power. (Technical specs are not my strong suit. Could you tell?)

i love this post by Ethical Games, Confessions of a Flash Game Developer, which sums the situation up very nicely.

The Unity 3D Web Player, which i encourage you to download now in anticipation of all the awesome stuff we’ll be building, is currently 3.18MB. That’s only slightly larger than the Flash Player plugin at 1.87 MB. Penetration rate is the the real difference – i heard somewhere that Flash Player, with its various incarnations, is the most installed piece of software of all time. i think penetration is up somewhere around a thousand percent (all numbers approximated).

But What Does It Cost?

From a developer standpoint, price is a big difference. Unity rocks out on multiple platforms including Wii and iPhone, but it also rocks out on different prices. The product appears deceptively inexpensive at first, but when you look at purchasing a real software solution and the accompanying programs it requires, you’ll find yourself wondering which credit union or train you’ll have to rob to afford it. Leave it to penny-pinching me to give you the breakdown:

Product #1 Unity 3D core engine. You must purchase this engine to be able to develop on any other non-PC/Mac platform. (ie you can’t just skip ahead and buy Unity iPhone on its own)

• Unity Indie – $200
• Unity Pro – $1500

Next up is the iPhone license. The Pro version is pretty crucial as it gives you stripping rights, which means that you can disable large chunks of the Unity3D framework that you don’t need, freeing up space and memory for your game. You also don’t have to display the Unity logo in front of your game.

• Unity iPhone Basic – $400
• Unity iPhone Advanced – $1500

Then there’s the Wii license. i see a lot of people mentioning it when they talk about Unity, but they obviously haven’t done their research – otherwise, it wouldn’t be a thought in their minds. You’ll notice from the Unity 3D pricing page that you have to contact the company to ask about Wii license pricing, and that it’s also listed with the source code for their entire app. It’s the same rule as restaurants: if they don’t list the price, you can’t afford it. When i spoke with a Unity 3D rep at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this year, he intimated that the then-current pricing was $10000.

Suffice it to say, Unity Wii is not part of our current strategy.

But That’s Not All

One of the biggest barriers to entry for us exploring the Unity 3D space is the 3D software we’d need. It’s all fine and dandy to have a great program like Unity with a smooth pipeline that integrates with a number of leading 3D software packages, but you need one of those 3D software packages, don’t you? The enormous cost of these packages has led us to explore various less expensive options – Cheetah3D, Blender, Sketch-Up … but in the end, none of them are as familiar or decent as the package i learned on in college, 3DStudio Max.

Here’s the trouble:

• Autodesk 3ds Max – $3495

Ouch. There used to be a lower-priced entry level program called gmax that the company discontinued, because they realized that they weren’t getting 3495 bloody dollars for it.

Putting It All Together

So let’s tally that all up. We have two developers, so we’d want two copies of Unity 3D core . But i figure we only need 1 pro license for deployment (i think?). We’d also only need 1 copy of Unity 3D iPhone, because we only have one Mac (and an Apple computer is required for iPhone deployment). Ideally, we’d buy two copies of 3ds Max, but unless and until the government approves gay marriage and i get hitched to Ritchie Rich, we’re looking at one copy.

So that’s:

• 1 Unity 3D Core Pro License – $1500
• 1 Unity 3D Indie License – $200
• 1 Unity 3D iPhone Pro License – $1500
• 1 Autodesk 3ds Max seat – 3495 friggin’ simoleans

Grand total: $6695

The Small Favour

i hope this has been an enjoyable learning experience, and a glimpse into the types of things that give a small business owner a grand mal seizure. The last time i spent over $7000 on something, it had a roof and indoor plumbing.

But you can help! The Unity 3D crew did a podcast interview wit the folks at Indie Game Dev Podcast Show. They gave the site a free Unity iPhone license to give away in a contest, which we entered. We very rarely enter contests, but in this case, all you had to do was write up a game idea. Preference will be given to the entrant who is the most likely to finish his project.

Well looky here … who’s got a perfectly AWESOME-LOOKING game in the works called Kahoots, which was modeled enirely in clay and built for the iPhone screen spec? (Answer: us.)

i get annoyed when people say “go here and vote for us!” What if their entry isn’t the best one? In this case, i’ll only say “Go here!” Click the link. Read the entries. And if you like what we have to offer the most, just leave a quick comment to tell the site owners you want to see us bring Kahoots™ to the iPhone.

According to the site, “Winner gets all the Unity tools needed to make an iPhone game using their platform.” i don’t know if this means they’re giving away the core engine along with the iPhone license, and whether they’re giving away pro or indie licenses (i suspect indie), but at the very least, it’ll knock $400 off the cost of our Unity 3D ambitions. And at the very most, it’ll cut the total down by $3000. Wowzers!

So search your heart! And if you find it in yourself to vote for us (we’re entry #8), i thank you very, very kindly. Voting ends today!

Update

1. We won … hooray! Thanks for voting.
2. A few quick questions to Tom Higgins from the Unity team cleared up some of my questions. Since a single company is not allowed to mix licenses (Pro and Indie), the cost of my software solution jumps up by a big $2400 to $9095. That’s almost ten-large for Unity3D iPhone for two people, and one copy of 3ds Max.

   By biting the bullet and learning Blender instead of buying 3ds Max, the price comes down to $5600. That still be one spicy meat-a-ball.

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.