Happion Labs GameDevBlog

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.

Indie Game: The Movie and How To Be A Happy Game Developer

Finally saw Indie Game: The Movie last week and a recurring theme for all the indie developers they followed around seemed to be that they were depressed. In fact, the only one who seemed moderately cheerful actually seemed to be Edmund McMillen, which frickin' surprised me because he made Aether.

Maybe this was just a choice of the filmmakers, only showing the developers in their sad and vulnerable moments, and really everyone filmed was a lot more balanced ... or maybe making games is not as fun as most people think.

This is probably true for most Making of Art. Or anytime anyone does anything off the beaten path. You're filled with self doubt and insecure about your financial situation and think to yourself "Once I've Made It then I'll be happy" and then you Make It and you're happy for a little bit but then you're back to yourself again.

I don't know Phil Fish, but I'm willing to bet that he didn't suddenly become happy once Fez was out.

Even Jonathan Blow said that after Braid shipped and he saw the (awesome) reviews he got depressed because the reviewers didn't Get what he was going for. (I'm paraphrasing a bit there.) One of the most succesful indie games ever - and he was depressed! So that's a reminder. If you're killing yourself, making yourself miserable, to make a hit game, don't think that once it's a hit you'll be happy. Studies have shown people tend to return to their baseline levels of happiness, even after massively fortunate events occur, such as winning the lottery.

So. Step One: Be Happy. Step Two: Make Games. (For As Long As We Can Afford To.) That's been my mission statement lately.

But how can we just "Be Happy"? (Particularly after one of our games flops?) Happion Laboratories, studying happiness-in-game-development since 2012, endorses these books, which describe the process, and studies have shown they work:

• The How of Happiness - Sonja Lyubomirsky - http://www.amazon.com/How-Happiness-Scientific-Approach-Getting/dp/159420148X
• Feeling Good - David D. Burns - http://www.amazon.com/Feeling-Good-Therapy-Revised-Updated/dp/0380810336

Something in particular I'd like to call out is perfectionism. Something that was pretty clear about watching Phil Fish in Indie Game was that he suffered from perfectionism, which was one of the reasons Fez was so long in the making. They even showed some before and after pixel art and although the 'after' art was clearly better, it wasn't, say, twice as good, and I had to wonder, if I had played Fez with the 'before' art, wouldn't I still have been delighted? (Okay, so XBLA launch, which means once you ship it it's trapped in amber, so I totally understand polishing every last pixel to a fine gloss. But I still wonder.)

If you've been watching my Energy Hook trailers you know I haven't been suffering from perfectionism lately. (Like my little marketing trick there? I've turned the topic back to my product.) Even though I've been doing the 'art' because Paul's too busy, I'm still flopping it out for the world to see, every time hoping nobody will be too critical. Some people actually seem to like it the way it is; others realize the Real Art isn't in yet; and for the most part every new thing I deliver seems to garner more praise...this latest bit seems to have a few people really excited:

All in all I gotta say - not being perfectionistic has been perfectly fine so far. But you may ask, "Okay, Jamie, that sounds great, but how do I just stop being a perfectionist?" Well, Feeling Good has a few techniques for fighting perfectionism when it rears its ugly head, and I also had a post about it here.

12 days to the Kickstarter...

Screenshot Saturday - Water, Landmarks, Animation, Camera

Combining some of the work of the past week (which wasn't much, due to Thanksgiving and whatnot) - to re-do a run with the new camera, better synced animation, and rooftop garden and other landmarks. I liked some things about the old run better. I may be at the point of diminishing returns.

@jeffool and others in the Unity forums complained about the animations looking floaty - turned out I lost some of my work on the animation speed, and there was a bug with the wallrun. Much better now.

I still want to get a tilt and shake on the camera. Next week.

13 days until Kickstarter launch! (Hopefully!)

Some Thoughts On Publisher Deals

Some publishers may not realize this, but developers eventually catch on. At this point, we realize that royalties are a sham, that on paper the product isn't going to make much of a profit and we'll never recoup our advance even if the game does moderately well. Which means our interests are no longer as aligned with the publisher's as we might like: if we're going to have to recoup an advance, we either need a megahit to start seeing those royalties or, probably the smarter thing, is to do as little as possible on the product since we're already getting all the money we're ever going to see.

You can argue that we dev should still put in the extra effort to make the game great, because it's our name on the product, because it might be a megahit, because we want to maintain a good relationship with that publisher. But I'd argue that's bending over and letting yourself be exploited.

Happily, some publishers have figured out that we've figured out the sham and are no longer calling the funding an 'advance', so the developer makes money with their first unit sold. Obviously this is much higher risk for the publisher! We can expect these deals to have lower prepaids - or that the publisher will ask for exclusivity or rights of refusal. Still, I think it's great, to be connected with the fruits of our labor again. And I think we'll see more and more of this, particularly now that developers have so many options.

