June Post

One of the things my dad always told me is if you can’t find the job you want, create it.  When I started Stigma Games it was because I wanted to be a game designer.  So I created a job, but not the one I intended.

Last night, I went to 5th Planet Games.  They are now the largest game studio in the Greater Sacramento area.  Rob Winkler, the founder and CEO, gave a speech to a group of us about how he got his company off the ground, what challenges they faced, etc.  I know a couple people that work there and they’re great people.  Rob was pretty humble and self deprecating about how he pulled it off, but it was obvious he was a lot smarter than he let on.  But he did mention that his goal was to be a game designer and how he had to let that go and realize he was an administrator instead.  I’m there too.

This is something I have to come to grips with.  The more I trust other people on the team to do design work and the more I step up and be a leader, the more successful Stigma Games will be.  About a month ago, 5th Planet put out a job posting that they were looking for a game designer / writer.  So 5th Planet is a company I know, I’m friends with people that work there, I’d get to work in a company with a really fun office culture—a dream job.  This is exactly what I was looking for a year and a half ago when I started Stigma Games.  I did consider applying, but I knew they’d make me give up Stigma Games.  When I talked to Rob last night (after everyone left, I hung out and talked to him for a while) he told me that yes, he would have made me quit Stigma Games to take the position.

But I think that job posting was the final straw that made me realize that leading a game development company was what I wanted more than being a game designer.  Now we’re still not funded, and that’s ok.  We’ll get there.  But I know now I’m doing what it is I really want to do.

Rob said that 5th Planet started with he and some of his friends that played Ever Quest together, who decided to make a game.  They made the game in Flash, something none of them knew how to use at the time, so they bought a book to learn how.  They went through the book, and four months later, released their game and started making enough money in the first couple weeks to back pay all of the artists for their work.  He said he moved in with his mom so she could support him while all of the money that came in went to his employees.  Imagine for the first year or so, he didn't collect a dime of revenue, investing everything back into the company.

They’re doing something else right.  They’re getting an amazing 15% conversion rate.  “Conversion Rate” is a fancy term that means how many players in a free to play game actually spend money.  People that spend money in free to play games are called “whales.”  Zynga's entire business model was how to attract and cater to whales and they only get about a 4% conversion rate.  Many companies only get about a 2-3% conversion rate.  So 15% is massive.  How do they do it?

He explained about obsessively dedicated they are to their fan base.  He mentioned that about once a month, they fly a player out to Roseville for the weekend so they can hang out and talk about one of their games.  They will show that player they changes that they’re planning and get feedback from the player face to face.

Now contrast that with something that happened about a decade ago when an executive from Ever Quest once said to a disgruntled player on their forums to shut up and give him the $10 bucks a month subscription fee so he could buy another Ferrari.  Nice, huh?

In management, there is a concept called TQM.  It stands for Total Quality Management.  The basic idea of TQM is that if you treat your employees really well, they will treat their customers really well.  If they hate their job, they will treat their customers poorly.  Rob may or may not have ever heard of TQM, but he’s obviously practicing it.  I got a tour of the place.  There were separate rooms for just Nintendo games, another for just Xbox games, another for Play Station.  The entire upstairs was another game room for table top games.  They did movie nights.  Essentially, they spend a lot of time team building and making employees happy.  They’re moving to a bigger office in a month or so.  They could always pile more people into their existing studio and convert some game rooms into office space, but since employee happiness is their primary focus, that won’t do.

I found it really inspiring to hear Rob’s story because he’s succeeded going down the same path, using the same methods that I want to do.  And though Rob attributed much of their success to luck, he was being too humble.  Indeed, they were not lucky.  They put all their eggs in the Facebook game basket and survived the social media game bubble burst, transitioning quickly to other platforms like Armor Games and Kongregate.  He also said something else important.  He said at one point, the one game that they had out was broken.  It was broken for about a week and they didn't know how to fix it.  But despite the fact that the game was unplayable, players still kept buying things, which kept them afloat financially.  The players did so because 5th Planet Games had done such a great job communicating with their player base, that the players had faith enough in them that the problems would get fixed and everything would be fine.

There’s one huge thing we’re doing differently.  Whereas 5th Planet out sources all their art, all our art (and well, everything) is done locally.  Will that pay off for us?  We’ll find out.  But the reason why 5th Planet outsources is because they can’t find talented artists locally.  Certainly, talented artists in this area are hard to find.  It’s a catch 22.  Talented artists don’t have a lot of employment options here, so they leave to the bay area or LA.  Then game companies here outsource artists from the bay area.

How do we get around that catch 22?  Now, Stigma Games isn't the only unfunded game company in town trying to get off the ground.  We are in direct competition with the other unfunded game company, fighting over the same limited human resources of people that have skills and are able to donate their time.  In the short term, for us to help each other hurts us.  But in the long term, the more successful other companies in the area are, the more opportunities there are for talented people in the area to find employment opportunities.  So instead of seeing each other as rivals, we should see each other as pillars towards creating the type of game development community that will bring us success towards forming triple AAA game development studios.

