Here are the FACTS that i’ve learned about game pricing:

If your game has a broad appeal, you can charge a relatively small amount of money for it and hope to make it up in volume.

If your game appeals to a small group of people – and, i mean, it REALLY appeals to that small group of people – you can charge a higher price, to make up for lost sales to everyone else, and to capitalize on your audience’s undying love of whatever.

Angry Birds? 99 cents. Sean O’Brien: Pro Windsurfer? Ten dollars.

So here i am developing Spellirium. It’s a graphic adventure game, in the style of those LucasArts/Sierra Online games from the 90′s, that have been relegated to a very narrow corner of niche gamedom – nestled in-between train simulators and Japanese child-rearing games.

But more than that, Spellirium is an experimental mash-up – a graphic adventure game mixed with a word puzzle game. It’s LOOM meets Boggle. Niche meets niche. Narrow audience carved down to an even more narrow audience. It’s like building a train simulator where you raise your train to be a little lady.

Born 2 Spell

So this game, on paper, is very very niche. Like many indies do, i’m making the game that i would want to play. You see, i grew up doing crossword puzzles. At eight years old, when other boys were thumbing through their dads’ copies of Oui, i was floundering through PennyPress variety magazines, trying to solve the Fill-Its. Other boys knew they had come of age when they finally beat up their old man after he lost the family car in a drunken poker game. My big coup was finally beating my mom at Scrabble.

i ran into a lot of trouble when i presented this game to the Casual crowd in Seattle. The most common reaction i received was that Spellirium was “too smart” for the middle-aged mom audience that Casual catered to. This was a huge blow, because the game was originally designed for that exact crowd, with nods to the dark fantasy that nerdy moms love.

i learned quickly that my biggest challenge with Spellirium would not be building the game, but marketing it. How would i find the niche audience that would adore the game, and pay a little more money for it than usual because it so suited their needs?

My first attempt was to build a web game portal packed with word games, which i called Word Game World – the idea being that i could learn from the hundreds of other word games out there, meet and talk to my audience, and most importantly, control the ad inventory so i could push that audience to Spellirium. My plan failed when marketing Word Game World became as big a marketing challenge as marketing Spellirium ever was.

This all led me to face some tough questions. Chief among them: did i overestimate the word game market? Is the group of players who will enjoy my game really too small to support the cost of developing it?

The success of Scrabulous, Words with Friends, Text Twist, and the critical success of indie games SpellTower, PuzzleJuice and Wurdle seem to suggest otherwise. i was even wrong about Bookworm Adventures, Spellirium’s kissing cousin and the game upon which this entire project was predicated. When the Casual crowd told me that word games didn’t “do well”, i thought for sure they were pointing to Bookworm Adventures, with its astronomical $700k budget, as a financial failure.

But get this: i learned recently that Bookworm Adventures has had two sequels. Generally, the existence of sequels indicates the financial success of the original, or at least projected financial success of future installments.

But What If i’m Dumb?

Before Spellirium was playable and i’d describe the game to people, common objections included:

• What if i don’t know what words to make?
• i’m bad at spelling.
• i’m slow at making words.
• How do you (or i) know there are any valid words in the grid?
• Longest words are best words, right?
• What if you just can’t make a word?

Based on these fears, i’ve made a LOT of concessions in gameplay to cater to a crowd that wouldn’t really consider playing word games, and that doesn’t count “word game” as a preferred genre.

Q: What if i don’t know what words to make?
A: There are two features – the Dictionary and the Quicklist – that mitigate this. The Dictionary stores all the words in the game. You can add words from the Dictionary on to your Quicklist, which hangs off the side of the grid while you’re playing. This way, Spellirium becomes sort of a build-your-own-word-search. And of all the activities in the Pantheon of Word Games, even the (self-described) dumbest players can complete a word search.

Q: i’m bad at spelling.
A: In an early Spellirum challenge, you have to shear a sheep by spelling words that have to do with cutting: SHEAR, CUT, CHOP, CLIP, TRIM, etc. i’ve only completed five playtests, but 2/5 players have spelled “SHEER”, a homonym for “SHEAR”. And they were confused when it didn’t work.

This led one tester to suggest i modify the game so that when you lasso a group of letters (like “BAED”), the game anagrams it until it finds a valid word in the Dictionary (“BEAD” or “BADE”). So it doesn’t matter whether you can spell or not -if you know there’s a valid word in the letters you lassoed, the game will accept the letters.

Q: i’m slow at making words.
A: This was a very early concession i knew i’d have to make. Many players hated the time pressure in the game, so i modified Spellirium to be turn-based. The Spellcaster has a “health bar” at the top. Whenever you swap letter tiles, your health goes down. The farther apart the letter tiles are, the more health you lose when you swap them. Guessing at bogus words also dings your bar. This turns Spellirium into a much more methodical, strategic game, and the time pressure has been removed completely.

Q: How do you (or i) know there are any valid words in the grid?
A: Obviously, this is a question that only non-word-game-players would ever ask. A few people have suggested that i run an algorithm in the game to highlight a valid word if a player can’t find one, much the same way that Bejeweled highlights a valid match after a few seconds of inactivity have elapsed.

Here’s the deal: the grid is 7×7 tiles, and it uses a Scrabble-like distribution, favouring common letters (RSTLNEAIOU etc – all the 1-point tiles in Scrabble). So essentially, you’re starting at a 49-letter anagram puzzle. If you can’t make a single 3-8-letter word given FORTY-NINE TILES, there’s really not much i can do for you. Go play Gears of War, and stop wasting my precious oxygen.

Q: Longest words are best words, right?
A: Here’s another classic objection from non-word-game-players. This one is so pervasive that even the creators of PuzzleJuice conceded and make longer words worth more points. As any proper Scrabble player knows, certain words are more difficult to make than others. “MUCH” is a higher-value word than “ROOSTER”, because the letters “M”, “C” and “H” are found in fewer English words than more common letters like the ones that comprise “ROOSTER”.

But in his GDC 2011 keynote, Sid Meier revealed that if the odds were 60/40 that a player would win a given battle, and the player lost that battle, the player would complain. “i had more guys”, the player would say. Mathematically, it made sense. Mathematically, the player should lose 4/10 times. But it felt unfair to the player.

Likewise, most players don’t care a fig for letter distribution and probabilities. To them, it takes more mental effort to make a long word than a short one – Z’s and Q’s be damned. Even worse, many players feel that the more obscure a word is, the more points it should be worth. So PARSONS, which is an odd and somewhat outdated word, should be worth more points than the more common word PUNCH. But in Scrabble scoring, PARSONS is worth 9 points, while PUNCH is worth 10 points (P3 + A1 + R1 + S1 + O1 + N1 + S1 = 9 vs P3 + U1 + N1 + C3 + H2 = 10).

Logistically, it would be very very difficult to award the player extra points for “obscure” or “clever” words. “Clever” words, really, are the ones you can spell using as many high-value letters as possible (think “BUZZ”, “QUENCH”, and “JAVA”). But the people – and i mean the E for Everyone people – want long words to trump challenging letter combination.

Q: What if you just can’t make a word?
A: i really bristle at this. It’s like if i were building a first-person shooter, and i had a lot of non-FPS fans asking me “what if i can’t shoot a guy?” There’s no such thing as not shooting a guy in an FPS. You SHOOT GUYS in an FPS. That’s what you do. That’s like asking “what if i can’t jump?” in a Mario platformer,
or “what if i can’t make car go?” in a racing game. Spellirium is about MAKING WORDS. You MAKE WORDS. What if you can’t make a word? There’s NO SUCH THING. That’s what you DO in this GAME.

i’m Down On My Niche

(Note: that heading doesn’t make a lot of sense if you pronounce it “nitch” .. but if you pronounce it “nitch”, living does not make a lot of sense, so please go directly to the nearest suiciditorium and kill yourself. Thanks kindly.)

As of now, i’ve only ever tested the game with non-word-game-players. i love them all dearly, and i don’t want them to be offended, but for the sake of this article, i’m going to call them the dumb players (in the same way that someone who doesn’t know how to strafe in an FPS, or how to handbrake-turn in a racing game, is “dumb”). The dumb players are not the target audience.

i was concerned because the game ground to a halt at the sheep challenge when the “dumb” players played. Many of them couldn’t think of enough synonyms for “CUT”. This led me to make the biggest and most controversial gameplay concession of all: you can’t lose If you play the game and can’t pass it for lack of ability, your energy eventually runs down and you win anyway. This is based on something i heard one of the Casual folks say at GDC many years ago, while advocating for women gamers: “If you buy a video game and you can’t access ALL of the content on that disc, go ask for your money back.” So in Spellirium, you’re never “stuck”. You can always proceed through the game, see all the story bits, and play through all the challenges – even if you fail at them.

A Word From the Wise

i’ve had one lengthy email conversation with a die-hard word game fan. In stark contrast to “i can’t think of any words that mean ‘cut’” and “that’s how you spell ‘SHEER’, right?”, here’s what the target audience wants:

if the challenges are a little more difficult than three- and four-letter words for SHEAR, then it could be a new adventure for traditional logophiles (like myself).

Say, something like… “Save the equines by naming all of the varieties”… HORSE, ZEBRA, COLT, DONKEY, ZEBRASS, JACKASS, CAYUSE, EQUID, ZEBRINE, NEDDY, ZEBROID, BRUMBY, ASS, MOKE, BURRO, CUDDY, JENNY, AIVER, FILLY, etc. Or maybe instead of shearing a sheep in a hurry, you can say “Save the sheep from getting sheared by giving up all of its buddies”… BUCK, DAM, EWE, RAM, HOGG, HOGGET, WETHER, LAMB, MULE, TEG, TUP, DOWNS, SLINK, BELL, SHEARLING, etc.

The “dumb” players, after trying Spellirium, have all said to me “gee … i didn’t think i would enjoy that, but it’s quite fun, and i don’t usually like word games.” So there’s a small victory. But when the game is out in the wild with only its trailer and my under-funded marketing strategy to support it, how am i going to get non-word-game-players to even pick it up and try it? One glimpse of those letter tiles, and they’ll be headed for the hills.

i’m at a crossroads. Do i:

1. Continue to make concessions to “dumb” players and make Spellirium playable by Everyone, and then risk “dumb” players not even bothering to try the game because it doesn’t LOOK like the kind of thing they’d enjoy
2. Go hardcore and court the logophiles, making the game challenging and interesting (as above), and then risk not finding nearly enough hardcore wordies to buy the game and help me break even
3. Strike some kind of balance. And what IS that balance?

i leave it to you, dear readers! Please help me figure this one out, and clarify your stance in the Comments section!

Word.

Here’s an early production example of what we call a “word quality” challenge: spell words that have to do with cutting in order to shear a sheep.

Check back on Friday for a first glimpse of the Companion System in Spellirium!

Word.

1. It’s one letter short of a 50-point BINGO (Scrabble’s point bonus for using all your letters).
2. You may not reach one of the bonus tiles with it (most notably Triple Word Score).
3. The letters in “TETHER” are all low-value, worth one point apiece.
4. With a sprawling crossword, you’re opening up a LOT of options for your opponent to exploit.

Often in Scrabble, it’s the tiny, well-placed words that win the day, enabling you to re-score two additional words that are already on the board via clever linking.

A Word of a Different Colour

The same goes for Spellirium. Spelling a 7-letter word is fine, but if you want to send your score into the stratosphere, you need to make solidly-coloured words.

Here’s how the combo/chain system works:

Big scores are extremely important for dominating your friends and showing off your superior vocabulary and intellect. In Story Mode, you’ll need these points in order to craft power-ups. More on power-ups in a future post.

Word.

That’s why it’s so rewarding to stand on the far shore and gaze back across that tumultuous ocean. Here are some screenshots illustrating how Spellirium began, and how far it’s come.

Word.

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

i Got All the Awards

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

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

I Fold

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Remains of the Day

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

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

Young Folks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s really frustrating when you make a word in a game, and it’s not recognized by the game’s dictionary. It’s the worst when the word is a perfectly natural English word like “PUCE”, but a game like Jumbline doesn’t accept it. (Hear that, Jumbline devs? Ahem. AHEM.)

