Blog for Dan MacDonald at GarageGames.com

The Complexity Barrier

Dan MacDonald — 2006-09-02T23:14:41+00:00

Have you ever wondered why games are so fun to start and so hard to finish? How a project you were so excited about can become something you dread working on?

Anyone who's experienced this may attribute this lack of motivation and passion about their project to be their own failing, when in fact it may just be the result of hitting the complexity barrier.

So what is the complexity barrier? Simply put, it's the point at which a projects complexity prohibits you from making enough progress to keep you motivated. As a projects size increases the cost of integrating new features increases at an even faster rate. The reason for this is fairly straight forward, a game or any other large project is a series of interconnected features. Features that depend on or interact with one another, as the number of features and dependencies increases, so does the number of things you have to account for when you make a new change or add new functionality.

So what is the net result of the increasing costs of integrating new features? As the project grows you get less new functionality for your time invested. At a certain point you will hit the complexity barrier where it no longer seems worth your time to add a single feature to the project. These increasing integration costs are also what limit the size of a project any one individual can create.

As these practical issues of getting less new functionality for your time and spending more time bug fixing then adding functionality affect you, you begin to experience psychological affects as well. Moving from early in the project where new functionality was coming a mile a minute to a point where adding one attribute to one object results in 45 minutes of testing and regressions tends to frustrate a developer. As frustration builds the motivation to work on the project collapses and you are left with yet another unfinished project. This point of abandonment is the complexity barrier. This barrier indicates the largest project that you can hope to create given your technology and resources. Most people hit this point before their intended game is even half way done. The odds against recovering from this are nearly insurmountable.

So how do you ensure you do not hit the complexity barrier in the middle of your project?

There are a number of things you can do, the first is obviously selecting a game design that seems well within your ability to finish. Something like a casual game or retro game. I guarantee (unless you've already shipped a bunch of games) you will be amazed at just how hard it is to finish it.

Aside from that there are three main things that I have identified.

1. Write as little code as possible
The less code you have to write to add features and functionality to your game the less it will cost you to integrate new features. This is what makes technologies like TGB so attractive, so much of the work has been done for you that you really have to do very little to make things happen. If you are building your own technology as you build your game functionality you will increase your dependency chain exponentially. Every feature you want to add to the game means you have to add new features to your technology. Leveraging existing mature technology removes that dependency chain and enables you to focus entirely on game code. This pushes the complexity barrier much farther out enabling you to create a lot more game play features before you hit it.

2. Have a great content pipeline
So you've managed to build your own technology, get all the game mechanics you want and all you have left is to fill out some levels. You seem to have escaped the perils of the complexity barrier, right? Well no, what happens when you decided that you really need to add a new enemy type, or the artist wants to add some additional animations to the main character. Perhaps an animated tile would look really good in your level? If you (like most do) neglected to build a suite of tools that enable you to make these kinds of changes without writing more code you can still slam right into the complexity barrier. If every new enemy type requires you to sublcass a new class from your "CEnemy" class and implement it's interface all over again you will find you suddenly lose motivation to work on making new levels for your game.

Competing your technology is just the beginning, you'll find that once functionality stabilizes building your content and adding new assets will become a bigger headache then building your technology ever was.

3. Plan to spend more time building your game then you do working on its code.
This tip is a little more abstract. It ensure that you have the right focus for successfully completing your game. I know people who spend months (or even years) working on their technology only to bust out 30 levels in as many days, slap a shell around the thing and stick it on the market. It may be code complete but it's not a finished game. Customers don't care how much time and energy you put into coding the game, they are only interested in two things. The games design and it's production values. This is what customers will be willing to pay money for, to them the technology is invisible. So don't spend all your time focused on building game features and gloss over the most important features of a game, its design and production.

There is a lot more I could say on this topic but I will leave it there, to some of you this may be old news but I hope that it will be of use to developers who find themselves defeated by their projects and chronically unmotivated.

Happy building Jay

Dan MacDonald — 2006-08-08T03:53:50+00:00

It was as much a surprise to me as anyone that Jay announced he would be leaving GarageGames for new endeavours. Jay has been in many ways the voice of GarageGames to the indie community. Having known Jay for some time now I can truly say that his presence will be missed. Jay always had a huge impact on IGC and I can remember going over plans and strategies to make it bigger and better "next year" for hours on end.

