4th Studio for 5th Planet

I just recently started listening to the internet radio Pandora.  I’m a big fan of Tool, Deftones, and Korn but not when listening to those same bands over and over on the “Industrial” station.  Come on, guys.  Is there a “This song is nice and all, but doesn't fit the genre you think it does” and I just don’t see it?

So last night I went to an event at 5th Planet to see their new studio.  There were about a hundred people there with tons of food and a keg(which I later found out was full of root beer--and it was good).  The CEO came by, saw me checking out the scene and asked me how Stigma Games was doing.  We talked production methods for a while.  I still can’t believe what a nice guy he is.

I’d say about a third of the people there were people I knew, but I was so engrossed in checking out the studio, I didn't even want to talk to people yet.  That place is massive.  There was an 8-10 foot tall dragon in the reception area.  Past that, you walk into the studio and it’s maybe 10k square feet with dozens of work stations.  No cubicles.  Everyone can see everyone else.  The kitchen was about the size of a Starbucks.  The break room was about the size of a tennis court.  No, bigger.  There was another large empty area where I was told later that they race go-carts in.  There were also half a dozen “chill out” rooms with couches and tvs in them.  The game room was straight out of a mega corporation meeting room only with tons of popular board games, consoles, a giant projector screen, and nerf darts and guns all over the place.  Even the office buildings were loaded with gamer related stuff.  In one business office I saw a replica of Frost Mourne, a sword from one of the Final Fantasy games, and the Portal gun.  I just thought, “This looks like Disney Land.”  I looked around again and thought, “If anyone is wondering what I’m trying to do with Stigma Games, this here, is it.”

After that, I did a fair amount of socializing.  There were people from KlickNation there.  One of their artists that got laid off used to be in a writer’s group with me and I talked to her about seeing if she’d like to join my current group.  I met another woman from KlickNation (which EA has since renamed “Capitol Games”) and she saw the “Stigma Games” title on my shirt and told me how cute it was to see young, unheard of studios in the area trying to make it.  Nice, huh?  All that really does is push me to want to build up Stigma Games more.  And once we’re a big studio and I meet someone trying to get their game studio off the ground, instead of being condescending to them, I’ll encourage them.  I believe the best revenge is to do on to others what should have been done to you.

I made another post recently, so this might be strange so close to that one.  But I wanted to talk about the various stages Stigma and I have gone through.  I remember when I first started this, anytime someone would answer a Craigslist add, I’d meet with them and tell them how awesome Dawnshine was going to be and why they should want to join.  No need to send me a resume.  If you were a gamer and knew anything about code or art, I’d talk to you.  Eventually, it turned into, “Well, do you have a portfolio?” first.  And then I started giving tests.  And now it’s gotten to the point where people need to demonstrate to me that they have a proven history of doing the role they’re applying for and the drive to push it further.  I've now seen the life cycle of the “I've never tried to make a game before, but I’m a big time gamer and I just want to be part of this” type applicant who ends up taking up space and slowing the morale of the team.  I have to stop seeing them as people that just want a chance that they haven’t otherwise worked for and see them instead as anchors that make it more difficult to reach our goals.  From now on, I’m only recruiting people that have the same drive I do.  We’re starting to attract applicants like that now.

It’s time to raise the bar.

Starting 2014

Hey everyone.  A lot has been going on.  We've had some crew shake ups over the Holidays.  It happened last year as well.  People on the team take some time off and reflect if they really want to be part of what we’re doing or not.  It’s a hard thing being in a start up.  No money coming in and still a lot more work to do... it’s certainly not for everyone.

I feel as though the team has gotten just a little too big to manage, so I've decided to downsize the team just a little.  That means, I won’t be seeking replacements for those we lost.  There are still a couple positions we still need to fill and I’ll continue to look for the right candidates for those.  Otherwise, I think we're going to shrink down to a 15-20 person team size, at least for now.

