Blog for Jeff Tunnell at GarageGames.com

The "Better Assholes" Clause

Jeff Tunnell — 2008-06-13T20:48:02+00:00

Coolness! Make It Big In Games has been picked up by Alltop (www.alltop.com. Guy Kawasaki's latest small web service business, Alltop is a much expanded version of popurls, i.e. a single place to go to read the five latest stories from hundreds of sites. All of the sites are arranged by categories, such as Games, Gizmos, Web, Green, etc. I kind of think of it as an automated RSS reader where I don't have to do much work, and I like it... a lot.

There is a cool little historical story that goes along with this post that explains the title. Here are some quotes:

Quote:

It was an extremely embarrassing dinner for me because "Ben" was trying to bully our small company into taking on a bunch of projects for Mediagenic at budgets that were way less than profitable, i.e. we would lose money on all of the projects. "Ben" used the usual tactics of saying that I must be a bad manager of bad developers if we could not take on these projects and make money. He was pushing extremely hard on me. Guy was sitting across the table and it was all very uncomfortable.

From then on in my career, when ever I ran into somebody that I didn't like or that didn't have strong integrity, I have always been able to say, "I've outlasted better assholes than that." in reference to my dealings with Mr. "Holeman". So, if I invoke the "better assholes" clause on you, you better watch out :D

3. Create your own version of the "Better Assholes" clause. Don't work for people that you don't like or that do not have integrity. Life is too short. I always say, "People that I want to work with on projects that I want to work on." It works.

Head on over and check it out. My blog's Alexa ranking has doubled in the week since I have started posting again. Getting on Alltop should help.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
www.makeitbigingames.com

Working For Big Publishers

Jeff Tunnell — 2008-06-09T22:35:36+00:00

Two years ago I wrote this article about what it is like to work for big publishers after the original "EA Spouse" article hit the news. With the recent follow up on Gamasutra, I thought I would pull it out of the dust bin and publish it.

The article is here: www.makeitbigingames.com/blog/?p=60 Here are some quotes from the article. Head on over to read it, and test out my shiny new Disqus comment system. Join the fun.

Quote:

...My advice is, no matter how desperate you are to get into the games business, don't go to work for a company teetering on the brink of collapse...

...Churn is a code word which means to fire the bottom performing 10% of your employees every year and replace them with a new, promising group of wide eyed recruits that will not have chips on their shoulders, and are willing to play into the "work them like dogs until they break" business model...

...Add in stretching for an overpriced home, and soon, the need for this steady stream of large income is an addictive process and cannot be easily escaped. If you ever want to Indie or start your own company, you must resist this temptation. You do not want to become a "share cropper" for the rest of your life...

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
www.makeitbigingames.com

First Day Of The Rest Of My Life

Jeff Tunnell — 2008-06-02T23:01:17+00:00

This being my first post-GarageGames day, I just posted a new article on my Make It Big In Games blog. It is about getting back into circulation and gives you some reasons why you should too. Here is a quote:

Quote:
Well, first up is to blog. Why should I do that? For a bunch of reasons, and I think they apply to anybody that is in business for themselves or even happily employed working for the Man. You need to be a part of the social fabric of your industry. As I have written about in the past, you need to stay in circulation and work on your personal brand.

Here is a link to the article: First Day Of The Rest Of My Life Please head on over there for more information. Make sure to leave comments on my shiny new Discus comment system (which is turning out to be The Shit... it is sooo good.)

Better yet, make sure to sign up for my RSS feed ( www.makeitbigingames.com/blog/?feed=rss2 ) so you don't miss any posts. That way all the posts are delivered to Google Reader or Bloglines (my preferred RSS reader) or your preferred RSS reader. Nothing beats drinking your morning coffee, and having these insightful posts delivered directly to you without visiting the site.

For even more game making observations I have opened another Twitter account: www.twitter.com/mbgames . This Twitter is only for games, and does not have my environmental, politics, farm, or music stuff in it. So, far, this is working out well.