But in other situations, you punch in words like “bazooms” with a childish grin on your face, and when the game doesn’t recognize it, you click your tongue in mock outrage.

Triple Word Score for “BLEEP”

The Official Scrabble Players’ Dictionary prides itself on being the most complete and fair collection of words suitable for tournament play, but it ran up against some controversy when a player complained about the listing of non-capitalized “jew” as a verb, with the accompanying definition “to bargain with – an offensive term”. The Jewish Defamation League got involved, and the next version of the OSPD removed the offending word, along with a big list of other words for good measure, including (but not limited to):

• boobie
• cunt
• faggoty
• the almighty fuck
• fubar
• hebe
• jesuit (i’m really not sure why? Unless there’s a pejorative verb form, as with “jew” … ?)
• nookie
• poo
• wetback

The Seattle SCRABBLE® Club has a complete list of expurgated words in case you’re up for a giggle or gasp.

When the neutered list was released, the players revolted, many of them upset at not having been consulted. There were threats of event boycotting and … rioting? i dunno. What do Scrabble players do when they’re enraged? Spell “GRR”?

Caving to the pressure, the Scrabbleati released an unexpurgated Official Tournament and Club Word List.

Somebody Set Us Up the F-Bomb

All this to say, i’m at a point now where i’m considering the word list for Spellirium, and whether or not it should contain naughties. As i’ve said before, the game is not necessarily for kids, so we can take “WILL SOMEONE CONSIDER THE CHILDREN??” handily out of the equation.

The difference between Spellirium and Scrabble is that while you have the option to spell various words in Scrabble, Spellirium may actually require you to spell certain words. For example, you may come to a point in the game where you meet a character who won’t let you pass unless you’ve spelled every word beginning with “Q”. i think this makes a big difference in deciding whether or not to include certain words on the list. When the word list is all up in your bidness, i don’t want to force a player to spell a word he is uncomfortable spelling.

Degrees of Depravity

We can sort the expurgated words into these general categories:

1. Swears
2. Euphemisms for swears
3. Racist/Prejudiced terms
4. Puerile words for body functions/parts (impolite words that mostly kids would use)
5. Crass words for body functions (impolite words that mostly adults would use)

So we could go a number of different ways with Spellirium. We could include these words, and complaints be damned. We could, as some have suggested, give the player an optional switch to flip that’s off by default – when you turn it on, you get the complete word list. And the “complete” word list could be everything but swears and racism, everything but racism, or even plain old everything … (but i have a gut feeling that of any of the words on the list, most people are most likely to take most offense at the racist/prejudiced stuff).

What do YOU think? Should we include a content switch? Should we include all the naughty words, or just some of them?

When you answer, imagine yourself playing Spellirium, making one of these words, and reacting when the game does (or doesn’t) acknowledge it. And imagine your reaction if the game required you to make one or all of the words on the list.

Thanks, everyone!

Word.

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.

Spellirium is a story-based game with a word puzzle mechanic. Many people have asked me “Who’s the target audience? Kids?”, or have cocked a skeptical eye, implying that it will never succeed in the mainstream marketplace … but maybe i should try selling the game to schools?

Breaking from Untold Entertainment’s core competency, we’re not developing Spellirium for kids. It’s a game for grown-ups. That’s because, simply put, kids hate word games.

H8

Back when i was working at YTV, i developed a series of games called The Sitekick Saga. It had an episodic release schedule, and each chapter contained a game. To progress through the story, you had to finish the game sandwiched inside.

The second chapter’s game was called Four Letter Words, because i’m subversive like that. It had four slots at the bottom of the screen. Letters would cascade down from the top. You guided them into the slots to form four-letter words. You needed to meet a quota of words before time ran out to proceed.

It was an extremely easy game. The clear strategy was to line up “ALL” at one end, and then plunk down letters to form “BALL”, “MALL”, “CALL”, “FALL”, “TALL”, etc. You could do the same thing with “OTE”, “ELL”, “ATE” or any other common letter formation. i figured any kid who’s read a Dr. Seuss book knows this. Or maybe i paid just a little too much attention to Sesame Street when i was younger, while other kids were busy imagining what’s up Prairie Dawn’s skirt?

At any rate, i overestimated the ability of nine and ten year olds to spell simple words. i received more hate mail about that game than anything i’ve ever done. The vitriol poured in over the message boards:

YTV how daer you made a game that maks us spel words?? what is this shool, if i wantd to learn i nad go sit in Miss jenkins class

While that’s not an actual quote from the site’s boards, please understand, dear reader, that in no way am i exaggerating the grammatical prowess here.

For the Love of the Queen’s English

So i don’t have plans to foist Spellirium on the school system. It’s a game for people who enjoy spelling words – who do it for fun rather than out of obligation. My players will be people who hold Scrabble matches, who adore Words with Friends, who hunch over newspaper crossword puzzles, and who cruise around WordGameWorld.com on their lunch break – during their adult job for adults.

It’s important, then, to know who your audience isn’t, so that you don’t waste marketing time and effort talking about your game to people who couldn’t care less. Beyond that, if you’ve really done the legwork to identify your target audience, don’t let folks who haven’t done the research convince you that you should be selling to someone else.

Word.

I’ll be flying out to the event in Culver City California next month to bring sunshine, love, and high-pitched screaming to a state famous for its short days and dreary cloud cover. While there, i’ll be able to try out some of the year’s most talked-about indie titles, and i’ll get to hang out with an absolutely stellar group of independent game developers, many of whom i’ll likely have regrettable and unfortunate sex with. i’m creeping all their Facebook photos right now, trying to weed out the ugly ones.

Also in the running are Toronto’s Capy/SuperBrothers with Sword & Sworcery, who developed the game directly across the hall from the Untold offices under our meddling eye. And you may not yet have heard of BigPants or their selected stereoscopic game The Depths to Which I Sink, but that’s another Toronto game by none other than Jim and emilie McGinley, co-founders of the weekend-long TOJam event where Cassie and i developed Ponycorns. Finally, Gamercamp co-founder Jaime Woo had his “real” game Gargoyles selected to be part of the expo.

And it won’t just be Toronto finalists attending – there’s a whole gaggle of us from the TDot flying out, including Mathew Kumar, the indie journalist behind EXP, Shawn McGrath, who’s currently building the trippy PS3 game Dyad, and indie dev Michael Todd, who gets a front row seat to my orgiastic debauchery because we’re splitting a hotel room. This just further solidifies Toronto’s reputation as the hub of indie game development in North America, and perhaps the world.

While i’d love to bring Cassie to the event, one of the drawbacks to being an indie is that you’re constantly down at the blood bank trying to sap enough haemoglobin to make rent. i could get her a plane ticket, but then of course i wouldn’t be able to act up at IndieCade, so i’d have to bring her mom … and if i brought Cheryl, i’d have to buy a ticket for Cassie’s little sister … and if you’ve ever seen our family pack for a 2-day stay at Grandma’s, you’d know that we couldn’t stop there – we’d have to charter our own cargo plane to transport all the “necessities” that two little girls require so that the day doesn’t devolve into a competition to see who can shriek the loudest. In short, i don’t have the means.

Ask Me About Loom™

While i’ll be happy to talk Ponycorns and its upcoming Japanese translation, i feel the game has about as much press and attention as any indie title will ever get. As IndieCade fast approaches, we’re working hard on playable demos of our upcoming games, Putty Crime: On the Trail of the Foxy Badger, a puzzle game modeled entirely in clay, and Spellirium, a post-apocalyptic word puzzle adventure game.

See you at IndieCade!

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.

I’ll Buy THAT For a Dollar

i’ve heard a little murmering about the game’s price point. For your education and edification, here is a list of five things to occupy your kid that are more expensive than Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure:

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is $2.99 on the iTunes App Store. i leave you with The Oatmeal. Seacrest out.

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.

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

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

Worth 1000 Words

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

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

Acclaim for Heads

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

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.

Logo 1

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.

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

One of Us

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

Talking Heads

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

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

One Note

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

UPDATE

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

Canada’s video game industry is a going concern

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Category Exclusivity

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

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

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

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

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

Idiocracy

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

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

Luna-cy

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

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

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

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

*** spoilers ***

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

And here’s just the backstory to Spellirium:

*** no spoilers ***

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

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

What Sort of Gamer Plays Spellirium?

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

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

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

Beer Covers a Multitude of Sins

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

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

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

   

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

   

   

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

   

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

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

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

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

Word.

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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.

Today, i want to introduce you to the two main characters in the game: Brother Todd and Lorms.

Brother Todd is the youngest member of the secret society of Runekeepers. He pairs up with the hulking Lorms, who has been changed into a big blue tunk against his will. Together, they set out on a quest to find the other Runekeepers, after one of the Runekeepers returns to the cottages and promptly dies.

Word.

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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!

It Begins

i spoke to some students the Toronto chapter IGDA meeting two weeks ago, and it brought back what a terrible struggle it was to bridge the gap between education and career. Last night, i read this obnoxious sob story by Alistair Jones who just wants to realize his dream: to become a video game designer/writer, except without having to do all that hard stuff like programming or drawing. The article is very very long, so i’ll pull a few choice quotes to sum it up for you:

Boo hoo hoo. Life is hard. Waaaahhh wahhh. Violin music. Why won’t anyone give me a job despite my complete lack of ability? Sob sob sob. Colleges are trying to ruin my life. Why does everyone hate me? It must be the world’s problem, not mine. Sniffle sob. Please give me a job in games, because i’m great at playing games.

Like the students at the IGDA meeting, Alistair makes some bad assumptions that are holding him, and many students, back:

1. An interest in gaming as a hobby has some bearing on my ability to succeed as a game developer.
2. Someone will hire me straight out of school (or while i’m in school) as a game designer/writer.
3. Since i trained in x/y/z, the world owes me a living in that field.
4. i don’t have to be an expert in any one thing … i can dabble in all aspects of game production and design, and land a job.

Reading Alistair’s article and talking to the guys at the IGDA meeting was painful, because it brought to mind my own struggle, and reminded me that i made the same bad assumptions. i had a lousy time in college, like Alistair, and i moaned about it like a little bitch, like Alistair, with badly-composed prose, like Alistair. i hate Alistair. i hate his article. i see too much of myself in it, and it embarrasses me. But through certain twists of fate, i somehow made it … and perhaps, as he matures and hunkers down and does what needs doing, Alistair will make it too.

Making It

As of this month, i became a ten-year veteran of the video game industry. Ten years ago, in April 2000, i accepted a job at Corus Entertainment making video games for the website of their kids’ station, YTV. (YTV is like the Canadian version of Nickelodeon.)

And as long as i’m bragging, i want to be clear: i’m not talking about ten years in the industry doing industry-related things, like pushing a mop at a video game studio, or making games in my mom’s basement for a few years. i’ve racked up ten solid years of personally designing and creating actual video games in exchange for money. i’m not positive that the story of how that happened could happen again today, but in case it helps any of you, here it is.

Art School Drop-Out

Coming out of high school, i had not taken art. This was due to a conflict with the Performing Arts program which had eaten up all of my electives. i was a drama major, a budding playwright, and had starred in a few musicals by the time i had graduated. i didn’t take computer courses either, except in my final year. The final project for the senior-level course was a video game. While the course was programming-centric, and i had none of the prerequisites, i slipped in by making the case that game development was multi-disciplinary, and that i should be able to take the course as an artist/animator.

So leaving high school, i had no fine arts training and i had muscled my way into one computers course, with no programming knowledge. Naturally, i decided i wanted to be a computer animator.

i applied to the province’s most prestigious art college, and was accepted into their Art Fundamentals survey course (“art is fun for mentals!” as the students called it). The computer animation program was a post-grad course, and the Animation and Illustration programs were filled with actual talented artists. A month before classes started, they offered me a spot in the Illustration program, because someone wasn’t able to pay his tuition, and i was next in line on their ranked list of portfolios. i took the slot. After four months of growing keenly aware that i was out-leagued by far, far better talent, i dropped out.

Lesson: If you’re in over your head, best to admit it early and switch tracks while the damage is minimal.