I really hope that IGC will live on in Jay's absence and that others will take up the torch and keep IGC happening. Whenever you put yourself in a public position you open yourself up to a lot of criticism. GG as a whole is no stranger to criticism and I always thought that Jay did a really good job of handling it. You can't please all the people all the time and some people are always going to complain. Even in that kind of environment Jay aways found a way to get excited about "the little guy" that indie developer working out of his bedroom. For a sales guy Jay genuinely cared about developers which was a little strange for me at first, it's odd seeing anyone but a developer care about other developers.

I know a lot of different independent developers here and there and almost all of them where a little unsure of what Jay's motives where at first (c'mon he's got that salesguy thing working against him :) ) but in the end almost all of them came back telling me stories of how He really wasn't that bad and how he had helped them in one way or another, often sharing contacts from his rather substantial Rolodex of industry connections.

I know Jay's favorite thing to do is to build something from nothing, perhaps that's why he empathizes with indie developers so much. So to whatever you go build next Jay I hope you'll throw just as much energy and drive into building it as you did with GarageGames and have a great time doing it. Best of luck to your future endeavors and from all of us who you've help out, got excited with, shared stories with, slipped contacts to, and generally been an all round great guy to hang out with, Thank you!

Do independent developers make indie games?

Dan MacDonald — 2005-12-19T09:42:46+00:00

Casual games are here and they are huge, it seems you can't turn around without bumping into another indie making money cloning the latest casual hit. To see what I'm talking about look at the games in the following blog (www.1goodgame.com/blog/). It seems knocking off the current hot game design in the casual games market is a great way to make some easy cash and when ever you have easy cash you have a small army of people lining up to capitalize on it.

This mad rush has got me to question the definition of an indie game. In the past we've defined independent developers as people who make games without the controlling interests of a publisher, client, producer, middle manger, etc. telling them how to make the game. In essence a developer who is free to pursue their own interests and sensibilities in game development. They call the shots. This is a good definition. We've also defined "indie games" as games created by "independent developers".

I don't think that definition of "indie games" fits, it's not merely enough to be created by an independent developer. You would think that independent developers free to work on whatever they choose would choose to work on gameplay and game designs like the ones that inspired them to become game developers. Instead what we tend to see (and not so much in this community) are developers who turn around and constrain their games to the same narrow view of games that the publishers and big business counterparts do. They go out, look at what's selling and try to make something similar to capitalize or share the success of that hot selling game.

So what is an "indie game"? I would like to apply the same definition to the game as we do to the developer. A game that is free to become what it wants to be, a design that's not constrained by what the current hot market is, or mechanics defined by the mechanics of the current best selling games. In short a game that is a result of the passions of the developer creating it, as opposed to a product designed to sell in a lucrative market.

What's the point of labeling certain games as "indie" if they are indistinguishable from their "not indie" counterparts. If my casual game looks just like a contracted playfirst game then what's the point of differentiating one as indie and one as not? There is no point, if anything it's detrimental to the independent developer. Indie ends up with the same connotation as shareware.

Indie games should inspire people, players should experience something different, something fresh, something that could only be a product of someone who was free to follow their own passions. It doesn't have to be innovative or even original, a side scrolling shooter for example, but a side scrolling shooter that is obviously a labor of love for the developer where special care has been taken to make sure that the game is fun and exciting. You can tell when a game has been rushed to market and when a game has been painstakingly crafted by someone who cared about it.

I'm not saying that indie games are games made "for the love" and that anything that's profitable is not indie. On the contrary I think that "indie games" can be very profitable, just not in the traditional ways ( stealing market share from bejeweled by adding yet another bejeweled clone ). When developers follow their own interests and passions they will find new markets with people who their game resonates with. It might not be right off the bat, so keep your costs low and don't expect to make a full time living off your first game. There will always be room in a market of sameness for passionately created, fresh games. This is the spirit of independent development and this is what sets it apart from all other types of development.

Saturday Nov 13 0:16

Dan MacDonald — 2004-11-13T00:16:18+00:00

Little Soldiers, one month after release

Little Soldiers one Month Later

We released Little Soldiers on the 8th of October right before IGC. There were two versions, a web-based version using flash and a single downloadable version that could be unlocked with a key code. The initial version ran in a 400x400 window, had 36 levels and was priced at $14.95 US. The flash version of Little Soldiers (LS) went live on www.grab.com/indie/ during IGC. Sales started slowly one or two ever few days but have been steadily increasing.

The indie section of grab.com is interesting and a nice opportunity. Essentially they allow Indies to submit demos of their games for nothing. No contracts, no anything. The demo can link back to your own site and if you have a downloadable version people can purchase it from your site.