So let’s get to some progress:

Not a lot of Raygun Rocketship news.  I’m hoping we can finalize concepts for the remaining, unfinished levels in the game.  We had to switch lead artists on the team, which I’m hoping doesn't slow us down too much.  I've been working more on story lines.  The marketing team has been talking about putting together a Kickstarter campaign for it.  I've been on the fence with that for a while.  Other KS campaigns for games in the same SHMUP genre are pretty dismal (nearly all successfully funded are less than $10 grand), certainly not enough money to make it worth it for paying the team of 6-7 people who've put nearly a year into it so far, but possibly enough to fund a decent marketing campaign.  We’ll see.  I know there are a few members on the team that are in financial trouble, but are so committed to this that they’re pushing forward.  It really sucks that there’s not much I can do about that right now.  A big KS funding round would be amazingly helpful.

Very little news on our casual game other than we have a basic story arc done.  Now we just need to storyboard it out in combination with the levels.  We only have a programmer and a story designer working on it right now, both of which are hard pressed for free time to devote to it.  But I’m thinking we’ll probably announce it soon.

I think I mentioned our parody fighting game hit a snag a couple months ago and we decided to start over.  We didn't get a whole lot done over the break on that in terms of asset competition, but we’re on a good path now.  I think I mentioned I screwed up and added too many artists to the project and turned it into a cluster mess.  I've re-assigned artists and one artist left the team entirely.  Now we’re settled with everyone having a specific job they need to take care of.  One of our artists has stepped up to be the Art Director on the project and I’m really happy with how she’s doing so far.  This game will be entirely hand drawn.  We've thought about going 3d since the very beginning.  Recently, I even considered modeling, rigging, and animating 3d characters then rendering them to 2d sprites, so it would technically still be a 2d game.  That would make things faster.  But a hand drawn game should look better and, hopefully, generate the buzz we really need.  I don’t want to quickly put out a game no one will care about, so it might be the better decision to take the long way.

Lastly, the Dawnshine table top project has been through a lot.  I was taking a backseat role, letting the rest of the team do the designs while I just worked on lore, theme, and flavoring.  I wasn't really happy with how the design was going, so when the design team fell apart and people left the team over the Christmas break, I knew it was time for me to step in, throw out everything that had been done so far, and start over.

I've decided to take the game in a deck building direction as the mechanic for an empire building game--thus merging two genres.  Though I have the finished idea in my head, it will be important to play test and keep researching other similar games to see if there’s more elegant ways of doing things or if my brilliant ideas have been done to death in other games.

Aside from that, there’s a few cool things on the horizon that I hope to be able to post more about soon.

AppNation 5

I’m back from AppNation. Luckily I didn't go in with high hopes, because it ended up not being worth the trip.  The last couple times I went to GDC in San Francisco, the hotels I stayed at had free parking.  I was a little surprised that this, a hotel that cost double a night from what I was used to would charge $45 dollars a day extra for parking.  And the room was tiny.  It was barely big enough to fit a bed that wasn't even built for a full sized human.  The bathroom was even too small to have a sink in it.  Rather the sink was next to the bed.  But ok.  The only reason why I picked that hotel was because it was a block from the Mascone.  And with my bad back, a short walking distance is a good thing.

So I go to the convention on the second floor of the Mascone West building.  There was a 3’ foot diameter, circular table set up for Stigma Games.  I got there early, so I had to wait a couple hours before there were people milling about to check out the booths.  Unfortunately, I was dressed up and wearing my dress shoes, which I swear have soles made of iron, my back still really starts to ache if I stand for more than 20 minutes, though going through physical therapy appointments for the last month has been helping, and on top of that, I still have a really bad cold with my throat pretty swollen.  So yeah, I ended up leaning on the table a few times to help alleviate the pain in my back and feet.  I found out later that we could have chairs, but they cost $55 dollars a day to rent. And at that point, I was feeling tapped out.  I know I sound cheap, but keep in mind, I practically live off of Top Ramin, so I normally have to be very careful about my expenses.

