It wasn’t long until I found the famous Sloperama post on ideas. But I didn’t believe it, and I don’t think a lot of new developers do either. But it is true. Sort of…

While Tom has good reason to write something like this intended for game dev tenderfoots, I think this nugget of advice can have a decent negative effect on what more experienced developers decide to work on, or even prototype.

So my post is directed towards developers with a few polished games under their belt. To stay with the Boy Scout ranking system, these developers would be First Class or Star. Not necessarily Eagle Scouts [Miyamoto?], but know how to tie a square-knot no problem. They’re comfortable with the execution of the game idea, working on usability, play-testing and have a general understanding of good and bad design. I’m not saying there’s some sort of ceiling on any of these, but I think there’s a point you reach where you feel like you’re “in your cockpit” [Stolen from Mike] when you’re making whatever it is that you’re making.

I think the reason Tom Sloper wrote that article, and so many other veterans follow with the same advice for designers starting out, is due to the fact that many a first timer looking to promote their game solely based on the idea of it is often touting an idea that doesn’t excite people experienced in game development. That’s not all that surprising, though if you’ve made a few games. Or even one.

I’m not excited by my Big Ideas that started me off on this path in the first place. In fact, a friend asked about “my first love” just last night and he seemed disappointed that I wasn’t excited anymore by the idea, like I had lost something along the way. But I’d argue the opposite, I’ve actually gained something and that’s the ability to understand my limits [temporary] as a developer at this point in time and what that means for the games I want to make.

In the beginning I would let ideas run wild with features, story and content. They were sprawling epics of games that would take decades to create with even a medium sized team, but I didn’t care. I was a teenager in love. Now though, an idea of that scope can’t even get me off the couch because it’s too big to understand really quickly. Not that a large idea can’t be great, but it certainly is much harder to test against and I have less experience with that. That’s just me, though.

As I grow as a developer I temper my taste for the game ideas that we come up with and I think more developers should take notice and give ourselves a little more credit as designers. Our latest game, due out in a week or so, is a product of really hashing out ideas based on an abstract concept and trusting our gut for that Eureka moment. I’m not saying it will be typical but the first time we tried doing the brainstorm-room thing, as more experienced developers, it worked. Though it seemed that throughout the process, the important thing was not to settle on good-enough. We had plenty of decent ideas that could have been decent games, but we weren’t excited about those.

For this session we settled on a word or phrase [parallax scrolling] and used it as a starting point to drive the brainstorm. Just about all of our games are centered around one mechanic that seeds teh rest of the game. If we hold true to that mechanic we feel like the mechanic itself will form into something cool and interesting. Anyway, “parallax” went to “speed”, into a discussion about speed and the feeling of going fast and how awesome that is, into talking about propulsion types and eventually into the final solution which was the Eureka moment. It was incredibly obvious to us both simultaneously that we realized it had to be prototyped immediately. I went into my room and created a mockup while Mike made a control-scheme prototype. And we had it.

A lot of my views on ideas now are driven by the experience, and while it may never happen again and I could be totally wrong, I feel like we need to trust ourselves as developers more often and put a little more faith into our ideas, even if they have burned us in the past with those terribly overblown growing-pain game projects that we all embarked on when wide eyed and green. Find a project that excites you in all areas that need exciting! Scope. Style. Gameplay. Innovation? You can have ‘em all, just hold out for the right one and bounce ideas off each other. It’s not like we have a checklist of things that make for a good or bad game project, it’s just what our tastes have become so we don’t need to check them against some sort of rote list or anything, we just kind of know.

I feel like that’s also one really important facet of settling in on an idea [as opposed to rapid prototyping multiple ideas]. Most often, those early game projects that I spent years translating into worthless design documents were solely from my brain, and that’s a problem! Our brains like to give themselves credit when they come up with something “new” so that colors the idea in a favorable light. If you have another brain around that can’t help but give you “big ups” for an idea it didn’t completely have, then you probably know you’re onto something.

Anyway, just wanted to ramble on that for a bit, something I’ve been thinking about while on some downtime. Also, you should know that there are many ways to generate ideas and prototypes. This is just what worked for us last time and we’ll probably try it again for the next game. I’m all for people coming up with personal ideas as a means of expression [I do that also] or shotgun prototypes or picking random ideas off a dartboard. Whatever works!

Play it right now for free!

I felt a great sense of accomplishment making this game on my own, though I know there is an oceans worth of improvement to be had still, it’s a big milestone for me so I thought I’d share the journey with you all in this post.