In the meantime, there are things I can do to try and develop the talent we do have in the area.  For one, I give tests to people that apply.  We get about 1 new person every day or two applying.  Some of the emails I get are from people that say simply, “I don’t know how to code or do art, but I’d like to help in anyway I can.  You can teach me!”  Those people, I just can’t use.  Then there are artists that aren't at a level we can use, which is obvious after I get an art test back from them.  What I do at that point, instead of just turning them down, I write them back telling them why I’m turning them down, and what they can do to reach a level where I would tell them yes.  How many people will let you take a test as many times as you want and tell you what to do the next time?

There was one case where I turned a person down without getting into why.  He also took four months to do something I could have done in an afternoon and the finished product wasn't great.  But otherwise, I’m pretty good at getting back to people.  Some artist cheat, and send me what they have part way through and ask me questions on how to move on.  That’s fine.  I want artists to pass, so I’ll help them pass art tests.

About half the time when I give art / design / writing tests, I never hear back from them again.  That number is around 70% for programmers that I never hear from again.  I don’t really know why I have a much harder time with programmers.  Of the artists that don’t pass, about half of them don’t try and redo it.  One of those artists actually insulted me for not recognizing what an amazing talent she was.  Wow.  Just wow.  All I can say, is I hope one day when she’s older, she’ll have enough good sense to be embarrassed that she sent me the email that she did.  But who knows?  I didn't even respond to it.

I got hit up at once by several art students looking for work experience credits.  I’m happy to say that there are four colleges in the area that give their students college credits for interning for Stigma Games.  I’m still a little unsure how to deal with that.  If the students isn't at a level that we can use and I’ll be spending a lot of my time holding their hand, is it worth it?  Maybe not in the short run.  But maybe so in the long run.  Today’s young artist might be tomorrow’s star.  We’ll see.

Late May Post

Hey guys.  It’s been a little while since my last post.  That’s mostly because I've been really busy.  I could probably pick one of ten things going on and fill this post with just that.  This will probably be the last non Dawnshine related blog that I link to the Dawnshine Facebook page.  Those of you that are FB fans of Dawnshine but not Stigma Games and you still want to read these, Like SG too.

The programmers on our team are good, but generally programmers I encounter come in two kinds: experienced enterprise programmers who how to code really well, but have never made a game before and young programmers who've either come out of academia or are self taught on something very specialized and lack that overall level of experience.  I can hand over the designs to one of our games to a programmer of either type, but unless I tell them what tools, languages, engines, libraries, etc, to use, they don’t know how to proceed.  Well, if they’re the programmer, they should figure that stuff out, right?  Not really.  It’s a lot more complicated than you might think.  To explain how, let me give you an insight into what programmers are like.

Programmers aren't always interested in creating things that are marketable.  They’re interested in challenging themselves to create something that solves a problem.  Sometimes that problem has already been solved and they have no idea.  Sometimes that problem is so specialized, it doesn't really need to be solved.  And sometimes that solution is amazing, but hard to turn into something practical.  But because of this, there are dozens of new programming languages, engines, sockets, server protocols, operating systems, and libraries created by programmers every day.  Some of them catch on, but most don’t.  Knowing which of these should be used, in which situation, and in conjunction with what, is really tough.

Now consider that new programmers I bring in are generally expecting an organized environment where they can learn what to do.  Generally what I would do if we were fully funded is hire an experienced lead programmer to give them tasks to do and train them.  Well, considering that we’re all working from home without a studio, we can’t really do that.  This falls to me to make these types of decisions, point a programmer in the right direction (what I think is the right direction) and either they follow it or they wonder why no one is holding their hand and they sort of fade away.

In either case, I’m trying to learn this stuff.  I've probably mentioned the Hacker Lab before.  I used to only go there for game related topics, but I've found it really useful to hit up the general coding topics.  Even if it’s not directly game related, it’s really helpful in understanding the difference between using XML to dynamically query an SQL and using JSON, knowing when the canvas tool is too slow and you have to use WebGL, how effective is a NodeJS set up server?  I still have a lot to learn.  In the meantime, Unity is free.  That’s what we’re using for most our games until we find something we like better.  A few miles from my house, KlickNation, now owned by EA Games, is using Unity for their mobile games.  If it’s good enough for EA… hmm.

I've been considering the Leadwerks engine.  I’ve been keeping my eye on it for about a year now.  I find it compelling for a couple reasons.  One, you can use C++ and Lua directly with it—two languages I’m comfortable with.  And two, and more importantly, the Leadwerks development company is located in Sacramento.  I've hung out with the president of the company recently and talked to him about it.  He’s offered us an amazing discount.  I've also talked to our programmers about it, and they’re interested in trying it out.  The problem is that C++ might be the industry standard, but usually programmers would rather use Java / C# than C++.  The main reason why is garbage collection, although inheritance issues are also easier in Java / C#.

