GameDevBlog

My Year In Positive Psychology 3: Notes on Creativity, Inc and Feedback

Continued from Part 1 & Part 2.

So now I'm on to Creativity, Inc (I may be consuming these faster than I'm able to blog about them) and - back the truck up! Pixar's CTO invented the z-buffer!? Why, he must be the same Catmull of Catmull-Rom splines! Respect!

I'm enjoying the book a great deal both as storytelling and as an advice column but there is of course no cure for werewolves here - a lot of the stories sound very similar to corporate game development. "No matter what we try our movies always suck at first and we have to go through hell in order to fix them." I was particularly horrified by the story that, during the Toy Story 2 hell, a Pixar employee forgot to drop his kid off at daycare on the way to work one morning during the Toy Story 2 hell, left him in the car, and the child was unconscious by the time he remembered. Would that employee have made the same mistake if he wasn't overworked? No way to know for sure, but just imagining the possibility is terrifying.

That said, it's clear they're trying and I just checked Pixar on Glassdoor and it does seem like people are happy there. (4.0. So, it's not Microsoft, but it's pretty good. On that note, this was my first week at Microsoft! I am stoked.) 

What really makes me think is the section on critical feedback. I have a troubled relationship with criticism. I thought it was essential up until I was in my forties (in fact, back when I ran a creative writing workshop in Venice I assumed everyone was there because they wanted the gut punch of brutal criticism and had a 'no defending your work' rule. Membership dwindled to a fraction of its former glory under my enlightened leadership. Go figure.) and then started to get tired of people telling me the myriad of ways my games could be better or I could be a better person... more ways than I could ever possibly address! And when I read Johnstone's Impro, where he rails against criticism as a destroyer of art and killer of babies, it resonated with me deeply. Yes, having an art tutor in middle school was why I stopped making art. Yes, instead of working on my novel for ten years until it was 'perfect' I could have written a half dozen novels and one of them was likely to be just as good as that 'perfect' one and surely would have sold more copies. Yes, there is only a slightly-above-average chance that even addressing someone's criticism will actually make a product better. Yes, we wouldn't have abandoned the stealth gameplay from Spider-Man 3 that IMO presaged the Arkham games if internal critics hadn't pounced on it too early.

And to top it all off it just hurts. It is not fun, and if you fill your days with it it probably means your days or not fun. I unfortunately forget which of the books I've read lately mentioned it--perhaps it was The Happiness Advantage?--but there's also some negative literature about performance reviews, those days that come once or twice a year where we shit on each other and the whole company needs to spend a few days recovering from the morale hit. Cerny talked about the 'stench of failure' that can affect projects that are revealed too early. Wow, I can just go on about it, can't I? Side note: my girlfriend and I pretty much have a tacit keep-your-mouth-shut-when-you-want-to-criticize-unless-it's-absolutely-essential understanding and we've been together for years, drama free. Best relationship ever. :)

And then Ed Catmull comes along and says that at Pixar, their brain trust of executives that candidly points out flaws in their movies is absolutely essential and one of the key ingredients of Pixar films. 

Huh.

It clearly works for Pixar. 

So what's up?

There are a few things about the brain trust review at Pixar that Catmull talks about that have been missing from the criticism I'm familiar with. Catmull acknowledges that criticism causes a possibly instinctual defensive reaction and that can make soliciting criticism like a trip to the dentist: necessary but painful. 

I'm going to have to re-listen to the chapter, but some things stood out to me that are different about the Pixar way. 

• One thing was it is trusted peers giving the criticism, not necessarily bosses. (Obviously Lasseter is in charge and involved in these meetings but he's earned it, yeah?) These are other successful movie-makers; not a bunch of executives from Activision HQ who have never made a game before on a strafing run to say 'ur combat sux.' 
• Another thing is that the creator knows the criticism is coming and can not only 'clench up' but gets to choose what they submit for criticism. They're not ambushed with 'hey, we need to talk to you about your level which we pulled down from perforce and tried last night without you knowing' or whatever.
• The creator gets to make some disclaimers beforehand. "This isn't ready, I know this still needs work, but this area I think is ready for judgment." So time isn't wasted beating any already dead horses. I bet this is more important than it sounds. When I get criticized for something I already know is wrong I feel this nearly uncontrollable urge to point out 'yeah, I know that needs work' to rebalance the status equation.
• It's understood that it is a process to make the product better, not a warning shot prior to cancellation. The product is being protected.
• Perfect world it's a criticism of the work and not the person but that's easier said than done. I think we probably need constant reminders of 'you're awesome' and to paraphrase Jake the Dog, 'dude, sucky work is the first step to sorta good work.'