My whole career as a game developer has been spent on the visual side of things, which can sometimes be frustrating for me. In my formative years as a developer I often struggled with programmers on any number of levels. Getting something as basic as prototyping the first draft of player movement in the game was an extremely laborious task [we were using a game-maker like tool as well!].

Though, I’m not totally oblivious to coding. I code all my own websites [intuition, Mikengreg, this site...] but that’s more script than anything and when it comes to games I rarely touched more than a config file in plain text or XML scripts.

So a few years ago, during the days of Dinowaurs, I ventured out to try and learn a bit about coding games. At first I started using ActionScript 2.0 with the help of a book or two and I made some solid progress, but I never felt like I “got it”. I think I made some particle systems and a few other toys, but no games.

After awhile I bought a few books on ActionScript 3.0 and dove into the terrifying world of Object Oriented Programming [OOP]. It was a completely new way to set things up compared to 2.0 though it felt more organized. Like there was a more strict set of rules that I’d need to follow that might allow me to uncover the underlying structure of this “magical coding stuff” better.

For the next couple years, and up until just recently, I would find a free night or weekend and try certain things out. Most of the time it was a simple project to learn how input works with the keyboard. Other times it was a grandiose plan to overhaul my portfolio or create a “platforming garden” where I would be able to test and tweak platforming characters. These would always fail miserably because I was in way over my head, but they were wholly necessary to the learning process. After I failed or came up against a brick wall I would often stop studying/coding for months at a time. The frustration was immense and I didn’t really have a community to advise me during. That was fine though. I certainly had plenty to do with my other projects and the break was nice since I would get a little obsessive about figuring out a certain problem.

So this sort of on/off parabola continued until about a month or two ago. I was in a programming phase and I took to going back to the early chapters of the Moock book. I realized I didn’t truly understand the core concepts of many different devices in OOP and I needed to get back to basics. It was here that I learned how powerful functions actually can be and what arrays actually do. I continued to read and re-read these same chapters until I completely understood the building blocks of AS3.0 and it was then that I decided I could pull of an actual game.

Using only circles and frictionless physics I was able to make a full game that I’m pretty happy with. It’s not a game that is supposed to say anything in particular nor is it a game that I think is incredibly gripping or fun for me, but I feel like the concept is sound and the execution decent for my first game. There are many things I would like to alter if I had the powers of an expert coder [motion blur] but those simply won’t be happening for this game.

I hope some of you get a kick out of it and I’m considering posting the awful source here since it might be a good opportunity for some more experienced developers to give me some tips on how to better code something and so on. Though that could get overwhelming as the whole thing is a 100% mess; I’m sure. It’s all in one file! o_O

Oh! And post your highest level in the comments if you want. I don’t have high-scores or anything so this’ll have to do.

So I played an awesome game today, it’s called Specter Spelunker Shrinks. But when I got to the site I thought…
me

“Whoa, this is the same dude [NMcCoy] who did Wavespark?! Awesome!

I continued to believe that NMcCoy made this game and my idea of him as a developer was bolstered. I already loved Wavespark. So while that helped out my opinion of NMcCoy, I completely missed the fact that it was done by a different developer, Ken Grafals of Fall Damage Games. It’s quite easy, but the only difference is in the masthead [image at the top of a page]. See for yourself:

Did you catch the difference? ;)

But seriously, this is becoming more of an issue now that we have plenty of free, well designed solutions for putting out what we make. I actually recommend using a theme of some sort if you’re not of the visual persuasion, and even if you are since it’s a great starting place. All of the typography is pretty much going to be nice, clean and legible so you don’t need to fret over that, and the overall user experience is polished on most popular Wordpress [insert your CMS here] themes.

However, this kind of thing happens a lot [i see this theme everywhere], where we all use the same theme and then the confusion starts in. So if you’re dropping in a theme of your own, I would advise one change. It can take as little as one minute if you want. Change the colors! It’s a very simple fix. Head over to the style.css and search for the hex of whatever colors you’re using [use firebug as well]. Do a Find and Replace on the colors, swap them consistently like that, and there you go. You’re a completely different “company” that’s most likely not going to be confused with anyone else. It’s all you need, and it goes a long way.

Now that doesn’t mean picking colors is easy, in fact it can go horribly wrong. But be modest, stick with a strict palette and ask for some honest opinions and after an hour or so you’ll be on your way. In fact, in just one line, I did it with Fall Damage Games. By taking out the background image, and just leaving the background black, the whole site took on its own identity.

Just tweak the CSS a tad, you’ll be glad you did. It’s important.

“Mom. Am I going to die?!”

