Plan for Stephen Zepp

Inspired by Joe M's first recent plan delving into the details of his life and how it affects and motivates his indy game development, I wanted to produce a similar plan on how Datastorm Studios is surviving and evolving.

From the beginning, I decided that our project lifecycle would be broken down into two major sections. For several months I agonized over the conflict between having the desire to make a fully sized AAA MMOG without any funding, production history for the company, or even major AAA game development experience, and all of the various issues surrounding a "first product" publishing agreement...which had about 2 chances to actually happen from the beginning, on the scale of a snowball in various locations not commonly visited during Spring Break.

My business and project decisions were based on the following:

--No desire to produce "small" games I have a slightly different business goal than many indy developers--I don't want to produce games, I want to produce a specific game. Like many aspiring Indy's have felt, every MMOG I've played from early 90's MUDS to watching WoW has had major design decisions that I simply have never agreed with, and I feel strongly that today's MMOG's are still using late 70's and early 80's game mechanics and designs--and I feel strongly as well that there are no longer any excuses for that except for lack of risk-taking. The entire purpose of the Nemesis Vortex project is to produce a game that moves past all of the currently in use paradigms and design decisions and models a real persistent world.

Ancedote: When the RTS SK came out in November, I jumped in with both feet and within 2 weeks popped out a pretty interesting community resource dealing with some basic aspects of the RTS genre: resource collection and use (gold, wood, stone for example), and use of buildings to perform game tasks such as tech research, unit hiring, etc. This quickly became a true community project in the fledging RTS SK community, and was released to the community in short order to pretty good response. What was really interesting to me is that the community project apparently put myself, and Nemesis Vortex on the GG "radar", and we started getting attention from GG itself. Jay Moore in fact contacted me via irc (I rarely hang out there, but can be seen occasionally), and asked about the possibility of releasing NemV in some form on a much shorter production cycle, or possibly working on a smaller game using the RTS SK.

In many many ways this was a "win-win" concept for both DataStorm Studios and GG. We as a company (were we successful in this smaller game and taken it to publishing) would now have a track record of published titles, as well as a possible revenue stream to assist development for our primary project, and GG would have a marketable product (again, assuming the game actually worked and was fun) showing off the RTS SK. I took my project leads and my business advisors into conference, and we carefully evaluated the advantages and disadvantages:

Track record--obviously, having any form of published game (profitable or not) is a great boon to any indy dev studio.

Revenue Generation--as so many people have commented upon, self-funded projects can be very limited. Currently, I personally finance each and every purchase for our studio, from software licenses to market research to contract art/code. This becomes expensive very quickly, and any revenue at all (once production/publishing costs were met) would help to alleviate this financial drain.

Losing our corporate vision--a very big concern on my part was something that Joe M. mentioned--contract work/other projects can very easily distract you from your real vision, which in our case was continuing to evolve Nemesis Vortex.

Need to accelerate corporate development--There was a lot of overhead involved from the business requirement of re-organizing DSS into a corporate entity ready to publish a game and generate revenue. From simple incorporation (C-corp? S-Corp? LLC? Who would be principles?), to profit sharing (both corporate and project based) to simple tax concerns were huge time commitments that weren't scheduled to be on our plate for a couple of quarters, but would have to be handled were we to do a separate title of any sort.

Long story short, we did elect to take a new game concept to prototype to explore possibilities within this idea. Ironically, after agonizing over the decision for quite a few weeks, and then making the decision, no progress has been made whatsoever (this will be detailed in a separate plan).

--Major Concerns over the validity of our business model and plan--anyone that has done any serious thought whatsoever on making a MMOG of any sort will quickly recognize that it simply is not something an Indy Studio can do by themselves using current business models. I can sum it up in one word: Cost. Cost, Cost, Cost.

---Production quality art: takes money, from contracted assets to hiring AAA quality artists.

---Infrastructure: As seen from several threads, as well as real world information (see WoW's server issues, WISH's desire to sell a single Blade server cluster for $100k+) the simple cost involved in the infrastucture setup and operations costs are daunting to a self-funded Indy Studio.

---Publishing: With no track record, any publishing deal even remotely possible would net just about zero real profit to the studio itself. Investors of any sort simply will not take on something like this for any potential profit, and if somehow you do convince a publisher to pick it up, you just aren't going to make much on the deal.

