"I'm Just Sayin' - Episode One" : Is Indie Game Developing The Way Forward?

Credit: http://www.pixelprospector.com/

So since i've decided to go back to my coding roots and get into games development again I'm looking around and I'm thinking is this actually the way forward now for video games? With game engines available such as Unity 4 and the new Unity 5 out soon, on top of the many others a lot of people are coming together over the Internet and putting out some decent games out there.  Ok so we are not exactly getting the same kind of games that have as many assets likes GTA or Assasins Creed, or in depth MMO's like World of Warcraft but yo know what? I think we are getting closer.

Lets look at a simple first person online shooter like Counter Strike. Really successful and always one of the most played games on Steam, it's a money spinner. Any half decent developers out there could clone that, in fact there may be a few people reading this who know they could probably do better whilst off there face on acid. In fact in one of the first Unity tutorials I took it was actually to create a one v one multiplier shooter. Maybe there are developers out there now ready and waiting for Unity 5 to hit so they can do that and take advantage of all the new features unity has to offer? Remember the concept of it is quite simple, team a try to defeat team b in a number of ways such as eliminate one another, defuse the bomb, rescue the hostages or something like capture the flag. You have some decent coders each with a unique set of skills, get some digital artists in and some sound specialists and providing everybody is singing off the same hymn sheet and there is a good team leader you have yourself possibly the "new" Counter Strike. It isn't hard to include rewards (hats!), achievements and such either.

All this can be done, online with people who never meet face to face. Unless of course some are from the same area but you get my meaning. And the best part is I'm doing this right now myself and everything looks promising so far.

Grand Theft Auto five cost a few hundreds of millions of dollars to make, in fact I think the only movie to ever cost as much as one of the Pirates of the Caribbean films and you have to wonder sometimes whether that's way more than what they should have actually spent on it. Over 900 people worked on Assassin's Creed Black Flag, was that a bit excessive to have on the the payroll? I've never worked for a AAA Developer studio so I wouldn't know, I don't have first hand experience in developing a AAA game but at first glance it seems excessive. Do we really care if it's a celebrity voice or done by a professional actor? For Has a celebrity voice over really been a selling point for a game? For me it's always been about whether it sounded good, and whether the emotion of the voice was fit the situation perfectly. There are voice actors out there prepared to work for peanuts just to get there name on the credits and have something for there portfolio.

Lets be real about the situation however, it's not just about getting a bunch of random people together. If you have a team of five and all five of you are coders then you aren't going to get very far.


Team Leader / Project Leader

Every team needs a team leader, that unique individual who isn't scared of calling the shots. They need to be realistic and have the unique ability to make everyone want to work for them, and to be able to inspire everyone to work to his or her vision.

Coders

You will  need a bunch of skilled coders and it's always worth bringing on someone new and enthusiastic, put them under the wing of a more experiencing programmer. You never know you might be the one to say you discovered the Gable of ten years from now and a brutal truth is sometimes, it's who you know which gets you to some places. If you have trust and give opportunity to others, who knows one day maybe they will do the same for you.

Digital Artists

Do you want to be looking for actual artists, not coders who know a bit about it? Perhaps the other way around being artists who maybe know a little bit about coding but that's not really essential; in other words coding is not there job just as much as the animation and artistic side of the project is not really anything to do with the coders.  It's very rare you will find someone who is masterly skilled in both. Those people are normally veterans with many many years and games under there belt. You will most likely need more than one artist, depending on the size of the game. If it's a 2D platform then one skilled artist who could make assets is all you need. On that note the developers could also use free assets but I'm not sure if other developers would look down upon that, I mean it's better to show that you have created your own assets right? Or at least as much as possible. But if you are talking some kind of 3rd Person or FPS or anything really that's going to require lots of models then two or three artists skilled in software like Maya would possibly be needed,

Sound?