So I think I'll let some criticism back into my life. Hell, I'll have to now that I don't work for myself anymore. But I will try my damnedest to remember the above stuff when giving criticism, and when receiving I'll try to guide the critical along the same path. "Would you like feedback on your criticism?" :)

My Year in Positive Psychology, Part 2: Notes on Essentialism

Continued from Part 1.

The last book I attempted to digest was Essentialism by Greg McKeown.

In a nutshell, Essentialism says to cut your life down to the bone, keeping only what is absolutely essential. 

Some positive psychology books are filled with common sense wisdom and I find myself asking 'why am I reading this stuff when most of it is obvious?' but I have to remind myself that the point is that being constantly reminded with positive words and helpful advice keeps it conscious and keeps me acting on it.

So while I think of myself as pretty good at optimizing my time and prioritizing my values this acted as a reminder that maybe it would be good to give myself a priority tune-up.

Is spending time on Twitter essential? As I mentioned before I've definitely gotten some good stuff out of it over the years, but has that made up for the time I spend on it each day, which is often 15 minutes on the PC and I'm not sure how much on my phone?

What about blogging? This is actually the second time I'm writing this - the first time I thought I saved a draft and did not. I went years without so at some level that makes it clear it's not essential.

And what about Dungeon Life, the game I went to keep working on as a side project just to keep my hand in on the game design side? It looks like I just can't bring myself to let go of that one. 

The fact that I'm writing this--and when I'm done, will undoubtedly tweet that it's here to read--shows that I'm not bringing myself to make any deep cuts. The way I'm rationalizing it is that blogging for me is really a way of thinking. By composing blog posts in my head and getting them down on paper I am wrestling with my thoughts and assimilating them. Publishing them for other people to read is actually a side effect. (But thanks for reading anyway!) So it doesn't actually matter that I lost my original draft of this article. :)

So on the whole I agree with Essentialism, think it was good to have the reminder to check my 'Essentialist Health', and in particular like McKeown's criteria for determining what is essential (most books that say focus don't really give you a good guide towards what to focus on): those things in which you can have the greatest impact.

There was one thing that really gave me pause though. (Allow me to indulge my negativity bias as I talk about the one part I disagreed with. :P) He seems to be a strong advocate for passing up questionable opportunities, and quotes a passage from Chiksentmihalyi's Creativity in which Peter Drucker turns down an interview with Chiksentmihalyi saying that he is an admirer of Chiksentmihalyi's work but has to decline because what keeps him productive is a laserlike focus on a small number of things. 

I personally believe luck is something of a skill rather than magic: the sort of person who takes advantage of opportunities is 'lucky'. If I turned down nonessential opportunities there are speaking engagements I wouldn't have taken and, therefore, foreign cities I never saw. Sixty Second Shooter Prime for the Xbox One would never have happened, which was, in a way, the biggest success story of my indie career. And I wouldn't have gotten to collect an income for playing with Roblox for the past couple of years. 

To put it another way, I think seizing promising opportunities is essential. For me anyway. Keeping an open mind, saying 'yes' to things, and at least tasting them before making a decision and giving a 'no' verdict brings happiness and variety.

As for Dungeon Life, I think keeping my range wide and continuing to be a generalist will be beneficial to my career as a whole and not just a time-waster. So as I was consuming Essentialism I thought about what the most essential thing to work on with Dungeon Life would be in the last couple weeks before I start at Microsoft. My conclusion? I spent the time playing with my kids.

My Year in Positive Psychology, Part 1

Why do you think I named my company Happion Labs? My first and foremost priority with it was happiness, not money. Happiness unfortunately doesn't always come that easily to me (though a lot easier to me than some), and Happion Labs in the end was something of a failed experiment that I maybe stuck with longer than I should have. And as I gave up on it and relegated game development to the category of 'hobby' or 'side project' I went through the sads.But the year wasn't all bad; for one thing Daniel Cook turned me on to this habit-forming thing at the beginning of the year:

First week of habit forming complete using @ncasenmare's post-it habit forming technique. So good. https://t.co/sBgEOeiJA6

— Daniel Cook (@danctheduck) January 5, 2019

And I've been doing it ever since, using the Habit Tracker app for Android rather than post-its. When I went into it it was with just a couple of fairly well established habits (running a few times a week and taking supplements every day) but at this point I'm also doing spaced repetition learning with ankidroid, meditating 9 minutes a day (sounds so much easier than 10), getting up earlier, drinking less, and getting at least 7 hours of sleep a night. (I'm shooting for 8 but my body just won't listen.) 