I’m really good at taking negative criticism.  And it was nice to actually have feedback from people now that we were finally starting to show off one of our games to the public.  This one guy, however, was just a moron.  I’d bought a Samsung Galaxy Note a couple days before to show off Raygun Rocketship on and let people try it out.  This guy kind of flicked his finger around, not really playing it, but rather made a minimal effort.  Finally, he said, “It needs to be a skateboard.”  Our 1950s sci fi inspired space combat game needs to be a skateboard instead.  That was his feedback.  It got worse.  With slurred speech, he told me that he worked with the biggest names in the business like Snoop Dog, JayZ, and Justin Bieber and that our game needed to be more like that.  Yes, Raygun Rocketship needed to be more like Justin Bieber.  Sorry, but that was the most idiotic thing I’d heard in a while.  The good news is the comments from people after him would get a lot less stupid after that guy.  How could they not?

In fact, feedback after that was pretty positive.  Everyone seemed to really like the game and the artwork.  Though I’m a little suspect of that.  The reason why is because, other than that one idiot, everyone else would basically say, “Wow, this game is really cool.  It would be even more cool if…” and then go into a spiel about what their company provided.  It reminded me about how I keep getting emails from people trying to get money from me.  Emails like: “Need help with coding or art?  We've been hired by thousands of big name studios and indies all over the world which is why we have to resort to spamming people to try and get work!”  Now instead of getting tons of spam emails, I had people come up to me in person trying to sell me stuff.

Some of the people I met might be good connections.  I talked to a lady whose company did localizations in 30 different languages.  That’s certainly a useful service.  I was just hoping it would have been more of a fan centered event.  I guess when you’re charging $500 bucks a ticket, that’s not going to happen.

I left early and went back to my hotel room and fell asleep on the tiny bed with my legs hanging over the bottom edge from just below my knees.  I’m only 6’ 4”.  That’s a little taller than normal, but come on.  I felt like somewhere during the booking through hotels.com, I forgot to uncheck the “Hobbit sized room” box.  I got woken up at midnight by an Indian couple down the hall yelling at each other.  The woman screamed a few times like she was being stabbed then went right back to yelling.  It was clear I wasn't going to go back to sleep.  I don’t speak Hindi, but that’s how loud they were, that I could clearly pick out what language they were yelling in.

Finally at 2am, I still couldn't fall back asleep so I decided to pack up.  By this time, the couple was out in the hallway yelling at each other with the man banging on walls and yelling.  How do people yell at each other for hours on end?  No matter how mad I was at someone, I’d eventually get tired.  I checked out at 2:30am.  The security guard at the bottom floor told me people had called to complain about the screaming couple, but there wasn't much they could do.  Oh well.  It was the perfect end to an ill fated trip. 

This sounds like a failure.  But one, I like San Francisco in general.  It’s just an amazing city to look at and drive around in, so I was actually in a good mood most of the trip.  But two, this was useful in that it helped me better focus on the type of booth presence we need and what type of conventions we need to be focusing on.  Now, most of this stuff sounds like common sense--show off a game to gamers and have a booth that attracts people to you.  Sure.  But there are a lot of little things.  And I’m just one of those people that needs to screw up something first before I understand it.  I need to see failure first hand before I can understand how to improve.

Raygun Rocketship is officially out of the bag.  So I’ll be talking a lot more about it soon.

Halloween Post

Hey guys,

Right now, I’m taking a break from massively overhauling the website.  In fact, this might be the last blog post I make on Blogspot, and will otherwise be moving all previous blogs over the last two years to the new site.  The new site is going to be created through Drupal.  And though I've used Drupal briefly before, it’s a lot to learn.  I’m pretty comfortable with php and MySQL, css, and object oriented principles in general, so I think I’ll pick it up pretty fast, but it’s still going to be a colossal amount of work.  So what’s the point?

Up until now, I've modeled the public image of Stigma Games after a big time game publishing company.  We’re working on multiple titles at once right now.  And though we’re not funded, the idea is when we’re close to releasing, we’ll announce our games, have tons of stuff to show off, send press releases about it to game journalists, get exposure, and hopefully things take off.  But I've been wondering if that’s not the way to go.