It’s this sort of mindset that gets me paralyzed in a creative block. I’m staring at sketches, ideas and everything else I can think of but a feeling of deterministic dread drapes every new thought. It’s not the blank-page problem, or at least not usually with me. I’m creating new stuff, exploring new areas but none of it is working. It all sucks. It’s never going to work! AHHHHH!!! In this most recent case it was my work on the Mikengreg identity. After a long hiatus from the badge, I decided I hated it. This is nothing new, I was never 100% happy with it, but now the pressure is on and I was questioning the entire direction because I was no longer in the groove of working on Mikengreg stuff.

While I know the big idea of Mikengreg is “handmade games crafted with love and high-fives” I lost the scent on how that would actually be applied to the identity a long time ago. What does our website look like? What surface are we making these games on? Where’s the system?

That’s how I work, in systems. If I don’t have a system that I can turn to then I’m 100% lost. More on systems in the future. I’ll post about that when I do my big Mikengreg identity process post. Point being, I was lost.

Don’t let it stagnate

So the first contributing factor was that this was looming over my head during a couple of big projects. In my head I am thinking: “Mikengreg isn’t perfect, in fact every time I look at it, it sucks a little more.” With each day that I didn’t work toward making it work I saw more and more mistakes. This may seem like a good thing on the surface, but in reality it added to my crippling creative paralysis. In the same way putting off talking about a serious problem with a significant other only makes the fight worse, putting off facing up to the issues with the logo made it that much harder to address.

Do your best not to cut off projects midway through their development. If you have to split time between them, do at least a little work everyday on one or the other to avoid it stagnating.

Stick with the spark

Of course, the “don’t let it happen” variants are merely precautionary and aren’t too useful when you’re in the throes of a major creative block. On Monday I basically just planned and sketched all day. It wasn’t a bad thing, and certainly could have been worse [stare at a screen all day] but I was convinced that I had got it all wrong in the first place. The original line of thinking was to make a beer/food label/badge/seal logo for us that would communicate our personality. Last time I left off I was planning on hand-painting everything [website etc.] and toying with the idea of doing it in woodcut. I did some website concepts and all of them felt aimless and trite. So I went back to the drawing board and came up with modern stuff, corporate looking stuff, experimental type and etc. Some of it was ok, but it was all just as aimless as the website concepts. It wasn’t until I realized where I’d left off with the woodcuts that I just needed to iterate on that. I was letting my growing distaste for what I’d done tempt me to scrap it all, including the big idea.

That’s really the nugget of all of this. The Big Idea. Don’t lose sight of it. It’s what Mikengreg was founded on; it gets us excited and we believe in it. By investigating other avenues I wasn’t expanding the process, rather I was abandoning the only shred of a system that we had in the first place. It’s healthy to think outside the box but if you’re letting the block itself frustrate and control your creative decisions you may make some serious mistakes. Always keep an eye on the original idea when moving forward. That is your guide and it will never waiver [unless of course it was a bad idea in the first place].

Don’t move horizontally, drill down vertically

Part of the solution to dredging myself out of the block was to stop thinking in terms of iterating horizontally on a design problem. What I mean was that I was looking for solutions in alternate styles of typography, completely new identity systems [see above] rather than constraining the vision and thinking vertically about what wasn’t working with the original concept. I had this aimless website design, a few aimless pieces of art that I was arranging and various typefaces I was switching in and out. One image was hand-painted, the other a sketch, and then the logo badge you see on mikengreg.com. These disparate elements weren’t working and I wasn’t willing to think about why because I was so frustrated.

The real problem was that I had a website that was more graphical than the content it would be displaying. After immersing myself in a healthy amount of top-quality website designs from around the internet, it was clear that I was more concerned with the identity itself than the games we would make and showcase through the identity. The identity is the pasta [handmade and cooked to perfection] and the games are the sauce. Of course I don’t actually want to have the identity overshadow the games; I love our games, and I think they’re fucking awesome. So, I took a step back and reconsidered all my choices and decided that all this hand-painted stuff had to go. Also, the badge needs a good amount of simplification as well some woodcut treatments.

Now I had my system. Woodcuts and wood. It made total sense the whole time. Wooden surfaces chiseled by hand into works of art. All the elements were now in place with the system. Handmade = 1 color woodcut. Games = showcased in full color. Crafted with Love & High-Fives = Mikengreg [the humans]. Now surely there is a lot more to the system, but we’re good now. I’ve got the badge looking much better. Everything in its right place.

Though, none of this would have happened as quickly if I hand’t stuck with it. Fight through the pain as much as you don’t want to. It’s a much stranger problem when facing creative problems, but hopefully some of these things I went through will help you find your way through it.