I also went back into therapy this year. (Which scares me a bit to write; I guess I'm still worried about the therapy stigma. But here I go, trying to normalize mental illness!) I didn't stick with it for long because I didn't feel like I was getting that much out of it, but my therapist gave me one stellar life-changing piece of advice which was to continually listen to positive psychology audiobooks. I was listening to fiction while running, driving, and doing chores and when I swapped in audiobooks it 'gave me a diet of positivity' as she put it.

A couple of these audiobooks were magical thinking, the modern equivalent of Think And Grow Rich (I'm talking particularly about Joe Dispenza here, don't tell my ex-wife because she's the one who recommended him) but most of what I listened to was inspiring, motivating, and affirming. I made various decisions and strategies this year that directly came out of these books.

My best source for a list of positive psychology books is Scott Crabtree's blog:

If you want to read a book that will not just entertain you, but might just make you happier for the rest of your life, I suggest these books.

Have you read any of these? What did you think? What books am I missing from my list that I should read next? https://t.co/5UC9FayEfg

— Happy Brain Science (@ScottCrab) April 22, 2019

(Side note: while social media is correlated with depression and I've definitely had my share of triggers on twitter this year the handful of positive psychology or mindfulness tweets I've seen has more than made up for it.)

One of the important and early ones was Succeed by Heidi Halvorson. This book pointed out that the mindset we have when trying to attain goals is very important, and although the magical-thinking Think And Grow Rich / The Secret type books might say 'just be positive' the evidence-based Succeed points out that the mindset is to both believe we can do it but at the same time believe it will not be easy. People who think achieving their goals will be easy, whether it's weight loss or finishing a novel or what, are more likely to fail than those who don't, because they might get complacent; they might allow themselves to be tempted because they're overconfident in their ability to resist temptation; and other reasons.

So after reading Succeed I reframed some of my goals. Dungeon Life became a thing that I was going to work on just to learn, not to make money or to necessarily become popular. (When you approach a goal with the mindset of learning rather than some criteria of 'success' you're more resistant to critical feedback, for one thing, and game developers sure get a lot of critical feedback.) I've been working on Dungeon Life ever since, part-time, and been much happier with my work on it than before.

The other goal I reframed was getting a real job-job-type-job. To be honest, I thought restarting my career after doing the indie game dev thing would be easy. I mean, like, I was the tech lead on Spider-Man 2 and stuff! But nobody was hiring for gameplay programming or lead positions and when I branched out to possible other areas I would either be ghosted or choke on the interviews. I realized: getting a job was going to be hard. I read in one book that 1 out of 10 onsites result in a hire. So to succeed at my goal I created new habits: one was to apply to a new position or follow up on an existing query every day, and another was to study how to take job interviews: I read Cracking the Coding Interview, practiced the algorithmic stuff on LeetCode almost every day. I also hit up my friends for referrals. It took many months but eventually I landed what I expect to be an awesome position: a lead coder on the Minecraft team at Microsoft! I don't know if I would have landed it if it hadn't been for Succeed, or, for that matter, my friend Max Szlagor.

My most recent read, Better Than Before, by Gretchen Rubin, was a surprise. It turned out it's a book about habit forming (look, I'm reincorporating. It's a storyteller thing) and I recognized a ton of myself in it, for example how I stopped strength training after my last Spartan race. That's the 'finish line' effect and why I've also stopped doing leetcode once I got offered the Minecraft gig. (Not ashamed of quitting leetcode though, as much as I enjoy doing it, if I'm going to have habits I want them to be the most important habits I can have and I'm not sure leetcode makes the cut.) It turns out goal setting can be harmful to habit forming unless you set a new goal as soon as you reach the old one. Hey, is that why I never wrote a second novel?

One strategy from Better Than Before is the 'clean slate' strategy: when facing a life change, it's an opportunity to commit to other habits as well that will be more likely to stick. How convenient that I'm starting a new job soon. I've been afraid that I'll let habits like running and meditation slip once faced with possibly long days and commutes, but Better Than Before has me thinking that if I build my cardio habit into my new schedule it will stick. I'll let you know.

Another thing Better Than Before reminded me of is that I'm a believer in a low carb diet, but I've let my dieting habits slip over the past few years. I want to recommit to a low carb diet again. So I've been keeping it down to around 100g a day for the past few days...and am pretty much hungry all the time now no matter how much protein I eat. :P But armed with the habit tracker I think I'll be able to stick with it. Again, I'll let you know.

Well...I've ran out of time for today, so I'm going to stop here. I've read a bunch of other books and I'll talk about how they've affected me and what I think of them in Part 2.