When Twitter first arrived, I thought it was a bunch of crap. At first it appeared to be a way for people to tell you they were sick, or just farted, or they were hungry. One day when I was surfing a small Oregon farm blog of all things, the writer had the Twitter widget on his site. It said he was at the USU library researching seeds, and was posted two minutes before I got to the page. I loved the immediacy of the experience. When I looked at the rest of his Twitter posts, they were all insightful and informative. Since I have started tweeting in earnest, I have gotten a bunch of great leads and met some interesting people. The moral is, if you are following somebody that is posting a bunch of inane crap, just quit following them.

Onward!

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker

P.S. the image in this post has little to do with the post. It is just a screen shot of Incredible Toons, a game that I worked on a long time ago. I made it the temporary background of the mbgames Twitter page.)

Make It Big In Games Call For Help

Jeff Tunnell — 2008-05-29T17:41:46+00:00

Hey everybody! Since my big announcement last week that I am leaving GarageGames, I have been updating and modernizing my www.makeitbigingames.com blog. If you have never been over there, please take a look. I have a bunch of articles about making it in the Indie games business.

Anyway, here is my call for help. I have just installed a new off-blog comment system called Disqus, and I need to make sure it works. Turns out my comment system for MBG has been broken for about six months, and I didn't have the time or expertise to fix it (turns out is was something to do with permalinks, but I'm not a web developer... I just plug and pray). Also, even with spam filters turned on, comment spam is a HUGE issue when running your own blog, so I am trying to see if this system will help that as well. Pease post here or send me feedback on the comment system or anything else you can see on my blog that seems messed up. My personal email is jeff.tunnell at gmail (you know the rest).

I am also going to dig back into my game development wiki makeitbigingames.pbwiki.com/, and I would appreciate any help I can get from people in filling out the skeleton that I put up a couple of years ago. I promise this time I will be filling all of that information in over the next couple of months.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.

-Jeff Tunnell

An Itch That Can't Be Scratched

Jeff Tunnell — 2008-05-15T16:59:05+00:00

Being a serial entrepreneurial is almost an addiction. It is the thrill of starting new things that are nothing but promise, have no baggage, and cannot yet be fully quantified. Once the vision is mostly realized, however, the itch comes back, and the cycle starts all over again. For me, the time has come to start the cycle over again. GarageGames has mostly fulfilled it vision, and I will be leaving on 6/2/2008 to start a new company with another vision and a new set of promises.

GarageGames via Instant Action has become the publisher that I always wanted to work with, so that is one of the thing that I will be doing. As I was pulling together teams and helping decide which games were going to go on IA, it was literally killing me to not be in a more creative, game development position. Every day I was helping people do what I wanted to do, so finally I decided to find out how I could get back into start up mode. Josh Williams and IAC have been very gracious in working with me to create this new win/win situation.

I thought about writing a sappy post about how the GG vision changed the landscape of indie gaming, and took a sentimental trip back though my old .plans (blogs) to support a bunch of thank yous and milestone reviews. It was fun reading, but I'm not going to put you through that. But I do reserve the right to do so in the future on my www.makeitbigingames.com blog that I will continue to maintain and grow :)

Meeting all of the people in this community in real life and in virtual space has been the biggest reward of being involved in GarageGames. I don' think any of us will ever recreate the feelings of friendship and camaraderie we built during late nights at IndieGamesCon, GDC, and other ad hoc indie game developer meetings. Rubbing two sticks together to make a fire in the rain, as Jay Moore and I always put it, was thrilling, dangerous, and had so much meaning. Jay, thanks brother.

I won't be leaving this community, in fact, I still check in every day, and I will continue to do so in the future. Instant Action is going to be a hit, and I still want to help get it there, just in a different way. Stay tuned for more information about my new company. In the meantime, feel free to check out my personal blog at jefftunnell.wordpress.com or jefftunnell.tumblr.com or www.twitter.com/jefftunn . Mostly, you will read about Colleen and I's 200 acre sustainable farm, but more game stuff is on the way. Oh yeah, my email address is jeff.tunnell at gmail dot com.

