The relationship between organizations and IT can be quite dysfunctional, and unfortunately they grew up together thinking poor results and demoralizing interactions are perfectly normal.
Developers tend to learn they have no control over their situation, which is unfortunate because they have so much more to offer an organization than merely following orders and writing code to a specification. Some internalize their status of “code monkey” and even take pride in it.
Organizations want efficiency, but then behave in ways that discourage developers from helping them actually become more efficient, and developers behave in ways that give organizations no reason to even think to ask developers for their input.
At dsmAgile 2018, my presentation “You Are Not a Code Monkey So Stop Acting Like One!” seemed well-received, and I had a number of people come up to me afterward to ask if I had been in their organization recently.
Based on conversation I had at the conference, I think I should have focused a bit more on hope for the future and less on itemizing the symptoms and illustrating the problem. My goal was to ask developers and organizations to step up and treat each other as partners, and not to provide ammo for a gripe session. Next time…
What are your thoughts? Do you feel your organization treats you as a partner or as a code monkey?
dsmAgile is a one day Agile conference in Des Moines, Iowa, and I’ll be presenting at it this year.
On Friday, September 28, 2018 from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM, you can discuss, discover, and learn more about Agile software development from people who have been practicing and living it. And it only costs $100, a great deal.
My presentation is called “You’re Not a Code Monkey, So Stop Acting Like One!” You can read more about in the dsmAgile session descriptions, but the main idea is that software developers can and should do more than write code.
You are responsible for not only creating value through technology but also for maintaining that capability, and you don’t get to pretend that “they won’t let me” is a valid excuse.
Merely slinging code is not enough. You are not a code monkey following orders. You are a first-class citizen in the organization, more than capable of driving value as well as delivering it. Let’s discuss how you (and your organization) can start acting like it.
I have enjoyed attending dsmAgile in the last few years, and I look forward to being part it. Will I see you there?
Back when I was going to school at DePaul University in Chicago, the computer science school was introducing a game development minor. To kick it off, they had a panel involving a few people from local game companies such as Midway and Volition, as well as a few members of the Xbox team from Microsoft.
I remember the vice president from Midway Games answering a question from the students in the audience about how to get into the game industry. He referred to some advice that had shown up somewhere from Midway’s HR that essentially said, “Specialize, don’t generalize.”
I remember not liking that advice then, and I still don’t like it now. It sounded to me like “pigeonhole yourself and don’t you dare try to step outside of your hole”. Telling students who are interested in a future career, “You can improve your skills, but only in this one area of life” sounds overly restrictive and a path to misery. Or at least getting let go when your limited expertise is no longer needed.
Now, specializing isn’t necessarily bad advice. It’s just not the only valid option, and yet people like to talk as if it is.
Don’t be a jack-of-all-trades. Pick what you like to do best, then get really good at it. Try to be better than anybody else. Let people see that you are an expert at the “thing” you do.
When you get known for that one “thing” you’ll see your art career soar. Now get in that pigeonhole and start working on your “thing.”
He says “Any successful marketer and business owner knows that you have to focus your efforts in order to target your market for sales. If you can’t target a market, you won’t make any sales – that’s business 101.”
He’s not wrong about needing a target market, but I don’t think “targeting your market for sales” is synonymous with pigeon-holing yourself into a single specialty.
He listed a bunch of artists as examples to further his point. The idea being that if you think of someone such as Monet or Jackson Pollock, you will inevitably call to mind some representative work of theirs.
But then, what about an artist such as Leonardo da Vinci? What was his “thing”? What about Leon Battista Alberti? Did he have just one thing?
How about someone more contemporary, such as Viggo Mortensen? I knew he was an actor from his role in Lord of the Rings, but I learned he is also an abstract painter and a poet, among other things.
There’s a lot of advice about specializing, and often it is very good advice, but just as often it is also not really supported by any sort of economic principle. Rather it’s more like “common wisdom” that “everyone” knows.
There’s no actual need to pigeonhole yourself into a specialty. Maybe it’s a tougher route to communicate your “thing”, since someone else can’t easily pigeonhole you as an abstract painter, but no one said it had to be easy.
Maybe rather than thinking about arbitrarily self-imposed limits, the more important thing is finding the thread that ties your story together as Pamela Slim argues in her book Body of Work.
Apple makes a lot of different products. Their thing isn’t merely iPhones or Macs. Their “thing” is elegantly, well-designed computing devices. Their “thing” is bigger than what a single product can encompass.
Telling executives at one of the most financially successful businesses in the world “Stop it. You need to niche down” wouldn’t make sense, would it?