My Roblox Years: Dungeon Life and New Product Science

After fourteen years I'm throwing in the towel as an indie game developer.

Now that I am quitting as an indie I can make blogging more of a priority. I've been feeling that itch to write, to communicate with other devs rather than just players, and in more than just the sporadic tweet. 

For the past three-plus years I've been doing something very unusual for an indie dev my age: developing games on Roblox. I was lucky enough, a few years ago, to meet an investor who had seen how much money some kids were making on Roblox and interested in seeing what would happen if he funded professional developers to make games for it. We came at the whole thing very arrogantly! We were sure we would be able to beat the best game they had on offer--after all, we were professionals!--and while we did beat most of them as far as production values go, we failed to make anything popular. Our games would have had to do at least a hundred times better than they did to be profitable.

In hindsight we discovered that there were actually plenty of games that have high production values on the platform but for whatever reason very few of those games became very popular. Perhaps Roblox is a platform where that je ne sais quois is truly what matters?

But just because we weren't able to figure out the market doesn't mean other devs should ignore it. While there are many reasons to not make games for Roblox that in turn means that there isn't that much competition on the platform. Unlike most entrenched platforms these days it's fairly easy to get noticed. So there are a lot of young, inexperienced developers who are making enough money with Roblox to fund small teams. Making a game on any platform is a highly risky proposition; it may be less risky on Roblox, with both smaller budgets and larger chances of success.

For me, possibly the most interesting thing about Roblox is that the costs of advertising on the platform are supernaturally low. On Roblox you can buy a click for your game for about two cents. I'd love to be corrected if I'm wrong but as far as I know that's unheard of anywhere else. This has allowed me to use Roblox as a petri dish for studying player behavior.

Roblox is therefore a pretty great place to apply some new product science, in particular the idea of going from a handful of prototypes / pilots / proofs of concept and winnowing them down until you have one product that has the best shot. After making Castleheart and Legend of You, products that we spent several months on before unveiling them to the public, I wanted to fail earlier. So I made several prototypes (most of which are still available on my Roblox profile page if you can find someone to play them with you) and launched them all before test audiences.

These prototypes all took around one to four weeks to make; the average was about two. They had no monetization component: they were not viable products in that sense. I also tried to keep extrinsic motivation out of them: I wanted to find activities that were intrinsically fun, that players wanted to play and come back to simply for the joy of playing. The prototype that became Dungeon Life, for example, was permadeath. Later, once I decided that it was the most promising prototype, I added its leveling system.

You can never be sure if a pilot program does poorly because it's a bad idea or because of poor execution, but by trying several prototypes and looking at their retention I was able to make decisions about which product to pursue which didn't just rely on gut feelings.

I wish I could report to you that thanks to that careful strategy I was able to create a game that was financially successful. As things built up to launch the signs were very promising: Dungeon Life was earning more than I was spending on advertising; it was getting over 80% thumbs up for its ratings; and it had longer average session lengths and more retention than any game I'd worked on yet: about 15 minutes and 10%. Roblox agreed to feature the game--note: currently I'm pretty sure that any experienced developer who puts in an honest few months of work can get their game featured--and my game was on the front page with my hopes high.

And then the game tanked. The ratings fell to 65%, the retention dropped to 5%, the average session length fell under 10 minutes. I spent the next month feverishly trying to improve it but to no avail; my changes were marginal improvements at best. The game earned a few hardcore fans who had lots of ideas for improvement but those were generally ideas that did not cater to the new players who were giving it low ratings and not coming back.

One of the best things I did that month was implement a method to provide feedback directly within the game; people's feedback would be turned into an event that was posted to Google Analytics, so I could simply read the analytics events page to see what the most popular complaints were. Movement speed was one of the main ones at the time--characters in Dungeon Life moved slow by Roblox standards--and bringing it back up to normal was an easy fix that noticeably improved engagement but not enough to save the game.

So this may make it sound like my attempts to apply new product science were pointless, but here's the thing: although Dungeon Life was a financial failure I know that none of the other ideas I had were necessarily any better. If I hadn't done that process of testing prototypes I might be swayed to go back and try to give another one of my game ideas a go; instead, I know that they're just as likely to flop as Dungeon Life. It makes more sense for me to tweak Dungeon Life and see if I can get to a tipping point with it than to try and breathe life into one of the less promising prototypes.

Unfortunately I'm at a point where I feel it's foolish to continue to pay the opportunity cost of being an indie game developer and plan to be back doing full-time employed work soon. (Honestly, I don't exactly remember why I wanted to be an indie game dev in the first place. At one point I thought it would be my dream job but aside from the actual development part it hasn't brought me much joy.) 

