Make It Big In Games

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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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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Marek Bronstring, a game developer that I met on Twitter, writes a blog called gamslol where he recently penned a post entitled “Game Design 101 Rant: Over-Reliance On Documentation“.

Many people have asked me what a design document should be, and while I am not going to write that article today, you can read about what they should NOT be in his post. Here are some quotes:

If you already knew that game design isn’t all about writing design documents, then that’s great. I like you. We should do the secret handshake. As for everyone else, I’m sorry that you have been misled, and hopefully I can help make some amends.

But sadly there’s a myth that writing giant Game Design Documents (GDDs) is what designing a game ultimately boils down to. This myth needs a thorough pummeling.

I totally agree him. What he calls GDD’s, I like to call Big Ass Design Documents, or BADD for short. I have seen design documents that look like the old ancient bibles that sit on top of family pianos. While the developers think they are really solving a problem, in actuality they are causing bigger problems.

Nobody reads those tombs, and they are so large that, like a government legislative proposal, entire developers are sucked up just keeping the document up to date. Worse, designers get pissed at the programmers because they still ask questions about the design even though the designer thinks the answer is in the document. “Didn’t you read the f***in’ document?”, is the common phrase.

Just like “Agile Development” is kind of the new phrase for doing what you want just about any time you want, I think Agile Design is a much better way to go. Of course, you need a certain amount of design documents, but having a designer that can communicate his vision and a producer that can carry it out is much more important than the bureaucratic process of creating and maintaining a BADD.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games

While moving my office, I had to do something with the boxes of games that I have worked on throughout my career. I used to keep them on a shelf, but I have run out of room. So, I had Jon scan both the front and back of the boxes in and upload them all to my Picassa album Game Library. I’m still missing a box that contains Project Firestart, Betrayal At Krondor, Pro-Pilot, FPS: Baseball, FPS: Golf, and a bunch of others.

I had a hand in all of these games in one form or another, either as designer, director, producer, or executive producer. In other words, I lost sleep on all of them.

Coolness! Make It Big In Games has been picked up by Alltop. Guy Kawasaki’s latest small web service business, Alltop is a much expanded version of popurls, i.e. a single place to go to read the five latest stories from hundreds of sites. All of the sites are arranged by categories, such as Games, Gizmos, Web, Green, etc. I kind of think of it as an automated RSS reader where I don’t have to do much work, and I like it… a lot.

I’m sure all of you have heard of Guy Kawasaki, but if you haven’t he was the original Apple “Evangelist”, i.e. a business development guy that would recruit software companies to build great products for the Apple Platform. Since leaving Apple, Guy has written a bunch of books, started Garage.com (a web form venture capitalist), and writes an incredibly insightful blog.

I once met Guy along time ago and I have a pretty amusing story about that meeting. We had dinner together at a SPA (Software Publisher’s Association) meeting in Washington, D.C. At the time, I was running Dynamix, a company that I co-founded with Damon Slye. We were an incredibly small, struggling game developer, and I was out looking for opportunities to increase our business from one large original IP project with Electronic Arts and a conversion project with Activision (they had just changed their name to Mediagenic..nice move, huh?). So, I was out to dinner with, I won’t use his name, but it rhymes with Ben Holeman (I decided I probably should not use his name, but I still burn about this 22 years later), a slick executive from Mediagenic, and Guy was there to get support for Apple games from us.
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