Flash Games Are Best?
I am beginning to think that Flash games are going to be a great place for Indie developers to find a huge audience and make a living. In fact, I have been giving a game design presentation called Games for the Non-Hardcore, in which I outline a lot of facts about Flash and why it is a great platform for gaming and developers. I will be turning that presentation into blog posts in the near future, but in the meantime, I could not resist putting up this comic from xkcd.
What this depicts is just one a many, many reasons Flash could be in your future.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
Memories From Office Move
I have found out that you can’t simultaneously resign from your old company, start a new company, move that company into new offices, remodel a house, start a farm, move into a new house, repair and sell the old house, work on three game concepts, teach game design classes, and blog. Something had to go, and it was blogging. I hope to get back to it now, but before I start I found a bunch of funny and inspirational pieces of history as I was putting my home office back together.
As you can see from the above photo, I have a lot of work to do before I can do “work”. More…
Welcome Alltop and the “Better Assholes” Clause
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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An Itch That Can’t Be Scratched
Being a serial entrepreneurial is almost an addiction. It is the thrill of starting new things that are nothing but promise, have no baggage, and cannot yet be fully quantified. Once the vision is mostly realized, however, the itch comes back, and the cycle starts all over again. For me, the time has come to start the cycle over again. I will be leaving GarageGames on 6/2/2008 to start a new company with another vision and a new set of promises.
GarageGames via Instant Action has become the publisher that I always wanted to work with, so that is one of the thing that I will be doing. More…
Communify Me! 80 Ways to Add Community Features to Games
Video games continue their trajectory towards increased complexity. We’ve watched the jump from 2D sprites, to rendered 3D objects, to next-gen shaders and high polygon models. We’ve seen games go from multiplayer on the same machine, to multiplayer over a modem, to entire server farms hosting persistent games millions of users strong. In the rush to improve the most surface aspect of games — the graphics — other important aspects like building community have been ignored.
Mario sits pretty in the third dimension — the community dimension — in this community created fan art piece
Community is the latest trend and buzzword to be sure, but an ironic one in that the community features we’re seeing now could have been present in games long ago (and many were, but were ahead of their time). In the same way that 3D graphics don’t merely escalate 2D graphics but add a dimension to them, adding community to games doesn’t merely escalate a multiplayer game but adds a new dimension to them. This blog post is not a theoretical one however, and will help give you ways to “communify” your game, offering you both practical tips and high-concept ideas. Though we ourselves have built a game community via The Great Games Experiment, and are now building a game portal with community features via InstantAction, these tips can be used by any developer for any platform. Use these tips to add the extra dimension of community to your game!
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Acquisition Fun! The Story Behind the Story
With the big acquisition announcement GarageGames made a while ago, sometimes it is hard to stay grounded in the every day. However, there is a very human aspect to all of this news, and I hope I can capture some of it for your enjoyment!
A year ago when I was on my first vacation to Italy and France, I got an email from Josh Williams in an Internet cafe. It was really short, “IAC wants to talk to us.” We had just gone through a couple of months on another acquisition offer that we ended up turning down. I was tired, and ready to just put pedal to the metal with GG and make it go on our own, so my answer was “no thanks.” Then the business side of me kicked in, and I said, “OK, I’m in for discussion, but they need to allow us to keep doing things the way we are, i.e. making game development accessible to everyone, and treat developers like we want to be treated.” BTW, that was pretty much the reaction from all of the GG partners/stakeholders, so Josh pursued it, they loved our strategy, and it kept looking good.
So, as soon as I got back, Josh and I made a trip down to Los Angeles to meet with Victor Kaufman, the Vice Chairman of IAC, to see if we should move forward, and if a deal made sense. We left the meeting stoked. Victor is a finance guy, but he has made movies and done a lot of really creative things in the past, and he made us feel welcomed and genuinely understood what we were trying to do.
