Make It Big In Games

OK, I get to be all sentimental again. A month or so ago, GarageGames pulled the original Torque Game Engine off the market. Now, they are pulling the name GarageGames itself off the market, and replacing it with Torque Technologies. I can’t disagree with the decision Brett Seylor, TT VP of Tech and Tools, made to change the name. Torque is a shiny new modern 3D game engine, and they have decided that the idea of programming in a garage is not quite the image they want to project. Even though I understand, it still tugs at my heart strings.

When Jay Moore and I used to head out on the road to evangelize our idea, we loved every minute of it. It was exciting times doing everything we could to help indies. Having a mission that fills your heart as well as your brain makes you do things you would not normally do, like working for little to no money for a long time, or getting up in front of big crowds to do public speaking (which I hate), or cold calling hardware companies to have them help out at IndieGamesCon.

We got paid back in so many ways though. Like our first booth at GDC, a wooden concoction I had a friend make for us. Our little 10 X 10 booth was the busiest per square foot of any booth at the conference, with people lined up 10 deep just to get in to talk to us. Or like seeing employees at big companies like EA walk by and thrust their clenched fist in the air and shout, “GarageGames!” with us knowing that they were using Torque in their off hours trying to escape the Man. Or having and incredibly talented and dedicated developer drive across the country to work for us for peanuts and sleep in his cars for days until they he was paid enough to get a room (we didn’t know this until years later, and that guy is now one of my partners in PushButton Labs).

I don’t think that kind of magic can ever happen twice in a row. But, after Dynamix, I never thought I could start and work at a place that would have its magic, yet GarageGames surpassed it. You never quite know the magic is happening when you are in the middle of it. There are time pressures, the stress of development, paying the bills and worrying about money. You need to look inward and make sure you feel the magic. This time around I am actively looking for the magic. My senses are a lot more tuned to it. I can tell you that the past two weeks have been nothing but magic, and some day I’ll blog about it when I can bring it public.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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Yesterday Brett Seyler of GarageGames posted a blog announcing the release of version 1.0 of Torque 3D, which is a $1000 updated version of Torque, with new rendering, tools, art pipeline, COLLADA support, etc. It looks awesome, and I know their world-wide team worked incredibly hard on the product. I congratulate them on this release, and wish them great commercial success.

However, buried in a single sentence of the blog was the following statement:

“No matter what the results, there will be other changes to the Torque product line up as well. Biggest of all, as of November 1st, 2009, past versions of Torque (TGEA, TGE) will no longer be available for purchase.”

Before I get back to this, allow me a little history lesson. Torque Game Engine started life in 1997 as the 3D engine behind Dynamix titles such as Starsiege and Tribes. For those that don’t know it, I was the founder of Dynamix and the Executive Producer of those titles. In 1999, myself, Rick Overman, Tim Gift, and Mark Frohnmayer made an agreement with Sierra/Vivendi/Universal, the parent company of Dynamix, to license this technology, leave Dynamix, and start a company called GarageGames. Open Source was the hottest thing going in those days, and our original intention was to give away the engine, and help people sell the games made with it. A couple of months into our company, we realized we would need some revenue, so we decided to charge $100 for the Torque Game Engine (TGE) and all of the source code. We joked that it was as close to Open Source as we could get it, or it was “Open Source with a business model”. At the time, game engines like id’s Quake engine were selling for $500,000 or more, so our price was something of a shot heard around the world.

People thought we were crazy, but with the semi-serious motto of “world domination through collaboration“, we absolutely believed in our mission of standing up for Indie game developers. As an aside, people did not use the word Indie for independent game developers back then. Mostly, they were called Shareware developers because that was the business model they used to monetize their efforts. We identified “Indies” as a market, and went after something most people did not think existed. I would always say, “Do more kids want to be rock stars or game developers? I think game developers. This is a huge market. We just need to hang in there, keep making our stuff better and easier to use.” Hang in there we did, and our sales of TGE steadily rose. None of us made much money, but everybody that came to GarageGames came out of the community, and were willing to work for less than normal to further the vision. It was an incredibly challenging, fun, creative environment and mission.

One constant in this world is change. Game engines get old, companies sell, and people move around. There are hundreds of engines available for all sorts of platforms. Indie game makers are a huge news makers. And, after an incredibly long 10 year life span, TGE is going to the big bit bucket in the sky.