See you all in the community...

-Jeff Tunnell, Co-Founder GarageGames

Blog O Fix

Jeff Tunnell — 2007-12-20T07:07:14+00:00

Hey guys. My www.makeitbigingames.com blog has been fixed. I upgraded to the new 2.3.1 Wordpress from the old 2.0 version and it broke a few things. Turns out it was kind of an obscure fix to a bug caused by being hosted on Yahoo. I'm probably going to change my host to Media Temple soon.

As many of you know, Josh Dallman has been helping me with some really nice guest posts. His latest, Communify Me! 80 Ways to Add Community Features to Games is a great article that was posted the day I broke the blog. As a result, not many people read it, and it has no comments. I feel responsible for Josh's work not getting properly recognized.

Feel free to hop over and give Josh's article some love. You won't regret the read.

Keep an eye on the MBG blog. Josh and I are ramping up on a bunch of new articles and some other cool features for helping people learn about the business and design side of making games.

-Jeff Tunnell
Make It Big In Games
GarageGames Co-Founder, GG Fellow, Game Maker

Acquisition Fun!

Jeff Tunnell — 2007-10-09T06:05:55+00:00

Here is a blog post that I just put up on my Make It Big In Games blog.

With the big acquisition announcement GarageGames made a while ago, sometimes it is hard to stay grounded in the every day. However, there is a very human aspect to all of this news, and I hope I can capture some of it for your enjoyment!

A year ago when I was on my first vacation to Italy and France, I got an email from Josh Williams in an Internet cafe. It was really short, "IAC wants to talk to us." We had just gone through a couple of months on another acquisition offer that we ended up turning down. I was tired, and ready to just put pedal to the metal with GG and make it go on our own, so my answer was "no thanks." Then the business side of me kicked in, and I said, "OK, I'm in for discussion, but they need to allow us to keep doing things the way we are, i.e. making game development accessible to everyone, and treat developers like we want to be treated." BTW, that was pretty much the reaction from all of the GG partners/stakeholders, so Josh pursued it, they loved our strategy, and it kept looking good.

So, as soon as I got back, Josh and I made a trip down to Los Angeles to meet with Victor Kaufman, the Vice Chairman of IAC, to see if we should move forward, and if a deal made sense. We left the meeting stoked. Victor is a finance guy, but he has made movies and done a lot of really creative things in the past, and he made us feel welcomed and genuinely understood what we were trying to do.

On the way home we circled through Portland to meet with Andy Yang (that we recruited to come to GG after the deal was done... now he works at GG), who was very instrumental in working with Shana Fisher inside IAC to develop their gaming strategy. Andy was there to make sure we passed the technology hurdle. It was pouring rain outside, so we huddled over a great lunch and we all seemed to hit it off well. Again, Josh and I were stoked. We kept meeting great people that really seemed to understand what we wanted to do, just in a bigger way!

Next up, we got word that we "passed" the auditions and a meeting with Barry Diller (more info here) in the New York board room of IAC was in order. Barry Diller has an incredible past and current record of success. I had been reading about him in all of the business magazines for years. He worked with people like Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Jack Welsh, not Jeff Tunnell (I can't speak for the other GG partners). I was confident in the plan and our ability to make games and pull it off, but still AGH! Now it was time to get nervous!

We spent the next few weeks polishing up the business plan and presentation. This was not too bad because we were doing this plan anyway and we had all of our thoughts in order. We just had to work out how we were going to do it in a much bigger way, with more money and the kind of exposure a company like IAC would bring. If we could do this deal, our chances of success would go up about 1,000 fold!

The night before the flight to NYC, I decided to go to Men's Warehouse and get some new clothes. I made sure Josh did the same. It had been a LONG time since I had to wear a suit, but I did understand that unspoken "dress codes" are the norm on the East Coast. It simply is a matter of showing respect when going into somebody's "house". I kind of hate to admit it, but after ten years of wearing jeans and black tee shirts (just me and Steve Jobs, baby), getting dressed up was actually enjoyable.

