GameDevBlog

Hubris And Feedback Continued

I think I may have missed the most important thing with my last post on hubris. It's not just the feedback on your product you have to listen to. It's any kind of advice whatsoever. And you have to really listen.

Going from corporate to indie is a completely different sport, and what works for corporate game development doesn't necessarily work for indie and may even be harmful. Overlarge teams, stealth mode, and overly rigorous coding practices are just a few things that pop to mind immediately. So the overarching thing is it's valuable to listen to other indies and learn the rules of this strange new sport. You're practically starting over.

Just one example - Torpex's PR guy told us we should make a MySpace page. (Yeah, this was a while ago.) He may have been wrong on the details but he was right on the idea - we should have started doing our own social marketing / networking, whether it was MySpace or Facebook or what. Our excuses for ignoring his advice were twofold - neither one of us wanted to take on the extra work, and it's hard to get started. When you first put up a page like that you're going to start with an unimpressive number of likes and fans, and the worry is that creates a sort of unimpressive social proof. "They only have fifty likes? Pffft." But you've got to start somewhere, and the sooner you start the better. Who knows how much of a community Torpex could have built up over the years.

This is something I've learned from playing story games and reading Keith Johnstone: real listening means allowing yourself to be changed. It's not enough just to hear someone.

Even without the hubris of being succesful in the world, most people have a nearly instinctive tendency to react negatively to new information. Some management science calls it 'reactance'; child psychologists call it 'bad first reaction.' We tend to shoot down others ideas. We don't want to be changed. When I was told to not launch the Kickstarter yet, my first reaction was, "But! Out of money out of time!" But that was just an excuse. I just didn't want to be changed.

If you can recognize that tendency in yourself, you can get past it.

And, speaking of social proof on social networks, please help me build some up by liking the Happion Labs / Energy Hook facebook page. 

Thinking About Give-Aways

What sort of thing might you like Happion Labs to give you? There's a poll here. Or write in something. Feel free to write in "A pony", "World peace", etc. Brainstorming here.

 

Mistakes To Avoid When Going From Corporate To Indie: Hubris Edition

I thought I was pretty awesome after Spider-Man 2. Thought I could do anything. And there I was on a team with other Spider-Man 2 vets and none other than Richard Garfield of Magic: The Gathering fame, making Schizoid. How could we possibly fail? So much awesome in one team!

Well, one of the reasons we could fail was because our team size was too big, but I've discussed that already. 

Another reason was pure hubris. We thought we knew better than our players. 

I've been a believer in playtesting for decades - you watch the playtests and you figure out what went wrong and you fix it. And we did quite a lot of playtesting with Schizoid. The problem was we ignored a lot of the results. People would have valid responses - specific feedback - "Feels like your ship moves too slow" or "I hate these star shaped enemies! HATE THEM!" 

(These two criticisms were actually closely related, IMO. Your avatar moves pretty fast in Schizoid, if you're talking 'how long does it take to get from one side of the level to the other' or 'how many character-lengths do you travel per second' but often they didn't feel fast when you had a skulk (our name for the star-shaped enemies) bearing down on you.)

And we would say, "Well, they just don't *get* it. The skulks are supposed to be almost as fast as you, because that's what forces you to work together with the other player, and use strategies x, y, and z. Why, the skulks are practically the heart of the game!"

And - this is related to team size - all it takes is one or two people who are resistant to change to convince the others that, yes, our way was the right way.

So we shipped the game our way and, strangely enough, the reviewers and players had the same complaints as the playtesters. Huh. Go figure.

So, here's something I try to remember when I'm getting feedback, even if I think it's wrong. And this is true not only of games but any creative endeavor - that feedback I'm getting? That's the player's reaction. Maybe they don't "get it" - maybe they're "wrong" - but somehow my game has elicited this reaction in them. And if I'm not going to fix it, I'm going to have to somehow change the game so they "get it". Because once we ship, reviewers and players are going to have the same reaction. (Side note: on platforms where it's easy to do updates it might be okay to learn these lessons after you ship...)

For example, in Schizoid, maybe an intermediate enemy, a sort of immature skulk, that would gently introduce the player to skulk-fighting, would have helped. 

So, I've convinced you of the importance of feedback. Another question is how do you get it, beyond playtesting. Sometimes it's hard to get negative criticism. (Sometimes it's as easy as posting a trailer to YouTube.) People want to be nice, and they damn you with faint praise.

