Happion Labs GameDevBlog

Not Just A Kickstarter - Also A Game Development Class

So the awesome keeps awesomeing - we've hit Stretch Goal #3, and Brian Luzietti is doing stuff. He's got some new jetpack sounds that I plan to get in the game today, just before the Indiecade deadline. 

Now, something that's buried pretty far down on the Kickstarter page, that nobody has picked up on yet, is that I'm offering classes in game development.

After teaching at Digipen for a bit, and getting paid hardly anything for a ton of work, and thinking about the ginormous tuition the students are paying, I thought it would be a good idea to cut out the middle man.

Also, I was looking at other Kickstarter projects and thinking it was a bit lame that people were donating a thousand dollars to get, like, a tavern named after them or whatever. (And then I did exactly that with my own. But at least there's only five "taverns" in my game - it's valuable because it's rare! And you get all the other stuff too.) But I also thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if they got to create a whole level?"

But wait: not everyone knows how to make a videogame level. Which is why I then thought, "What if I offered one-on-one online (or in person, if they happen to be in the Seattle area) instruction and worked together with these budding level designers to make these levels?"

So that's what I'm doing. You'll get at least ten hours of one-on-one instruction by me. You'll get your level in the game, with a big bold credit by you, like the way N+ levels often have the designer's name on them. Also: you'll be keeping the rights to the stuff you make—so you can use what you create in your own games. (Though, at least for the near future, without the swinging character controller that's the key to Energy Hook. Still - your assets and level could be the foundation for something cool of your own.)

"But wait," you say, "that means I'd be paying you to work for you?"

Oh, no, you're onto me! Yes! Yes, you kind of would!

But I still feel like it's a good deal. You're getting real-world experience, mentoring from a veteran developer, and credit working on a notable game for a lot less than the price of going to game design school.

The bonus levels will be tangential to the main game. Players who don't want to play them won't have to, but I have a feeling some of them might end up being more fun than the core levels. What I'm imagining is at certain times the Energy Hook protagonist, Delilah, has to sleep. And when she sleeps she dreams about Energy Hook. And those dreams are the Bonus Levels that you all will make. Maybe sometimes they're pretty much like the regular Energy Hook levels; maybe sometimes they're COMPLETELY CRAZY. It's up to you. (But I get final cut.)

Make sure you have several solid days to work on your level before signing up for this - because if your level isn't done in time we just might have to ship without it. And if you're interested, you should probably get in touch first and ask me any questions you might have: jdfristrom@gmail.com. 

The $1 Kickstarter

I said I was going to talk about why I did a $1 Kickstarter; well I did, not on the blog, but with Dave Tach of Polygon, and it's all here! 

 

Looking For An Art Director

So, sadly, this isn't an April Fool's joke. Paul Whitehead, the artist who has been working with me part-time on Energy Hook, works at Arena.Net by day and they've just announced a new profit sharing plan which he'd be kind of crazy to walk away from. So my dreams of raising enough funds to hire him away from Arena.Net and have him work with me full-time have been quashed.

So I'm looking for a new art director to take over for him. More details are here.

If you know someone who might be interested, and you want Energy Hook to be as awesome as it can be, please let them know. Spread that job link! Thanks!

Interview

I did an interview over on Warpzoned.com.  Check it out.

The New Plan - Delaying The Kickstarter Yet Again

When I first got the idea to do Energy Hook I planned on Kickstarting ASAP so I could see just how brilliant or dumb an idea it was. But in the process of working on the pitch and prototype I've fallen in love with it. I can't not finish it now. So I'm going to. Finish it. No matter what, even if I don't make a cent off it.

I want to do the Kickstarter anyway. Why? To find out if I should make the smallest, minimally viable game possible - or if we'll have the resources to do something grander.

That being the case, Paul urged me to wait more on the Kickstarter, so we can make the game look as good as possible before we pass the hat around. I really didn't want to wait. I've already postponed it once.

So I did that thing that people do when they have tough decisions. I made a list of pros and cons. It looked something like this:

Should I do the Kickstarter now?

Pros:

• It's eating my brain. I want to get it over with.
• Slipping again is embarrassing.
• We'll find out now how much resources we have - we might have to redo less stuff. (For example, right now we're making everything fairly flat-shaded and colored-in - with a lot more funding we could have higher surface detail, but we'll have to redo those flat-shaded models.)
• Once the Kickstarter is over, we'll focus more on making a good game instead of making a good kickstarter pitch.
• Kickstarter fatigue. It's getting harder to have a success on Kickstarter as time goes on.