I recently read an article about Chris Roberts and how he recently broke the crowd funding World Record.  He’s at $25 million.  Most of that is through PayPal donations.  Now, Chris Roberts is obviously famous.  Just about every PC gamer I know about my age has played the Wing Commander series, so if he asks for money to make a space sim, people will pay attention.  But putting that aside, he said in the article that Notch was his inspiration.

Now, no one really knew who Markus “Notch” Persson was as he was building Minecraft.  But instead of building up content and unleashing it upon the world, he invited people to come in so he could bounce ideas off them and ask them what they wanted to see in the game.  In that regard, gamers became part of the creation.  And because of that, 3 million of them bought Minecraft while it was still in beta for $20 bucks a pop.

Ok, so what does all this mean for Stigma Games?  We have boatloads of content to show off and talk about.  With the new site, we would be able to start showing it off while it’s still unpolished in an effort to get feedback from other gamers outside Stigma Games.  Anyone would be able to log in and post their feedback in certain sections.  We’ll have alpha builds of our games available to be played directly through our website.  I’ll be building a public forum as well once we have enough users signed up.  I hate seeing dead forums.  But otherwise, the point of the site would be to engage people.

I've mentioned what’s good about letting people in, but there’s danger here.  Just ask Richard Garriott how great an idea it was to let people in early for Tabala Rasa.  Or the lottery winner who hit Kickstarter to pitch his MMORPG idea using his 2nd grade reading and writing skills who then insulted the many people that pointed out how terrible his ideas were by telling them how they were just jealous of his money.

Aside from being obnoxious and insulting fans, the more realistic danger for us is to make promises, have to back track or completely abandon things.  We could also have fans that make suggestions that are either unrealistic, bad, or won’t work with our overall theme.  Such fans could feel like we’re not listening to them when we don’t implement those ideas.

Also, we might be long term gamers, but having great ideas for games and knowing how to make them are about as different as knowing how to drive a car and how to build one.  We make mistakes, have to pivot, and change.  I’m not as excited about the idea of letting people in and watch us first hand as we screw up and have to make radical changes.

All that aside, where we’re currently at:  Raygun Rocketship is now playable on the Ouya.  Once the Drupal site is up and running, I might start holding events at various pizza places around town to get random gamers to check it out and give us instant feedback--hopefully convincing them to go to our website and get involved there.  I mean, I could essentially do this every night.  I've already talked to a Round Table in the area about it, and they like the idea.

Our casual game is playable.  I might have mentioned, I don’t remember, that we parted ways with the programmer on that project and threw out all the code he did and started over.  Well, it’s playable (again) and completely in HTML5 like I wanted it done in the first place.  We’re planning on following a Candy Crush Saga model with it--Facebook and Mobile platforms where you solve puzzles as you move along a board.  If you beat a level on your phone, you can pick up where you left off on the Facebook version.  It’s pretty rough right now and just got basic functionality, so still a long ways to go.

Our fighting game hit a big snag.  We have a theme song for it, which is good.  But art wise is not coming together how we’d like.  We made this mistake before--spent way too little time in pre-production, jumped into production, and things fell apart.  This is a really common mistake that new developers make--have a cool sounding idea, jump into making it, realize they’re making a design or art style mistake, but feeling like they’re locked into it since they’re so far into production.  Rather than feeling locked in, we’re starting over and throwing out most of what we have so far--about 6 months of work.  This fighting game has changed radically from a simple and funny fighting game you could play on your phone to a complex game for the console (starting with Ouya).  Why are we mostly walking away from the massive mobile game market to move to the tiny Ouya market?  Maybe I’ll explain why in another post.

As for Dawnshine, we’re close to finalizing some game play mechanics.  The next step is to make a prototype out of index cards and see how the game plays.  It’s good to know that there’s a local community of table top game designers who get together though a Meetup group to test out their prototypes.  We’ll see.  Ok, back to Drupal.

