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.

Fire Sales In Digital Distribution

Right now there's a huge sale going on at Steam, with many games (including AI War) being on large discount. In a recent comment thread over at Rock, Paper Shotgun, some people were wondering how these sorts of sales affect the profits made by indie developers. I commented there, but thought I'd also turn this into a blog post.

Like Jonathan Blow, I can also confirm that the percentage cut is the same with these sorts of deals, with Steam and elsewhere. Digital distributors take a percentage of net profits, so discounts are taken off before that. So, in the case of Steam, that would meant that then the developer/publisher would make less on discounted sales, but so does Steam. However, the loss on any individual sale is generally greatly offset by the huge influx of sales in general that these sort of discounts bring.

With any digital distributor, having a sale on a given game is going to increase its sales volume 10x or more in my experience with AI War. Sometimes as much as 50x, depending on the day. For AI War, one of these sales can make us several month's worth of income from a distributor in a single week. That's why you see this sort of thing so commonly, and why it is becoming even more commonplace. I think that these sorts of sales tend to incite people to buy who might otherwise not, so it's not even really seeming to cut into longer-term sales at all. On the contrary, on the wake of any given sale, I tend to see a ripple effect of higher sales volume even for a week or so after the game returns to full price.

I assume that's people trying the demo while it's on sale, then not buying it in time, then deciding they like it well enough to buy it at full price. Or something along those lines, anyway -- those discounts are essentially marketing costs, is one way you could look at it, given the increase in visibility these sorts of sales bring.

Anyway, in my opinion there's no reason you should feel guilty at all for partaking of buying a game on discount, you're still helping the developer/publisher. If you really want the max money to go to them, you can always wait and buy it at full price, I guess, but I'm always happy to see new customers no matter when they buy it; if I wasn't cool with the discounted price, I wouldn't sell it at that discount, you know?

Encapsulated Businesses For Indie Development

Justin Vincent recently wrote a blog post about what he calls the Venture Matrix, which is basically a way to create a huge company out of a lot of little companies-- or, alternatively/additionally to make it easier to launch successful startup companies. It's a long article, and it starts out with a lot of semi-tangential discussion about centralized necessities, but if you look down at the heading The Birth of Companies and on, there are some really novel ideas there; or rather, he's cleverly applied some best practices from good programming to real world business, and that in itself is quite novel.

The article is well worth a read, and it flows well with a lot of things I have been thinking about recently. I've always worked for small businesses, but often I've had very large businesses as key clients, and so I've had an opportunity to see it from both ends. I much prefer being in a small company because of the autonomy and room for creativity that provides (and the increased possibility of returns if the business does very well), but there's a key aspect often missing from small companies: security. That in itself can be a good thing, because it can prompt the business to be proactive where larger companies might be lethargic. But...

The Inevitable Challenge Of Traditional Small Businesses
On the other hand, lack of funding can lead to lack of certain expertises among available staff. In the past I've been in a company where we had excellent programming staff and support staff, but sales staff that couldn't sell the product, and a very novice marketing staff. That business actually did okay based on word of mouth alone, because clients liked our product and told other clients, but how much better might things have gone if we'd had really excellent sales and marketing staff to match our excellent product?

Or, to cite another example, I once did some contract work for a small company that had developed the world's smallest (at the time) cell phone motherboard. It was about half the size of anything else on the market, back when cell phones were much larger; the possibility of such a motherboard was staggering, because it would have allowed for phones the size of today's devices about 3 years before those actually hit stores. Unfortunately, the company was completely unsuccessful in selling their work because they didn't have the needed expertise on the business development end of things.

I love Justin Vincent's talk about encapsulation in his article, because that's exactly what is needed for companies like these. A lot of startups are product-focused, and they know how to make a product that is really unique and useful inside some niche. But unless they just happen to be lucky enough to have staff who are really ace at sales, marketing, and business development, that great idea is likely to languish in obscurity or at least not reach its full potential.

AI War, for example, has done extremely well for an indie game and is still seeing a significantly growing playerbase every month, but marketing has always been a huge challenge for us. And none of the success we have seen would have been possible without all our digital distribution partners, and our upcoming retail partners. It's still quite a challenge to launch a product even in the digital marketplace, and I had to essentially work two jobs for years and luck into the right partnerships in order to make it happen.

My Ideal Approach For Indie Development
I have been thinking for the last few months about how the ideal setup for indie development would work. In other words, how to maximize output from indie developers, maximize revenue for them and their partners, and in general serve the gaming consumers the best by getting them the widest possible variety of truly quality titles at reasonable prices. Here's the ecosystem I imagine:

Indie Development Company: This obviously already exists, but currently the indie developer has to do most everything -- game development, support, funding themselves, marketing, business development, and so on. In my imagined environment, the indie development company would mainly be responsible for game development and technical support/patches (basically what AAA game development companies are responsible for).

