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Aug
Piczle Lines post-mortem25
posted by James Kay
Something we try to do after every game we release, something that big studio development usually can't find time for, is a post-mortem; a look back at the good and bad points of the game and its development process. This time it's Piczle Lines' turn.
The good
As a logic puzzle fanatic there are many types of puzzle I wanted on the iPhone, but in the end we decided on a line drawing puzzle (originally a Japanese invention that goes under many different names) currently playable as Piczle Lines because we felt it was the best fit for the platform. Building on our philosophy to build specifically to a platform's strengths, the iPhone's touch screen as well as it being a perfect "quick fix" casual gaming device meant of all the logic puzzles we wanted to create, Lines was absolutely the best one to go with. We had a previous design around a different popular logic puzzle but it simply wouldn't have worked as well. We made the right choice for the right platform, we believe. With quick prototyping, such as our toolchain allows, we soon realised this was the way to go, and work on Piczle Lines started in earnest in spring.
Piczle Lines is our first entry in what we hope to make into an ongoing IP. Though the name "Piczle" has caused some confusion, even derision (it does make sense though, being a contraction of PICture puzZLE), this would be the first in hopefully a long and fruitful line of Piczle-themed logic puzzle games featuring the august Professor Molecule Matrix. I think we did a good job setting him up as a character that we can revisit later and though we obviously are having problems introducing this weirdly spelled word "Piczle" into the collective consciousness, hopefully in the future it'll be a name we can build on, it'll be a name people recognise as a series of addictive logic puzzle games with, hopefully, a guarantee of quality. We feel Piczle Lines sets the professor up as a character that can be recognisable, and the name as something noteworthy. Time alone can tell, but as a first entry into a proposed series I think we did a pretty good job.
With each product we have released so far we have tried a different approach in the appstore; a full-priced title with a free demo version, totally free with advertising, beta-release and ongoing development, ad-supported with paid-for "support your developer" ad-free versions and now, with Piczle Lines, also freemium.
To give something away for free is quite something. We talked about how much we actually wanted to give away and eventually the consensus was to give away more than a "mere" demo version. Piczle Lines ships with 40 puzzles (1 chapter of story mode containing 20 puzzles, and one puzzle mode pack of 20 puzzles) and had, from day 1, a free download of another pack of 20 puzzles. So from day one there were 60 puzzles for FREE right off the bat. People called us insane. And to be honest, I doubted our sanity too.
However, we had a lot of trust in our game and knew that once people got into it they'd want to play more and purchase the additional bundles available from the in-game store. This, at least, was what we hoped.
There is a bit of game dev knowledge, a credo, or law even that states that your average conversion rate for free games or demos is about 1%. This means that generally, if 1000 people download and play a free game, only 10 will eventually pay for extra content. Therefore it is imperative to boost the numbers. 1% of a million people is still a significant amount of people and some developers have stated that that 1% of their customers have been responsible for 99% of their profits.
The conversion rate for Piczle Lines in the first few weeks, however, easily exceeded 10%. What we had hoped had become a reality; people would play, get addicted to its charms and purchase more puzzles. We expect as free downloads go up for this figure to go down eventually, but as it stands it has been our most successful entry into the appstore yet. For the interested: the final chapters of story mode has, by far, been the most downloaded content pack.
Our gamble to give away for free something resembling a full game, as opposed to a mere, small demo, and having paid-for content available in the in-game store has, so far, paid off.
The community has been a great asset in the development and continued support of Piczle Lines. I'm not just talking about the awesome feedback we've received from the players, both as plaudits and as constructive feedback on where we could improve our game, but also in our wide network of friends, family and fellow developers, who have all contributed immensely in both helping spreading the word, but also providing us with invaluable insight into marketing and development. No developer is an island and without the sterling help of our fellow independent developers and game development friends Piczle would probably not have been half the game it is now.
The bad
Scheduling was an issue for Piczle Lines. During development we were sidetracked by several work-for-hire projects, that were rewarding in their own ways but delayed Piczle Lines by a couple of months at least.
More annoying than having to lay down tools on your own project for a while to focus on another is the fact you have to reacquaint yourself with the game when you get back to it, losing ourselves valuable time. Sometimes a break can be good (Paul pretty much created DMTools as a "give my brain a break from Piczle Lines occasionally" side project during development) focusing for a long time on other projects is too distracting.
At one point we forced ourself into a semi-crunch, hunkered down and got it finished. And though there were still things we wanted to do (game development is NEVER finished) we forced ourselves to release Piczle Lines the moment it was stable and complete enough. One day we hope to be richer than Croesus, or Blizzard, and release games "when they're ready" but until then we don't quite have that luxury.
We thought we were prepared, this time, for the marketing. But we weren't, of course.
We had created a funky trailer, some cool papercraft, had prepared a press release, lead up to the release of Piczle Lines with a series of comics, had our mailing list ready....and forgot entirely about our local market. We used Twitter to support our push, as opposed to using it as a tool in its own right, and didn't realise our mistake until we were lucky enough for a popular Japanese tweeter to pick up on our game, review it and tweet about it. As a Tokyo-based company, with, we think, a pretty good grasp of Japanese tastes, we had totally ignored the entire local market. We rushed the game out before we had localised it (something our tool was specifically designed to cope with), didn't even localise our appstore texts, not even engaged in the local community. We had egg on our faces, for sure. A single tweet from a Japanese reviewer and we were propelled up the charts in the Japanese appstore, despite the fact they RIGHTFULLY complained about the lack of Japanese texts.
Though Piczle Lines continues to do very well in English-speaking countries, also thanks to some excellent reviews from American and English gaming sites, we missed a trick by engaging our local customers.
We get our inspiration from other indie developers; we know the awesome Behemoth has one, single artist in Dan Paladin who does ALL the art for their games, and that Hello Games is a four man team who created the amazing Joe Danger. This kind of spectacular display of development heroism makes us think we could be Gods too, but with having to wear so many hats we are still sometimes overwhelmed, and Piczle Lines did end up turning into a bit of a task larger than we had anticipated.
Paul had to write the puzzle creation scripts from scratch as well as deal with my lack of decent scripting knowledge to create the framework, Dimitrios had to cope with some tricky engineering to make the puzzles run as smoothly as possible and I myself had to not only create the puzzles, but the front-end and all of the art for the story mode too. Each of the six chapters had 20 objects that had to be designed and modeled in 3D, rendered, prepared, the comic book sections had to be written, created in 3D as well, rendered, animated and put in the tool....all on top of having to deal with external projects, supporting older releases, dealing with paperwork and general life issues, like families, significant others, babies, sleep... It all got a bit much.
I am happy we are such sticklers for quality and that we do want to create the best game we can, but sometimes we might need to take a step back and reevaluate our goals. That said... we did manage it this time..maybe this wasn't such a problem afterall. Maybe for our next project would should increase the scope even more!
Though it's hard to sympathise with anyone complaining about success, we were quite unprepared to the level of addiction our players displayed. We thought the initial batch of downloadable content would be enough for satisfy the most ardent puzzler for a while, despite also containing simpler puzzles to ease newcomers to the genre into the complexities of the gameplay, we didn't quite expect people to take to it so feverishly, completing the free and downloadable puzzles so quickly.
As soon as download figures started coming in it was clear we had to do something and new puzzle bundles were created with haste. As a point of personal pride, I created another 160 puzzles in just three eye-popping days of madness, but in the end it would have been better had we been better prepared for this eventuality. What we don't want is for people to finish the available puzzles and not start the game up again, and thus potentially missing the new content. We just didn't quite expect people to take to this game with the zeal and determination that they have so far, and we have had to ramp up puzzle production quite a bit because of that. Maybe a little more faith in our product would have helped us here, but the reception has exceeded all expectations, and that has been a blessing and a bit of a surprise.
Piczle Lines is a game for the iPhone and iPod Touch and as such it has to compete in a very crowded market. Despite it getting rave reviews, offering a LOT of content for free and getting a lot of attention from fans it has still been incredibly hard competing with other games on the appstore. With even big name publishers setting content for free and the sheer number of other, quality titles out there it is still a struggle. We believe Piczle Lines has a long tail and that over time our sales will continue to improve, especially as we plan to release more and more content, and despite it having had a pretty good start in its first few weeks, releasing Piczle Lines on the appstore has meant a continuing and difficult struggle for attention.
Conclusion
Piczle Lines is being met by rave reviews and countless user comments, which is humbling and immensely exciting. Though we need to make a living, as game developers and geeks nothing is quite as satisfying as happy customers. It may sound cheesy to say, but it warms our cockles! I remember as an employee any review a game I worked on got was, well, just a review. Now it's our own blood, sweat and tears, and our own product, every review, let alone every great review is just pure sliced gold.
Sure, the development had some niggles, and the marketing push is an ongoing onslaught of strife and hard work, we are immensely proud of the game and extremely happy with its reception. Hopefully the sales continue to grow and our business plan will be vindicated, but like any project it has been a learning experience more valuable than mere money.
Keep a look out for more Piczle-themed logic-puzzle goodness from us in the future!
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Aug
Marketing 101, lessons learned on the battlefield9
posted by James Kay
Every independent developer knows, eventually, that exposure is the most important thing about releasing your game. We secretly like to think if we create a quality product we will somehow magically get the customers, but of course life doesn't work this way. As a lot of indies, ourselves included, come from a big studio background, as artists, coders, designers, producers, thinking we can do it all better ourselves, we often overlook the massive importance of the marketing department. We might have a vague inclination marketing might be very important, but how it works, and just how much hard work it is is something you only truly realise when you release your own games. Here are a few lessons we learned over the first year of Score Studios releases.
$0 is NOT the ideal price point
A lot has been said about pricing games, and some have called it a "race to the bottom", with the ideal price point for games being $0. We have found this isn't entirely true. Indies often use "free for a day" sites to push their games out there and hopefully get a few hits, to propel their title to the top of the charts. However, and anyone with their eye on the right Twitter accounts knows, there is a LOT of competition, even at this price level. Even big name studios give away their games sometimes and an informed user need never pay for a game on the iPhone (aside: which makes the idea of iPhone piracy even more ridiculous). You need to grab the attention of the right reviewers and websites for exposure, and merely setting the price at $0 alone will not give you any extra sales just by itself. It certainly won't give you any income. You'll notice those at the top of the foodchain can pretty much charge what they want, as they are already at the top and highly visible. If you're not even in the top #100 not even being free will help you that much.
NOTE: Apple's changes to the Appstore to include a "try before you buy" section could be a double-edged sword for indies too. Will free or freemium titles also be listed here? Or will it merely be for lite or demo versions of paid applications? Won't people be drawn to this section, especially if Apple promotes it heavily on the front page and steer people away from freemium titles? We shall have to wait and see.
Ratings don't matter!
This is a lie, they really do, but they do not help the visibility of your app. Once you are visible on the Appstore and random people get to see your game's page, then they come into play, but until then they are pretty meaningless. If you find yourself on a random page and you are wondering if you can be bothered trying out an application seeing it has dozens, hundreds of largely positive reviews you are more likely to download it. Conversely, the "train-wreck" syndrome also comes into play here, especially for free applications. If an app has largely and numerous 1 star reviews, customers seem more likely to check it out for themselves, further driving up download figures and pushing the app further up the charts.
When we released Piczle Lines we added rating options within the game itself. Luckily with OS4 the deeply unfair and skewed towards negativity system of "rate when you delete an app" has been removed, yet there is still no way for people to easily rate an app they like. So we added an option for it in our game's option menu, showed the button whenever a puzzle was completed, and even sneakily added a special award in the game for pressing either of these buttons. The result was that within a week of release Piczle Lines received not only dozen and dozens of 5-star ratings, people actually took the time to write a review, saying how much they enjoyed the game! Our average rating was between 4.5 and 5 stars with many written reviews, around 90 at time of writing. Any person stumbling across this game would surely be tempted to try it out. But the random game we picked to follow as a test case that happened to be released on the same day as ours received mostly negative 2 or 1 star ratings, few reviews and found itself featured in the "new and noteworthy" section, as well as riding high in the top #10 lists.
Twitter > Blogs
Whereas once you could snarkily state 90% of the internet was porn, these days it seems 90% of the internet is blogs about games and applications. There are babillions of apps on the Appstore, as here are millions of blogs writing about them, and competition is tough. After we released any of our titles we sent out email after email to these sites and on average only a handful would pick up on it. Some even had the audacity to charge us for a review - something we are wholly against. I'm not against bloggers and web admins making some money but they should do so by creating the content, getting the views and maybe with advertising revenue, not by exploiting the desperation of developers. Of course, we have never paid any of the sites for reviews.
Some also offer fairly cheap banner advertising, though hardly any will make any promises on numbers, readership volume and guaranteed click-throughs. In the end, as a developer, you can only truly trust the big sites, but they are usually more occupied with bigger titles (though we have been blessed with some awesome reviews for Piczle Lines on sites as Eurogamer, Pocketgamer and Gamezebo).
When blog and sites did pick up on our press releases and emails though, we found the Japanese go above and beyond. A lot of English language blogs did nothing more than copy the Appstore description text and show a few Appstore screenshots, but several Japanese sites wrote long walk-throughs, made a LOT of their own screenshots to illustrate what they were talking about and generally took a lot of effort to not only write about the game but seriously review it. We have been fools for ignoring our own local market for so long, or at least, for not paying them more attention.
Twitter, though, is a Godsend. Unlike sites you can easily see a Tweeter's readership in the number of followers someone has, and the ease with which people can re-tweet articles they are interested in means if you spark some interest it will travel through the, uhm, Twittersphere (?) at a lightning pace and goes very far and deep.
Japan has for a long time lagged behind the rest of the world in embracing Twitter but these days it's nothing short of a craze. Twitter logos are splashes around mobile phone shops, where new phones are specifically geared towards cashing in on the current fashion. With the 140 character limit and the way kanji works Twitter seems ideal for Japan and now it's in the public consciousness it's taking off like nobody's business.
Indeed, it took a single popular Japanese Tweeter to review our game Piczle Lines for it to storm into the top #10 free puzzle games charts on the Japanese Appstore, reaching #5 in just 1 day, and breaking through the top #100 list in the self-same store.