Ok, so what is garbage collection?  In object oriented programming, you create classes that are a list of fields of what an object might have.  If the class is “dog,” maybe you have the breed, the weight, the age of the dog, the name of the dog, the name of the current owners, etc.  Then you instantiate a dog, aka, you say, “Ok, so I’m going to use this class and create a dog named ‘Lucky,’ who will be ___ breed, weigh ____ much…” and so on.  There, you just created an object.  A …um, dog object.  Objects can be less interesting than that, like the annoying pop up window or even more basic--the size and position of the pop up window can be a separate “object.”  Now let’s say the program allocated memory to this object so it could be used, but now you’re now done with it.  You want to de-allocate that memory so that something else can use it.  Cool.  In C++, as part of the class you defined, you have to lay out how the object no longer in use will be destroyed.  If you don’t program things correctly to destruct the object at the correct time, you could get a memory leak until finally the Blue Screen of Death.

Now you might be thinking… “Hmm, I haven’t gotten a BSoD in a really long time.”  Part of the reason for that is Java / C# does garbage collection automatically and Java and C# are what a lot of Windows programs are written in these days.  In Java / C#, if an object no longer has anything able to access it, then it will be destructed automatically so that it will never cause a memory leak.  For a programmer to never have to worry about destructing objects again, it’s a pretty cool thing.  But as with anything, there has to be a downside, and that is that a language that runs garbage collection runs slower.  Unity uses C#, meaning that ultimately, it will usually run slower than a pure C++ built game.  How complicated does the game have to be before the player will notice the performance hit?  That’s one of those things, you program games long enough, and you know the answer to questions like that.  We’re a young team and we have years of mistakes to learn from.

 Let’s do some Sacramento news.  A couple weeks ago, Sacramento got an official IGDA chapter.  Gabriel Guittierrez (luckily I have his business card right in front of me or I never would have spelled his last name correctly) of Nascent Games is the Chapter President.  I met Gabriel about a year ago.  He seems like a really nice guy.  I've been helping him out with creating content for the IGDA website.  Stuff like, if you live in Sacramento, want to get involved in making games but have no idea where to go, what you need to know, and who to talk to?  Having one site that’s specific to Sacramento and answers stuff like that can be really helpful.  There are a lot of talented people here, but they have no idea how to get started.  Oh, anyone reading this that doesn't already know me, feel free to email me and ask me some of those questions.  My email is brian at stigma games.  I’ll try and help if I can.  I will say I get an email from a new person about every day or two, so it can sometimes take me a couple days to respond.  But if I can help aspiring game developers in the area get started on the right path, feel free to ask me stuff.

We’re still working on Dawnshine.  I’m working on an ability, class progression system (I know, “What?! You’re just now doing that?”) down to the last detail, and a naming convention for the Neg Wath people based on their tribal affiliation, moiety kinship, spirit animal, and gender.  I’ve also been separating phones that make up the Neg Wath language.  I’m not going to create a fictional language for them, but if I can isolate consistent sounds for the Neg Wath, their names for things will all sound Neg Wath-y.  There are hundreds of sounds possible for humans to make, far more than our adorable little 26 letter alphabet might have you believe.  Every little thing you can do to make a sound, there’s a technical term for.  I had to take a year worth of linguistics as part of my Anthro degree, though I never thought I’d ever need to know the difference between a voiced alveolar fricative and a non voiced one (one’s a “z” and the other an “s”).  But this is actually really helpful.  When it’s all done, players will at least subconsciously know it’s done right.

That would be cool that you pick those things with your character and hit the Random Name Generator and it gives you something that fits with lore.

As a side note, a younger, more naive me once went to the career pavilion at GDC, trying to explain to the interns posing as hiring managers why they should hire an Anthropologist to create their game lore.  That worked out as well for me as it sounds.

As for our other game projects, I’m hoping we’ll be able to announce something soon.  One of our games has been playable on a phone for months now.  Stay tuned.

April Post

I think in my last post I was kind of down on mobile games.  After watching gameplay footage of hundreds of mobile games on youtube, I've started to change my mind on that—not because the games I've seen so far have just been so gosh darn great, though some are, but because I can see a strong sense of what’s missing from them.

I started thinking about when I was around 12 years old and a friend gave me a copy of Ultima 3, my first RGP and how much I really liked the whole ultima series and the effect its story line had on me.  The values of honesty, justice, humility, spirituality, sacrifice, compassion, honor, and valor woven into the lore of the game really had an impact on me.   To this day, I still think of Richard Garriott and what can be done with games.  Much in the same way that Cliff Burton of Metallica inspired me to learn the bass and become a musician when I was a teenager during the 80’s, Richard Garriott inspired me to want to be a game designer… um, 25 years later.

Combine that idea with more recent games like Limbo with a striking art style to it, and I've really had a change of attitude towards mobile games.  Especially if the motivation is in how to move people with art, a compelling story, interesting characters, or an immersive environment.  Of course, the game industry is a business, and at the end of the day, we’re making mobile games to bring in revenue so we can focus on Dawnshine, but there’s no reason why our mobile games can’t also be something we can be proud of.