The benefits to a focused approach are more than just increased sales. As you begin to focus your work, you’ll begin to get really good at it – better than you thought possible.
While I can see the logic, I also think that I could see someone get really good at their craft if they are able to work with different approaches, techniques, and mediums.
If all you know is oil painting, maybe you’ll get really good at oil painting. But if you know water color as well?
And if you think, “Huh, I wonder how it would look if part of the painting was oil but part was water color?” Would the result potentially be a more interesting work? Would the skill developed in each medium overlap, complement, or reinforce the other?
I don’t know, but I bet a conversation with someone who focused on creating the best work they could with all of their varied skills would be more fascinating and interesting than someone who is Yet Another Oil Painter.
And if their work is more fascinating and interesting, would commercial success also be possible?
Do you think his work in one influences the other and makes him a better artist, or does it reduce him to mediocrity because of a lack of focus? How about his music and his film efforts?
Dismissing the jack-of-all-trades as doomed to financial failure easy, but I see no supporting evidence. In fact, in software development, there’s a premium on so-called “full-stack” developers. Rather than hiring someone who only knows how to work with back-end databases or front-end forms, you get yourself a programmer who can do both as well as everything in between.
No one says, “Oh, sorry. we’re looking for a programmer who only knows one kind of programming language.” That’s like saying, “We want programmers who can’t think beyond one paradigm.”
On the other hand, a jack-of-all-trades without a larger purpose, vision, or mission? THAT I can see as being a problem, financially and otherwise.
Most indies pay little attention to their purpose, mission, and vision, but then again, most indies don’t have sustainable businesses. The vast majority don’t make $500 in a year.
Rolling the dice and hoping for a hit, or at least something that earns enough to fund the development of another game, is not a serious strategy.
And there are a lot of new new indie game developers struggling with motivating themselves to work on their projects for more than a few days at a time before the pain of the creative effort overwhelms any enthusiasm they had to be a game developer. There are always posts online asking for tips of staying motivated.
At the most recent IGDA meeting, I presented an updated version of my 2014 talk Playing the Long Game: The Vital Importance of Purpose, Mission, and Vision to Your Indie Game Development Business.
I’m running my business part-time as I have a day job, but doing a poor job of running GBGames as a full-time independent game developer from 2010 to 2012 taught me some major lessons about running a business. Other indie game developers could benefit from my experience.
While there is no video of the presentation, I uploaded the slides with notes in a few formats:
Knowing who you are and what you stand for will go a long way towards reducing the stress and pain and fear that can otherwise be a regular part of running your own indie game development business.
At the very least, it will give you the energy and motivation to keep working on your projects for the long haul.
At this Tuesday’s meeting, I’m excited to be presenting an updated version of my 2014 talk Playing the Long Game: The Vital Importance of Purpose, Mission, and Vision to Your Indie Game Development Business, sharing lessons that can be drawn from my experience running an independent game development business full-time between 2010 and 2012, and talking about what I’ve done with my business since then based on those lessons.
Many indie game developers dive into the business head-first with nothing much more than a vague dream and some hope, and often with disastrous results. My aim is to help you clarify your Why, your What, and your How so that your efforts are clear, focused, and more decisive, both immediately and in the long term.
I hope to see you at this free event, whether you’re an established game developer, an aspiring one, or someone who is interested in learning about the behind-the-scenes of games.
Wow, it’s almost February? I’m incredibly overdue for the blog post in which I give a post mortem of the previous year and talk about my plans for the coming year.
Which isn’t to say that I’ve been doing nothing this past month. I just haven’t prioritized telling you about it over actually doing it. B-)
WHAT WENT WELL IN 2016
As I said in 2015, I improved my ability to remember my goals. I no longer did the equivalent of setting New Year’s resolutions that I forgot within weeks. Throughout the year, I knew how well or poorly I was doing according to metrics I tracked.
Unfortunately, it meant that I was very aware of how poorly I was doing most of the time.
Last year I set out to build on my success with remembering goals by focusing on what’s needed to actually accomplish those goals.
One big and important improvement I had was in the area of project planning.
In the past, even if tried to be formal about my project management, my actual planning efforts never amounted to more than creating a list of tasks.
Now, some developers find that they can do just fine with nothing more formal than a TODO list or two, and it worked fine for me if I just wanted to know WHAT to work on and maybe even in what order.
But when you’re a lone wolf indie game developer, you need to wear a lot of hats. I had no problem with donning the Software Developer Hat, but my Producer Hat was neglected and gathering dust.