I tell people this a lot but my Mom gave me a great piece of sinister logic when I was younger trying to learn simple division. I was on the bed cross-legged pounding my fists into the comforter because I couldn’t understand the problem. My mom, being the award-winning teacher she is, waited until I calmed enough to tell me:
Mom

Now Greg, you want to know something? That frustration you’re feeling… Well that’s how you know you’re just about to learn something new!

About 5 minutes later I figured it out and I’ve been doing long-division ever since!

Edmund’s points are all very sound, but like any list, it’s easy to pick apart. But really what came out was a discussion about how each of us as developers approaches things from what sometimes is a vastly different angle. Stephen Lavelle [increpare] mentions how he takes issue with most of the points, and with good reason. Stephen makes games for very different reasons than Edmund. It got me thinking again about something I’ve been thinking about a lot since I was talked to Ben about creativity. We were chatting about his ongoing sideproject: Aztez and we got talking about collaborations and he mentioned how he sees most developers as one of two different types of creative people: Artists or Entertainers. That stuck with me and forced me to take it on and ask myself…
Me

Am I an Artist or an Entertainer?

Now there are a lot of problems with grouping someone in such a broad category. Certainly there is a vast spectrum there between those two values and the words Artist and Entertainer are insufficient especially in lieu of the “games as art” dead horse. Perhaps a better divide would be Artists who want to Express an Idea v. Artists who want to Express Emotion? I dunno…

Labeling things like that will only upset people but if you can get past it and ask yourself “which am I?” I think it provides an interesting insight into the “why” of creative expression. If nothing else, it’s a good starting point. So let me start…

Raymond Arnold

If you don’t care about quality and you don’t care about money or recognition, by what metric do you measure yourself at all?

Rob Fearon

Whilst I obviously can’t answer for Stephen, I can answer this for myself. Getting the idea out of my head and onto the screen is far more important a factor for me than anything else. If it turns out to be an idea with some merit (however one might choose to define that on a personal level), then ace. If it isn’t, at least it’s out of my head.

But crucially, I don’t measure myself on the body of my work and wouldn’t care to either. It doesn’t define me. There are far more important things in life to worry about, y’know?

Rob’s feelings on the question of “why” are pretty close to what I feel about making games. Or anything for that matter. Right now I have an idea for a visual poem I want to do. A comic strip that I want to start. An iPhone game that refuses to find a home. These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them. Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me. Showing it to other people is a nice side effect, it’s always nice to hear someone got something out of something I did, but it’s not the why. The why is much more selfish.

Raymond Arnold

the people who are most successful (both in terms of quality and recognition for that quality) tend to do most of [Edmund's] things.

Stephen Lavelle

Screw quality, screw recognition, screw success.

I understand what Stephen is saying here and I think his heart is in the right place and I definitely feel the frustration of forcing a “focus on success” type of attitude. Too often do we assume that everyone else in the world wants tons of money and fame. Though I do take issue with the bit about quality. If I have an idea for something and I can’t execute it like I see it in my head then it’s never as satisfying as creating something that I feel is 100% realized how I envisioned. Now, that doesn’t really exist, just like no circle is perfect, but there are things that I’ve done that I’m still proud of today and then there are many that I am not. I am highly critical of myself and if I weren’t I probably would have gotten bored of this a long time ago. It’s that unreachable goal of perfectly capturing and conveying an idea and transferring it from my head to the screen/page/canvas that also drives me [mad].

Exactly why I do what I do

I want to get more specific though, because this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. For me, the real reason I make video games boils down to a very specific, very discernible moment.

It’s “seeing it live”. It’s a feeling I clued in to over a decade ago doing Final Fantasy VII fan sites in PageMaker. I would type in some code, save the file and then load it up in the browser. I’d see the changes and it would work! It felt awesome and I was hooked. I had this thing [webpage] that I could endlessly modify and watch it work and show to others. It had this whole hairy underbelly that only I knew about and I would be pulling the levers and setting it up just right. Games are a lot like that. Animation; 3D modeling; they all have elements of alchemy that let you surprise yourself. There’s something very abstract about the process, much like Pollock probably experienced when he was playing with gravity and paint on a canvas. The work would surprise him and he’d respond and refine and respond and refine…

That’s why I make games, or why I do anything creative. I’m addicted to that. I enjoy drawing, but when I draw I usually find a way to play with my subconscious by laying down a doodle and then responding to it, or venturing into watercolor or inkwash and letting the water do its thing with the paper. In my early college years at Iowa I did a lot of symmetrical abstract work in Photoshop using the Liquify filter and hundreds of blend layers horizontally flipped to create something incredibly unexpected, yet recognizable. The moment just before turning on the blend mode to see what it would look like was that nugget of crack that I craved out of the whole process.

