All Advice You Hear (Even From Me) Is Wrong

Bold statement, no? But this is a pretty simple post, actually. It shouldn't come as surprise to anyone that we live in a complex world, but we tend to rely on mental models that oversimplify things. Even without discussing heuristics and the problems those can create, we can simply think of this in terms of the "perceptual screen." In other words, we all form preconceptions about all manner of things in the world, and we tend to discount or even completely ignore data that doesn't fit our model.

Yeah, there are exceptions, and yes, many people try to make a point of working around their perceptual screens (myself included), but the fact is that people tend to do so much subconscious filtering that there is only so much your conscious mind can override that. I drive down the same streets every day, and miss a thousand details that are there because I'm distracted, watching the road, or otherwise. Only if something really violates my expectations of what I should see on that road am I likely to notice it, and I might not even notice it then.

Perhaps that's getting overly technical, but my point is simply this: none of us knows what we are doing, really. If someone asks me why I think AI War sold as well as it did, or even why it didn't sell better than it did, I can give my theories, but those theories are wrong and incomplete. If you ask a developer, an executive, and a marketer that were involved with a AAA game the same thing, they'll all give you slightly (or majorly) different answers, too. None of them know, really. To some extent it's unknowable: if you ask the average consumer why they're so excited about some game or another, often their response is going to be pretty vague and unhelpful.

This isn't related to games, either. Nobody knows why one movie is more successful than another, or why one author is suddenly a bestseller overnight when another similar author is not. Sometimes there are obvious things: quality differences, timing differences, the amount of marketing support, etc. Having a quality product that is well marketed -- or an established brand that people are already loyal to -- is a well known way to ensure some degree of success in a project.

Until you start looking at all the exceptions: Rock Band Beatles, anyone? That was way less successful than anyone expected, and it had absolutely everything going for it. In retrospect you can point to this or that factor, but the fact is that no one can be really sure why the game didn't do as well as expected. The problem: there is a market filled with hundreds of millions of consumers, and they have thousands of reasons why they may or not buy something. And not only that, individually they all have various timing issues (being too busy, being out of a job, whatever) that are impossible to collectively predict.

Statisticians may be scoffing at me around now, as many seem quite confident of their ability to predict what large groups of people will do. To that, I say: meh. The best statisticians are pretty accurate in the main, but it's those pesky outliers that confound all the regular models. They're using heuristics or mental (or mathematical) models like everyone else. Their models might well be far better than the norm, but they're still so far from perfect it's not funny. Not that I'm trying to insult statisticians or their work, which is still important, but I'm making a point here: the future is unknowable, and the reasons for past events when those events involve millions of people are also pretty well unknowable.

Here's a fun example: if I were releasing AI War now, instead of last year, how would that have affect things? Would the proximity to Starcraft hurt it? Would I have had an easier or a harder time forging partnerships with digital distributors? Would less or more people have bought it do to economic factors with the recession? Would competition with other AAA and indie games have been better or worse for AI War in 2010 compared to 2009? Even the weather might have had some effect, indirectly, in terms of how much people were inclined to stay inside and play games last year versus this year.

And those are just the major factors. There's also all the hundreds of personal-life factors for every person who bought AI War, or who didn't-but-might-have-bought AI War. It's a mess of probabilities, of emergent patterns based on multiple overlapping systems. In short, it's that whole Chaos Theory thing.

So if you ever ask anyone advice about, well, anything, bear that in mind. We're all walking around behind our own perceptual screens, making wrong and/or incomplete assumptions and models of the world, and acting based on an accumulated multitude of beliefs. And even if your beliefs, history, etc, closely line up with those another person, if they're advising you about something like (say) how to be a successful indie developer, bear in mind that there are still so many different factors that can't be helped: the timing of their release versus yours, the fact that you both developed games that are probably quite different, and so on.

Perhaps this post sounds pessimistic, but I don't mean for it to. Advice, wrong and/or inapplicable though it might be, is still better than no data at all. Seeking advice is a great thing to do, just like the study of statistics is extremely valuable. You just have to understand what it is you're getting out of either process: a model, or a way of looking at some small slice of the world. All models are incomplete, so you can't just rely on any single one. That's why you want to listen to the advice of others, then make your own decisions.

In the end, the only way to find out how AI War would do was to release it and see. Same with Rock Band Beatles. I made my predictions and I'm sure Harmonix made theirs, but in the end all predictions tend to be at least somewhat wrong. If you're an aspiring indie developer, you need to worry about two things:

1. Making the best game you can.
2. Doing the best job you can in promoting it and getting people interested in it.

Then, based on a thousand factors -- many of which you can't control or even really even perceive -- your game will do well, or it won't. Most likely it will fall somewhere in the statistical norm for the type of game you are making and the market in which you release it. There's a chance you might be an outlier in a positive or negative sense, but planning to be an outlier is like planning to win the lottery. Awesome games flop all the time, while their inferior counterparts get accolades piled on top of them. More often than not quality rises to the top, though, so by making a good game you're certainly playing the odds.

I'm sure that I'll continue giving out advice for indie developers, just like other indie developers or industry veterans do, but in the future when you read advice from anyone (me included) keep this post in mind. Too many commentators get hung up on extolling the virtues (or imminent demise) of this or that model -- casual or not, social or not, sandbox or not, are the current hot topics -- and what you need to remember is to do what makes sense for you, and to not try to trend follow. Forge your own path, and see what happens. That's all any of us are doing, really, if you get right down to it.

Tidalis Beta 0.407 Released, Major Updates and New Videos

Version 0.407 of Tidalis, which has been inwork for a surprisingly long amount of time for one of our beta updates, is now out. If you look at the full features list, you can definitely see why it took more time than usual. The major new feature here is multi-well co-op play on the local computer, which has a lot of exciting possibilities that we're just starting to tap. This also paves the way for our Vs and network play modes, which will be making an appearance soon.

Also new in this version are more art/music background themes, more special blocks, the first few usable items, updates to the level editor, added animation techniques and general polish, more block skins including even better colorblind support, and dozens of more minor features. Things are moving fast as usual with Arcen, and we're looking to be right on schedule for our planned full release in early July (Windows and Mac OSX at first -- other platforms are under consideration for the fall and beyond).

We've also put together a new pair of videos for the game:



View Larger Version





View Larger Version

Armchair Treasure Hunt at Stephen Parrish's

I am late on mentioning this, but a writer friend of mine, Stephen Parrish, is now running an armchair treasure hunt in support of his upcoming first novel, The Tavernier Stones. I have not read the book yet, but I've enjoyed the excerpt he posted quite a bit, and am really looking to getting my hands on it when it comes out in May.

If you're into ARGs, which are becoming all the rage these days, I think that something like this sort of armchair treasure hunt might be right up your alley. Armchair treasure hunts have been around for a while, and if this one is any indication they are as tricky as heck. As well they should be -- the clever winner gets a 1 carat diamond (no joke) as a reward. So be sure to stop by Stephen's site and check that out.

A Quick Guide: How To Recognize An Arcen Title

Overall, early reactions to Tidalis have been extremely positive, for which our entire team is really gratified. However, there have been a few predictable reactions along the lines of "how do you go from making a hardcore strategy game to an [insert slur on casual or puzzle games, or games with cheerful graphics or music]?" While not unexpected, this is a bit frustrating for me -- did people really expect that we'd just make strategy games forever?

Granted, we are still adding free DLC to AI War, and have more expansions planned for that in the future, so it's not like we're leaving the strategy market; AI War is as important to us as ever. But that doesn't mean that AI War is all we want to do, or that hardcore strategy is the only sort of game we are interested in. Personally, I'm a huge fan of action/adventure games (Zelda, etc), platformers (Mario, but also more than that), FPS games (all the great ones -- and even some third person ones, like Red Faction: Guerrilla), sandbox games in general (Assassin's Creed II, etc), puzzle games (Tetris Attack, especially), and also of course strategy games (I have favorites in the tactical, tower defense, RTS, and TBS sub-genres, as you can probably tell from AI War).

I also really enjoy sidescrolling action games (like Bionic Commando Rearmed), some racing games (Burnout Paradise, Midnight Club II, all the Mario Kart games), RPGs (the less-talky American RPGs, and the less-campy JRPGs). I have even been known to enjoy sports games on occasion, though that's not really my main thing at all. Same with Fighting games. And survival horror games in general, though Silent Hill 2 specifically is one of my favorite games ever. There are all sorts of outliers for me, too, like my love of playing drums on Rock Band or my enjoyment of Boom Blox and its sequel. Speaking historically, I grew up on classic arcade-style games on the Atari 2600, and later a wide swath of games on the NES, SNES, and Genesis. And then N64, and somewhat PSX.

