The latest in the misguided indie backlash

It’s not uncommon to feel some occasional frustration (see the annual rant session at GDC’s Indie Game Summit), but Kurt was unusually harsh in his condemnation. The article is full of quotes that paint the indie scene as an exclusive and disingenuous clique, motivated by an insular agenda, that hates the casual gamers who just play games for fun.

Kurt, in disgust, has decided to drop out of the indie community. This is a shame in itself. His game Circadia is exactly the sort of game I’d like to make someday, and he presented some interesting stuff in last year’s Experimental Gameplay Workshop. The indie community is poorer without his voice and perspective.

Several prominent indies responded to the article. I collected part of the Twitter conversation. Some of the responses were defensive or lashed out, which I imagine didn’t do much to help change minds.

We can talk about this

Kurt’s two primary complaints are that the indie community is incestuous and anti-casual:

“Now indies make games for other indies, or for awards, or for kickstarters. Every game is the next greatest game forever and ever and ever, and honestly, I find myself mostly disappointed and uninspired when I play them.”

“Then I remembered the many conversations I had with game devs who hated casual gamers, hated those who played the ‘ville games, hated people like my wife, even though only a few decades ago we were in pizza shops dumping quarters in machines while people scoffed at us telling us we we’re wasting our money.”

I’m not privy to the “many conversations” that Kurt cites, but I’ve never personally heard indies speak ill of casual gamers. I’ve heard them complain about the design practices of casual game companies (Zynga etc.), but that’s not the same thing. When someone criticizes a cigarette company, does that mean they hate smokers? (No.) There are plenty of well-regarded hardcore or niche games in the indie scene, but there are casual games there, too. I wish Kurt would stick around to help advocate for more.

As for the “incestuous” claim, Kurt has a point; indies do tend to speak well of indie games. But that’s not evidence of an exclusive cabal with selfish motives. Usually, the main reason is that indies share the same interests and are genuinely enthusiastic about the same things. (That’s why they formed a community, after all.) In other cases, they’re choosing to be more forgiving of risky, experimental, limited-budget work. And in some cases, it’s just difficult for friends to criticize each other’s work in public. (Liz Ryerson has made this point too.)

But that’s not a good excuse, and I agree that more indie-to-indie criticism would be helpful. If conducted respectfully, we could get a lot out of it. You’re allowed to have your own thoughts, and others are free to disagree with you. Personally, I think that the 8-bit aesthetic is overused, and that grindy unlock mechanics (as in, say, Ridiculous Fishing) are distasteful, though I struggle to articulate why. Maybe I’ll give it a shot soon, and I’ll hear the other side’s perspective, and we’ll all be better off for it.

So Kurt is not wholly wrong in his complaints. But he’s not wholly right, either, and his frustrations stem from problems that can be worked out. A blanket condemnation of the indie community really isn’t justified.

Don’t gloss over the good

When talking about problems in the indie community, it’s easy to forget the good that indies have done. I experienced a lot of that good firsthand.

When I was a student, just getting seriously into game design, it was the lectures by indies Jon Blow and Chris Hecker that first introduced me to the concept of exploitative game design, and ultimately led me to understand design as something more than just a craft. Along with early indie games like Audiosurf and flOw and Everyday Shooter, they were the ones that first made me think that I could build personal, ambitious, meaningful games.

When I was making my first commercial indie game, I was inspired directly by Eufloria. I posted my game’s beta on an indie game forum. By chance, the co-creator of Eufloria, Alex May, saw it and critiqued it. His insight helped me make a better game, but more importantly, the mere fact that he noticed and responded was hugely inspiring. Later, around the time I released the game, I needed business advice. Kellee Santiago and Eddy Boxerman each spoke to me for over an hour, giving personalized guidance based on their own experience. Later, when I moved to a new city, Andy Schatz took the time (during crunch!) to meet with me and help me find the local indie community.

I’m leaving out a lot of details, of supportive online conversations, meetings at conferences, talks and videos and podcasts and blogs and articles that guided and motivated me. But my point is this: these people were celebrities in my eyes, and owed me nothing, yet they treated me with respect and generosity from the beginning, even though I was just another aspiring game dev.

Then there’s the games themselves. There are too many great games to name, but the last five indie games I’ve played are Fez, Monaco, Year Walk, Cart Life, and Howling Dogs. There’s incredible variety between them in terms of mechanics, setting, tone, et cetera, and yet they’re all personal and successful in their own ways. Each one has inspired me to make better games, nudging me towards greater ambition. Even the ones that I didn’t like have taught me something.

