Life as and Indie Developer

The last few plans that I have posted have been marketing related, and I have been so busy with work that I had not had the time to write a longer more personal plan. Recent developments have given me some time off to think and reflect on a lot of things. I am just going to spew out a lot of things that have been going through my head. Instead of talking about development or product, I want to talk about life. Life as an independent game developer. Apologies in advance for this .plan be a little disorganized and rambling.. it is a side product of all the pain killers..

So how did I get this extra time to reflect? It all stems from a flaring up of a recurring back problem. Five or so years ago I had surgery for a herniated disc in my spine that was pressing on a nerve. It flares up once or twice a year, and usually goes away in a week. This time, it flared up in mid-December, right before Jill (my wife), Anya (my 2 year old daughter), and I went back east for the Christmas holidays. It bothered me all vacation, and did not subside. A few days after I got back it got so bad that I wound up in the hospital. I was on serious pain killers and steroid anti-inflamatory medication. It sucked pretty bad as I was totally unable to move for about 5 days.

A very special thanks goes out to John Quigley, for lending me Cosmos, which helped me to survive the 5 days of hell.

I am on the mend now. The pain has subsided, but along with the decrease in pain, I have also lost feeling in parts of my right leg and foot. To top it off, I got my cholesterol checked while I was at the doctor (I did this because my father died very young, at age 62, from a heart attack, 4 months before Anya was born.) and I found out that my cholesterol was very high... 261. Seems like I am a mess.

In good news though, both Jill and I quit smoking on the 1st of this year. Both of us had been smoking since our teens. Now, some 20 years later, it feels good to get that monkey off of our backs. Given my high cholesterol, it seems like a good move on my part so that I might be able to see my daughter get through college.

I got a pedometer and I am working on increasing the number of steps I take a day. I have increased my step count from about 5000 a day to about 7500.. shooting for over 10K a day, which will help me take off 15-20 pounds of excess weight that snuck up on me over the last few years and get my cholesterol down and build up the muscles in my back to keep the pain away.

All of this got me thinking about life. Being faced with a serious medical condition (and the possibility of a shortened life span) caused me to reflect on my life and what I am doing, where I am going, and why I chose the life I chose.

As I was in bed in pain, I got to thinking about desires. What is it want? Now, I am pretty poor. I don't own a house (and probably never will be able to). Jill and I have a lot of school debt, and we spent what we had been saving for a house on living during the first 2 years of BraveTree. We can't afford the trappings of life that most people have. We are able to pay the bills.. but we don't live an extravagant lifestyle that one would think an owner of a game company might live. BraveTree is stable now.. but if it is going to make us rich, it is not going to be this year, or next, and there is a lot of hard work ahead.

We all want things. I want a plasma screen TV and a Jaguar, but I don't lust after them or lose sleep over them. As the pain was subsiding, I was reflecting on all that I have. The fact that I am alive, in a free country where I can do what I want.. a loving wife, a beautiful and healthy daughter. A job that I love.. what else is there? A dream.. what keeps me going is the idea that I am the architect of my life. I live life on my terms, by my rules. I am incredibly thankful that I am in a position where I can live like this.

Often, the feeling of freedom comes with a great deal of guilt. I feel like I am indulging myself too much. My wife has bought into my dream. What we gave up for my dream was the stability of a home and a secure job and source of income. I could give up this idea of a indie company and go out and get a paying job at a big publisher. In many ways, this would help take the edge off of living close to the edge. I do have the feeling that this would destroy my spirit.. it would be giving up. Is this what I want to teach my daughter? To give up a dream and be practical? Every time I have this internal dialogue I come to the same conclusion.. that who I am and what I am about.. the dream, the striving for more, the idea that I can do it, is the most important thing I can give to my daughter.

So where is the line drawn? I have everything I need. I do not have everything I want. When does striving for what you want going too far?

I ask this because at work we have a little dilemma. We are doing well. Most of the stability of BraveTree has been due to getting some really good contracts this past year. The contract work keeps us stable and keeps the money rolling in, but it is distracting. Doing work for hire is taking away from us completing our games. As a business owner, I have this dilemma where I feel a great deal of responsibility to the rest of the team to make good business decisions. Given where we are at now, the contract work is a good decision. Given where we want to be, which is working on our own games full time ALL the time, it gets in the way. Is working on our own stuff being overly indulgent? No answer to the question yet.. I am still pondering it.