Taking the above concerns (as well as many others which will be discussed in a future .plan focused on Virtual Team Management), the only really feasible business plan that I could develop broke the project down into two major cycles:

--Prototype to Demo: The goal in this cycle is to produce a fully playable "demo" that could be taken on an investment presentation round to achieve funding for a production cycle, the main goal being to produce enough of a quality product that we could attract serious investment opportunities without a completely profit-destroying contract. Interestingly enough, while I came up with this idea more than 2 years ago, I could not find any cases directly on point to validate the business plan. Sure, there were many studios that did exactly what we were planning and then got picked up by larger publishers, but for the most part they produced full games to their conclusions, and then finally attracted funded attention. Just this week however I've finally seen what appears to be total validation of the business plan: A Tale in the Desert (and yes, it was a "completed" game, and therefore doesn't totally apply, but...) has been approached by UbiSoft for what appears to be an "enhance and re-release" funded publishing agreement.

---as alluded to, our plan is to implement all basic game mechanics and systems, and produce roughly "AA" quality art assets for a very small portion of our total world environment--specifically, we have selected 3 out of our 24 "entities" for full development, as well as our basic infrastructure and game systems.

---there does exist a good possibility that if we meet these goals and produce a truly fun game at this point, instead of going directly to the second phase, we could self-publish the game online, the goal being possibly following the path of ATITD and attract a major publisher. Alternatively, we could also self-publish, and then leverage the revenue stream (assuming it is successful at this level) to finish full production of the remaining entities and enhanced game functionality. This however is rife with concerns and issues, from the image of trying to get people to pay for a beta, to simply not generating the revenue required to move to the next phase.

Production--this second phase would entail basically starting from scratch. We use what we call an "iterative/cyclic" development methodology that involves rapid prototyping, evaluation of each system, and then follow on development at a higher "tier", or level of implementation. I plan on expanding this type of lifecycle in a future plan as well so I won't go into details, but it is a very agile methodology that accounts for code refactoring, and in some cases complete re-writes of functionality implementation. What this methodology means from the highest perspective is that in this Production Phase, we will re-develop every single system from a "fresh" perspective, and factor in all of the knowledge we've gained from the first phase. It sounds almost wasteful to "throw away" previous implementations, but it does allow us to reach the Production phase as quickly as appropriate without spending dozens of man-years designing each and every requirement from vision to details, while still being able to have our final implementation as well-designed as possible.

--this phase will require funding. Based on corporate events during the previous phase, it will be provided either from revenue generated from a self-published release, or venture capital attracted as a result of the game produced in the first phase.

--objectively, being able to actually achieve this phase is without a doubt the most important goal. We simply will not reach our corporate vision without funding of some form, and even if NemV is somewhat successful prior to this phase, we won't mark it up as a complete "win" unless this phase is completed.

Concusion (for now...)
We've known from the beginning that basically we are violating every proven principle of independent game development:

--we're not starting small--we're starting as big as you can possibly get

--we're not interested in building a portfolio of published games to use as "stepping stones"

--we (currently) do not have anyone on the team with a published game, or even history with a successful studio

--our goals and expectation aren't "reasonable"...the success rate for MMOG's of any sort is worse than the Red Sox's performance in the World Series prior to 2003.

--managing a fully virtual team that hasn't even ever met anyone else on the team face to face is the most difficult management challenge I've ever even imagined.

---team member churn is ungodly.
---managing team expectations and communications virtually is extremely difficult
---flexible milestones and tasking to integrate with real world commitments is next to impossible to predict

Some of the things we seem to be doing right:

--agile software development is better than sex and sliced bread put together

--leveraging the "world domination through collaboration" concept to maximize development efficiency

--community involvement. There simply is nothing better than strong involvement in a community such as GG. What comes around goes around, and we've already received great benefit from past interaction with the GG members.

--software development "best practices". From source control management (SVN) to bug/issue tracking (Bugzilla) to focusing on dedicated server architecture from the beginning (non-local leased servers), to formalizing Quality Assurance and Validation procedures early on, we're making great strides towards project management of a very complex lifecycle.

--Guess what? The Red Sox won!