This is all from one person’s perspective, but I’ve received so much support from the indie community that I can’t accept the picture that Kurt painted. I can’t believe that the indie community is insular, or exclusive, or disingenuous, or full of hatred.

I don’t know what Kurt saw that pushed him away, but based on what I have seen, it’s not all bad. Come back.

Since going indie about six months ago, I’ve spent some time dithering around on prototypes and side projects, working on my website and blog, and occasionally entering game jams. Although I found some success, I wasn’t satisfied with my output, and I wasn’t sure what to work on next. Noel’s question sounded like a good start for some reflection.

So then, why am I making games? Aside from some very real limitations of practicality, ethics, and motivation, I can think of six reasons. (They aren’t fully orthogonal, which, as a system designer, bugs me, but whatever.)

1. To create trojan horses for ludic joy. In other words, to show others the beauty of gameplay. I know a lot of people who don’t play games, or don’t understand what I see in them. I want to make them understand, and my best scheme is to create hardcore games for casual gamers. My game Auralux is an attempt at this, and hearing my usually-a-nongamer dad avidly discussing his strategies is hugely rewarding. This isn’t about distraction or escapism or even entertainment, but rather the innate beauty of gameplay, of the sort that Lantz and Zimmerman promote. Bringing that to the world seems like a deeply meaningful and worthwhile use of my time.

2. To explore and advance the medium of games. Discovering or demonstrating the possibilities and limits of this medium is fascinating, and it makes the game design community (including myself) more powerful. Making games at the extremes is more useful and interesting than making “just another [genre] game”.

3. To make the games I want to play. I grew up on games and cultivated a healthy crop of fantasies and wild ideas of games that didn’t yet exist. Bringing those games into existence is innately exciting, and since my own intuition is my guide, I can execute on a vision more successfully.

4. To improve my skills at making games. Sometimes I want to explore a design or technology or style that’s intriguing or useful or difficult. Actually making a game with it seems like the best way to learn.

5. To impress the people I respect. This can be paralyzing. But I already wrote a whole blog post about that.

6. To make money. You might view this as a natural practical concern, but I also mean it in a selfish way. I want to make enough money to continue a comfortable middle-class lifestyle and to securely work on my own projects for the rest of my life. I’d be happy to make enough money to sustain myself, but I’d really like to make millions and millions. A starving artist I am not.

Noel explained the problem with his initial goals like this: “I wanted to make a unique and different game, yet at the same time I wanted it to reach a huge audience. I wanted to ride the wave of financially successful iOS games, but I didn’t want to sell my soul with freemium-based games, and instead, I was going to make a “good” freemium game. I wanted to make something innovative, but I wanted to do it in just 6-9 months. I wanted it all, and I wanted it yesterday. Bad combination.”

Writing out my goals doesn’t seem to save me from the “wanting it all” issue. I apparently want to make games that appeal to everyone, do things that no other game has done, in ways that appeal to my arbitrary personal preferences, using skills that I don’t yet have, to impress a broad set of opinionated outside voices, in a way that will earn me millions of dollars. Sounds like a plan!

Laid out like this, I feel like the only way forward is to select a few of my goals to focus on. In a sense, I’ve already done this for my prototypes. One is a card game that will appeal to hardcore gamers and game designers (and me), but isn’t very innovative or widely appealing. Another is a IF game that aspires to appeal to broad audiences, but won’t impress the tastemakers or make money. My current project, Bombball, is guaranteed to make at least some money (thanks to a game jam award) and to teach me a thing or two about networked multiplayer programming, but it ultimately feels too limited to leave much of a mark otherwise.

The one idea to which I keep returning is a prototype that lacks almost any substance, but which serves as a perfect platform for my dreams and ambitions. I can see what it would look like, I can feel what it would be like to play, I know what I want to accomplish with it, but so far every bit of actual gameplay I’ve implemented has been a dismal failure. There’s no game there, and yet it’s a constant siren song.

Picking which goals to pursue seems like a classic strategic choice. Should I pick the goals that will improve my skills, leaving me equipped to make better games in the future? Should I pick the most fulfilling ones that reside within the bounds of practicality? Or the ones based around my less selfish, more noble goals? Or the ones that I would most enjoy the process of pursuing? Or should I embrace ambition, return to my amorphous dream game, and try to do it all at once?

Noel’s question is a good lens, a prompt that clarifies my issues. But it’s still up to me to provide an answer.

…You don’t want to revisit the thing. I mean, readers are always disappointed when you talk about your work. You have to say to them, ‘Look, you’re talking about work you may love … I’m talking about work that I loathe …’ It’s nothing to do with me any more. Really, it has nothing to do with me.