Community College (or: When Does the Hurting Stop?)

i slid over to another college almost immediately, and took their computer animation program. This was NOT a prestigious school by any means. Clueless teachers proudly plastered the walls with plagiarized student assignments. The classes were filled with international students who didn’t speak English, and ate up the instructors’ time asking them to slowly, clearly explain rudimentary instructions (“Click file … SAVE. No – not ‘shave’ …. “) i had a lousy time.

The program had one interactive course in Director. i really took to it. Lingo, the scripting language, was simple enough to allow me to make button rollovers and responses, which was almost all i needed to make a simple first-person graphic adventure or puzzle game like MYST. So while most other students struggled with Director, i really had a good time with it. Our final assignment in that class was to make a program that had a title screen with five buttons on it. Each of the five buttons would link to a scene demonstrating a different animation type: tweening, mouse-tracking, straight-ahead, motion path, and i forget. i knew the other students would blow off the assignment and animate a bunch of meaningless circles and triangles around the screen (i was right!), so i made something called Bouncing Baby Boys:

The school ostensibly had a co-op placement program, but like so many schools, they only had three industry contacts which were quickly exhausted. It was up to the students to find their own placements. i found one on my own in the Durham Board of Education (Durham is a district East of Toronto). The school hired me on contract as a technology tutor. i taught junior kindergarten kids how to use a mouse, i taught fourth-grade kids how to use a word processor, and i taught a sixth-grade gifted class how to make animated movies on the computer.

When that was over, i returned to the college to cut together my demo reel. i purchased a plane ticket and a pass to SIGgraph (Special Interest Group – Computer Graphics), an international conference in Florida where it was rumoured that big studios like Digital Design, Industrial Light and Magic, and PIXAR would hire graduates. i booked the edit room for three days and hastily began cutting my reel together over the weekend – my flight to SIGGraph left Monday. In the middle of that ordeal, the facilities manager kicked me out of the edit suite because i was no longer a student (my co-op placement had ended the week prior). i remember tearfully appealing to the school president in her office to let me finish cutting my reel. She begrudgingly agreed, but warned me that i was never to return to the school. i haven’t. To this day, i’m careful never to mention the name of that school, in case they ever try to claim me as a success story. Karma, friends.

Lesson: don’t take no for an answer, and don’t leave school without a proper portfolio. That portfolio is why you’re paying the money and spending the time.

BJs for Career Advancement: NOT a Myth

SIGGraph was a bust. i managed to weasel my way into a number of parties, including one at the top of the hotel overlooking Walt Disney World, where i spoke to the VP of Disney’s feature animation department. i realized the entire time that i scored a lot of party tickets because the gay men at the conference wanted a piece of my sweet cherry ass. Absolutely true story. (i didn’t give it up though! Let me repeat that fact for absolute clarity: i was then, and remain today, an ass virgin.) Despite meeting with a number of surprisingly high-ranking (and lascivious) people from various studios, i did not land a job at SIGgraph. And despite the header title of this section, i also did not blow anyone to get those tickets.

Lesson: There is always some legendary conference where desirable companies reportedly hire students. GDC has a career fair. i’m sure there are others. Don’t believe the hype. If you’re really that great, you won’t have to leave home to get noticed. And if your portfolio-fu is weak, you’re not getting a job, no matter how well-connected you make yourself. Unless you give up your man-hymen.

Seething at the Ceeb

i had a few misadventures in Toronto trying to find a job. Please understand that my hastily-slapped-together demo reel was HORRIBLE. i wouldn’t have hired me. i had one meeting at the CBC for a job making props for an unfunny show called Royal Canadian Air Farce, which is Canada’s second most toxic by-product next to pulp and paper mill runoff. They wanted signs and posters created with Adobe Illustrator. i showed the producer my hideous demo reel. He suggested i go to school. i told him i’d already been to school. He said i didn’t know how to use Illustrator. i protested that i DID … i was one of the best in my class. But since my portfolio didn’t contain any of my Illustrator pieces, i didn’t get the job. The guy actually said to me “Well, since your portfolio doesn’t have any Illustrator examples, despite what you say, you don’t know how to use Illustrator.” Not “i don’t THINK you know how to use Illustrator” – just “you DON’T know how to use Illustrator.”

Lesson: Tailor your portfolio samples to the job for which you’re applying. Employers can’t take you at your word.

In another instance, a guy went so far as to show me around the office and introduce me to the employees as someone who was going to start working there soon. He never called me back.

Lesson: Be consistent, follow up, and hold people to their promises. And unless there’s ink on a contract, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.

At a complete loss, i took a few more jobs with the Board of Education. The second job was teaching kids how to make games and mousetrap cars at a technology summer camp. The third was as an on-site technician for TVOntario’s Virtual Classroom project. i did that for a year.

Lesson: Inertia! Don’t be surprised if your first real job continues from the job you took as your college co-op placement. This means you should try your damndest to make your co-op placement as good as possible.

Rock Bottom

i was two years out of computer animation school, and i had nothing to show for it but some experience running an NES emulator during recess to distract two elementary school kids with rage issues from beating up the other kids on the playground. i had a number of near-misses, including one freelance job at City TV (a local Toronto teevee station). My college education had not panned out. i decided to admit defeat and try for a University degree. i enrolled at Trent University, and majored in Cultural Studies for one year, paying tuition with the money i’d made at the Board of Education, and my ongoing job as a clerk at a video rental store in my home town. The boss there kept his Adult section stocked with some disproportionately freaky stuff (in spite of the mostly sexually vanilla population), and screened most of it himself in his office in the basement. He was constantly on my case about my clothes not fitting properly – i had gained a ton of weight in college. This, friends – this was the low point for me. This is when i would have written my Alistair-style sob story on Gamasutra.

Lesson: Don’t write an Alistair-style sob story on Gamasutra. You’re low enough already.

Summer came. i had finished my intro courses in University. Since i had already conceded defeat and had taken the status quo measure of attending University, i figured i’d further submit to mundanity and get a summer job planting evergreen trees in a deforested chunk of Northern Ontario. i had heard it was soulless, back-breaking work, plagued with sunburns and black flies. With utter abandon, i started searching the online job site Monster.ca.

The Turning Point

That’s where i found it: a job posting for a game developer. i couldn’t believe my eyes. Could NOT believe them. Monster.ca was in its infancy, and was mostly packed with data-entry jobs and jobs selling knives door-to-door. There was never anything like THIS on that site. An actual game developer position. i freaked out.

The job was to use Macromedia Flash to create video games for YTV.com, a kids website. i spent my teen years watching a lot of YTV, and was smitten with their (then) purple, orange and green colour palette. This was too good to be true. A game developer at YTV. i was going insane.

i wrote a cover letter to them. A spazmodic one. An INSANE cover letter. i packed it with as much enthusiasm and passion as i could muster. It was an absolutely deranged cover letter. i attached my resume, and told them i had a demo reel. (You couldn’t run video online then like you could now, so people had to view your demo reel in person. Today, of course, you MUST put your stuff online, or it will likely cost you the interview). Within the week, YTV called me in for an interview.

Lesson: If the job is really, really important to you, it’s alright to show it. Geek out about it. Don’t send a static, staid letter. Do NOT send your form cover letter. Every employer wants to hire someone who really, REALLY wants to work there. Don’t be afraid to go off-book and fly your freak flag a little.

i brought my friend along he day of the interview, and we went shopping for suitable interview clothes that fit my more considerable stature. This was YTV, so i chose an orange T under a loud Hawaiian shirt, a pair of cargo shorts and some sandals. i must have looked like a cartoon character. And really, that was the point.

Lesson: Dress appropriately for your job interview.

i showed them my demo reel at the interview. They weren’t impressed. No one was. It was a terrible reel. They asked me what my favourite show on YTV was. i had my answer ready: Nanalan’. This impressed them.

Lesson: Research the company before the interview.

They asked me if i knew Flash. i didn’t – i knew Director. BUT, the week of the interview, i had downloaded the free 30-day trial of Flash. i completed the 10 tutorials that shipped with the software. i took all the graphics and animations from the Bouncing Babies piece from my college Director course two years earlier, and recreated it in Flash. i showed it to them. It got me the job.

Lesson: Show the employer exactly what they’re looking for.

i remember the phone call vividly. i remember exactly what i said to the woman who hired me. Through elation and tears of joy, i managed “THANK YOU. Thank you SO much. You’ve changed my life.”

Programming by the Seat of My Pants

And that’s how i found myself, on day one of my first job in the game development industry ten years ago, sitting at a desk with my own computer, my own phone, and a contract for a $40k annual salary (which, adjusted for inflation, is like a $41k salary). This was at the peak of the dot com collapse. My official title was “Game Developer”. i had not made a single game in all my life. The first day on the job, the producer asked me to create a game for a financial client who wanted kids to learn the value of saving. i built on what i already knew how to do, and built this, my first-ever professionally-produced video game:

The goal is to flip all the coins to “heads”. When you flip a coin, all of the coins in the same row and column are flipped. The game has three difficulty levels with three different animated endings. Art, animation, voice-over and sound effects were all by me, with (i think) a deadline of one week.

i learned on the job. i expanded my skillset with every game they asked me to make. i leaned heavily on the expertise of the more experienced game developer there, and barraged him with questions. He was very patient. He told me later that of all the applicants for the job, i was the only one even remotely qualified, as unqualified as i was. No one else showed them any work that was youthful, kiddy and cartoony. No one else showed the same amount of promise or potential.

Lesson: Be in the right place at the right time, and be very, very lucky.

Ten Years After

i built over fifty Flash games at Corus for YTV, Treehouse TV (their preschool brand), WNetwork (their women’s brand), and corporate side-projects like The Big Rip collection of kids’ virtual worlds. i have created games for blind children, and games for deaf children. Ten years since landing that first real industry job, i own my own game development studio. i meet people like those two guys wanting to be hired as game designers/writers, and i read articles like Alistair’s, and i wince. It’s a familiar angst. i knew then, and i affirm now, that to get into this industry, you need to be a skilled at one of two things: art or programming. It’s very unusual to skip the queue, so don’t hold out hope. Instead, devote yourself to being useful or talented at something.

Lesson: Is this really your dream? Do you REALLY want to get into this industry? Then stop whining, stop playing World of Warcraft, and stop cooking up new and impossibly large game designs for RPGs and MMOs. Stop mistaking your notebook full of game ideas with actual completed game projects. Stop confusing game playing with game development. Stop equating your knowledge of games with some mystical birthright creating games.

Instead, devote yourself completely to doing whatever it bloody well takes to succeed: that means starting small, and finishing something – then starting slightly larger, and finishing something else. You may not have the luxury of doing that on someone else’s dime as a salaried employee, but i guarantee you won’t get where you’re going unless you translate angst into action.

Since settling into a full-time job ten years ago and sinking into a job coma, the amount of risk i’ve assumed has dropped steadily year after year until at last, to coin a quaint colloquialism, i wouldn’t piss with my pants on fire unless my employer gave me the go-ahead.

The Seven Year Itch

That changed about seven years into the job, when i put my name on the “please fire me” list. For a number of reasons, it was time to go, and i was one of the lucky few who left at the exact right time. But make no mistake: it took stones. i had a daughter in diapers and, i found out later, another little girl on the way. i had a mortgage to pay and a fierce angel dust habit, and i owed money to Timmy Two-Fingers for a rigged boxing bet gone sour. (No … just kidding about the mortgage).

So it was then, after a long absence from risk, i took the very big step of incorporating a company and striking out on my own, instead of finding the next available corporate teat to suckle. And it was terrifying to do that. And it remains terrifying. We’re approaching three years of profitable operation in July, but every year is a nail-biter.

i’m assuming even more risk with our upcoming game Spellirium. As you may know, the project is made possible with funding from the OMDC’s Interactive Digital Media Fund – free, non-repayable money. They’re putting up 50%, which we have to match. We’re matching it with another batch of free money from the SR&ED (Scientific Research and Economic Development) grant, which we earned by twisting technology to our steely will. So the entire budget for the project is essentially paid for. Sounds like very little risk, no?

Because there’s such little financial risk involved, it seems an opportune time to audition some new risks, risk-free … if that makes sense. It might be the angel dust talking.