Cons:

• The longer we wait, the better the game will look, and more people will want to fund it.
• The longer we wait, the more we can build awareness and our social networks.
• And if we wait long enough, we can have a first playable to show journalists before the launch and to give as a reward to higher tier backers.

Although the list of pros seems longer than the list of cons - the pros are mostly psychological issues of my own. Yes, I'm devoting too much brain glucose to thinking about the Kickstarter, but I don't have to be. Yes, I'm working harder on making our Kickstarter pitch look good than making the game good, but I don't have to be. Yes, I'm embarrassed about slipping again, but I don't have to be.

And yes, "Kickstarter fatigue" seems to be setting in; there are fewer successes on Kickstarter these days. But I don't want people to fund the game because Kickstarter is hot, I want people to fund the game because they genuinely think it's worth funding.

The only semi-reasonable pro is the one about redoing work, but if we raise enough funding that we have to redo work, that's ... actually a really good problem to have.

So, the cons have it! We're slipping.

Our new plan is to get something playable going, which could take anywhere from 1-3 months, all the while Paul making more better art. He's finished his teaching gig at Digipen and has more free time to make stuff. Then we'll have something to hand out to a few select journalists and players. (Which is another reason to Like us on Facebook - we'll give away one or two to our FB followers.) And then we'll do the Kickstarter.

What do you think?

Happy Holidays!

Details for you developers out there: This uses the ats Snow Suite by Lars Steerhoff - procedural snowy ground and trees - and it's free! Really awesome. It also uses Soft Snow by Unlock Software - instant snow for only $2. The framerate is sketchy because I did everything on my crappy laptop, since I'm away at my folks. Recorded with Bandicam. The whole thing - finding the plugins, creating the scene, recording, editing the movie - took about two hours.

The award-winning sixty second shooter Deluxe!

That's right, sixty second shooter Deluxe has won Playstation.Blog's Playstation Mobile Game Of The Year Gold award.

I wonder what sort of sales bump this news might get. All I can do is check the number of reviews that the game's gotten. It's been a while since I've checked, unfortunately, and although it's gone up a few since I last checked, no way to tell if that's in response to this news.

I am expecting my first month's sales data any day now...

Mistakes To Avoid When Going From Corporate To Indie: Being 'Proactive' Considered Harmful

I heard this definition of 'Proactive' once: fire erupts in the office. The reactive worker grabs a fire extinguisher and puts it out, but the proactive worker has already installed a sprinkler system. (The retroactive worker simply does nothing and says, "I told you we should install a sprinkler system." Jerk.) 

If that's really how to define 'proactive', then it sounds good on the surface. You're always prepared for every eventuality. If we look closer, though, we realize that the proactive worker seems to always be engaged in risk management. They install sprinkler systems, they buy insurance, they consult their lawyers, they file the proper paperwork, they get permission, they look before they leap. All of this takes a lot of time and money. If one of those bad eventualities happens, you're glad you were prepared, but I'm thinking it's quite possible that the expense in risk-avoidance ends up being higher than the expense of having to put out that fire that erupts once in a while. Talking expected value here.

Coming from a corporate background, we were very risk-avoidant at Torpex. We limited our liability. We consulted lawyers. We had E&O insurance. We made everyone sign NDA's. We operated in stealth mode. We didn't show Schizoid to people because, "What if they clone it?" We often refused to pitch games to publishers because, "We can only pull back the curtain once, you know." We didn't share with other indies how our games were selling. 

So we succesfully avoided some worst-case scenarios--this is the only clone of Schizoid I know of (but would anyone have cloned it anyway?)--but who knows how many opportunities we passed up? Opportunities to network - opportunities to find clients - opportunities to build our social networks - opportunities to raise awareness - opportunities to earn favor and respect. And how much did we spend, in time and money, on the legal stuff and insurance and fear and anxiety in general?

So I've mostly been trying the opposite approach this time. I've signed contracts without consulting lawyers; I've done jams with no agreements about who-owns-what in place; I've never made anyone sign an nda; I've announced games after working on them just a few days; I've put up trailers showing incomplete work. When problems arise - like somebody complaining about the way the water looks in the trailer - I fix them, maybe. (I'll show y'all that tomorrow.)