50 famous authors recently agreed to annotate their old works for a charity auction, as described by a recent FT Magazine article. “However unlikely it sounds, that a writer would revisit a work he or she finished decades ago and risk uncovering its errors, to say nothing of the potential agony of rereading a younger self, this is exactly what they have done.” I understand their reluctance, but I think it can go beyond the embarrassment of discovering old flaws.

In January of 2011, I released the PC version of my game Auralux. It was a minimalistic game with bare-bones features. I could think of dozens of possible improvements, but I knew the saying: works of art are never finished, only abandoned. Besides that, I knew I would want to move on to other projects. So, I picked a coherent set of features, polished the game up, released it, and tried to avoid promising anything more. That was that.

Over a year and a half later, the Android version of the game (handled by a separate company, with some light input from me) was released, and the game’s audience expanded hugely. It happened again several months later, when the iOS version came out.

For the first time since the PC launch, I was inundated with requests, complaints, and reviews from players.
To them, this was a new game. To me, it was old work that I had long since “abandoned”. I had put so much distance between myself and the game that I found myself unwilling to commit to revisiting the game. I had put a lot of effort into cutting myself off, and I had no desire to re-attach.

I actually sympathize with most of the requests and complaints that I get. At this point, I suspect I see the design flaws of the game better than anyone. For instance, the game moves too slowly early on. The difficulty labels for half the levels are wrong. At high skill levels, the game is just about exploiting flaws in the AI. That’s to say nothing about obviously missing features like rally points, multiplayer, or custom levels.

The trouble is that fixing any of these issues would call for a much deeper, much more involved return to the game. The game feels slow, but every part of it was built around that pace. The AI is dumb, but it would need to become vastly more complex to avoid player exploits. Multiplayer is missing, but it would be horribly unbalanced or stagnant if it were added without other big changes alongside it. Surgically fixing any individual design flaw in the game would first require cutting the game open. Usually, the expense and the risk of complications are too great to justify it.

But I also have to admit a bigger reason for my inaction: I already came to accept the game’s flaws as permanent. Over two years ago, when I first released Auralux, I worked hard to shape it into a coherent whole that was lovable despite its imperfections. I chose to accept it rather than “loathe” my earlier work like the author quoted above. I appreciated it just the way it was, and so (apparently) do thousands of players. It was my child, and it grew up, and I sent it out into the world. To go back and assert myself over it now, long after the fact, somehow feels wrong, profane.

That, of course, is not a widely-held view nowadays, in the age of Minimum Viable Products and constant updates and living software. The company that did the mobile port wants to put out new content consistently, adding new levels and features to keep the audience engaged. I usually agree to help, albeit with some grumbling; I recognize their practical reasoning. But every time I implement a change, even the ones that players have asked for, I feel more guilty than proud. I feel like I’m violating the game’s integrity in some way. I feel like I’m tinkering ineffectually, when the game is demanding to be either accepted as-is or replaced completely.

Sometimes I’ll respond to players’ requests by gesturing towards a hypothetical sequel. I’m not sure if that’s for their benefit or mine. If I do attempt a sequel, I could wholeheartedly address all the design flaws I see, but I don’t delude myself into thinking that I could ever reach a point of perfection. I suppose I could plan on continuous development, periodically changing the game’s design after release. But constantly alternating between building the game up and tearing it down (effectively “rereading a younger self”) sounds even more agonizing and exhausting when it’s all in public. And even if I pass the game onto others, no development process lasts forever. If I start development of any new game, it will eventually have to end the same way it did last time: recognizing its flaws and choosing to accept them. I’m not sure that I’d want it any other way.

Since then, I’ve been dealing with some light anxiety about my work and my place in the game development community. To some extent, this is totally normal; after all, I bet my life savings on my ability to succeed in a perpetually overcrowded market. But my anxiety goes beyond the usual fear of failure. I usually explain it with a term coined by Ed Catmull, President of Pixar, when he wrote about Pixar’s problems with “fresh meat”:

Successful organizations face two challenges when bringing in new people with fresh perspectives. One is well-known— the not-invented-here syndrome. The other— the awe-of-the-institution syndrome (an issue with young new hires)—is often overlooked…. The bigger issue for us has been getting young new hires to have the confidence to speak up…. We do not want people to assume that because we are successful, everything we do is right.

This is my problem. Before going indie, I idolized the celebrity game designers that gave the lectures and wrote the articles and invented the games that inspired me. I loved game design, and I loved their work, and I wanted to do what they were doing.