Let’s see.  There’s a lot else going on.  I have a revised statement of internship for the art department at CSUS.  I’m sure I've mentioned that before.  I got my BA from Sac State, but I've had the hardest time recruiting from there.  At least I’ll set up a program to recruit their artist interns.  I’m hoping this will lead to being able to set up something similar with the Computer Science department.  The phone conversation I had with their contact person there didn't go all that well.  In fact, she’s now the only counselor / instructor person that I've ever talked to that didn't actively pursue a relationship with Stigma Games.  Maybe I just caught her on a bad day.  But I’m hoping that if the art internship program goes well that Computer Science and Engineering Department will follow.  I've been having a tough time finding experienced programmers lately.  Though, ironically, most of our programmers that we've since lost have been Sac State students that are really busy with school.  So, yeah.

I was contacted by someone that writes articles for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office.  He interviewed me and a few members of the team over the phone about the relationship Stigma Games has with American River Community College.  I think things went well until he emailed me for a picture.  I have very, very few pictures of myself—none of which are professional other than band photos—one of which was featured in a national magazine.  It’s not likely a picture of me in a midair jump while playing bass and sporting a blue spiked mohawk would have been what he was looking for.  Speaking of that, I have a mohawk now and it’s growing out and looks really awkward.  Side tracked.  Anyways, I sent him two pictures.  Neither of which were good.  I need to get a professional looking picture done of me wearing business attire, if nothing else but for future reference.

Speaking of ARC, I got invited to a board advisory meeting to give my feedback on the curriculum of certificates and degrees offered in the Art New Media department.  I mention this because it was something I mentioned in one of the very few posts I made—that one day I might actually help shape what local art colleges teach.  I believe I thought the idea was insane at the time, though I was pretty comfortable when it actually happened.  I had some comments, though for the most part, I think Matt Stoehr had things dialed in how they should be and there wasn't much for me to really pick at.  But I still really enjoyed sitting down and being a part of things.  I wish I would have done some research first so I would have had a better idea of what the catalogs said beforehand.  Oh well, something to be ready for next year.

Have I mentioned that I’m a perfectionist?  Usually when someone calls themselves that, it’s a veiled brag.  But it isn’t in my case.  My problem is that I don’t like to do anything unless it’s perfect, and since nothing I ever do is perfect, it means I struggle to finish things and my fear of failing means I rarely try new things.  Failure is such a vital part of progress.  This whole process has pushed me to fail at things and work outside my comfort zone.  In fact, I would say that failure isn’t something to be feared, but something to strive for, learn from, and move past.  It’s taken me years to learn that lesson, though I still have a ways to go.

At the last art meeting, the team made a push to get me to print out the Dawnshine novel I've been working on.  I haven’t worked on it in almost three years and it’s currently a half-finished rough draft.  Amazingly, I don’t hate it.  And I usually dislike every bit of writing I do, even the writing some company has paid me for.  So I started looking through it.  It hasn't been revised yet, though I will revise some of it before I print out the half of it that’s done.  Going through it, and with so much time since I last looked at it, I've noticed a strong lack of visual details.  I was planning on working on details after the rough draft was finished.  But as it stands, I don’t really think it will help the art team visualize things, but I could be wrong.  Maybe it’s helpful for them to read.

There are some things I know I’ll need to change—things that were changed as I laid out the zones.  For example, Elaeria can see Old Kayne as she walks from the Great Kaynish Senate to Droyman Square.  I've since moved Old Kayne, so that will need to be changed.  The Neg Wath and Sherites have become far more important in the world.  I didn't originally see the Neg Wath as a playable faction or important in the world.  Now they’re a huge part of it.  Aside from that, I’m pretty happy with the novel, though I think it’s going to really throw off fantasy readers that are used to reading about events and magic.  All of the fantasy elements, though they’re present, take a far backseat.  The Dawncaster could easily be a contemporary story about a teenage girl surviving in and escaping an abusive home—certainly not anything like what most fantasy readers are used to.  Dawnshine is a really grim, brutal, and depressing place.

March Post

Hey Guys,

I think I mentioned that I might work as a Project Manager for another game company that’s forming in Roseville.  We started our first project and I decided that I didn't want to continue working with them.  It’s probably best if I don’t get into the details.  Not because they’re bad people.  Let’s just say we had a very different idea on how games should be made.

I was thinking about this as I wrote a midterm paper for the Human Resource Management class I’m taking right now.  The topic we were given was about the challenges of managing a multigenerational workforce.  Sounds boring, right?  I actually thought it was really interesting.  What was going on in the world shaped the mentality of the generation growing up at the time.   I won’t go through each of the four generations in the workforce today.  But according to my research, Generation X'ers, like me, are radically different from the Baby Boomers before us and the Millennials after us.

The biggest traits of people of my generation in terms of business and workplace issues: we’re incredibly skeptical of strangers offering us deals, we hate being micro managed, we don’t work well being told what to do by people that have no idea what they’re talking about, and we don’t need or want structure.  Basically, we want to be given a job and left the hell alone so we can get it done the way we know how to get it done.  Now, we’ll listen to others and follow directions, but only if it’s from a boss that we consider to be a guru or equal on the subject at hand.  But you have to earn our respect first before you can boss us around.  Man, that fits me so well.  That’s exactly how I am.