The little soldiers release went O.K. on Grab.com, maybe 4-6 simultaneous players at any given time. During this time I continually made little improvements to the game, making one of the difficult demo levels easier, a better nag screen etc. Then one day the developer of the flash version of the game said that the game was doing too much traffic on his site so he had to re-direct it to grab.com. What happened next caught us by surprise, LS quickly rose to become the #1 indie game...

At its peak I took a screenshot because I just couldn't believe how many people were playing it.

Soon after this screencap was taken we got a mail from grab.com asking us if we would like to publish LS on the commercial end of the Grab.com network. Things are moving forward there and we are excited about the potential.

Overall the sales of LS have exceeded my expectations, in it's first 30 days it averaged more then 1 sale a day which is just great. I was hoping to average at least one a day but to exceed that has been very exciting. Not only that, sales have almost doubled in the past week as LS continues to grow. LS is available for both Mac and Windows platforms, early on Mac sales exceed PC sales by nearly 7 to 1. Recently there has been a resurgence in Windows sales (most likely due to grab.com traffic) and Mac and PC sales are nearly equal.

I can't stress this enough, if you are going to make a game. Make it cross platform, it's not that much extra effort to be cross platform starting out. There are plenty of available cross platform technologies available to use. I used PTK for Little Soldiers, because it is an easy to use HW accelerated 2D engine. If you are doing 3D games, pick something like Torque or another cross platform technology so that you can capitalize on Mac sales. It's not that much extra effort to be cross platform when you are starting out, but trying to port to another platform later when you haven't planned ahead can be very time consuming. The Mac port of LS took one afternoon. While Mac's account for a puny 3% of the market its users are very familiar with having to turn to indie developers for software and games. They tend to be a little less spoiled then PC game customers and more willing to purchase something if they like it.

We've added a full screen option to LS and rounded out it's levels at an even 40. On Monday we will release with a few more levels and an updated nag screen. I'm confident that this will improve the conversion rate of the game even more.

The nice thing about Little Soldiers, it took about 4 months of part time work. I was working 10hr days in enterprise software development at the time. Total costs were about $300 for sound and music. The game has already made well over that much in its first month so it wont be long before it has paid for the time invested and then some.

Tuesday Oct 12 19:08

Dan MacDonald — 2004-10-12T19:08:01+00:00

IGC impressions and an article covering Jeff Tunnell's presentation on Game Design

IGC'04 was my third time attending an IGC and let me say it keeps getting better and better each year. The amount of games at IGC this year was truly impressive. Torque is looking less and less like itself each year, people are pushing the accepted norms and doing new things with the engine and it's really exciting to see. BraveTree's dRacer and 21-6's GravRalley are both looking pretty impressive. Not to mention there was a great showing of 2D games at IGC this year. ZAP being the one getting the most attention, but I would say that close to half of the games being shown were 2D.

This year I showed off my 2D game, Little Soldiers on both Mac and Windows platforms, people seemed to like it and it took 2nd place in the "Most Innovative" category. Needless to say I was very proud.

The biggest change this year was the difference in how the guys from the portals and distribution channels acted. Before I continue I have to say that the opinions expressed here are entirely my own and not the opinions of GarageGames or anyone else on this site. A number of the people I am going to talk about are actually GarageGames partners and I understand why that is. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

First a little background, last year there were a number of producers from the various channels, Shockwave, Real, etc. They were really nice guys, they were more then happy to take a look at your game give you advice on how to improve it so that it would sell better to their audiences etc. They seemed like normal human beings. This year, the mass market / casual games space is big business. PlayFirst was there, having just come off a first round of funding totaling 4 million. Of course PopCap was there with their millions, the dude from popcap was wearing clothes that had to have cost more then my car. (my '89 firebird cost about $1700 and this guy was close). Basically there is this major shift in how things work for the mass market space. Distribution channels like Real, Shockwave, yahoo games, MSN etc. are tired of the overhead of dealing with hundreds of indie developers to get games. Not only that they are giving away less and less in terms of royalties, where it was once 40-50% for developers it's now down around 20% and will continue to drop as the players get bigger and the developers loose leverage.

Enter Oberon Media and PlayFirst, the first straight up retail style publishers in the online space. They see their position as an intermediary between developers and the distribution channels. They want to leverage developers IP (by owning it) and use it to keep the distribution channels honest and demand higher royalties. Of course for this "added value" they want a piece of the pie. Phil Carlisle was there and he asked the panel "So you point fingers at the retail industry and say how broken it is, but they you want to bring the same problems to the online space, how are you making things better for indies?", the response from Dave Nixon (formerly of Real Arcade, now for Oberon media) "Hey at least you still get royalties."