Now, I find myself handicapped by my idolatry. I compare myself to the people I admire, and I feel small. I see my bloopers next to their highlight reels and turn timid. Profiles of successful artists often seem to highlight a maniacal drive and an unquenchable spirit and an unshakable belief in their own greatness. My ego is healthy, but I lack that mania.

This causes some practical problems, especially when I actually interact with the people that I put on this pedestal. I read about the indie game scene constantly, and I know who the cool kids are. I’ve heard some people portray these successful indies as an insular cabal, always boosting their friends and keeping the little guy down, but (aside from being preposterous on the face of it) my experience shows the opposite. Instead of being insular and grudging, they’ve always been extremely kind and generous to me (Hi, Eddy!). And yet, when I interact with one of these scene celebrities, I feel like I’m an awkward kid trying to talk to my crush. I try too hard to get attention, overanalyze everything that they say, and constantly feel the need to self-denigrate. I take their opinions as gospel and discount my own. I fail to see myself as an equal collaborator, and so I can’t become one.

These comparisons also summon an urge to self-handicap. If I try to produce a magnum opus, and I fail, then what does that mean about me? At what point do I transform from “potential undiscovered genius” to “wannabe hack”? What will the tastemakers think of me? It feels safer to produce throwaway prototypes and design unambitious games, but that approach would ensure that I never discover my potential, whatever it may be.

The usual advice in this situation is to “fake it til you make it”: start acting as if you had confidence, and that confidence will become real. But I don’t want to “fake it” at all. Earnestness is too important if I aspire to be an artist.

In fact, I think my anxiety stems from a subtle realization that I’m already “faking it” too much. I care too much about what others think of me and too little about what I believe at heart. I focus too much on reputation and appearances and not enough on making a great game. I lose sight of true success and get fixated on its lesser rewards, and in doing so I drift further away from both.

I need to be more ambitious. Raise my standards. Genuinely try for greatness with each game, and learn to handle both triumph and disaster gracefully. The solution to my problem is to prove myself to myself.

I’m not saying that I need to drop everything and start on some new, massive project. I still have a lot to learn, prototyping is still useful, and I know that small projects can still be ambitious. But I want to speak and design more plainly, earnestly, and deeply. I want to refocus on making worthwhile games, regardless of short-term success or failure. Perhaps, with that, I can meet my role models as equals.

Aaron San Filippo is an indie game developer. More importantly, he’s a nice guy. He gives a lot back to the community, writing articles and doing interviews, and he’s always been polite and positive in Twitter or email conversation. We’d all be better off with more people like him.

He and his brother are making a game. This game is called Race The Sun, which takes the endless action of games like Cube Runner and cranks the speed up to a ridiculous degree.

More importantly, they’re making this game in all the right ways. To start with, they released a free playable alpha to get feedback from players. (That was enough to make me a fan. They nailed that feeling of speed.) Then, in a bid to avoid going free-to-play, they introduced a creative and novel indie funding scheme called Votables. Then, they revamped their game to win over the critics (“The new version comes to life… The game now has flavor, and more action. It’s a marked improvement.”).

And yet, their Kickstarter is failing.

Maybe they’ve run into the long-predicted Kickstarter Fatigue. Maybe their social network just wasn’t wide enough to get them a good early start. Maybe their game just isn’t inspiring people. Whatever the cause, I just feel bad when good people are failing to find success.

Of course, there’s still a few days left, and anybody can push the game forward towards its goal with absolutely no risk. I’m reminded of Mike Hanson’s recent comment about running his Kickstarter: ”Publicly, I tried to remain optimistic but I’ll be honest, it was hard to read so many variants of: ’I'm holding my money back until I see that it’s going to be a success.’ hitting my Twitter, Facebook and email feeds… Man, that’s something I still can’t get my head around now. Are so many people that frightened to be associated with a failure story?”

If you agree that Aaron and his brother are Doing Things Right, support their Kickstarter. If they succeed, then you’ll be rewarding the good guys and you’ll get to play a better game to boot. If they fail… well, you’ll lose nothing, but I’ll lose a bit of faith in the wisdom of the crowd.

As evidence, the article quoted some typical post-press-release Twitter snark, some of which was taken out of context, some of which was politely justified in the comments, and some of which was real (though mostly just a case of genre fatigue). All in all, this was a lot of smoke and not much fire, but it struck a nerve in enough people to fuel yet more outraged/snarky Twitter conversation.