I've mentioned before that I used to be a musician.  I also used to write for a popular music magazine that focused on metal bands.  I was one of about a dozen journalists when new owners took over.  Every single writer was fired except me.  They also never once told me what to do.  They let me cover my own stories—as many or as little as I wanted.  But I covered a lot, out producing everyone else on the team.  As a concert promoter in the underground metal scene, I knew who all the underground bands were.  I knew who was up and coming, who was getting signed, and who people wanted to hear about.  I really liked working for that company.  Then one day, we had a new editor.

I didn't have a college degree at that time, nor did I want to relocate to their corporate office in the bay area.  So when the editor position opened up, they decided to go with a local, recent Journalism graduate.  He was young and knew nothing about the underground music scene.  It didn't take long for him to piss me off.  I think the second email I got from him, he was telling me what to do.  He told me to interview a band.  I won’t say the name of the band, so I’ll just call them “band.”

Anyways, I knew Band.  I’d done a show with them back when I was playing in my band Stigma.  In short, they sucked.  I wrote the editor back and told him no.  I’m sorry, but I had a long waiting list of good bands that no one had heard of yet that I was trying to get to.  The last thing I was going to do is waste my time interviewing a terrible band that no one wanted to hear about and putting them on the top story that week and making the 9 million users a month that our site got think, “Huh?  They’re doing articles on these crappy bands now?  Why don’t you cover someone good?”  I don’t want to sound like an elitist, but my reputation is important to me.  If I covered a band, it was because they were damn good and people should take a listen.

So the editor writes me back telling me that Band asked him to be covered, that 98 Rock was trying to break them, and that he, the editor, already told Band that I’d be contacting them soon to interview them.  I was really, really mad.  Really mad.

Now, some info here.  98 Rock, aka KRXQ is a pretty important radio station.  You might not think Sacramento is famous for anything other than Def Tones, Tom Hanks, and… ok, nothing else.  But believe it or not, 98 Rock often breaks new bands long before any other radio station plays them.  In fact, radio stations around the country often listen to 98 Rock in an effort to guess which rock / metal bands are up and coming bands.  If 98 Rock was really trying to break Band, then that’s pretty impressive.

So I got ahold of this dj at 98 Rock I’m good friends with.  I doubt he’d care (and this was about 10 years ago), but I probably shouldn't mention his name either.  So I asked my dj friend wtf was up.  He rolled his eyes and sighed.  I could tell he was pretty mad about what he was going to tell me.  Apparently, the bass player of Band was the 6^th caller and won some “98 Rock Christmas Wish List” contest.  The rules were anything the station could reasonable do for the contest winner, they would do.  So the bass player’s wish was to get his band played on the radio.  My dj friend told the station manager basically that he knew this band and he absolutely refused to play them.  They got in a big fight over it, but the dj caved-- agreeing to play Band one time at 4am on a Wednesday morning, and that was that.

The next day after hearing this, the bass player was emailing me asking me when I was going to interview them.  So I went to one of their shows where they pulled about 6 people( I think 5 of which were wives / girlfriends) and interviewed them.  I wrote up the interview and story I did about them (all positive), emailed it to the editor and quit the next day.  Four years at a job I really liked, but yeah, I wasn't going to put up with that crap.

I know.  I’m such a rebel, huh?  But I was thinking about this.  Am I making the mistake of treating the Dawnshine team like I want to be treated and not like how they want to be treated?  According to my research, Millennials want to be told what to do.  They don’t want to be micromanaged or talked down to, but they do want direction from their boss.  So by leaving them alone and giving them freedom to run with things, I might actually be frustrating them.  Hmm, that’s something to think about.

I always have a ton of work to do each week.  But I’m going to try and do more design work for Dawnshine if I can.  I’ll see if this helps the Millennials on the team do their thing.  Aside from that, there’s a lot else going on.  I recently met with one of the main art professors from the California State University of Sacramento about setting up an internship.  CSUS isn't known for their art program, but no doubt there’s some great artists there that couldn't afford to go away for school.  I know how that goes.  CSUS (we call it Sac State) does have a really good Computer Science program, so setting something up officially with art students could help open up the door with the CS students.  I still find it funny that Sac State is where I graduated from and I’m just now starting to recruit there after hitting up everywhere else first.  I've just had trouble making contacts there.  Recruiting at Trade Schools that hire career counselors is a lot easier.

Speaking of Trade Schools, I got invited to go to the Art Institute for one of their job fairs and man a Stigma Games booth.  I've done that before over a year ago when I first started this.  So this isn't huge news.  But at least this time I’ll actually be prepared.

I think I mentioned last post that we started making mobile games.  We currently have four games in production.  I don’t want to talk about them just yet, but believe me, we’ll be talking about them a lot soon.  At yesterday’s art meeting, I passed around a design document for one of the games, and I noticed just about everyone that read it laughed.  Mobile games might not be my favorite platform, but we’re still going to be making pretty awesome games.  We’re not going for quick bucks here.