So in the end, it’s completely selfish. There was a time that I thought what I was doing would somehow make a difference in the world, or help people understand each other a bit better so that maybe the world would be a better place, but the last few years of my life have taken that view out of the idyllic and into the realistic. It’s impossible to save something that doesn’t want to be saved even if it needs it. I don’t think what I’m doing is bad, and I still do believe in what I’m doing is for the good, but it’s clear now that it’s much more for myself than it is for others. If others get something out of it, then that’s the icing.

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!

Before we decided to pull off of Liferaft I had an idea while we were attending IndieCade in early October. Like every other idea I have I wasn’t sure about how doable it would be, but I started fleshing it out right there in the park next to the Ivy Substation in Culver City.

Like Gray, the idea is best boiled down into a simple phrase.
Cliche

“If you love something, you have to set it free.”

This wasn’t the initial spark, but merely a way to compact the complex personal issue I wanted to express into something that would be easier to hone in on. Pterogative is definitely the most personal game I’ve ever worked on. It’s only recently that I’ve started allowing my personal life to influence my games, previously they involved larger issues like politics, religion or Wal-Mart. At IndieCade Daniel gave a talk about how he works and the intangible things that go into the games he makes. It’s always interesting to hear how other people approach creativity, and occasionally bits and pieces can really change the way I approach it. One little bit stuck with me [paraphrasing].

Daniel

“You know it’s getting to the right place when you get a knot in your throat. I’m usually embarrassed or exposed when I release a game. That’s how I know it’s honest.”

That sounds more like the opposite feeling you want to have when releasing a game, but when it comes to communicating something personal about yourself honestly, if you don’t feel naked, then it needs more work.

When I talk about the origins of Pterogative to Mike or other close friends, it’s always embarrassing to some degree. I suppose that’s what reminds me that the idea is honest and worth pursuing. That doesn’t mean the game will have the same effect, but I think it’s on the right track. We will see.

But why would this idea be best expressed in a game? Why not just write a short story about my experience, fiction or non-fiction? That’s fair, but I feel there’s more potential in a game. Beyond any other art-form, games include personal interaction as THE device that allows for a deeply personal experience. People don’t change unless they want to. Yes? If they pick up Passage and don’t let it in, well they weren’t vulnerable enough to let it affect them in the first place. If that same person saw The David in person, I’m not sure that’d garner much more of a reaction than “Whoa, that’s a big naked dude!” Not exactly the intended effect…

Interpretation will always be personal, but games have this whole interaction thing that’s happening every second of the experience [mostly]. Games are actually much more directed. The rules are set, the player has to admit to them and control the game in order to continue. The give and take there creates a bond, however fragile, between the game world and the player’s brain. Rather than leave it up to chance, the game can create its own context and influence people directly. If you don’t think that’s true, then you haven’t noticed the 10+ million people playing WoW.

The cliche itself, “if you love something you have to set it free”, doesn’t really resonate with many people strongly enough to make any real impact. It’s too abstract, too lifeless. The work I want to do now would take an incredibly real piece of life, interpret it simply, then communicate it back to people with that elegant simplicity while retaining as much of the original emotion as possible. Clarify, reflect and change.

Whoops. Re-reading this and it looks like I went on a bit of a rant. BTW, what do you think of the title? I’m still unsure about it and suggestions would be welcome. Do you “get it”? Or is my latin mish-mash far too clever/pretentious?

Me

“This is actually kind of easy. It’s not perfect or even great, but making a game with a message is a relatively simple pursuit. So why is making a fun game so hard?”

After some thinking and a few late night discussions with people smarter than me I’m pretty sure I know why.

Fun is a dead horse

When it comes to games, that’s the one trait of a game that people gauge. Sure reviewers will throw in ratings for graphics and music, but that’s mostly naive. Their response to the game directly hinges on if the total package was entertaining. If the art style is horrendous, but the game is fun/engaging [Sexy Hiking] then all is forgiven. The fact is, people have been perfecting the art of making fun games for the last few decades. They’ve gotten pretty amazing at it. Though, take a step back for a moment. Why are we still going after Fun like it’s the Holy Grail?

Golden Developer

“It’s simple. Make a good game.”

