When I worked at Elixir and Lionhead I often got really distressed over how much artwork got thrown away. It seemed mad to spend so much time and money on getting artwork, only to ditch it and start again. Some of this was just typical inefficiency, but some of it becomes more understandable the longer you work in games.
games are very visual things. We can rant about game play vs graphics all we like, but the first impression of 99% of games is visual. It’s REALLY hard work to slog away 10 hours a day, every day on a game that actually looks really bad. Most coder art is really bad, so in order to get an idea of whether or not the game will feel any good, and to inspire you to work hard and believe in the current game, it’s important to have something that looks nice as soon as you can.
There are two approaches to this. One is to spend a lot more time than you usually do on really polishing your ‘coder art’. I’ve spent some time doing this. I know my way around photoshop, and I’ve read hundreds of tutorials over the years on how to do all sorts of arty things. I still do some of the artwork for my games (less and less of it each game. The problem with doing this is it takes up a lot of time.
The alternative is to pay an artist to do some work before you really know what style you want, or if you will keep it. This can bexcellent, because they can prompt you into a new direction, or just turn out higher quality stuff, but it also obviously costs money. Indie games are done on a shoestring. Wasting money on artwork you know you will not ship with the game is scary. But right now, looking at my mystery new game and it’s crappy coder art, I am tempted to spend a few dollars and get a proper artist to mock up some basic stuff for me…
Do you want to be a currency speculator? Because if you are outside the USA and considering a career doing what I do, you might have to become one.
Most games sales come from the US, and generally people tend to price their games in dollars. Plus, most of the big sales portals charge in dollars, and (more importantly) pay the developers in US dollars. I’m in the UK, and this means two big things.
- I have to pay a fortune each time in bank fees when the money gets converted into UK Pounds
- I am at the mercy of exchange rates.
Recently, the pound and the dollar have been all over the place. here is a 3 month chart:
Generally it’s been good news, because a stronger dollar and a weaker pound means I earn more for each game I sell in the US. However it’s not that simple, because I tend to pay for my advertising in dollars. Advertising is my major expense, once the games are done, so it really matter if the adverts are suddenly 20% more expensive than they were a week ago. As a result, one of the many parts of my daily routine is to keep an eye on the exchange rate to see if now is a good time to stick some money in the advertising account and get a few free dollars (effectively) by ‘picking my moment’.
If I was really organised I’d probably have a US bank account that people could pay into (in dollars) and avoid a lot of currency-changing fees. Does anyone know how easy it is for a UK busienss to open a US bank account?
I posed for a picture once brandishing a klingon knife. It was my blog picture for ages. because of that pic, some people have developed an impression of me as a homicidal maniac with anger management issues. This isn’t helped by my hobby of shooting a recurve bow (at targets, not animals). I want to reassure everyone that i am a lovely cat-loving human being who is not at all a weapon-obsessed freak.
On an unrelated topic, a mate of mine gave me a late birthday present today. Holy crap its tough to load (80 pounds draw).
It’s a crossbow pistol, clearly 
Today I’ve spent the whole morning working on getting my old particle engine editor doodad from Rock Legend (used to do the pyro effects) in a fit state to use for my next game (should that continue to be my next game).
I’m often amazed at how crap my tools are in comparison to everyone else (maybe that’s why i get the games done though?). Anyway, this is the most feature-rich tool I’ve ever had for one of my games (and It’s not finished yet).
Here’s a nice little blog interview with yours truly:
http://thereticule.com/2008/11/24/cliff-harris-interview/
I spent a lot of today doing some basic AI for my mystery new game Just the very basics so that I have stuff on screen actually doing something. I’m quite pleased with it so far, although at the start of a game there is always a quick rush of instant results before the debugging and re-factoring sets in later
It’s amazing how much time can be involved in being an indie developer. Apart from all the actual work on games today there is all the email stuff to handle, ad budgets to tweak, website changes to make and financial spreadsheety and invoicy things to do. It’s a full-time job and then some.
A few days ago I started work on what i thought would be the basics of my next game. I had a basic design document, and had thought about the game a lot. But the moment I started coding it, I started getting flashbacks to an older game idea I had tried ages ago and stopped work on. The more I thought about it, the more I thought it would be cool to do a game like that again.
I started coding it, and within a few hours had something on screen that made me smile. I’ve been working on it ever since, and I’m quite pleased with how it’s coming along. I almost can’t work on it without smiling.
it makes NO commercial sense for me to make it. I have 3 game ideas prepared which build on my current ‘reputation’ for doing complex simulation / management / strategy games with a real-world setting. They are all good ideas and I think they would all sell. One of them would be great for the ‘casual’ crowd. One is a potentially hugely popular and funny game. Another is more serious, maybe even political.