In the meantime though I continue to noodle with Dungeon Life as a testbed for learning: it's given me the opportunity to learn typescript (thanks to https://roblox-ts.github.io/), backend coding (I've made my own analytics system where I get to actually look at the data I gather, unlike with, say, Google Analytics or Game Analytics. Crazy, I know!), and some machine learning and data science. (I use my analytics data for a test set.) I hope to write more about this stuff in the near future. 

I don't regret the time I spent as an indie, or the time I spent working on Roblox. The creative part has always been a joy and I've made some games that I think are really cool even if they weren't financially successful. You might give Dungeon Life a go: it's a dungeon crawler where you take turns playing the heroes and the monsters, a bit like Crawl, but it's a third-person action RPG with persistent levels and loot and online multiplayer. (https://www.roblox.com/games/2184151436/Dungeon-Life)

If you have questions about developing for Roblox fire away; hopefully I'll make a habit of blogging again and be able to use your questions for future articles.

Happiness In Game Development: Why Try?

I’ve written a couple articles on how to be happy as a game developer, but just realized I have yet to talk about why we should even try to be happy. I kind of thought it was obvious. But lately a friend of mine has been ranting about how happiness is for saps. The gist of his argument is that the world sucks and we should be angry about it, not happy about it, because maybe that will motivate us to Do Something About Things.

And, well, it’s hard to argue. All the sexist bullshit I see; the fact that one out of six women get raped; Gaza; seeing some of my wonderful friends struggle through their lives with hardly any income to speak of, yeesh. Yeah, it makes me angry. And sad. I used to be numb to that kind of stuff but the older me is like a raw nerve.

For a moment, after reading his rants, it made me embarrassed to have named my company Happion Laboratories, and to be so dedicated to the pursuit of happiness myself.

And then I remembered: seeking authentic, lasting happiness does not mean you’re a douche bag. In fact, it likely means the opposite.

A lot of happiness science studies confirm it - the people who are in good moods and score high on tests of happiness (and low on tests of depression) are often the ones who donate more of their money and volunteer more of their time. (Some sources: *How of Happiness*, by Sonja Lyubomrisky; *Happy Money*, by Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton; and the movie *Happy*.) They’re people who are doing good and making a difference. 

Take the Dalai Lama. He sure as hell has a right to be angry. And yet some people think he may be the happiest person on earth. Is he a sap? 

Whereas people who chase status and More Stuff are often mysteriously unsatisfied and depressed.
Since I’ve started reading about happiness science I try harder to give back more, and spend a lot more on charity and other people. My pursuit of lasting happiness has led me to become a better person.

So that’s reason number one to try to be happy.

Reason two appeals to logic. If we shouldn’t be happy as long as there’s some injustice or awfulness out there to be angry about … then that sounds like nobody should be happy until everyone is. Which means that nobody will ever be happy. Is that we want for each other? We don’t want each other to be happy unless absolutely everyone is?

There’s something to be said for putting on your own oxygen mask first. Maybe your anger will motivate you to help people but I think it’s just as likely that your unhappiness might motivate you to stay in bed all day and not lift a finger.

Finally, there’s another reason I try to be happy. I am super-fucking-privileged. I am a middle (or upper-middle, depending on how you count) class white male in the United States. Most of the world has it worse off than me. I have no right to complain. Although I suffer from dysthymia (or maybe it’s cyclothymia) and have had some bad crap in my life I feel obligated to work past it because I imagine the rest of the world looking at me and saying, “What does he have to complain about? He gets to make videogames for a living.” So the last thing I want to do is be unhappy about my personal situation. 

Now, if you find yourself with a belief like “happiness is for saps” or “nobody should be happy until everyone is” or “I can’t help the world unless I’m angry” - those are the sorts of hyperbolic all-or-nothing thoughts that clinically depressed people often have. You may want to take a test for depression (there’s one on this website: it’s the CES-D under the Questionnaires) and if you score high consider therapy, self-help books, and/or antidepressants.

But how far do we take this? It’s good to be happy sometimes, but if we’re ecstatic all the time then something’s wrong with us. 

Something I’ve been wrestling with lately is how much to expose myself to secondary trauma. When I hear about sexual assault or murdered children on my twitter feed, it does affect my mood. It does make me sad and angry. And so I sometimes wonder if I should tune out - after all, most of this stuff is beyond my circle of control - what can I do beyond retweeting and making pitiful contributions to rape awareness programs and the like? It seems I have to choose between being angry and numb. Is it really numbness, though? Although we are magnetically drawn to focus on what’s wrong, if we could step back and look at all the progress we’ve made over the centuries, and remember that most people are doing … okay ... most of the time ... maybe ‘numb’ is the wrong word. Maybe we’re just balanced, aware of the whole. 

