Buy me a house or "Is there money in games?" theme week

As always, I was inspired by Jeff Tunnell's blog as well as a topic that I can't seem to find about just how much money we should expect to make in game development (enough to buy a used Porsche?). It was while sitting around avoiding my ethnography project on performance inhibitions that I had my own little Ah-Ha! moment. There is money to be made in games. And I'm just the guy to do it. I mean, if there are so many people playing so many games and paying money for the privilege, there must be a market, right? [Right.

So, how to penetrate this nebulous market? Some would say that having a game to release would be of importance. But I'm going to look at it from a different perspective. People want to play games. They pay to play games. But do they really like the games they play? If you happen to cruise GameFAQs, IGN or GameSpot, the routine answer would be "mostly, no." So rather than initially offering a game, I'm going to offer hype, dreams, and gimmick.

Introducing...

Buy Me a House

Currently: $0 out of $169,900

We all know how important it is to have a place to lay one's head and shower and play Xbox Live Arcade while dreaming about making games. Well, I'm sick of my current house so I need a new one. This one looks good. But I have a problem: I can't afford it.

This is where games come in. See, Carmack was happy with a fast car. Jeff with fast motorcycles. Me, I just want a place to live that's bigger than my current place and has a nice kitchen where I can make me a sandwich. This one has the added benefit of a game room.



Think of the games that I could imagine making in digs like that!

So I decided that I'd best research the business side before I jumped into this crazy world. I did a search on Amazon for Success in Business. After looking at the searches, I realized that this business stuff is hard. I didn't want to sit around and read about other people's success stories. I want to write my own. Well, the first couple of books were all "how I did it" tripe...but then I noticed that there was something more my style on that search page: a JVC in-dash CD player. I even had a remote so I could divert my attention from the road with a handheld device. I own a Dodge Caravan filled to the teeth with film equipment so the CD player seemed to be the most logical choice. I have the original cassette that came with it and it is not that friendly with tapes (or those CD convertor tape thingies). So I picked that up and got to thinking about how I would make my house come to be. Which means doing some hard thinking about making a game.

First I put in a FlipSyde CD to get in the design mood. As an avid reader of the forums here at Garage Games and the Stile Project, I remember that there was a forum topic about productivity and music. Now I had my thinker in action!

So, making money making games. Or hyping dream games that are going to be the next best things since sliced WoW. I had this idea for a game center structured somewhat like MySpace but with parental control over access to all content, chat capabilities, and oriented towards parents playing with their children and giving them a reason to monitor their children's internet activities (and not make it so bad later when they monitor them in the angsty teen years). There were a couple of problems that I could see with this. First, parents don't want to play with their children. There's a reason we have schools: inexpensive child care for today's disposable income workforce. Second, I didn't want to go through the COPPA. And lastly, the amount of money required for bandwidth and servers and all that good stuff to make a Children's MMO-MySpace/Xanga/RealArcade/Club Pogo/etc feasible would eat into the funds towards my house goal. That just can't happen.

So I had to use my currently available tools, which are actually quite varied. I'm a strong believer in the right tool for the right job. Since I own just about everything that GG sells, they're pretty much a shoe-in (of course, I own *everything* that Blitz Research sells and a good chunk of what TheGameMakers sells among a million other engines or SDK's or API's or "game languages"). I own a lot of modeling packages. But boy those things are complex. All those buttons and GUI's and options. It's entirely too much work to actually make a game, but if I don't make a killer hit game to kill WoW or Bejewelled or Unreal Tournament 2007, how will I ever get my house? That's the rub.

My next concept was a game like tetris, but with a cubic interface. You try to eat away the cube using Tetri-tactics. Pieces fly from left, right, top and bottom, and you can rotate the cube to put them in place. Kind of like a timed jigsaw puzzle where you are both adding to and destroying a cube made up of small tiles. Feasability and fun factor aside, I began thinking about this concept and what I could use to make it. I would have to write a custom scene object in TGE to do it, and while that might be fun (for someone), it also sounds like a lot of work. 3D shapes in TGB wouldn't be quite right becasue I would need a 3D system. So it looked like DarkBasic, BlitzMax (+ OpenGL and custom objects) or Blitz3D. Play Basic, Pure Basic, and Real Basic didn't quite seem to fit (that's a lot of BASICs!). So maybe DarkBasic. After all, I have that cool cloth pack so I can make things flap and the particle pack to make things sparkly. I hear casual gamers like sparkly things. It's like money in the bank! Ka-CHING!

So my killer game (it's CopyTradePatentMarked so don't steal it) for the casual market was well on its way to fruition. Which is a good thing because it was getting cold in my van. I had run out of gas and the CD player was running on battery power. And it was snowing. Great night. Time to go in, have a beer, play a little Wildlife Tycoon and maybe a little Rez. I could think of my Puzzle Pirates killer tomorrow while pushing my van to the service station.

So I headed inside, sat down, and began working on my RPG Tutorial for TGB. It will not be nearly as comprehensive as the one proposed on TDN. I'm trying to give the basics so that new people who want to make a RPG can find their footing and get an idea of how to organize extremely basic systems and data (I am shooting for Dragon Quest I; extremely simplistic combat, inventory, conversations, event system, etc).

Right now I'm not sure what the timeline is. I've been writing on gradual student crap (if I ever get my Masters, it will be amazing). But luckily spring break has given me a bit of a pause to get started (and transcribe interviews). Mainly I've been putting together some art assets (from Vue, Modo, and Poser) to work with it.

Maybe a little later I'll have more done on my mega scheme and be a little closer to owning a home with a bigger kitchen and a yard...and if I dream big enough, perhaps one of those kiddie pools that I can fill with milk and laugh at the neighbors because they just don't understand the eccentric lifestyle of an indie game developer with BIG dreams.