October Update

Hey everyone,

We’re coming up on the 2 year anniversary of when I decided to start Stigma Games.  A lot has changed since then.  I started the company in an effort to make an MMORPG.  We've since completely stopped all production on it and moved to other things.  This is why game companies don’t like to talk about what they’re doing until the very end--because things change.  We’re in a unique position in which, since we’re not funded, we can’t make rigid schedules.  Not just because people bail--as I've mentioned, our attrition rate has slowed to the point to where now it’s generally only the new people that we tend to lose--but because I don’t know when something will get done.  I can’t really get on someone’s case about not meeting their deadlines.  People have work or school, or often both.  People aren't always sure how long something will take them to do and often hit unexpected roadblocks and need more input.

Funding will radically change how we’re able to work.  I’ll be so amazingly happy when I’m able to meet a payroll.  My stress levels will also radically increase as I worry about how to keep making enough money to make payroll each month.  But I can handle that.  Anyways, enough of that.  Let’s move on to what we’re doing.

A new web host!  Ok, I’m the only one that seems excited about this.  I’ll be paying about 3 times a month for a virtual private server, but man, the old host was really irritating me.  The MySQL was down a lot, and when it was working, it was slow and about half the time, would time out in the middle of a query.  We use a private forum and wiki to keep all our design documents and discussions.  And it was just miserable to work with.  Also, for some reason, all of a sudden php files stopped working completely.  I was not in the mood to convert everything to html files.  That was the last straw.  The downside, transferring all the data from the old MySQL to the new didn't exactly work as well as I thought it would.  I saved the more important data manually, and it’s taking me a lot of time to manually input everything in the new.  That means all the accounts for the team have to be recreated.  Fun.

I mentioned last post about the Dawnshine Card Game.  We've hit a stumbling block as we've realized a lot of the game mechanics we wanted to use as still under a patent owned by Wizards of the Coast who make Magic: The Gathering.  That patent runs out in about two years.  Do we want to wait that long or come up with something that doesn't violate their patent?  The vote was to do something new and release sooner rather than later.  I've only played Magic once, and it was about 15 years ago.  I barely know the rules.  My version of the Dawnshine Card Game was based more on Battle Systems.  So we might revert back to that somewhat.  We've also talked about a type of Tower Defense and Lane Combat rules.  And furthermore, we've talked about using an actual physical board.  I mean, we've already mapped out the zones for the MMO, so turning that or part of that into a physical board would be easier.

I’m not the main designer on this.  One of our marketing people who is obsessed with card games and the local CCG community and one of our designers who also plays CCGs a lot are both working on designs.  So Wednesday, at our meeting, I’ll see where they’re at and what they've come up with.  I’m really just there to make sure things fit Dawnshine lore and it’s something I think we can market and sell.

I also mentioned making single player Dawnshine games.  I finished a Game Design Document for one.  It’s based on a character that I created long before founding Stigma Games.  The character’s name is Theo, and that will likely be the name of the game “Dawnshine: Theo.”  What I was thinking about doing is moving everyone to it after we finish our other projects.  A few people on the team have told me that they want to get back to Dawnshine.  But I want to do this smarter--meaning getting the design down a lot more solidly before we have artists and programmers take a crack.

I've mentioned Raygun Rocketship.  I’m still thinking about the best way to market this game.  Space combat games generally aren't  things people get excited about unless they’re being made by people named Chris Roberts.  Speaking of which, I have a feeling Star Citizen is going to be absolutely amazing, but anyways.  Now, I think Raygun Rocketship is going to be a really fun and cool game and people will really like it once they play it, but getting people to try it in the first place will take some doing.  So, how to make it really stand out?  I think the way to go is to really work on the characters, make them really interesting, and push that angle.  Out of all our projects, this is the one I’m the least involved in, though I’m really happy with how the team is doing with it.  I've written some dialogue and story, but I told the team it’s totally cool if they want to throw out all that and have me start again.

I've also been working on fleshing out the characters for our fighting game parody.  I’m fine with changing characters based on the team’s input.  Not that it’s a better or worse game than Raygun Rocketship, but I think it will be much easier to market since it’s all about the characters.  Being a parody game, humor is often an easier way to grab people.