Now Dave is a nice guy, if you hang out with him in a bar or something he's a lot of fun. But I personally detest the business he's in. It's like the retail industry all over again, except the only difference is THIS time THEY are the players instead of the guys being screwed. The general feeling I was getting from members of the panel was "hey guys, we are the gatekeepers now, time to bend over and take it." Gate keepers to what you might ask? well the mass market as they would describe it. Games like Zuma, feeding frenzy, or bejeweled that appeal to the majority of "casual gamers" out there. I remember 3-4 years ago before these guys were really big players with all the market share, indie developers used to try and make games for this market. They tried hard to make their games accessible so more people could enjoy them and they sold their games directly to their customers and took care of them.

Now a days it's just a big commercial machine. To these guys it's just pushing product that has a large market that's willing to pay for it, the larger the market the better. It costs popcap 100 thousand dollars to make a game, the prototype tons of games and throw them away before they find the one they think will be a hit. Guys like Oberon and PlayFirst sign traditional publishing deals with development teams and give them money up front to develop games, of course they want to own the IP and if your lucky they'll remember to pay you royalties. Of course there's nothing you as an indie developer can do about it, because you've given all your leverage away, you don't have access to your customers you don't own your own IP you have absolutely no leverage.

There is hope however, this panel still seems to think that the 250 million people going online and buying games are 35 year old women, grandparents and grandkids. So that's why all the game they promote look like they do. They are right to some extent that's a huge section of the market, most likely the majority and hence the most profitable, but there are other segments that they don't seem to see. The ex-gamer, guys like me who were hardcore players but then got married, had kids, and started game development. I don't have the time to get into the complexly designed retail titles, but games like Think Tanks that are easy to get into and have short time commitments can suck me in. There's also the logic game crowd that has made dexterity.com successful. There's a distinct crowd, call them the hard core casual gamer, who like games that look like casual games but have hard core logic problems. Thinking games. There's also strategy games, there are number of strategy web and downloadable games that have come out recently and all seem to be doing pretty well. This is one of those places where they aren't getting what they want from retail and are finding it elsewhere. Simulation games are another.

There are plenty of sub sections of that 250 million consumers that don't fall into the 35 year old women category, but plenty big enough to support an indie with low overhead and keep them financially very comfortable. Think 60-100k a year, I know indies who are doing this, and some who far exceed this.

I guess the whole point of this rather long rant is that you have to ask yourself what are you in this business for? Is it purely for the money? or do you love what you are creating as well? The popcap guy said since their costs are primarily salary there's still a possibility for a 3 man team in a basement to create a superhit. But honestly if your a 3 man team without popcaps record and no customers how much of a royalty do you think PlayFirst or Oberon is going to give you? You'll have this wildly successful title and all the middle men will laugh all the way to the bank.

And honestly, the games that do well in this MASS market do really well, like millions of dollars in sales, but give me a break they are some of the most boring and uninspired games I've ever seen. A result of a game that was designed with one goal in mind, make money. I like to think that indie developers started hacking away in their garage's because of something more then money. Because they were insprired, because they loved games, because they couldn't be happy doing anything else. I'm not saying you should ignore markets altogether, hone your ideas so that their something people actually want to play, but for crying out loud. You have to be passionate about your projects, build something that interests you, that excites you. Even if you do grow, get an office and hire a few employees never forget the compulsion that drove you to into the garage in the first place.

I think with a few more games GarageGames has great staying power, while the big business goes increasingly toward bubble poppers and color matchers GarageGames will differentiate itself by being the place with something different. I honestly think that it might actually be better in the long term for garage games to pull it's titles from the distribution channels, get more of their own customer base by forcing them to come and get it from the source. The more users you have the more visible you are and the more those other segments of the market will be able to find you.

Anyway, here's some of Jeff Tunnells ideas on the process of designing a good game, I'll be cleaning this up and submitting it as a resource, but I wanted to get it out there for the inquireing minds that didn't make it to IGC.

www.planetthinktanks.com/dan/jefftunnell/

Sunday Jul 11 23:10

Dan MacDonald — 2004-07-11T23:10:15+00:00

SUMMARY

Work continues on various fronts. If you read my last plan you'll know that I've been having problems getting art worked out for Katsu, in lieu of that I've picked up a few side projects. One of those is Little Soldiers, the game I posted about in my last .plan. The other is the Easy PocketPC Installer. The 2D game engine I use ( PTK ) has recently been "mostly" ported to PocketPC. The author and owner of www.phelios.com Patrice K. used it to port his game

Abracadabra to the pocket pc.