In other words, like a lot of people, I am a Gamer with a capital "G." I enjoy variety. I like to think as much as I like to have my reflexes tested. Sometimes I'll play a game just for the sheer joy of the way the controls feel, and how immersive/fun the environment is -- Far Cry 2 was a great game for me for that reason, despite the complaints some others had. But unless the mechanic is just incredibly fun, these days I get bored pretty quick if there isn't some brainpower required to get better at the game and really succeed. I also really feel like there is a lack of classically-inspired 2D games that really shine -- they are out there, but they are too few by comparison to their 3D counterparts. All of this contributes to how I go about making games.

In general, you'll know an Arcen title because:

1. It's probably in one of the genres noted above, or even more likely it blends several of them together.

2. It's definitely going to have some hardcore depth to it, though in general our titles are going to be more accessible on the surface than AI War (closer on the scale to Tidalis).

3. It's definitely going to have co-op, because playing with my family is important to me.

4. It's either going to make you really think about things, or it's going to have a really awesome skill-based mechanic that is just plain fun to play at a visceral level (all our games so far are in the first category, but I won't rule the second category out).

5. All our games are likely to be 2D unless I ever break down and do something like an FPS game or a kart racer or something. I really would like to do an FPS game someday, but given the number of current quality FPS games constantly coming out, and the ridiculous production values on all of them, I doubt I could compete.

6. In general, you can trust that our games will never be more casual than Tidalis, or more hardcore than AI War. That's basically the scale on which we're operating. There is a huge stigma about "casual games," and honestly I share that stigma in many cases. There are a lot of empty calories out there, so to speak, and a ton of games that are barely games. I don't have any interest in that sort of thing; Tidalis is able to fit into our lineup because it very much delivers on every line item on this list.

7. We don't do blood and gore.

8. There will always be a plethora of original ideas, and a unique feel, to each of our games. We don't do clones or also-rans.

Given the above:

When you look at the list above, hopefully you can see the pattern on which we are operating. Tidalis was our next move after AI War partly because we really wanted to do a puzzle game and had a great concept in hand, but also partly because it was important to me that we go ahead and set the boundaries within which Arcen will be working. We were already starting to be typecast as a "strategy developer," and that really bugs me. Our next game after Tidalis is a 2D action-adventure game (with strong environmental puzzle elements) with some aspects of survival horror (no gore, nothing even really that T rated, but with lots of suspense and zombies), called Alden Ridge.

Then after that action-adventure game will come the next expansion to AI War. Hopefully by the time that game comes out, people won't think of Arcen in terms of any specific genre. Hopefully they'll think of us simply as making great 2D games that they enjoy, and which have all the various characteristics from the list above. When our tower defense / JRPG hybrid, A Valley Without Wind, hits sometime next year, the goal is that won't be any sort of surprise at all.

I can't imagine the thought of being stuck in only one genre for the rest of my career, but we're also not "abandoning" any particular genre after having made a single title there. I expect we'll do more puzzle games sometime down the road. I suspect we'll make a tactical strategy game (probably turn-based, but we'll see), and I suspect we might make a larger TBS strategy game at some point, too. And I know Alden Ridge won't be our last adventure game. And we'll be doing more than one platformer, too.

A lot of companies might not be able to pull off this type of diversity of genres. But, that's part of the flexibility of our being indie. And speaking from personal experience, I have worked on either hobbyist or professional projects in the past on games in the following genres: action/adventure, platformer, strategy, text-based adventure, sidescrolling action, JRPG, AD&D-style RPG, dungeon crawler, action puzzle, and FPS. It isn't exactly a stretch for me to say I want to work in any of those genres, because I've been working in most of them on and off, largely as a hobbyist, for the last sixteen years.

So don't sweat it. Good things are coming from Arcen, and if you're not into puzzle games (or strategy games, for that matter), you might still want to watch out for our future titles. We have no intention of getting stuck into any sort of routine. Tidalis is not a game purely for the casual crowd (though casual players are welcome), and all of our future games are not going to be like Tidalis any more than they will be like AI War. I'm looking forward to sharing many of the ideas I've been storing up over the years with you!

Tidalis Teaser Trailer 1, Tidalis Beta Coming April 15th

Tidalis is the second standalone game from indie developer Arcen Games, known originally for their hardcore RTS/4X hybrid, AI War: Fleet Command. Not wishing to be typecast, and having game and level design backgrounds in a wide variety of genres, Arcen chose pretty much the exact opposite genre for their second game. The final game will be complete with Arcen staples such as co-op, huge amounts of content, and attention to depth and detail -- Tidalis is extremely easy for casual players to pick up, but it will also keep hardcore puzzle fans entertained for months.

Also: it's coming to both Windows and Mac OSX! Beta will begin on April 15th, 2010 for both platforms. Beta means that people who want to demo the prerelease versions of the game can do so, and customers who preorder will be able to play the whole thing as soon as each new feature and component becomes available. This should be a pretty familiar arrangement to anyone who was around for the beta phase of The Zenith Remnant -- though instead of soliciting feature suggestions, we'll be interested in fan-created levels and puzzles, some of which may make it into the official game (with permission, and with full credit given, of course). Full digital release is expected in late June.

View On Youtube

Indie Game News: Exclusive Screenshots: Tidalis now on Unity3D

Over at Indie Game News, where Arcen's Chris Park is a contributing writer, we've revealed a new screenshot of our upcoming puzzle game Tidalis, along with major news: Arcen is going cross-platform with a move to Unity 3D. It is not yet certain whether or not that will affect AI War down the road, but for the moment AI War is staying with its existing platform. More details in the article.

Q&A: PC Indie Game Sales Numbers

I get mail from time to time from aspiring indies, and recently I was asked an intriguing question: "The fact is that I have no idea what is the average number of sales for indie pc games... more like 10,000 or 30,000? More? Less? I know it's around 50 000 for XBLA titles but I have no clue for indie pc games. Even if I'm conscious that this number will dramatically change from one title to another, I would really appreciate to have real numbers to work with."

How To Find Sales Numbers For A Variety Of Games
You should take a look at the indie games blog and IndieGamer Forums -- there are sometimes some links there to sales numbers and aggregates, etc. Gamasutra is also a good resource, with information about sales numbers of many AAA games as well as some indie titles (Another good indie site is the IndieOtaku blog). A few specific posts I can point you to are the sales statistics category at Game Producer, or this one over here at The Bottom Feeder, an excellent blog by a longtime indie developer.

A PowerPoint slideshow called Indie Game Metrics 2009 has a ton of down-to-earth info. Of interest for potential indie developers on the PC: High-end sales are from 5,000 to 50,000 units sold on the PC. Middle-end sales are just from 1,000 to 5,000 units, and Low-end sales are 100-1,000 units sold. This is not nearly the sort of numbers that aspiring indie developers are hoping to hear, but these seem quite accurate from my experience and from talking to various other indies.

Kingmakers Vs Building On Each Past Success
XBLA numbers are misleading because that is a closed service with marketing implied. In other words, once you get on there, you are already getting a fair bit of exposure simply via Microsoft having hand-selected you and promoting the release through newsletters, blogs, etc, and even magazines. That's hugely valuable, and not something that you can count on unless your game is very, very good. They are basically playing "kingmaker" with a few specific games, and then ignoring the rest.

At any rate, Microsoft is very selective about what games they accept, but so are Steam and most other digital distribution sites. Steam first ignored AI War, then turned it down four months later after ongoing contacts from myself, then eventually agreed to take it on after a recommendation of the game to them by a notable fan in the games press (I can't say who).

In other words: we got lucky, in that we made fans that had some influence over the process. Our arrival on the various other digital distribution sites, including Impulse, were similarly either made possible by either a) some staff member in a position of influence falling in love with the game and recommending it up the chain, or b) the distributor seeing our existing success with other distributors and wanting to get in on the action.

Some few games are immediately noticed for how amazing they are, and get a ton of press and publicity off of that, and an immediate wave of sales. This is just a matter of being in the right place at the right time, I think, and anyway it's not something that has ever happened to me, so I can't give any specific advice there. My method has always been to take each incremental success that I've had, and use that to drive further success. If I'm doing well on one platform, but another platform is still giving me the cold shoulder, I talk about the public sales rank of my game on the first platform, etc (nothing that would break any NDAs).

In other words, unless you just get really lucky, you're going to have to put a lot of work into even just getting your games on all the various digital distribution sites. And even then you might hit a brick wall on one or more of them. At the time that AI War was accepted onto Steam, in late 2009, I believe that we were only the 79th or so indie game on their platform (since they started in 2004). Many other platforms have similarly low numbers of indie titles.