By now, it was December, 2006, and it was turning to Christmas time in NYC. Cold, decorations, and the big city are always fun. We found a hotel close to IAC's old world HQ (before they moved to this new building), so we would make sure and be there on time no matter what the traffic was doing. I don't think there is an excuse big enough to cover for being late to a meeting like this, so we left nothing to chance! The next morning we were up and dressed a few hours before we needed to be, so we had breakfast at Norma's, the best breakfast place I have ever eaten (in fact, it was so good we ate there the next day, too).

Time to do it. Dum, duh, dum, dum... We marched up to the security guard and acted like we were supposed to be there, and the next thing we knew we were in the Board Room of I, f**kin', A, C! By this time, Shana, Victor, and Andy were on our side, so we were feeling pretty comfortable. We all wanted to work together to pull this off. Josh and I were feeling pretty good. But, the boardroom was big, and all of a sudden it was filled with a bunch of people we don't know or expect to be there. Meet and greet is great, but the more people that show up, the more inadequate I think we both started to feel. WTF business does little GG have doing in a place like this??

Barry walked in, dispensed with the hand shakes and small talk, then immediately took control of the room, asking his first question before he even sat down. BAM, -3 hitpoints, and Josh and I were stumbling a little bit, when Andy swooped in to save our butts by giving an XBLA Marble Blast demo while we were talking (+4 healing potion). That little diversion gave us enough time to regain our composure, and we started doing much better. By the end, discussion was flowing and everybody was having a good time (+ 8 exp. pts). As Barry left, he gave orders to make sure things continued to progress. We didn't exactly know how it went, but everybody in the meeting said that we got an exceptional response, and the deal looked to be on. (level up!)

After that meeting, Shana, Andy, Josh, and I went out for a celebration dinner and to really start to nail things down. There was a certain amount of alcohol consumption, and even though we all knew there was a TON of work to do, this thing was going to happen!

As a side note, Andy told us that one of the best hamburger joints in all of NYC was in a dark dingy corner of our fancy hotel. We didn't want to wait until we came back, so we ATE AGAIN! That night, we didn't sleep. Our flight home required us to leave the hotel at 6AM, and we were still buzzing at 4:30AM. Side, side note is that IAC actually had a LIMO pick us up and take us to the airport. Very cool.

From that time on, everything was a blur. All of the fun dog and pony relationship building was done, and we had to move on to the dirty work of getting the deal done. Lots of attorneys. No, I mean LOTS of ATTORNEYS, back and forth, cajoling, reading legalese as thick as hair on a dog's back, Board meetings, shareholder meetings, more attorneys. More meetings until you think it cannot go on any longer.

During an acquisition, the worst possible time is the period from when everybody agrees on everything, and the paperwork is not done. By this time, all parties have a lot invested, and do not want to see the deal go sideways, but anything can happen. A publicly traded company can have a bad quarter and decide to bail, a key person could be run over, the CEO could just decide it does feel right, etc, etc.

Luckily, we had Josh Williams on our side. If Josh had not become a programmer, he would have been an attorney. Josh took the LSAT's just for fun one time, and with out studying, he got in the 99th percentile. By the end of the negotiation and getting the paperwork done, Josh had earned the nickname Killer from the IAC guys. Good thing he was on our side.

This post is getting long, but the great ending to the story came when my wife Colleen and I were heading over to the Coast to stay for the weekend. On the way over Josh called and said... "It closed."

I knew what that meant. Money was in the bank, and we were on our way to a whole new place.

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
GarageGames
Make It Big In Games

Design Journals Rule

Jeff Tunnell — 2007-09-14T13:20:35+00:00

NOTE: Here is an article that I just posted over on my Make It Big In Games blog. It feels good to finally be writing articles again. ---Jeff

Lately, GarageGames has had the good fortune to begin to fund game ideas for publication. So, for a few months, starting last April, I began to talk to outside developers about what games they would like to create. My job was to pull together a portfolio of games that would be unique, fun, and, since it is a business, eventually sell and make money. I thought it would be no problem since we have been making games for six years with absolutely no money. I figured a few calls to developers that we had been working with and met over the years, and the portfolio would practically fall into place. Turns out I was wrong.

