Motivations for becoming an indie game developer

Survey Results
Unfortunately, the summary doesn't fit well into my blog's content area. So for those interested in seeing the real-time results, you can click on this link:

Motivations for Becoming Indie: Survey Results

Thanks for checking it out. With any luck, there will be some useful data in here for indies and studios alike!

Building an Indie Brand

So I played Pioneer Trail yesterday. (Bizarre aside: it took me longer than I expected to find a link to it via Google) A friend of mine invited me to try it, and I've been meaning to for a while. NEO Scavenger has its roots in a post-apocalyptic homage to Oregon Trail, so it makes sense to see someone's modern interpretation of a "Trail-like" game.

I'd played a social game or two before. (Literally, I've played two.) So one of the first things I did was to check the game permissions. I wanted to cut off all attack vectors from Pioneer Trail, so I didn't spam my friends' walls with game messages.

It started out innocently enough. You're presented with a small homestead, peppered with plants, rocks, and a few animals. The art is real slick-looking, and a friendly gap-toothed prospector fellow is helping you get started. You're hand-held through some user-friendly harvesting and clearing, and before you know it, you've leveled-up! And completed your first goal! And the game is now asking you to broadcast it to the world!

I declined, and continued to follow ol' toothless's advice. Sure enough, I managed to trip another game event that wanted to be broadcast. I think the rhythm was about one spam request per minute. I was glad I turned off as many of the game's permissions as I did.

Then, it was trail time. I was ushered into the trail mode, and told the virtues of "friending-up" for the trip. Each of the characters was demonstrated via tutorial. I didn't get much of a chance to see if any of the mechanics were reminiscent of Oregon Trail, because the game thought it was high-time I "friended-up." The entire interface shut down, except for a throbbing "hire a friend!" button at the bottom. No other buttons functioned anymore.

The game was literally dictating that, in order to continue, I'd have to reach out to a friend. Uncomfortable with the idea of bothering someone I care about just to try the game, I closed the app. And removed it from my Facebook entirely. I guess that's what folks call "rage quit" these days.

Slimy Games
As I was composing a message to my friend, describing my first impressions of the game, I couldn't help but notice I was getting riled up. Pioneer Trail really struck a nerve with me. This type of friend-peddling just seemed wrong to me. I kept thinking of the day I was helping my mom clear out all the wall posts from her friends' Facebook games.

"Why do they keep posting these on my wall?" she'd ask. And "I keep clicking on them to go away, but more keep cropping up." She just wanted to use Facebook to keep in touch with family and friends, but she could hardly see any through the wall of noise from games. I showed her a few tips for preventing apps from showing up, but there was always a new mole to whack.

She doesn't use Facebook anymore. That's right. She dropped a whole service, one which was actually helping her stay in touch with people she cared about, because of some disproportionately loud and annoying apps. Which brings me to the heart of this post.

Building an Indie Brand
A while back, I blogged about my core values. In #2, I talk about respecting the user. I want my game to treat the player as if they're someone special. I don't want DRM to get in the way of easily playing the game. I don't want to trick them into playing, or playing at certain times. I don't want to hang banner ads and placards all around my games like a kiosk in Times Square. And now that I'm reminded of the "creepy social game touch," I don't want to trick them into getting friends to play either.

I want to build games for people like me. People who enjoy sitting down with a cup of tea, and cracking into a deep, enjoyable, thoughtful game. I want people to go to my games because there aren't ads, spam, or friend requests chipping away at their suspension of disbelief. I want to make games that treat people the way I wish games treated me.

How the Hell Are You Going to Monetize That?
That's a good question. I'm not entirely sure yet. I do have a few streams in mind, though.

1. Ads - Ads are almost universally regarded as a minor revenue stream in Flash games, so it isn't a huge sacrifice to axe them. And I think the brand gain to be had by being ad-free is more than worth it. So no ads.
2. Sponsorship and Site Licensing - Sponsorship is an option, as is site licensing. Apart from the monetary gain, there's an advertising benefit to being featured on various portals. The potential downside is portal branding competing with my own brand, but I think that largely depends on the details of the arrangement. This seems like a reasonable avenue to keep open.
3. Time-limited demo - NEO Scavenger is fairly well-suited to a time-limited demo format. It's an easy-to-understand business model, for both me and the consumer. Choosing a price point is a risk, though. Whatever number I choose, I'm cutting off a chunk of players uncomfortable paying that amount, and missing out on those comfortable paying more.
4. Area-based demo - NEO Scavenger also fits into an area-limited model pretty well too. The game is bounded on all sides by obstacles, by design. It was originally my intention to allow free-play in the Michigan area, and charge for access to each of the zones outside of that. Each zone would have unique content to offer, but you'd have to buy passage to that zone. It'd be a pittance to cross the border each time, but players could also "buy-off" the ferryman, so to speak, for permanent access. I really like this model, as it allows for unlimited free play, and a "pay what you want" fee structure to get access to other parts of the game.
   The down side? It makes more sense to launch the game later, when this content is in place. I'd have to take more time to make the content.
5. Player-Created Content - This one is likely part of #4 above. In this model, there is a zone which is entirely player-created encounters. I create a tool for making encounters, and charge for access to that tool (as well as the fee for playing in that zone, in #4 above). Players could rate encounters, and create "playlists" of encounters to tailor their experiences. The upside here is that it can supplement or replace the content creation budget of #4. It also fosters a community of content creators. The down sides include moderating user content, griefing, cheating (Monty-Haul encounters), and building the content creation and management tools.
6. Microtransactions - I brainstormed a list of features that could be charged for. Things like buying premium listings for your created content, buying a clone in case you die, buying extra character slots, buying increased storage capacity or recipe capacity (for crafting), etc. All of which are viable, they just take development and community management time to implement.