Press Popularity != Financial Success
There are a few thousand indie games that get completed every year, and the sad fact is that most of them sell only a few hundred copies or so through their own website, mostly to family and friends. There is a huge hurdle there at the start where nobody is your fan, no one knows who you are, and you seem to just be part of the background clutter of all the fairly-crappy indie games that are constantly coming out. And even some really "successful" indie games that are considered must-plays that most people have heard of don't sell as well as you might imagine. People tend to focus on the standout success of a minority of games, such as World of Goo or Braid, and assume that anything with a similar amount of press is similarly financially successful -- this is not so.

On the other hand, there are a variety of games that are only popular in a really specific niche, and get almost no press, but nevertheless sell well enough for their creators to do game creation as a fulltime job. So visibility in the press != financial success, although it certainly does help.

In the case of AI War, we were unusually successful with both the press and financially, and yet somehow we're still extremely niche and something that a lot of people have never heard of. (We were one of only a handful of indie games to make the Top 40 Best PC Games list on Metacritic, and we're in the top non-blockbuster sales bracket for PC indie games, as well as having off-and-on held the top-or-close indie game sales position on Impulse, Steam, and other platforms). AI War is not a blockbuster or even remotely close, in other words, and yet we were one of the most popular indie games of the year by a couple of measures.

That's something to chew on, if you think indie game development is a path to riches: AI War has been more financially successful than most indie titles, and yet if you're expecting sales on par with World of Goo or Braid, you'd certainly be absolutely crestfallen to have sales numbers even twice as good, possibly even 10x as good, as us. If you're hoping to get rich making indie games, know that you might get lucky and make it, but odds are not in your favor. If you're looking to make a living for yourself and maybe even a small staff, that is a lot more attainable but still something that only a minority of indie game developers achieve.

AI War's Sales Numbers
In the case of AI War, before we landed on Impulse in May 2009, we had literally 0 sales. We were getting maybe a couple of hundred hits per day to the site, maybe 30-50 unique visitors, and we had some downloads of the demo, but nobody was biting. Then we got on Impulse right at the end of the month, and bam -- suddenly we were up to around 10 sales per day with them, plus 1 or 2 on our own site. That was what got the ball rolling, and things have gone onwards and upwards from there.

Presently, on our "off" months (when we don't do any sort of discount promotions or what have you), we sell around 500-900 copies of AI War, and around 100-300 copies of The Zenith Remnant. On our "on" months when we do a discount promotion with one or multiple vendors, those numbers jump to around 3200-4400 copies of AI War, and around 1600 copies of The Zenith Remnant. These numbers are digital-only, not including our retail sales, the first results of which are not even in yet. But through digital-only sales, we've sold around 15,000 copies of AI War so far, and around 2,500 copies of The Zenith Remnant.

AI War is a very unusual title in that it is somewhat "evergreen." In other words, it's been 10 months since the game originally came out, and it's still selling quite well: better than ever, on average. Assuming nothing hugely changes, I expect do double our current sales numbers by the time the second expansion to AI War comes out.

What (Maybe) Creates "Evergreen" Titles
To properly address this in a scientific sense, I'd need a lot more data. It's possible that AI War's "evergreen" status is simply based on the fact that it is not a very well-known title despite the success it has had, and thus that as new people discover it our sales continue onwards. But, there are two main contributing factors, I think:

1. We make continuous (usually monthly) improvements and additions, keeping players interested.

2. We do semi-frequent (every few months or so) discount sales with our digital distribution partners, which is basically like "free" advertising that we are paying for with a lower profit per unit sold (but way more units sold).

I don't think that #2 would work as well without #1. #1 also keeps traffic to our site high, to the point where we get around 10,000 hits per day on average to our site now, which is certainly much improved from when we started out.

In Conclusion
I love being an indie developer, and wouldn't want to do anything else if this career remains open to me (aside from trying being a novelist on the side, which is something I am sure I will return to in a few years). However, it's not an easy road. I've paid my dues with a good 15+ years of hobbyist game content/level/etc creation, and a solid 6 years of hobbyist game programming for titles of my own.

Then, after all that work, I happened to get fairly lucky in various ways so that AI War was able to become a success. AI War is a good game, make no mistake, and it wouldn't have found any success without being a good game. However, there are lots of good games that go unnoticed for various reasons, and that's where the luck factor comes in if you don't already have an "easy in" into the industry (I had none).

If you're wanting to become an indie developer, the best question to ask yourself is this: would I do this even if I never made a cent off of it? If the answer is yes, then go for it and see what happens. If the answer is no, you may want to seriously reconsider.

I did this sort of thing for a decade and a half without ever thinking of it as a viable career or anything I would charge money for -- it was just a hobby. Then for some reason it occurred to me in 2008 that I could probably make a living at this, and I decided to give it a go. Turns out I was right, but it wasn't until December 2009 that I started taking any money out of the AI War proceeds to pay myself (for anything beyond expense reimbursements). All the money up until that point was being spent on making sure that AI War 2.0 would be possible, on developing the first expansion, etc. So in a very real sense, the first 12 months of my work on AI War were all done for no pay whatsoever, and only in the months following that did I start getting paid.

That was cool with me because I wasn't purely in it for the money, I just wanted to make the best possible game I could and see if there was a living for me in doing more of that sort of thing. If your motivations lie along the same lines, then get cracking. Your first indie game might not make it, even your second or third or fourth might not, but if you love it for the sake of the created games themselves, it won't matter. If you get lucky on your first or your fifth try, and then get into a realm of profitability where you can hire yourself, that's just icing on the cake.

Final note: It's not that I think that indies should be willing to work for free. However, if you want to be a game designer / novelist / actor / football star, bear in mind that there are millions upon millions of other people who also want to. The average advance for a novelist is $10,000, and that's for 1-5 years of work, and only for the 0.01% of authors who actually ever get published at all. More people want to be novelists than game designers at the moment, so the competition is less stiff here so far. But the competition is tough enough that the likelihood of financial payoff is too low to make this worthwhile unless you love the creation process as an end unto itself.

Playing Well With Others

Okay, so you've seen the post I made about the Indie Strategy Bundle, which was just a re-post of Cliff's, Vic's, and my press release. Cliff and Vic, naturally, made much more interesting posts on their own blogs, talking about the context of the bundle, their own feelings about it, etc. I thought I'd add a few words of my own along those lines.

For my own part, I'm not sure exactly where this is headed. Cliff and I created a perma-bundle of just AI War and GSB through Impulse starting in early December, and it was a successful thing despite how low the discount there turned out to be (well, c'mon, it is a perma-bundle rather than a time limited thing). When that bundle came out, Rock, Paper, Shotgun remarked that it was the indie equivalent of Guitar Hero and Rock Band offering a bundle together. Cliff and I both thought it would be a good idea to take it even further, so here we are.

Indies banding together in various ways looks like it may be a new trend. I certainly hope so. This Valentines day you had the Indie Love Bundle. More recently there was the announcement of the Indie Fund (which I think is a super terrific idea, and something I've blogged about in the past -- I'm glad that someone else with the money to actually make it happen also thought of it). And I think there are probably other examples that I'm either just not thinking of at the moment, or wasn't aware of for whatever reason.

I'm not including the distributor-led bundles because those are often featuring individual game prices so low that it seems like the largest benefit is to the distributor itself, rather than any one indie in there. Maybe those games are at the stage where they are no longer selling well, and the publicity of the deal (and whatever resultant cash) is a huge boon. There's certainly something to be said for publicity, obviously, and in large part that's the main reason for indies to band together -- that, and funding.

The bottom line is that indies are coming together in various capacities to shore up their traditional weaknesses. You know, all that stuff that a AAA publisher manages for their developers. This is stuff we're still figuring out, obviously. If you take three companies with zero or near-zero marketing budget and add them together, you still get a zero or near-zero marketing budget. So it's not like even if we got a hundred indies together you'd see advertising on par with even one minor game from EA.

But on the flip side, indies that are successful all are good at drumming up a fanbase somehow. And we all have different methods, different contacts, and different existing pools of customers. There ought to be a way that we can turn this into something that is greater than the sum of its parts -- and so that's what we're trying, in our grand experiment. I'll be as interested as anyone to see where this goes.

If you haven't yet tried GSB or Solium Infernum, I highly recommend them both. None of the games in this package are really substitutes for the other, and that's what's so awesome about indie games. In a time where a lot of the AAA strategy offerings are getting increasingly blurred together to my eyes, you still wind up with indie strategy offerings that are of a high quality, but which have various nontraditional foci that would probably turn off the mass audience in various ways. To me, that's pretty special, and I'm really happy that I'm able to be a part of it -- especially alongside such great talents as Cliff and Vic.

Announcing... The Indie Strategy Bundle!

Indie developers Arcen Games, Cryptic Comet, and Positech Games have joined forces to bring strategy fans the ultimate bundle: Gratuitous Space Battles + The Tribe Expansion, Solium Infernum, and AI War + The Zenith Remnant Expansion. This weekend only, the three companies are offering this special package for a mere $49.99 (for the math impaired, it would normally be $90).