By and large, I think that broad, aggressive complaints like this blog post are bullshit. Not very harmful bullshit, mind you. At their best, these well-intentioned polemics can serve as course corrections for an indie community that has started to go off track. (Ben Ruiz’s GDC 2012 soapbox talk exhorting indies to “quit being so f***ing egocentric” might be an example, though it too tended toward the harsh side.)

But at their worst, these sorts of highly-charged broadsides risk injuring the indie community instead of pointing it in the right direction. There’s already plenty of anti-indie sentiment floating around. After noticing it some time ago, I started collecting quotes. “Getting more disappointed every day with the whole indie scene.” “Getting really tired of these ‘everyone else is doing it wrong’ poser auteurs. First Blow, now Chen.” “Anyone else sick of hearing the capital-I “Indie” dev community complain about a perceived lack of innovation in games and then fart out a bunch of vaguely remixed pre-existing game mechanics? ‘Players don’t know what they want, so we have to give it to them!’ Players do know what they want and they’re already telling us – they do so with their money.” (From Gamasutra comment threads: 1, 2, 3, 4.)

This is the fuel for an anti-indie backlash. And fiery scattershot commentary, like Gross’s blog post, might be the spark.

I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to silence anyone. Gross certainly had worthy points to make in her blog post, and certainly some indies are arrogant or pretentious, at least on occasion. What I’m suggesting is that those who want to see the indie community flourish should be conscious of their audience. If only indie developers were reading, then the aggressive language wouldn’t concern me. But there are lots of other readers, some of whom seem to be afraid that indies will threaten the good old games that they know and love, or think that indie games are overhyped hipster trash, or else feel for whatever reason that indies just need to be taken down a peg. Their tone is one of hostility and disdain, not constructive concern, and that tone is slowly creeping into the mainstream conversation.

Fueling a backlash would be bad. “Indie” is still a good brand. Indies are still broadly (and accurately) seen as scrappy, creative underdogs, which is part of what lets indies compete with vastly larger studios. If “scrappy” gets replaced by “desperate”, and “creative” with “pretentious”, that ability to compete may evaporate.

So, keep writing about what’s wrong with the indie community, but please realize the potential power of your words. If you want to see improvement, then by all means point out the problems, but maybe address your critiques to specific individuals instead of all indies, or use a tone of constructive suggestion instead of incendiary rant. And maybe consider stopping short of “snubby douchetwats”.

—–

That’s all I wanted to say to the people who hope to see the indie community grow and thrive. I also want to address the indie skeptics, and specifically the accusation that came up yesterday: that indies are prejudiced against AAA games. This is not just wrong, but also an excellent illustration of how ready some people are to believe the worst about indies.

I’ll start by acknowledging that I’m biased, of course. My first commercially released game was mocked with a video review involving bongos and free verse, and after going indie full-time a few months ago, I’m busily making a game for the OUYA. So I tend to think of myself as pretty goddamn indie. (That’s not a boast. I’m trying to incriminate myself here.)

But even I, with all my bias, would name a AAA game as my favorite of all time (Morrowind). I’m currently hooked on a AAA game, and once I’m done with it, I plan on immediately picking up another. And I’m probably more elitist than most in the indie crowd! I only picked up XCOM and Dishonored because other indies were praising them so much, and I doubt I would have even noticed Spec Ops: The Line or Dark Souls without the attention that indies poured onto them. This supposed anti-AAA prejudice already has a lot of room for exceptions.

Yet, still, the myth persists that indies despise production value. Take, for example, the #indieAAAConfessional hashtag. This was invented to allow people to bravely “admit” to liking AAA games, standing firm against the (imagined) scorn that the elitist Indies would heap upon them. It was created as a rhetorical shot at indies, but it was immediately misconstrued as being created and perpetuated by indies, and thus as yet more evidence of their elitism.

What did indie developers themselves think about this? Well, I couldn’t take a poll, but here’s what my Twitter feed looked like:

Sorry, but I’m just not seeing it. The idea of anti-AAA prejudice just seems ridiculous to these guys.

I’m not entirely sure where the hostility comes from. Maybe I just give too much credence to Twitter and Gamasutra comments, or maybe I’m making too much out of disparate and minor complaints. But I worry that the wider game community is slowly forgetting what indies have brought to the table. The innovation coming out of the indie scene is enormous, and it helps the entire art form, including the AAA projects. Richard Lemarchand spoke at IndieCade 2011 about how indie games influenced Uncharted 2, for example, and Minecraft was acknowledged as an inspiration for Epic’s upcoming Fortnite. A lot of that innovation comes with enormous financial risk for indie developers. Give the community some credit for that risk!