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How to Focus your Game and Give Players More of What They Want
We’re excited about the new platform we’re developing called InstantAction. We believe it will be an exciting new medium for indies to publish to. But no matter what platform a game resides on or what new technology exists, the same bread and butter principles still guide all good design. Having a cool platform with the opportunities and features that platform affords is not a shortcut to good design. And a part of good design is focusing your game to give players a satisfying experience. This post describes a technique to help bring focus to your design to give players more of what they want and less of what they don’t. This is one technique and not the last word on the matter, but try it and see if it’s useful to you.
This kid is definitely NOT getting more of what he wants!
Focus your design to give players more of what they want by supporting your core fun.
Focus your design to give players more of what they want by supporting your core fun.
You have a vision for what your game should be, but you can’t see it with a hundred percent clarity yet. Sometimes it feels like you’re a jazz musician trying out different riffs and going with what seems cool. In the end, as long as the behavior of the game works — that is, it’s fun — the process of how you got there doesn’t matter. Or does it?
In later stages of game design it takes structure to produce a well balanced design, unlike abstract painting where you dabble and feel your way through the entire process. Game design is in good part a methodology. That methodology taken to its extreme removes the creative element from design. But used in good measure, design benefits from structural techniques. The following is a simple design focusing technique that I employ. In addition to using it, I’ve helped several developers with it to help them focus their designs too. It is another tool for the designer’s arsenal. Let’s begin!
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WSJ: IAC/InterActiveCorp Buys Majority of GarageGames
IAC/InterActiveCorp today plans to announce it has taken a majority stake in game developer GarageGames to anchor a soon-to-be launched gaming site, InstantAction.
More information here:
IAC/Interactive Takes Game Designer Stake
I will be talking about this a lot in the future, but for tonight, I can just let it all soak in:)
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
GarageGames
Design Journals Rule
Lately, GarageGames has had the good fortune to begin to fund game ideas for publication. So, for a few months, starting last April, I began to talk to outside developers about what games they would like to create. My job was to pull together a portfolio of games that would be unique, fun, and, since it is a business, eventually sell and make money. I thought it would be no problem since we have been making games for six years with absolutely no money. I figured a few calls to developers that we had been working with and met over the years, and the portfolio would practically fall into place. Turns out I was wrong.
Our only requirement was that the games be fun. I was not looking to change the world, just pull together some fun games. After all, games should be fun, first, and anything else later. My assumption was that developers would be walking the talk of all the Indie blogs and game blogs that are complaining about mainstream publishers putting out the same old crap, and and have a bunch of ideas just bursting to get out into the world. Well, not so much. At least 80% of the developers we approached were like a deer in the headlights when asked to come up with an idea. We did end up with a bunch of great games, but it was just a lot harder than I thought it would be.
I can’t go into all of this too much more, but will cover it at a later time. Besides, the above story is just an anecdote to set up the premise of this article. The actual premise is game ideas. You should have literally hundreds of them floating around in your head. Even better, you should have hundreds of them written in your own design portfolio or journal.
I have been preaching this for years. At every IGC, I have gone over it, yet continue to see game developers that have only ONE idea. One idea won’t cut it. What if you can’t get other people on your team to buy into your one idea? What if the technology is not available to get you one idea done? What if you can’t find a publisher if your idea is too big to fund yourself? There are many, many reasons why you need a LOT of game ideas.
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Who Was That Masked Writer?
As you may have noticed, the How to Pitch Your Game post was not written by me. It was written by Josh Dallman, a producer at GarageGames. Here is Josh’s profile on Great Games Experiment.
Josh is one of the best producers I have ever worked with. He understands game designs at a very deep level, can help with the contracting process, is extremely organized, and has lived the “Indie” life. After a stint at Microsoft, Josh decided he wanted to make games. He took the advice of “right sizing your life” to the most extreme level I have ever seen by selling all of his stuff, getting in his car (that became his house), and moving to Mexico in order to save enough money to get his game made. For anybody that thinks game development should be easy or handed to them on a silver platter, Josh is a living example that you are wrong.
After turning me down several times, Josh finally accepted a position at GarageGames, where he has been in charge of acquiring games for the GG Game Store as well as some other important tasks that we can’t talk about right now. Josh has agreed to help me get more regular posts out here on Make It Big In Games as well as help fill out our lingering game development wiki.
-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games