“It’s a jungle out there for a lone indie dev: tired, hungry, low on ammunition and surrounded on all sides by AAA monsters and flesh eating zombies, and that’s why I want Cliff and Chris on my side,” says Vic Davis, founder of Cryptic Comet. “I think all three of us share the desire to prove that the little guys can really create some unique games. It’s our business... and business is good.”

“If we were larger companies, and profit-focused, I think we’d view each other as the enemy,” says Chris Park, founder of Arcen Games. “But as tiny indies, that’s just not productive -- time has already shown that there are plenty of fans to go around. We’re here to make innovative games, not corner markets. There’s a lot more for us to gain by working together instead of by being antagonistic.”

“I can't think of three games that go together better, or which appeal to a more distinct group of gamers, than these three,” says Cliff Harris, founder of Positech Games. “The reason for this bundle is clear. We are like the Judean People’s Front from Monty Python. We need to unite against the common enemy, and that enemy is obscurity, not each other.”

Each game in the bundle is a fan favorite, having carved out a unique niche in the strategy genre. Inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost, Solium Infernum is a turn-based strategy game that pits you against other players as you use diplomacy, deceit and force to claim the Infernal Thrones of Hell. Gratuitous Space Battles turns real time strategy on its head, making the deployment phase of battle into the game itself. AI War is built around a completely unique AI concept, with gameplay best described as grand strategic 4X tower defense RTS (say that five times fast).

Suffice it to say that none of these concepts would have seen the light of day at larger companies, but each expands the genre in novel ways that will likely influence more mainstream strategy titles to come. But most of all, if you’re into strategy these games are fun (and they scratch that special itch in the brains of grognards). The Indie Strategy Bundle is designed to help strategy fans support the originals, while giving themselves a treat if they haven’t yet played these genre-bending gems!

This bundle will be available from March 4th until March 9th, 2010 at IndieStrategyGames.com

Choosing A Network Library in C#

I am a bad, bad man for not having blogged about this sooner. Last year I blogged about How I Chose SlimDX as my graphics/sound/etc library of choice. And I've been meaning to blog about how I chose my network library, and what I think of it, yet have failed to do so. This was particularly important to me because (spoiler alert) I really love the networking library I'm currently using and think the guy making it is also a real class act.

Early Alpha
For the first versions of AI War, I was using an earlier version of the Lidgren Network Library. I found this easy to implement, and got the game up and running pretty quick. The Lidgren library is a UDP-based solution, which means that it is a layer over an unreliable, connectionless protocol. That means that for applications that require reliability (like AI War), and for all messages to arrive in order, you need something like the Lidgren library. This library does a really good job of managing this whole process in a transparent way, fortunately, so you don't have to think about most of that sort of thing as a programmer working a layer above it.

There were a few bugs in the Lidgren library at the time, though, that eventually led me to create my own sockets-based code based on what I'd learned from working with Lidgren's code. Mainly I was concerned because the Lidgren library was flagged as beta software by its own creator, and I didn't want to have my game running on critical code that was beta. So I coded my own replacement.

Later Alpha Until A Few Months Post-Release
My sockets-based implementation was surprisingly easy to implement. I used TCP instead of UDP, you see, which meant that all that reliability and orderliness that the Lidgren library was having to create when running on top was built right into the protocol. I mean, after all, isn't that the entire point of TCP as a protocol? There were dire warnings on many game programming sites about not using TCP for these sorts of purposes, so I was wary, but in one afternoon programming I had a working prototype of my event-driven TCP-based code, and it worked perfectly.

In further testing, for months and months with my alpha testers, it continued to work perfectly. I stopped worrying about the TCP issue, clearly it was a non-issue. The game released in May, quietly at first, with most players playing solo at that time. Gradually it picked up an increasing playerbase, and more of them started wanting to play online together. Largely it was fine. I think it was around late June that I started getting scattered reports of really terrible performance in networking, however. Mostly it was people playing from the US to Europe, or between Australia and anywhere else.

My first thought was that these were simply connections that could not handle AI War -- AI War is a big game, and uses a fair bit of bandwidth when a lot of ships are being moved around at once. However, since this issue was a constant thing, even when no significant amount of command data was being passed, I was rather stumped for a month or so. I implemented a "Network skip" feature that adjusted network latency, and this largely let people work around the problem, but it then made the command lag pretty horrific when they used that feature.

I don't remember what or who eventually helped me realize what the problem was (it's been a while), but the key realization was this: TCP networking absolutely stinks in high packet-loss situations, which is what was interfering with these specific connections that were otherwise really fast and capable. In other words: all those articles warning against using TCP were (of course) absolutely right, and the issue had come back to bite me in a major way. All those months of testing were for naught, despite all the various network load conditions we had subjected it to, because we'd never subjected it to a high packet-loss environment.

Drat.

Returning To The Lidgren Network Library
So the very first thing I did was look up the Lidgren library again, since I had liked it so well in the alpha stages of AI War. I figured that it might have had a number of updates in the intervening 6ish months (it had -- substantial ones), and I also figured that if there were errors in it, it would still be less of an issue than packet-loss issue with TCP. Basically, I was running monthly public betas, and I could let everyone beat on the Lidgren library in the game for a solid month, and see what shook out.

Another afternoon spent implementing the very-differently-organized Lidgren library (all changes very much for the better), and it was up and running. I pushed it out to the current beta release, and the affected parties noted that their issues with latency had all disappeared. And there was much rejoicing! All seemed to be well. It was working well for somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred people (always hard to know, since not everyone who downloads beta versions posts or registers on the forums), and it remained doing so for the remainder of that beta month. That beta then turned into the official version of the game, and the Lidgren library has been an integral part of the AI War library ever since. But my story isn't quite done yet.

Sending Large Messages
Sometime after that first release that made the Lidgren library an official part of the AI War game, I started getting reports from players that the initial connection speed was super slow for them (when they would be transferring between 500kb and 2MB of data for the initial "full sync" of the game), but then that after they were connected, it was fine. And it wasn't just a little bit slow -- it was taking upwards of 30 minutes for a few of them, sometimes.

The strangest thing was that it wasn't all the time, even though it was mostly centered in that same crowd that had been having the issues with my TCP implementation. And weirdest of all, these same folks had had very speedy and nice sending of the initial game state under the TCP solution, and it was just the in-game performance that had then stunk. Groan. There were suggestions that I should use the TCP for file send, and UDP for the game itself, but that would have been a nightmare to code and maintain on a number of levels (dual connections that are really the same connection, but used for different purposes -- yuck).

So after my initial investigation of the issue, I had basically determined that any data that was above a certain size was causing a performance impact in the library, but that breaking that same message up into smaller bits was no problem. I talked to Michael Lidgren, the author of the eponymous library, via email. Basically what it boiled down to, in talking to him, was that based on the way the library was having to manage resending of lost packets, and the way that it was breaking up the data that I was unceremoniously dumping into its buffers, was causing a lot of extra re-sends that were problematic.

This was something he moved to look into (I could have done the same, since his library is open source, and I did poke around in it some -- but despite the fact that his program is extremely well organized and commented and formatted, it is nonetheless quite a complex library simply by nature). It's actually quite possible this was largely a bug in the network drivers on the specific cards, which is what it wound up looking like was most likely in the end. In the meantime, with some suggestions from Michael, I implemented some logic on my end that put less load on the network card by spacing out that content slightly, and the result was perfect.

Until a few months later...

MTU
The concept of MTU was not something I was familiar with, not being formally trained in any way for network programming. So when a few players later started having some disconnections, I was not sure what the issue was, but it seemed network-card related. The Lidgren library had been working fine for months for an ever-wider group of players, after all, so I doubted it was a problem there.

As fortune would have it, the player with this problem happened to be extraordinarily knowledgeable about networking in general, and with the help of the debug data that is built into the Lidgren library (which I make available through a key combo in AI War), he was able to figure out that this was an MTU problem. This was not a bug at all, per se, but the default value in the Lidgren library at that time was high enough that it would cause problems with a super tiny minority of players and network card/router combos.

Fortunately, I was able to set this via a simple property in AI War, to override the Lidgren library defaults, and the user's problem vanished. Voila! I had contacted Michal Lidgren again when this specific problem came up, since I'd been through a ton of debugging steps with the player and had videos of what the network was doing, and Michael had had some more good suggestions that helped lead to the discovery of the MTU issue. So I contacted him again to let him know what the player had figured out and what I had implemented as an override in my program, and suggested that he consider lowering the default MTU in his library. He agreed, and that was another problem solved.

Conclusion
It's been around 5 months now, during which AI War has had it's playerbase grow 400%, with no more issues since those two. Additionally, those two were really unusual and outside the bounds of even what most games would require in terms of load spikes (AI War is quite hefty on the network when it comes to moving lots of units or doing a full sync), and really they were less issues with the Lidgren library, and just unfortunate confluences with hardware that was nonstandard in some way, we basically determined in the end.