The lesson here is that Twitter is a much better marketing tool than blogs and sites seem to be, and that the Japanese care deeply about their apps, will take the time to review and really deserve any developer's attention as a market!
The Appstore is obtuse
Selling games is all about the figures. We check daily our sales charts and our revenue to figure out what people are reacting to, so we can focus our attention on those things our customers enjoy more than others. However, the Appstore isn't very transparent and often we are forced to guess where traffic is coming from.
Ideally any links we create through banner advertising or mentions lead first to our own site's games page, so we can use Google Analytics to find out where our traffic comes from, but often, from blogs, forums and tweets links lead directly to the Appstore, which is of course convenient for the user, but means we have no idea where our sales are coming from, making it extremely difficult to focus our marketing pushes on the most useful outlets. Currently we get a mention, on say a popular twitter feed, a blog or website, then the next day we check our sales figures and we can, at best guess the there is a correlation there.
DMTools is a great example of this. The built-in feedback system helps a lot, as people email us with great suggestions for improvement, and by all accounts it seems to be a great app for Dungeon Masters; it has been seeing a steady stream of downloads since we released it. However, we have no clue where these sales are coming from. Is it word of mouth? A forum link somewhere? We simply don't know, so we don't know which communities or sites to approach with information once we release a major update. It's definitely an issue for iPhone developers.
Conclusions
The Appstore is a massive beast, but it is also unwieldy. The riches and success it could yield are legendary, but also, especially these days, elusive to most. As developers the Appstore leaves a lot to be desired, especially in its obtuseness and lack of control. It's too difficult to find that sweet spot, to find strategies that work and to compete with, frankly, the rest of the world. Predictably it has become a marketplace of two opposites; the established, well-funded big name publishers and the amateur with a day job wishing to develop games or apps in his or her spare time. The entire middle ground is a no man's land of blood, sweat and tears that any serious independent developer, for whom development is a living, should consider deeply before making any decisions about.
Also, create good relationships with bloggers but don't forget Twitter, and the Japanese market is an important one. Don't ignore it!
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Aug
Games we play: DeathSpank (PSN,XBLA)2
posted by Paul Caristino
Paul: I downloaded the demo for this game without having heard a thing about it, and boy oh boy, I bought the game as soon as the demo expired. I was sucked right in with the cardboard cut-out style graphics and the over dramatised humour. Its such a fun and simple game with an easy to follow storyline, accompanied with a quest log to give you me hints on the rare times I got stuck. It also allows you to pick it up at any time from where you left off without having to rack your brain to remember what you're supposed to be doing. The only real problem I've had with it is the inventory system. Its great how it shows you your current highest damage weapon or best armor, but it quickly gets filled up with random items you'll never use and while each weapon can have different magical properties, theres only a couple places in the game where it really matters. The dialog is fun to read without having to exhaust every response and is accompanied by some well delivered voice acting. While I haven't played the local multiplayer mode yet, I do wish it did have an online mode so I could DeathSpank it up with my friends. A definate pickup if you're looking for a casual romp with a simple and fun game. Awesome sauce Hothead Games, awesome sauce.
James: I LOVE the art style and the cutscenes, and how this game pokes gentle fun at the usual RPG tropes. Personally the inventory system is doing my head in a bit, but I think I'll stick with it, simply because of the silly fun I'm having. Content-wise and in terms of polish this game really raises the bar for download games, which are just getting better and better!
Dimitrios: Although lately i haven't been playing as much as i want to, i'm glad i tried this game. It's fun, easy to pick up and, though not a high profile game, very nice to look at. The seriousness of the main Deathspank's voice combined with his sometimes absurd comments is a recipe for laughter. The auto-select armor system is very helpful. Wish there was a similar setting for weapons so that the questing is less interrupted by browsing the inventory. Althought most of the quests are of the type go fetch this item, there is a lot of variety into the quest descriptions and some of them need a bit of extra thinking to do in order to complete them. Of course there are tips, in the form of chinese fortune cookies, that can be used to help you with the quests. Deathspank is a really good and polished game and a nice addition to my library.
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Jul
REJECTED! The MagicSteve story23
It all happened earlier this summer when myself and some friends found ourselves getting increasingly drunk at a Thai restaurant in Shibuya, central Tokyo. As one of the guys there was enjoying some success with his own iPhone application the discussion turned to the difficulty of making a splash on the Appstore. We were trying to figure out if there was any reasoning behind the success of certain titles while others, more polished and better ones lingered unnoticed at the bottom of the pile. The conclusion we came to is: no, there is no rhyme or reason to the Appstore at all.
During the increasingly loud and drunken conversation someone - I will say now it was me but alternate retellings may also be true - came up with the idea of making a quick, throw-away little app that might just fire up the viral success we all so crave; a little magic 8-ball application featuring none other than Apple CEO Steve Jobs, and, after shaking, presenting you with a collection of actual and imagined but funny Steve Jobs quotes. Bish bash bosh, charge a buck, profit! We laughed and annoyed the people at nearby tables coming up with possible quotes, some of the better ones being "I'll be there in a Flash!", the "plug-in unavailable" lego brick that has become the icon for Apple's refusal to allow Flash on its platform and an endless variations of single-syllable replies with "sent from my iPod Touch" signatures.
In the cold, headache-filled morning of hungover sobriety the idea had stuck, it seemed, and in no time a prototype was up and running. We spent an inordinate amount of time selecting the best actual Steve Jobs quotes for the little bobble-head MagicSteve to spout, that would still be relevant to its function as a magic 8-ball and...well... finished the app. Then, we looked at it and paranoia creeped over us.
What if Apple, or more precisely, Steve Jobs himself didn't see the joke? What if they saw it as a stick in the eye instead of the respectful tribute/satire of its most public figure? What had started off as a quick app to reap the riches the Appstore is purported to hold suddenly became an albatross around our neck. Swallowing hard and keeping our fingers crossed we submitted the application for approval by Apple.
And then we waited.
After about two weeks, the expected amount of time, though being on the long side, for the submission and approval process we received an ominous automatic email from Apple. Our application submission, it stated, has been delayed and if we would please hang on just a tad longer. Paranoid as I am, this fired my imagination in all sorts of wrong ways. I imagined a representative of the submission team, sweating and cowering, knocking on the door of Steve Jobs' cavernous office. He would turn around in his high-backed swivel chair, stroke a long-haired white cat, look at the app on his prototype iPhone 5, put it down and turning calmly to his employee say "kill them". I started looking out for helicopters and black-suited SWAT teams to burst into my apartment at any time. Being busy finishing off Piczle Lines these paranoid delusions didn't last long and the matter was pretty much put out of my head entirely within a few days.
Until we received another email asking us to speak directly to a named person at the submission team regarding the application MagicSteve. My heart skipped a beat. Was this the call where they'd be saying our developer license was to be revoked, our other applications pulled? I gulped and called the number provided. It didn't go through. It had seemed the person in question had shot off the email just before leaving the office on a Friday evening. On a holiday weekend, of July 4th. We weren't going to find out our fate until at least Tuesday. A long, sweaty and paranoid weekend followed.
When we eventually failed to make telephonic contact a few short emails were exchanged, which culminated in the polite statement: "The issue is with the basic concept of using Steve Jobs as the prognosticator in your application. Please revise it and resubmit without using any Apple Executives in this manner in the application."
Now it's not as if we hadn't expected this. We thought it was worth a shot anyway, and in the end Apple had not taken it the wrong way at all. We wouldn't, of course, resubmit the application with another, anonymous character, as the entire point of the app was to have fun with the abundance of Steve Jobs quotes out there, but in the end it was of course never going to happen.
For now the application has a home as an adhoc on my own personal iPhone, which I occasionally start up to give bobble-head Mr. Jobs a quick shake and get some sage advice. And the main lesson learnt here is, of course: beer and design brainstorming do not mix as well as you might think.
Sent from my iPad.
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Jun
By the book, Japanmanship29
A few years ago I started blogging on the Japanese video game development industry, from the inside, so to speak. I mostly did it to excercise my brain, flex my writing muscle, for what it's worth, and didn't really think it'd lead to anything. Without any marketing or spreading the word myself the blog slowly gathered a core group of steady followers, keen to hear about the ins and outs of an industry which is often examined from the outside but hardly ever exposed from the inside.
Though I sometimes used it to vent steam, generally it was a sober look at the ins and outs of game development, especially for a foreigner like myself. It soon became clear it was turning into something of a guide for people who have similar ambitions to those I once had; to work in games in Japan. It has lead to some commissioned writing gigs for magazines, on-line and on paper, and has put me in touch with a great bunch of people, both interested onlookers and other industry insiders alike, some of whom I had to pleasure to meet in real life. Mostly it helped me keep my sanity and perspective; writing nasty, hatefull bile is no use to anyone and it often forced me to reevaluate my positions on certain subjects and figure out things are usually not as bad as we think. Though I've long stopped writing the blog, I am glad I did it back in the day, only good things have come of it.
Now I have had a chance to revisit the blog I figured why not turn it into a guidebook? Part of its appeal, apparently, was that there were a lot of people interested in working in Japanese games, yet still there is extremely little information about it. Even in the last couple of years we've seen a massive rise of foreign developers hired at Japanese studios, and I thought now is as good a time as any to take the information I've gathered over the years and turn it into a book.
Though writing has begun in earnest it's a massive task that will take quite some time and effort to complete. Aside from covering all the basics, I've decided to write a few new editorials, as well as select and edit a few pertinent posts from the old blog for inclusion. I've also approached a few fellow expatriates willing to give their insights in small interviews for the book, so as to give possibly opposing views on what is otherwise a very subjective experience. And we plan to have an extensive list of Japanese game companies to include. We really want it to be, as the working subtitle is suggesting, an "ultimate guide to working in video games in Japan".
For the print version we are currently thinking Lulu.com, self publishing it. We might approach a publisher or two, but we kind of like the idea of having the level of control self-publishing affords us. We'll also do an e-book version, though we haven't decided yet how. On the one hand if we make our own app using our own technology we can do a lot of cool stuff, like making the company database link up to Googlemaps and your contacts list, though depending on the time involved, we are also considering publishing the paperversion as a bare-bones e-book, via one of the many new services that are cropping up.
As a first attempt at a book it's not quite the Great Modern Novel I was hoping I'd be writing, but I figured there are more people interested in a guidebook to working in games in Japan than there would be in my tedious and verbose prose. Once it is finished and becomes available I'll be sure to boast about it all over our site, and will try to instigate a big push through relevant websites and magazines. Hopefully I can help hopefuls with the same dream I had to be as lucky as I was, to give something back to the industry I have so often complained about (I am British afterall). For now though I am just spweing words onto paper, through the medium of keyboard and screen, and interested parties are implored to have patience. I'll do my best to finish it sooner rather than later, but I never seem to be able to run out of things to write about.
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Jun
Pen and Paper (and iPhone)23
posted by Paul Caristino
(D&D nerd warning!)
Every Tuesday I make the trek to my mate's place for some old fashioned dice rolling. Since our last DM went back to America I have taken over his duties and started a new campaign. Being el Dungeon Master Supremo is a lot of fun and is rewarding in ways that differ when playing as a character. Unfortunately it also brings with it a bit of hurt as I constantly have to look up adventure notes, monster stats and especially tracking pretty much everybody in an encounter. I don't have a small laptop so took to my primitive drawing tools to scratch our monster HP and initiative order. I tried to print out cheat sheets for monsters to make it easier but everything still took too much time. After several sessions of fumbling through encounters I though "Hey, i've got an iPhone, maybe there's an app for that", thus I hit the Appstore. I downloaded a couple free and cheap D&D apps and waded through them. Some of them had what I needed but missed a vital feature which made them pretty much useless for me, others were nothing like what I wanted or were hard to use. I was a sad panda, forever doomed to scribble out numbers into my notepad... but wait!
Lets get this party started
The best thing about being a programmer is being able to DIY, so I set off to make my own basic initiative tracker. I jotted down some of the basic things I needed, track initiative scores, track monster names and HP, highlight whose turn it is and also be able to keep some simple notes for quick reference. I made what I thought were easy to use input methods for all the numbers using the iphone's scrolling picker controls, it automatically sort based on initiative numbers, and even kept track of bloodied monsters for me. Armed with my new DM Tool of Awesome+2 I was ready to test it in a real session. Oh the humanity T_T
Original DM Tools Prototype
Tis better to have tried and failed...
Wow, turns out it wasn't as easy to use as I thought. There were so many things that I hadn't considered or at first thought would be really easy to manage that just fell apart in practise. Having to enter everybody's initiative scores at the start of the encounter, dealing with people with the same initiative score, having to re-order based on held actions, entering the same damage to several monsters for burst/blast attacks.... all took way more time than they should have. There were also other annoying things like still spending a lot of time looking up monster sheets for defenses whenever someone attacked which really slowed things down. It was still much faster than before where I was writing everything down myself but the interface left a lot to be desired, so back to the drawing board I went.
I brutally ripped out the current initiative tracker replacing it with a far simpler list that can be reordered by dragging rows. Each monster now shows all their defenses right in the list and I can edit their notes for effects and whatnot. Now you can tap a monster to add damage using a simple calculator style set of buttons, also remember the last input to easily apply similar damage/healing to multiple monsters. You can add multiples of the same monster into the encounter and the "current turn" marker also groups like-monsters if they're next to each other in the initiative order. I also added a "notes" system that allows me to prepare quick and ordered lists for each session as well as add them quickly during gameplay. Tuesday hits as I'm adding some final UI adjustments, this time for sure...
Revised Interface
Take Two
Success! After a disappointing first attempt I finally realized what I ACTUALLY needed in an app. Not something that I put all the numbers into and calculates who is next, and what does who and how/which/where/when, but an app to complement the table top experience allowing the game play to be fast and fun. I also learned that sometimes what I think I want isn't actually what I want at all.
I am curious to see what other D&Ders think of my approach and so after a few more tests and a bit of UI cleanup we put it on the Appstore. I do have plans for future features such as being able to prepare and store multiple encounters, easier editing of effects on monsters as well as perhaps syncing information with a website for easy editing, but as with all our products, suggestions and feedback is of course always welcome!
Comment in our forums ...