(I do have an offsite backup, though. Losing my work is a worst-case-scenario too grim to fathom.)

I didn't even have a separate bank account for the company until I needed one to get paid.

Is this sounding familiar? It's being agile, isn't it? Maybe it's not just good for software development. Time will tell...

So, yeah. I don't like being proactive. Not if it means risk management. I like showing initiative.

By the way - I'm running out of ideas for the Corporate to Indie Mistakes thing. Anybody care to share some juicy mistakes?

And please Like Happion Labs on Facebook, y'all.

Backer Upgrades

So, nobody having come up with a better idea, we'll be giving away "Backer Upgrades" on the Facebook page over the next several weeks up until the Kickstarter launches.

Like most, the Kickstarter is going to have a few levels of virtual rewards - you get the game when it ships (let's call that 'gamma'); you get early access, to the beta ('beta'); you get early-early access, to the alpha ('alpha'); and you get some kind of extra something that we haven't figured out yet ... cheats unlocked just for you, A+ gear, or something like that ('alpha plus').

If you have a backer upgrade, whatever level you back at, you'll be promoted to the next level. Gamma becomes beta; beta becomes alpha; alpha becomes alpha plus. 

So - we win, because you still have to back at some level and help fund the game at least a bit. And you win - because you get better stuff.

Like us on Facebook for a chance to win one.

Kickstarter Anxiety

Despite all my talk about being a happy game developer I'm actually super-anxious about the upcoming Kickstarter launch. I think I'm more anxious about it than I've been about any actual finished games I've shipped!

Why the heck is that?

A combination of things, I guess:

• I'm showing people stuff that's so rough and unfinished. The other things I shipped I thought were at least medium-to-well-done.
• Kickstarter is so random. I don't know why some games - ones I wouldn't back - get ridiculously funded and others - that I do think are worth backing - can't even raise enough money to pay for a programmer-month.
• This may be my last hurrah. If this doesn't work, it's probably back to the pixel mines for me. (Side note: I've been saying that for two years now, ever since Torpex was chasing publisher funding for a Richard Garfield game we were working on, and nothing has worked and I still haven't gone back to the pixel mines, so take me with a grain of salt.)

Anyhow!

I don't know who she is or what her credentials are - in fact, it's possible she took a series of articles about how to do marketing for shoes, crossed out 'shoes' and wrote in 'games' - but this Emmy Jonassen has posted a bunch of very wise-sounding stuff about how to do a Kickstarter, and that's what I've lately been using for a playbook. I'm on phase two now. But I'm behind schedule. I was supposed to be contacting journalists weeks ago, and I wasn't able to bring myself to do that. (Though happily, Khris Golder of the up-and-coming GamerCheese actually reached out to me, and we got an interview up yesterday.)

After all, I'm supposed to have a teaser trailer ready first. So. Finally 'finished' that - and by 'finished' I mean cradling my head in my hands in front of my desk going "this looks so amateur", seeing nothing but flaws, so Cathy looked into my office and was all 'What's wrong?' so I showed her the video and she sat there in silence for a moment and then was just like, "Um ... is it done?" and my heart sank further and I was like, "Yeah, except for the music" ... which helped a lot, actually (George Ellinas - shit I forgot to credit him on the youtube page, brb) ... but I was not confident.

But, like I said in my post on perfectionism, sometimes you just have to set a deadline and ship what you've got.

And so yesterday I did the contacting journalists thing, more or less just as Ms. Jonassen described. (Though she says we're actually supposed to call people, like, on the phone? Who has their phone numbers listed anywhere?) And I heard back from a couple whom I already knew from previous games, who said they'd try to get something up - but mostly crickets.

So it was stressful and anxious-making. But I wouldn't call it unhappy. There's no way to get all the stress out of your life ... "You can't keep birds from landing on your head, but you can keep them from making a nest in your hair." I still managed to get in some quality family time last night, watch some TV with the wife, get a good night's sleep.

And in the morning - fucking awesome! We're in Rock, Paper, Shotgun and ShogunGamer! And 1 out of 10 people who have watched the teaser trailer Liked it! And all these positive comments! (And I also have other positive news which I should keep secret for now.)

I'm over the moon. Maybe this will really work! But I like to think I'd still be happy even if I hadn't gotten that external validation.

Here's that trailer.