In other words, the Lidgren network library has been rock solid since I implemented it into a post-release beta version of the game, with the only two "issues" relating to it not really being issues with it directly, but with network hardware under it. The reason that I related those issues at all was because I think it illustrates the character and devotion of Michael Lidgren, as he helped to solve both of them despite suspecting that they were not really problems with his library from the get-go.

The last thing I want is for this post to result in a slew of simple help requests to Michael, so don't take this to mean he's going to help you set up networking or learn the basics of what is going on with how to use his library. I made sure not to bother him until I had collected a ton of data that I thought he was the only one who could reasonably interpret, about really specific complex issues that I'd already spent significant time trying to debug on my own. I'm pointing out his devotion because for any team that is worried they might implement the Lidgren library and then just be stuck if they discover some sort of rare but fatal bug (of which I have seen none, anyway), they can rest easy that the creator of the library is very much on the ball and is interested in making sure his library is rock solid. He's not a tutor or a guide, and I wouldn't expect him to give out a ton of free support (he's giving this out for free, come on), but it's also not one of those headless, abandoned projects that no one cares about or updates anymore.

For any team working in C# and looking for a UDP networking library, I can't recommend the Lidgren one enough. It's been rock solid for a demanding game like AI War, the creator stands behind the library, and it's small and efficient -- and open source, if you need to make changes of your own. Given all of the various sample projects he includes with it, you can probably get something up and running in an afternoon, or at least a day or two, as well. This is precisely why I've felt so bad for not making this blog post before now, because there are few (free, nonetheless) products which I can recommend so wholeheartedly and unequivocally.

Fanboyism And The Cycle Of Perceived Inferiority

I'm not known for being brief, but I'll try to keep it as short as possible for this post. Fact is, I have a ton of work I should be doing on Tidalis, but I was struck by inspiration today after watching the various shows of the Penny Arcade TV Show, which I hadn't managed to see until recently.

Some Of My Own Fanboyism
I love me some Penny Arcade, I've got all their books and have read most of their archives more than once, and even have three or four of their shirts, but for some reason I'd been putting off their TV show as being something I wouldn't like. Instead, when I finally got around to watching it, I discovered an insightful look into the work life of a company full of interesting people. It's rather like what some of the later anthologies of Bill Watterson and Gary Larson provided: insight into creative talents that fascinate me. Or the same reason that I enjoyed the two Michael J. Fox memoirs so much.

Sounds like I'm a real voyeur when you put it all together like that, right? I'm not, or at least I don't think I am. I'm not into celebrity gossip or whatever else. My own curiosity is mostly limited to a few creative individuals over a span of decades, and I'm mostly interested in their work, how they accomplish it, how their work affected them, and their outlook on life based on doing some sort of job that has impacted me in some way.

We're All Just People
This is a fact most people know, but few people seem to really believe. We're all just people, every last one of us on this planet. President Obama is just a guy who gets up in the morning and does a very difficult, very important job. Shigeru Miyamoto is just a guy who makes video games, and has been doing so for a long time. John Williams is just a guy who writes film scores. And, frankly, Einstein was just a guy that came up with lot of important ideas, worked really hard, and turned those ideas to a few practical applications.

This is not an attempt to minimize any of those people. On the contrary, I hold them all in the highest esteem. They are visionaries who do exceptional work, and have made notable contributions to the world in their lifetimes. What they are not, is mythical. These are just folks that have a lot of attention focused on them, for various reasons -- they are not, well, unicorns.

This is something that everybody knows, but it can be so hard to believe. I think it really sank in for me when I was in high school and had the chance to speak to Orson Scott Card for about 10 minutes at a library fund raiser. Lately I've come to realize that he holds a number of views that I very much disagree with, but that doesn't detract from the fact that he wrote what I consider the two very best books, ever. And yet while I was standing there talking to him, I was struck by just how ordinary he was; he had written these amazing books, but he was still just a guy, and once we were done talking he got in his car and made the drive back to Greensboro to be with his wife and kids.

Fanboyism Is Nonlinear And Relative
What I fully realized only today, while watching the PA TV show, is that Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins feel inferior. They were amazed that the guys at Naughty Dog thought it was cool to be in a Penny Arcade (PA) strip. And Mike, for years, has commented in the "braying and neighing" section of their news post on how he feels his art is inferior and derivative to the comic book artists that he particularly admires.

But it gets better: thinking back to Bill Watterson, I can remember that he definitely seemed to have at least a bit of an inferiority complex regarding much older comic strips (Peanuts and Pogo, mainly), and Gary Larson was in awe of the scientists that he was depicting in many of his strips. When he did a strip about Jane Goodall, there was a minor misunderstanding with some of her staff, and to make a long story short Larson and his wife went out to spend a bit of time with Goodall at her preserve. I think that each was a bit intrigued with the other, reading between the lines of Larson's account of the events.

The oddest thing is how this cycle of fanboyism is not linear. Goodall and Larson can be impressed with one another. The PA guys can be impressed with staff from a game developer, while I'm impressed with PA and yet likely to casually know someone from a game developer. I don't happen to know anyone from Naughty Dog, but I know enough people from companies like them that I wouldn't be at all starstruck. Seeing Gabe Newell's name on Arcen's Steam contract was a bit of a thrill for me, but come on... it's Gabe Newell!

See what I mean? This whole fanboyism thing, and why we humans tend to feel this way, is very mysterious and unpredictable. But I'm not done yet (predictably, this post has turned longer than I meant it to).

"Fame" Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
Well, first off, the obvious examples: Gabe Newell, or Mike and Jerry from Penny Arcade. I'd be a bit shaky talking to any of these folks, at least at first, as would maybe a few million other people. Generously, let's say 50 million. And then to everyone else out of the world's 6 billion inhabitants, to meet these guys would be utterly ordinary, possibly even boring.

Kind of puts things in perspective a bit. Let's take a more famous example, like for instance Tom Hanks or Brad Pitt. Either one of them probably has at least (I imagine) a billion or two people who would be nervous upon meeting them. The reaction of the rest of the billions of people on the planet would be: nothing. Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt... they're just guys. Maybe unusually funny, maybe unusually good-looking, but still just guys. There are funny and good-looking guys all over the place, though. That's less notable than people might assume.

Few People Seem To Feel Famous
Looking back at Mike and Jerry from PA again, Jerry made a comment that I found pretty fascinating: that he's not really famous, he's just "Internet famous." In other words, he doesn't feel famous at all, and the fact that a lot of people know who he is (and want autographs, come PAX), doesn't really change his perception of himself. He knows he's well-known, but Mike mentioned that both of them felt strange signing autographs until well into their careers.

In the Michael J. Fox memoirs, Fox talks about how his own super-stardom didn't really feel real for years. He was on the cover of multiple magazines in every US newsstand for a few years there, but he still felt odd when meeting other celebrities and expected them not to know he was. Of course they did. He was tremendously famous at that point. But that's still how he felt, and I don't think that he was unusually insecure.

Most Famous People Are Less Famous Than You Think
People overestimate the fame of everyone. Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks? I'm sure there are plenty of people who imagine those two are known to every last person on the planet. And yet there are plenty of people who don't watch TV or movies, or don't watch American TV or movies. Even with the most-famous examples I can think of, we're overestimating.

Apparently we do that. When I was in 8th grade, there was a new comic strip that came out in the local paper, called I Need Help. Do you remember it? I thought it was really funny, and sent the creator, Vic Lee, a snail-mail letter. That was one of the few times I ever sent fan mail, and apparently it made a huge impression. I don't think Vic had gotten much yet, and so he sent not only a lengthy response that was as witty and funny as it was informative, but also a signed copy of his first book (three weeks before it hit stores), despite the fact that I'd asked for no such thing. He also included his AOL handle, and we wound up chatting via instant messenger about a variety of things (that wasn't a taboo thing for a grown man to do back then, stop frowning -- he was just connecting with a fan that was excited about his work).

Anyway, the point is that I'd wrongly assumed that Vic Lee was as famous as Bill Watterson, who was the only other author I'd ever sent fan mail to (I got a note back from Watterson's publisher saying he doesn't accept fan mail). Anyway, if Watterson doesn't feel famous (and I'm pretty sure he doesn't), Vic Lee really didn't feel like he was famous. Yet he had a nationally syndicated cartoon that a lot of people felt was a promising new strip. He had a book that was in stores. What else was needed to make him famous?

Fanboyism Is A Dangerous Thing
Fanboyism is dangerous because it leads people to have unreasonable expectations. When I sent Bill Watterson a letter, I expected a response. It was a punch in the gut what actually happened, but it also wasn't Watterson's fault. A lot more people wanted to send him mail than he could reasonably reply to, and so he just didn't accept any mail whatsoever. I think that's why a lot of game developers also hide behind PR departments and private email addresses. It isn't that they don't want to talk to fans: it's that they need a buffer from the raging fanboyism (or fanboyism's inverse) that is pointed at them at any given time.