Who cares if it's Tom Hanks or Dave the assistant coder, as long as it sounds good and fits the emotion for the scene who cares right? Chances are you can get audio assets from the web, but as your team builds someone will generally know someone by now. Hell the coders themselves may even pick this one up.

Marketing

So lets say you almost have your game complete after months and months and months of hard work, design and implementation. It's at the point now where the team leader can look at the progress of the project as a whole and make a decision of when the game could possibly be released, perhaps an earliest release date so how would you go about doing this? One of the most popular options at the moment is Steams Greenlight, you show off your game and sell the idea and if people like it then steam will publish it and and take something like 30% of the profits but don't quote me on that. Who knows maybe you could end up with some high success like Hotline Miami or hey maybe it won't be a success, or maybe by the time you've paid everyone you'll have made like $50. But at least you have something under your belt. Then again maybe people won't like it, ie if you've created yet another zombie game.

Do you really need a social media manager? Everybody knows how Facebook, twitter and all other social networking works. And if a games developer doesn't then they should so regardless between the team everyone should be able to bang there heads together a few times and come up with a marketing plan.

If your development team are really smart game would be compatible on apple and ios devices, this could improve your chances of getting the game green lit on steam. Obviously free to play will greatly give it a better chance of a large scale exposure, then again 69p isn't a lot of money either and people will buy it especially if it's marketed well.

Kickerstarter - It's also a financing option, but at the same time you're marketing your project. But at this stage the development team really have to be able to pitch the game well. Possibly playable demo, solid promotional video. They have to make the person on the other end want to invest money in it and sometimes these can go very well but I'll do some more research into this at a later date.

Games by Indie Developers are played more than the big guns.
Source: www.entrepreneur.com/article/224735

The point is, thinking about it we now have all these perhaps thousands of game studios popping up now, and we now have the ability to easily publish our games digitally on a world wide scale. We don't need to fund costs for packing and media and the thousands of copies to be made. If we make a game that can be played in a web browser we could publish it for free on our own domain, a free to play game that gets paid by advertisers (i'm looking at you flappy birds). A skilled developer could knock up a flappy birds clone in just a few hours, and that's a team of one.  Gamer's from around the world are now getting together, they are using the biggest teacher tool of them all and that's the Internet to learn, and for every gamer out there they probably have an idea inside of them that they think would be awesome for a game and chances are a bunch of other people think the game. They get together and they start making that game, it doesn't always work and that's just natural for a number of reasons, such as lacking that team leader. It could even be a case of getting half way through and that then plain and simply realize the whole project is shit and even though, you look at what you learned, gather up the resources you are left with and move on.

It's happening now, i'm currently working on a large scale project for an online game, and we are all from America to Europe to Australia. And if it makes release in which I'm very confident it will, I look forward to the feeling of hopefully seeing my name on the credits. To me it'll be "That's me, I was part of that team that made that game". I hope it's a success (royalties!) and I hope the majority of it is invested and we work on a new project, but I also accept that there is, for me at least a very small chance that it won't and that reason because be something as silly as 'right game, wrong time'.  But even so, my name will be on there and I look forward to that proud feeling and hopefully it'll be the first of money to come *cough* I mean many.

I'll just be honest i'm too lazy to fix this image

The Ultimate Warrior RIP

The Warrior has passed away at 54. It's almost unreal, he had been at war with the WWE for many years up until recently when he was inducted into the hall of fame and even made a what is now a haunting speech on Monday Night Raw the following evening.

When I was a kid and first into wrestling you were either a Hulkamanic or you were a warrior and I think deep down I was always a warrior because he was just...different. He had that intensity from the moment his music hits all the way to the moment he went back behind the curtain. No doubt Hulkamania was a much bigger marketing tool for the WWE but the Warrior still is one of the biggest money pullers of all time and no doubt now following his death he will continue to be.

