2009 was a real roller coaster but we’re still strapped in.

tl;dr: I know this is over 2K words so if you just want to get an update on what’s going on right now and what we’re planning, skip to the 2010 heading at the end of the post.

Most individual years of my life have been pretty homogenous. Save an errant semester, my entire life up until a couple years ago has been calculated in years; Freshman Year of High School; Senior Year of College. While there are definitely a lot of up and downs within those years, nothing has been so completely sporadic as my 2009.

But like any year, it boils down to a handful of very important moments. Not all of them were instrumental, but in some way each defined a project or a period of time. I think this year was particularly unique because it was my first real year of being completely on my own. Kongregate was no longer funding Dinowaurs [although that stopped well before 2009 started] and everything was pretty much up to us. What game we were going to make and how that was going to pay the rent every month. We’re still learning, but we’re much better off now than we were and it’s thanks to this roller coaster we rode and the lessons it taught us.

Effing Hail

The year started off like 2008. Dinowaurs. To our surprise we were still working on it. What seemed like endless bug fixing and gameplay balance was still going on and would be until February when we would go gold. We were all more than burnt out and looking for a way out. So in late December I chatted up Jiggmin for a side project to skirt some of the monotony.
Jiggmin

do ya have any neat-o game ideas that you’ve been wanting to give a try?
I’d love to hear ‘em

Me

yea i do actually
i’ve been looking for a coder to collab with
and brainstorming
typing game
grid based film noir taxi game
your character is in the back seat and you’re typing out “go left!”
and stuff like that
to order the taxi driver
because you’re following some getaway car
so it’s on a big, simple grid
so the typing isn’t linear, you make choices based on if you type “hey dude! go left!”
a set of canned responses and all that
kind of like moves
this making any sense?

Jiggmin

type: use go go gadget wheels!
hehe

Me

haha totally
but the dialog would kind of create teh mood

Jiggmin

what happens when you catch the car?
explosion?

Me

haha
next level
or something simple
so there’s that
Taxi Typer
or whatever

So that was the start of The Great Red Herring Chase. Eventually we would make Effing Hail and three other games that we have yet to release, and probably never will.

The collaboration with Jacob was enormously important to how I would approach game development in the future. Without that experience of not only creating a hit like Effing Hail but also proving itself as a possible business model, I might not be here at all. That’s probably a little drastic, but I can’t imagine a life where that didn’t happen. Jacob came up with the Effing Hail idea [name and all] about midway through development on TGRHC and it immediately stuck. I got to work right away on it and we had something up and running in no time. We knew it was fun but we didn’t know it would be as successful as it was; on FGL and in the press. To this day, Effing Hail is far and away our most popular game and it accounts for about 75% of traffic on the intuition site.

After the whole deal was settled it sent a shockwave through the office. Everyone saw what happened with Effing Hail and got excited. The trouble was we were still in the throws of releasing Dinowaurs and it was as painful as ever. It didn’t necessarily help the situation that I was having more success in my side projects than we were seeing as a team.

Dinowaurs After-Party

I’m not positive, but I’m pretty sure we were done with Dinowaurs in early February. There’s probably blog post somewhere floating about… Nonetheless the day was memorable, but not for the release and reception of the game, but what happened afterward. It was about 1AM and we decided to get Jimmy John’s and talk it over. We had finally tied up all the loose ends and now we could breathe a sigh of relief and look ahead to the future. But that’s not how it went at all. We all looked dead; we were tired, and not the sort that comes with accomplishing a huge task. It was more of a defeat and a hopelessness. Morale was at an all-time low.

The kind of atmosphere caused us to ask the tough questions.
Us

Why are we doing this?
Why are we making games?
What’s next?

This was an incredibly important moment for us and for me personally. We were all more or less hopeless and vulnerable so we answered these questions honestly and openly. Not that we wouldn’t have otherwise but this kind of “dire straights” situation made us take these questions as seriously as possible. Here we realized how serious it is to know the answer to these things. What is the dream? If you don’t know that, then you better figure it out or you’ll end up in a nightmare. You can quote that. ;)

It’s really easy to gloss over “Why do I make games?”. It’s uncomfortable to really answer it honestly and I’m convinced few people actually do. It exposes you as an artist and as an individual, but if you never confronted and shared my dream with others, I’m not sure I’d ever have the chance to achieve it. These are the questions that I return to when I feel like we’ve gone off track. It’s not a matter of necessarily keeping eachother on track, but moreso to understand where everyone is headed. Life is complex and ever-changing, so it’s important to check in as often as necessary.

So we sat there eating our subs silently mulling over these questions. We got it all out right there. Everything was on the table and we knew were we stood. For the first time in over a year we could look to the future with excitement. Soon we were talking of a new idea and riffing on building something great again, something brand new! This was the same kind of joy and giddiness that we signed on for in the first place.

GDC & Gray

Just before we headed off to GDC Mike and I brewed up a little prototype for a game that we would later name: Gray. Over the week of GDC we worked on it some, but in addition to Gray, GDC is always a milestone event for us. It marks another year of full-time game development, our dream and meeting new friends and reconnecting with old. Since we live in Iowa we don’t have much chance to hang out with our brethren but when we do it’s like we never missed a beat. Most importantly, probably, I met Colin Northway and Andy Moore there [Fantastic Contraption] which led to a collaboration between myself and Andy to create
Protonaut. We continue to keep in contact and are planning on starting work on a new game shortly.