On a brighter note, on Twitter I speculated that it would be very cool if TGE was Open Sourced. Not five minutes after I tweeted, Brett Seyler responded with:

“relyes @jefftunn I think that’s a very likely outcome in 2010.”

That would be awesome! Let’s hope that a little bit of game development history gets to live on forever.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
PushButton Labs
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Flashbang Studios, creators of the portal Blurst, which is filled with their own games such as Off Road Velociraptor, Blush, and Minotaur in a China Shop are really doing things right. They have now self funded five titles and try to come out with a new game every eight weeks (six per year total). All of their games use the Unity web plug in for a nice, high fidelity game experience in the browser on both Macs and Windows machines.

These guys have no idea that I am posting about them. While I met Mathew Wegner a few years back at a Casual Connect, we have not stayed in touch. At the time, I was extremely impressed with his creativity and the types of games they were creating. Since then, their company has really hit its stride. In this article, Gamasutra - News - Interview: Flashbang Studios, Blursting Through?, Gamasutra interviewed the founders.

Here are some of the things that I think they are doing right:

• They have a”day jobs” doing contract work.
• They are creating new Intellectual Property at the rate of six games per year.
• They abandoned their old plan of making casual games to make money to concentrate on games they really believed in.
• They chose a game engine and work within its bounds. They don’t complain about what it does not have, they just crank out great games.
• They are aggregating their efforts in a rapidly evolving portal, Blurst, that is gaining traffic at a nice rate.

In summary, Flashbang is following all of the steps that I advocate in my Foundational Five article about surviving as a game developer. They have a small team of creative, like minded people, they have day jobs, they are creating innovative games, they are building a portfolio of company owned IP. In my mind, these guys, along with companies like Thatgamecompany, Behemoth, and 2D Boy are a new generation of rising stars that will be making the hits of the future. A couple of years from now, I think Blurst will have huge traffic, and these guys will be extremely successful.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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Owen Goss, the owner of Streaming Colour Studios released a great article about his iPhone App Store experience that has been sweeping the Indie blogosphere. If you have not read the post, you really need to do it right now, but the gist is that Owen invested $32,000 in Dapple, a color matching game, that has returned only a couple hundred dollars in the first few weeks of release. Owen’s post was awesome. He was not whining. He was just putting out a data point for the community to digest, and I, for one, appreciate his honesty.

A day after the release, the article was picked up by Slashdot, and Owen wrote a follow up article describing the responses he has gotten. Here is an excerpt:

Perception of whining or quitting

Many people perceived my post as whining about my sales, or that I was giving up on the game. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The post was meant purely as informational. I thought it would help people to see that selling an app on the App Store is just like selling any other product: it takes a lot of work and you shouldn’t expect to be an overnight success. I am also not giving up on Dapple; far from it. I’m only just getting started with it. That post was only a single data point on what I hope is a long upward trend for the game. Every game, every company starts somewhere, and I wanted to document where that was for me.

The observation that I would like to make is that it would be great if Owen’s work could be leveraged across multiple platforms. I think Dapple looks like a game that would work in the casual portals, on Facebook, and in the Flash market. Adding all of those revenue streams together may not have made the game profitable, but it could lessen the blow, and who knows, maybe activity in one market will lead to recognition in another market.

This is the strategy we are taking with our Push Button Labs game, Grunts: Skirmish, and a strategy that I am seeing a lot of developers talk about. We will be counting on a lot of activity in the Flash market to drive sales in the other markets. If hundreds of thousands or even millions of people play our game on the Flash version, it will drive traffic to our site so we can potentially upsell them on our High Definition or heavy client versions, or eventually on microtransactions or even subscriptions. Imagine what you would have to pay in advertising dollars to get that kind of exposure, but the cool thing is, we will get PAID to release the Flash version.

Some developers only want to focus on a single platform. As an example, Jeremy Alessi, a frequent commenter on MBG, is just about to release his third game on the iPhone. He is happy with this strategy, and does not want to take the time to develop tools or processes to put the game anywhere else. As always, the best thing about being an Indie is that you have the freedom to do what you want. However, it is my firm belief, as an Indie, that spreading risk around is the best path to success.

