IndieBird's Lair

I haven’t posted an update in a while – with good reason.  I’m busy putting the finishing touches on the game, but there aren’t many flashy things to show.  It’s just a process of gradual improvement, working on things like tutorials and user interface.  The testing is going quite well and I’m pleased by people’s response.  I still need to balance the difficulty a bit, but I think that the core of the game is fun.

My plan right now is to release the game on Feb 16 for PC and Feb 23 for Mac.  As I get closer to the release date, I’ll have more material to show off, like videos and screenshots.

The IndieGames blog has put up a manifesto by Ed McMillen that has sparked some interesting discussion.  One point that seems to have resonated was 12. Grow up.  I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently – how can games reflect the breadth of experience that’s to be found in the world?  I like shooting things, blowing stuff up is great fun!  Go blowing stuff up!  That said, there’s a multitude of other interesting ideas out there.

For example, how does one convince other people to be honest and effective when you’re not looking?  Peter the Great had a heck of a time building governmental institutions in 18th century Russia.  People would obey his orders to the letter when he was present, but would hesitate to act if a command was not issued.  Because of Peter’s energetic and domineering character, many of his subordinates lacked initiative and feared making mistakes.

Another dragon he wrestled with was corruption.  He raised wages, created internal auditors, threatened and executed, but still everyone stole from the government in gargantuan quantities.  Peter accomplished a great deal and had an insatiable curiosity for warfare and engineering, but he lacked empathy.  If he understood people better, he would realise that trying to prod everyone like cattle has limited effectiveness.  Instead of trying to micromanage the country, he should have focused on finding the right people and nurturing their talents.  To be fair to Peter, he was dealing with a thousand problems and once, and he DID work to educate the Russians.  He wasn’t perfect, but he did enough to be “The Great”.

What does this have to do with games you ask?  Absolutely nothing!  This bothers me a great deal – we’ve gone a great job exploring shooting things in corridors and managing resources, but little else.  Those spots in the fabric are starting to wear a little thin, if you ask me.

I don’t have all the answers;  you’ll notice that my games (including the current one) deal with shooting things and managing resources.  More and more though, I imagine broad green fields, as far as the eye can see and where no game designer has trodden before.  Who knows what riches we’ll find there?

Radical Poesis Games & Creations is holding a “pay whatever you want” sale for Immortal Defense.  I’m usually not a fan of the tower defense genre – I find it too inbred and unimaginative, but I enjoyed ID quite a bit.

Besides being a fun tower defense game, Immortal Defense’s story deals with immortality, loneliness and purpose.  That’s a lot deeper than most games go.  I suggest that you go pick it up; you can name your own price, so there’s nothing to lose.

The TIGSoure Assemblee Competition has moved into Part 2.  The basic idea is that artists create a bunch of awesome art assets in Part 1, and then coders make games with them in Part 2.  I think that we’ll see some interesting stuff.

Argh! I wish that I could participate, but the Zombie game comes first.  I’ll have to stand on the sidelines for this one.  CURSE YOU ZOMBIES!!!

I’ve taken some screenshots to show off the things I’ve been working on recently.  Here’s a sneak peek.

Flamethrowers allow the player to decimate tightly packed groups of zombies.  They’re great against crowds, but they have a limited range.

Sniper rifles don’t do so well against advancing enemies, but they’re great for picking off things from a distance.  A solitary marine with a sniper rifle can destroy a hive all by himself.  If you want to capture that point, however, you’ll need some help.

The siege gun is the latest and greatest in anti-zombie artillery.  Big and expensive, it rains a barrage of explosive shells down on enemy crowds and structures.  This baby doesn’t come cheap, but when you build it you can be sure that nothing will survive in its vicinity for long.

I came across a pretty interesting article today.  The quick summary is that marketing was found to have three times more effect on revenue than high review scores.  They don’t cite any numbers, but to be honest the result doesn’t surprise me.  I’ve been thinking about making a for-pay game for a while now, so I’ve contemplated that side of things quite a bit.  Spending as much 50% of my time on self-promotion is something that makes quite a bit of sense.  Things are not too different on the freeware side of the fence, by the way.  Where you get linked from is what determines your download count, much less than how good your game is.

The sad truth is that for most games spending one hour on implementing more features or polishing the game quickly becomes sub-optimal when compared to spending an hour on talking about your game.  If you pay attention to the indie game scene, then you’ll find that all of the latest “big” hits were by people who are masters of self-promotion.  Jonathan Blow, Ron Carmel and Kyle Gabler all handled the PR for their games very deftly.  I doubt that they would be as successful as they are if they didn’t.

So what are we to do, as people who love playing and making games?  One answer is to just ignore the marketing side and focus on making great games.  This is the answer a lot of developers pick, mostly because they either don’t realise the importance of PR or can’t be bothered.  As a result, a lot fewer people see their work and they can’t fund their next game.  What’s the point of making an amazing game if nobody sees it?

Another possibility is to play the marketing game and scream your lungs out about your work.  Once you get over your aversion to talking about how great you are, it’s surprisingly easy, actually.  All you need to do is have an unshakable confidence that your game is friggin great and to view the whole thing as a matter of survivial.  Unfortunately, you’re still spending the time on marketing when you could be making something cool.

The third answer, and the one I like the most, is community building.  If you can build a group of people who are consistently interested in your work, then you have an audience that’s already paying attention to what you have to say.  Of course, this is not a magic bullet.  For one thing, building a community takes time and hard work.  You won’t neccesarily spend any less time on community building than on marketing.  Secondly, you actually have to care about your audience when you do this.  This is not something that you can outsource to a PR company.  Lastly, and this is the one that concerns me most, is that niche communities tend to have extreme tastes.  This will probably restrict what you can do as a designer.  Do you think that Tarn Adams could quit making Dwarf Fortress and work on a horse petting sim, while still getting donations from his fans?  I think not (of course, the great thing about Dwarf Fortress is that he could probably include a horse petting sim somewhere in there).

Maybe indie games developers should form some sort of promotion group for cool work.  There’s already some of this, informally, but it could be juiced up a bit.  For example, if Jonathan Blow is making something neat, I could direct people who pay attention to my work to his site.  That way audiences get to find interesting new things and developers get a sort of co-op marketing.

What do you guys think?  How can an indie game developer balance making cool games simultaneously with details like eating and having a place to live?  What part do game players have in all of this?

In case you guys are wondering where I went, all the November game releases sucked up a lot of time.  Now that I’m done playing Dragon Age and Assassin’s Creed 2, I can get back to working on the game.

Here’s a tidbit.  I added sniper rifles and flamethrowers recently.  They really improve the game by giving the player more choice on how they want to tackle the Zombies.

Over the last week, I’ve overhauled the art style of the zombie game.  I felt that the earlier art development was way too complicated and that nobody would see all the work anyway.  To deal with this, I simplified the art and made it more scrawly.  Here’s a work-in-progress sample:

Edit:  I’ve just added the interface art:

I was recently interviewed by kriptosporidium, who has setup a new indie gaming forum.  If you’re interested in my thoughts about indie game development and a whole bunch of other things, head to: IndieBird Interview

Hi Everyone,

I thought that I should make a quick post to show people that I’m still alive.  The Zombie game is still being worked on, even though it’s taken quite some time to get this far.  Right now I’m working on the marine animations.  I’m using Blender (see screenshot) to mock up the movement of the character and then I’ll translate it into code.  I still haven’t finished the art for the marine yet, so that’s why he’s black and white.

I’ll keep everyone up to date on the progress of the game, but it’s entering the final stages of work.  Hopefully sometime soon, you’ll get to play it.