So I might spend weeks working on a particular feature or task without realizing it because I never stopped to think about how the entire project’s progress was being impacted.
At the beginning of the year, I spent quite a bit of time in project planning mode. I even wrote about how I approached it in How to Create a Game Development Project Plan. Then I dove into executing the plan.
And I was very pleased at how well following the actual plan worked for me. Even when my project started running late and surprises appeared that I hadn’t planned for, having a more active Producer Hat meant that at any given time I was focused on actually shipping my game.
Which leads me to the next thing that went well: I shipped!
I still need to write the post mortem for it, but it is my first finished commercial project in years. While there are still features and content I wished I could have added, I’m proud of what I put together.
The release of my first commercial game in years also gave me my first sales in years. After earning $0 in 2015, I like this new trend of actually earning money from my business.
Speaking of money, 2016 was also the first time I put together a detailed budget for my business.
I used to track my expenses and income as they happened, and my aim was to ensure I had enough money in my bank accounts to cover everything.
But I got tired of learning that my bank account balance was lower than expected, only to discover that an automatic renewal on domain names or web hosting had occurred. I felt like I should be able to anticipate such regular expenses instead of being surprised by them.
So, I put together a projected budget, which allowed me to see not only how much I anticipated spending in the coming year, but also when my expenses were expected to spike. For example, I knew that my annual web hosting renewal was coming up in August.
And then I tracked my actual expenditures against the budget. It was eye-opening, and not just because I was able to quickly learn that my web host increased its rates without telling me before autorenewing. B-(
As a side effect of being hyper-aware of where my money was coming and going (er, mostly going), I also added to my budget a plan for a monthly investment into my business. I managed to add a significant amount of money into my business bank accounts by the end of the year.
Also, I updated my website, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. My blog used to be completely separate from the main site, and now it’s integrated.
WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN BETTER IN 2016
Aside from my newly detailed budget and more robust project plan, I didn’t have plans for much else.
I wish I had spent some significant time on creating a promotion plan for Toytles: Leaf Raking. I had done some keyword research and put together a list of reviewer contacts, but most of my effort was spent on actually finishing the game.
Once it was nearly ready, I struggled to make forward progress on getting it in front of people. I realized quite late that the reason I was struggling was because I had no real plan to make it happen.
I didn’t even blog much about it, so I rarely mentioned it during development. I was a bit too accidentally secretive.
For a long time, I had a TODO item on my list to create a skill development plan for myself. I wanted to direct my learning more rather than pick up things haphazardly, but all of 2016 passed without such a plan in place.
I read 54 books, but only 8 were business related, of which I believe only one was game development related.
My project ran late. I didn’t plan for balancing the design, and so quite a bit of work to make the game feel complete wasn’t in the original plan.
Had I published it in three months, I would have had the rest of the year to figure out how to promote it. I wanted to try earning $1,000 by December 31st, but between the late release and my lack of promotion, I fell way short of that mark.
WHAT I WANT 2017 TO LOOK LIKE
2015 was about keeping my goals in front of me and establishing habits.
2016 was about being outcome focused. I logged more game development hours in 2016 than in 2015, but the more important thing was that those hours were aimed at targets.
In 2017, I want to focus on promotion and sales.
Which means I’ll be putting together concrete, specific, actionable plans instead of hoping and praying, or haphazardly trying to tweet about what I’ve made, which is basically the same thing.
I’ve already started the year with efforts to port Toytles: Leaf Raking to other platforms. More platforms means more opportunities for people to find my game. First up is GNU/Linux, mainly because it is my development platform and is easiest for me.
But what about making other games? Project planning is one thing, but product planning is another thing entirely. I have various ideas for new games, but I don’t want to be random about picking something just because it appeals to me. It will be easier to promote new projects if I do my market research and ensure my projects already appeal to players.
My blog has historically been about running an indie game development business, and so my audience has been other game developers primarily. My customers, however, aren’t going to be other game developers and aren’t necessarily going to care about what happens behind-the-scenes.
The thing is, I like writing what I’ve been writing on my blog and don’t want to stop. Can I address players more directly, or do I need to separate my business from my blog to do so?
I am confident when it comes to creating games, but thinking about selling them is both exciting and terrifying to me, the way new things often are.
2017 is when I challenge myself to be incredibly proactive about putting myself and my work out there.
There’s been a meme going around in which indie game developers have posted photos of themselves today juxtaposed with photos of themselves from 10 years ago.
It took me forever to find a 2006 picture of myself.
Let’s go back in time.