On another note, Chris Natsuume of BoomZap had a saying: a developer can get prepaids, royalties, or keep their IP, and they get to pick two. I'm not sure where BoomZap even found those deals, because at Torpex, when we talked to publishers, we never even managed to sign advance+royalties deals. In hindsight, we probably were asking for overlarge advances, but also in hindsight, I have to wonder why we were even asking for royalties, when we knew full well the chances of them ever paying off were slim to none. The Torpex strategy was doomed to failure: it was essentially work-for-hire, and all it could possibly do is keep us afloat until hopefully we found a better strategy. Sure, staying afloat sounds better than sinking, but maybe if you're just treading water it's time to seriously think outside the box.

The new TDD

I'm doing something these days that a younger me would have been horrified of. Trailer Driven Development: the feature isn't done until I've made a trailer of it.

I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. One, because I'm working alone most of the time and I can't just call across the office, "Hey, check out the cool thing I just did!" and have my co-workers ooh and ah. (I can have my kids ooh and ah but it's not the same.) So making trailers and e-mailing them to Paul (and often, the world) fills that need. But also because the important thing right now is to sell the vision of the game, and what better way to do that than with trailers? In fact, if I'm coding something that isn't going to make good trailer and help the kickstarter, I'm kind of wasting my time, because the kickstarter might not even succeed.

This isn't so different from what any studio needs to do when they're in the early stages of making a game. Those early stages are often not about selling the game to the end player (who couldn't care less about our trailers, they want the game itself to be delivering the awesome, of course) but selling the game to publishers, biz dev people, bosses, journalists, and others who probably don't have the time or inclination to actually play your game (and put up with some gameplay that might not-be-so-awesome as they get over a learning curve...) and what better way to do that than trailers.

The younger me would have freaked out. He would have said, "Dude, you're a game maker, not a film maker." The younger me (and the older me, for that matter) has seen so many games make teaser trailers - sometimes just for in-house purposes, sometimes not - that are often prerendered in Max or Maya! - that create unreasonable expectations in people only to dash their hopes. (Medal of Honor: Airborne was one of the most egregious.) And it really chafed the younger me's hide when people got all excited over those games. "Doesn't anyone see!? Can't they tell these games are making promises they can't keep!?"

So that's where I'm drawing a line: I'm not making prerendered footage. (I don't actually have the resources to do that, anyway...) It's all in-game footage. And while I may be putting the camera in a place it would not actually be in game, and while there may be bugs and sketchy bits that I'm not revealing - which would be a sin to not take care of in full production - I'm okay with that level of sketchiness right now.

So have a 9-second trailer: this is addressing two pieces of feedback from the weekend. One, from @MaxSzlagor, that I need more landmarks. This is a pretty serious landmark. And another, from @RossCowman, that I need to let people know what the story is. The story is it's the future, and we have gravitic technology, and this is a massive example of that.

What do you think? (You see, if you give feedback, you can get credit! Being good gets you stuff!)

"Screenshot" Saturday - and a deadline

@MaxSzlagor thought we needed an actual character, not just a stick figure. So now we have a character, the sporty lady you see here! We also have some breaking glass, courtesy of one @JohnAegard.

I'm looking for feedback, positive or negative, but mostly negative: why wouldn't you help fund this?

It's easy to keep coming up with excuses for putting off the Kickstarter. My latest excuse is that if we wait to launch it in December (and we make it) the money will come in the next tax year...

But no more excuses! I'm starting the Countdown!

DECEMBER 8TH! Rain or shine!

And again, feedback please!

Anatomy of a Business Mistake

In one day on Playstation Mobile, sixty second shooter Deluxe has made more money than the original did in its year-long lifetime on the Chrome Web Store.

(Unfortunately, one day of data is all the data I have: I got the report for the month of October, and Deluxe launched on the last day. How it's really doing, and whether going with Playstation Mobile is an advisable course of action for others, I won't know for another month.)

And that's not saying much, because the Chrome Web Store really, really sucks.

I'm a total Google fanboy, by the way. In general my philosophy is, "If you can't do it with a Google product it might not be worth doing." Web browsing, mail, the OS and most of my devices, most of the word processing and spreadsheets I do, G+, AppEngine, the modeling package formerly owned by Google (SketchUp) ... all great stuff.

But sixty second shooter in Native Client for Chrome was an abject and total business failure. If we simply look at the results, I spent several months working on it part-time, spent around $300 on hardware, PR expenses (going to GDC and giving out a bottle of Patron to the reviewer who got the best score), URL, and server time - and brought in $120 in ad revenue and $143 in sales.

So, a question on your mind might be, why did I ever think this might be a good idea in the first place? Because, believe it or not, I do have eyes. Anybody can see that the Chrome Web Store, as it stands, is a ghetto. It's got to be an embarrassment for Google - I won't be surprised if a future version of Chrome makes the CWS harder to find becuase it's such a joke. Or if they shoot it in the head, or somehow merge it in with Google Play.