Scrumptious

In an earlier post, i talked about the first risk we’re assuming – a new (for us) development methodology called Agile/Scrum. This terrifies me. i’ve been absorbing as many videos and articles as i can about it so that i don’t fall completely flat on my face when we start work next week, but it’s a shiny new thing, and it’s apparently difficult to implement and easy to fail at.

Essentially, instead of spending two weeks putting together a rock-solid Game Design Document – a game bible, from which you shall not stray – you describe all the stuff your game is gonna do, you prioritize the list based on value to the player, and then you start building. That’s it. You just start building. And you look back after two weeks and evaluate what went right, and what went wrong. Then you grab more items from the Big List, and keep building. At the end of every two weeks, you have a shippable product. That means, friends, that two weeks from today, you’ll be able to play a shippable version of Spellirium. i promise you, i will suck, but you can start providing your feedback right away, and we’ll be Agile enough to respond. This way, we can find the fun as fast as possible, and spend the rest of our time developing a game that you will find increasingly awesome and worth your time and monays.

(Note: if you like word games and story-based adventurey-type games and would like to be on the SpellCaster mailing list to play these early builds, head over to Word Game World and sign up here. If you DON’T like word games and story-based games, kindly DO NOT sign up. We’d love to get your feedback on other projects, but if you’re not a wordie, please move on. This is not the game you’re looking for.)

We’ll try using an online tool called Pivotal Tracker to help us through the process. It does burn-down charts, which frighten and confuse me by virtue of the very fact that they are charts, and they incorporate the word “burn”. If there are two things that make me nervous in this world, it’s statistics and being set on fire.

i’ll share more about how the Agile/Scrum process is going for us as the project progresses. i can already see we’ll run into some early problems because the start times of our talented artists and programmers are staggered … i’m still trying to figure out how to gracefully fold everyone into the batter. The second problem i’m seeing is somewhat more troubling.

Off-Site Collaboration

In the early days of the company, i was very proud of the fact that we did things differently than our competitors. We paid our employees money, for starters … you wouldn’t believe the number of game developers in this province who are working for free, or for points on royalties that never materialize. Our other point of difference is that we work with everyone in-house. We have ample face-to-face time, giving us the advantage of fast an frequent team communication, so that stuff doesn’t get lost in the email/MSN morass. i was very surprised to learn that many game companies work remotely. Everyone’s on Skype, scattered across bedrooms and coffee shops around the world. It didn’t strike me as an effective way to work.

Now, due to the requirements of Spellirium and our relatively small office, i’m taking another risk: i need to hire 6 or 7 people, and i can only fit 3 of those people in-house, so half the team needs to be remote. Or i need to hire only midgets, and build bunk-desks.

The prospect of working with people remotely causes me anxiety. i like to have everyone within what i wryly call “strangling distance”. Communication – FAST communication – is very, very important to me, and i’ve been stung too many times by email threads where people’s true intent isn’t adequately conveyed through text, and people get needlessly hurt or frustrated. There’s only so much the mighty happyface can cover:

You’re an absolute idiot.

vs.

You’re an absolute idiot. :)

i’m considering using Google Wave as our online collaboration tool. i know i’ll have to try to get Skype or some other video chat software working so that we can beam at least one guy in via satellite. i’m wary about paying someone money to sit around at home in his underpants eating cheese fidgets and watching daytime soaps when he’s supposed to be making gameage for me, but maybe this is all part of an important process for me of slowly easing up on control and trusting other people a little more? i know other game studio heads who have been burned by remote workers, but i can’t help but think that at the slightest sign of smoke, my reaction will be swift and decisive. Spellirium is too awesome to be plagued by dead weight.

Word.

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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.

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How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process

Speakers:
Robin Hunicke and Kellie Santiago from That Game Company (Flower)

This talk had the potential for greatness, but the speakers fell down when it came to providing concrete examples to illustrate what they were saying. The whole talk was given from a very vague, 50 000-foot-level, and i wanted some more blood n’ guts to make the material more relatable.

Robin and Kellie were talking about how the video game industry is a very stressful place, and how team members can end up hating each other, hating the project, and suffering anxiety and nightmares needlessly. The talk was part scrum advocacy, part therapy advocacy. (Don’t know what scrum is? Neither did i, until i had lunch with an expert! See below for more.)

Here are a few points of interest i jotted down:

• Robin – “We don’t have to burn ourselves out, starve, or suffer to create fantastic works of interactive art.”
• When team conflicts arise, the impulse is to say “i’ll just do it” or “i can’t seem weak”
• It’s easy to dismiss someone else’s ideas when you have to build them. That’s why it’s important for your whole team to have ownership of the whole project (another scrum/agile concept)
• If you iterate, you will chuck stuff. And that’s not a bad thing.
• Robin – “Not everyone who gives you money is stupid.” Me – “HAHAHAHA!” She was talking about how keeping constant, open and honest communication with your funder or publisher makes for a better relationship and less anxiety
• Estimates are fake
• When something takes longer than you thought it would, the conversation you have with the publisher/funder doesn’t have to be plagued by shame and guilt. “You don’t have to wear a hairshirt during that conversation.”

Here were the (relatively few) takeaways the speakers provided:

• Put up a big board for your team with a calendar on it. Add blobs to the calendar across different game dev disciplines and buckets (development, infrastructure, marketing). Massage frequently.
• Keep a task board between sprints (2-week development periods), listing team members’ names across the top, and the tasks they need to complete under their names
• Write a private game dev diary. The more you do these, the more you’ll realize that the problems you have on one project are the problems you have on ALL projects – use this knowledge to help you anticipate and navigate problem situations in the future

Robin is formerly of EA, and you could tell from the talk that she’s been through monstrously stressful projects, and game teams with huge egos on them. The thing i found really interesting is that i couldn’t ignore the fact that the speakers were both women, and that the talk itself was very chicky. i started writing down the most repeated words in the presentation: stuff, concerns, thing, worries, communication, anxiety, guilt, conversation, open. Very touchy-feely Dr Phil stuff. That’s not a bad thing necessarily … it just struck me that i would probably never, EVER hear the same talk coming from male presenters.

When people repeat, to my dismay, that there need to be more women/black people/Down syndrome people (or whatever) in the game industry, so that other voices can be heard, this must be what they mean. i’m fine with having more women in the industry as long as they’re smart, with-it and (dare i say?) worthy women like the two presenters. i get my back up when people try to stack teams based on some minority bingo card, as i’ve said before. The talent and ability has to be there. More on that later, when Robin takes to the stage during the indie rant.

Also, i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again: Robin has the best hair in the industry. Sleek, red, and awesomazing.

Ninjabee’s Top 10 Development Lessons

Next up was Brent Fox, who does NOT have the best hair in the industry (sorry, Brent). Brent was a decent speaker, and kudos to him for breaking his talk down into a nice bite-sized list of ten items. Seems to be the only way to get people to read your blog – bullet points and countdowns. Perhaps it’s also becoming the only way to keep people awake during your PowerPoint question.

i won’t list all of Brent’s ten points, because many of them were pedestrian and uninteresting (again – sorry, Brent!) These are the ones that held my interest:

#10. DLC Doesn’t make any money. Brent bemoaned the fact that Ninjabee’s downloadable content for games like Outpost Kaloki X and Band of Bugs didn’t sell well. He later added the exception to the rule: A Kingdom for Keflings had add-ons that sold very well. His conclusion: DLC is worth it if the game is very popular.

i asked him at the end of the talk whether he’d measured the sales of DLC against how many people had finished the game. i didn’t buy Outpost DLC because i didn’t come anywhere near to finishing the main game. i did, however, finish Keflings, and would be far more likely to buy an expansion for it. To my sheer amazement, after hearing Zynga and the other Facebook devs drone on about how important it was to collect and measure player data, Brent admitted that he had no idea what the correlation between finishing players and sold DLC was. Shocking!

#6. A picture is worth a million dollars. If someone says “You can show me a demo with no graphics and i can look past it”, he’s lying. (i wholeheartedly agree here – pretty pictures are CRUCIAL.) He gave an example where his team had mocked up an example of avatar placement in Keflings, and the feeling from the publisher was sort of like “oh – of course they can do it. They’ve got a picture to prove it!”

#5. XBLA is hit-driven (no surprises there). He did say, though, that on the list of the top games for XML, the gap between the sales figures for the games on page 2 and the games on page 8 isn’t significant … but the gap between the games on page 1 and the games on page 2 is immense.

Brent ended his talk by quoting EA’s CEO, who claimed that in the next year (ONE year!), sales from digital downloads would overtake console numbers. Sacre le crap!

Why Do People Buy Virtual Goods? Ten Attributes to Influence Desirability

Speaker Vili Lehdonvirta from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology is an unnervingly calm, almost robotic speaker. i found him very listenable … if only because i was worried that if i didn’t listen, he’d melt my face with his laser eyes. i didn’t get a single thing out of Vili’s talk, because i knew it all already. Drag.

If you don’t know it all, here are ten factors affecting the desirability of virtual goods as they relate primarily to virtual worlds and MMOs:

1. Performance (+2 sword, +4 sword)
2. Functionality (items that save the player time, like warp gates or loot pets)
3. Visuals and sounds
4. Background fiction (he gave the example of a ring you could get that belonged to a very popular NPC in the game – it’s the same as when people buy Elvis’s underwear)
5. Provenance – the item might have history attached to it (eg a famous player owned it in the past, or a certain item was only given out during an exclusive promotion)
6. customizability
7. Cultural References (ie holiday-themed items)
8. Licensed Items (Nestle Chocobot Power Hour hats)
9. Rarity (he gave the example of an Ultima Online item, horse dung, that did not propagate in the game world. Players realized the stuff was precious and rare, so they started hanging it on their walls as an elite status symbol. Horse dung.
10. Prince. The super-expensive item that you sell to a player as a status symbol.

Getting a Free Phone

After those sessions, and just before lunch, i picked up my free Nexus One phone courtesy of Google. Thanks, Google! That’s super.

Lunch

i had lunch with three great guys – Joe, who you may know on Twitter as @retrogamer4ever, Shane and Vince. It was then that i brought up Robin’s talk, and Shane exploded with a passionate hour-long diatribe about the wonders of scrum development, with Vince chiming in every so often with a “what what!” and “daaaamn!”

i hadn’t paid much attention to scrum, and only kind of knew what it was. Or so i thought. i learned so much more from Shane during lunch. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Traditionally, when you make video games, you use the waterfall method. You write a game design document describing the entire game, you break it up into tasks, and you build the game. The final game MUST keep referring back to this increasingly ancient GDD, and there is very little room for iteration (changing the game little by little on the fly in response to playtesting, new ideas, etc)

Agile development philosophy aims to solve a number of problems that waterfall causes. Scrum is one way to implement Agile concepts. Here’s how you develop a game using scrum:

1. Cook up the KINDS of things you need to build. The whole team meets and decides how much effort something will take to complete. Not how much TIME … how much effort. You assign effort points to tasks. So if you’re talking about a programming system, the programmer talks about what’s involved in implementing it, and the TEAM decides how much effort it’ll take. Not the programmer – the whole team. The aim here is to get everyone owning the project. As Robin said earlier in the day, it’s easier to disregard someone else’s input if you don’t own it, but are just building it.
2. The whole team works towards a sprint. At the end of a 2-week run, the game will be finished. The whole team works towards a common goal: a build of the game. It’s not feature-complete or necessarily awesome, but it’s a working (if stunted) version of the game. The benefit here is that you always have a working, playable version of the game. Vince and Shane told us about the different public humiliation tactics they’ve employed to shame a team member if he let everyone down by breaking the build.
3. Within a sprint, the team members review their assumptions every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
4. Repeat this process every two weeks until the game is done, or the money runs out and the Earth crashes into the sun.

There’s way more to it than that, but that’s a primer. It’s the primer i would have wanted when i was trying to casually understand what scrum was.

The Convergence of Flash Portals and Social Games

* view the slides here! *

It’s no secret: i have a total man-crush on Dan Cook. It was a thrill to meet him in person, and his talk was typical Dan Cook – whip-smart, on the money, relevant and kickass.

Dan’s talk was on the Flash game industry – the devs, the portals, the middle-men, and the incredible opportunity for developers in that space. i have a hunch that most of you reading this blog know most of what Dan was saying, but the way he said it and the slides he’d put together had me riveted to his talk, even though i knew most of what he was saying beforehand.