Hogan vs Warrior at Wrestlemania 6 is one match that always stands in my mind. It was the Rock and Austin of that era and the entire world was watching. It is perhaps my favorite match in history because for me it was the first time two of the worlds biggest icons had collided on such a large media scale. The ending was sort of an ending that everybody wanted, a winner with no hatred between the two (on camera anyhow). The Warrior was successful and Hogan was passing the torch to him.

It can't be ignored that the Warrior back in those days did have his critics behind the camera and with his fellow superstars. He had long lasting feuds with the likes of Hulk Hogan until up recent years until Wrestlemania recently where they had appeared to have put all there differences behind them as the Warrior was rightfully inducted into the WWE hall of fame. A few years ago a notorious DVD was released entitled "The Self Destruction of the Ultimate Warrior" in which past and present superstars basically destroyed the Warrior personally. However the reasons of the feuds he had a that time with the WWE and other wrestlers is unimportant.

What matters is the Warrior touched the lives of millions of people around the world who grew  up with him and that includes myself. During his final speech on Raw after Wrestlemania he spoke of everybody will take there final breath, their heart will beat one last time and if they have fueled others then they will live on in lore and story tellers, very haunting now it seems.

The Warrior has been very active over the past few years especially over social media and has still been making a large sum selling Warrior merchandise. The WWE have also vowed to honor the contract they had with the Warrior for the family.

RIP Warrior

Peaches Geldof (1989-2014)

Perhaps one of the more tragic deaths on the celebrity circuit in modern memory. Daughter of the famed Bob Geldof and the late Paula Yates, Peaches was always haunted by her mother’s death when she was just eleven years old as it would haunt any child. Throughout this torment inside of her she was thrust into the spotlight at a very young age and for many years ridiculed by the press and 'normal folk' alike because of her previous wild child status. Rushing into her first marriage at nineteen only for it to be over just six months later Peaches over the past few years had almost been portrayed as someone almost respectable and a shadow of her former self since the birth of her two children.

The viral debate she had with motor mouth Katie Hopkins and winning will go down in living memory, it's tragic that it's because of her passing people really have turned towards her and will turn towards her for inspiration. Previously she was a wild child, a drug addict living her youth and overcame that to settle down with her young family and focus on her career and was slowly gaining wider and wider credibility despite her addiction to instagram and feeling the need to constantly keep taking photos. Despite everything she was making a successful career out of herself, even I at times wished the press would just stop picking on the poor girl. 

Personally, I was  concerned about her skinny frame. Over the past few years her curves disappeared and she was a walking skeleton, even through pregnancy she was looking skinny and gaunt.

Yes, some of the things she came out with were silly and sometimes even ill timed, yet those people who mocked her for saying those things appear to be under the self-belief that they never have nor will they ever say something silly. The only difference was with her being in the lime light everybody was there to judge everything she did, said and ate. Could those people who laughed at her ever imagine have the country watch every move they make? Twist any tweet or facebook message they can do? Having random people completely judge you just having never met or spoke to you before just because of a few silly funny things you've said? Of course not, I mean what right would they have to judge that person? Peaches was a human being like the rest of us, sometimes she said some silly things and sometimes she said some empowering things. More importantly she was a wife, a mother and a daughter. 

You have to think about her two children, growing up without a mother and wondering would history continue to repeat itself. I don't personally believe that will happen, after all they will be raised by a loving father, two loving families...not to mention two very wealthy families and I've no doubt that despite some struggles they will lead a happy life, one can only pray for the Geldof family tonight.

So the whole Early Access Game thing

First of all it amazes me how some people read "Early Access" and not only buy it, but also reads the "This game is still in early access" message at the start and STILL complains about bugs in the game I mean those people must be a special kind of stupid gamer right? So lets think about this whole early access concept then.

Why even go early access?

Money why else? For some studios they need financing and it's a nice way to do it. The gamers can also see the development of the game bit by bit and so of become involved in the process. They watch it grow so to speak.

And why could this be bad?