With the recent announcement of the iPhone 4 Apple once again makes us salivate with all their shiny, technological goodness. Just last month the iPad was released in Japan and having some playtime with one of those made me all giddy. As our company's technology is specifically designed to be malleable and adapt to new consoles we obviously already had some thoughts on iPad, and will of course be thinking about the new iPhone's higher resolution and features. Though we won't be rushing to release anything substandard, we do think the devices can offer some interesting possibilities and open up new markets.
The iPad is an almost perfect web browsing device that is incredibly easy to use, it will undoubtedly open up technology to people previously put off. I'm thinking specifically of the older generation who have stayed away from the web and home computers, in the same way the Nintendo Wii opened up the market to people who didn't want to have to deal with controllers with 2 sticks and 20 buttons. It's missing the front-facing camera, of course, at least in version 1, but imagine being able to video chat with your parents or grandparents on an iPad - awesome! We'll see how well this feature will work on the iPhone 4, where the face-to-face video chat functionality is one of the main reasons I'll consider switching.
Most surprisingly, really, is the sheer number of YouTube videos that have been posted with toddlers playing on an iPad. Intuitive and sheer fun, developers who aim at toddlers could make a killing. Not just apps, mind you, but interactive children's books too could do extremely well. And finally, let's not forget that often overlooked pet market - kittens playing on iPads is not only feasible but damn cute to watch on YouTube clips.
The higher resolution and the bigger screen on the iPad could be a blessing for some, a curse for others. The small size and low budgets of iPhone development has opened the doors to many amateur developers, hobbyists and independents, in somewhat of a great democratization of the market. The iPad will continue this trend, we think, allowing developers to make bigger, better and more beautiful games that mightn't have worked on the iPhone smaller screen. But of course, some developers won't be able to cope; bigger budgets and longer development time, combined with the ruthless, self-inflicted pricing model of the Appstore will be difficult for some, and substandard applications won't be able to get away with so much anymore either, but it might separate the wheat from the chaff, and for the consumers this can only be a good thing.
Many have said this before us but the iPad's screen is stunning! Already people are getting excited about reading newspapers, books and magazines on the device, but mostly people are excited about comics - they simply look fantastic. That said, the "PDF zine" culture, which has been plodding along on the web, could see a massive surge with iPads as the main and best device to read them on. Personally I am most interested in seeing what amateur magazine makers will come up with.
Finally, a lot has been said about the Appstore; it's a closed system that paradoxically is also too open. The race to the bottom has pretty much been completed, with the perfect price point for apps being around $0, forcing developers and publishers to get more creative in order to continue to make money. This, in a sense, is good. The main thing, though, is that it's an established outlet that works and that people know. Having it available as-is for the iPad is perfect and the jump from iPhone to iPad will be as easy for consumers as it will be for developers. There is no unproven thing about it. We have yet to see how the market will behave, whether prices will increase for iPad apps, but the device came into existence with an entire market already in place.
The big question is, of course, are we going to be releasing our games on iPad? The answer is, well, probably, yes, at some point. We are committed to quality and we feel we don't just want to port our iPhone games to a bigger screen. In the same way we designed our games specifically for the iPhone, its screen and controls, so do we want to focus specifically on the iPad and find and utilise what it has to offer in the best possible way. iPad is in our longer term future, for sure, but it won't be our sole focus.
That said, possibly due to the retro nature of the graphics, I was personally quite pleased how well Flock It!, our flagship iPhone game, holds up on the big screen, zoomed x2. If you have an iPad be sure to check it out !
Comment in our forums ...
James: I have looked at Q Games' excellent series of PixelJunk games for the Playstation Network with great interest, but Shooter just grabbed me and wouldn't let go until I completed it 100%. From the simple, slightly retro yet very stylish artwork, to, again, the simple yet very tight controls this game is pretty much perfect for me. Finding out how the different elements react to each other, trying your hardest to rescue, not accidentally kill, the miners and the fantastic and beautifully designed bosses, this game just gets everything right. I particularly love how it tells you how to control your craft but after that leaves you to figure things out for yourself. As new elements and ships are introduced I had a lot of fun just playing around to learn how they interacted. I love it when playing the game teaches you how it works, as opposed to having to follow a tutorial first. If anything, the one major failing this game has is that it's too short. But to be honest, if the game had 1000 levels I'd still think it was too short.
Paul: I had awesome fun with this game in 2 player. When one guy dies you can grab his dying ship and bring him to water! really loved some of the liquid physics as well. Looking forward to the next in the series!
Comment in our forums ...
Every Tuesday I make the trek to my mate's place for some old fashioned dice rolling. Since our last DM went back to America I have taken over his duties and started a new campaign. Being el Dungeon Master Supremo is a lot of fun and is rewarding in ways that differ when playing as a character. Unfortunately it also brings with it a bit of hurt as I constantly have to look up adventure notes, monster stats and especially tracking pretty much everybody in an encounter. I don't have a small laptop so took to my primitive drawing tools to scratch our monster HP and initiative order. I tried to print out cheat sheets for monsters to make it easier but everything still took too much time. After several sessions of fumbling through encounters I though "Hey, i've got an iPhone, maybe there's an app for that", thus I hit the Appstore. I downloaded a couple free and cheap D&D apps and waded through them. Some of them had what I needed but missed a vital feature which made them pretty much useless for me, others were nothing like what I wanted or were hard to use. I was a sad panda, forever doomed to scribble out numbers into my notepad... but wait!
Lets get this party started
The best thing about being a programmer is being able to DIY, so I set off to make my own basic initiative tracker. I jotted down some of the basic things I needed, track initiative scores, track monster names and HP, highlight whose turn it is and also be able to keep some simple notes for quick reference. I made what I thought were easy to use input methods for all the numbers using the iphone's scrolling picker controls, it automatically sort based on initiative numbers, and even kept track of bloodied monsters for me. Armed with my new DM Tool of Awesome+2 I was ready to test it in a real session. Oh the humanity T_T
Original DM Tools Prototype
Tis better to have tried and failed...
Wow, turns out it wasn't as easy to use as I thought. There were so many things that I hadn't considered or at first thought would be really easy to manage that just fell apart in practise. Having to enter everybody's initiative scores at the start of the encounter, dealing with people with the same initiative score, having to re-order based on held actions, entering the same damage to several monsters for burst/blast attacks.... all took way more time than they should have. There were also other annoying things like still spending a lot of time looking up monster sheets for defenses whenever someone attacked which really slowed things down. It was still much faster than before where I was writing everything down myself but the interface left a lot to be desired, so back to the drawing board I went.
I brutally ripped out the current initiative tracker replacing it with a far simpler list that can be reordered by dragging rows. Each monster now shows all their defenses right in the list and I can edit their notes for effects and whatnot. Now you can tap a monster to add damage using a simple calculator style set of buttons, also remember the last input to easily apply similar damage/healing to multiple monsters. You can add multiples of the same monster into the encounter and the "current turn" marker also groups like-monsters if they're next to each other in the initiative order. I also added a "notes" system that allows me to prepare quick and ordered lists for each session as well as add them quickly during gameplay. Tuesday hits as I'm adding some final UI adjustments, this time for sure...
Revised Interface
Take Two
Success! After a disappointing first attempt I finally realized what I ACTUALLY needed in an app. Not something that I put all the numbers into and calculates who is next, and what does who and how/which/where/when, but an app to complement the table top experience allowing the game play to be fast and fun. I also learned that sometimes what I think I want isn't actually what I want at all.
I am curious to see what other D&Ders think of my approach and so after a few more tests and a bit of UI cleanup we put it on the Appstore. I do have plans for future features such as being able to prepare and store multiple encounters, easier editing of effects on monsters as well as perhaps syncing information with a website for easy editing, but as with all our products, suggestions and feedback is of course always welcome!
Comment in our forums ...
Jun
An Apple near-future9
posted by James Kay
With the recent announcement of the iPhone 4 Apple once again makes us salivate with all their shiny, technological goodness. Just last month the iPad was released in Japan and having some playtime with one of those made me all giddy. As our company's technology is specifically designed to be malleable and adapt to new consoles we obviously already had some thoughts on iPad, and will of course be thinking about the new iPhone's higher resolution and features. Though we won't be rushing to release anything substandard, we do think the devices can offer some interesting possibilities and open up new markets.
The iPad is an almost perfect web browsing device that is incredibly easy to use, it will undoubtedly open up technology to people previously put off. I'm thinking specifically of the older generation who have stayed away from the web and home computers, in the same way the Nintendo Wii opened up the market to people who didn't want to have to deal with controllers with 2 sticks and 20 buttons. It's missing the front-facing camera, of course, at least in version 1, but imagine being able to video chat with your parents or grandparents on an iPad - awesome! We'll see how well this feature will work on the iPhone 4, where the face-to-face video chat functionality is one of the main reasons I'll consider switching.
Most surprisingly, really, is the sheer number of YouTube videos that have been posted with toddlers playing on an iPad. Intuitive and sheer fun, developers who aim at toddlers could make a killing. Not just apps, mind you, but interactive children's books too could do extremely well. And finally, let's not forget that often overlooked pet market - kittens playing on iPads is not only feasible but damn cute to watch on YouTube clips.
The higher resolution and the bigger screen on the iPad could be a blessing for some, a curse for others. The small size and low budgets of iPhone development has opened the doors to many amateur developers, hobbyists and independents, in somewhat of a great democratization of the market. The iPad will continue this trend, we think, allowing developers to make bigger, better and more beautiful games that mightn't have worked on the iPhone smaller screen. But of course, some developers won't be able to cope; bigger budgets and longer development time, combined with the ruthless, self-inflicted pricing model of the Appstore will be difficult for some, and substandard applications won't be able to get away with so much anymore either, but it might separate the wheat from the chaff, and for the consumers this can only be a good thing.
Many have said this before us but the iPad's screen is stunning! Already people are getting excited about reading newspapers, books and magazines on the device, but mostly people are excited about comics - they simply look fantastic. That said, the "PDF zine" culture, which has been plodding along on the web, could see a massive surge with iPads as the main and best device to read them on. Personally I am most interested in seeing what amateur magazine makers will come up with.
Finally, a lot has been said about the Appstore; it's a closed system that paradoxically is also too open. The race to the bottom has pretty much been completed, with the perfect price point for apps being around $0, forcing developers and publishers to get more creative in order to continue to make money. This, in a sense, is good. The main thing, though, is that it's an established outlet that works and that people know. Having it available as-is for the iPad is perfect and the jump from iPhone to iPad will be as easy for consumers as it will be for developers. There is no unproven thing about it. We have yet to see how the market will behave, whether prices will increase for iPad apps, but the device came into existence with an entire market already in place.
The big question is, of course, are we going to be releasing our games on iPad? The answer is, well, probably, yes, at some point. We are committed to quality and we feel we don't just want to port our iPhone games to a bigger screen. In the same way we designed our games specifically for the iPhone, its screen and controls, so do we want to focus specifically on the iPad and find and utilise what it has to offer in the best possible way. iPad is in our longer term future, for sure, but it won't be our sole focus.
That said, possibly due to the retro nature of the graphics, I was personally quite pleased how well Flock It!, our flagship iPhone game, holds up on the big screen, zoomed x2. If you have an iPad be sure to check it out !
Comment in our forums ...
Jun
Games we play: PixelJunk Shooter (PS3)2
posted by James Kay
James: I have looked at Q Games' excellent series of PixelJunk games for the Playstation Network with great interest, but Shooter just grabbed me and wouldn't let go until I completed it 100%. From the simple, slightly retro yet very stylish artwork, to, again, the simple yet very tight controls this game is pretty much perfect for me. Finding out how the different elements react to each other, trying your hardest to rescue, not accidentally kill, the miners and the fantastic and beautifully designed bosses, this game just gets everything right. I particularly love how it tells you how to control your craft but after that leaves you to figure things out for yourself. As new elements and ships are introduced I had a lot of fun just playing around to learn how they interacted. I love it when playing the game teaches you how it works, as opposed to having to follow a tutorial first. If anything, the one major failing this game has is that it's too short. But to be honest, if the game had 1000 levels I'd still think it was too short.
Paul: I had awesome fun with this game in 2 player. When one guy dies you can grab his dying ship and bring him to water! really loved some of the liquid physics as well. Looking forward to the next in the series!
Comment in our forums ...
May
Easter eggs27
Easter eggs are a little bit of video game fun and maybe, it would be sad if it were true, video game history. If you haven't heard the term before, an "easter egg" is a hidden message or function in a video game that serves no other purpose than to be there, and is usually hidden from anyone but those who know about it or accidentally stumble upon it. It is widely believed the first easter egg was hidden in Atari's Adventure, released in 1979, where the creator, Warren Robinett, hid his name as a credit in a room that was only accessible after doing a very specific task. Since then many video games have had hidden messages or in-jokes.
The fun suddenly came to a screeching halt in 2005, after a hack revealed a hidden mini-game in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; a sexually explicit mini-game that was never meant to be included in the final game, but instead of removing the source they simply hid its functionality. This, of course, wasn't an easter egg, but the rabid media hype machine squarely blamed Rockstar and accused them of trying to surreptitiously squeeze sexually explicit content past the censors and into the fragile young mind of our nation's youthes. Bunkum it was, of course, but it had somewhat of a backlash in the industry. Suddenly publishers became very paranoid and demanded to see all source code, just to make sure some bored programmer didn't leave explicit comments in the code or some artist left some rude imagery lying about. And this was probably with good cause - in those days this was fairly common practice. Players never get to see the code comments, for example, but programmers communicate best in four letter words.
And so the whole easter egg thing became something of the past, mostly. They are still around, of course, but seemingly less prominently so. I myself have secretly held up the tradition and tried to leave a "mark" in many games I worked on. My method of virtual tagging was something much more innocent though, innocent enough even that when I told colleagues, my boss even, they were totally fine with it - or rather they just chalked it up to more foreign proclivities they'd never understand.
My tag was the Hardy–Ramanujan number, "1729". It's a little mathematical oddity and one that others too, in other media, have referenced just for fun. Futurama's Bender character, for example, was the 1729th unit built by his assembly robot. The whole series, in fact, references the number several times. For me it was a tip of the hat to mathematics, as well as a less arrogant and self-obsessed way of leaving a personal signature in my work.
Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility (Wii) left, and Harvest Moon: Animal Parade (Wii) right
In both Harvest Moon titles for the Nintendo Wii on which I worked in the past, for example, did I plant the number, though you'd need a good eye to see them. In The Tree of Tranquility the boat that brings you to the island, which I modeled and textured, has it stamped on its side (only really visible in the opening sequence) and in Animal Parade the second floor in the Photography shop has toy blocks arranged to spell out 1729. Katekyo Hitman Reborn! Dream Hyper Battle!, for the Wii and Playstation 2 has the number as graffiti under an overpass in one of the arenas I modeled and textured. One of our upcoming games too features the number, though you need a pretty sharp eye to catch it.
Katekyo Hitman Reborn! Dream Hyper Battle! (Wii/PS2) left, Flock It! (iPhone/iPod Touch) right
In Flock It! we hid two easter eggs, though nothing to do with "1729", and to encourage people to look for them we made unlocking them worthy of a special medal in the achievements menu. Check the menu and see the "?????" behind two of the awards? Those are the easter eggs. We personally think they're pretty funny and just about accessible enough that you might stumble across them by accident as you play the game.
Did you find the two hidden awards in Flock It?
Comment in our forums (3 replies)...
The fun suddenly came to a screeching halt in 2005, after a hack revealed a hidden mini-game in Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas; a sexually explicit mini-game that was never meant to be included in the final game, but instead of removing the source they simply hid its functionality. This, of course, wasn't an easter egg, but the rabid media hype machine squarely blamed Rockstar and accused them of trying to surreptitiously squeeze sexually explicit content past the censors and into the fragile young mind of our nation's youthes. Bunkum it was, of course, but it had somewhat of a backlash in the industry. Suddenly publishers became very paranoid and demanded to see all source code, just to make sure some bored programmer didn't leave explicit comments in the code or some artist left some rude imagery lying about. And this was probably with good cause - in those days this was fairly common practice. Players never get to see the code comments, for example, but programmers communicate best in four letter words.
And so the whole easter egg thing became something of the past, mostly. They are still around, of course, but seemingly less prominently so. I myself have secretly held up the tradition and tried to leave a "mark" in many games I worked on. My method of virtual tagging was something much more innocent though, innocent enough even that when I told colleagues, my boss even, they were totally fine with it - or rather they just chalked it up to more foreign proclivities they'd never understand.
My tag was the Hardy–Ramanujan number, "1729". It's a little mathematical oddity and one that others too, in other media, have referenced just for fun. Futurama's Bender character, for example, was the 1729th unit built by his assembly robot. The whole series, in fact, references the number several times. For me it was a tip of the hat to mathematics, as well as a less arrogant and self-obsessed way of leaving a personal signature in my work.
Harvest Moon: Tree of Tranquility (Wii) left, and Harvest Moon: Animal Parade (Wii) right
In both Harvest Moon titles for the Nintendo Wii on which I worked in the past, for example, did I plant the number, though you'd need a good eye to see them. In The Tree of Tranquility the boat that brings you to the island, which I modeled and textured, has it stamped on its side (only really visible in the opening sequence) and in Animal Parade the second floor in the Photography shop has toy blocks arranged to spell out 1729. Katekyo Hitman Reborn! Dream Hyper Battle!, for the Wii and Playstation 2 has the number as graffiti under an overpass in one of the arenas I modeled and textured. One of our upcoming games too features the number, though you need a pretty sharp eye to catch it.
Katekyo Hitman Reborn! Dream Hyper Battle! (Wii/PS2) left, Flock It! (iPhone/iPod Touch) right
In Flock It! we hid two easter eggs, though nothing to do with "1729", and to encourage people to look for them we made unlocking them worthy of a special medal in the achievements menu. Check the menu and see the "?????" behind two of the awards? Those are the easter eggs. We personally think they're pretty funny and just about accessible enough that you might stumble across them by accident as you play the game.
Did you find the two hidden awards in Flock It?
Comment in our forums (3 replies)...
May
Managing expectations25
I dare you to find a game developer who doesn't think they can do it better. The "it", of course, meaning "everything", from coding, art, game design, management. If game developers are to be believed, fantastic games can be made by them alone, if only they got a chance and didn't have to deal with the "idiots". Let's face it, this is more or less why we went indie. A healthy dose of arrogance and self-belief is essential to making that huge step from being an employee with a monthly paycheck to becoming a risky, financially insecure start-up. However self-obsessed we were (and are), we were luckily also fairly realistic. It wasn't going to be easy, we knew. And though we agree on the major issues, we have disagreements regularly which, I'd like to think, keep us grounded and on track. Too much back-slapping can lead to a blindness in purpose.
Though we have all taken lead positions in several forms over our careers, management is something that has been fairly new to us, and as such has been somewhat of a weak point that manifests itself in different ways. In fact, the funny Youtube links we used to share with each other have slowly been replaced by links to interesting articles on management. The more we read about management, the more it's obvious it's not something that can be learned, but something that has to be ingrained, slowly, over time and with experience, and is intensely personal. For every nugget of wisdom, as we see it, that we read concerning management there are many more that preach management fundamentals that we either wholly disagree with or simply wouldn't work for us or our company strategy.
One aspect of our business that good management would have helped us with is that of focus. I'm talking personal focus here, not business, which I believe we are all pretty much agreed on. No, personal focus is an issue that we are still trying to tackle.
A major failing I perceive in our business is that we are just too bally keen. We have a deep passionate love for games and ideas coming out of the wazoo, wherever that is located. It's very hard not to get distracted by better ideas, or to avoid that last crunch period of finishing a game because we just love to work on this latest, greatest idea. Though Score Studio in itself isn't a vanity project, a lot of our prototypes could be seen as such. The other day, for example, I couldn't face a fifth straight day of slog, so I took a personal day and spent it designing and creating all the art for a simple little game, just because I could. Obviously this time would have been better spent finishing off another project, but being your own boss it's easy to come up with excuses like "well, I'm inspired" or "I wouldn't be as productive had I forced myself to work on that other stuff". Having a scary manager who holds your paycheck ransom can be useful to force the fleeting, playful mind of a developer back on track.
Another issue is that we are all simply wearing too many hats. So far we have more or less dealt with managing ourselves, occasionally each other. It can work very well. However, when certain things need to be done but one of us is distracted by important but non-development tasks, it can be an issue. Though we've often drawn up lists of how we would expand in the future, what kind of people we'd need to progress further, we often overlook management and business people because, well, we're developers; we tend to think only about development. Having someone to deal with (read: stress about) finances, contracts, paperwork and all that malarkey would mean one or two thirds of our company wouldn't be distracted so much.
Our current dynamic of being a three-pronged Hydra, where we all have equal say and decision power, works great. Yes, it is distracting, but it's a great dynamic that works well for us. Assigning one of us to be the overall boss or manager won't work. We'd need to hire an outsider to do that job for us at some point. But we have benefited greatly from taking on contract work alongside our own projects. Instead of having a boss, we have a client, who acts as boss. This has meant we are necessarily more focused. Keeping a client happy is as good a drive as having a scary boss look over your shoulder constantly. On top of that it has helped us reevaluate our toolchain and work methods. What has worked for us in our closed eco-system needed some tinkering with when dealing with clients, which has been a great eye opener and motivator.
Though initially we might also have had problems with motivating ourselves, always a big issue when you first start to work from home, that issue has now been reversed. We now have to force ourselves to take it easy sometimes. I personally find it hard not to get drawn into work on weekends, and have made efforts to stay as far away from my PC as possible on days I am supposed to rest. As Paul often likes to point out "it's not work if you're having fun!" which is true, but try telling that to your body. We've all seen the dangers of overwork and it's something we need to avoid for ourselves, no matter how much fun we think we're having.
Between doing contract work, pushing ourselves to finish off our own products and an increasing understanding of the importance of managing ourselves, and our expectations, this first year of Score Studios (our anniversary is coming up soon) has been an immense learning experience. We are more focused now, better organised and increasingly better managed, but especially that latter point is something that needs addressing constantly and hopefully, in the future, by a manager, so we can do our developing thing, and occasionally be told to just shut up and work.
Comment in our forums (2 replies)...
Though we have all taken lead positions in several forms over our careers, management is something that has been fairly new to us, and as such has been somewhat of a weak point that manifests itself in different ways. In fact, the funny Youtube links we used to share with each other have slowly been replaced by links to interesting articles on management. The more we read about management, the more it's obvious it's not something that can be learned, but something that has to be ingrained, slowly, over time and with experience, and is intensely personal. For every nugget of wisdom, as we see it, that we read concerning management there are many more that preach management fundamentals that we either wholly disagree with or simply wouldn't work for us or our company strategy.
One aspect of our business that good management would have helped us with is that of focus. I'm talking personal focus here, not business, which I believe we are all pretty much agreed on. No, personal focus is an issue that we are still trying to tackle.
A major failing I perceive in our business is that we are just too bally keen. We have a deep passionate love for games and ideas coming out of the wazoo, wherever that is located. It's very hard not to get distracted by better ideas, or to avoid that last crunch period of finishing a game because we just love to work on this latest, greatest idea. Though Score Studio in itself isn't a vanity project, a lot of our prototypes could be seen as such. The other day, for example, I couldn't face a fifth straight day of slog, so I took a personal day and spent it designing and creating all the art for a simple little game, just because I could. Obviously this time would have been better spent finishing off another project, but being your own boss it's easy to come up with excuses like "well, I'm inspired" or "I wouldn't be as productive had I forced myself to work on that other stuff". Having a scary manager who holds your paycheck ransom can be useful to force the fleeting, playful mind of a developer back on track.
Another issue is that we are all simply wearing too many hats. So far we have more or less dealt with managing ourselves, occasionally each other. It can work very well. However, when certain things need to be done but one of us is distracted by important but non-development tasks, it can be an issue. Though we've often drawn up lists of how we would expand in the future, what kind of people we'd need to progress further, we often overlook management and business people because, well, we're developers; we tend to think only about development. Having someone to deal with (read: stress about) finances, contracts, paperwork and all that malarkey would mean one or two thirds of our company wouldn't be distracted so much.
Our current dynamic of being a three-pronged Hydra, where we all have equal say and decision power, works great. Yes, it is distracting, but it's a great dynamic that works well for us. Assigning one of us to be the overall boss or manager won't work. We'd need to hire an outsider to do that job for us at some point. But we have benefited greatly from taking on contract work alongside our own projects. Instead of having a boss, we have a client, who acts as boss. This has meant we are necessarily more focused. Keeping a client happy is as good a drive as having a scary boss look over your shoulder constantly. On top of that it has helped us reevaluate our toolchain and work methods. What has worked for us in our closed eco-system needed some tinkering with when dealing with clients, which has been a great eye opener and motivator.
Though initially we might also have had problems with motivating ourselves, always a big issue when you first start to work from home, that issue has now been reversed. We now have to force ourselves to take it easy sometimes. I personally find it hard not to get drawn into work on weekends, and have made efforts to stay as far away from my PC as possible on days I am supposed to rest. As Paul often likes to point out "it's not work if you're having fun!" which is true, but try telling that to your body. We've all seen the dangers of overwork and it's something we need to avoid for ourselves, no matter how much fun we think we're having.
Between doing contract work, pushing ourselves to finish off our own products and an increasing understanding of the importance of managing ourselves, and our expectations, this first year of Score Studios (our anniversary is coming up soon) has been an immense learning experience. We are more focused now, better organised and increasingly better managed, but especially that latter point is something that needs addressing constantly and hopefully, in the future, by a manager, so we can do our developing thing, and occasionally be told to just shut up and work.
Comment in our forums (2 replies)...
May
Games we play: Heavy Rain (PS3)20
posted by James Kay
We are big fans of the Headcase Games blog, especially their often updated retro games reviews. Instead of blatantly ripping off that idea, we thought we'd start blogging about the games we play, so you get an insight into what we enjoy in games ourselves, and what we do with our time when we're not developing our own stuff. Despite having a rather strict, casual-based theoretical direction with our own games, our own tastes are quite eclectic, I think you'll find.
Heavy Rain (PS3)
Paul: I've spent a few nights immersed in a world of child abduction, private dicks and drug addicted FBI agents. The game seems to start slow, and I assumed this was to show you the basic gameplay mechanics, but after a while of blindly following instructions I found the world to be filled with details relating not only to the story and it made me realize that I am not just playing a game where all I have to do is get to the end. It is so much more.
This game really shines when you explore each character's lives, carefully consider all the possibilities, and have to make tough decisions that you would never EVER want to have to make in real life. You are free to go back and replay chapters as you progress but I highly recommend you don't do this on your first run through. Invest in your decisions instead of backtracking whenever you think you made a wrong choice. Don't let your pride as a gamer stop you from lowering the difficulty level. I also recommend going back and seeing some of the other endings, although some of the hardest and most tense moments for me were letting bad things happen to the characters so I could explore other story paths.
James: I have to admit, it took me a while to convince myself I liked this game. The demo and the opening hours of the full game still found me dubious, but before I realised I was sucked in until I finished it. It certainly had some tense moments, even deeply sad ones, that left me a little depressed. And though I am still unconvinced of the plot itself, especially the payoff, and I did feel a little ridiculous sometimes controlling the characters, it is undeniably an amazing game with awesome production values, an astounding achievement that everyone really should try out! Visually it was stunning and this is the closest we've ever seen to that "interactive movie" Holy Grail. If you're not going to play it yourself, then at least try to watch someone else play it; you owe it to yourself to see this game!
Comment in our forums ...
Heavy Rain (PS3)
Paul: I've spent a few nights immersed in a world of child abduction, private dicks and drug addicted FBI agents. The game seems to start slow, and I assumed this was to show you the basic gameplay mechanics, but after a while of blindly following instructions I found the world to be filled with details relating not only to the story and it made me realize that I am not just playing a game where all I have to do is get to the end. It is so much more.