In the end it doesn't matter what anyone says, or what we intellectually understand. I still want to hear back from Jerry Holkins at some point. I'd like to know what he thinks about AI War, which he might love or he might be indifferent to. I'm mildly jealous of both Cliff Harris and Vic Davis, because "Tycho" played their games and raved about how good they are. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking "why not AI War?" Thankfully, I have a daily reminder of why I shouldn't: there are enough folks who get mildly sulky and resentful when I don't have time to respond in detail to their communiques.

I have it easy at Arcen at the moment compared to what someone famous has to deal with, but it's already at the point where I could spend all day, every day, just responding to posts on the forums and still never catch up. My hope is that, perhaps, anyone who is starting to turn resentful can be referred to this post for an explanation. I still respond to about 50+ messages per day, but that no longer covers anywhere near responding to everyone. With luck, as Arcen grows I won't piss too many people off, and I'll keep my sanity, too. With luck.

Lastly: I Am Not Famous
This heading is a pretty obvious statement. I don't think I'm famous. Most people that I meet don't think I'm famous. In fact, I'm a bit embarrassed to tell strangers that I'm a game developer because they've never heard of my work.

And yet there are still people out there who, when sending me fan mail, clearly think I'm famous. It's all over the way they write, the exact same patterns of how I wrote to Vic Lee. It took me a while to realize what was going on, honestly, and so I have always simply responded like I would to anyone who gives me a compliment: saying thanks, making whatever comments are appropriate, and so on.

Fortunately, that response seems pretty appropriate, so I'm sticking with it. Better than getting a swelled head. Generously, maybe fifty thousand people think I'm some sort of super mild case of famous. Maybe half a million people have even heard of my games, and most of them still have no idea who I personally am. Most people who meet me from the forums or this blog seem to accept that I'm a regular guy, for which I am grateful.

This whole phenomenon is interesting to me, though. As a kid I thought that there was a very clear line differentiating the mythical famous people from the rest of us. I don't know when everything got so murky. But evidence suggests that's how it's always been.

Complexity for the sake of complexity.

Recently an IGF judge accused me of seemingly adding "complexity for the sake of complexity" to AI War. Naturally I disagree with him/her, but I think that it does raise some interesting design questions that are very much worth exploring. So here we are.

The Merits of Simplicity
First of all, let's talk about simplicity. Simplicity is a good thing in general, I think that most people agree. Most indie games that are successful are so because they are simple and have an immediate hook (AI War being one of the few that is both successful and more complex than your average AAA game. Also see: Dwarf Fortress, among a handful of others). Even AAA games have been going through a simplification process for years, partly in an attempt to simply improve usability in general and partly in an attempt to draw a larger audience. Both laudable goals, in general.

Nintendo has always made fairly usable games, in that their surface complexity is fairly low, but their games have become increasingly usable over time. There are fewer hard-stop puzzles in Zelda games nowadays, there is overall a lower difficulty to newer Mario games (or concessions such as more-frequent saves or save-anywhere compared to older games). These are positive trends, and I support them. In fact, certain upcoming of Arcen's own titles -- our upcoming casual puzzle game, and our tower defense game A Valley Without Wind -- are the sort of games that this very same IGF judge would probably approve of in terms of simplicity. For a great example of how a simple game can have amazing depth, see PixelJunk Monsters on the PS3 -- that's the sort of depth that IGF and the industry at large generally would approve of, and it's the sort of game that, overall, I prefer to play myself.

Why Complexity, Then?
So if simplicity is the bee's knees, all games should strive for that sort of design, right? Wrong. Very wrong, in fact. That's like saying that, because Mario Kart is so popular and accessible with its blue shells and its rubberband AI, hardcore racing sims should use the same sort of design. Gran Turismo fans are having heart attacks about now, let alone fans of the even more hardcore racing sims.

Now: I picked the above genre for a reason. Specifically, I love Mario Kart and I really don't like hardcore racing sims. I find them, as a genre, obtuse, too difficult to use, and all around un-fun. In other words, if I was to review one, it would get very low marks from me because I'd simply not be able to appreciate it. Luckily I'm not a reviewer, so that particular difficult situation is not mine to work out a solution to -- I don't personally like those games, but I can understand why others love them in an intellectual sense. But this post isn't about reviewers, anyway -- it's about game design.

I could list a lot of other major games with prohibitive complexity:

- Sim City, despite becoming more accessible over the years, is still very daunting in most respects. Just the basics of the various residential/commercial/industrial zones and water/electricity/fire/school supplies are enough to blow many people's minds, I think.

- Street Fighter IV (or any other fighting game) -- aside from people really into that genre, what most people do is spam punches or kicks, mash buttons until something good happens, and then lose interest because the game doesn't seem very deep.

- Demon's Souls I've written about in the past under the guise of talking about difficulty, but difficulty is also an expression of complexity in this sense, as is the case with Street Fighter IV. A lot of people give up on Demon's Souls due to it being "cheap" or something similar (just look on forums), and completely miss the wonderful experience that is there.

- Any online First Person Shooter game is complex in its own way -- just try logging into a random server, and you'll get shot pretty instantly if you don't know what you're doing. You not only have to be great with the mouse/keyboard (or dual analog sticks), you also need to learn the ins and outs of each map, weapon, class, and all the attendant strategies. Even with tutorials and more than a dozen hours of flight time in Warhawk, I don't last more than 30-60 seconds in the air in one of those vaunted aerial death machines (and that's considered pretty much normal). Any game where you "normally" die every 30-60 seconds if you are good has a pretty steep learning curve.

Clearly, without complexity, all of these games could not exist in anything resembling their current form. But that's a shallow answer. Many of these games have simpler modes or a way that even novices can enjoy them without pain and hours of time investment (see: offline mode/bots for FPSes, button-mashing for SFIV, "just messing around" in Sim City). Even the most complex of these has less surface complexity than, for instance, AI War or Dwarf Fortress (well, Sim City has perhaps a similar amount of surface complexity, actually -- same as flight sims, various other city builders after their game-long tutorials are over, etc).

Why Have Very Complex Games?
The argument that "X games that are popular couldn't exist without high complexity" is a pretty weak argument, really. Games are more than the sum of their parts, and it could be the case that those other games are popular in spite of their complexity, after all. In other words, maybe they would be even more popular if they were simpler -- sounds logical right? And in many cases that is perhaps true.

But, in the interest of designing with intent (also known as "knowing what you are doing"), let's assume that there is a reason the element of complexity is in all of these games. So what is that reason? I posit that, at a basic level, the reason is the same in all of the examples I have given. The reason is simple: to better simulate some aspect of the real world, or something resembling the real world. Let's take a look at these games again, through that lens:

- Sim City is complex because being a mayor + city planner is complex, and that's a subject that interests certain people. In other words, if I like Sim City (and I do, even if I'm not expert at it), it's because I'm interested in the topic at hand. And at some point, if I'm interested in that topic, I hit a point where I say "well, Los Angeles has X feature in its city, and I'd like to make a simulated city that explores that." Sim City is so complex that you can probably do so. You can make realistic, believable hamlets, metropolises, and so forth.

Sim City is interesting as a semi-instructional intellectual exercise, and as a "game" insofar as you get to come up with creative ideas and then try to realize them through the game engine. It's fun to see your ideas work, or learn why they don't work. It's fun to learn the game system and rules, which overall so closely mimic real cities. Of course, if the subject matter doesn't interest you or you don't inherently have a draw towards complex simulations, there is no enjoyment there for you. It will be frustrating, obtuse, slow, and boring. And that's okay -- lots of people like Sim City, but it isn't for everyone.

- Street Fighter IV is complex with its button presses in order to better simulate (very fantastical) fighting. Have you ever taken a martial art? In most of them there are a ton, a ton, of moves. Timing is critical, and you must remember the sequences of motions to each one, and so forth. Fighting games mimic this sort of thing through button combos that have many of the same attributes as their real-world counterparts: critical timing, sequences of motions (button presses), and so on. For fighting game purists, I think there is not a point where they will complain that their character has too many possible moves -- they will delight in being able to pull off ridiculously complex combos, because it shows their mastery of the virtual martial art they are practicing.

For those not very much into the fighting game genre (which mostly includes me), there is just a lot of button-pressing going on, and it all seems pretty random and shallow until you see some real experts play the game. Same as with real martial arts, non-experts tend to just flail around a lot and imagine that this will have results on par with what the experts can do. The experts, in both cases, delight in the knowledge that this is, in fact, not true.