Not much to report on our casual game.  I think I've mentioned the bulk of the main artwork is done.  One of our designers is finishing some story line stuff for it, then he’ll be freed up for a while until the programmer catches up.  In the meantime, I’ll probably move him to the Dawnshine: Theo game.  I’ve already moved the artist off the casual game and to the fighting game.

This is something that I've learned.  It’s pointless bringing on a programmer right away.  Which is funny because studios usually bring on writers towards the end of a project to polish turds and create a story out of art work and game mechanics.  I've learned to do the opposite.  Bring in designers and writers first.  Do a lot of pre-production.  Halfway through pre-production, bring in Tools Programmers so that the designers have the tools to be able to implement what they create in the game.  Halfway through pre-production, bring in artists to concept out designs and characters once the artists actually have something to go off of.  Do not leave it to artists to come up with story or character ideas.  By that, I’m not saying not to listen to their, or anyone else’s input, but rather to say that designers should be designing.  All things being equal, no one designs better than a designer.

Oh, not that anyone reads this for the latest on game news, but I wanted to mention what’s going on with Ouya to finish what I said in the last post.  Ouya has lowered the “Free the Games Fund” from $50k to $10k minimum.  This is a much more attainable goal, so I’m happy about this.  This makes Raygun Rocketship a more obtainable goal to enter the contest with.  I also mentioned a sketchy entry where one team raised $171k and got a lot of crap about it.  The game is called Gridiron Thunder by MogoTXT.  Well, they announced that they would not be taking the matching funds from Ouya.  Yeah, that’s a lot of money to turn down just to improve their PR, but I got to hand them for having the guts to do it.  All and all, I have a lot more respect for Ouya for being flexible.  The revenue devs are getting by releasing on Ouya isn’t very good so far, but I still see this as a good first step for us.

I let one of our programmers borrow my Ouya to try and get Raygun Rocketship working on it.  I’m hoping by the meeting this weekend, it will be working.  It’s only one level so far and it still has some bugs.  It needs a lot of balancing.  Once you play it a few times and get the patterns down, it’s not challenging.  So that will need to be adjusted, then play tested, etc.  We still have a long way to go with it.  In general, I’m really happy with how it’s coming along.  I just wish we had a funded studio so the team could focus on it exclusively.

Anyways, I have a lot of work to do today, so I have to get back to that.

September Post

I was thinking about how rare it is to see a successful MMO that’s not built upon an existing IP.  Often these few that are original are based heavily on generic canon of their well established genres.  Fantasy games with dragons, elves, and dwarves, space exploration games with alien races, jump points, and warp drives, super hero games with mutants, criminal organizations, and mad scientists…. These can be successful, but they’re derivative.

Do gamers really want original IPs on a grand MMO scale or do they want to play something familiar?  I can point to MMOs with original IPs, and they're not very successful.  I think Ryzom is a big one that comes to mind.  City of Steam might be another.  Defiance?  Sort of original.  Tabula Rasa was one.  But yeah, none all that successful.  There are a few coming up that might change things: The Repopulation and Wildstar.  We’ll see.

So if gamers are tired of games of the same genre, and they don’t really want to try something they’re completely unfamiliar with, then it seems like there’s only one real path to go: build a new IP, and make an MMO out of that.  Age of Conan and Star Wars(despite William Shatner calling it derivative), are based on existing IP that are(or were when originally created) original.   Depending on your perspective, perhaps you could add The Secret World to this definition--not original ideas but rather existing conspiracy theories presented in game form in a new way.  The Secret World isn't massively successful, but it does ok.

Alright, cool.  So where does that leave Dawnshine?  Well, the goal is still to make a big huge MMO.  But making smaller games based on the Dawnshine IP first, will also make it easier to make the MMO.  I don’t normally like to give details as to what we’re up to in case we abandon something.  But I’ll come out and say I've decided to have the team start working on a Dawnshine collectible card game.  So far, this has been pretty helpful starting out really small scale and deciding big things about the lore.  Much easier.