Digital and Retail Distributors: These companies also clearly already exist, and I think that they by and large serve their function admirably. The challenge for most indie developers, however, is actually getting the notice of these distributors. The challenge for these distributors is that they get so many totally crap submissions that it is hard to evaluate what is good and what is not. This is very similar to the book publishing industry, incidentally, which leads us to...

Indie Game Agents: These currently do not exist, not in the sense of the book publishing world. Certain well-connected individuals can act as agents, and in fact there are regional sales agents for retail, but they don't act as quite the career partner and liaison that you see with book author agents. More to the point, most indie developers don't even know these agents exist, and/or don't have any way to contact them. It basically requires having the right network connections, and a track record of existing success in the digital market. If you're unheard-of, then forget about it at present. So, the theoretical agents would be:

1) Available for submissions from all indies (acting as talent scouts), as with book publishing agents.

2) In exchange for an ongoing commission (10% to 15% of what the indie developer earns) but no upfront fees, will handle coordination of marketing, sales, business development, and so forth in both the digital and retail spaces. They would basically be the indie developer's business guide, advocate to business associates, and so on. Again, like book publishing agents.

3) These agents would be known and trusted by the distributors based on their past successes in finding diamonds in the rough that went on to be successful, and so if your game were to catch the eye of an agent that would be a sure-in to digital distribution at the least. These agents would be the valuable filters to the distribution pipeline, and the net effect in the short term would be to get more quality titles through. Fact is, a lot of indie developers themselves are not persistent enough or good enough at describing their work to catch the interest of distributors who have so much else to do. Right now, to get even digital distribution deals, you have to catch someone's eye at just the right time.

Advertising/Marketing Agencies: These certainly exist, but these are vendors, not partners, in almost every case. They perform a service for a fee for anyone who can pay the fee, and then their work is done. They have no stake in the success of the product (they don't even have to like the product, let alone fully understand it), and they are inaccessible to anyone who can't afford the upfront costs. In the ideal model for the indie market, these agencies would be full partners on an individual game's public image, coordinated by the game agent.

In other words, they would handle the details of advertising and marketing, as overseen by the game agent (who would also be responsible for selecting a good advertising/marketing agency), and they would not see any return on their work except a percentage of sales revenue. This could be anywhere from 5% to 10% of what the game makes in total. This is akin to having a talented in-house advertising/marketing staff, since they have a vested interest in making the products they represent quantifiably more successful.

Investment Partners: The last big problem for indies is funding. Creating a game takes quite a long while to do, and this requires money for staff salaries, contractor pay, health insurance, licensing of development tools, possibly office space (for those that aren't virtual offices), and so on. Really polished indie games are likely to cost anywhere from $200,000.00 USD to $400,000.00 USD (or more) if the staff isn't being paid a pittance upfront in hopes of later return. The idea of the investment partners is that they would be contacted by the game agent, or directly by the indie developer in a few cases, and they would provide upfront funding for projects that can demonstrate their worth.

That doesn't necessarily mean a detailed and rigid design document, given that part of the strength of an indie developer is their ability to innovate and use iterative design techniques. Rather, it's a matter of proving out the team and their ability to execute and refine solid ideas. That could be based on past products (spare-time, second-job type affairs), or based on a prototype. Some of the products an investment partner picks up will flop, as is the case with any such market, but the idea is that the investment partner is structured in such a way that even if 9 out of 10 indie projects they take on do not make a positive return, they as a company still see a positive return based on the 1 out of 10 that is a much larger success.

With the advertising/marketing partners and game agents in place, the likelihood of success only goes up. Additionally, for the savvy investment partner that invests only in indie developers with a history of past success (whether that means commercially-speaking, or in terms of potentially marketable ideas brought to fruition, or whatever the criteria is), the return is likely to be much higher. I could see several tiers of investment partners forming, with higher-percentage-taking investors that might prefer higher-risk investments, and lower-percentage-taking investors that only the "premium" indie developers with mega-hits under their belts could have access to. Arcen would likely be slotted with an investment partner somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, for instance.

What Would This Sort Of Indie Development Approach Really Change?
It would provide a way for indie developers to start small and stay small, which has many advantages as noted in Justin Vincent's article. I am dismayed that so many indie developers basically create a pet project as a way to then launch into the larger industry. Indie development shouldn't just be about launching yourself into AAA development. I started indie, and I want to finish indie, if at all possible.