The balance I strike? I don’t read or watch the news. But I do pay attention when people rant on my social networks, and often ask, “So what can I do?”

I don’t want to tone-police. If something makes you angry, by all means, get angry. Don’t fight it - that can fester. Go ahead and rant and fix things. But don’t stay angry forever. And when you’re done … be happy again.

 

Happiness in Game Development: Obligation

It took me a while to get myself to sit down and write a second real post in this column or series I imagined myself writing on happiness in game development. Of the many things I could write about next, I didn’t know which to pick, for one thing. But I realized there was something else going on there. Now that I’ve said to myself (and on the blog), “I’m going to do this,” it changed. It became an obligation.

I’ve blogged for years and years because it was fun. I’ve never really tried to monetize or to improve my SEO - sometimes I’ll post several times in a week and sometimes I’ll go months without posting anything. I just would get the urge to let some of my thoughts out through the keyboard and make it public.

But now I’ve promised to blog. And this shadow fell over me. When I had some free time, I’d think to myself, I should blog. The stern parent in me nagging the little kid in me. Is it any surprise the little kid in me says, “Screw that, I’m going to read a comic book instead”?

Jesse Schell, in The Art of Game Design, defined ‘fun’ as stuff you do that you don’t have to do. How true that is. When we can’t pull ourselves away from a game, when we say to ourselves “Just one more turn”, there’s often no logical reason for it. We just wanna.

This ties in with studies about intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. We’ve all heard about the study where a bunch of kids were asked to draw - some of them were then paid and others weren’t. The kids who got paid eventually lost interest in drawing, and would only do it for money. You can take something fun and turn it into a chore.

These ideas about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are obvious and scary at the same time. Obvious because when I’m reading a comic book, I know I’m having fun, I know I’m doing it for the pure intrinsic enjoyment of reading the comic book, because I’m not getting paid, because nobody is nagging me, there’s no reason I have to read the book. What if I was paid to read comic books? Before I quit as creative director on Spider-Man 3 I took it upon myself to read an absolute crapload of Spider-Man comics. That was not fun. 99% of those old silver age Spider-Man comics were crap. Not just because they came from an era when Marvel churned out issue after issue to make money, but also because of my perception - I’m not reading this because it’s good; I’m reading this because I ought to.

And scary because most of those things we game designers like to do to keep people interested in our game, to keep them playing, fall into the ‘extrinsic motivator’ category. The play of Energy Hook is intrinsically motivating - it’s inherently fun to make your avatar swing from a building, sail through the air, spin and flip and run along a wall - but I can’t resist also putting in all the traditional mechanisms for ‘replay value’ - you get points, you unlock levels and powers, there are leaderboards and achievements. The players who start playing for those other motivators are no longer playing just for fun. Hopefully it won't ruin the game for them, but the possibility scares the crap out of me.

It’s also scary for our careers. When we were kids we made videogames for fun. Writing those early computer programs or building something with Arcade Machine or Pinball Construction Kit, making a new level or mod for a game we liked - we did that for the pure joy of creating and building. We didn’t expect to get paid. When we started getting paid the bit got flipped. Now we’re obliged to do it. Now it can be hard to sit down at the computer and fix the next bug. I watch my daughter, who couldn’t wait to sit down at her computer and work on her RPGMaker game some more, and wish I could get back to that place where making a game is just pure intrinsic joy.

So. That’s one of the reasons it’s hard to stay happy as a game developer. I’ll share some of the things I do to fight this tendency (I did manage to finally sit down and write this article, after all) in the next post.

Until then - what do you do about it? How do you get back to that place where making a game is fun, even when it’s your job?

How To Be A Happy Indie Game Developer

You know what? Lots of indie game developers blog about how to make money (or sell more product, which is kind of the same thing). But do any of them blog about how to be happy while you’re doing it?

If you’re not an indie developer, you might think, “Why do you need to blog about that? Of course I’d be happy being an indie game developer. I’d be doing what I want with my life, right? How could I not be happy?”

But if you are an indie game developer you know. Some of my indie dev friends even have a term for it - the malaise. Even the most successful indies get it. It’s something a lot of us have to continually struggle with and fight against.

So, you know what? I’ve decided to be the one. The one who blogs about how to be happy while making your indie games.

Why me?

Well …

1) I’ve talked about happiness before. That elusive substance is why I named my company Happion Labs. I have a whole category tag for it on my blog.