To help with the pondering, I have taken all of the sales and income data from the founding of BraveTree and I am putting it all into a big spreadsheet to try to look for any patterns that I can see with the sales data. Right now it is a big mass of numbers. I need to look to see if I can get some of this data into a form that others can see and not violate any of the agreements we have signed.. but the hope is that some of the sales patterns that might emerge might be helpful to other indie teams. If I see anything interesting fall out of this data I will be posting it here in my .plan...

I also pondered my lack of productivity this past year. I have been feeling really bad as of late, seemingly spending more time doing email and on the phone than I have been making art. I feel rusty. It forced me to look back at what I did this past year and I felt a little better. I did end up making 6 unique character models, a bunch of animation, a tank model.. a car for dRacer and a bunch of miscellaneous models for contracts and I felt a bit better. Not as productive as I would like to be, but better than I had thought in terms of art output. I still feel like I am not doing enough or at a fast enough pace, but looking back made me feel a little better.


In the next few years we do need to think about where we are going, and I need to either make a plan to get a 'business' guy taking care of the business stuff so I can get back to art or resign myself to being the business guy and not worry about making art any more. I do feel that I am growing as a designer/producer/director.. and that maybe this is my true calling. Hard to say. I don't want to start believing that I have some special something that makes me a good designer.. but I do like to design games and I seem ok at it.. so maybe....

On the design end, I am feeling good about our abilty as a team to make fun games repeatedly. ThinkTanks continues to sell and the community continues to thrive. dRacer was a hit at this years Indie Games Con, and after a lot of hand wringing and fear, ThinkTanks XBOX starting to become fun utilizing dual stick controls. Here is a picture of John working hard on the XBOX port.


and an image of the amazingly talented Mark McCoy working on the new shell:


The addition of Mark, John and Matt this year has really brought the low murmur to a full on buzz. Even though the office is crowded, it feels good to see things happening.. to see projects move forward faster than Clark and I could do with just the two of us. I feel very lucky to be in a position where we can grow slowly and organically like we are. Everyone at BraveTree brings something unique to the team.

With all these people, the office is pretty crazy as of late. We have five guys crammed into a tiny office that is smaller than my bedroom (those that stopped by the office at the IGC know how small it is) Everyone now has a dev kit for multiplayer testing, and the heat gets a little extreme sometimes due to all the TVs going.

And here are some screenshots of the 3 new tanks that will be in the Xbox version and that will make their way into ThinkTanks 2.


We are pretty excited to be nearing the end of completion of ThinkTanks xbox.. after it is done we will all be able to again turn our attention to 1 project instead of the constant 4 or 5 projects going on.

Other things that I have been thinking about. I really like the fact that plans are now RSS feeds. Jeff turned me onto Bloglines a long time ago, and I have been using it to get my news and to keep up on what is going on in the world. I have been thinking about updating my webiste and getting a blog going.. I just never seem to have the time. Now that I can 'blog' in my .plan makes it that much easier.

If you have not set up a page at Bloglines.. go there now and subscribe to my .plan. It is great for keeping up on the .plans and archives them for later reading when the get backpaged on busy .plan days on GG,

I have been following at Danny's blog for a while now and I have been loving it. Reading his blog also turned me on to Flickr, which I hope will get me back into doing some photography.

Thinking about photography and all the 'stuff' I have made me realize just how fortunate I am. Jill and I have a good deal of traditional photography equipment, and we have our nice little Canon Elph digital. For Christmas, I got an Ipod mini, and Jill's parents got Anya a portable DVD player (which we have hooked up in our car now). As I type this out on the BraveTree iBook (whilst downloading a CD into iTunes for my iPod) I love the fact that while I am poor, I still have enough to be a 'connected' tech geek.

I did want to talk about the iPod a bit. Man.. apple did it right. The whole iPod experience is slick. From opening the box to installing iTunes to going to the Itunes store, to getting some music onto the Pod and using it with the super well thought out scroll wheel.. it is just.. well, as close to perfect as one can get. A lot of thought went into the design.. into how the end user interfaces with the device, and it is very cool.. I give them really high marks for paying attention to the whole experience. I have joined the cult of the iPod.

As it relates to game design, it is a great example of looking 'outside the box' for inspiration. Designing a game is about thinking how a person interacts with your software. The whole experience is important. I am constantly looking for ways to better understand the human experience.. about how one interacts with something. The iPod is an inspiration in this regard, and I will be looking at other non game designs for design inspiration in the future.

Ok, this turned out to be pretty long.. I will end it here for now. Again, I hope to make .plan writing a more regular activity, and I am going to bug the rest of the BraveTree team to start doing the same. Hopefully the next one will be shorter and a bit more coherent.