This game really shines when you explore each character's lives, carefully consider all the possibilities, and have to make tough decisions that you would never EVER want to have to make in real life. You are free to go back and replay chapters as you progress but I highly recommend you don't do this on your first run through. Invest in your decisions instead of backtracking whenever you think you made a wrong choice. Don't let your pride as a gamer stop you from lowering the difficulty level. I also recommend going back and seeing some of the other endings, although some of the hardest and most tense moments for me were letting bad things happen to the characters so I could explore other story paths.
James: I have to admit, it took me a while to convince myself I liked this game. The demo and the opening hours of the full game still found me dubious, but before I realised I was sucked in until I finished it. It certainly had some tense moments, even deeply sad ones, that left me a little depressed. And though I am still unconvinced of the plot itself, especially the payoff, and I did feel a little ridiculous sometimes controlling the characters, it is undeniably an amazing game with awesome production values, an astounding achievement that everyone really should try out! Visually it was stunning and this is the closest we've ever seen to that "interactive movie" Holy Grail. If you're not going to play it yourself, then at least try to watch someone else play it; you owe it to yourself to see this game!
Comment in our forums ...
May
Time issues16
posted by James Kay
You may have noticed the lack of activity on our newsfeed and blog recently. We all knew starting our own company would be difficult and time consuming, but it always keeps surprising us how few hours there really are in a day!
Work progresses apace, though. Our next game is coming along nicely, it being almost art-complete. We still have a ways to go on it though, but with just a single artist (myself) working on it, and parts of the game being a little art intensive, it took longer than we would have liked. On top of the game itself, I've also already been working on some marketing materials surrounding its launch, when we finally get to release it. Making your own games is a rewarding experience, but it can be hard to put a period to a project when we always feel something could be better if we only just...
We've also expanded our contract work, currently working on some fun and exciting projects with other people. We obviously can't say anything about these yet, but will do once they are released. However much fun it would be to spend all the time on our own thing, just doing our own little vanity projects, doing contract work can be a rewarding experience too and made us re-evaluate parts of our toolchain that we would otherwise have neglected.
Aside from all the hard work, we've also committed to some serious relaxing! Working isn't really working if you're having fun, but it can still be draining. So we have all decided to try a little harder to enjoy our weekends. Spring has finally sprung in Tokyo and the weather is, mostly, gorgeous. Once the summer hits it will be too hot and humid to do anything but lock ourselves indoors with the air conditioner on, so until that time we're making the best of it. From lazing about in one of Tokyo's parks, having picnics, or just being lazy at home catching up on television and films we have missed, taking time to relax is very important and makes us work so much better during the week. On top of that, we had Golden Week last week; a series of national holiday days in Japan, often stretched out to fill an entire week. Traditionally Japanese people will go to their old home towns and visit their relatives in these times, leaving Tokyo relatively quiet. Not much work gets done at this time.
So between us working hard on our next release, doing contract work and relaxing, we've still found time for other little excursions, from attending events to writing for a new magazine aimed at developers, of which we'll write more in the future, and following Josh McKible's Nanibird project, which recently was displayed in Breda, the Netherlands, and featured a Score Studios designed "GameBird" (as mentioned here on Kotaku last weekend). We've let our news and blog pages suffer a bit, but we'll try harder to keep you up to date on what's going on. If only we could fit more hours in a day...
Comment in our forums ...
Work progresses apace, though. Our next game is coming along nicely, it being almost art-complete. We still have a ways to go on it though, but with just a single artist (myself) working on it, and parts of the game being a little art intensive, it took longer than we would have liked. On top of the game itself, I've also already been working on some marketing materials surrounding its launch, when we finally get to release it. Making your own games is a rewarding experience, but it can be hard to put a period to a project when we always feel something could be better if we only just...
We've also expanded our contract work, currently working on some fun and exciting projects with other people. We obviously can't say anything about these yet, but will do once they are released. However much fun it would be to spend all the time on our own thing, just doing our own little vanity projects, doing contract work can be a rewarding experience too and made us re-evaluate parts of our toolchain that we would otherwise have neglected.
Aside from all the hard work, we've also committed to some serious relaxing! Working isn't really working if you're having fun, but it can still be draining. So we have all decided to try a little harder to enjoy our weekends. Spring has finally sprung in Tokyo and the weather is, mostly, gorgeous. Once the summer hits it will be too hot and humid to do anything but lock ourselves indoors with the air conditioner on, so until that time we're making the best of it. From lazing about in one of Tokyo's parks, having picnics, or just being lazy at home catching up on television and films we have missed, taking time to relax is very important and makes us work so much better during the week. On top of that, we had Golden Week last week; a series of national holiday days in Japan, often stretched out to fill an entire week. Traditionally Japanese people will go to their old home towns and visit their relatives in these times, leaving Tokyo relatively quiet. Not much work gets done at this time.
So between us working hard on our next release, doing contract work and relaxing, we've still found time for other little excursions, from attending events to writing for a new magazine aimed at developers, of which we'll write more in the future, and following Josh McKible's Nanibird project, which recently was displayed in Breda, the Netherlands, and featured a Score Studios designed "GameBird" (as mentioned here on Kotaku last weekend). We've let our news and blog pages suffer a bit, but we'll try harder to keep you up to date on what's going on. If only we could fit more hours in a day...
Comment in our forums ...
Apr
It's all about communicashun!11
posted by James Kay
Video games are all about communication, moreso the creation of them. It being such a collaborative process, each single individual relying heavily on his or her colleagues, it was quite a switch to move from a big, open-plan office environment to a tiny, home-office based working attitude. Paul, Dimitrios and I all work from our own respective homes most of the time so our biggest challenge was to find a good way of communicating with each other.
Instead of pushing back your chair and asking the persons you work with for input, fixes, problems and whatnot, we have only our digital channels. To be honest, it took a while to get used to and we certainly had our teething problems, but we finally settled on a semi-smooth flow of communication using several freely available tools.
Google Wave
For the longest time Paul hosted a wiki in which we collated information, design ideas and the like. But when we first got the opportunity to get a Google Wave account we jumped at it. Sure, it has its problems, but having previously experimented with a number of wikis to get a slowly accumulating dialogue going on certain issues we found the way Google Wave works fit perfectly with what we needed. When we have design or game ideas we add them to a wave. We all contribute, edit, give feedback and it's clear, easy to read and easily edited. Important emails and, well, blog posts like these too are created in waves, so we can all read them, add our comments and unanimously agree to a final draft before emailing or posting them. It works incredibly well for us, despite some small interface niggles with the waves themselves.
We still have a wiki in which we collect important information, usually business related, but Google Wave is functioning pretty well as our virtual whiteboard.
Skype
We also experimented with several different chat clients before finally settling on Skype. Google Chat was our first try, but there were too many little niggles. When Dimitrios joined, who works exclusively on Macintosh, as opposed to us two on PCs, and group chats were required, eventually Skype took over. It was especially the group chat, having all three of us in the same chat session, that was the deciding factor.
These days I constantly have the Score Studios group chat window open on my second monitor as I work and our chats cover everything from important work-related issues, for me rather boring code-related chat between Paul and Dimitrios to the usual silly buggery of funny or disturbing links we feel compelled to share with each other. It also has a very easy drag and drop file share function which we use to quickly show each other screenshots for quick feedback. For bigger files, though, we have a VPN set up, where we also collect all our project data. We have not yet had need for sharing our entire screens with each other, something I'm informed Skype does too, but it's good to know the function is there for when we will, inevitably, need it.
It really fulfils the function of the "colleague at the next desk" for discussions and distractions, especially for Paul and Dimitrios who have to work closely together on our technology, and often have voice-chat sessions, thankfully excluding myself.
Email
Though a certain type of people would like to evangelise the imminent death of email, we still use it, a lot! Not merely in communication with outside businesses, but also as reminders to ourselves or each other, keeping ourselves updated on important changes, which might get lost in our 1,000 page Skype chat window. Email is not going to go anywhere soon, certainly not at the rate we're using it!
Meat-space
Sometimes, though, having face to face meetings is better than anything. To this end we try as often as we can to meet up. Sometimes Paul and Dimitrios have coding sessions together, sometimes we meet up at a cheap family restaurant - the unlimited drink bar option is good for hours of refreshments for only a few hundred yen - and we discuss business matters, design ideas, all over a notepad and pencil. Talking is faster than typing, and it's also easier to recognise sarcasm or leg-pullery which can cause, and has occasionally caused problems in Skype when one or more of us foolishly started work before consuming enough morning coffee.
Communication is an integral part to any functioning team. There are plenty of free and paid applications out there to help you with this, and some for better for your needs than others. It took us a while to get into the flow and figure out which worked best for us overall, but now we have constantly open lines of communication, it really isn't that much different to working in an office, with the added bonus that I don't have to look at Paul's mug or have to smell Dimitrios' Pot Noodle at lunchtime.
Comment in our forums ...
Tokyo 2.0 is a community for web-related professionals and amateurs in Japan and regularly organises events and meet-ups. Last night they held an Appstar event, a competition where four iPhone developers presented to a panel of judges for a prize and popular vote.
The event was held in Superdeluxe, an event space near Roppongi Hills. I've been to many engagements there, some filled beyond capacity, but last night was a decent turnout, which meant it was filled but not crowded to the point of being no fun.
The judges were Danny Choo, the Tokyo stormtrooper, Nobuyuki Hayashi, a tech journalist, Hareo Shiiya, the CEO of Appliya, one of the bigger app companies in Japan, and Hiroko Tabuchi, writer for the New York Times. The host of the event was CEO of Tunewear and Focalpoint Hideki Francis Onda who presented in both English and Japanese to a very mixed and international crowd.
With a short slideshow projected on the three back walls and a small camera set-up to view iPhones attached to a mount, four developers had to give a short presentation about their product. Last night the apps in question were:
BalloonMaker (paid, free), an app to add speech balloons to photos from your library or snapped with your iPhone camera. The full version would then allow you to send these to friends, Facebook, Twitpic, etc.
iPoseable (free): a tech demo showing off poseable 3D figures in a 3D environment.
TwitCasting (free): a variation on uStream that worked with lower bandwidths.
Huff Puff Volley (paid, free): a cutesy badminton game in which animal characters could be moved with the motion sensor and a shuttlecock had to be volleyed by either tapping the screen or blowing on the microphone.
I thought all presenters did a pretty good job of showing their products, often with well-produced videos and trailers. BalloonMaker certainly had its charm, showing the developer's own kids in photos with speech balloons saying cute things. iPoseable showed off some impressive 3D tech, but as a product it still needed to find its footing, something the developer, the only foreigner of the night, was probably aware of, and certainly something the panel of judges were keen to ask about. Twitcasting gave a live demo of the crowd being broadcast live and viewed on a second iPhone he was trying to juggle on stage. Huff Puff Volley too gave a live bluetooth battle between the presenter and an accomplice in the crowd and, especially due to its cutesy graphics, was rather delightful.
The overall winner of the night was Twitcasting, winning the judges' special prize as well as the audience award, something which was decided decidedly un-2.0-like by putting pieces of plastic in bottles for voting. It was the app I voted for myself, bringing exciting technology, the ability to broadcast decent video live over low bandwidth and dodgy connectivity, in an admittedly not new but exciting area of social web development, video broadcasting via Twitter and iPhones.
Special mention and a prize were given to Huff Puff Volley for its ease of play and cute design. In my eyes the game was the most polished of the evening and having a soft spot for cutesy characters myself I am glad it got special attention.
Events like these are numerous, interested parties could find an event every week to tackle one or more of his own interests. Tokyo2.0 certainly has plenty of dates, though the Appstar competition seems to be something new. I think it's a nice way of giving extra attention to new developers in this rough market, and for non-participants it's a great way to get introduced to new apps and developers.
Comment in our forums ...
Instead of pushing back your chair and asking the persons you work with for input, fixes, problems and whatnot, we have only our digital channels. To be honest, it took a while to get used to and we certainly had our teething problems, but we finally settled on a semi-smooth flow of communication using several freely available tools.
Google Wave
For the longest time Paul hosted a wiki in which we collated information, design ideas and the like. But when we first got the opportunity to get a Google Wave account we jumped at it. Sure, it has its problems, but having previously experimented with a number of wikis to get a slowly accumulating dialogue going on certain issues we found the way Google Wave works fit perfectly with what we needed. When we have design or game ideas we add them to a wave. We all contribute, edit, give feedback and it's clear, easy to read and easily edited. Important emails and, well, blog posts like these too are created in waves, so we can all read them, add our comments and unanimously agree to a final draft before emailing or posting them. It works incredibly well for us, despite some small interface niggles with the waves themselves.
We still have a wiki in which we collect important information, usually business related, but Google Wave is functioning pretty well as our virtual whiteboard.
Skype
We also experimented with several different chat clients before finally settling on Skype. Google Chat was our first try, but there were too many little niggles. When Dimitrios joined, who works exclusively on Macintosh, as opposed to us two on PCs, and group chats were required, eventually Skype took over. It was especially the group chat, having all three of us in the same chat session, that was the deciding factor.
These days I constantly have the Score Studios group chat window open on my second monitor as I work and our chats cover everything from important work-related issues, for me rather boring code-related chat between Paul and Dimitrios to the usual silly buggery of funny or disturbing links we feel compelled to share with each other. It also has a very easy drag and drop file share function which we use to quickly show each other screenshots for quick feedback. For bigger files, though, we have a VPN set up, where we also collect all our project data. We have not yet had need for sharing our entire screens with each other, something I'm informed Skype does too, but it's good to know the function is there for when we will, inevitably, need it.
It really fulfils the function of the "colleague at the next desk" for discussions and distractions, especially for Paul and Dimitrios who have to work closely together on our technology, and often have voice-chat sessions, thankfully excluding myself.
Though a certain type of people would like to evangelise the imminent death of email, we still use it, a lot! Not merely in communication with outside businesses, but also as reminders to ourselves or each other, keeping ourselves updated on important changes, which might get lost in our 1,000 page Skype chat window. Email is not going to go anywhere soon, certainly not at the rate we're using it!
Meat-space
Sometimes, though, having face to face meetings is better than anything. To this end we try as often as we can to meet up. Sometimes Paul and Dimitrios have coding sessions together, sometimes we meet up at a cheap family restaurant - the unlimited drink bar option is good for hours of refreshments for only a few hundred yen - and we discuss business matters, design ideas, all over a notepad and pencil. Talking is faster than typing, and it's also easier to recognise sarcasm or leg-pullery which can cause, and has occasionally caused problems in Skype when one or more of us foolishly started work before consuming enough morning coffee.