That sucks. Not because it’s untrue, but because it doesn’t help at all. Well how do I make a good game?! What is a good game? Well, for the most part, a good game is a fun game. Right? Gray was a game we made that completely ignored fun. In fact we didn’t want it to be fun at all, if it was, it would have muddled the message. But yet, to a fair amount of people, Gray is a good game. As I said earlier, it was fairly easy to make. Certainly much easier than making something like Dinowaurs or even Fig. 8 because those chased Fun.

F • un

What is Fun anyway? Well it’s engaging. Often a challenge of just enough difficulty to be compelling but not enough to be frustrating with enough variety to maintain interest. At least that’s how I see it. Fun is about learning new skills and using those skills and being rewarded for using them. The rewards vary. In WoW, rewards come by way of numbers. Other times rewards are more intangible, such as “skill” in a hand-eye-coordination game like Halo. That’s really it though, and it’s not easy. Designing a game that does this well is no small task.

Though, designing the first Fun video game was probably a bit easier than designing a Fun video game today. Why? Well, we’re spoiled. We get Fun thrown at us from all directions to the point where we have an incredibly high tolerance for it. Each new game must do something slightly different, but not too different or it will be too frustrating/confusing for the players. In the beginning, games were hard. Kid Icarus hard. But now, designers have learned that doesn’t hit the Fun sweet spot, so we’ve altered things to capitalize on the Fun.

Look at Valve. Perhaps the best game developer in the universe, but they don’t have a roadmap for Fun even. They know when they have it, that’s a skill in itself, but they spend years play testing and tweaking a game in order to get it to that point. Do a couple guys with laptops have that kind of time and resources? That’s where we’re at right now. Surely we can still compete through the Fun angle with interesting new ideas even today, which is pretty incredible when you think about it, but it is most certainly rare.

Video games are porn

I love this quote, though this isn’t verbatim.
John Carmack

“Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important”

Carmack isn’t wrong, but he succumbs to the same notion that all of us have. If film was invented and the only thing we did with it was make porno for 30 years, it’s clear that people would start associating film with porno. Of course there’s a lot more that you can do with film than show people having sex. Why not video games as well?

Well, some of folks are trying. Beyond “art games” plenty of Fun games have nuggets of message in them and they always will, but for those to work they’ve had to have a healthy dose of Fun, and often times having a mechanic that is Fun and provides the right message through gameplay leaves things muddy for the player. They’re focusing on the entertainment, not the meaning. The UnFun games movement isn’t a dead horse at all, in fact it can barely walk! Eventually, though, these will grow and mature into a market that will challenge the traditional video game market. Carmack is right, video games are porn. That might seem outrageous, and it definitely sells Fun video games way too short, but it wouldn’t be a wake-up call if it wasn’t annoying, right?

Now there is huge blank canvas for people to experiment in all kinds of ways. If you cross Fun off your To Do list, then you free yourself as a developer to search an almost endless amount of emotions/responses. That’s really what fun is isn’t it? It’s just a response. There are hundreds more we can look into.

So let’s go do that.

Don’t Compete

If we don’t compete with Fun games, we’ll save ourselves the enormous burden of honing in on that special formula of fun. If few people have really been making any games about honor [right Clint? :P], loss, or obesity, then we don’t have to trump the last guy. The bar is lower and that’s not a bad thing. That’s a great thing!
Kyle Gabler

“AAA game companies have hundreds of people with millions of dollars that allow them to produce high caliber games and would be incredibly daunting to compete with. So don’t.”

Mikengreg just returned safely from IndieCade to the gray plains of Iowa and we couldn’t be happier. It’s Mike’s birthday [wish him well on twitter] today and we’re both charged full of IndieCade. Countless memories, so many new-old friends, it was an unbelievable gathering of intimate and heartfelt personalities that we will never forget. We love you all.

Mike was so happy he dusted off his stripping skills for you all.

While I was considering on writing more of a reflective post on how this has transformed my life, I think right now there’s simply too much to talk about and the message would get lost. For now, here are some videos that capture a little bit of the tone of our experience.

Also check out my flickr set for all of the [crappy] pictures I took during the festival.

IndieCade Videos

Cactus makes for great couch play. ;) Here’s part 2 [much longer at 9+ min.]

Zach and Steph battle it out. Check out Unify

She doesn’t just write adventure games, she lives them!

Not to brag or anything but we slept together. :P

In a lapse of judgement Daniel gives up his trade secret: brain damage.

This kept going on with MarioKart and glitch art. Very cool.

To be clear, a collaboration is a type of working relationship where all parties agree to some kind of revenue split on a per-project basis. This has nothing to do with hiring employees, contractors or anything else. Anyway, here’s some of what I learned about finding good collaborators.