So far, #s 2 and 4 seem like my favorites. As a player, #2 is invisible to me (maybe even my entryway to the game universe), and #4 makes sense to me. I would feel like I'm buying something of value, and being charged a fair price since I can play for free, and pay what I'm comfortable with for extra content.

All of this assumes I'm able to pull off the user account management and billing systems. My hope here is that I can leverage third-party services to handle as many transaction types as possible in one, easy interface. Social Gold/Google are candidates here. Zong is another I'm looking at. And with any luck, I can use their APIs to do the customer management, so I'm not storing any usernames, passwords, or billing info.

With my soft deadline of September rapidly approaching, and given some of the significant chunks of work implicit in the monetization section above, I appear to be behind schedule. But I'm still motivated, still pleased with my work so far, and still optimistic there is a chance at success here.

Close Encounters of the Close Kind

I've been working on the encounter system, and I think I've arrived at a working draft that serves well enough for the time being. Here's what it looks like:

NEO Scavenger's first encounter!

When the player has an encounter, this screen pops up. The player can see this encounter's details, and navigate to the other inventory and character sheet screens on the left menu, but they cannot exit back to the game board and continue moving until this encounter is dealt with.

The encounter screen itself is roughly divided into quadrants. Clockwise from the top left are:

1. Illustration - an image depicting the encounter.
2. Description - a text blurb describing the encounter. Also, there is a blurb of yellow text showing what your current response to the encounter is set to. In this case, the player has done nothing to respond yet.
3. Response - This is the response area. The player can drag any number of items or skills into this area to formulate a response. At the bottom of this quadrant is an "OK" button. Once the user clicks this button when they are happy with the response they've chosen.
4. Specials - This is the special encounter item area. Any items specific to this encounter which can be used are shown here. These items disappear when the encounter is resolved, and are replaced by new items when a new encounter occurs.

In this case, the player has awoken in a cryogenic stasis facility, and has no idea what is going on. The image in #1 is only coincidentally isometric, the game board has no such tiles. I was briefly tempted to create a cryo tile set, but I'm not sure I want to commit to making tilesets for each locale yet. #1 is mainly isometric because I'm better at iso pixel art than perspective painting.

#2 is currently some of the first game plot text the player sees. The player does not know who they are, why they're here, or where they are. Part of the game will involve answering those questions. However, a greater concern is pressing: something screams from down the hall, and is approaching fast.

#4 shows two scene items that were called out in #2: a door control panel and a broken window to the outdoors. The player can use these items (by dragging them into #3) alone or in combination with any items from their inventory, or skills they've chosen for their character (bottom item in left menu).

Once the player is satisfied with the response items they've chosen, they click the "OK" button. The screen updates to show the player the result of their response. This will usually take the form of a new encounter with no responses possible.

Basically, a dialog box.

During such a "no response" encounter, all navigation options are hidden, so the player isn't confused into thinking they can do anything to alter it. In this case, inaction has killed the player. But such "no response" encounters might also include parting words with an NPC, a status change on the player, new items being deposited in the current hex as loot, etc.

The result could also be another encounter, allowing a chain of encounters and responses to ensue.

I've written the encounter system such that there is a list of outcomes for each encounter, based on the items the user chooses as a response. If they fulfill the pattern for a response, a corresponding new encounter occurs. If not, there is a default encounter outcome that occurs. I wanted this to closely resemble the type of play that occurs in a pen and paper RPG session. The game master presents the player with an encounter, and the player can use any of the items or abilities available to their character to deal with it.

One issue which may surface as a result of this design is the temptation for "kitchen sink" responses. The player may just assume that if they throw everything they own into the response, they'll safely pass the encounter. That sort of breaks with the role-playing tradition, but I'm not sure it's my place to be policing play style in my game. Still, it would be nice if the game presented an actual challenge requiring critical and creative thinking to progress, rather than brute force.