I don’t want to turn this blog into a big advertisement, but I do need to mention that our open source Flash based Push Button Engine is the basis of how we are going to be bringing our games to multiple markets. It is currently in closed Beta, but we hope to announce the Open Beta before GDC.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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Photo by woodleywonderworks

Recently, an article about Indie gaming went up on Ars Technica entitled Indie dev suggests peers should support OS X, Linux gaming. While I think Jeff Rosen and the Wolfire Games guys are making a cool game, and Ars Technica meant well, this is not enough in Today’s market.

Eight years ago, when we were first starting GarageGames, putting your game on three OS’s was state of the art, and we supported it by releasing an engine and many games on all three platforms. Obviously, making sure your game can run on three OS’s instead of just Windows is a big step in the right direction, but now days, you need to expand your idea of what a platform is, and build your game accordingly.

Instead of debating OSX, Linux, and Windows vs. just Windows, you should be considering all OS’s, Flash, the browser, Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, Steam, Instant Action, Greenhouse, your own site, iPhone, Android, other smart phones, Nintendo DS, Xbox via XNA, XBLA, Playstation Network, Wii Ware, box distribution, Casual Portals like Big Fish Games and Yahoo Games, Flash Portals like Kongregate and New Grounds, international portals.

Concentrating on how you can make your game and intellectual property accessible for as many of these platforms as possible will greatly increase your chances of success. Look at how Popcap is growing like a weed in an era when most of the big publishers are losing money and market share, selling out, or going bankrupt. Concentrating on smaller IP’s that can exploit every platform imaginable is a much more viable strategy for Indies.

If you are an Indie trying to make the next Fable or Halo or Tribes, this approach probably won’t work, but for nearly every other type of game, I think an iterative approach to the development of the game and IP behind the game will work. If you have a BIG idea, you may want to consider making it smaller by using some of the techniques I described in the article The Art of Backing Off. If you have not read that article yet, please click on over, so we are all on the same page for the rest of this article.

Our game, Grunts: Skirmish, started as a big RTS + community for publication on Instant Action, but as per the Art of Backing Off article, it is currently a Flash game that will be available to play for free within the next few months (note: it is taking a long time because we are developing a company, several web properties, and the Push Button Engine at the same time). We like to call this first Flash version of the game our “Light Client” version, and we have plans to go from this version all the way up to “Heavy Client” versions like XBox and Playstation 3. However, we may never make it to the heavy client versions based on what we find out from the light client releases.

While you may argue that it is extra work to create light client versions of your game, I think it is the best method I have ever experienced for making a game so far in my career. Work on the light client has not slowed down or stopped our development of the intellectual property behind the game, i.e. the characters, back story, logos, or web site design. Plus, it has given us time to create and design a nice progression of milestones and prototypes that we can test along the way toward the end goal of the entire game. For instance, given the response to our characters already, I think people are going to like the IP, but there will be nothing like putting the game up on Kongregate to find out.

If players do end up hating the characters or back story, we are not too far into the concept or idea to kill it. We are flexible and not too invested. Developers that put their all into a huge concept for years, then find out players don’t like it, are screwed. Again, our idea is “too small to fail” right now. If we misjudged the market, we have dry powder to try something different. The same thing goes for the game play. Since we have only developed the first part of the overall game, we are not so invested that we will die if it does not work out.

Besides the above advantages of light and heavy client development, getting onto all of the platforms starts to get much easier. Check out what happens once we ship the Flash version.

• We immediately bring a subset of our full game and IP to a billion potential players world wide on Day One of ship.
• We are immediately available on Windows, OSX, and Linux.
• We are positioned very well to put the product on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, or any other social network.
• Using some “special sauce” that we have worked up, porting our game to iPhone is fairly an easy task.

In one step, our game is delivered on over half of the platforms I mentioned above. In addition, we now have a great looking calling card and, hopefully, data to back it up, to allow us to pitch the heavy client platforms. Instead of going to Microsoft with a demo or a pitch, we can go to them with data that says our game was played by 7MM people that loved it and are looking for the next version. If you think about it, that is how Flow, Line Rider, and even the Behemoth guys got onto the heavy client platforms, although I don’t think they were thinking about that when those games were originally created.

To summarize, definitely make your game for more than one OS, but open your mind to where games are really being played in Today’s market.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
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