Beyond that though, we came home fresh from GDC recharged ready to knock out the rest of the work on Gray. To this day, Gray is still the game I am most proud of. I feel like it delivers exactly what we set out to do with it. It’s the only game I’ve worked on where everything has been precisely placed. That’s mostly due to the scope of the game, but it’s also a part of the art direction and our increased comfort with the Flash platform.

The most important part of making Gray was the personal realization that these are the kinds of games I want to focus on. I’ve done a few personal installations, animations and interactive media experiments that were shown in student galleries but I never received much feedback about any of them. I was happy people got a chance to take a look, but it never felt like any of those punches connected. However, with Gray that was certainly a game that connected with a percentage of the audience and that connection was great to see that this is something that could actually work. While I love games as entertainment and will always be interested in making games like that, I decided after Gray that I would pursue more personal game development with all of my side projects.

Indiecade & Liferaft

Strangely enough, while Gray got us into IndieCade, it’s Liferaft that was the real story for us at the time. Mike and I had started work on Liferaft in mid March sporadically and then set our complete focus on it sometime in early May. We’d been going strong on it but the game continued to grow. From what was once a prototype of a grappling circle, we now had an overly-involved storyline with grandiose plans of unique environments, enthralling level design all to be completed by before the IGF deadline. And that was just the first episode!

In early October we headed to Culver City to what would set up the wake-up call of the year. IndieCade was so incredible and so inspirational that it completely bucked us off course on Liferaft, and with good reason. We were in over our heads and had no business thinking we could deliver. Now that we were in the middle of a Kickstarter drive we had responsibilities to our backers and the whole thing became a pressure cooker. Returning from the sunny and friend-filled life of California we came to some realizations about Liferaft and o did I regarding my own life.

There were two lessons here for me. One was the age-old, don’t let a project get too big. It’s a beginner mistake really, but it’s easy to let it get a hold of you and your game. Like so many mistakes in my life I can point to the Ira Glass on Storytelling snippet of advice. Basically, we weren’t ready to pull off the kind of game Mike and I want to make together… ultimately. We need to keep that at the front of our minds when we consider a new, riskier idea.

The second lesson from all this was the workaholic stuff. How not to live my life and what I can do to make sure that doesn’t happen again. This was a huge revelation for me and probably one that was had been waiting in the weeds for well over a year. I linked it earlier but here it is again: Hi I’m Greg Wohlwend and I’m a Workaholic. But like any breakdown, it doesn’t end there. My life got substantially better after realizing what I was doing to myself, but the real-world effects of cutting off Liferaft for the good of our sanity and livelihood soon came knocking.

$34.13 Thanksgiving

I’m not sure if it was 13 cents exactly but what the hell, it’s unlucky enough. I went on Thanksgiving break with that much money in my bank account. I didn’t really know what was going to happen, or where I’d have to go but I just kept working. I was continuing a collaboration with Tyler Glaiel called Tetraform, we were in the midst of a bidding war for EON and we were in talks with a friend for some contract work. Business wasn’t bad, in fact, by all accounts it was bustling.

Bustling or not though… That kind of money and uncertainty made me seriously question if this is going to work. Everyone around me thought it was time to give up and strongly advised I do so. Today, it’s still in question. At that point I realized that the only person that’s really going to believe in me is myself. It’s lonely, sad and probably a good bit destructive but from the outside looking in this is by no means a way to live. My income is well below the poverty line, I don’t have health insurance of any kind and I can’t afford much more than the basics. I have a deep seated urge to live in a big city where there are more people of my ilk, local shops and markets and etc. but I can’t afford to.

I kept hope though. I knew EON would come through and Tetraform would sell soon enough. It worked out, but it left a mark. It reminded me of the huge mistake that was Liferaft. Spending multiple pay-less months on a project that will most likely never see the light of day. It’s a folly I will never forget. For this to work we need to continue with what we know works and take small steps towards big rewards. We know how to make small games that can float us and then some. We’re making more on sponsorships with each game we make and we retain all ownership. More people are coming to us for contracts and collaborations than ever before. Things are looking up. But just one month ago they hit an all-time low in terms of where our business was. Luckily we worked through it and saw the upswing and had faith in it. We’re climbing now and I’m very excited for our future.

2010: A Mikengreg Odyssey

Mike and I are planning a new brand: Mikengreg. We’ve been working on it for over 4 months bit by bit and it’s starting to shape up. We’ll release it when it’s ready and we’re both really proud of it so far. For now, all I can tell you is that we’ll be combining our handmade beer [and possibly bread, pasta and other handmade food] with handmade games. Not sure how just yet, but it’s sure to be tasty!

Other than that, game-wise we’re working on a Gamma IV entry that Mike and I are really excited about as well finishing up EON with a level editor. We’re also kicking around a couple of game ideas that we’ve had for awhile now, one of which is multiplayer. We’re toying with releasing an X-BOX Indie Game and maybe something PC downloadable. Those are our big milestone targets right now. One thing is for certain though, we will continue with the 2-week game cycle to fund our riskier moves. Expect the same kind of little interesting and/or fun games that we’ve been churning out over the last year.

Also, I will be continuing work on Pterogative which I hope to have finished sometime before GDC. I took a break from it and recently found a coder to help me with out. :)

Happy New Year!