Honestly, I don’t remember what all I’ve written. Skimming it now I see a lot of redundancy. So maybe I have said all that needs to be said. But I think it bears repeating.

2) Because I’ve been there (and often end up back there). Truth is, despite all my good fortune I still often feel kinda ‘meh’.  It’s not right, I know. I’m a spoiled brat who should be on his knees, thanking the powers that be that he got so lucky with his lot in life, and instead I’m often like, “Man, I’m tired and kinda grumpy and my family’s being a pain and my back is sore. Think I’ll go back to bed.” Unless I continually remind myself how lucky I am (“I make my own games! I had a fantastic Kickstarter the other day! I have a great family and my own home!”) and keep up with whatever happiness exercises I’m into at the time, whether it’s meditating or “double column technique” or walks in the woods or what. (These days it’s bicycling. Variety in these things is good. See hedonic adaptation, below.)

3) Unlike most game programmers, I have a psych degree. Sure it’s just a BA, but it has to be good for something, right?

So, if you’re not an indie game developer, you may be wondering what the fuck. Why aren’t indie game developers happy? Why do they get depressed or even feel just mediocre? Why aren’t they walking on sunbeams and puking rainbows all the time?

Part of it is what happiness scientists call hedonic adaptation. Whenever good stuff happens to us, we rapidly get used to our new standards, and things start seeming normal again. There’s a “set point” theory that says people are basically cheerful or not - once they get used to their current circumstances they return to their typical set point. If we’re born with a tendency to not be cheerful, it doesn’t matter how much awesome stuff happens to us in our lives, we rapidly return to that not-cheerful state. In other words - most peoplefeel ‘meh’. And indie game developers are people.

So, if you’re not an indie game developer, and you’ve been thinking maybe it would make you happy, maybe you should think again. It turns out humans are notoriously bad at knowing what will make them happy. Whether you’re an indie developer or not probably will have no bearing on your happiness.

Now, suppose you’re like me, and there’s something in you that says, “I don’t care. I still want to do it, even so. I can’t imagine doing anything else.” Then what do we do?

First, let’s define our terms. Because I’ve written about happiness-in-game-development before, I was invited to talk at the Seattle Indies Expo about the topic. Then my dad died. So I was in the weird position of talking about happiness when I felt really sad. But never-being-sad is not the kind of happiness I’m talking about here. We want authentic happiness. Not the momentary pleasure of the hedonist, and not just smiles and laughter, but something more subtle and more lasting. That I’m-really-glad-to-be-alive feeling, even if I don’t happen to be eating a sumptuous meal or playing an awesome game at that very moment. You can be very sad that your dad is dead and also very glad to be alive at the same time. Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile describes this distinction in more detail. (That talk, by the way, is what inspired me to start posting about happiness-in-game-development again. I remembered I have a lot to say on the topic.)

Then, how about we try to measure our happiness? We can to an extent. There are websites, like Authentic Happiness and Happify.com, with surveys that will give you a very good indication of how you’ve been feeling lately. You might wonder why to do it. One reason is that when our mood sours, it feels like it’s always been that way. We forget that just yesterday we were on top of the world. It’s good to remember that it’s just a down in a series of ups and downs, and having an official record can help.

We can also get an idea where we stand. Maybe we feel ‘meh’. These tests can give us an idea whether that ‘meh’ is normal quiet desperation or we should seek therapy now.

And finally, we can make a game out of it. We’re gamers, so that should come naturally, right? When I started studying happiness science my CES-D score was usually in the double digits. By doing the work, I was usually able to keep it in the single digits, except when horrible stuff happened (like my dad dying.)

What kind of work? Well, the indie game developer’s malaise isn’t that different from other people’s run-of-the-mill unhappiness. So the same thing that fixes other people can fix us. The good news is the “set point” theory is kind of wrong. You can control your own happiness, but: it’s work; it doesn’t come from the things we commonly think it does; and we have to make it a priority. I’ve linked to these books before and I’ll probably link to them again - studies have shown that just reading a book can make you happier - The How of Happiness - Sonja Lyubomirsky and Feeling Good - David D. Burns.

They’re both a really good start.

But there are particular nuances and quirks of indie game development that pull us away from happiness, and I’ll try to cover them in future posts. In fact, there's so many I'm not sure where to begin, so I'd like to do some research. If you can let me know in the comments:

Are you indie? Are you happy? Why not?

I'll be talking at iFest in Seattle on November 9

You know why I named my new company Happion Laboratories?

Because I'm all about the pursuit-of-happiness with it.

And I'm going to talk about that some at iFest.

Come on by!