At the end of his talk, Dan painted a very bleak picture of the Flash games industry, one where ongoing consolidation leads to big, unstoppable companies, and Flash developers serve at the behest of their new overlords. He’s totally right – that’s already happening. But then he started channeling Karl Marx and Sun Tzu, preaching that workers (Flash devs) must own the mode of production, or build their castles on less crowded hills. His advice: be platform-agnostic. Don’t be a Flash developer or an iPhone developer or an Android developer. Be an octopus. Constantly dip your tentacles into many different buckets, pulling out new players and audience members on a variety of platforms, so that you don’t become beholden to the powers that will eventually control any particular platform, given enough time.

My thoughts, of course, immediately went to Untold Entertainment’s site masthead: “We make Flash games.” i hate that credo, but it’s true. i am dying to develop something on a different platform so that i can finally change it, but for now i gotta call a spade a spade.

i love you, Dan Cook. Please have my man-babies.

From Casual to Social: What to Pack

Unfortunately, this talk was at the bottom of the heap for me. Presenter Jeferson Valaderes from Playfish spoke too quickly, in a rapid-fire South American (?) accent. Everything he said sounded like a throw-away. His slides were almost incomprehensible. Ugh. It was just a really, really bad session. The conference volunteer kept bringing him cup after cup of water during his presentation, as if hoping that if he took a sip, he’d magically start being interesting and relevant. Alas, water only keeps you alive. It does not keep you alive and bearable.

Indie Gamemaker Rant!

This series of 5-minute talks from various indies in the increasingly upsetting indie Old Boys Club was hit and miss. Here are a few things that jumped out at me:

Tommy Refenes pulled kind a dick move in his rant about the app store by implying that Adam Saltsman “got lucky” with Canabalt. If i were Adam, i can’t imagine i’d feel good about that. And if i were Adam, i imagine i’d have enough money from Wurdle by now to buy myself a Tommy Refenes-skin rug.

Anyway, Tommy ran a really interesting experiment. He put a game called Zits n’ Giggles in the App Store and didn’t make any money from it. So he jacked the price up to $15, and three people bought it. Then he jacked the price up to $50, and four people bought it. So he decided to keep jacking up the price as long as it kept selling. Fourteen people bought it on Valentine’s Day for $199 a pop. The game currently sells for $350.

He did this to illustrate why he thinks the App Store is a joke, filled with uneducated consumers. It’s hard to argue with him, but his elitist attitude and opening complaint that it’s too hard to beat Mega Man 2 on the iPhone betrays a very close-minded, old-school mentality that implies that games and systems are only valid or valuable if they have traditional controls, and if their games are called Mega Man 2.

Robin Hunicke will be happy to know that her rant tipped me from being a staunch opponent of affirmative action, to someone who now sees the benefit of having a sexually and racially diverse game development team. It’s hard to say what did it: it was either her mesmerizing red hair, or the science she provided that showed that teams are more productive, creative, and effective when they are diversified.

i have a big chip on my shoulder about affirmative action and women in the games industry, because i come from an office where the management layer was suspiciously stacked with women, and the worker bees were almost all men, and a certain degree of nepotism and unfair hiring kept it that way. Many of the women in the management layer weren’t worthy of the jobs they held, in my opinion, and it was hard to get excited about women in the workplace when i was surrounded by so many women who shouldn’t have been there.

Since then, i’ve met many more women who don’t get it, and who have their jobs because they’re women, and that really gets my back up. But i have met a few women who are savvy and smart and really knowledgeable, and i’m very happy they’re here.

Robin talked about a concept called signaling threat, which is where you’re surrounded by people who are all cut from the same cloth (white men … or heck, even black women with green hats), and the imbalance makes you want to run like hell, or stay with all your defenses cranked way up. i think that i actually experienced signaling threat at that old job by being surrounded by those women, so i totally buy the case for diversity now. i’m about to put together a team for Spellirium, so i’ll definitely keep Robin’s rant in mind.

Journalist Brendan Boyer’s claim was that “Seanbaby has ruined video game journalism for an entire generation.” Seanbaby is an initially funny, but ultimately caustic commenter who had a stint on IGN, and who Brendan blames for poisoning game journalism by making every game insight flippant and rude. He called for 2010 to be “the year we sunk snark.” The point would be hard to argue, if Brendan wasn’t such an ass-grabbing tard-monkey.

Anna Anthropy called for video games to have more personal stories. “i’m tired of male fantasy wish fulfillment and saving the world.” i was later informed that Anna was a pre-op transgender – another case of a different viewpoint enriching the dialogue. Spellirium actually aims to do what Anna is talking about – the story will completely deconstruct the same tired save-the-world, you-are-the-most-imporant-person-on-the-planet arc that so many video games follow relentlessly.

In Anna’s stack of rants, she also made the bold claim that the term “Indie” is no good, and that it is increasingly exclusionary. i completely know where she’s coming from, and will give specifics of indie snobbery in my GDC wrap-up later this week.

… 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.

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.

A Different Kind of “M” for Mature

Through early play-testing, i realized that young people don’t like trivia. Trivia’s no fun when you don’t know any of the answers. And the younger you are, the less likely you are to know stuff. Based more on a hunch than actual market research, we decided that our target audience was this guy:

Cliff Clavin is male, middle-aged, a baby boomer, and thinks he knows a lot of stuff about stuff. Cliff is our power-user – the guy who’s going to discover Interrupting Cow Trivia and burn through all of the content in a day.

Here’s another type of customer we suspect will be interested in the game:

These are college-aged smarty-pantses who play weekly trivia at the pub, but can’t always afford the six-dollar beers and the time away from the dorm.

Design by Hunch

Put that all together, and we came up with the idea to stage Interrupting Cow Trivia at a restaurant, to re-create that social pub feel. Specifically, it’s a 50′s-style diner, in a nod to the baby boomers. And not a grungy, dilapidated diner like something out of Fallout or Bioshock. It’s a shiny, sparkly 50′s diner in its heyday. We hope that the theme will make older players feel welcomed and comfortable, while younger players will dig it as a retro curiosity.

So a 50′s-style diner needs a 50′s-style User Interface (UI … or “MOO-I”, as it says in the title of this post, because we’re under contract to include at least one awful cow pun in every ICT Designer Diary entry). We carefully studied menu designs from retro 50′s diners, and put this together in our first attempt:

We actually started to build the game with this look – there are vestiges of it in the current alpha version. But after completing the painted backgrounds of the game’s diner, we realized that we needed to ratchet the visuals up a few notches. We took some cues from the A&W chain of retro burger joints, and various other sources. Here’s a taste of how it’s coming along:

This has the right amount of “pop”, both visually and stylistically. Expect the beta version of ICT to be packed with fun, bubbly 50′s UI that’ll make players want to stay in the game longer, and will encourage players to buy an ICT Diners Club Card for some groovy perks.

Moo.

Continuity is a student project (JEALOUS!), and bears the hallmark of student projects/amateur game developers/free-to-play Flash games: a stick figure as the lead character. Countless free-to-play Flash games star the very same character. The stick man is, i believe, the most famous and popular of all video game characters – moreso than Mario, Pac-Man or Tim Langdell.

Brand and Deliver

i attend many many video game events where someone in-the-know preaches from the pulpit to people not in-the-know, mostly students and hobbyists and amateurs. And the one tip that i hear repeated again and again, particularly in the free-to-play Flash (and even iPhone) climate where there’s a lot of competition and it’s tough to be heard above the noise, is to “build a brand.” Put another way, “develop your own original IP.” They say this because generally speaking, students, hobbyists and amateurs don’t build brands. But what does building a brand or an IP mean, anyway?

Well, for starters, it means not using a stick man as your main character. You can’t own a stick man. No one can. And your stick man game, even if it’s innovative like Continuity, won’t stand out from the throngs of other stick man games. No one will approach you and ask to buy the rights to your stick man game IP. No one wants to develop comic books or fridge magnets or Band-Aids based on your stick man, because it’s not an ownable or exploitable thing. And, very likely, no one will remember your stick man game. i’m struggling to keep the name “Continuity” in my head as i write this article.

i suspect the creators of Continuity are more passionate about programming than they are artwork. The bones of their game are reasonably solid. Now imagine what they could do if they found an artist and put a little English on it. Maybe Continuity’s main character is a fugitive on the run from the law, or an anthropomorphic kangaroo, or a sorceror who can bend reality to his will? Maybe she’s just a cool-looking chick in a hat? i dunno. But any of these completely trample “stick man”.

Stick Em Up

Let’s do the opposite: let’s take a strong brand and use a stick man instead. i don’t feel that the main character in Braid, “Tim”, was incredibly interesting. But he was short and wore a tie and was at least halfway there.

Now let’s wipe him out and replace him with a stick man and box art:

From awesome to n’awsome in sixty seconds.

Or let’s go with something like Super Mario Galaxy. Mario doesn’t say much, but his personality shines through the way he’s drawn and the way he animates. He’s a pleasantly plump Italian plumber who utters adorably stereotyped phrases like “It’s-a me!” and “Bowser Koopa sleeps with-a the fishes!” So here’s the game with its very broadly appealing brand identity:

And now, Super Mario Galaxy with stick men and box art:

Even though Braid has a wonderfully unique gameplay mechanic to offer (despite horrible, horrible grade 12 poetry class writing), and Super Mario Galaxy is a super-solid 3D platformer, if you take away the brand, you take away MOST of the experience. That’s right, i said MOST. Not half. Visuals are not half of a game. Even though your team and man-hours may be split 50/50 between code and art, a well-coded game with bad art (or stick men) that can compete commercially is a rare beast indeed. i’ll boldly put it this way: art and sound are 70-80% of both the player’s experience, and your ability as a designer to market and profit from your game.

Sharp-Dressed Man

The one interesting exception i’ll throw out here is Fancy Pants Adventures, a free-to-play Flash game with great programming and tight platform controls. These games star a stick man as their lead character, but dig the difference: a pair of yellow pants and a shock of hair.

Can you own a sitck man with a pair of yellow pants and a shock of hair? Sure you can. Can you build a strong original IP with such a minimally modified figure? Absolutely. In this case, the pants and the hair are all it took to elevate Fancy Pants Adventures from a generic and forgettable free-to-play platformer, to a memorable series that has done extremely well for the developer.

Now let’s take a look at the same character with no pants and hair:

Visual style and brand identity are not nice-to-haves. If you have any hope of rising above the thousands of hobbyists, amateurs, and even certain professional developers in the free-to-play space, visual style and brand identity are HAVE-to-haves. Free yourself from the tyranny of stick men and, at the very least, put a hat on that guy. Then you can go from this:

To this:

The difference is brand recognition, noteriety and, hopefully, money in the bank.

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.

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!

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.

But for someone like me, who has long wondered at the scientific term for “toppy-fronty” (think Pokémon), the article was enough to hold my interest.

Back when i was working on kids’ virtual worlds, i didn’t understand why isometric seemed to be the de facto standard. It’s a pain to draw, a pain to code, and largely played out.

It’s likely because Habbo Hotel was so hugely popular and well-known among the Canadian broadcasters, thanks to the MuchMusic/Habbo franchise here in the frozen North. i’m just surprised that isometric views are still so common, what with the biggest players using completely different projections:

If i were to create a kids’ virtual world – and i’m not necessarily saying that i am actually creating a kids’ virtual world, i’d definitely go with toppy-fronty. That’s if i were to create a 2D kids’ virtual world (which, as we’ve established, i am not actually necessarily doing). If i were to create a kids’ virtual world at all, i’d likely use Unity3D. Which i’m not currently doing right now. At all.

i’m glad we’ve got this straightened out.

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.

We auditioned a half-dozen actors for the role of the Chief Inspector. As soon as we heard Gray Gleason’s read, we knew we’d found The One. His voice was an exact match for the voice in my head (one of the voices in my head, anyway :) Give Gray a shot if you need v/o work. He’s quick, professional, and his low range “trailer guy” voice can lend a lot of gravity to your next high fantasy epic.