Communication is an integral part to any functioning team. There are plenty of free and paid applications out there to help you with this, and some for better for your needs than others. It took us a while to get into the flow and figure out which worked best for us overall, but now we have constantly open lines of communication, it really isn't that much different to working in an office, with the added bonus that I don't have to look at Paul's mug or have to smell Dimitrios' Pot Noodle at lunchtime.
Comment in our forums ...
Mar
Appstar, a Tokyo 2.0 Event30
posted by James Kay
Tokyo 2.0 is a community for web-related professionals and amateurs in Japan and regularly organises events and meet-ups. Last night they held an Appstar event, a competition where four iPhone developers presented to a panel of judges for a prize and popular vote.
The event was held in Superdeluxe, an event space near Roppongi Hills. I've been to many engagements there, some filled beyond capacity, but last night was a decent turnout, which meant it was filled but not crowded to the point of being no fun.
The judges were Danny Choo, the Tokyo stormtrooper, Nobuyuki Hayashi, a tech journalist, Hareo Shiiya, the CEO of Appliya, one of the bigger app companies in Japan, and Hiroko Tabuchi, writer for the New York Times. The host of the event was CEO of Tunewear and Focalpoint Hideki Francis Onda who presented in both English and Japanese to a very mixed and international crowd.
With a short slideshow projected on the three back walls and a small camera set-up to view iPhones attached to a mount, four developers had to give a short presentation about their product. Last night the apps in question were:
BalloonMaker (paid, free), an app to add speech balloons to photos from your library or snapped with your iPhone camera. The full version would then allow you to send these to friends, Facebook, Twitpic, etc.
iPoseable (free): a tech demo showing off poseable 3D figures in a 3D environment.
TwitCasting (free): a variation on uStream that worked with lower bandwidths.
Huff Puff Volley (paid, free): a cutesy badminton game in which animal characters could be moved with the motion sensor and a shuttlecock had to be volleyed by either tapping the screen or blowing on the microphone.
I thought all presenters did a pretty good job of showing their products, often with well-produced videos and trailers. BalloonMaker certainly had its charm, showing the developer's own kids in photos with speech balloons saying cute things. iPoseable showed off some impressive 3D tech, but as a product it still needed to find its footing, something the developer, the only foreigner of the night, was probably aware of, and certainly something the panel of judges were keen to ask about. Twitcasting gave a live demo of the crowd being broadcast live and viewed on a second iPhone he was trying to juggle on stage. Huff Puff Volley too gave a live bluetooth battle between the presenter and an accomplice in the crowd and, especially due to its cutesy graphics, was rather delightful.
The overall winner of the night was Twitcasting, winning the judges' special prize as well as the audience award, something which was decided decidedly un-2.0-like by putting pieces of plastic in bottles for voting. It was the app I voted for myself, bringing exciting technology, the ability to broadcast decent video live over low bandwidth and dodgy connectivity, in an admittedly not new but exciting area of social web development, video broadcasting via Twitter and iPhones.
Special mention and a prize were given to Huff Puff Volley for its ease of play and cute design. In my eyes the game was the most polished of the evening and having a soft spot for cutesy characters myself I am glad it got special attention.
Events like these are numerous, interested parties could find an event every week to tackle one or more of his own interests. Tokyo2.0 certainly has plenty of dates, though the Appstar competition seems to be something new. I think it's a nice way of giving extra attention to new developers in this rough market, and for non-participants it's a great way to get introduced to new apps and developers.
Comment in our forums ...
Mar
Getting a job in Japanese Video Game Development1
posted by James Kay
Score Studios is not actually hiring at the moment, but we know there are a lot of people who dream of working in Japan on Japanese video games, so we thought we'd look at our collective experiences over here and write a little post on what that all entails.
It's not a pipe dream!
Many people seem to think that working in Japan as anything other than an English teacher is some kind of impossible dream. The language and cultural barriers do seem overwhelming at first, and if you don't have any experience of proven skills it can be rather difficult, but with a little effort and study it is far from impossible. In fact, it seems to be more common; more and more foreigners are working at Japanese development studios these days than just a few years ago. You'll have to work at it, but if it's something you really want to do there is no reason you won't be able to achieve this.
You will need to learn Japanese!
Not only will life be a lot easier, you will vastly increase your employment opportunities and day to day work life if you speak Japanese. Some studios will make concessions for people without Japanese abilities, but only if they bring something to the table they need, like experience and skills. That said, communication within the company will be mostly Japanese, with very few of your future colleagues being able to speak English at all. Certain jobs let you get away with less Japanese ability than others; a video game artist, for example, requires less Japanese ability than, say, a designer or planner, who has to communicate with the entire team on many levels.
The good news is, Japanese isn't that hard to learn. You'll need to learn new vocabulary and, of course, the dreaded kanji, but once you're in Japan and you take the effort to study you'll find your skills improve rather rapidly. It takes a lifetime, though, so the sooner you start the better.
You will require a proper visa!
Though there are always loopholes, especially for those wishing to pay for good immigration lawyers, getting a working visa has minimum requirements. These change over time, so do check the proper authorities before applying, but generally a degree is required, a sponsor and a clean record. Japanese companies are slowly getting accustomed to hiring foreigners and so also the paperwork that comes with that. Your company will have to sponsor you, apply for certain papers, etc. To this day you will still see job adverts stating the possession of a proper visa as a requirement, meaning that they don't want to have to go through the hassle of getting one for you. A holiday visa doesn't allow you to work, and a student visa only allows for part-time work up to 20 hours a week.
You will work hard!
The industry in Japan, as it is everywhere, changes over time, but one thing that remains is a propensity for unpaid overtime, and lots of it. If you want to come to Japan to soak up its history and travel around, you may find a career in video game development is a little too draining and time consuming for your plans. It certainly isn't a "gateway" job to get you here so you can learn about Japan and its language, there are much better jobs for that that give you the time and opportunity.
Salaries are lower!
Lower than in the West, that is, for similar jobs at similar levels of employment. It's not a terrible paying job, though, you can certainly have a comfortable life on the salary of an experienced game developer, especially if you negotiate hard before joining a company, but if you think you'll be rich making video games in Japan, well, you won't be.
It can be worth it!
Despite it being hard work with some barriers to entry, it can be a worthwhile pursuit. Moving to a different country broadens your horizons and learning a new language is as fun as it can be challenging, but it is certainly an experience. Because of the study and work required before making a move such as this I highly recommend visiting Japan a few times first, on holiday, and straying off the beaten track. Or try a homestay or study here for a few months. If you're serious about it, though, start now! Start learning the language, work on getting some work experience at home first and study up on Japan a bit. And most of all: good luck!
In a future post we will cover some more basic elements, like the difficulties of apartment hunting, opening a bank account, getting a visa or alternative jobs to get you to Japan, like the JET programme. If you have any specific questions about working in Japan you'd like to see covered, please feel free to contact us at info@score-studios.jp and we might include it in a future blog post.
Comment in our forums ...
It's not a pipe dream!
Many people seem to think that working in Japan as anything other than an English teacher is some kind of impossible dream. The language and cultural barriers do seem overwhelming at first, and if you don't have any experience of proven skills it can be rather difficult, but with a little effort and study it is far from impossible. In fact, it seems to be more common; more and more foreigners are working at Japanese development studios these days than just a few years ago. You'll have to work at it, but if it's something you really want to do there is no reason you won't be able to achieve this.
You will need to learn Japanese!
Not only will life be a lot easier, you will vastly increase your employment opportunities and day to day work life if you speak Japanese. Some studios will make concessions for people without Japanese abilities, but only if they bring something to the table they need, like experience and skills. That said, communication within the company will be mostly Japanese, with very few of your future colleagues being able to speak English at all. Certain jobs let you get away with less Japanese ability than others; a video game artist, for example, requires less Japanese ability than, say, a designer or planner, who has to communicate with the entire team on many levels.
The good news is, Japanese isn't that hard to learn. You'll need to learn new vocabulary and, of course, the dreaded kanji, but once you're in Japan and you take the effort to study you'll find your skills improve rather rapidly. It takes a lifetime, though, so the sooner you start the better.
You will require a proper visa!
Though there are always loopholes, especially for those wishing to pay for good immigration lawyers, getting a working visa has minimum requirements. These change over time, so do check the proper authorities before applying, but generally a degree is required, a sponsor and a clean record. Japanese companies are slowly getting accustomed to hiring foreigners and so also the paperwork that comes with that. Your company will have to sponsor you, apply for certain papers, etc. To this day you will still see job adverts stating the possession of a proper visa as a requirement, meaning that they don't want to have to go through the hassle of getting one for you. A holiday visa doesn't allow you to work, and a student visa only allows for part-time work up to 20 hours a week.
You will work hard!
The industry in Japan, as it is everywhere, changes over time, but one thing that remains is a propensity for unpaid overtime, and lots of it. If you want to come to Japan to soak up its history and travel around, you may find a career in video game development is a little too draining and time consuming for your plans. It certainly isn't a "gateway" job to get you here so you can learn about Japan and its language, there are much better jobs for that that give you the time and opportunity.
Salaries are lower!
Lower than in the West, that is, for similar jobs at similar levels of employment. It's not a terrible paying job, though, you can certainly have a comfortable life on the salary of an experienced game developer, especially if you negotiate hard before joining a company, but if you think you'll be rich making video games in Japan, well, you won't be.
It can be worth it!
Despite it being hard work with some barriers to entry, it can be a worthwhile pursuit. Moving to a different country broadens your horizons and learning a new language is as fun as it can be challenging, but it is certainly an experience. Because of the study and work required before making a move such as this I highly recommend visiting Japan a few times first, on holiday, and straying off the beaten track. Or try a homestay or study here for a few months. If you're serious about it, though, start now! Start learning the language, work on getting some work experience at home first and study up on Japan a bit. And most of all: good luck!
In a future post we will cover some more basic elements, like the difficulties of apartment hunting, opening a bank account, getting a visa or alternative jobs to get you to Japan, like the JET programme. If you have any specific questions about working in Japan you'd like to see covered, please feel free to contact us at info@score-studios.jp and we might include it in a future blog post.
Comment in our forums ...
Feb
How I got to be a video game developer21
posted by James Kay
Working in video games seems to be a very popular dream for many. It was a dream for me too, this blog post covers my history with the medium and how I finally ended up making video games for a living. It's very easy to wax lyrical with nostalgia about the early days of video games, so that is exactly what I'll be doing here in this post.
Growing up I had the great fortune of being the offspring to a technophile father. Even to this day my father has the latest and coolest gadgets, even before I do, which is disgraceful, of course - a man of his age should be frightened of new things, not embrace them. But in the end it served a useful purpose in my upbringing as I was exposed to computers from a very early age.
The first piece of hardware I remember him buying for the home was the Texas Instruments 99/4A home computer. Of course, we had little electronic gadgets before then, like a talking robot calculator and the occasional LED handheld game, but this was the first computer I got my mitts on. We had books, of course, with pages of code, which I would copy over and type out on wasted afternoons, then laboriously save on casette tape. A lot of these were simple little games, but the IT-99/4A also had a cartridge slot, and we had a cartridge game called "Munch Man". Neighbours, defying the natural laws of probability, also owned a TI-99/4A and had the game "Parsec", which I borrowed endlessly. It was an awesome but frighteningly difficult side-scrolling shooter that had me hooked. It took me until last year (!!) to realise that pressing up and down on the keyboard would slow down your craft, which would have made parts of the game a lot easier. Sadly, by the time I really got into making my own little games on the machine, just as my understanding of it grew, the TI-99/4A committed suicide after I switched it on one morning; a little puff of sour-smelling smoke appearing from its fan grill.
During this time my father had brought home what is now laughably considered a "portable PC". It was as big and heavy as a suitcase loaded with bricks. The top came off and had a keyboard on it, revealing a tiny green/black screen and 5,25" floppy disc drives - this is the days when floppy discs were actually floppy! He gleefully showed me "Microsoft Flight Simulator" which had me hooked immediately - well, the dogfighting section of it anyway. But when he brought home his first desktop PC, a pathetic little thing showing, what was at the time an awesome 16 colours on screen at the same time, I got hooked on creating things on it.
One piece of software he had was CAD (not even AutoCAD), a drawing package for making blueprints. It was vector-based, so you could make highly detailed drawings of architecture or machinery. I used it to make little cartoon drawings, zooming in and in to hide little easter eggs here and there. It was my first experience of creating art on a PC and I was loving it.
On this PC and its slightly more powerful successor I learned to code in BASICA. I had a stack of grid-paper notebooks on which I drew my graphics, after which I'd write the code to draw it on-screen. I created simple arcade games, a fully functioning and finished text adventure and more, as well as getting introduced to more and more games to play myself. I think I always had an affinity with games but I distinctly remember playing King's Quest I and being blown away by it. It could be the game that made me realise it was a powerful medium and I wanted to work in it. I was a character on-screen walking around in a fully realised world, it was astounding! Moreso than the many Game & Watch games I had played, this was an awakening for me. At this point I was researching more real "gaming" (as opposed to playing games on a PC). I saved up and bought the original Gameboy, with Tetris packed in, sought out friends with consoles and played at their houses. I was hooked, not just on gaming itself, but the possibilities of the medium. I was sure I wanted to make video games myself.
Around this time the BBS (Bulletin Board System) sprung up, years before the internet is what it is today. I had to dial in a number and as soon as the phone started making noises like an 80-year old smoker coughing up a lung I had to put the received on our modem so the PCs could connect, one to one. Thanks to this system I got access to the greatest shareware games and also heralded my foray into "commercial art". I would use a package called TheDraw to create ASCII and ANSI art, sometimes even animated, for various BBS front-ends in return for higher download ratios. I also made several attempts to hook up with other people, programmers, to make video games, but as is often the case with amateur projects they never came to fruition.