10 years ago, states were passing laws to ban the sale of video games to minors. It was after Bush was elected and everyone was falling all over themselves to prove they had “family values”, so a lot of governors were posing with moms and demonizing the great scourge of video games. In the end, each state had its law struck down as unconstitutional (which is to be expected when you base your law on versions from the other states that had been declared unconstitutional already), and it cost the states a lot of money.
Roger Ebert was claiming that games could never be art. Again. And some high profile people in the game industry were arguing the same. I gave my thoughts back then in What Are Games Good For?.
Games were projected to double in revenue by 2011 driven by online and mobile gaming. Keep in mind that the iPhone wasn’t introduced until the next year, and so everyone was thinking mobile meant Java and Brew or Palm Pilots.
Digital Rights Management was in the news, whether it was about computer hardware, games, or things like the Broadcast Flag. I made my opinion known about how annoyed I was that people were so cavalier about it.
Steve Pavlina’s Dexterity.com shut down that year as he completed his transition from the game industry to the personal development industry. His game developer forums eventually became the IndieGamer forums, and his old game development articles turned up either on his site or elsewhere.
The World Cup was in Europe, and the United States had one of their most epic matches against Italy, with both sides losing players before the final whistle. The US was defeated by Ghana to be eliminated in the group stages. Super disappointing. It took two more tries before they would beat them.
Back then, I was living with a girlfriend in an apartment in Chicago. I was working as a paid intern at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the UNIX group, and shortly after I formed my company, I got a software development job at WMS. It was across the street from Midway Games, and I worked on slot machines.
My cats, Diego and Gizmo, entered my life that summer. Before them, I never even had so much as a goldfish as a pet, unless you count the rooster my father brought home one time which I later realized was the dinner my mother prepared the next day.
During crunch time, I would get home feeling dead, and the next thing I knew I would have both cats curled up on me as I lay on the couch. I hated crunch time, but I loved those moments with my cats.
As someone interested in becoming a better indie game developer, I joined the Thousander Club. Back then, everyone was recently introduced to the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at something. Seriously, everyone who was blogging was blogging about it. If you work on your craft for a few hours a day, over the course of a year you would do about 1,000 hours, well on your way to becoming an expert in 10 years.
The Thousander Club was a way of tracking my hours and publicly holding myself accountable. Aside from the person who originally started it, I don’t remember too many people joining this club, but I would keep it up for a few years, although I never spent that much time in a given year on it. By the end of 2006, I had only 262.25 hours, only a little more than 25% of the goal.
I was working on a game I codenamed Oracle’s Eye, and I can’t remember what the game was about at this point. I remember a ball that could be bounced around the level by the player.
It was a stick figure in 2005. I actually like the look of the tiles. Eventually I created a business man sprite.
Since I was writing the game from scratch using libSDL, I encountered and had to solve issues most kids these days get for free with their Unity3Ds and their GameMakers. I had to solve my own hit detection issues, such as the ball or the player entering and getting stuck in walls. I spent time learning the wrong and better ways to write code to make objects move around. Thanks to those early efforts, today I recognize certain issues before they become issues. That’s experience.
But I was bad at finishing my projects then. I had plans to submit a game to the Independent Games Festival that year, but I eventually started over with Oracle’s Eye Prime, which I also don’t have much of a recollection of. It was one of those “I’ve learned so much! This time I’ll do it better!” kinds of restarts. I never finished it, and I never ended up getting a game submitted to the festival. I was super frustrated with myself about that failure.
I switched to creating a Pong clone (I should write another one just to see how much faster I could do it today), and later a Space Invaders clone.
I created this desktop image to inspire me to finish my project.
Note the orange “ship” which was originally blue.
I was just starting to learn about Agile software development and wondering how to apply it to my own efforts to make me more effective.
I joined the Association of Software Professionals the year prior and wanted to become more involved so I could get more out of my membership. A lot of indies joined back then, and many of them let their memberships lapse, which was too bad. I attended the Grand Rapids Schmooze and met a bunch of great people I’m still friends with. Eventually I became a board member and then president of the organization, something I didn’t really anticipate back then.
The next year’s resolutions included the goal of selling my first game, but I woefully underestimated how much I still had to learn about making games, let alone selling them.
And today?
Since then, I had saved up a chunk of money, quit my job, moved from Chicago to Des Moines, Iowa, all to go full-time indie and live the dream. I got quite a bit of feedback from people in the industry which I promptly ignored, then ran out of money and got a day job again after about two years. So, GBGames is back to a part-time effort for me.
So four years as an employee at a company making slot machines, two years being a full-time independent game developer, and now another four years as an employee, only now I don’t work on slot machines and the devices are quieter.
