240 days, and counting!

I've been threatening to write a blog entry for a while, and now, on MrJoy's 240th operational day, I finally keep my threat.

I think it's high time I started a regular feature in fact. So let today mark the birth of "Indie On the Loose", which will chronicle our trials and tribulations. Our successes and our failures. Our highs, our lows, our general crankiness. We will use this series as a means of recounting our experiences for the benefit of other indies out there trying to make their own way.

Let's kick this off with a recap of The Story, Thus Far:

-6/15 - I started coding like crazy.
-9/16 - Finished "When Orcs Attack!"
-12/11 - Finished "Hordes of Orcs"
-1/14 - Our first MacWorld.
-2/10 - Today.

It started out as just me, back on 6/15. That's not to say that anything I've done has been a solo effort (far from it!), just that MrJoy, Inc was... Me. Now, I have two partners in this little venture (plus the perpetual enslavement of Magnus and John!), a full-time contractor in Viet Nam and a growing rolodex of some of the most amazingly talented and skillful people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting and working with.

I've worked with several different publishers, and talked to a large number of companies about various opportunities and partnerships. The variety of experience has been huge; at one end of the spectrum are companies who have been more helpful and generous than we have any right to hope for. At the other are companies who have broken -- literally -- every single promise they've made. I've met people who made me think "I NEED to hire that person! S/he's going to be amazing, and I want to see that up close!", and I've met people who are all smiles and charm but who are clearly wolves in sheep's clothing.

So let me introduce you to the team, as it currently exists:

Brian "NakAttack" Nakamoto -- I've had the good fortune to work with Brian on-and-off for 10 years. He is in many respects, my polar opposite. Where I am forgetful and flaky, he is meticulous and thorough. Where I am emotional and willful he is thoughtful and measured. He is my right hand, and the glue keeping this fledgling company from coming apart at the hastily-glued seams. Doing everything from product management to QA to supplying Derek and me with caffeine and sugar during death-marches, Brian makes sure things get done.

Derek "infinite_monkeys" Chan -- Derek was one of the early engineering hires at my last company. He survived a rather tough hiring process and managed to put up with me for four straight years. Worse yet, he had to put up with *my code* for four straight years. He's never been quite right since... We keep him chained up, Hannibal Lector style, letting him out to code for no more than three hours per day; and then only with strict supervision and a gun pointed to his head JUST IN CASE. Derek is getting his C#-legs and will be taking over much of the coding duties from me.

Hao "King of Gods" Pham -- Bright, eager, and prone to losing his command of English when excited (much like Magnus after 2 "black russians"), Hao has breezed through every challenge I have thrown his way with ease. Hao is working on our super-secret-nifty-high-tech-secret-sauce. Shhhh! Can't say more yet!

We've worked 80 hour weeks side-by-side getting builds ready, agonized over what projects to take on, spent hours playing games to get ideas and see what's out there and generally had a hell of a time so far. Together, we've shipped one game, we have another about to ship, and three more in planning stages.

Now, I know what you're all wondering: "Yes, yes, yes -- that's all totally freakin' irrelevant to me. What about the games? Have they been successful? Have they bombed? SPILL!!!"

Well, that's where things get interesting. "When Orcs Attack!" is not a financial success, but it wasn't really intended as such. It was meant to open doors, and provide key insights and learnings about the development process and the marketplace. To that end, it's been a huge success. Freeverse would not have had word one to say to me without it.

"Hordes of Orcs" is looking to be either "very successful" or "really really successful" depending on whether the numbers I've seen for "typical" casual games are referring to gross sales, or the revenue that the developer actually sees. It's looking like it will return at LEAST a 50% profit to MrJoy, even after including the cost of developing "When Orcs Attack!" -- eventually. It could actually be substantially HIGHER than that once we ship on Windows and go to retail.

We've even gotten some very nice coverage of the game in various circles (presented in no particular order):

-Apple.com review.
-CNET review and award.
-MacMod interview.
-MacMost interview.



The gotcha of course is that the lifespan of a casual game is several years, meaning MrJoy sees a trickle of income, not a tidalwave. One friend, whose background is finance, compared it to an annuity.

One thing I think worth mentioning is "Why Mac?" Mac users account for a small fraction of the total market, making it just about impossible to have a break-away hit that's Mac-based. I.E. reaching PopCap's sales numbers for Bejeweled with a Mac-exclusive game just ain't gonna happen. So why have we focused to heavily on Mac right now?

Well, I'd be lying if I said that the fact that I prefer using a Mac isn't part of it but it really is a sound business decision: The Mac market is less saturated (one might even say "under-served"), and historically has been composed of individuals with pretty high disposable income. The flip-side of this is that Mac users are generally more demanding and of course the inevitable cost of cross-platform support.

Thanks to Unity, the cost of cross-platform support has been remarkably close to zero for MrJoy. Barring the odd bug or two, it Just Works on Direct3D 9/Windows and OpenGL/Mac. Now, the harder you push things and the more cutting-edge the features you want to use (especially graphics related), the less likely this is to hold up for you; that's just inevitable. The abstraction eventually proves to be leaky. But we've tried hard to push us *down* the technological spectrum, rather than *up* it. There's QA effort involved, and the effort of making a Windows installer (essentially a one-time cost; our NSIS template can be reused across multiple projects easily) but these wind up being very small costs.

The fact of the Mac community being more demanding should actually work in our favor on the Windows side too. Making a product that's viable for a Mac audience means making a product that should stand out as being clearly more refined, polished and compelling in the Windows market. When you weigh all of that together, I cannot see any good for an indie trying to bootstrap to NOT focus on the Mac.

Another small but important lesson we've learned along the way: It can be good to develop on a machine close to your minimum target spec. With the huge variance in graphics capabilities between even last-generation high-end and current-generation low-end cards it's very easy to fall into the trap of making something that's very efficient and fast on your higher-end dev box but which is a slideshow on more typical machines. This is especially true if you're going after the casual gaming market.

And so, we press forward with our plans. Will we go bankrupt? Will we go insane? Will we work ourselves into early graves? Stay tuned, for the next exciting episode!