At this point I enrolled in art college. My entry exam, a day long of doing small art projects, didn't go well at all and I was close to being rejected until I dragged the head of the department to the only PC they had at the college, his secretary's, and showed him some of my digital art, at which point my enrolment was guaranteed. This art college was on the cusp of embracing the new media so were highly impressed at my "advanced" skills in this field. Indeed, during the course of my study all old equipment was being replaced by Apple computers and Silicon Graphic workstations. The greatest upshot of which is that my year had the advantages of both the old and the new. We learned splicing 16 millimeter film and linear editing on SVHS sets or developing your own film, as well as Media100 non-linear editing and digital media creation. Then in my final year, just as it seemed likely I was being groomed for a career in video production I was suddenly reminded of my motivations. What did I want to do with my life after college? Make video games, of course, how could I have forgotten that in 4 years of toying with cool equipment?
After graduation I packed up and moved to London, then still a hotbed of video game development. It took me a couple of months and many many resumes and cover letters, but once I got my first interview at a game development company I was in, and hooked. I haven't looked back since, and that was well over a decade ago, approaching a decade and a half now, if I allow myself to feel terribly old for a second.
It is true that a passion for video games is somewhat of a requirement to work in the medium. Work can be hard, sometimes tedious, it certainly isn't the pizza-eating, nerf-circus people seem to think it is. But I am very glad I took the time to get a degree in a vaguely associated field. To this day I find myself using knowledge I learned from my college days, as it gave me a strong foundation of understanding visual media and gave me a wider sense of perspective, allowing me to be influenced by subjects outside the field of video games too. On top of that, being in possession of a degree helped smooth my entry into Japan and getting a visa. I'd have loved to say my years at college also gave me a chance to party, drink and socialise, but possibly presciently, I learned my hard graft attitudes there and spent most of my time there learning to cope with "overtime", little sleep and backbreaking work.
And that, as they say, is that.
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Festival Time
I loves me a good festival. Having done a bit of travelling around Japan I've managed to see quite a few, from local country fair's to big city street dance festivals, to Flower Viewing in front of a castle. There are several major festivals throughout the year but any given weekend there a various festivals happening around Japan. If you're visiting Japan I highly recommend you check out what festivals will be in the area, you never know when they'll be burning kanji on a mountain, or dancing with the dead.
Daruma Festival
Last Thursday my town held a Daruma festival. Closing off a few side streets and packing it with stalls selling various food and and a mountain of Daruma dolls. When you buy a Daruma you're supposed to make a wish/goal, usually written on the back of its head, and paint in one eye, then when you achieve that goal you paint in the other eye. At the end of the year you take it back to the temple you bought it from and burn it, buy another one, repeat. The traditional Darumas are red, meaning 'luck', but there are several other colours which can mean wealth, health, success (work/exams) and even safety while driving. Near the center of the festival was a small temple with a big bonfire of old Darumas that people had bought the previous year.
Being a first time buyer I picked up one of the standard edition red (faster?) ones and took it home. I wrote my goal, "The success of Score Studios", painted in one of the eyes and patted its head for a bit of extra luck. I thought that placing it on my desk facing me would inspire me, but having it stare at me constantly with its one eye is kind of creepy so I moved it to a more out of the way position on a shelf. Im guessing it will stay there until next year when I get to burn it, hopefully with its other eye painted in.
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day in Japan is different to what I expected, girls make chocolate at home and give it to the boy the like. This usually consists of buying special valentines day chocolate at the store, melting it down into a different shape and sprinkling powdered chocolate on top. I'm sure it was harder in the days before department stores...
They also give "obligation" chocolate so as not to make the other boys lonely. This is usually given to co-workers and other such people you see every day. Of course you dont say its obligation chocolate, thats something for you to figure out yourself, especially if you're a foreigner and haven't been told about this custom. When someone finally explains it to you, don't worry, you probably still have some time to intercept the flower delivery guy.
"But what about the girls?!" I hear you cry. Don't worry, they get their fair share of chocolate a month later on what is traditionally known as White day. This is now the boys turn to give back chocolate to all the girls they received it from. This day might also catch you by surprise if nobody tells you, luckily convenience stores are packed with expensive chocolate for us forgetful types.
Comment in our forums ...
Growing up I had the great fortune of being the offspring to a technophile father. Even to this day my father has the latest and coolest gadgets, even before I do, which is disgraceful, of course - a man of his age should be frightened of new things, not embrace them. But in the end it served a useful purpose in my upbringing as I was exposed to computers from a very early age.
The first piece of hardware I remember him buying for the home was the Texas Instruments 99/4A home computer. Of course, we had little electronic gadgets before then, like a talking robot calculator and the occasional LED handheld game, but this was the first computer I got my mitts on. We had books, of course, with pages of code, which I would copy over and type out on wasted afternoons, then laboriously save on casette tape. A lot of these were simple little games, but the IT-99/4A also had a cartridge slot, and we had a cartridge game called "Munch Man". Neighbours, defying the natural laws of probability, also owned a TI-99/4A and had the game "Parsec", which I borrowed endlessly. It was an awesome but frighteningly difficult side-scrolling shooter that had me hooked. It took me until last year (!!) to realise that pressing up and down on the keyboard would slow down your craft, which would have made parts of the game a lot easier. Sadly, by the time I really got into making my own little games on the machine, just as my understanding of it grew, the TI-99/4A committed suicide after I switched it on one morning; a little puff of sour-smelling smoke appearing from its fan grill.
During this time my father had brought home what is now laughably considered a "portable PC". It was as big and heavy as a suitcase loaded with bricks. The top came off and had a keyboard on it, revealing a tiny green/black screen and 5,25" floppy disc drives - this is the days when floppy discs were actually floppy! He gleefully showed me "Microsoft Flight Simulator" which had me hooked immediately - well, the dogfighting section of it anyway. But when he brought home his first desktop PC, a pathetic little thing showing, what was at the time an awesome 16 colours on screen at the same time, I got hooked on creating things on it.
One piece of software he had was CAD (not even AutoCAD), a drawing package for making blueprints. It was vector-based, so you could make highly detailed drawings of architecture or machinery. I used it to make little cartoon drawings, zooming in and in to hide little easter eggs here and there. It was my first experience of creating art on a PC and I was loving it.
On this PC and its slightly more powerful successor I learned to code in BASICA. I had a stack of grid-paper notebooks on which I drew my graphics, after which I'd write the code to draw it on-screen. I created simple arcade games, a fully functioning and finished text adventure and more, as well as getting introduced to more and more games to play myself. I think I always had an affinity with games but I distinctly remember playing King's Quest I and being blown away by it. It could be the game that made me realise it was a powerful medium and I wanted to work in it. I was a character on-screen walking around in a fully realised world, it was astounding! Moreso than the many Game & Watch games I had played, this was an awakening for me. At this point I was researching more real "gaming" (as opposed to playing games on a PC). I saved up and bought the original Gameboy, with Tetris packed in, sought out friends with consoles and played at their houses. I was hooked, not just on gaming itself, but the possibilities of the medium. I was sure I wanted to make video games myself.
Around this time the BBS (Bulletin Board System) sprung up, years before the internet is what it is today. I had to dial in a number and as soon as the phone started making noises like an 80-year old smoker coughing up a lung I had to put the received on our modem so the PCs could connect, one to one. Thanks to this system I got access to the greatest shareware games and also heralded my foray into "commercial art". I would use a package called TheDraw to create ASCII and ANSI art, sometimes even animated, for various BBS front-ends in return for higher download ratios. I also made several attempts to hook up with other people, programmers, to make video games, but as is often the case with amateur projects they never came to fruition.
At this point I enrolled in art college. My entry exam, a day long of doing small art projects, didn't go well at all and I was close to being rejected until I dragged the head of the department to the only PC they had at the college, his secretary's, and showed him some of my digital art, at which point my enrolment was guaranteed. This art college was on the cusp of embracing the new media so were highly impressed at my "advanced" skills in this field. Indeed, during the course of my study all old equipment was being replaced by Apple computers and Silicon Graphic workstations. The greatest upshot of which is that my year had the advantages of both the old and the new. We learned splicing 16 millimeter film and linear editing on SVHS sets or developing your own film, as well as Media100 non-linear editing and digital media creation. Then in my final year, just as it seemed likely I was being groomed for a career in video production I was suddenly reminded of my motivations. What did I want to do with my life after college? Make video games, of course, how could I have forgotten that in 4 years of toying with cool equipment?
After graduation I packed up and moved to London, then still a hotbed of video game development. It took me a couple of months and many many resumes and cover letters, but once I got my first interview at a game development company I was in, and hooked. I haven't looked back since, and that was well over a decade ago, approaching a decade and a half now, if I allow myself to feel terribly old for a second.
It is true that a passion for video games is somewhat of a requirement to work in the medium. Work can be hard, sometimes tedious, it certainly isn't the pizza-eating, nerf-circus people seem to think it is. But I am very glad I took the time to get a degree in a vaguely associated field. To this day I find myself using knowledge I learned from my college days, as it gave me a strong foundation of understanding visual media and gave me a wider sense of perspective, allowing me to be influenced by subjects outside the field of video games too. On top of that, being in possession of a degree helped smooth my entry into Japan and getting a visa. I'd have loved to say my years at college also gave me a chance to party, drink and socialise, but possibly presciently, I learned my hard graft attitudes there and spent most of my time there learning to cope with "overtime", little sleep and backbreaking work.
And that, as they say, is that.
Comment in our forums ...
Feb
Lets Japan! (^∀^)/16
posted by Paul Caristino
Festival Time
I loves me a good festival. Having done a bit of travelling around Japan I've managed to see quite a few, from local country fair's to big city street dance festivals, to Flower Viewing in front of a castle. There are several major festivals throughout the year but any given weekend there a various festivals happening around Japan. If you're visiting Japan I highly recommend you check out what festivals will be in the area, you never know when they'll be burning kanji on a mountain, or dancing with the dead.
Daruma Festival
Last Thursday my town held a Daruma festival. Closing off a few side streets and packing it with stalls selling various food and and a mountain of Daruma dolls. When you buy a Daruma you're supposed to make a wish/goal, usually written on the back of its head, and paint in one eye, then when you achieve that goal you paint in the other eye. At the end of the year you take it back to the temple you bought it from and burn it, buy another one, repeat. The traditional Darumas are red, meaning 'luck', but there are several other colours which can mean wealth, health, success (work/exams) and even safety while driving. Near the center of the festival was a small temple with a big bonfire of old Darumas that people had bought the previous year.
Being a first time buyer I picked up one of the standard edition red (faster?) ones and took it home. I wrote my goal, "The success of Score Studios", painted in one of the eyes and patted its head for a bit of extra luck. I thought that placing it on my desk facing me would inspire me, but having it stare at me constantly with its one eye is kind of creepy so I moved it to a more out of the way position on a shelf. Im guessing it will stay there until next year when I get to burn it, hopefully with its other eye painted in.
Valentine's Day
Valentine's Day in Japan is different to what I expected, girls make chocolate at home and give it to the boy the like. This usually consists of buying special valentines day chocolate at the store, melting it down into a different shape and sprinkling powdered chocolate on top. I'm sure it was harder in the days before department stores...
They also give "obligation" chocolate so as not to make the other boys lonely. This is usually given to co-workers and other such people you see every day. Of course you dont say its obligation chocolate, thats something for you to figure out yourself, especially if you're a foreigner and haven't been told about this custom. When someone finally explains it to you, don't worry, you probably still have some time to intercept the flower delivery guy.
"But what about the girls?!" I hear you cry. Don't worry, they get their fair share of chocolate a month later on what is traditionally known as White day. This is now the boys turn to give back chocolate to all the girls they received it from. This day might also catch you by surprise if nobody tells you, luckily convenience stores are packed with expensive chocolate for us forgetful types.
Comment in our forums ...
Feb
The way we work (part 2)6
posted by James Kay
In the last post you got a little bit of an insight into our daily routines, the fact business matters can distract from development, that coffee is drunk in copious amounts and that we can be lazy when we want to. In this post, though, I'll try to paint a picture of our actual development process.
Thanks to Google Wave we have an on-line repository of game ideas. Usually ideas come thick and fast and we note them down, sometimes with notes on why one of us thinks a particular idea is worth pursuing or not. Whenever we decide it's time to look at a new project we go through the list and discuss our best options and ideas. As I've mentioned before, getting ideas is the easy part, but deciding which project to go for next is quite difficult. Both Paul and I have our little "vanity projects" we'd like to do, but those are usually too big for a small team and would require significant time and money investments. So naturally we focus on the do-able, the most fun and interesting ideas. Once we have picked one we try to decide whose baby it is.
One thing I've learned working at Japanese development studios is that having a single person at the top in charge of final decisions is a pretty good way of working, if that person is rational, schedule-minded and knows what's going on. So this is one element we've tried to incorporate in the way we do things at Score Studios. Though the process is 99% collaborative, in the end it's best to have one of us in charge of a product, making final decisions on looks, design, implementation, etc. As Paul and I are usually well in tune with each other, these decisions usually come naturally without either of us having to put our foot down, but it's good to know that when necessary the buck stops at just one of us. Design by committee is something we really want to avoid.
The "auteur" usually is the person who pitched the original idea. Flock It! for example grew out of an original idea of Paul's, with plenty of input from myself. He focused mainly on the flocking and gameplay code, tuning it until he was happy with it, but giving me free reign over the graphic style and level design. Score Video Poker grew out of my personal desire to have a decent video poker game on the iPhone that had an auto-hold feature. Development of this title saw me basically telling Paul how I wanted it to work. As I said, everything we do is collaborative, and I would never try to credit one person's input over another, but during development it really helps us keep focus.
Once an idea is decided upon, we each go do our own thing. Paul will either take an existing prototype or create a new one that covers the basics of the gameplay. Usually he uses art from earlier games as placeholders and scripts the game in our tool to basically work as we intend it to. It is important we get this running very early on, as balancing and tweaking the gameplay is the hardest, most time-consuming task of development. It doesn't really matter if it looks like the end product, as long as we can play it, get feedback and come across early problems and issues we'll need to fix. Due to the nature of the tool and script, the way Paul built it up from scratch to his own specific architecture, it usually takes him no time at all to get something up and running.