Aside from that, I started looking for marketing people.  We've been talking about a complete over haul of the website, and in general, splitting www.dawnshine.com / www.dawnshineonline.com and www.stigmagames.com into two different sites.  Right now, they both point to the same shell account.  The one marketing person we have came up with a new logo for us.  I just wanted her to tweak the one I made and turn it into a simple 2d animation that we could play before our videos, rather than completely overhaul what I did.  But I’m glad she did her own thing, because I like what she came up with better.  She’s of the same generation as I am, so I guess that means I need to present her with a lot of information, tell her the problem, and then give her all the freedom she needs to fix it.  I like that.  And I like what she’s doing, even if I don’t get it at first.  That’s fine.  I don’t have to get or understand everything people on the team are doing.  Just like I've decided to take myself out of the loop for figuring out clothing styles of Dawnshine factions.  Anytime my vote is taken out of fashion related decisions, it’s probably a good thing.  I will say that I’m really happy with the job the artists are doing though.  We might be some unfunded indie no one’s heard of, but the artists can do AAA work.

This week, I have a bunch of marketing and PR work to do.  I need to finish some designs and recruit a couple more programmers.  A very, very busy week.  But that’s how I like it.

February Post

Hey everyone,

I've been incredibly busy lately.  I had about a dozen meetings last week, and at least one meeting each day this week.  I’m starting to book into next week.  Because I meet so many people now and our attrition rate is so high, I've started going into meetings with the idea that I’ll try and scare people away from wanting to join the team.  So far, I still have yet to meet anyone that decided not to join.  So it doesn't seem to be working.  But at least I’m giving people a more grim idea of the game industry in general and the amount of work, working on a game requires.

Our attrition rate has started to come down a little.  That’s partly because we now have some people that have been around for a long while and now there’s at least a core group I can count on.  That makes things a lot easier.  But it’s also because I've been giving artists art tests.

Productivity among the programmers has increased since moving to my father’s office.  It’s inspired me to think even harder about getting us funding so we can all work on Dawnshine full time in an office.  But our funding options are bleak.  Without having any games out, it’s impossible for an investor or publishing company to be able to assess us.  So that’s looking pretty unlikely for now.  So I was thinking about alternatives for self-funding.

There’s still Kickstarter, of course.  That might help a little and I might still do that.  But another possibility is for us to make mobile games.  I've talked to the team about it, and they’re on board to give it a try.  We have the talent to make it happen, and it can be quite profitable.  I asked a guy I know about it.  He makes mobile games with his grandson.  I asked him how much he makes on his best selling game.  He told me $1,000 bucks a day.  I thought that it must be a new game that just came out, and that money will taper off.  But no, he said that’s a 4 year old game and it’s still making that kind of money.  He said they have a few others than make a few hundred dollars a day.  Um, wow.  Not to be mean, but I've seen the guy’s games that he’s shown off at game events here in Sacramento.  And they’re simple games with very basic art.  Really nothing special.

I’m thinking that $1,000 dollars a day could pay for a small studio in an industrial office area and hire 10 people at $15 dollars an hour(not spectacular wages, but it’s a start) and still have a little bit of money left over each week.  Why aren't we doing that now?  I took a look at the top grossing games on the iStore.  They’re stupid, most of them.  Many of them wouldn't take a few people from the team more than a week.

I have a feeling though, it’s not as easy as it looks.  If you make the best game in the world and no one knows about it because they’re too busy playing the pimple popping game, then you won’t make a dime.  And although the mobile market is growing and will continue to do so over the next several years, I notice that just about all the big game companies are hiring mobile developers.  That means the market is going to be completely dominated by big budget, well produced (and free) games that the indie developer will have a harder and harder time competing against.

If that’s true and we want to put out some games to make some money, we need to do it now while the market is still fairly indie friendly.  We’ll see how that goes.  From my research recently, the best money comes from making free games with ads in it.  Also, from what little I could find online about it, if you’re an unknown developer, you’ll get very little money per ad click, which is bad because you’ll also be getting far less people clicking.  So if you get 200 players per day, only 5% of which click on the ad, and each click only pays $0.10 cent per click, that’s a buck a day.  Pretty grim.  From what I've heard, this is the fate of most developers.  Or, 80% of games will make less than $3,000 dollars over its lifetime.  That’s the only statistic I could find, and it’s a grim one.  Well, it’s not too bad if it’s one guy living in the boonies making one game a month.  But bad for us trying to support a few dozen people.

Another possibility.  We could make a really good game and put no ads in it other than ads for our other games which we’ll release right after.  That would get our name out there and get us some revenue eventually.  Something to think about, at least.

I've been thinking about target demographics.  There’s the mom at the bank with a screaming kid, so she pulls out her iPhone to give to the kid to give them some game to play to keep them quiet.  Making games that would appeal to little kids… hmm.  Then people at school who want to play multiplayer games with their friends during lunch.  That’s actually a really cool idea.  Think about how annoying LAN parties are.  You have to haul your desktop over to your friend’s house.  Much easier to just pull out your phone, and you don’t even have to plan that in advance because you’re likely to have your phone with you anyways.

These aren't the type of games that get me excited.  I mean, I don’t even have any games on my phone.  But if this means I could be able to pay people, yeah, I’ll make Hello Kitty / Pokemon style whatever games.  Ok, I don’t really know what a Pokemon is.  Step one, look up what a Pokemon is.  Step two ???  Step three, profit.  This is the start of my business plan.  I think I need help.