The indie scene definitely has its issues. (My pet gripe: retro graphics.) But they are still, by and large, the Good Guys. Save your ire for the true anti-creative forces, and give developers, indie and AAA both, the benefit of the doubt.

At GDC 2012, I had the pleasure of playing a game called Hokra at a party. I had never heard of it before, but I watched a game from across the room, and it looked like some easy fun. And it was! Playing was awesome, but even more striking was just how fun it was to watch other people play and get caught up in the moment-to-moment action. Later that year, at IndieCade, I got to see the designer, Ramiro Corbetta, and a few other awesome dudes give a presentation about eSports, and I resolved: I was going to make an eSport of my own. When the 10-day CREATE gam jam for OUYA games was announced, Hokra was the first game that came to my mind. Here was my opportunity to make a simple eSport for a platform that’s actually built for local multiplayer.

In keeping with that focus, I started the design in a way that I never have before: Not by imagining a feeling or a mechanic, but by envisioning the particular social setting for the game. The IndieCade eSports panel pointed out the enormous differences between games built for the screen versus those built for the stadium (or for streaming online). I wanted to make a game that could be the perfect background tournament game at a party, like Hokra was when I first saw it. I wanted a fast-paced, highly dynamic, skill-focused game that would be clear and compelling even for someone just glancing at it from across the room.

There were some obvious steps to take towards this end, like adding movement trails and an enormous scoreboard. The gameplay-oriented choices were more difficult, since I had to balance the desires of the players (control, fairness, skill) with the desires of the hypothetical audience (dynamism, unpredictability, speed). As I discussed in the dev diary halfway through the contest, the need to balance the game for the players initially led me to nerf the players’ level of control over and over again, hoping to make a game that couldn’t be dominated by any strategy that was uninteresting to watch. I eventually realized that this was a mistake and reversed course, giving the players more power until it was balanced, which works better for both groups. Another example involved the interesting problem of figuring out the game’s optimal level of chaos. At one point, the explosions were so powerful and the ball was so light that players would get lucky goals without even trying. When I tried to fix this, the game ended up feeling sluggish instead. The solution was to have both very high-powered explosions but also very high drag on the ball; it would zoom away at high speed, but come to a stop before it could reach the opposite goal. This stayed fair, but also moved the action around the map much more.

Getting art and sound assets was a challenge, especially under a tight deadline, and I wanted to make the presentation as audience-friendly as the gameplay. I knew I wanted some upbeat, high-energy music, but good, game-appropriate, free-to-use music tracks are digital needles in an internet haystack. This time, thankfully, I had friends helping me search, and I got lucky besides. I ended up with three distinctive tracks that fit the game’s feel perfectly. The visuals, on the other hand, were more difficult, since they couldn’t just be found online. Aside from the movement trails, I had no idea what to do for art in the game. I couldn’t recruit a dedicated artist on short notice, so I picked a set of interesting constraints and made the best programmer art that I could. I chose to use highly saturated colors with no outlines; the sharp edges that the game required would be colors-on-white instead of my usual darker lines. I’m sure it’s not the best look the game could have, but it’s different, and the brightness captures attention. The music pumps you up, the graphics catch your eye, and some buzzer sound effects here and there hopefully cater to the audience that I envisioned at the start.

The biggest flaw in this design process was the almost total lack of playtesting. I was rushed. Ten days isn’t long, and I needed all of that time just to finish the game. This failure to test the game with a variety of other people means that A) I made a few mistakes, like making the AI too difficult for first-time players, and B) I never got to evaluate whether the game would actually work in its intended setting. I hope to be able to test it out properly at some point, and I hope the contest judges experience it in the way I originally hoped.

I’m also not sure what level of interest the game could sustain on a larger scale. My ambition was to create a game that could support a hardcore following of dedicated, skillful players. I think the gameplay is there, but the rounds are so short (two minutes) and the game so simple that I can’t imagine people casting games or streaming them or creating a community around them. Bombball fits the same niche as Hokra, but the IndieCade eSports panel pointed out that “sports” are pretty diverse and may just be a cultural label for competitive games with some cultural importance. I chose to label Bombball as an eSport because of the competitive focus, spectator angle, and high skill ceiling, but I realize that the label can look a little silly for a simple game coming out of a 10-day jam.

In the middle of development, I re-read my old notes from the IndieCade eSports panel. As I went over the various suggestions and “rules” for designing such games, I was pleased that Bombball already featured so many of them: an obvious score, the possibility for comebacks, visual clarity, real-time action, close calls, opportunities for demonstrations of great skill, etc. I usually have a sense for whether my games really work or not. It’s possible that the game will just get lost in the usual game jam crowd, but this one works. I pursued a vision, and in the end, I’m proud of how close to it I got.