I went to GDC in 2011, so I could check that off my list. I met a lot of people I’ve only ever known through the Internet, including a bunch of people from Ludum Dare or the IndieGamer forums.
These days when I learn that someone’s kid is really into Minecraft, I find that half the time they get super impressed when I say, “You know, I met Notch once.” The other half of the time they say, “Who?” That meeting, by the way? We talked about our Ludum Dare projects before he had to go handle some email emergency.
Shortly after GDC, I proposed to my girlfriend on the balcony of a castle in Europe. We got married. I still have two cats. I’m a home-owner now.
My four years working on slot machines taught me a lot about working on big projects, but my experience working on Stop That Hero!, writing and designing everything from scratch, turned me into a pretty good software developer. I leverage the knowledge and expertise I gained from game development at my current day job, which pays me well.
I spent way too long working on this project, but I’m still very proud of what I was able to accomplish with it. It’s currently on the backburner indefinitely.
So, in general, I’m doing great. I’m fairly healthy. I’m getting paid very well to apply my skills and training daily. I’m fortunate to be married to a wonderful and incredible woman. I am living in a comfortable and spacious home. And again, I have cats.
And yet…
But my business isn’t doing well at all.
Part-time efforts means that things run slowly. What I thought would take me a matter of weeks ends up taking many months. And being slow in this industry is death when there are dozens of games being released daily. I learned about the importance of speed at GDC in 2011, so I knew this fact even before the market got flooded.
I once went to a talk by an entrepreneur who said working part-time on a business just isn’t sustainable because by the time you put something out there, others with more resources and time on their hands might have gotten there first. He said there’s a reason why many entrepreneurs end up divorced.
Well, that sucks. My priorities put being a good husband above my business, and I know other people make different choices in this regard, but I love my wife and can’t see ever deciding that my Limited Liability Company is more important than our partnership.
When I was single and younger, I could work a full-time job, then work for hours on my game development without too many worries. I was just undisciplined and unfocused then, so I didn’t take advantage of it as much as I should have.
Today, I’m better disciplined and more able to focus, but now my time is split quite a bit. I’ve learned that I can’t work on my business too much before I start getting rubberbanded back towards other responsibilities or my health starts forcing me to pull back.
The year prior to 2006, I assessed my ability to create at a very low value and identified it as my major weakness. It’s why I joined the Thousander Club, and I wish I put more time into it back then.
In 2006, I did 262.25 hours of game development. That’s about 1.4 hours a day, which isn’t much, but it can work. It didn’t really result in much that year, though.
This past year? I only did 259.5 hours of game development so far, although that number doesn’t include the 40+ hours of writing and 40+ hours of business planning and marketing I’ve put in. Yet, I had a plan, and I managed to publish. 10 years on, and I am still taking too long to work on a game, but at least I finish my games now.
My three month project that took me 10 months to publish. I think it’s a pretty good business strategy game, and I’m REALLY proud of finishing this one.
Yes, it was meant to be finished in three months and took about 10, and even though I spent a lot more time on game design and balance as opposed to infrastructure and technical details, I still felt very frustrated with how slow this project went.
My wife pointed out that had I worked on it full-time, I easily could have done the almost 260 hours within three months.
Fair enough. I felt better. A little. It’s easy to get frustrated when you compare your struggles and efforts with the successes that other people publicize, or with the future possibilities. Saying things like “I’m a failure because I spent a year making a dinky game while this highly polished mobile game is making millions” is a good way to get yourself stressed. I went through that with my previous project.
You need to measure your progress looking back at where you came from. And compared to how I was in 2006, I’m way more capable as a game developer, as a software developer, as a partner in a relationship, as a business owner, and as a leader. I mean, I know terms like “the Dunning-Kruger effect” now.
10 years goes by quickly
But in 10 years, I’ve only published less than a handful of games commercially? Oof. I still haven’t submitted a game to the IGF. It’s not that I haven’t worked on games, but unless I take my Ludum Dare or One Game a Month projects and polish them up for release, they kind of don’t count except as ways I’ve gained experience with making games.
But again, when I think about what I have accomplished since 2006, it adds up to a few commercial attempts and over 20 different published projects that are more or less playable. Each Ludum Dare game jam or experiment adds to my expertise. Each finished project makes the next one that much easier.
So, I’ve grown quite a bit. And I did it my own way. And doing it my own way was part of the appeal of going indie in the first place.