When I start to look for a collaborator, I go through a series of steps to get to the actual point of making the game. It’s my vetting process. But before that, I think it’s important to understand the nature of a collaboration. How it will work for you and the other person[s] and why.

Partners v. Collaborators

Usually, when someone thinks of making games they start with The Almighty Game Development Company. It’s how I started. But truthfully, that’s a whole other mess. Finding a partner is a serious commitment, like marrying someone. A collaborator is more of a girlfriend/boyfriend situation, and rarely includes living together! ;) Distinguishing the two is important for a number of reasons.

Short-term commitments

By eliminating the idea of a long-term, serious commitment to a partner you can afford to fail. That’s incredibly important because you will fail a lot in your search for the right collaborator. The trick though, is to fail in short bursts, wasting as little time as possible.

You’re allowed to be desperate

If you were to form up a partnership with someone that would presumably last for many years, you wouldn’t want to go in signing that contract with a shred of desperation. Would you? Put your feelers out, lay yourself out for everyone to see. Sure, the search for a partner/collaborator is very similar but the emotional impact of people abusing your investment is much, much less.

Know what you want

By talking to people with the intention of creating something with them you’ll figure out your own turn-ons and turn-offs and what you’re looking for in someone else. There is a lot of complexity within anyone’s personality so it’s up to you to find out what values are most important to you. For instance, perhaps you need someone that aligns with your style of brainstorming, or you can’t work with people who want to make RTSs [or any other certain kind of game].

I’ve been able to isolate a number of these traits that clash/mesh when working with someone closely on a creative project.

Work style

This is a tough one to pin down because you need to work together first to truly understand how the other works, but that shouldn’t stop you from asking. Ask about their hours, when they are most productive, what’s the usual? The thing about these questions is that they all infer that they work regularly. If they come off as sporadic or unorganized, that’s pretty telling that they haven’t developed a style at all. If that’s the case, I’d recommend moving on since it means they probably haven’t been doing this for long enough anyway.

If they do have a style, know what you can tolerate and what you can’t. Usually this isn’t a large problem if you can understand it early enough. That way you’ll know how to work best with that person. If they need false deadlines, set them. If they binge and do 90% of their work in the space of one manic day, don’t hound them the rest of the week.

Creative Process

Not everyone wants to be a game designer, but most do. Finding a common ground on how to come up with a game idea can definitely be a challenge on its own, let alone two strangers fumbling around trying to agree on one. I think, more than anything, this is what trips up most collaborations. Too often, one person has a really strong attachment to an idea [or type of game] they bring to the table and can’t let it go. It’s important to allow for wiggle room, be lenient and let the idea be owned by all people involved. Even if one person came up with a single area or story idea, that’s still an important contribution. Get excited about the idea and riff on it, don’t obsess about owning the seed, you’ll get nowhere fast.

Demeanor/Personality

This is something that’s often a chemistry issue. While it’s ideal that you meet someone in person to truly gauge whether your personalities blend well, I think with a healthy chat via Skype or something else you can get a good idea for how the person generally is. This is a gut thing, so any further explanation is a bit ridiculous. Just make sure you get that “good feeling” from the other person.

Mission/Goal

Make sure you are both doing this for similar reasons. If halfway through you realize that your collaborator is doing this purely for profit, disregarding any possible creative ideas you have about design or awesomeness for the sake of pandering to a canned audience, things will go South very quickly. Again, know who you are and why you’re doing this. If you’re in it for the money, find someone else who’s in it for the money.

I’ve been watching Dexter and there was a really good moment in a recent episode [season 1] where he asks a married couple a very interesting question.
Dexter

Why do you love each other?

Married Couple

Because we share the same dream.

Even though they were killing smuggled Cubans and dumping them in the Pacific, they still shared the same dream. I found that comforting. The dream isn’t important, what’s important is that you share it. There’s someone for everyone.

Conflict Resolution/Breaking Point

This may be one of the hardest things to vet out as nobody [sane] wants to initiate a conflict for the sake of finding out how eachother reacts to it. Though you can definitely understand how someone deals with mini-conflicts by criticizing their ideas/design. If a prospective collaborator were to fly off the handle after you mentioned something about your apprehension to including real-time weather patterns in your game, you might want to step away.

Conflict is a very real and necessary element to any kind of team effort. They will arise and they must be dealt with in one way or another. If they cannot be handled in a reasonable way, that can be a leading cause to a game’s death or some other terrible outcome. Definitely think ahead as much as possible to how someone might respond to adversity.

The Vetting Process

Ok, so that’s some general things to look out for, now for the process itself. In step-by-step form!