I started late, unfortunately. It’s billed as a 10-day game jam, but in fact you were allowed to start on January 7th and can finish as late as the 23rd. I started on the 13th, and worked too slowly on the first few days (since any deadline that’s more than a week away seems like it’ll never arrive). But, at the halfway point, I’m happy to report that I’ve got a working prototype and that I’ve learned a bit about making Unity games for the OUYA.

Bombball is a simple eSport designed for competitive local multiplayer. It was inspired directly by Hokra, an excellent indie game that I had the privilege to play at GDC 2012, although Bombball focuses is a little more complicated and targets 1v1 tournaments instead of team play. I was also keeping in mind a panel discussion about eSports from IndieCade 2012. The goal was to make a game that’s perfect for playing on a couch and that’s as fun to watch as it is to play.

The basic premise of the game is that you need to knock a ball into your opponent’s goal. To do this, you can catch and shoot the ball, but you can also employ various explosive tools to help in this process. In the game’s first iteration, you could drop up to two remote bombs at a time and detonate them whenever you wanted. Thus you could “pass” the ball to your bombs and use them to direct the ball into the goal. I figured that this was a simple system with some tricky timing challenges that would make for deep gameplay.

Unfortunately, using omnidirectional explosions to direct a moving object to a specific point is nearly impossible, at least at first. To make it a little easier, I changed the bombs to be “directional” bombs; when you detonated them, you could indicate an angle, and the bomb would explode in that direction, taking the ball along with it. This made it much easier to pass the ball from one bomb to the next (or to the goal).

Unfortunately, the bombs still weren’t as useful as just picking up the ball and carrying it. So, I removed the ability for the player to “catch” the ball; now the player could only bump into it to knock it around the arena. This made the bombs much more essential.

Unfortunately, it had a side effect of making bombs far too effective on defense. Since the opponent couldn’t just score a goal without using bombs, you could effectively guard your own goal with one bomb at a time. To prevent players from using this strategy, I changed the way that the remote bombs worked: instead of being able to lay two at any time, the bombs were randomly spawned around the arena (in symmetrical pairs to keep things fair), and the player could “arm” them to take control. Now, the player had to make the best use of unreliable resources, and the defensive strategy was undermined.

This version of the game sorta kinda worked. It was balanced enough, but I got to that balance by constantly nerfing the player’s abilities. The game was fair, but you didn’t feel like you had much control over the ball, and you certainly weren’t getting many awesome combo explosions like I had originally envisioned. The best strategy, in fact, was just to constantly chase the ball and try to knock it further into the opponent’s territory.

Fortunately, I was able to completely scrap the changes I had made and go in the other direction, re-empowering the player with the ability to catch the ball while changing the bomb system. Now, three different types of pickups will randomly spawn: remote mines, speed boosts, and bullets (think shmup-style projectiles). The player can carry any two of these at a time and can deploy them with one button. Now, the player has several very powerful abilities at his or her disposal, as well as better control over the ball, and offensive and defensive strategies remain roughly balanced. This came at the cost of greater complexity, but I think it’s worth it.

Above is a look at the game in its current state. I have five days to nail down the bugs, add sound effects and music, completely replace my placeholder art, add a menu and other structure to the game, and get it working perfectly on the OUYA. Stay tuned.

I created Farmpunk for the 2012 Indie Speed Run, a 48-hour game jam / competition. It was my first game jam ever, and I worked solo. Development was kind of a mess.

What Went Right:

1) The idea. I was given the random variables of “Construction” and “Seeds”. In the first couple hours, I started out by going in some very different directions (including, somehow, space combat and zombie themes, both of which I rejected on principle). Once I started thinking about cellular automata and GM plants, though, the game finally started taking definitive shape. A primarily procedural system with room for complexity and natural dynamism was perfect for a game jam, I figured. Now that it’s done, I’m pleased that I went with a more original theme and system, and the basic resource-management dynamics work.

2) The technology. I had started using Unity and 2D Toolkit two weeks before I began the project, yet I never felt like I was being slowed down by my tools. Plus, I could publish for the web, which was a major priority for a game jam.

3) The sheer effort. It came down to the last few minutes, but I was able to finish in time. I slept a total of 7 hours over the entire 2 days, and there were several moments when I seriously considered just giving up on the competition and finishing the game later. Actually making the deadline was a triumph. I felt like the last person to finish a marathon: a little bummed, but mostly proud of having gotten there at all.