I don’t know too much about what my life will be like in another 10 years. My wife and I will be middle-aged then. My cats are getting old and may not be there with us, which makes me sad when I think about it. I’m getting old, and I worry that I’ll fall behind in terms of my technical expertise with artificial intelligence and automation threatening once-secure jobs. I worry about continuing to miss out on opportunities. I feel out of touch with the game industry as it is. I worry about becoming a sad old man who refuses to acknowledge the futility of what he’s doing.
Frankly, I don’t have an exit plan. I don’t have an idea of a situation or point in time when I say, “Well, that’s it. I’ve hit the limit of what I will accomplish in game development for my lifetime.”
Ever since I went back on “corporate welfare”, I’ve been working slowly and trying to build up my business, with the expectation that it will all come together. I don’t mean getting lucky with a hit game, but that the business will eventually become sustainable as my full-time employment.
I have been aiming to build up streams of income, rather than hope for a big jackpot. But for a few years now I’ve been worried that the premise isn’t workable, that it’s not possible to do what I’m doing and expect great things eventually. I’d hate to think I’m limiting myself to mediocrity.
But I chose my current approach because there are certain things in my life that I value as more important. I’m trying to be the tortoise and shouldn’t get frustrated when the hares around me are sprinting by, often off cliffs.
Many of the game developers and blogs I followed back in 2006 are no longer around. Some retired. Some switched industries. Some gave up.
I’m still here, though.
And I expect to be here for another 10 years. In order to have more to show for it by then, I’m making plans to do more rapid and focused learning and hard work now to get me there. Part of that is rereading some of the advice people gave me in the last 10 years and reconsidering what I’ve ignored or misunderstood then.
Flash game developers may remember Flixel, the open source game dev library created by Adam “Atomic” Saltsman.
HaxeFlixel is the Haxe-based port that eventually became its own full-featured, mature library that allows for deployment across not only Flash but many other platforms.
The five-year-old project is an open source project using the MIT License. That license, unlike the GPL, does not require code changes to be released to the public.
While the MIT License is appealing to developers who want to leverage freely available code for their own projects, there is nothing to encourage contributions to the source code of a project that is under that license.
The terms of the GPL requires any modifications to be released, so it solves the problem of people taking advantage of the code but not contributing back. But if a project’s developers don’t want to make that requirement, would prefer to have the MIT License applied instead, and still have people contribute to the project, whether in monetary terms or source code, what can be done?
How We Paid Our Open Source Taxes documents how the HaxeFlixel project was able to “collect its open source taxes with smiles on all sides.”
In this case, the core contributors realized that the project founder lives in an area where the cost of living is much, much less than it would be in, say, San Francisco. Just $6,000 would be enough.
So rather than having a vague fundraiser and hoping to make a bunch of money to meter out as needed, they were able to make a hyper-focused plea with their IndieGoGo campaign to get enough money to gain a full-time developer rather than require the project to continue to be supported by an all-volunteer base of contributors.
It’s kind of like when you talk to people about how much money they wish they had in life. Some people talk about “a million dollars” as if it is a lot of money that they’ll never see in reality, and other people realize that they can get penthouse apartments complete with maid service in some exotic countries for less than the cost of a New York apartment, such as what Tim Ferriss described in The 4-Hour Workweek.
The trick is learning what’s really possible.
HaxeFlixel’s story gives some insight into not only how an open source project operates but also teaches the lesson that if you know exactly what you need, it’s a lot easier to ask for it.
There are a lot of conflicting thoughts in my head about how I want to approach my efforts at creating games. Some of these conflicts are from seemingly contradictory pieces of advice I’ve received over the years, and some are just related to fear, uncertainty, and doubt due to inexperience.
I want to quickly get a minimum viable product out there in the hands of customers, get their feedback, and similarly very quickly make an informed decision to either tweak the existing game or abandon it for a completely different project. If I can do this quickly enough, I have more chances to earn enough money to make these efforts sustainable.
On the other hand, I don’t want to put out junk. I don’t want to release half-finished ideas, non-workable games, or projects that aren’t anywhere near ready. I want the projects to have a chance, and in order to be proud of what I put out, I need to finish my games.
But on the third hand, I don’t want to work on my project forever, constantly tweaking, adding, and removing inconsequential features. You might call it “feature creep,” but I don’t think that name really describes the issue I’m worried about. It’s more like being so afraid of pulling the trigger that you distract yourself into thinking there’s more development work to do to avoid thinking about the hard work of actually releasing the game to the public.
There’s always unimplemented features and more balancing work that could be done in a game, right? As a developer, I KNOW how to do that kind of stuff. It’s easy to stay in the comfort zone of being the technician.