- Demon's Souls, again, is something I wrote about at great length in the past, so I won't reiterate all that here. The short version is that the game is hard and nuanced in order to more accurately simulate the act of exploring hostile dungeons. It generates fear, and a genuine sense of place and exhaustion and a variety of other things like no other game I've played. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to really be the hero in any fantasy tale -- I mean be them, in a very real and mortal sense -- then this is the game for you. But you also have to have a certain amount of patience and skill to go with that true interest in the subject matter. People looking for a casual, unpremeditated experience need not apply.

- For the online first person shooters, it's all one big hierarchy of skill -- one big massive paintball game or virtual battle. I've been quite taken by these in the past, and am quite adept at them, so it's easy for me to look at an FPS game and decide if I think it is interesting for online play or not. The good FPS games for online play tend to have maps with more complexity, so that there are more possible decisions to make and more potential standoff locations. Maps that are too small, or too similar to past FPS games, tend to generate conflicts that are wholly predictable and thus boring.

All of the other aspects of an FPS game -- the various guns, the various classes, the meta-game rules for health and pickups and all that stuff -- all augment the basic skills required for FPS that have been around since Quake or before. Weapons that have strange and unusual powers are popular because they inject all sorts of subtle new strategies (assuming they are well-balanced), which is something that experts in a given genre tend to crave.

Subject Complexity Vs. Representation Fidelity
So, what are the common attributes of why these very complex games are the way they are? In all of these cases, there are one of two drivers: complexity of the subject matter or fidelity of representing that subject matter.

- SimCity is trying to simulate something that is extremely complex with a low degree of fidelity. You don't have to sign paperwork, hire contractors, or go through all the democracy and bureaucratic aspects of being a real mayor -- that takes a huge staff, and is a fulltime job. SimCity is a convincing approximation, as complex as it needs to be to be fun.

- Street Fighter IV is simulating something very complex with a moderate degree of fidelity. Real martial arts take a lifetime to learn, and include both mental and physical training. Fighting games include physical training only in terms of reflexes and hand-eye coordination with the controller, and the rest is mental training.

- Demon's Souls is simulating something that is moderately complex with a very high degree of fidelity, as far as games go. Dungeon-hunting is not simple, but neither does it take the sort of training that advanced martial arts in the eastern style requires (I contend). It's more about general physical fitness, awareness, quick-thinking, and bravery. Demon's Souls requires all but the first from the player.

- Online first person shooters simulate something that is moderately complex with a moderate degree of fidelity. The physics and ballistics are simplified, as are many other aspects of what gun warfare is really all about, but the cutthroat nature and "you can die at any time" aspects of gun warfare are right on. They tend to do a better job of simulating the adrenaline and furor of full-out modern combat than they do of simulating the actual combat itself. But that varies from game to game.

Expert Players Tend To Want Complexity
Genre plays a huge role in the sort of complexity that comes in games like the above. Sim City was groundbreaking for its time, but there were certain simpler precursors (which I can't name off the top of my head) which at least made the idea of a city simulation not entirely unfathomable. Don't get me wrong -- Sid Meier was years ahead of his time and a visionary, I'm sure, but it's not like he handed Street Fighter IV to people who had only ever seen Pong.

In the case of all of these other games, they are late entries in extremely well-established genres. They are banking on players having a certain amount of expertise in the genre as a whole, and their value is in adding a twist or extension onto the genre. Red Orchestra added realistic ballistics; Counter-Strike added strong team play; Half Life added a greater sense of immersion; Unreal Tournament added new game modes, a huge amount of fluidity, and the translocator.

Expert FPS players have played at least one of these games, or another FPS game that was influenced in part by one or more of them. So what does an expert FPS player want? More. I want more guns, or more players, or something new to do, or more maps, more variety, more types of vehicles, more game modes, more actions or specials or weapon slots... just, in general, more. In other words, I have played certain games and done everything I can with them. I had a really great time. Now I want something that is the same, but different. Something that includes everything that I liked about the other game(s) if possible, and which adds a bunch of new stuff to keep me occupied.

This is a trend that, in the end, leads to very complex games for a very hardcore audience. The counter-trend to this is then trying to make other games that are More in terms of graphics and production values, but which are at least somewhat simpler in gameplay. Thus those sorts of games are better able to draw in the hardcore and the less-so alike.

In the case of Sim City sequels, what do they advertise? More complexity, essentially, alongside better graphics (more complexity there, too). They have more buildings, more things you can do, more options, bigger maps, maps next to other maps in whole regions, more special events and special buildings you can put in your cities. In other words: I played an older Sim City, probably didn't do everything possible with it, but did everything that was fun for me personally. Now I want more to do.

Street Fighter IV and Demon's Souls also have lineages that you can trace, and which they expand on for similar reasons. Expert players play games in genres that they like, and expect each game to offer them more than did the one before it. They want there to be more to do than ever before, and they also want to feel like they are more a part of the world than they did in the past.

There are a number of popular variants on even games as old as Chess -- Speed Chess, Bughouse, etc -- and they are (surprise) more complex in some way than the base game itself, in that they add more rules and/or constraints, and are only fit for players who are already pretty good at Chess. The fact that games trend towards complexity is not limited to video games -- look at Magic: The Gathering (which is always getting more complex), or Descent: Journeys in the Dark (which gets more complex with each expansion, and which is itself a more complex take on older games such as Hero Quest).

Complex Simulation, Simpler Interface
One other counter-trend to the above is that of interface. In other words, interfaces for games are universally becoming simpler and easier to use, while the underlying games themselves are often becoming more complex.

Sim City 4's interface is easier to use than that of Sim City 1, although to new players it might not feel as such because the simulation of Sim City 4 is so very much more complex than the original. All that extra complexity has to manifest itself somehow, and that makes the sheer volume and depth of the menus more overwhelming to newbies, even if the menus are more sensibly laid out and better designed and more relevant.

In Real Time Strategy Games (shifting gears a bit here), there have been a similar huge, huge number of interface improvements over the years. Things like dynamic camera zoom, build queue looping, streamlined economies, better minimaps, various quick-menus and context-sensitive displays are commonplace now, and it's hard to go back to older games that didn't have this sort of thing. They can seem... archaic, by comparison. In the current market, you wind up with beginner-friendly RTS games, RTS games that are aimed at beginners and experts alike, and a few that are aimed solely at the true grognards. All of these tend to have streamlined interfaces, but the apparent complexity of the interface increases with the games that have a more complex underlying simulation.

Complexity and AI War
So all of this brings us back to my own game. I've pretty much made my case already -- I think it's now pretty obvious why I or any other game designer might make a game that is complex: we're designing for expert players (either those who are already experts, or those who are motivated to go from complete newbie to expert through one game engine). In the case of AI War, my logic is this: there are already a lot of very accessible, fairly easy RTS games out there. Those games are also beautiful to behold in graphics, and as an indie there is not much I can do to compete with that. Plus, as an indie, there has to be a secondary motivation for any project: I have to want to make it, for reasons other than profit.

I'm an expert strategy player, in terms of humans vs. AI opponents. I don't play pvp much at all, but in terms of AI opponents I can trounce the best AI of a dozen or so RTS games -- or could when I was in practice with each game, anyway, which is why I moved away from each game to the next. The other problem was that all of these other games, despite their polish and accessibility, were starting to become something of a blur to me. If you play enough FPS games, you start seeing the same sort of problem: no matter how many maps are added, no matter how many gun variants, etc, they all start feeling the same. Hence you get wild departures with realistic ballistics, co-op against zombies, etc.

In the case of RTS, what I wanted the most was a better, more interesting AI. But in order for an AI to be good, what does that even mean? That means it has to be inventive, and do the unexpected -- for the AI to be creative as a human opponent would be, basically. In a game with relatively few mechanics and pieces, there is less room for creativity. How creative is Mario Kart versus Sim City, for example? Sim City is so complex that you can really express yourself an a huge variety of ways. In AI War, not only do players need to be able to express themselves convincingly, but the AI does as well. This requires options -- a very wide decision space, in other words. So AI War got complex... and then more complex... and still more complex. And the AI turned out to be stellar partly because of all that complexity. A simpler RTS game could not use my style of AI with as much success.

The other issue, that of all RTS games starting to blend together, was something that was also addressed by complexity. Having a very wide array of units that interact in very different ways makes for a different feel to the game in the same way that the realistic ballistics makes Red Orchestra feel different: there are always more factors to consider than you can really consider, like in real life, but expert players are better at reading the subtle signs and acting accordingly. In AI War, having vastly larger unit counts, much-extended game times, and a huge variety of AI types and map types are all responses to the same symptom: blandness. Larger maps in an FPS game, with more players, leads to a very different style of play. So too, here.