Our only requirement was that the games be fun. I was not looking to change the world, just pull together some fun games. After all, games should be fun, first, and anything else later. My assumption was that developers would be walking the talk of all the Indie blogs and game blogs that are complaining about mainstream publishers putting out the same old crap, and would have a bunch of ideas just bursting to get out into the world. Well, not so much. At least 80% of the developers we approached were like a deer in the headlights when asked to come up with an idea. We did end up with a bunch of great games, but it was just a lot harder than I thought it would be.

I can't go into all of this too much more, but will cover it at a later time. Besides, the above story is just an anecdote to set up the premise of this article. The actual premise is game ideas. You should have literally hundreds of them floating around in your head. Even better, you should have hundreds of them written in your own design portfolio or journal.

I have been preaching this for years. At every IGC, I have gone over it, yet continue to see game developers that have only ONE idea. One idea won't cut it. What if you can't get other people on your team to buy into your one idea? What if the technology is not available to get you one idea done? What if you can't find a publisher if your idea is too big to fund yourself? There are many, many reasons why you need a LOT of game ideas.

For inspiration, take a look at this graphic designer's site. I ran across Dave Werner's site on StumbleUpon, and was totally inspired. If you go to the site (all Flash, so a little hard to tell you specific places to go), mouse over the lower left side of the home page and check out the video of Dave's sketchbook. Every game designer should have something like that.

While mine is not nearly as cool as Dave's, I have collected a huge number of portfolios, journals, and design documents over the years. Here are some of them:

The entire bottom drawer of the cabinet is full of completed designs. The journals have a bunch of scribbled ideas for games, websites, businesses, etc. As you can see, I have experimented a lot over the years with different formats, from the early days and the extremely formal Day Timers (too expensive and corporate, inflexible), to the cool wirebound 3 subject notebooks (too big), to finally settling on the Mead 9 3/4" X 7 1/2" college ruled composition books.

Sometimes it is embarrassing to go back through the old journals, but sometimes it is a treasure chest of good ideas. ( "Did I write that?") But, the point is that many ideas take a LONG time to bring to the market. The original Incredible Machine design overview shown below has an original date of 1985, and did not reach the market until 1992, and was not a hit until 1994. (note that it was written on an original Mac, and printed on one of Apple's new fangled laser printers that cost $10,000!, but we only paid $6,000 because we had a developer discount:)

Anyway, the point of this article it to urge you to have a "million" ideas, and be ready to spring one at any time. The next time a producer approaches you with money, a great contract, and a huge opportunity, you need to be able to blow them away. So, start designing!

-Jeff Tunnell, Game Maker
Make It Big In Games
GarageGames
GGE Profile

Publishing Solutions and Affiliated Developers

Jeff Tunnell — 2006-09-21T22:14:45+00:00

I just updated our aging Publishing Solitions and Publishing FAQ to reflect the ever changing state of the Indie games business. In addition, the Publishing page now reflects our current thinking for our Affiliated Developer program where we team up with a few developers to help them create games that can be effective across the entire range of opportunities now present in the marketplace.

As background, when we first started GarageGames we were "raging against the box channel machine". At the time Indie games were called shareware and that was the only method of bringing your game to market without signing away all of your rights with a box publisher. We didn't think "shareware" was a good term for the developers, so we started calling them Indie games and it stuck. I'm sure the name would have happened without GG, but we made it happen sooner.

When GG started in 1999, people thought we were crazy. Downloadable games? On 56K modems. Get outta here! Well, of course, it did work. For a little more history, at about that same time, the first "dot com" bubble was starting to burst, and some of the left over venture capital and shareholder money was able to fund some other forward thinking companies such as Real Arcade and Shockwave. Developer/publishers like Gamehouse and PopCap were also just starting to emerge, and suddenly the downloadable market was real.