But this one just triggers my inner geek endorphin levels too much. People who think of me as ‘the Kudos’ guy, will wonder if the game is made by the same person. It’s very geeky, very old-school in some ways. It’s still 2D and it’s still strategic (in a way). It makes me feel 7 years old again.
I almost feel duty bound to make it, because I wish there was a game like this. For once, it’s a positech game that will look much better in video than in screenshots. If in a few weeks time I’m still working on it (and thus am more sure I’ll stick with it), I’ll drop some hints about it.
It’s not Democracy 3 or Kudos 3.
Thanks to QT3.
I got my subscriber copy of PC Gamer UK today. There is a copy of Kudos on the coverdisk and also a review of the game, where it scored 72%. It DOES bug me that they give half a page to K2 with 72%, and then spend 2 whole pages giving a lower score to Quantum of Solace. I mean… who the fuck was looking forward to the new bond movie tie-in game so much that they need a whole 2 pages to tell them it’s not as good as a hip cool new Indie game? Bah!
You can read the review online here:
http://www.gamesradar.com/pc/kudos-2/review/kudos-2/a-2008110714375486059/g-20081107142631814067
Also… I added an RSS thingy to the left of the blog for subscribing. If anyone understands that stuff well and notices it doesn’t work, let me know! I don’t personally use an RSS reader, I never got around to finding and installing one.
There’s a big problem in doing PR and marketing for Kudos 2. It has no genre. The nearest it gets to a genre is ‘like the sims’. But even then, the Sims has no genre. Most hardcore gaming sites have genres such as Strategy,Arcade, RTS, FPS, Adventure. Kudos is none of these. Some might consider it a strategy game, but many sites assume a strategy game is an RTS, or at least some sort of combat or war game. Most strategy sites are bulging with screenshots of Elves and Tanks, hardly the same genre as Kudos 2.
Then there are the casual sites, where the taregt market for Kudos 2 also overlaps. The people who play games like ‘Diner Dash’ often quite like Kudos 2, IF they get to try it. The thing is, these sites also pigeonhole their games into ‘Time management’ ‘Puzzle’ and ‘Arcade’.
That makes me laugh, because what they really mean is ‘Diner Dash clone’ ‘bejewlled Clone’ and ‘Zuma Clone’. There is sod-all innovation in most of these games. But anyway, despite that rant, you will see again that Kudos 2 does not fit nicely anywhere. Sometimes it’s puzzle, sometimes arcade, sometimes its RPG or Adventure or strategy.
Nobody actually looks for Kudos 2, because they don’t know what sort of game it is. The best I can hope for is people expect it to be like an existing gewnre, but give it a go anyway. When people try it, they tend to like it.
Maybe next time I should make a game that more clearly fits in an existing genre. Right now I’m doing the very first bits of work on the next game, and it’s another strategy game. I have a nice idea for the game, and can imagine it being really cool. I just need to get the visual side of things arranged nicely…
Well….
You guys seem to have some pretty widely varying guesses as to how many games I sell. Be aware that i am only talking about DIRECT sales. By that I mean someone who comes to the positech site and buys the game direct through BMT Micro (my payment provider). That excludes all the casual portal sales through sites like arcadetown, bigfishgames and so on, plus the other portals such as GamersGate and Stardock’s Impulse. It also excludes retail deals, and it excludes stuff such as sales of the Apple Mac ports as well.
Some of you guessed around 25,000. I would be very happy with that . if I disregard my advertising costs (which are BIG in my terms), then I’m earning around $20 for Democracy 2 and $18 for Kudos 2. That means that 25,000 copies of D2 would have earned me half a million dollars (almost £18*)
Ha!
I wish. I REALLY do. I’d be working on Democracy 3 right now if I had earned that amount from just the direct sales. The real number is a lot lower than that. There HAS been a bit of a sales spike recently for D2 thanks to the US elections though.
Unfortunately I can’t really tell you the figures for Kudos 2, or the exact Democracy 2 figures, because that information is what they call ‘commercially sensitive’. In practice that means that while I’m negotiating with several companies (many of whom may have people who read this) it’s not in my interest to ‘reveal my hand’ as to how much money I make from my games. However, suffice it to say that i don’t *need* any of the portals, publishers or people I do business with. I can pay the rent and food bill with my direct sales. This is l33t because it means I don’t have to answer to anyone and can make the games I love to make.
Because I predict lots of cross blog readers wanting some juicy stats, here is a chart instead…
One day when I’m feeling less stressed about sales and have some decent figures behind me, I might publish some more sales figures.
*joke