What Went Wrong:

1) The idea. Picking a complex procedural system ensured that I could have some complexity, but it was like a wild beast that I was constantly struggling to tame. There were a lot of positive feedback loops that wanted to ruin the game’s balance (e.g. plants that would immediately kill everything on the screen, or immediately die off en masse, or be obviously optimal or suboptimal strategies), and I didn’t have the time to carefully adjust all the variables. In most cases, the various mechanics were either far too influential or had little influence at all. I had to cut several systems entirely due to…

2) The schedule. I started out with a scope that was far too ambitious, which I understand to be a common mistake in a first game jam. I was constantly cutting and simplifying as I built the game, and despite that effort, everything I worked on took 2-3 times longer than I estimated. Worse still, the game required a fairly large amount of UI work, which is usually my slowest to produce. Out of desperation, I ended up re-using the art style and music from one of my previous games. In the end, I had almost no time to flesh out or balance the final product. The version I submitted to the competition was terribly unbalanced and featured a game-breaking bug after a few minutes of play.

3) The format. I prefer working solo on small projects, but combined with the time pressure of this game jam and the “random variable” constraints, I think it worked against me. Without the camaraderie and teamwork that’s usually associated with in-person game jams, the extra pressures did more to limit my output than to squeeze it out of me. I don’t think this would have been such a problem if I had picked a much simpler game to make, but I didn’t, and it was.

Overall:

I’m proud that I finished the game, but I’m not so proud of the game itself. I think my instincts were in the right place; the core of the game is successful and has a lot of potential, some of which was realized. But I know I could have done something better if I had started with something smaller and saved the bigger idea for some other day. If I want to do some rapid prototyping in the future, I’ll just call it prototyping, give myself a full week, and not worry about extrinsic constraints.

I’ve been making that claim for a while, but only now do I feel like I can really mean it wholeheartedly. About a month ago I finally took the plunge. I went indie full-time. Of course, I’ve been doing my own work in games for a while (and even released a game commercially), but it was never my primary occupation. Not until now.

As you should suspect, going indie was not the original plan; I had expected to break into the industry in the usual way. I got my CS degree, worked in QA, got some internships with big companies, and most recently spent a year with the title of Lead Game Designer (though I didn’t actually make games in that capacity (long story)). It was a good job, a cushy job! But the indie scene was inspiring me day after day, and cushiness doesn’t satisfy for long. I was, and am, a true believer in indie games. So I saved up, quit, packed up all my stuff, and drove across the country to set up my new life in San Diego. (This move really had nothing to do with games (I was following my girlfriend), but it turns out that driving westward for five days straight feels very poignant in this circumstance.)

I’ve been indie for a little over a month now. I can’t claim much wisdom, but I figured I could share my thoughts and worries for anyone else contemplating a change. I know I appreciate getting to see personal looks at indie development, and finally I can offer a glimpse from the inside.

1. I’m arriving fashionably late. Indie games have been booming for nearly five years now, and I find myself worried that I may have come at the start of the decline. I don’t think that it’s truly too late to find success, but I remember that independent developers used to be the rare, daring few, whereas now I’m just one of the many. The primary obstacle facing indie devs used to be the obscurity of the scene; now the problem is how crowded it is. Meanwhile, I feel like I’ve only just begun to develop my own skills, when instead I need to be at my peak. I’ve heard it said that “very good” is the enemy of “truly great”; I won’t be able to afford many “learning experiences” in my shipping projects. And if the golden age comes to a close, the quality bar will be set that much higher.

2. Thank God for Unity. After years of working almost exclusively in XNA, I decided to give some new engines a try. After trying Unity3D for a week, I stopped looking for anything better. I can keep programming in C#, deploy to almost any platform, and have a huge dev community surrounding me. That’s a sweet deal if ever I saw one. Not to mention the excellent extensions for everything under the sun (shout-out to 2D Toolkit). I finally get why everyone has been flocking to this engine.

3. This is awesome. So far, at least. I’m still in the fun prototyping phase, so I can’t claim too much, but I finally feel like I’m doing exactly what I want to do. I had a strange experience on my first Friday after going indie. Normally, I would work all week and make games on the weekend. On that Friday, having just spent five days making games, I felt like it was time for the weekend to end and to get back to work. I couldn’t internally accept that the weekend was instead just starting. This feeling hasn’t entirely gone away; I find myself looking forward to Monday mornings and it feels weird. Weird, but good. Mostly good, actually.

I realize that this may be a cliched portrait of the excited and idealistic newcomer. But that’s honestly what I am, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’m proud to be doing this. And I hope that I can do it well enough to keep calling myself an indie game designer for a long, long time.