STEP ONE: Put the feelers out

What you’re looking for is someone who is everything you’re not. Maybe it’s two people, maybe it’s five. Whatever it is, if you’re an artist, look for games with programmer/amateur art. If you’re a programmer, look for artists with game mockups, paintings and the like. You’re not necessarily looking for amazing games here. Those are games that already have the total package. You need to find half-baked games preferably mocked up or programmed by one person.

Alternatively, it’s important for you to put your best foot forward. If you’re an artist, provide a link to your portfolio that showcases your best and most relevant work. If you’ve made games before, point directly to them. If you’re a programmer, do the same. It’s not enough to simply be interested, you need to prove why you’re going to be awesome to work with. Make your intentions clear. More on that later.

This being the internet, there are loads of places to find people actively looking for collaborators. Though, because of that, things are pretty competitive. Here’s just a few. If you have any suggestions on other places let me know in a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

• TIGForums COLLABORATION THREAD
• Kong’s Collabs
• Kong Collab Forum
• Newgrounds Artists
• Newgrounds Programmers
• Pixelation Job Board
• FlashGameArt Artist List
• FlashGameLicense Collaboration Thread
• DeviantArt suggested by Colm

Now this list is focused around finding someone with experience in making Flash games. That’s where my experience lies, but surely there are other places, if you have one and you’re reading this please let me know so I can add it.

There are definitely other places to find collaborators. I met Andy Moore at the 2009 GDC in San Francisco. I found Jiggmin through his game Platform Racing 2. None of those happened based on a post from a forum, I found them by emailing with them directly.

STEP TWO: Set a course

Once you’ve got some prospective collaborators on the line, you’ve got to hook them. I’d encourage you to try and foster an environment that is as creatively open and fair as possible while also maintaining a very small scope for your first collaboration together. There are a few ways to do this.

1. Do not come in to a collaboration with a preconceived game idea. Seriously. Don’t.
2. Split any future profits equally among original collaborators [for the most part].
3. Define a basic timeline. eg. “Let’s make this game in two weeks.”
4. Go further and agree on a mini-milestone such as: “Game ideas by tomorrow.”
5. Chat with them at length. Ask about what games they like, how they got into it, etc.
6. Unearth both of your intentions for this project. What’s the qualifies as a success? Why are you here?>

All of these agreements will tell you a lot about the other person and definitely bring up a good many red flags if they exist. If someone misses the “game ideas by tomorrow” deadline, then that’s probably a red flag that they may not be as committed to this as you are. Alternatively, if they have Idea A that they really want to make and you’re just not into it, but they keep pushing, well that’s another red flag. The reason you’re setting a course is so that you both have to follow it.

Frankly, a large part of this is about your gut. If you get a good vibe from the other[s] then move forward. I’ve had a fair amount of collaborations never get past this stage due to a whole host of problems. Many of them are completely understandable. Most of the time, it simply doesn’t work out. It’s nobody’s fault, just a bad combo.

STEP THREE: Fast Prototype

Once you’ve decided on an idea it’s important to get something up and running ASAP. Don’t get entrenched in a series of game design documents and planning schedules. Those can be useful, but if you spent a month doing all that only to find out that when it actually comes to making the game it’s not going to work out, then that’s time wasted. The main idea here is to fast forward to the good part so you can find out if it’s really going to work or not.

STEP FOUR: Communicate and Develop

Decide on a chat program/account that you will both use to keep in touch daily. If you are going on vacation, let the other person know. Since most of these happen remotely this kind of feedback is really important for motivating the other member[s]. Sometimes simply not knowing what’s up with the other person will coerce you into slowly losing hope that the project will actually be completed. If you’re wondering, shoot them an email! If they go AWOL, they go AWOL and that sucks, but at least you know. Learn and move on.

It’s a bit ludicrous to reduce this stage [certainly the bulk of the time] to a couple paragraphs, but game development is its own animal all together. The best advice I can give is to communicate throughout the development process, even if it’s just saying “Hi” in the morning. It’s enough to let the other person know you care, which is a lot more important than most people think it is. Think of this as a relationship/friendship.

STEP FIVE: Profit

Once you’ve finished the game, regardless of the platform, there will certainly be a lot more work to do in order to distribute the game. Even if it’s a Flash game, you’ll probably want to find a sponsor, set up ads or even use some kind of microTX system. Whatever the case, the work continues and it’s important to realize that.

I hope my haphazard brain-dump helps a few folks out there, if you have comments or criticisms please post below. I’d be curious to hear other folk’s experiences with this practice.