Originally, I thought I could discourage this kitchen sinking by having any item used in the encounter consumed. It would definitely cause the player to be more stingy and selective. However, there are things like skills that I don't want consumed, even if used in an encounter.

I think an alternative way to dissuade kitchen sinking is to have the game simply take the first valid response it finds. Particularly, if undesirable outcomes are matched before more desirable ones, this should encourage players to be more selective with their responses.

This design is still subject to iteration. But it's reached a stage where it roughly matches the design, and I can create some test content for it.

Skills and Abilities
As part of the above system, I also roughed-out a skills and abilities system for the player. It's still very bare-bones, but it's enough to make encounters work reasonably close to the proposed design.

When the game starts, the player is presented with a skill selection page

Choosing skills for one's character.

The right side of the page has a list of available skills, and the left side is for skills the player already has. In this screenshot, the player has three skills: Hak (Hacking), Hid (Hiding), and Cbt (Combat), and the Med (Medicine) skill is available to take.

One thing you'll note is that skills are treated a lot like items. You can drag them around like items, and you have a place to store them. I want to see if this is sufficient for handling skills and abilities, as it allows me to leverage the existing inventory system code (and the player needs only learn one system for both items and skills).

One neat side-effect of this approach is that I can handle character development by adjusting the size of the player's skills container. As the player gains experience, I can simply increase their container size, so they can fit more skills into their space for use in encounters later.

When finished, I expect the right side of the screen to include many more skills than will fit on the left, so the player must choose carefully. I may even decide to have each skill item represent an increment of aptitude in a skill, such that a player can choose Hiding multiple times. Unlike the current system, where the simple presence of the Hiding skill determines success or not, I could change it such that each copy of Hiding used in an encounter increases the chance of it succeeding.

This multiple-copy approach would be a major leap towards mimicking traditional pen and paper RPGs, and I'm excited to give it a shot. I'd simply have to determine what scale to use for determining probability of success.

The Need for Struggle

As mentioned last post, I'm trying to make the first 5 minutes of the game playable. That means core systems are in place and working with each other. Once in place, I think I can begin focusing on the whole experience, and start tweaking it. Until now, I've been building and testing systems in near-isolation. I'd like to see if these systems can work in harmony, and start putting my efforts towards increasing fun factor.

So far, I wouldn't say the game is fun. While that doesn't overly worry me yet, it hasn't escaped me. I have a hunch that part of what's missing is a struggle. The player just wanders right now, and while he can die of hunger or exposure, it doesn't feel like a game. More like a (very dangerous) sandbox or toy. I recall my first experiences playing Minecraft.

What most people first see when playing Minecraft.

What I didn't realize when I first tried Minecraft is that there are two versions of the game: Classic and Beta. With Classic being the free option, that was the one I chose to try first. In Classic, you have a lot of the same elements of Beta: you can move around a randomly-generated world, place blocks, and remove blocks. It was interesting to move around and build a few things in Classic, but I didn't really get what the big deal was. Fortunately, I came across this:

What I hadn't realized is that Minecraft Beta has a few extra, crucial features. Of course, crafting is one of them. Being able to pull resources from the blocks in the world and build tools and items from them is pretty interesting. But I have a feeling even that would rapidly grow old, as did the ultimate freedom of block-building in Classic.

But then the sun goes down, and monsters come out to kill you. Suddenly, it transformed from an idle Lego-like game to a desperate struggle to survive. You'd better hope you can mine enough wood and coal to carve out a torch-lit cave before nightfall, or else the exploding zombies and jumping spiders will destroy you.

My first game of Minecraft, in Classic mode, lasted about 10-15 minutes. And I might've said "that's nice," walked away, and forgot about it forever. My second game, in Beta, lasted several hours. And I still remember constructing my fortress of safety fondly. Even now, with the webpage open for screengrab purposes, I'm tempted to play it a bit.

I think I may be approaching a similar point in NEO Scavenger. I have several interesting systems in place, but I'm not sure why I'm playing. There isn't any pressure. No struggle. No resistance from the game. No opportunity to test my mettle.


So I'm focusing on the encounter system next. It can be a vehicle for introducing obstacles to the player, aside from hunger or exposure, and provides an opportunity for the player to be clever. It also makes finding loot and managing inventory more meaningful, since there will now be a use for that loot down the road.

Watch for screenshots soon. And if I can manage to make it cohesive enough, perhaps it'll be time to launch a pre-alpha for readers to try out?

PS: In the time it's taken me to shower and proofread this, I thought of some ways of making the food situation a little more game-y and less tedium. Be on the lookout for that too.