Starting 2013

So, so very much to talk about.  First off, I’ve mentioned in the last post about two investors putting together a game studio in Roseville.  I've since been in the physical studio still in construction.  It's not even sheet rocked yet and probably won't be ready until March.  But they've decided to get some game projects going now, so starting next week, myself and two people I’ve picked from the Dawnshine team will start prototyping out our first game.  If that works out, it means bigger and better things, including the possibility of me hiring more artists and programmers from Dawnshine to work professionally for a funded studio.  I've worked for game studios professionally before, but always as a telecommuter.  I hate telecommuting.  I like talking to people face to face and seeing what people are doing when ever I need to.  So this will be a new experience for me, one I'm excited about.

As for Dawnshine, I’m very glad that I reached out to Professor Matthew Stoehr, chair of the Art New Media Department of the second largest college in Sacramento--American River College.  He's been sending me his students.  I’ve been really impressed with the quality of work they're doing.  I actually went to ARC myself starting in the 1990s back when I was determined to major in every single subject ever created before I finally settled transferring to CSUS in 2005 to get my degree in Psychology and graduated 4 years later with my Anthropology BA(and now I’m back at ARC getting a Business AA degree).  But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever met an instructor that was as passionate about improving the skills of his students as Matt is.  He’s a hard teacher though from what I’ve heard.  He expects a lot from his students.

In addition to sending his current and former students our way to work on the Dawnshine project, he’s been helping out with some behind the scenes stuff.  There are a lot of technical art issues we’ve needed some help with.  Just knowing that I can turn to Matt for help on those issues is a relief.  Plus having an artist of Matt's caliber associated with this project really gives us some credibility.  It's really tough saying to people, "Hey, I'm just some random guy with a dream and no money.  Please take me seriously."  People like that are a dime a dozen.  And although I know Dawnshine is a stand out project, it's hard overtly showing that to others.

I get about 1-3 emails a day from people interested in joining the project.  That sounds awesome, though most of the emails I get are basically, "I don't know anything about programming, but I play a lot of games.  When can I start?"  And that's great.  I love it that people are excited enough just from seeing what little is on our website about it enough to write me.  But trying to attract people of a high enough skill level to be useful on this project is pretty tough.  All of the people on the team right now are talented enough to be working at a game studio professionally.  And even though we don't have funding, we still need skilled people to make the type of game that will attract investors.

Aside from that, the art team has been working on concepts.  I know, here we are a year later, and we still haven’t modeled very much.  But the more time we spend on concepts, the better looking the game will be.  I’m really happy about the direction the artists are taking now.  I feel like we’re a lot more organized than we’ve ever been.  Despite having a smaller team, we’re getting far more work done than before.  It makes me think I should have started out small from the beginning and added people slowly instead of trying to start off with a big team.  Starting out with a big team just made things really chaotic and disorganized.  The first artist I recruited told me that if I didn't recruit a big team right off the bat, she'd quit.  So I did, and she quit right after anyways.  Lesson learned.  People that are hard to work with and demanding don't want to be there in the first place.

Our Programmer team has been pretty stable as well.  In fact, we haven’t parted with a programmer since August, though we have added some, making it as large as the art team.  My father owns a small drafting company and he’s going to let the programming team hold our meetings there.  That’ll be pretty cool to be coding side by side with the rest of the team instead of meeting at a pizza place and just talking about the coding we've been doing.  The downside is that it’s in Roseville, which is even further away for the Elk Grove, Vacaville people.  But we might carpool.

I formed a third team consisting of a 2d artist, a programmer, and our audio guy.  We started jokingly calling it the A Team.  Their task is to come up with spell effects.  The HeroEngine already has a cool FX system in place, though there’s a few ways we want to adapt it to the Dawnshine Project specifically, hence why the programmer on that team.  We had our first meeting as a team at my dad’s office.

As for future teams, I’ve split off a Level Design team from the main art team.  It’s still a little shaky.  We need more artists and level designers, then it should be ok eventually.

I’m also looking to put together a management and business development team.  I need help with organizing tasks, so an Assistant Producer would be useful.  That would give me more time to focus on recruiting and writing design documentation.  If I recruited a recruiter, that would save me even more time, though they’d have to be really good to replace me.  Finally, I’d like to recruit a grant writer.  Believe it or not, but the game industry is one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the US.  First off, it’s considered IT.  And anything relating to technology, the US wants to keep in the US.  Since tech jobs tend to pay a lot higher, that means more tax revenue.  Considering that the Canadian government pays American game companies big money to relocate to Canada, the US wants to do what it can to keep those jobs state side.

The other reason is that game development can cover so many other mediums: tech, education, music, art, research and development, the internet, commerce, and a few I’m probably forgetting, a single game dev company can qualify for multiple, otherwise unrelated, government grants and tax subsidies.  Now, I’m not the least bit a fan of taking government money.  However, I’m a pretty big fan of being able to actually start paying my peeps.  The idea of walking through the middle of an office full of happy artists and programmers plugging away at one of our game projects, that’s probably the most awesome thing I could imagine.