But going further than just the cluttered pile of crap that is the web store, it's easy to see that if a game dares to charge a buck or two on the platform, they'll move under a 100 copies, lifetime. If the games are free, then the top games, the ones that get promoted in the top bar of the CWS, only have 100K-200K installs. That's basically the equivalent of downloading the trial on XBLA (Schizoid had over a million downloads on XBLA).  That's really bad.

So I was basically hoping for two things:

1) Google would give me some promotion, because sixty second shooter was the first 3D native client game, exclusive to their platform, and pretty darn cool. 

2) Chrome Web Store 'conversion rates' (moneys/installs) being higher than other portals. I hoped that the typical Chrome Web Store user, after downloading a trial and deciding it wasn't for them, would remove it. And therefore those numbers-of-installs on the CWS, which seemed low, were actually good.

But no, my conversion rates sucked way worse than Schizoid and, from what I hear, typical internet games. The number of installed copies of sixty second shooter has plateaued around 8000 - of those 8000, 1000 signed in (not bad), 600 signed up for the mailing list, and 15 actually paid some money, averaging $9.

(You might point out, hey, Jamie, your monetization system blows. Yes, that's true - I've gotten plenty of advice how to improve it - but still, conversion rates would have to be 100 times better for the Chrome Web Store to start making sense as a platform.)

I still think sixty second shooter is just about the perfect game for the platform: it shows off the high framerates and 3Dness capable of the system while keeping a low footprint on the player's time. But nobody can discover that because Google didn't deign to promote it amidst the clutter.

So here's another problem with Google: with what little PR they have been doing for Native Client and the CWS (almost none), they'd been pushing it as 'console-quality games in a browser'. Their idea of a good Chrome NaCl game seemed to be Bastion or AirMech. The problem with that idea is that the people who want those games are hardcore and are mostly going to prefer them on Steam, where the framerates and loading times are much, much better. (Console gaming in the browser? How about "1/2 speed console gaming in the browser"? *) What Native Client would be theoretically good at is core-casual stuff: snack-sized games for people who want the graphics to be a level above flash games.

But Google didn't seem to realize that, and maybe that's why they didn't think my thing deserved any promotion. Or maybe it's because they didn't give me any money, and therefore didn't have any costs to try to cover / justify.

Another thing about Google - the native client people at Google did help out. A little. The few times I contacted them they'd usually get back to me with advice. It was always nearly useless. I'd say "I'm having problems with coding such-and-such" and they'd dig up some source code off the interwebs and throw it over the wall at me. It was always incompatible with their stuff or would have required a huge effort on my part to port over.

So here's a nutshell opinion: 

I love Google. I would rather work at Google than at Sony or Microsoft.

But I would rather work with Sony or Microsoft than with Google.

Have you seen Microsoft's latest mission statement? "At Microsoft, our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world reach their full potential." And when we were making Schizoid for XBLA, that really showed! We met with an engineer and a product evangelist, in person, almost every week. They helped us code, helped us measure performance, gave us good advice, and cracked the whip on their engineering team to make sure that features we needed like network play made it in as soon as possible. 

Day and night compared to Google! Which shouldn't surprise anybody - my understanding is it's the way Google does things. Throw stuff at the wall and see if it sticks. No big blow-out PR campaign like Microsoft did with XNA Game Studio with contests and prizes! For all I know, Native Client was somebody's "20% time" project and I was foolish enough to be excited by it. Hence my theory: Work with Microsoft. Work at Google.

Now let's go meta.

Regardless of whether it was a business mistake or not, I consider it a personal success. I had a great time making it, learned a lot, and appreciate the kudos it has earned.

But, okay, so sixty second shooter was a business mistake ... or was it? If it wasn't for the original sixty second shooter, Deluxe would never have happened. It's looking like it's quite possible I'll break even or make a profit eventually. So thank you thank you Sony for giving new life to it, but should I be glad that Google was there to encourage the early broken unprofitable version happening in the first place?

Mistakes happen, particularly in the games industry where you'll have only one profitable game for dozens or maybe even hundreds of unprofitable ones. You make those mistakes, shoot them in the head, and move on.

The question I'm struggling with now: It's looking like sixty second shooter wasn't simply a bad idea that needed to be shot in the head. It was worth investing more into. But how was I supposed to tell? And how about Schizoid? Is it possible Schizoid was a good idea that just needed another revision and a different platform?

I recently said that it's important to ship your Minimum Viable Product early. But it's unlikely those MVP's are going to make a profit, even if they're decent ideas on decent platforms - so how do you decide, once you've seen lackluster sales, if a game is worth investing more resources into?

Well, what do you think?