And when you work by yourself, it’s easy to forget to take off your Developer’s hat, put on your Producer’s hat, and think about deadlines and what work is optional versus what work is core to what your game needs. You need to ship.
On the fourth hand, I will become a better game developer if I work on more games more often. There’s that story from Art & Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland about the ceramics teacher who split his class into two groups. One group was graded on the quality of a single pot on the last day of class, and the other group was graded on the quantity of pots produced by the last day of class.
It turned out that the group that produced the higher quality pots was the group graded on quantity, mainly because the experience of creating each pot also gave them insights into how to make the next pot better. Meanwhile the quality group spent more time merely thinking about how to make a quality piece of pottery, and when it came time to actually put in the work, they were not necessarily up to the task.
So, if I focus on making more games more often, I’ll make better and better games.
Of course, on the fifth hand, I don’t want to make throwaway entertainment that people pay little or no money for and pay little or no attention to. I want my games to have meat on their bones. I want my games to be the kinds of games I’d play.
On the sixth hand, I am not my customers, and I need to make sure I create games with a target audience in mind. I should find out what THEY want to play.
On the seventh hand, I’m creating these games, and the message these games put out reflects what I want to see in the world. I own my art, and they’re not “just games.”
On the eighth hand, I’m not working on games in a vacuum. There are other games being made by other developers, and I should make sure to spend some time playing those games.
I should research other implementations, see what other developers have tried, learn what works and what doesn’t, all without spending the effort myself.
I should listen to podcasts, watch presentations online, and read blogs more regularly.
I can leverage the experience of other people.
On the ninth hand, I’m a part-time indie game developer. There’s only so many hours in a day that I dedicate to being a game developer, and if I spend it playing other people’s games and watching other people talk about how they do their work, I won’t have time to do my own work and put out my own games. I barely participate in online forums anymore, and I finally understand all of those people who complained about the lack of time to participate in forums. Where does anyone in my position find the time?
There’s a difference between doing and learning how to do, and there is always more to learn.
There’s also always more to do, and doing is the hard part.
On the tenth hand, I hate that I’m ill-informed about what’s going on in the world of games and their development. I was blown away to learn that multiple people were making virtual reality games for the most recent Ludum Dare 48-hour game development competition, as it sounds like the kind of thing that still requires a huge upfront investment. Clearly I’m out of the loop.
On the eleventh hand, I’m an indie game developer, which means I define my own rules of engagement.
It’s not a race, despite the realities of opportunity costs and trends, and despite the realities of impending life events that change everything.
Success isn’t defined by money but by accomplishing goals, despite the fact that earning a significant income from this effort would be a great side-effect of those goals being accomplished, one that could help me set and achieve bigger and better goals. Money isn’t a goal, but it can be a measure of progress. But it also doesn’t have to be.
When you’re starting out, you look to people who already know what they are doing to provide some guidance. And they are often more than willing and able to share what they think works.
But in the end, it’s easy to get stressed out about meeting someone else’s expectations if you don’t take care to set your own expectations.
I’ve had people tell me what I should do and what I shouldn’t do. I’ve had people question decisions I made and ask why I didn’t make a better decision on a choice I didn’t know I had.
There is no wrong or right way to go about this process, though.
Some people swear by putting out prototypes daily. Others like to work in secret for months or years at a time.
Some people like to explore one game mechanic fully, and others like to experiment with lots of different concepts.
Some people like to put out fully formed games to be consumed, and others like to release early development builds for people to nibble on.
Some people throw spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks, and other people like to plan out an entire evening with a multiple course gourmet meal.
If I use the same criteria for the spaghetti-thrower’s efforts that EA uses for their heavily-invested and marketed blockbusters, it’s going to look like a lot of failures and flops are being thrown at a wall. That’s not the way to make a blockbuster hit!
But the spaghetti-thrower has different goals entirely. They’re not trying to put out blockbuster hits. They might not even be trying to make something commercially. They’re trying to gauge interest in prototypes, seeing if there is a significant amount of interest in something before putting a lot of time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears into a more substantial work.
Following EA’s playbook is probably not going to help them achieve their goal. They’ll probably stress out way too much to be useful if they somehow get it in their head that EA has the truth about How Games Are Made(tm) and that they are not following it.
While other people might have great advice for their own expectations of how things work, it’s a lot less stressful (although still pretty stressful) if you politely ignore them and create your own expectations. You have enough to worry about without second-guessing if you didn’t make games similar enough to how some celebrity game developer did.
It’s fine to seek out and get advice, and it can all be really great advice, but don’t forget to make your own path.