Think of it this way imagine there is a game called "Big Bad John" and Big Bad John goes on early release, and people are really amazed and how good it looks and the potential it has. The game studio has a nice site and promo video for it and things look good, people buy the game early access and the studio immediately starts to get some funding which is great, developers could get paid, more licenses can be bought perhaps software that needed an expensive license can now be purchased or whatever.

What a lot of developers are not counting on is the immediate pressure that they are putting themselves under, the developers and everyone all of a sudden are under the spotlight. The gamers know how well progress is going whether it's slow or going as expected so it's hard to mask that if something unexpected happens. The whole development process generally becomes public and because people have already shelled out for it, that's exactly what they expect...development. If Big Bad John doesn't make decent developmental progress over the coming months eventually players will wish they never bothered in the first place and will play the next early access game that shows potential.

Lets face it nobody wants a steam library full of early access, incomplete games do they? So you also have to think about just how many early access games are knocking about at the moment. If two or three games are doing really well then people might not want to pay out for another incomplete game (because bottom line that's what an early access game is) no matter how good Big Bad John looks.

Suppose that the final release day comes for Big Bad Johnson, do you think sales will soar? Probably not, you'll have an instant spike for the final release (lets face it some people just won't buy early access games from past experience) but generally people have already bought it. Take the amount of people who have bought Rust and Dayz, when and IF they make there final release date they won't exactly be shifting millions of copies because they have already sold so many on early access.

Are the Studios required to finish the game after you've bought it?

No! Absolutely not, if you look through the terms you'll probably find that they can at any time turn around and say "you know what? this project is shit lets cancel it". It's going to happen one day and lot of people are not going to be happy about it. Recently the Dayz project leader has walked, citing it a "Flawed Project". No you can take that in a number ways, me personally I take it as "well you were the project leader so if it is flawed it is only because you let it be and now you're doing a runner because the bubble burst"), still things like this throw the game into doubt.

Are the studios required to do constant updates?

Again no, and it's not uncommon for early access games to have no updates for months on end and then have a small minor one. The smaller ones pick up for a few months at a time and then go quiet for the rest of the year. Lets look at Starbound, at first everybody was into it and the idea. However lack of updates, lack of actual signs of developmental progress has seen people jump to Rust and Days. The Starbound bubble has now burst, and Rust and Dayz are heading the same way so that leaves us with the question:

When will the Early Access Game fad come to an end? 

It's not worked, studios have not been able to live up to the demand of the gamers from this method.

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What I'm Currently Working On

I've recently signed up with Mountain Wheel Games, a fairly new games studio who are making an MMO. Quite a big leap into Games Development as MMO's are generally in another league of there own but here I am on the coding side.

The games called Stone Rage and you can from some information on it from Gaming With Noms blog at:

Gaming with Noms

So yeah it's an MMO based around the stone age, three factions so far who battle it out with one another basically. It's a unique idea for an MMO and for once it's nothing at all zombie related. The games industry still think we want Zombie games when most actually done, unfortunately we are caught in the vicious cycle of still buying them so as long as  we are still buying them so regardless of whether we want that genre still is Irrelevant. If we are buying them then as far as the gaming industry is concerned  the consumer wants them and they have no reason to think otherwise.

It won't be competing with the likes of World of Warcraft or other 'AAA MMO titles', it'll be free to play. Whether there will be any micro transactions taking place in game I do not know, I do know that if that happens they won't be required to experience the full level of the game.

There are a lot of people working on this, coders, artists, audio specialists and it's all being done online. Welcome to modern day games developing where you can potentially create a AAA game with the right skilled people without having to leave your home. The game itself is being developed on the CryEngine, so no strictly nancy Unity developers here, and yes I see a difference between a unity developer and a games developer. I personally don't want to get stuck with a bunch of people who only know and are only prepared to work with Unity, it's not the only engine and by gaining experience on engines such as CryEngine and UnrealEngine then that will make me a better developer.

I'm also working on a side project, an indie 2d platformer. Unfortunately I have no details on that yet. It'll probably aim for a steam greenlight release for something like 2.99.