It took us a while to get TGE launched and the developer community web stuff going, so we didn't actually launch our store until December 2001 with Marble Blast, Orbz, Chain Reaction, and Robot Battle. In the following few months, Think Tanks and Tennis Critters came aboard, and we were on a roll. We were counting on getting a lot of games, but they were slow in coming, and we were being too picky on the submission side of things, so our supply of games dwindled. A steady supply of games is needed in order to keep customers interested in coming back to a game store, so while the developer side of the house was rocking, our game store sales were languishing in the 2002-2004 time frame.

During this time, we were concentrating on making the developer tools and making the developer community the best in the world (successfully, IMHO:), so the Game store took a back seat. We continued to push on the Indie game opportunity front, however, exploring good ideas and bad. Examples of bad include the Phantom. Examples of good things are book deals, consoles on XBLA, next generation on consoles for XB360 and others, cell phone deals, hand held deals, OEM deals, international partnerships, portal partnerships, etc.

Finally some really nice Torque games started coming through, plus we released TGB which is really picking up the pace for game releases. In addition, all of the press we received for our console efforts have brought thousands of gamers to the site, and the results have been a huge pick up in game sales. Marble Blast Gold is selling better today than at any time in its history, and we are having some really nice hits with games like Tube Twist.

Our game store will continue to grow, and we should pick up the pace with the number of games in the store. Meanwhile, in the background, we are working with a few great developers to make games that are exclusive to GarageGames and that we help bring to every market (consoles, cell phones, PC portals), not just our Game Store. We call this our "Affiliated Developer" partnership program. I first started talking about this last year at IGC, and you will soon see some nice results from these partnerships. The first example of this is Kevin Ryan's Puzzle Poker game. This one is cheating a little because Kevin and I have worked together for so long, but it still counts. There are more coming, and we still have some capacity to help a few more developers. If you have the talent and are interested, please let me know at jefft at garagegames dot com. (Please don't send me an email asking me about the program. Read the publishing page and follow the directions there. I will simply disregard any email that does not follow directions)

In related news, look for a new GarageGames service that will help all developers get their games out there as well as create a lot more traffic for selling your game. I don't want to hype it up too much, but we are just about to go out to a friends and family release, so I hope we can see this service before the end of the year. Stay tuned.

Lastly, I just posted a new article in my Make It Big In Games blog about how much money an XBLA360 downloadable next generation console game can make. It ended up getting picked up by a lot of on-line news outlets, so my little blog has had record traffic for the past few days. Check it out.

-Jeff Tunnell, GG

Five Realistic Steps To Starting A Game Development Company

Jeff Tunnell — 2006-06-12T20:37:09+00:00

This is the beginning of a huge article that I posted a couple of days ago on my Make It Big In Games blog. The article just got a big mention in this Gamasutra article, so it will be interesting to see if my traffic goes up.

Oh, by the way, I did an interview for 2Old2Play Issue #3, an on-line magazine. The download is here. That issue, along with my interview made it to the front page of Digg, which is a first for me.

Lately, I have read a couple of blog articles about starting your own game company. To me, they are too short, overly simplistic, and not very complete. So, I decided to start at the beginning, and write a step by step approach to starting your own development company. I hope to string all of these articles together, along with a few of the posts I have already written, and create a freely downloadble eBook. I will still circle back around and finish the "How much money can Indie games make" series, but it will be a part of the eBook.

You've played games since you could walk. Fond memories of your NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, and PS1 fill your brain like your console collection that fills your closet. Your Gameboys are piled up in a box that you just can't bring yourself to give away. Your collection of current hardware, i.e. GameCube, PS2, DS, and a hopped up PC hooked to the Internet powers your play while you are saving up for your new XBox360, and probably a Wii and DS-Lite too. Your game collection looks like a museum or a small library, with countless birthday presents, allowances, and parental gifts adding up to thousands and thousands of dollars worth of investment. Playing this collection of games over the years must make you an EXPERT on gaming! Well, at least on playing them. Making them is a different story...

Continue article here...