There was a game jam in which I used Stencyl, but otherwise, all of my projects have been based on my own hand-coded C++ with libSDL. I spent time figuring out how to write a basic game loop, how to design my software architecture, how to create simple buttons to interface with, and more.
It’s time I could have been spending designing games rather than implementing them. I know this fact.
And yet, I persist.
Over the years, I’ve been told to switch to Flash, or use an engine like Torque 2D or Unity. When XNA was released, I remember wondering if C# was going to become the dominant programming language in game development.
But my C++ game engine is still with me, and still relevant. Granted, it’s not as full-featured as some systems, and the asset pipeline is still a manual effort. But what it does feature is well-tested, and I know how it works.
There’s something about learning how to build it from scratch that makes development more enjoyable. My A* pathfinding algorithm might make oddly suboptimal paths, but learning how the algorithm works and figuring out how to implement it was a fantastic experience.
As you can see from this 2010 development shot of what ultimately became Stop That Hero!, the AI hero should have followed something like that yellow line rather than the path it actually took.
It’s sort of like doing my own home repairs. There are some things I’ll leave to well-paid experts, but other things shouldn’t be too difficult to do. For instance, replacing the toilet’s fill valve and flapper took a small trip to the hardware store to get a replacement part and then a few minutes of work.
A bigger project I finished recently involved putting lockable doors on shelves we have in the basement. My wife and I are getting licensed to become foster parents, and part of the requirements for our home’s safety include keeping flammable materials such as paint in a locked storage area.
Rather than buy a big expensive cabinet, I thought, “We already have these wooden shelves in the basement. How hard could it be to put up a piece of wood with some hinges and a padlock?”
I measured the area I needed to cover. I bought the wood and had the guy at the store cut it for me as I didn’t own a power saw myself. I learned the screws for the hinges were longer than the wood was deep, and I found that you could get 1x4s to frame the wood to make it look nice while also giving the door the thickness needed for those screws.
In the end, the doors looked nice enough and were functional, although they are not perfectly centered, as you can see. It turned out that the dimensions I measured didn’t take into account parts of the shelf protruding in ways that would prevent the doors from fitting perfectly. The good news is that they look homemade. B-)
Now, it took some time. I had to go to the hardware store a couple of times to get all of the materials, and I had to spend time on it when I could have been doing something more important, like working on finishing my game before we have foster children in the house. Did this time and effort translate into a better return on investment than the $90 cabinet I thought we could avoid buying?
No. In fact, we probably overspent on the wood and other materials for other projects.
But there are some benefits to having done it myself.
One, I learned 1x4s are not actually 1 inch by 4 inches. I never knew this fact, but when you buy wood, you need to expect your 1x4s will be 0.75 inches by 3.5 inches. It’s about how the wood is when it is cut and rough versus when it is dry, planed, and made ready for sale. It’s just one of those things that I now know for future projects. Luckily, the screws I had to attach the 1×4 to the plywood weren’t too long, but that could have been another trip to the hardware store since I was expecting the nominal dimensions to be the actual dimensions.
Two, I discovered that I can improvise a carpentry job. I had not made plans, yet I was able to put together some decent looking doors. When I ran into trouble, such as finding out that the doors wouldn’t fit where I expected them, I was able to shift them to different parts of the existing shelf and keep going. I could easily have given up when I found out that the doors were just a little too big, but I made it work. If I was doing kitchen cabinetry, I would have been more careful, but this project was more about the functionality than the aesthetics.
Three, I have the pride of saying, “I built that myself.” There’s nothing like that feeling.
My game development efforts might result in projects that are somewhat askew like my basement shelf doors are. It might take me longer. The end result might be less than what I could have gotten had I leveraged someone else’s efforts.
I know.
But I am a much stronger developer than I was in the past mostly because of all of the from-scratch efforts I have put in. I did the research myself. I explored from first principles rather than taking the shortcut of an existing path. I understand the trade-offs involved in design decisions rather than accepting decisions made for me.
And in the end, when I release a game, I can say proudly, “I built that myself.”
It won’t likely be important to my customers. And it won’t likely be important to you. But as an indie game developer, I don’t have to pay attention to your criteria for what’s the best approach.
I can build it myself, a process I enjoy.
And next time, I will be more experienced and knowledgeable than I was before.
It was a stick figure in 2005. I actually like the look of the tiles. Eventually I created a business man sprite.
by David Bayles and Ted Orland about the ceramics teacher who split his class into two groups. One group was graded on the quality of a single pot on the last day of class, and the other group was graded on the quantity of pots produced by the last day of class. 