Of course, AI War suffers from the same interface challenge that Sim City 4 does -- the interface in AI War is hugely refined, both in terms of innovations that it includes itself and all the cumulative evolutions of genre standards over the last 20 years -- but because, like Sim City 4, it has more to convey than its predecessors, it can seem worse to some players; most specifically those not as attuned to the genre, or at least AI War. In terms of the expert players of both Sim City 4 and AI War, the reaction is much more favorable in both cases (so far as I know about Sim City -- I certainly was much impressed, but I have not polled their player community).

In the end, what do you wind up with? An exceedingly complex game with a complex-but-streamlined UI. Something that people who have exhausted other RTS games absolutely adore, but which people who aren't into the subject matter are more than a bit mystified by (either feeling like it is too complex to be fun -- ala hardcore racing sims -- or feeling like it is largely random -- ala fighting games -- or feeling like it is very generic -- ala outsider reactions to most any FPS game). You also get plenty of reviewers who prefix their reviews with "I liked/enjoyed/loved this, but only hardcore genre fans need apply."

And those reviewers are largely right, although AI War itself has captured a surprising number of non-genre addicts (or recaptured those who were lost with the newer wave of too-friendly RTS games), or who are only expert at similar genres (4X, citybuilders, etc). Turns out that there is a certain minority of people who simply like complex activities, where "complexity for the sake of complexity" makes perfect sense to them. I am not generally one of those people -- my desire for complexity in a given genre is typically based on having become expert and thus bored.

Conclusion: The Proof Is In The Pudding
In the end, despite the commercial success of AI War (for an online-only indie game, we were one of the top sellers of 2009 -- aside from being the 40th best-reviewed PC game in general), perhaps the best indicator that its formula works for some players is the commercial success of its expansion. I don't know what normal numbers are for sales of an expansion to an existing game -- do 30% of the original customers buy it? 50%? Certainly the number is somewhere south of 100%. In the case of AI War, the first expansion to the game has sold well enough in its first five days to constitute 15% of the customers of the base game, and that number is still climbing.

Given that sales of the base game also are continuing I have no idea where the final percentile will wind up at, but it's notable: the expansion adds nothing except more complexity to an already "too complex" game, and yet at least 15% of the customers of the original wanted more. To me, this says that AI War has met the needs of a specific market segment, and has done so well enough to incur repeat business (as well as a lot of positive word of mouth). Given that Dwarf Fortress, perhaps the mother of all complex and unintuitive games, has enjoyed such positive word of mouth, I think the trend is not at all isolated to AI War.

All of this is just to say that very complex games tend to be complex for a variety of good reasons, and there is an audience for that sort of thing. They have a track record of selling well within their respective niches, but people outside of that niche have a hard time understanding the appeal in every last case. But it's okay that outsiders don't understand: the people in those niches are just happy they aren't being ignored by at least some game developers. Niche markets are still markets, and are worth serving especially if you're a small company with specialty interests of your own.

What Makes For An Expert Indie Developer?

Last month, I wrote about a hypothetical funding model for indie games development. In it, I posited the question: is there such a thing as an "expert indie developer?" I quickly answered with my belief: yes, it's possible, and there are examples all around you. This post is about what makes for an expert indie developer.

Isn't "Expert Indie" An Oxymoron?
Because, after all, indie developers are sometimes seen as being inexpert by nature -- individuals or groups who are hoping to make it into the larger AAA industry by making a home-grown product of their own as something of a calling card, or as a student project, or just to get the experience. Sure, that sort of thing happens; you do see some indies go "pro" after a successful project or two, and some indies are openly trying to leverage their success in this market in order to get an "in" to the larger industry.

But. There are others of us who are indies not because we are forced to be, or because we are trying to break our way into larger-scale development. I've had some offers to at least interview at very large and respectable AAA developers, but I kindly turned them down, saying essentially "If it weren't for Arcen, that would be a great thing for me, but right now I have to see this through and this is ultimately where I'd like to stay if I can sustain the business." I've always worked in small business, and I've been the head of my projects for years, and I'm not inclined to change those things if I don't have to. Being indie also lets me work on exactly the sort of games I am most interested in, and do it my way, on my schedule. Indie is simply a perfect fit for me.

Another example is 2D Boy, who created World of Goo. You probably already know all about them, but the basic gist is that they started out in the AAA space, and then "went indie" to use their industry-begotten expertise to make projects that they couldn't have created at their previous employers. And thus you get a game like World of Goo. There are countless other examples of small studios being set up by ex-AAA-industry folks.

Okay... So What Makes For An "Expert" Indie?
In many respects, the same things that make any small company able to be an expert software developer. And the same things, overall, that make large companies good software developers. The studio has to know how to make products that people want, know how to position them within their market, and then also know how to support those products. That's a little vague and obvious, though. Here are some specific indicators that I would look for if I were going to choose between indie development studios to invest money in:

Design
1. Does the studio know how to formulate a vision and then stick to the broad outline of it -- while maintaining creative awareness and freedom during the process? In other words, do they (via upfront planning or iterative methods) make products that are sensibly cohesive, or are they a mess of unrelated ideas of various quality?

2. Does the studio know how to evaluate their own ideas? Do they often keep ideas that one or more team members simply love, but that don't work in practice -- despite evidence that the idea should be reworked or scrapped? (This sort of self indulgence is unacceptable in any commercial product, and highlights the need to Kill Your Darlings).

3. Conversely, does the studio know how to properly polish their product? Do they know how to go beyond the basics of simply getting the game functional into making it really feel as if it is professional -- whether the game is 2D or 3D, no matter how good or bad the production values are, some games just "feel right" and others feel shaky or worse. This problem is not limited to the indie arena, of course. Does the team know how to leave enough time to get this final polish done as it needs to be, or do they keep adding new, unpolished features right up until the end?

4. Does the studio know the target genre(s) they are working in? Are they producing designs that are in some way viable in that space. Innovation is great, but there are limits. And on the other side of it, if the studio is just interested in making indie clones of successful AAA games, that isn't very investment-worthy, either. They need to be doing something new, preferably pushing at least one new concept in some aspect of their game, but the game needs to be recognizable to players in some form or fashion to get much traction.

Marketing
1. Does the studio make strong efforts to market their games and get them in front of a larger audience? Whether or not they are successful in this endeavor is irrelevant -- great games get ignored all the time, indie and AAA both. What is important is if they are attacking the marketing problem with as much interest and intent as they did the creation of the game itself, or whether they are just assuming that success will find them on its own (it won't). The type of marketing efforts vary widely, and that's great and expected, but every expert indie studio should be making some sort of effort here.

2. Does the studio know how to build and nurture a player community? Do they foster a forums or similar where there is a reasonably friendly (as far as gamers go in the specific genre) group of players? For some genres, most notably casual, this is much less relevant. But, the main question is if there is an elite clique of expert players that are semi-endorsed by the studio and who are arrogantly driving out newcomers. Most successful indie games seem to have some sort of community, or at least some sort of public following of blog commenters, youtube commenters, or something, where there is more than just caustic toxins from the experts.

Support
1. Does the studio respond promptly, politely, and competently to support questions that arise for past released products? Do they know the answers to common questions, or are players largely left frustrated and having to find answers (or give up) on their own?

2. Does the studio have plans in place for how to support prior released products while developing new ones? Is time budgeted, for example, for making sure that at least severe bugs (but preferably everything that isn't completely trivial) are fixed within a reasonable amount of time?

Project Management
1. Does the studio know how to properly budget time? Do they spend inordinate amounts of time on low-value activities, or are they constantly reassessing their own time usage and making the best of the limited time that they do have? Specifically, are they spending a lot of time on "nice to have" features that they personally want, at the detriment of a reasonable schedule or more core aspects of the game design?

2. Does the studio know how to limit scope? At the start of a project it is great to have a ton of ideas, but past some certain point some ideas must be cut for reasons of time -- otherwise, projects tend to spiral on indefinitely without really becoming materially better from features added past some certain stage. Is there a project manager at the studio who is constantly evaluating features for potential cutting or simplification for the overall good of the project?

3. Does the studio have a method in place for evaluating their own products based on objective feedback, alpha/beta testers, or similar? In other words, do they work toward theoretical end goals based on assumed qualities of their current work? Or, do they have some method for validating that their assumptions about their current work are correct, and that their theoretical end state is in any way valid?

This Is A Living List
This list was last revised on 1/17/2010, but I may revise it some from time to time in the future. It isn't a complete list and probably never will be, and some of the items are subjective or can be bent or broken by certain studios that are nonetheless quite expert. But, in general this list is meant to be a good guide for at least defining what an "expert indie developer" would even mean.

To sum that whole thing up as briefly as I possibly can: An expert indie developer knows what they are doing, approaches their work in a professional and eyes-open manner, doesn't neglect the business side of their work or their customers post-launch, and ultimately knows how to build products that some customer segment is interested in. That's an expert indie developer, and you can find them all over the place if you look.