The intro was built over a series of very late nights leading up to Casual Connect. We had run into some opposition from the portals claiming that the game wasn’t high quality enough, and i had to explain that the big blank gaps on the title screen and intro scene (you beta testers know what i’m talking about) were not actually final. Sheesh. i figured that having a completed title screen and intro would go a long way towards convincing a portal to sell my game and claim 65% of the proceeds.

Anyway, the strategy worked out, and now a number of outlets are excited about the game. i actually got the chance to meet a few people on submissions duty who had seen the first playable, and dismissed it as Yet Another Match-3 Game. Those of you who have played Kahoots™ know that although you are selecting groups of three, the game has as much to do with Bejewelled as chevre has to do with Cheez Whiz.

Either way, the game is still pretty cheesy.

But i’ve been to Casual Connect, and i have seen the future of online gaming, and it’s microtransactions. Go ahead and close the browser now, if you like. You haven’t seen what i’ve seen, man. i was there. And although many of you are probably skeptical about a system that’ll have you paying twenty-five cents to a preteen for a badly-drawn sword jpeg, i’m here to posit that there’s a side of this you may not have considered. And if you’re a casual downloadable portal owner, i’ll tell you why you should be shaking in your hitherto cash-stuffed boots.

A Quick Primer

First, some terms and definitions.

• Flash game A video game created with a tool called Adobe Flash. These games are playable in the browser using the ubiquitous Flash Player plugin, the second-to-latest iteration of which has a >90% install base.
• Casual game A piece of interactive entertainment marketed outside the “core” video game demographic. Casual games typically have smaller development budgets, and break up the gameplay experience into more easily digestible chunks, setting them apart from more demanding “enthusiast” game titles
• Casual downloadable game These titles can be created with any tool, but are typically written in the C++ language by “real” programmers. File sizes are usually much larger than Flash game file sizes, and the games are often not playable in the browser. “Casual downloadable” can also describe the monetization method for these games.
• Portal A website that hosts games from a number of different developers. Some portals deal exclusively in casual downloadable games, while others solely have collections of Flash games. One of the most successful portals (at present) is Big Fish Games, which hosts both.
• Demo A handicapped version of a game for the purpose of convincing the player to purchase the full version. Demos can be time-limited (play for up to an hour free), or feature-limited (play with only Character X, or play only the first five levels). Demos can either exist within the larger game file, or they can be entirely separate files.
• Try and Buy (or Try-Before-You-Buy) A monetization model where the player samples the demo version of a game, and is enticed to pay a one-time fee to purchase the full version. Demos or trial versions can be downloadable, but more and more, developers are creating Flash demos that can be played in the browser.
• Subscription A monetization model where the player pays a regular (often monthly) fee for the privilege of playing the game, or to have access to features that free players cannot experience
• Free-to-play A game model where a significant selection of gameplay – even the entire game – does not cost the player any money. Some Free-to-play games are ad-supported, while others use subscriptions and microtransactions to fund further development. Still others are completely free to play with no strings attached for the player.
• Microtransactions A monetization model where the player buys incremental upgrades to the game experience that can cost as low as pennies, or even fractions of pennies.

Thanks But No Thanks

Before i went to Casual Connect 09, i had it in for Flash microtransactions. i had heard the announcement that Mochi Media was in closed beta on a microtransaction system for Flash games, and i just rolled my eyes, imagining the horrendous state of affairs that would erupt when the army of basement-dwelling Flash teens, fat from their $1000 sponsorship deals on games like Set Your Grandma on Fire and Zombie Asskicker 4: the Killening, started charging five and ten cents a pop for in-game items like “cartoonish weapon of implausible proportions” and “extra health”. No thanks.

And i knew that the microtransaction press was going to be packed with success stories about how Joe Coder made fifty million dollars in two weeks selling special in-game hats for his game, Ninja Kittens. But as soon as i give it a try, i’ll net thirty cents in a year’s worth of schlepping. No thanks.

And i knew that associating games with one-cent transactions would eventually drive down the value of absolutely everything, to the point where a developer charging five cents instead of one cent for a virtual crocheted tank cozy would be tarred and feathered by the broke-ass (but entitled) players rallying around these games. No thanks.

But let me put a more optimistic spin on things. Let’s take a look at where we are now, and where we could be very, very soon.

The Story So Far

Right now, i very much doubt i can make money on my original Flash games. i took an admittedly mediocre game from our library and ran it through the ad injection model in the Pulitzer prize-winning series Pimp My Game (which did not actually win a Pulitzer prize, so i’m thinking of withdrawing that press release). The game’s made about $90 in a year.

So i looked across the fence where the grass is clearly greener, and i saw the casual downloadable market. These people were charging actual, real-live dollars for their games. The developers were getting a share of actual cash money that numbered in the more-than-90′s, and i wanted a piece. But i recognized that the development times were longer, the budgets were bigger, and the risk was greater. That’s when we started work on Kahoots™, our fun crime-themed puzzle game.

Kahoots is a further (longer, riskier, more expensive) step in our quest to establish a baseline for development. i’ve been hunting this mythical baseline for two years now: it’s the average amount of money that i can make from an online game. Establishing a baseline will enable us to work within a reasonable budget, and then, hopefully, we can turn a reasonable profit.

i wasn’t one to leave my free-to-play Flash roots buried, so we got cracking on Interrupting Cow Trivia a few months ago. ICT is yet another experiment in game monetization. The development costs are still large, but the model is different. ICT will show an ad to the player before he jumps into a game room. The free player can answer X questions before being booted back out to the lobby, where he’ll have to watch another ad to re-join. Free players will also be limited to certain trivia content packs, which will be unlocked in regular rotation. For example, the Music Trivia pack will be free to play on Mondays and Saturdays. (That’s a little trick i borrowed from Three Rings of Puzzle Pirates fame. Thanks, OOO!)

Paid Interruping Cow Trivia players won’t see any ads, and they can play from any trivia pack any day of the week. They’ll also have advance access to new trivia packs. As we build more features into the game, we’ll cook up further carrots-on-sticks to incent free players. So be sure to give the game a shot while it’s in alpha and completely free!

PLEASE Make Money from my Efforts! PLEEEEEASE!!!

Going into the Casual Connect conference, i knew i needed a way to charge people money to play Interrupting Cow Trivia, and to purchase Kahoots on our own site. i knew that this was a good idea, because we would get a larger cut of the profits than if we sent Kahoots to a casual downloadable portal. i haven’t partnered with one of these guys yet, but rumour has it that the split is around 65/35 in favour of the portal. This is somewhat upsetting. The portals haven’t spent a single dime on the development of Kahoots™, and offering a completed, quality game for sale on their site is a zero risk proposition, yet somehow i still have do do a song and dance for them to convince them the game is great, all for the privilege of giving them the lion’s share of the proceeds.

But they have the lion’s share of the traffic, right? Big Fish Games is essentially Wal Mart, and if you don’t sell there, you don’t sell anywhere. (Or so i thought – more on that in a bit.) One big problem these days is that a few months ago, Amazon got into the casual games business and started charging $9.99 for its wares, down from the status quo of $20. This sparked a price war that saw Big Fish reduce its prices to $7.99, with a $2.99 price point for their special toolbar promotion.

So who knows where prices will end up? My prediction is that they’ll sink down to the App Store dumps, where everything will be at 99 cents, and a number of casual downloadable devs will go bankrupt because they’ll be a month from releasing their latest big-budget opus. That, or they won’t be able to adjust quickly enough to the Flash way of doing things, where we can bang out a complete game in under a week (see our game Bloat., and fear us.)

The Transaction Faction

So knowing i’d need to charge people on my site, i started meeting with the droves of online transaction companies at the show. These are the companies who have already done the legwork to enable credit card, debit card, pay-by-phone, SMS, cheque, money order, secret password, cost-per-action and wooden nickel transactions to your visitors seemlessly, in exchange for a cut and a few cents on the dollar. The VISA bill says “You were charged $x by Untold Entertainment for Kahoots”. Nice.

But i quickly learned that it would be very difficult, as a small developer, to have a relationship with these guys. GlobalCollect, for example, charges a monthly user fee of around $700. Plimus charges a big set-up fee, and takes a sizable chunk of the proceeds based on the volume of cash you move through their system. The price comes down according to volume. They asked me how many sales i intended to make. i shrugged and said “Dunno. Million … ish.” i have no idea. i’ve never done it before. If Kahoots sells five copies, i’ll be pleased with putting smiles on the faces of five people. (while my homeless family shivers in a makeshift cave made from egg crates and refrigerator boxes in a forgotten alleyway somewhere in Toronto)

It was whispered to me at the conference that if i had engineering chops, i could get an authorize.net account with an SSL certificate and roll my own payment solution. i don’t have engineering chops, unfortunately. And anyway, it’s the kind of thing where i’d like to see how it works out before i sit down and figure out exactly what to build to save myself some money.

And all the while, i saw companies like HeyZap, MochiMedia and GamerSafe, all offering Flash-integrated online wallets for virtual cash, glad-handing the conference delegates and preaching the gospel of Flash game microtransactions. (i’m not actually sure GamerSafe was there phyiscally, but they were there in spirit)

And that’s when i had a brainwave.

“Micro” is a Possibility, Not a Requirement

A microtransaction system is great because it allows for tiny transactions. The player is more likely to spend tiny amounts of money, but tiny amounts of money add up to significant amounts of money. If you’ve ever bought more than seven vials of heroin in a single afternoon to drown out the pain of your failed existence, you’ll know how those singular transactions start to really add up. And then developers can pull all kinds of nonsense like in Tencent QQ in Korea, where they went hog-wild pioneering this stuff. In Korea’s Cyworld, you can dress up your room, or buy things to send to your friend, but those things – those VIRTUAL ITEMS – expire. You give your friend some wallpaper that has a two-week time limit on it. Insane.

But here’s (finally) my point: a microtransaction system enables you to charge tiny amounts of money, but it doesn’t require you to. There’s no reason why i can’t decide on, say, a $7.99 price point for Kahoots (as Big Fish Games would), and then charge that to my players as a one-time fee at the end of the demo. Correct me if i’m wrong, providers, but i can do that – right?

And if i can do THAT, let’s look at how a Flash system stacks up against the casual downloadable market:

Casual Downloadable Games

• (Potentially) large exe download
• Play on desktop
• Trial type is limited (for example, i believe Big Fish forces your game into a 1-hour trial. What if that’s not the best trial type for my game?)
• Deal must be negotiated separately with individual portals/publishers via dog-and-pony show convincing them the game will sell well

Flash Games

• (Potentially) much smaller download, with opportunity for progressive download (files are pulled into the game as needed, and can be loaded in the background while player does other stuff)
• Play in the browser with a plugin that >90% of people are running
• Trial type is whatever the heck i want it to be
• No deals to negotiate – just use a service like Flash Game Distribution to fire that sucker out the Internet cannon

And i’d love to have someone chip in some data on this, but my hunch is that the amount of traffic going to the oodles of Flash game portals trumps the traffic going to the casual downloadable portals. i could be wrong there. Who’s got numbers for daddy?

Fear the Coming Flood, Fish

So if you’re Big Fish Games right now, you oughta see this coming. And if you didn’t, you do now. And you might re-consider your current strategy of offering $400 to Flash developers for unlimited licenses of their games.

But … if you’re Big Fish, you also offer a distinct advantage over the oodles of portals (say that with a strange British accent and it almost rhymes). The whole reason why Big Fish Games built up that audience in the first place is that it built a brand. Building a brand was one of the cornerstone take-aways at the Casual Connect conference. Big Fish Games built a great site with an excellent customer experience. They were consistent, like McDonald’s. They defined their target hockey mom demographic, and tailored the Big Fish experience to that type of customer. They only stocked games that they knew would sell well to that customer. And then, they raked in mountains of dough and jumped in them like piles of fall leaves, giggling wildly.

Steam did the same thing. They built from an established brand, so the going was a little easier from a customer loyalty point-of-view. But they try to stock games that appeal to their audience, first-person shooter fans. Everything on Steam is dark and gritty and shooty, and they’re doing very well. Lately, some colleagues and i have thought that Steam would be very well-served to create a parallel girly portal on their service, plastered with pink unicorns and fairies and vaginas and stuff.

