gg comm weeekend & joining the garage

the gg community weekend is wrapping up today, and it was a big success! a surprising number of people showed up all involved in the gg community in some way, and it was a great atmosphere with cool people and impressive games. people came as far away as the UK and sweden, and there was even free food and kegs! it couldn't have gone better -- thanks for putting on the event.

the big news for me is that I'm going to be moving to eugene and interning at the garage starting... tomorrow! it's both exciting and scary. exciting because it's a door into what I've wanted so painfully bad every day for the last 3 years of indie development, scary because, well, "be careful what you ask for." it's going to be a lot of work but so much damn fun. I won't bother with a job description - ask me again in a month - but suffice to say I'll be working with Jeff helping him and doing a wide net of tasks, with some focus on one. I'm also not sure how much I can say, I'll be more comfortable with that after time. my personal m.o. however will be to learn as much as I can from the talented artists, programmers, designers, and other trades there, who constantly amaze me, and to always approach things with a beginner's mind -- ready to accept, ready to doubt, open to all possibilities. thanks for the internship, guys! the timing was finally perfect and it's truly an honor.

with that, Shelled will be released nearly as-is within a month instead of undergoing further work in the eternal "3 months from now" finish date. I want and need to focus on what I'll be doing at the garage and not be distracted by my own project. red thumb games as a studio is not dead - many people at the garage work on their own projects independently - but starting out I don't want to be distracted and stretched too thin - I need to focus. this also means the planned split of Shelled into two games is cancelled, and Pods of War is nixxed. I have no immediate plans for a next game, though it is still my intention and dream to one day finish the ballet game I've been long designing.

segway to a bit of history. after high school I went straight into high tech, which I've done for 8 years, hating most days of it (not a good way to live your life). I tried to get out of it by going to college for something else, so 4 years ago I did that. but I was drifting, with interest in many subjects but no passion in any single of them. then it hit me to go to a game design college and get into games, my great lifetime passion, and a merging of my technical and artistic interests. but game design colleges were expensive (compared to the state college's more general ed stuff), so I surmised I could make a game for a fraction of the amount, learning in the process, making contacts, and having a product for sale to boot at the end instead of just a student reel. I dove into making games, and continued with high tech work to financially support it. and I ended up with some cool little games. but along the way I saw other indies succeeding as studios, if barely, and my goal shifted to pursue studio success.

shelled will not be a big seller. no portal would touch it - it's too complex, not intuitive, and too hardcore, at odds with its cuddly appearance. even with more time and more money invested in modifications via public playtesting iterations, it might still not work. you can't add more writers into a film script to make it better. there are some fundemental design flaws in the game that needed attention earlier in the dev cycle - actually, not in the dev cyle at all, but in pre-dev, which effectively never happened. chalk it up to experience. I spoke with a few indies with games in similar states who ruefully echoed the sentiment and mistake. prototype, bitches! no better beginner advice is there then that.

here's a compelling story. a team of 3 made a game in 7 weeks that will likely go to xbla - and if it doesn't it has other guaraunteed publishers interested. seven freakin weeks. how did they hit such gold? I pryed and got the answers: they started by each taking 10 design ideas on paper for a total of 30 and weeding out the best 10 of them. they prototyped 5 of them, seriously prototyped 2 of them, then whittled it down to the last one, which is the game they made. on top of that, they pulled a random group of college students aside every week or two to play the game's latest build to get feedback. cheers to them, that's how you make a game, and it's a hella fun game. it's a testament to what a small, *full time* team can do in a short period of time.

by comparison, shelled wasn't compared to other prototypes, and wasn't even prototyped - it went into full production straight from the design doc. the core firing mechanic wasn't even working proper until 6 months into it, and it was another 6 months before the other major game component (flying) was working. nobody playtested shelled until over a year into development, and by then the core game ideas were already pretty locked in. playtesting improved things interatively, but bigger-picture core problems remained, and still do. that's not the ideal way to make a game.

that shelled will not hit it off with a mass audience is ok. that became the goal, but it wasn't the original one. that one was to learn about the nuts and bolts of game-making, get some portfolio pieces in the form of completed full games, and open some doors. all of those goals have been met. I am still proud of what I did - it was the best game I could make, and I put my all into it. and it was a pleasure working with the great people I did on the project. they became friends, and it's been a blast. but it's time to finish it up and look ahead.

so look for shelled out sometime this month (after small fixes and DRM), and look for future blogs from me discussing garage stuff. exciting and fun times ahead!

josh