What does indie really mean, anyway? It does mean smaller projects (not multi-million dollars), but also projects with a lot more creativity -- and therefore risk. It means having freedom to experiment, and less structure to the start of the development process. There is less known up front, and more discovered as you go. With expert developers, you'll get products that would never come about any other way. If you take Jonathan Blow, give him some money and some time, then stay out of his way, you can trust he'll come out with something amazing that he'd never create if he was working at someplace like EA.

Is it possible to be an expert indie developer? You bet. This subject probably deserves a post all of its own, but for now let it suffice to say that there are examples all around the industry. Even just purely from an ROI standpoint for investors and partners, I think that's something worthwhile to cultivate in a more structured way from the business side of things (let alone all of the larger creative benefits to the industry as a whole). The goal is to give the indie development business more structure and security, have encapsulated partners who are better at handling the things that your average indie developer is poor at, and then just let the indie developers do their work.

The investors and partners will of course want to keep an eye on the developers, especially the not-yet-fully-proven ones, to make sure they don't go off on a crazy tangent -- but otherwise they need to just trust that the developers are doing what they need to do to make an innovative product that people will want to buy. If a developer doesn't deliver, which occasionally one won't (these are humans we're talking about), then that developer will likely have an extremely hard time of ever getting significant funding again. So the onus is still on them to deliver a very solid product.

In the end, you wind up with a team of companies that are all focusing on what they are best at, working together to create, deliver, and market products that are superior to what one of the companies could ever have hoped to achieve alone. In terms of percentages, each might have to take a lower amount than they might otherwise prefer (this especially applies to the indie developers themselves), but given the increase this is likely to have on sales volume, the actual amount of revenue received by each party would generally be higher in the end. All of the businesses I just described in my imagined indie ecosystem should be able to be profitable, even quite profitable, if they do their respective jobs well.

And that's still with a $20 or less price point for the games, which is good for consumers. Also good for consumers: if indie developers have the time and money they need to be secure and just focus on creating amazing products, you'll see better products. That's a win for everyone.

Design Mostly Right: Co-Op In New Super Mario Bros. Wii

This post is a response to the co-op review of New Super Mario Bros. Wii on Co-Optimus. I'm a longtime fan of co-optimus, and so I found it interesting that they gave NSMBW a 2.5/5 on their co-op review, and a 4.5/5 overall. I've had the game for a few days now, and have made it through the first six worlds playing co-op with my wife. Here are my thoughts, from a design standpoint (make sure you read the co-optimus review first):

I see the points in the co-optimus review, and as a game designer I would certainly never have made the players collide with one another in a platformer about precision timing. It's like having extreme friendly fire turned on all the time.

However, that said, for lack of the "perfect" mode of co-op in a Mario game, this is certainly quite wonderful and my wife and I really enjoy it. The bubble has been used to great effect, usually as a last-ditch "save yourself" effect when one player gets too far ahead of the other, or one is about to fall off, or whatever.

The interesting thing is that I feel like the "always having friendly fire on" requires and encourages more cooperation for true success. You can go in and fight and bicker through levels, but you'll never succeed on the harder ones that way. The only way to really succeed is to pay close attention to what your teammates are doing.

Now, granted, I've only played this with two players (not 1, 3, or 4), and I imagine that with 3-4 players this would be a nightmare. But with 2 it's great. One of the most enjoyable Mario games I've played in a long time (and I've played them all), and a lot of that is because it is so hardcore-oriented along with having co-op in it.

For those who were hoping for a co-op experience that would allow for players of wildly different skill levels to play together (which would have been ideal by far), I can see why this scored a 2.5/5. For myself and my wife, this has been a 4.5/5 experience or higher, because of the co-op and the game experience in general. If the co-op had been a bit better, this would have been a 5/5, definitely.

One comment about the mushrooms being the secondary items coming out of question blocks. From my experience, that is not actually true. If all of the players are small, then yes, that's what happens. Normally in single player you would just get a single mushroom, so the extra powerup is sort of a bonus. But if there are a mix of big-or-better players and small players, you will get one good powerup per non-small player, and one mushroom per small player. If everyone is non-small, you just get good powerups. Seems sensible to me.

This game is not perfect, and part of me can really understand why co-optimus gave it a 2.5/5, but I hope that doesn't turn people away from the game who might otherwise enjoy it. It's quite good in co-op, under the right circumstances. It's that caveat there that's the cause of all the trouble.

And that, in a nutshell, is the case for getting feedback from players early and often. It could so easily have been all but perfect as a game. As it stands, I still love it, but not everyone will.