Start Building

So if you’re still reading this, and you haven’t already picked an under-served audience and drawn up a sitemap for your new Flash game portal, you need to get on that pronto. GamerSafe is already pledging a 10% cut of microtransaction proceeds to portals, and MochiMedia has hinted that they’ll do something similar. And if enough Flash devs figure out that in addition to nickel-and-diming people for hats n’ guns, you can also sell your games for a one-off price just like the big boys do on casual downloadable portals, there could be a lot of cash floating around the Internatz by this time next year.

i’d just like to grab a little of that cash to tuck away for a rainy day. The rest, i’ll shred up and use to wallpaper my private jet like a supersonic piñata. ¡Olé!

It was my first time at the conference. With a tight economy, i hadn’t planned to go, until my colleague Kala from Alien Concepts here in Toronto clued me in to the fact that the Canadian feds were comping $550 passes to the show. Can’t beat that.

If you weren’t able to attend, let’s save you five hundred bucks. Here are the things everyone couldn’t shaddup about.

Social Gaming

These are games tied to social networks like MySpace and Twitter – but mostly Facebook, with its oft-cited 250 million active member install base. That’s ACTIVE members. Facebook defines an active member as someone who’s logged in at least once in the past thirty days.

Tired of seeing endless messages in the stream like “So-and-so from your grade ten biology class who you friended just to be polite just gifted a virtual tchotchke to that girl you had a crush on from cadet camp who’s really let herself go since her skiing accident”? Expect to see a LOT more noise along those lines in the near future, as game developers harness the power of social media spam to get the word out about their (usually) microtransaction-based social games.

Microtransactions

MochiMedia unveiled their new MochiCoins system to compete with a few others in the increasingly crowded payment provision space. MochiCoins uses a digital wallet that players can fill with fake cash (using their real cash, via credit cards and various other means). Then, players spend their coins on bonus content and digital bric-a-brac in any of the (soon-to-be) bajillions of Flash games that implement the system. A number of these types solutions have been released for Flash developers, (HeyZap, GamerSafe) and the whole thing is well worth a separate article.

Payment Providers Aplenty

i couldn’t walk a few feet through the conference hall without slamming into a payment provider booth. These are joints that set you up with online transaction pages so that you can charge real money for your digital crap, and there are SCADS of them. The companies take a cut of whatever sales you rack up. Their percentage depends on how much crap you sell. They don’t give you a lot of love if you’re a small studio like Untold Entertainment, because they don’t stand to make a lot of money on you in the very near future. Forget about treating people well when they’re small to foster a strong relationship when the company grows. Most of these companies are all about making money NOW, baby! Yeah! Oh, garçon! More cocaine, please.

The Long Tail

Please stop using this term. It makes my left eye twitch.

Building Strong Brands and Innovating

The call for innovation rings out loud and true at many conference, i’m sure – even gatherings of paperclip manufacturers and vacuum cleaner salesman. Innovation is a good thing, and no one can disagree with you if you stand on a stage and thump the podium, driving home your plea for differentiation. What most speakers don’t do, however, is tell the audience how to innovate. Why give away great ideas at a show when you can execute them yourself? So you wind up with a bunch of panels and lectures with everyone on stage stressing the need to innovate, everyone in the audience agreeing, and nothing getting accomplished. One only has to look at the throngs of hidden object or match-3 games on portals, or the flagrant farm game rip-offs on Facebook, to know that there are those who innovate, and there are those who clone. I know which side of that equation i’d like to be on.

But a word about strong brands: i got a lot of strange looks when i told people the name of our newest game, Interrupting Cow Trivia. That’s because it’s a stupid name. But it’s stupid by design. We went through a pile of name ideas before settling on ICT that were even crazier – Welfare-Dependant Antelope Trivia and Obsessive-Compulsive Aardvark Trivia are two that come to mind before we settled on Interrupting Cow Trivia, which is a little more familiar to people because of the knock-knock joke.

Sideline! I’m amazed that some people aren’t familiar with the joke. Here it is:

- Knock, knock!
- Who’s there?
- Interrupting cow,
- Interrupting c…
- MOO!

Hilarity.

The whole strategy behind picking a nutzoid name for that game is (hopefully) obvious. If we named the thing Super IQ Trivia or Brain Buster Knowledge-O-Matic Trivia or Thinky-Pants Trivia, you’d probably forget the title pretty quickly, and the game would be lost amid piles of generically-named trivia products. We haven’t said much about the graphic style of the game, but it also doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s a rather different look for a trivia game. Just one more way we’re hoping to create a jarring, disruptive presence online and stick out in people’s brainheads.

Throw Mama from the Train

One of the distinct advantages of the casual games business is that it’s like Gigantipus, an enormous sea squid slowly converting non-gamers to gaming addicts with its terrifying robo-tentacles and face-melting eyeball beams. The portal owners and portal game developers have long boasted to the core console side of the business that they’ve landed the coveted female demographic, creating games and services that appeal to 35-year-old (and up) soccer moms. Their words, not mine. “Soccer moms.” i wondered how many non-North American audience members understood the term (in Canada, it’s usually “hockey moms”). These are usually high-strung, type-A personality women who drive their kids to soccer practice in SUVs, inhaling coffee and getting a little too involved in the competitive and social aspects of their kids’ lives.
This past week at Casual Connect, many of the speakers dreamed of reaching a demographic beyond soccer moms. It all had an air of world domination, but in a good way … in a way that makes everyone’s eyes bug out and go bloodshot as they try to match just three more gems.

Untrends

Here are a few things that weren’t spoken of very often, which surprised me.

Augmented Reality

I expect this to be the buzzword at Casual Connect 2009. Augmented reality is bleeding edge visual technology where (generally) graphics are overlayed on a device’s video camera display, often using awareness of the user’s position and direction. The classic example is a user pointing his smartphone around a mall, and in the video camera image on the phone he sees little graphic fly-outs popping out of the stores saying “50% off fattening cinnamon buns here!” and “more crap you don’t need but are gonna purchase anyway over here!” It’s a lot like the shopping mall scene in Minority Report, except that the user actually requests this noise using a device he paid six hundred dollars for.
Here’s a very cool example of Augmented Reality in games:

The Futility of Ad-Supported Free-to-Play

Many of the panels were well-represented by companies like MochiMedia and AdMob protecting their interests and squawking about the amazing distribution potential, customer engagement and accessibility that ad support lends to their games. Of course, what they weren’t saying is that the eCMP rate is utter trash, and that precious few developers can ever hope to make an honest wage solely by injecting ads. It seems to do alright business for the likes of MochiMedia, though, who threw a swanky open-bar party at the Fairmont hotel.

Check out our Pimp My Game series if you haven’t already. It chaffs me that i’ve cooked up a cool eighty dollars in a YEAR by running one of my games through multiple monetization schemes, including MochiAds, Flash Game License and Kongregate. My new plan was to make up the difference by drinking a few thousand dollars worth of booze at the MochiMedia party. But since i don’t drink, it’d have to be Coca-Cola, and i’m not sure i could manage it. But i was tempted to give it a shot – that’s what matters. Watch yourselves, Mochi.

(i rag on the MochiMedia people a lot, but i finally had the chance to meet a few of them and they were lovely people. But even a shark has a gleaming smile before it chews your hip bones out of your body)

The Embarrassing Number of Rip-Offs in Casual Gaming

This was touched on a few times in the panels i attended, but nowhere did anyone apologize for the flagrant and downright embarrassing amount of copying going on in casual gaming. Dave Rorhl (a nice guy in his own right) with a straight face, and without apology, discussed the Facebook hit game Farm-Something, and his own company Playdom’s utter knock-off Farm-Something-Else, with a passing nod to Zynga’s Farm-Whatever. Dave just left Zynga a short time ago. He also discussed Playdom’s Also a Mafia Game, an “homage” to the inexplicably popular shopping list-inspired Facebook hit A Mafia Game. No batting of eyes. Not a single red-faced, navel-gazing mutter of explanation or justification.

Here at Untold Entertainment, our games are not completely unique either. Kahoots™ uses a fairly well-known math mechanic, and Interrupting Cow Trivia is inspired by Internet Relay Chat-style trivia bots. There’s nothing wrong with taking what works and spinning it in your own game. But these farm and hidden object games are the online equivalent to the toy section at the dollar store, where you can pick up a few “G.I. Jon” action figures, and something called a “Slunky”.

Why farming, Dave? Why not take what works and set it somewhere else, like outer space or a toy factory or at a summer camp or at the mall? I think we can all aspire to something better.

P.S. … Moo.

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

KidScreen June 2009: iPhone game innovates with stop motion

Feeling Testy?

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

Thrill to the Spectacle of: Kahoots Beta Tests Updates

We’ve been building Kahoots™, our fun crime-themed puzzle game (which we’ve modeled entirely in clay) to the iPhone/iPod Touch screen spec, which is approximately 478 x effin’ tiny. i even went out and got one of those Apple tattoos, because that’s supposed to count for something. The one thing we haven’t done is to actually learn Objective-C and deploy something to the iPhone. Pfft. A minor detail.

With every step i take towards learning this new (to me) technology, it feels like a wall erupts out of the ground and up into my face:

1. An industry pal told me that the CoreAnimation libraries for the iPhone were very, very slow, and that even the simplest game slowed to a crawl. i would need to learn to program in openGL-ES.
2. Terrified by the prospect of having to learn the square bracket-crazy OBJ-C and openGL-ES (whatever THAT was), i was seduced by the apparent C#/javascript-based simplicity of Unity3D, a game engine for creating browser-based and iPhone games
3. While evaluating Unity, every time i tried to access the software’s online documentation, their website was down
4. With Unity’s site proving unreliable, i resolved again to learn OBJ-C
5. At a recent iPhone developers meeting here in Toronto, devs told me that OBJ-C is mixed in with C++, so i should learn C++ while i’m at it
6. At the same meeting, other devs mentioned that the whole thing is hung on C. Now i was faced with the prospect of learning Objective-C, C++, C and openGL-ES (whatever THAT was)

Fine. If that was my lot in life, then so be it. i’m not a stupid guy. i can learn things, like words and junk. And sometimes stuff. Sometimes i can learn stuff. And i wanted to program things for the iPhone, so if i had to learn four new languages in my off-hours, i was prepared to do that.

Free Smarts from the Stanf’

Fellow devs mentioned repeatedly that i could audit a new publicly-available Stanford iPhone development course. The lectures are all recorded and posted for free on iTunes, and the assignments are all available online. Great! And the only pre-requisite was familiarity with Object-Oriented Programming, which i have under my belt since learning ActionScript 3 this past year. So off i went.

i watched the first two lectures, and then turned my attention to the assignments. Assignment #1a had me dragging things around the screen and breathing with my mouth open. No problem. i sailed right through it.

Assignment #1b asked me to write a few methods. Okay … no biggie. i know what a method is. i just didn’t know the OBJ-C format for writing a method. i know it starts with a minus sign, and you put the return type in there first, or some junk …

Assignment #1b asked me to open the documentation. So i did. Assignment #1b wanted me to look up the path-finding method for an NSString. i wanted to know how to write a method first. So i searched “method”. And then “method structure.” Nothing. Of course not – language references don’t exist to tell you how to build a car, or even to provide pictures of what a finished car looks like. They’re just encyclopedias of nuts and bolts you’ve never heard of.

To Google!

i started looking up OBJ-C code examples. Everything i found was needlessly complex. i just wanted the basic structure for a basic method with no arguments and no return types, and Google was all “but then you can flim-wang your fozzbuster!” And i was all “no thanks, Google! Just passing through.” And then i backed away slowly, trying not to make any sudden movements.

What was my last resort for help, short of asking my 60+-year-old mother for programming advice?

To IRC!

Internet Relay Chat is a magical place filled with verbally-abusive and generally terrible people who will sometimes help you with your problems if you appeal to their supposedly superior intellect and delusions of grandeur. i asked some folks in a related channel if they could refer me to a clean code example that would show me how to write a function. They copy/pasted exactly what i had written in XCode, which was throwing me errors.

One IRC person said that knowledge of OBJ-C was a pre-req for the Stanford course. i respectfully disagreed: the course syllabus only required a knowledge of Object Oriented Programming. Then he said something unkind about my 60+-year-old mother. i won’t repeat it.