* Although on my crappy old PC NaCl on Chrome runs around half the speed of Native - I've tested a few different games with it - other PC's don't display the same problem. sixty second shooter runs beautifully on my Mac, btw.

A Few Unity3D Tips

I heard over a million people use Unity? That's ... crazy. There's a million game developers in the world? 1 out of 5000 people is a game developer? I wonder how many people who play my games are also game developers. Maybe writing articles on game development is fairly user-facing after all. So here we go.

I taught a class at DigiPen earlier this year where I made the students use Unity to illustrate various game-tech concepts like shaders, physics, lighting, audio, etc. So I've now got a list of a few things they typically didn't do that you really should if you want to be productive / effective / cool with Unity. I'm still a Unity rookie (been using it for less than a year) but here's stuff I wish someone had told me (or my students) when we were starting out.

1. Prefabs, prefabs, prefabs. It's very tempting to put some GameObjects in your scene, and then start duplicating them, and then you realize, "Hey, I want to make some changes to all of these." And if you had used prefabs, you'd be able to. So always use prefabs. It doesn't hurt to get into the habit of using prefabs even with one-offs. Hey, you might duplicate them, or use them in another scene, or what-have-you. For prefabbing a mesh, I've found it's good to parent the mesh to an empty GameObject and prefab that. You can't nest prefabs; you can't have prefabs within prefabs. It's not a super-huge deal, but if you expect a nested prefab to work you'll probably be confused. Something I learned the hard way. 
   If you've already duplicated a bunch of non prefabbed GameObjects in your scene, it's not too late. There's a useful script here that lets you select a bunch of objects and replace them. Replace all those duplicate GameObjects with a nice prefab. 
   
   (The L-shaped buildings are instances of prefabs. I've got a thing going on in the code that randomly shows and hides their roof decorations, that's why they don't look identical.)
2. Debug. In my programming career, the habit that took me from being a not-so-effective to a very effective programmer was learning to step through code in the debugger as I wrote it. Don't wait for your code to clearly not work; make sure it's doing what you think it does as you write it. I do this less now, because C# is so much more reliable than C++, but I still do it about half the time. An in depth look at Unity debugging is here.
3. Figure out and use the light mapping. The difference in quality between a light mapped scene and a not-light-mapped scene is huge. I'd rather have lightmaps than textures. (Okay, a lightmap is a texture, but you know what I mean.) The settings I've been using for Energy Hook include Shadow Samples: 1000, ambient occlusion 1, but only 5 texels per world unit. Takes hours to bake the city scene, but you can selectively bake if you want to see how the bits you just worked on look.
   
   
   
   You don't need Pro to use the light mapping.
4. Editor scripts are cool! There's something in me that makes me reluctant to write an editor script - it doesn't feel like real work somehow - but it can be a great time saver, as with any batch file or python script or what-have-you. I have scripts that randomly recolor entities and scripts that randomly adjust the heights of buildings, and I feel like I'm just getting started ... a random city generator wouldn't be out of the question.

"Screenshot" Saturday

Paul recently modeled some untextured buildings, trains, water tanks, billboards. I've thrown them in the city and am checking them out. Please excuse the stock Unity character model and the low texel density on some of the buildings, that will change.

It was also an opportunity to put iMovie and the new Mac through its trailer-making paces. So much more intuitive than Vegas...and faster, though that's probably just because my windows machine was so old.

Only Tom Chick Can Prevent Ratings Inflation

Say what you will about Tom Chick. I believe the guy has integrity. If he doesn't like something everybody else likes, he says so. (And as I understand it, he didn't even get a review copy of the latest X-Com - I guess they were afraid of him - but he gushes over it anyway.) Some people might call that 'being wrong' but it's crazy to think that everyone's going to have the same opinions about a work of art - reviews should be all over the map. With apologies to friends at 343, I dig it. And I miss Shoot Club.

There's been some talk lately about how game reviewing is broken - for various reasons reviewers aren't usually willing to give games less than 7/10. Because the dev is their buddy, because they're low-paid, because the publishers buy advertising space on their blogs, because they got a free copy of the game, and so on. And I agree, it's kinda broken, although maybe not such a big deal - you just have to renormalize.

Anyhow, guys like Tom Chick and Yahtzee Croshaw show that you can really dis on games and, if you know your stuff, get rewarded for it with lots of clicks. (You've got to know your stuff though - there's a reviewer some of my indie friends like to disparage who pretty clearly never plays the games he rips on. He's probably going to have trouble keep a job.) This anti-Halo review may even be the beginning of a new revolution, as a new school of journalists realize they can get eyeballs by being harsh. And maybe we can look forward to a day where videogames ratings have a mean in the fifties, like movies.

Side note: five or so years ago a younger me used to love almost all the games that got 90+ on gamerankings. These days, not so much; these days, 90+ usually means "highly polished retread"...