Keeping My Happy On During The Kickstarter

Unless there's some catastrophe I'm going to launch the Energy Hook Kickstarter tomorrow.  

I'm already pretty stressed out and anxious and replaying constructive criticism in my head over-and-over and second-guessing myself about stuff. I know, after it launches, I'm going to have trouble separating my sense of personal self-worth from how it does - kind of like after Schizoid launched and I was depressed for two months.

And I've also heard I'll need a thick skin. Again, just like with a normal product launch, though then there are also sometimes weird semi-personal attacks with Kickstarter. But no, I don't have a thick skin. That's not my default state, anyway.

So what am I going to do?

I'm going to do a lot of positive self-talk. I'm thinking about this quote:

"My hat's in the ring. The fight's on and I'm stripped to the buff." - Teddy Roosevelt

Yeah, I'd rather have my hat in the ring then never try and wonder what might have happened. And in that sense, no matter how 'succesful' it is financially, it'll be a success just to be there. Just to press that green candylike button.

And I'll have to keep reminding myself of that, over and over. Already a success. Already a success.

That means celebrating the launch is just as important as celebrating the outcome. So I'm going to do some kind of live party / celebration thing tomorrow, but still not sure when and not what - twitch.tv?  Live tweeting? Something. I'll keep you posted.

Mistakes To Avoid When Going From AAA To Indie: The Movie

Here's a cautionary tale on Indie Game development from Matt Gilgenbach. Some people think that - particularly with console development - you'll get out of it at least what you put into it. Not so - my experiences with Schizoid and Matt's experiences with this say otherwise. There's no sure thing in indie game dev.

http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1017963/Obsessive-Compulsive-Development-Retro-Grade

And it also goes to show migrating from AAA to Indie is harder than you might think. It is almost a completely different sport, seems like. 

A couple possible 'mistakes' that Matt didn't call out explicitly (or if he did, I spaced at that moment) that it's easy for us ex-AAA people to fall into:

Why are you writing your own engine? 

I did this with Schizoid and with the Richard Garfield game that endlessly chased publisher funding to no avail. Oh yeah, and Sixty Second Shooter. With Schizoid and Sixty Second Shooter it was arguably the right call, because it let me have "first game with such-and-such tech" PR stories, but who can say for sure. Anyhow, my own internal logic went something like this - and maybe Matt shared it: "This is a really simple indie game. Therefore it'll be easy to write our own engine." And then later, when we decided to add awesome post-processing shaders or network play or this that and the other already solved feature, it became a burden. (And another thing that led me down the path is it's also fun to write your own engine.) But you have to ask yourself: are you a game developer or an engine developer?

Obviously there are plenty of hugely succesful indie games out there where they wrote their own engine, so it's hard to say making your own engine is clearly a mistake, but you also have to wonder - would given succesful indie game X *not* have been succesful if they used a pre-existing engine?

What's Your Relationship To Feedback?

I have a difficult thought to articulate here. It's not cut-and-dry. I keep rewriting this paragraph as I think about it. As indie developers showing our work to people, whether it's just youtube videos or alphas or showing it off at conferences and contests - we're going to get more feedback on our work than we could respond to in our lifetime. That can be murder on a perfectionist. A lot of people-on-the-internet complained about the graphics in my first trailer for Energy Hook, and since I've became perhaps overly concerned with making it look better, even though the game isn't supposed to be about the graphics, it's about the gameplay. The graphics are supposed to be a means to an end and while I'd like them to look distinctive and consistent and not bad it's certainly a mistake for me to waste time trying to compete in that arena. And yet I have been anyway.
On the other hand, a place where feedback can be really beneficial is when there's some feature or fix that I think might be important - and none of the players I show the game to seem to notice. There can be a massive time savings there as I punt on the feature or fix that nobody cares about. Matt might have saved some serious time not working on things if he resisted the temptation to add features that nobody asked for?
So, you need feedback, not just to find out what you should fix but also to find out what you don't have to fix. But some stuff that feedback says you should fix - you shouldn't. And that's the really tough part. How to decide. Maybe asking- "Is this going to be one of my actual players or is this just a random internet troll who isn't going to play my game anyway because he just wants the next CoD?" -is a good place to start...

And speaking of feedback, I'm looking for more. I'm selecting just a few people to look at an early pre-alpha build of Energy Hook to figure out what I should fix before showing it to journalists before the Kickstarter. If you'd like to, and have a few hours to play it and write up some thoughtful, specific feedback, comment here or send me an e-mail ([email protected]) and I'll put your name in the hat. Let me know what kind of computer you have and whether you're a mouse/keyboard or gamepad sort of person.