EASYPPC INSTALLER

I've known Patrice for a while now and he had an idea for a better PocketPC installer creation program, when he approached me about developing jointly I thought it was a good opportunity to actually finish and release software for a change, so I accepted. After 3 weeks of part time development we had the first version of the Easy PocketPC installer.

The EasyPPC installer is two parts, an application that creates installers, and the installers themselves. It has a few features that set it apart from other installers out there. For one, it has an easy to use drag and drop interface, the interface is fairly straightforward (we have plans to improve it). Creating an installer bundeles up all the files into a .dat file format that then get's embedded as a resource in the installer. The installer application itself is a lot smaller, but it knows how to copy files from the embedded .dat file to the Device. One of the nice features is that it allows users to specify any folder on the device. The PocketPC exposes a number of default folders which are identified by special ID's. The reason for this is "Program Files" might work on an English PocketPC but not on a german one. Our installer is smart enough to go and inspect the file system on the target device and allow the user to install to any location on their device, including sim cards etc.

There are a few other features that set it apart, but those are some of the main ones. If you do PocketPC development, feel free to check it out and let me know what you think, we are continually adding features based on feedback.

It has been doing pretty well for a version 1.0, it sold its first copy after only 7 downloads, and it's sold a few since then. We think sales will only improve as we add requested features.

KATSU:

With regards to katsu, one of my vanishing artist re-appeared and sent me some work samples for what he has in mind. This is great news, and it can only bode well for the project. I also spent some time this weekend polishing up some of our exsisting levels in anticipation of the new tile art.

Here's some work samples...

LITTLE SOLDIERS:

This project has been getting the most work lately, and recently has gotten to a point where I would say its gameplay complete. It had a really nasty memory leak that Patrice and I managed to crush after a day of bug hunting. Next up to add sound and music, I've been in contact with a guy who's currently slaving away on some mod type music for the game and I have some sound affects so I imagine things will go pretty quickly. After that it will be time to put in the shell UI and start working on refining the level design. About that time the Mac port will begin as well. I think it's reasonable to expect that this game will be finished for PC and Mac by the end of the month (depending on how crazy we get with level design).

I have a feeling that the market for PC logic games is pretty much saturated, but I expect the game will do pretty well on Mac and PocketPC. Only time will tell :)

Saturday Jun 19 10:01

Dan MacDonald — 2004-06-19T10:01:54+00:00

Summary of works in progress, Katsu and Little Soldiers. Screenshots inside.

I must say the quality of content in the .plan's lately has really inspired me. It's great to see so many members of the community working on so many cool projects. I've been following the GG community for some time now and after seeing all the great .plan's I felt I just had to share what I've been working on as well.

My big project is a game that was originally called "Katsu's Journey", a project endeavored on by myself and two long time friends. The game can be likened to a Zelda type game with stealthy, high and sneak game play. You take on the role of a young ninja in feudal Japan trying to accomplish your quest. The story is not anything new or innovative, but it serves to give the player some context and a reason to go from point A to point B. As you (the player) go about your quests you are constantly trying to avoid patrolling samurai guards who are on the lookout for you. The core gameplay mechanic in the game is trying to keep Katsu out of the enemy guard's lanterns. To aid him in his journeys Katsu can collect items that can be used to interact with the guards in various ways, either by going invisible, putting out their lantern, or knocking them out.. etc

I've been working on this project for almost 3 years now, since before the first IGC. It really needs to get done. For the most part the game is coded it's just waiting on tile art. I've been having a really hard time keeping my artist from disappearing on me. I think we've gone though more then 5 on this project already...

Anyway, here are some screenies, they show the guards, and Katsu being seen by two guards. Once spotted by a guard, Katsu has until the guards progress bar fills up to get out of the guards view, otherwise he will have to start back from the last save point.

Because of the various headaches on Katsu, I have taken the last 2.5 weeks off to port a mostly finished flash game by two friends of mine to PC, Mac, and PocketPC. So far the game is almost game play complete and the first few levels are entirely playable. The game is called Little Soldiers and is a puzzle strategy game. You must move one or more "little soldiers" though a hostile environment using an assortment of actions that can create interesting chain reactions in the levels. For instance, if you dig away a dirt block supporting a falling brick, it will fall. If it lands on a dynamite crate, the crate will blow up and take the surrounding blocks with it, changing the layout of the level...

Here's some quick screenies of Little Soldiers.