So this is Christmas

Merry Christmas everyone,

So this Christmas break is the longest time off I've had since the Dawnshine project began.  More specifically, it’s the longest break between meetings.  We’re not going to start meeting again until January 2013.  It gives me a chance to reorganize.  Two things here.  One, I’ve been meeting with investors lately.  And two, I've recently completed a semester of management classes.

The investors I've been talking to, I haven’t talked to them much about Dawnshine.  Why?  Because it would be a waste of time to do so at this point, this early in.  But what has been helpful is to learn the investment side of things by talking to angels, going to VC seminars, and reading as many articles on the subject as I can.  You can set up your interests through LinkedIn and read a new article or two on funding a day.

I have a completely different game project that I think would be hugely successful and highly disruptive, and I’ve now had two completely different investors tell me they’d be interested in it, but I need to set up some infrastructure and solve some technical issues for it.  But that’s something I’d also like to get started.  I just haven’t had time.

Taking management classes has been helping as well.  Want to hear something pretty embarrassing?  Not long after I graduated Sac State with a BA in Anthropology, I applied for a large tech company looking for a Culture Change Instructor.  Well, I had just gotten my Anthro degree with a Culture shift and I have over a decade professional experience as an instructor, so I applied.  Yeah, um, now that I actually understand what “culture change” means from a business stand point, I feel pretty dumb.  I bet they looked at my application and shook their heads.

A friend of mine graduated with me.  She was telling me about how her Anthro degree should help her get a marketing position because she better knew how to market products to a diverse group of people based on her better understanding of cultural values.  It made sense to me at the time, but yeah, I understand a little better how completely wrong that is.  People into marketing only spend a part of their time trying to sell stuff.  They spend the majority of their time analyzing trends, mapping out strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to individual businesses, and trying to predict changes in entire markets.  Anthropologists can't do 1/10th of what a marketer can do in the business world.

Speaking of business, I might be landing another opportunity.  I've been talking to an up and coming game company.  If I were to get involved with them, it would not deter my time spent on Stigma Games.  In fact, I think working for another game company could actually make things better.  I haven’t signed anything, so of course, it may or may not happen.  But in light of these events and some reflection, I've decided to fundamentally alter the course for Stigma Games.

Right now we’re a group of people working on a game for the fun of it, with the hope that it could one day turn into something.  Most of the people on the team are just here for experience to help them get a job elsewhere.  And that’s fine too.

While this approach has been fine in the past, I will instead start treating Stigma Games as a serious company currently bootstrapping, but moving towards a strong proof of concept with Dawnshine that would allow us to start attracting investors.  I say this due to the fact that there are people currently on the team taking Dawnshine seriously, investors taking us seriously, and other professionals from tech companies in the area that I meet a mixers and things taking us seriously.

On the other hand, there are people on our team that see this as a fun project to drop in and out of when they have time.  And I’ve thought in the past that if I start taking this too seriously, those people might quit.  Considering how extremely hard this project is to manage with people coming and going and maybe doing 10 hours worth of work this week or 3 months from now, I need to start taking a more hard line approach.  I’ve been afraid of getting the “You know you’re not paying me, right?” line if I try and push production too much and we might start losing people.  But more importantly, if I don’t start pushing the team, we’re going to start losing the top performers that get frustrated that the project isn't serious enough.

I’ll list another example.  There is a concept of a hut.  It’s an unusual concept, and one I think will be really awesome once it’s modeled.  I believe it was created back in March or April.  I first passed it off to a modeler who never finished it and faded away from the team.  I assume she’s no longer part of the team because she doesn't contact me any more.  So I passed it off to someone else, who also disappeared.  Finally, we recruited another person who wanted something simple to work on.  I passed it to him and never heard from him again.  Will the fourth person I pass it to do it in a week or will this simple hut take years before someone finally does it?

Now, if I wanted to recruit a level designer to design the capitol city for the Neg Wath and I had a whole list of assets needed first and some of them could be completed next week and others years from now(who knows?), I have no idea what to tell the level designer when he’d be able to start.  It sucks to say this, but I’m going to have to remove people from the team who are given tasks and either don’t do them by next week or don’t keep me in the loop on their progress.  Managing this project is an impossible task if I can’t rely on people to do what they tell me they’re going to do or keep me informed when they have problems.

I don’t think people on the team are flaky or bad people.  Mostly, I don’t think I've done a very good job at explaining to the team the importance of being organized or how tight our pipeline is as we start creating different specialized teams that need A done before they can start on B.  This is especially hard if A and B are done by different teams.  Why rush to finish something that’s needed by someone you haven’t even met or are aware of?

I have photographers taking pictures of things we need for the modelers to do their thing.  They've never worked on a game project.  They don’t come to the art meeting.  They don’t understand that when I need something by next week before a modeler can finish their asset, emailing me 3 months later asking if I still need it done, isn't going to fly.

But again, I don’t blame the members of my team.  I blame myself for not better communicating how interconnected everyone’s work is, even to other members of the project that they haven’t even met because they go to different production meetings.

2013 is a new year.  Hopefully each year gets better for us.  We’ll see how it goes.