Another person suggested that i go through Apple’s tutorial. So off i went to the Apple Developer Site, and found the Your First iPhone Application tutorial. Now i was getting somewhere!

“First” Apparently Has a Number of Meanings

The preamble to the tutorial mentioned that i should have both Objective-C knowledge AND Object-Oriented Programming knowledge before proceeding. It linked me to two different whitepapers. Somewhat afeared, i decided to take Apple’s advice and read up. One of the links was broken. Almost completely out of options by this point, i started in on the other link:Object-Oriented Programming with Objective-C”.

i made it about 3/4 of the way down the page before looking around to see if i was on hidden camera or something. If this was it – if THIS was the most basic, square-one starting point that Apple recommended for someone in their iPhone Developer Program, then clearly i’d have to think about evolving into a new species so i could fly off of this planet and nuke the site from orbit.

Here’s a taste of what the whitepaper offered:

A programming language can be judged by the kinds of abstractions that it enables you to encode. You shouldn’t be distracted by extraneous matters or forced to express yourself using a vocabulary that doesn’t match the reality you’re trying to capture.

i read that sentence, and then i noticed a little feedback box at the bottom of the page. It asked “Hey. How ya doin? Are you digging the article so far? Hey? Has it met your needs, kiddo? If not, click here.”

i clicked so hard on that button that i dented my web browser.

What followed was somewhat of a tirade. The feedback went something like:

Are you serious? Did you guys proofread this before publishing it? It sounds like it was written by Little Lord Fauntleroy.

i called the whitepaper heady and pretentious. And then, for good measure, i threw in something about Apple’s 60+-year-old-mother. That bit was fresh in my mind already.

But if this is the starting point, this is the starting point. Apparently, against my best wishes and hope for my own sanity, i somehow need to learn three new programming languages across two paradigms in reverse order of development AND openGL-ES (whatever THAT is) if i want to build games for the iPhone … which i do, because i’ve heard you can make like NINETY MILLION DOLLARS on a FART APP.

Or i can save myself some pain and suffering and eat a chimichanga. (** FRAAAPP! **) Ninety million dollars please?

Newgrounds is an American Flash Portal created by the people, for the people … and by “people”, i mean mostly adolescent boys and similarly-minded men who revel in exploitative content created in Flash. This content includes pornographic, copyright-infringing, gratuitously violent and often morally insensitive (see the site’s various Virginia Tech massacre-inspired content) web games and animations.

The site frustratingly caters to the lowest common denominator, when the site’s founder Tom Fulp has actually turned out a very strong game with Castle Crashers, the sophomore follow-up to Alien Hominid, which was the first Flash game to appear on a major home video game console. i wasn’t such a big fan of Alien Hominid, and was actually pretty surprised that the ESRB would give it a Teen rating, what with all the decapitation. But to each his own, i suppose. Maybe the graphics were just too darn cute?

Submit!

The Newgrounds submission process is very painless – moreso than MochiAds or Kongregate. You fill out a form with a bunch of options to indicate authorship (the site encourages “collabs” – collaborations between site members), and credits for any audio you’ve used from the site’s audio repository. There’s also a section where you can self-rate your content. This is more in the spirit of reassuring viewers or players of all the dirty stuff they’re going to see, because there are no actual measures taken on the site to caution minors about viewing that content. So kids are free to watch, for example, the Teletubbies parody “Pojo Gets Wit a Ho”, or the action packed “Space Slut Slim”. Ssssuper.

The fact is that most of the Newgrounds content that is inappropriate for minors is actually created by the minors for whom the content is inappropriate.

The site does draw the line at uploading *real* pics of people having sex, a measure which it’s clear to point out is only “due to new laws.” Newgrounds also discourages users from uploading child pornography. It’s good to know that a site that hosts “Dirty C*nt”, “Donkey vs. Bitch”, and “Suicide Can Be Fun” draws that moral line somewhere.

So when it came to uploading Two By Two to Newgrounds, i didn’t expect much love for a light puzzle game that kicks off – unironically – with a Bible verse, on a site where animated debauchery reigns. In order to actually make money from posting your content to Newgrounds, you have to implement their advertising API. i believe i could have uploaded the MochiAds-enabled version of Two By Two, but Pimp My Game is all about putting different monetization methods through their paces. So off i went.

API API Joy Joy

Integrating the Newgrounds API was very painless in AS3. There are only three lines of code, which you place at the beginning of the movie, and then Bob’s your uncle. (This is to say that once you press the “Submit” button, a man named Robert actually marries your mother’s sister.)

The most time-consuming part of the NG API integration is setting up custom events. These are trigger points that you define on the Newgrounds site and activate with a single line of code for each event. Once these hooks are in, you can visit the site and see a report on how often each custom even was called. (This is all in theory – i never did figure out exactly where on the site i could view the data for these events.)

There are all kinds of things you could conceivably track in your game – anything from “Passed level x with y lives” to “pressed the Quit button during level x”. It’s all stuff that can help you to better understand the users’ experience with your game. For example, if you realize that 50% of your players are running out of time and dying in level two, perhaps you can re-jig level two and update the game?

The Newgrounds custom events are a nice idea, but if you’re going to pimp your game, you’re better off tracking events with a third party – Google Analytics, for example. That way, it won’t matter where your game is hosted – you can track events from anywhere on the Internatz. As you’ll see during our numbers round-up below, the time i spent setting up these custom events was not worth the exposure i received on Newgrounds.

The final step to rigging up your game with Newgrounds ads is to pass staff approval, where i assume a real live person scans your game for content that miscellaneous advertisers may not enjoy (ie “Tits in the Forest” or “Murder the Government”, both currently playing on Newgrounds.) A Newgrounds inspector apparently gave Two By Two the thumbs-up.

The Result

i’ve given Newgrounds more time than any other featured Pimp My Game monetization method. The game was uploaded in on December 21st 2008, and the date stamp on this article puts us near the end of April – a full four months to let the masses pour over the game and bathe it in hot sweaty ad rev-share cash.

597 plays, with an average score of 2.75/5.00. 38% of players rated the game. It’s worthwhile to note that all of these numbers were charted within the first three days of the game appearing on the site; the game has since dropped completely out of view, and has experienced four solid months of complete radio silence. One way to get extra love for your game on Newgrounds is to promote it within the site forums. But frankly, i’m above baselessly begging people to play Two By Two and talking about it ad nauseum to other people on the Internatz. Wink.

The game garnered three written reviews, which i repost here for your spiritual edification:

Score: 10 “Good!” Great game man , this one is going in my favs!

Score: 5 “Meh.” its not too great and very boring

Score: 3 “Only one level???” To be quite honest I thought this game was weak. I aint being harsh on you but puzzle games are not something that attracts alot of people unless it is very good and unique…. but overall this game is not that great. I am sorry for sounding very harsh but this aint gnna do well.

i’m not sure why, even with a meagre 500-odd plays, there were zero ad impressions for the game. Does the Newgrounds API even work? Do the Custom Events work? Are we using any of this stuff properly? Maybe Tom can pop on here and explain.

Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the overall numbers for Two By Two which, thanks entirely to MochiAds, have climbed steadily (and pathetically).

The Graph

With its forty hour TOJam development period, Two By Two has earned me an hourly wage of 56 cents – not counting the hours spent integrating APIs, creating thumbnails for each portal and uploading the game to their exacting and non-standardized standards.

Keep in mind that this is seventy virtual dollars that i’ve earned. Each different site has a payout cap – MochiAds doesn’t pay until you hit $100. So although my readers in Bangladesh must be idolizing me for the amazing wad of cash they imagine i’m rolling around in, bear in mind that i haven’t seen a penny of actual money yet. The MochiAds numbers come in at around $0.30/day … by my calculations, i should see a cheque from them after Tuesday August 4th of this year, roughly foour months from now.

Epilogue

Newgrounds is a site that caters mostly to young boys gettin’ their kicks, with tits n’ guns as their favourite subject matter. Kids’ shows are a favourite target; a conspicuous amount of the Newgrounds games and animations are of the “Kill Barney” variety. This is likely a rite of passage for the age group – putting aside childish things and adopting more “mature” forms of entertainment which include sex and violence. This denouncement of kid content is carried out very literally by having a character violently murder Elmo, or sodomize Thomas the Tank Engine.

It’s not my world. i don’t need to assert my adulthood by creating or watching this kind of content. i get all the sex and violence i need at home: first, by having sex with my wife and creating children, and second, by having said children stomp on my scrotum during independent play time. i need money to feed that family, and to pay for our mortgage, and to afford ice packs to soothe my swooning groin. That’s what Pimp My Game is all about – determining whether i can generate respectable income making original games.

i don’t have time to sit around designing a 7-part animated series about action heroes raping beloved childhood icons. The rewards on Newgrounds are community “glory” and no actual profit.

Newgrounds is not for me. And i’m not even sure it’s a decent also-ran in our growing list of monetization schemes. It’s a portal where content of a certain ilk will get noticed and talked about, while the creators of sanitized casual games should save their efforts for other sites.

Keep watching this feature for more info on monetizing your Flash games! If you missed the other articles, catch the rest of Pimp My Game here!

At one of their monthly meetings, the Toronto Flash User Group (FlashInTO) invited speakers to try a new presentation style straight outta Japan called Pecha Kucha. i didn’t know what i was going to present, but i did know i wanted to try the style: 20 slides at 20 seconds apiece. No more, no less.

The result was the Hardest Video Game Quiz Evar, a punny visual puzzle where images formed clues to video game titles. i burned through a bunch of these at the presentation and had the audience members shout out the answers. i tried to use the presentation as a teaser, enticing the audience to visit our new website to try an additional dozen or so puzzles.

The game worked far better as a group activity than a single-player game. A few weeks after the presentation, i found a similar quiz with music as the topic, and i didn’t enjoy it. Part of the problem is how unforgiving the puzzles are – you either get it, or you don’t.

When similar puzzles were passed around at work, a group of us would try to one-up each other to get the best score, but eventually we’d keep chipping away at them, giving each other hints until they were solved. That’s when picture quizzes are at their best: when you have friends nearby to ridicule, brag at, and crib from.

The blood, sweat and tears that went into creating this seemingly simple jigsaw puzzle game aren’t evident, but our jigsaw puzzle game goes where few Flash jigsaw puzzle games fear to tread!

Instead of clicking and dragging the pieces onto a static mat in the middle of the screen, the puzzle can be assembled anywhere on the screen. Clusters of pieces can be fitted together and rotated, giving the player much more freedom and control than mat puzzles with non-rotating pieces.

Every image in the gallery is dynamically loaded and cut into a jigsaw puzzle. The game is architected so that new images need only to be dropped into a folder alongside the game. Like magic, they appear in the image gallery and are automatically cut into small, medium or large pieces depending on player preference.

Finally, any online image can be brought into the app. Click the Custom gallery image and copy/paste the URL for your favourite online picture. The program supports most common image formats.

Check the links below for more information on the Jigsaw! project and how all this was accomplished.

Related Articles:

• Flash Tutorial: Pagination
• AS3 Pitfalls: Cross-Domain Bitmap Data
• Jigsaw! Project Announcement
  
• Cross-Domain Bitmap Data: Adobe Says No

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The game is a simple twist on tried and true flip n’ match memory, where the cards are mapped onto a cube. i sat at my station and folded a paper origami cube to help me visualize where the cube’s faces should be when the cube was rotated.

The chime-like music effects for the raindrop were created with a kalimba (thumb piano).

The game has three difficulty modes. In the hardest mode, the cube has 9 cards on each cube face. 27 individual animals had to be drawn to satisfy the “Hard” mode requirement. These illustrations took the better part of a day. The animals are randomized on the “Easy” and “Normal” levels to create variety.

The sound that plays when the ark doors close is the door chime for Toronto’s subway trains. This was one of the required TOJam elements, along with some variation of a goat. We saitsfied this requirement by including a goat as one of the animals.

The game was reasonably well-received, and later became the subject of our Pimp My Game series of articles, where we ran it through a number of online monetization schemes and reported the financials. The most common complaint among players is that the experience is over too quickly, and that the game requires some sort of levels system or progression padding to make it seem more satisfying.

Related aricles:

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