One little trick I've found helps? Mention how someone else doesn't like something. "A friend of mine said this was crap but he wouldn't tell me why. I don't know. What do you think?" When I do that, people start 'guessing' why the other person didn't like it - and their guesses are, of course, what they didn't like but were too nice to tell me.

Then there's the final problem that negative feedback hurts. I've never been great at taking critical feedback. It's something I've had to do for decades in various venues, whether it was creative writing workshops or bug reports or reviews of my games or what. And always, I feel it right in my chest, though I usually put on a brave face, take out my pencil, write it down, and, if necessary - ask if they can be more specific. (And then snap at my family later for no reason.)

Here are some things we can do to process critical feedback (which I forget to do all too often):

• Set aside a time for it. If I'm going to be hanging out with my family later, don't click on those comments on youtube videos or reddit or articles about my stuff, or read those e-mails that have feedback in them, because I don't want my brain to be circling around some nasty thing someone has said when interacting with my family.
• Remember what we're doing is courageous. We're putting yourself out there, making ourselves vulnerable. We're pretty cool that way.
• Remember it's ridiculous to expect everyone to like whatever it is.
• Remember they're criticizing our work and not our selves - the quality of our work has nothing to do with our self-worth.
• When engaging with someone giving critical feedback, find a way to agree with them. If they say, "This looks like crap." we can say, "It could definitely look better, that's for sure. We'll be working on that. Is there something particular that stands out to you?" 
• Remember it's just part of life. Just as a diabetic needs to get shots once or twice a day, we have to listen to feedback, if we want to exist at the intersection between art and commerce. (If we just want to be starving artists, we don't need to listen to anybody...) 

So, speaking of feedback, I could use some feedback on this: I just prettied up the Happion Labs / Energy Hook Facebook page yesterday, and intend to maintain it more actively, and have the occasional giveaway. Now, I can't help but notice that most of you haven't bothered to Like it. Hundreds of you visit the blog every day, and the candylike button is right there, and yet only sixty-something of you have actually clicked on it. So - why not?

And, for bonus points, what are some of your techniques for dealing with feedback?

Sportsfriends

I think they'd agree that they could probably have planned their Kickstarter better. And having to go out and pick up some move controllers for my PC might be annoying. But it would be sad if a couple logistical issues killed these games: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gutefabrik/sportsfriends-featuring-johann-sebastian-joust. I'm backing a little extra than I had to for the reward I wanted.

They're doing an AMA on Reddit right now!

If you're only backing things that look like they're going to succeed, you might be doing it wrong.

Postponement

Like I said before, it's easy to make excuses to put off the Kickstarter. But sometimes they're good excuses! So I'm going with the wisdom of the crowds - I'm postponing the Kickstarter. People tell me that Kickstarters don't seem to do as well on holidays. So. Good to know. And, then, right after the holidays is CES, and I don't want to compete with the eyeballs that'll be sucked down into that, so. After CES.

January 14th!

Unless anybody wants to give me an excuse to push it still further...?

In the meantime, if you'd like a 3D grappling-and-swinging game on your PC, why not play Froggle?

(In other news, my wife is on the front page of etsy.com today. Maybe she can be the breadwinner of the family now...)

 

Kickstarter Anxiety Continued

I've been showing other devs our Kickstarter preview page and have mostly been encouraged ... except by Bob Berry and Jon Mavor from Uber - the Planetary Annihilation guys - who have basically told me, "That's a total do over!" and "Either don't show people that trailer at all or put a lot more time into it."

Yeah. That trailer. The one that's already Out There. Hmm.

Now ... we're not in Uber's weight class. We're just a couple guys working out of our homes and don't need to raise anywhere near the kinds of money they're used to to make this game. 

But they know what the hell they're doing.

We're estimating to bring the pitch up to where Uber thinks it'll be ready will cost around $5K (by way of comparison, I've spent less than $100 on this project so far, cash wise - time is another story) and take 2-4 months. We probably won't increase our funding target - sunk costs are sunk, after all - but that'll put us in this situation where we can succeed at the Kickstarter but still feel like it wasn't worth it. If we fail now, that'll be more of an, "Oh well, we failed, c'est la vie," sort of thing.

I hate when people ask me for feedback and ignore it. So I'm going to feel like an ass after this, no matter which way I jump, but ... oh people on the internet, what do you think? Trust the experts, take the larger risk which will potentially let us make the bigger, better game? Or stay the course, cash in on the good press we've gotten last week, and launch ASAP?