I notice that card games tend to well on Kickstarter.  We don’t need a programmer for it and one of the guys on our marketing team is obsessed with card games and knows a lot of people in the community that plays them.  Another of our designers is a big Magic: The Gathering player.  I've only played it a couple times, and although this isn't all that similar, I've played a lot of Battle Systems (where you move cardboard squares around to represent your army) to supplement table top DnD game sessions.  Again, not that similar, but the idea of having physical props and designing rules around it is something I’m familiar with.

Anyways, I think this is a great first DS release.  How popular will it be?  I don’t think for a second that it’s going to be the least bit successful without a lot of hard work, and even then, it will be an uphill battle the whole way.  Convincing people to put down their Magic, Yugioh, and Pokemon cards and buy something new that they've never heard of?  Yeah, this won’t be easy at all.  But we’ll start off locally, play test a lot and try and get the local community playing it.

The plan after this project, is to start making shorter single player video games based in the Dawnshine world.  I certainly don’t want to try and make something on the scale of Skyrim.  It would be more about you play a specific character in DS lore and go through an adventure.  I’m thinking 20-50 hours of game play total, but the game would be a lot less expensive than the typical $50-60 dollar range for a PC game.  Once we get some of these mobile games done, we might just switch over to making these Dawnshine mini adventure type games.  I’m kicking around the design for one already.

Speaking of Kickstarter, so we've been talking about doing a KS campaign for one of our games for a month now.  Ouya announced a, now infamous, Free the Games Fund program deal where they will match dollar for dollar what a game developer raises on KS with two conditions: the game has to make at least $50k and it has to be exclusive on the Ouya for 6 months first.  What could possibly go wrong?

To be honest, it never occurred to me that people could use this as a scam.  Think about it this way.  You get a bunch of friends to donate a combination up to $50k dollars on the condition that you’ll give it right back to them,  Ouya matches those dollars, and then you take the free money Ouya gives you and fund your game with that.  You don’t get all the money up front, but again, it’s still free money.  So far, two games have successfully hit the $50k mark—both under heavy suspicion of exactly this happening.  One was shut down by Kickstarter themselves, though the reason why has never been given.  The other, fans have been mercilessly mocking, downgrading all their youtube videos like it’s Rebecca Black singing Friday.  It is really, really fishy.  They've raised $171k dollars, have only a couple dozen Facebook fans, only about 10 people following their 3 year old company on LinkedIn, and got most of their funding from only a few backers who created their KS accounts the same day.  Really, really sketchy.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading comments on Kickstarter and following related stories.  Fans are really, really sick of idiots that promise to do X, Y, and Z, realize they have no idea how to do what they promised, the money gets squandered, and the project never materializes.  I seriously don’t blame the KS peeps for harassing these amateur game developers.  And I’ll be honest and say I’m certainly worried about becoming one of those incompetent amateur game developers that think they’re prepared and end up screwing up.

Not to name names, but it looks like there’s now a third game to hit the $50+k limit.  They were at a couple thousand with only days left, and suddenly hit $50k more.  Um, huh?  The difference?  They’re openly admitting that they had friends and family push them to their goal at the last minute.  Now if they pay those friends their money back, as far as I know, that’s not illegal, though it’s pretty sketchy.  At that point, they’re abusing the rules of the contest, but again, if Ouya doesn't care--and they don’t seem to--then I guess it doesn't matter. 

It was encouraging to see a few indie studios actually succeed, and even more discouraging to see the reality is that the few roads to success for a start up game studio without funding or friends with money are even fewer than they appear.  We’ll get there though, one way or another.

Some Side Inspiration

Hey guys,

You know that Ashton Kutcher video that’s circulating around?  It’s the one where he says that he’s never been too good for any of the jobs he’s had, that opportunity always looks like hard work, and that none of the people around you are smarter than you so you should be able to do anything they can do with hard work.  So I teach a music class over the summer called Stairway to Stardom.  This is the 18th year I've taught it.  At the end of the summer (Sunday, a week ago), it ends in a battle of the bands where all the students performing in their bands play at the Crest Theater to about a thousand people.

This year, the surprise guest was Frank Hannon, lead guitarist of Tesla.  Ok, he’s usually the “surprise” guest every year.  He’s on tour, but he flew to Sacramento just to talk for 5 minutes on stage to inspire the young participants of the program.  His message was fairly simple and one I've heard him say before, but it would make a great addition to the Ashton Kutcher video.

There’s always someone better than you.  It’s easy to give up and think that no matter what you do, you’ll always be out classed.  And as Frank explained as a young musician once himself, he was always surrounded by guitar players that could out play him.  Instead of being intimidated by them, he would listen and learn from them.  When I was a young musician and struggling to get my band playing in the better clubs, performing in local music festivals, and seeing other bands that had the connections I never seemed to be able to make, I’d offer to work for those bands.  I’d build or improve their websites for them, I’d roadie for them, I’d pass out flyers for them, and I would learn and make some of the same connections they made.  I saw first hand how they promoted themselves.  I saw the types of connections they made and why.  Eventually, I was able to get my band Stigma playing in big venues.

Something else that’s important and related to this.  Every artisan has a skill level and a potential level.  The more disappointed you are in your current skill level, the higher your potential level is.  The day you are satisfied with your skill level is the day you stop improving.  If you’re really doing well, each time you hit a milestone(thus increasing your skill level), you’ll realize there’s more things you don’t know and will have to get better at, thus your potential goes up.

This is an interesting dynamic because the closer your skill level is to your potential, the more confident you are.  That being the case, confidence is then completely unrelated to skill.  This is probably what Ashton was hinting at--just because you think people around you know more than you (because they’re confident) that isn’t always the case.  It can be an incorrect assumption to assume just because someone is confident, that they know what they’re doing.  I think this is a big part of why talentless people of low potential end up becoming bosses--they just seem so confident.

This reminds me of Socrates.  The Oracle of Delphi proclaimed he was the wisest man on Earth.  Socrates thought this was impossible, because he didn't know anything.  He didn't know anything because he realized the more he knew, the more he realized he didn't know.  He decided to go to others that were thought of to be wise.  When he spoke to politicians, he soon realized that they believed they had all the answers, even to things they couldn't possibly know.  He soon realized that because their minds were shut, that they couldn't possibly be wise, and thus he challenged the very idea of what wisdom meant.  By questioning society and proclaiming that politicians were fools, he got himself executed.  And yet, it’s his name that we all know, not the names of those that executed him.

How does this relate to the game industry?  Well, it’s not the big companies that challenge conventional wisdom.  It’s the small indie studios that do. Maybe 90% of the time these new ideas fail, but they’re small enough that they can regroup and try again.  When that other 10% hits and that thing everyone else would tell them would never work, is successful, then the big companies copy them.  The big companies aren't uncreative.  It’s just that when you have a huge payroll to meet each month, taking gambles on new ideas means people get laid off.

But as a side note, the artisans with high potential that fail, are more likely to assume they failed because they’re just not good at what they’re doing.  The higher their potential, the more insecure they will feel and the more insecure, and thus, ready to quit at the first sign of failure.  It’s those with low potential that have confidence and are less deterred by failure.  This is a sad dynamic because it means in the long term, that the mediocre will be successful and the brilliant and talentless both will give up early.  This is why it’s often important to find others that believe in you, even when you don’t, to encourage you to keep going.

Putting all this together, if you’re an indie studio because you grew up playing games from big game companies and you want to create that same experience but with 0.1% of the budget and without all the expertise, maybe you might want to rethink things.  As Frank Hannon might say, move to where the big companies are so you can learn from them.  As Ashton might say, no job, not even a minimum wage game tester job is beneath you.  So start on the bottom and work up.

If on the other hand, you’re disappointed in what games are out there and want to do something unconventional, you might have the right mindset to go indie.  So if you’re unconventional and consistently unhappy with your work, but still driven to get better, you’re probably on the right path.  Don’t give up.