Myself, I start making mockups of the art, graphical user interface and in-game graphics. I try to pick a "feel" for the graphics early on, a technique so that I am sure the rest of the art I create all fits in with the art style. I usually make these in Photoshop and send fake screenshots to Paul for feedback.
While I create these I am always careful to keep my work process as open as possible; if you're familiar with Photoshop you can, for example, "flatten" layers together to keep things organised, but at this stage I never do this, instead organising everything in folders. This way, once I pick a good style I can go back and apply the same effects to other required art or make an actionscript to do it automatically. As you might have seen in an earlier blog post about the art of Flock It!, for example, each rendered image underwent the same post-production steps, so I made a little script for that to speed up the process and to make sure everything looked the same, that nothing stuck out as being odd, or off kilter.
Once a prototype is running and an art style has been decided our processes start to overlap. As Paul continues scripting the game, optimising gameplay and adding features I start adding final art to the tool as much as possible. That way we will be running a prototype in a form much closer to the final product, which will often bring up new issues we hadn't foreseen. Where will we fit this integral part of the GUI, for example, or figuring out why certain in-game objects don't look right once the game is running. This part of the process can be a little frustrating, as the game will look more and more finished, yet it is still fairly incomplete. Plus developing while at the same time bug tracking can slow down the process. I will tell Paul that something isn't working right, and he'll say that he hasn't optimised that part yet, but that it's on his task list. Most of this down to exuberance and excitement; seeing your work in action is always exciting and it's hard to not to get too keen at this point.
What follows is the scourge of every game developer in the world; the final push. The design has been implemented, it works, you have had your creativity but now it's hard graft. Now I have to spend a lot of time simply making assets and Paul is optimising and fixing bugs. There is not much room for creativity anymore, it's simply a matter of getting it done. There is always a temptation to add more features at this point, to keep the brain sharp, but that usually just delays the process needlessly. You have to be disciplined and work hard, hunker down.
Nearing the end of this part of the process we start letting friends and family members play the game for that important feedback. Some close friends and family members might have had an opportunity to sneak a peek earlier in the process, but it is always important to show something that is pretty much complete or people get the wrong impression. The feedback we get is very important to us. We may think we know what is fun, we certainly know what we think is fun, but if our prospective customers are not enjoying it there is absolutely no point. Because of the nature of Paul's scripting framework it is fairly easy to make tweaks or add features that we now find out people are really hankering for. We found this after we released Score Video Poker, Bail-out and Flock It!, reading reviews and web forums, and we gladly went back to add features people felt were missing. Not all proposed features are worthwhile implementing, but often if enough people are saying the same thing we will have to swallow our pride and admit we messed up.
Once we finish our game, or at least version 1, we submit it and start working on PR materials and screenshots. But even before that, we go back to our list of ideas and start thinking of the next one. And the whole process repeats itself.
If this post was useful or interesting to you, or if you have questions or comments we'd love to hear from you at info@score-studios.jp.
Comment in our forums ...
Thanks to Google Wave we have an on-line repository of game ideas. Usually ideas come thick and fast and we note them down, sometimes with notes on why one of us thinks a particular idea is worth pursuing or not. Whenever we decide it's time to look at a new project we go through the list and discuss our best options and ideas. As I've mentioned before, getting ideas is the easy part, but deciding which project to go for next is quite difficult. Both Paul and I have our little "vanity projects" we'd like to do, but those are usually too big for a small team and would require significant time and money investments. So naturally we focus on the do-able, the most fun and interesting ideas. Once we have picked one we try to decide whose baby it is.
One thing I've learned working at Japanese development studios is that having a single person at the top in charge of final decisions is a pretty good way of working, if that person is rational, schedule-minded and knows what's going on. So this is one element we've tried to incorporate in the way we do things at Score Studios. Though the process is 99% collaborative, in the end it's best to have one of us in charge of a product, making final decisions on looks, design, implementation, etc. As Paul and I are usually well in tune with each other, these decisions usually come naturally without either of us having to put our foot down, but it's good to know that when necessary the buck stops at just one of us. Design by committee is something we really want to avoid.
The "auteur" usually is the person who pitched the original idea. Flock It! for example grew out of an original idea of Paul's, with plenty of input from myself. He focused mainly on the flocking and gameplay code, tuning it until he was happy with it, but giving me free reign over the graphic style and level design. Score Video Poker grew out of my personal desire to have a decent video poker game on the iPhone that had an auto-hold feature. Development of this title saw me basically telling Paul how I wanted it to work. As I said, everything we do is collaborative, and I would never try to credit one person's input over another, but during development it really helps us keep focus.
Once an idea is decided upon, we each go do our own thing. Paul will either take an existing prototype or create a new one that covers the basics of the gameplay. Usually he uses art from earlier games as placeholders and scripts the game in our tool to basically work as we intend it to. It is important we get this running very early on, as balancing and tweaking the gameplay is the hardest, most time-consuming task of development. It doesn't really matter if it looks like the end product, as long as we can play it, get feedback and come across early problems and issues we'll need to fix. Due to the nature of the tool and script, the way Paul built it up from scratch to his own specific architecture, it usually takes him no time at all to get something up and running.
Myself, I start making mockups of the art, graphical user interface and in-game graphics. I try to pick a "feel" for the graphics early on, a technique so that I am sure the rest of the art I create all fits in with the art style. I usually make these in Photoshop and send fake screenshots to Paul for feedback.
While I create these I am always careful to keep my work process as open as possible; if you're familiar with Photoshop you can, for example, "flatten" layers together to keep things organised, but at this stage I never do this, instead organising everything in folders. This way, once I pick a good style I can go back and apply the same effects to other required art or make an actionscript to do it automatically. As you might have seen in an earlier blog post about the art of Flock It!, for example, each rendered image underwent the same post-production steps, so I made a little script for that to speed up the process and to make sure everything looked the same, that nothing stuck out as being odd, or off kilter.
Once a prototype is running and an art style has been decided our processes start to overlap. As Paul continues scripting the game, optimising gameplay and adding features I start adding final art to the tool as much as possible. That way we will be running a prototype in a form much closer to the final product, which will often bring up new issues we hadn't foreseen. Where will we fit this integral part of the GUI, for example, or figuring out why certain in-game objects don't look right once the game is running. This part of the process can be a little frustrating, as the game will look more and more finished, yet it is still fairly incomplete. Plus developing while at the same time bug tracking can slow down the process. I will tell Paul that something isn't working right, and he'll say that he hasn't optimised that part yet, but that it's on his task list. Most of this down to exuberance and excitement; seeing your work in action is always exciting and it's hard to not to get too keen at this point.
What follows is the scourge of every game developer in the world; the final push. The design has been implemented, it works, you have had your creativity but now it's hard graft. Now I have to spend a lot of time simply making assets and Paul is optimising and fixing bugs. There is not much room for creativity anymore, it's simply a matter of getting it done. There is always a temptation to add more features at this point, to keep the brain sharp, but that usually just delays the process needlessly. You have to be disciplined and work hard, hunker down.
Nearing the end of this part of the process we start letting friends and family members play the game for that important feedback. Some close friends and family members might have had an opportunity to sneak a peek earlier in the process, but it is always important to show something that is pretty much complete or people get the wrong impression. The feedback we get is very important to us. We may think we know what is fun, we certainly know what we think is fun, but if our prospective customers are not enjoying it there is absolutely no point. Because of the nature of Paul's scripting framework it is fairly easy to make tweaks or add features that we now find out people are really hankering for. We found this after we released Score Video Poker, Bail-out and Flock It!, reading reviews and web forums, and we gladly went back to add features people felt were missing. Not all proposed features are worthwhile implementing, but often if enough people are saying the same thing we will have to swallow our pride and admit we messed up.
Once we finish our game, or at least version 1, we submit it and start working on PR materials and screenshots. But even before that, we go back to our list of ideas and start thinking of the next one. And the whole process repeats itself.
If this post was useful or interesting to you, or if you have questions or comments we'd love to hear from you at info@score-studios.jp.
Comment in our forums ...
Feb
The way we work (part 1)1
posted by James Kay
Having spent over a decade tied to a desk in, what I call "the big studio system", suddenly being an independent developer was a little overwhelming. Though it came in starts and stops Paul and I have slowly settled into our own personal routines to get our work done. Working from home, with a remote (physically, if not mentally) colleague is a very different way of working than I grew accustomed to, but it's very gratifying.
There are negatives, of course. Just off the top of my head, not sitting at a desk right next to the person you're working with can be hard to get used to. When I worked at studios I could simply lean back, take off my headphones and ask the programmer assigned to my tasks a question and have it answered immediately. If things were unclear I could just show the issues on my monitor and come to a solution together. Instant Messaging has taken over that role now and though it works pretty well, I do sometimes wish I could physically show and explain things.
Secondly, having the discipline to actually work at home is hard. With so many distractions around and no boss to crack the whip it takes a lot of effort to actually get work done. At the beginning of a project everybody is still excited and you simply cannot work hard and long enough, as it's just so much fun. But nearing the end of the project all tasks are cumbersome and can be tedious. At these times you really have to force yourself to hack through the task list.
There are positives too, of course. For one, I can listen to music and radio as loud as I want, which I usually do when I work. I don't have a commute which, if you know anything about the Japanese rail system, is a blessing! And being your own boss, able to manage your own time gives you a lot of freedom to live life a little better. I can take a day off during the week if I'm not feeling like working (usually hangover-related), and just make up for it another day. Or I can decide to work through the weekend and just take it a little easier during the week. Plus being your own boss also focuses your work as all responsibility is on your own head. I can't "pretend" to be working by re-doing some easy artwork; all my work has to have a purpose.
All in all going independent, however difficult it has been financially and professionally, has been a great decision for me personally. I think I've done more and better work since becoming my own boss than I have as an employed video game artist. And this is nothing against my old jobs, it's just that the extra responsibility and freedom has allowed me to try things that are simply not financially viable if you're developing a large console game for a publisher.
Here then is a breakdown of how I spend my working days:
I wake up when I wake up. Sometimes I set an alarm because I have plans to finish something specific on a certain day, but usually I just wake up naturally, which is never too late in the morning. I stumble out of bed, immediately boot up the PC and switch on the kettle.
Once everything is warmed up, including the coffee, I go through my emails, read some blogs and websites and check the news. Then I have to decide, based on the emails for the day, what kind of day it's going to be: business or development. Usually when I do art and design I need to create a mindset. I start the ball rolling, even if it is difficult at first, I end up on a roll and can easily end up in 12 hour workdays, forgetting to eat and shower. But I am very bad at starting on one task in the morning, switch to do a couple of hours of art and then go back. I like to focus, hard, on one thing.
A business day usually involves paperwork, a trip to the bank or dealing with whatever our accountant requires. As I am based in Tokyo, and Paul isn't, it's easiest for me to take charge of all these little tasks. I might take a trip to our post box, check the company accounts, go to the bank to pay withholding taxes or invoices, etc. It could also be a PR day. I would spend an entire day seeking out blogs and websites that might be interested in reviewing our games or covering our company and send out email after email. I'd update our Flickr page, take new screenshots, check out our sales reports. It could also include writing out design documents, making asset lists or blog posts, like this one. I never feel like I'm being a real developer on days like these, but it's important work that needs to be done.
A development day means I will focus on creating art, assets or using our toolset to actually create our game. I usually start early in the workday until I'm on a roll and just keep on going until I'm tired. I'll have several art creation packages open at the same time, have a chat window open with Paul so I can ask him questions or chew the fat, and either listen to podcasts or BBC radio through their iplayer. Depending on the task I usually end up creating a lot of art on good days. Rather than create everything and then put it in the game, I create one aspect, or part of it, say the front-end or some particular in-game assets, load up the tool and see how they work immediately. Nothing is worse than creating a folder full of art only to find out it doesn't quite fit, or is too big or generally needs redoing. The way Paul developed our tool it's very easy to drop my work in the game, press a button and see it running immediately.
I might have discussions with Paul through the chat window about how I see a particular element working, or how he intends to do something specific, which in turn means I'll have to make sure my artwork is to spec. Occasionally we send each other links to pertinent (or funny) websites or news reports, constantly keeping ourselves up to date on what is going on out there.
For a better insight into my personal work processes check back for the next blog post where I'll be talking about one of our new projects, currently in development. I'll explain how we decide who "takes charge", how I'm trying to develop a character for a particular series of games we've planned and all the coffee I drink during the day.
If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact us via info@score-studios.jp. We always love to hear from you!
Comment in our forums ...
There are negatives, of course. Just off the top of my head, not sitting at a desk right next to the person you're working with can be hard to get used to. When I worked at studios I could simply lean back, take off my headphones and ask the programmer assigned to my tasks a question and have it answered immediately. If things were unclear I could just show the issues on my monitor and come to a solution together. Instant Messaging has taken over that role now and though it works pretty well, I do sometimes wish I could physically show and explain things.
Secondly, having the discipline to actually work at home is hard. With so many distractions around and no boss to crack the whip it takes a lot of effort to actually get work done. At the beginning of a project everybody is still excited and you simply cannot work hard and long enough, as it's just so much fun. But nearing the end of the project all tasks are cumbersome and can be tedious. At these times you really have to force yourself to hack through the task list.
There are positives too, of course. For one, I can listen to music and radio as loud as I want, which I usually do when I work. I don't have a commute which, if you know anything about the Japanese rail system, is a blessing! And being your own boss, able to manage your own time gives you a lot of freedom to live life a little better. I can take a day off during the week if I'm not feeling like working (usually hangover-related), and just make up for it another day. Or I can decide to work through the weekend and just take it a little easier during the week. Plus being your own boss also focuses your work as all responsibility is on your own head. I can't "pretend" to be working by re-doing some easy artwork; all my work has to have a purpose.
All in all going independent, however difficult it has been financially and professionally, has been a great decision for me personally. I think I've done more and better work since becoming my own boss than I have as an employed video game artist. And this is nothing against my old jobs, it's just that the extra responsibility and freedom has allowed me to try things that are simply not financially viable if you're developing a large console game for a publisher.
Here then is a breakdown of how I spend my working days:
I wake up when I wake up. Sometimes I set an alarm because I have plans to finish something specific on a certain day, but usually I just wake up naturally, which is never too late in the morning. I stumble out of bed, immediately boot up the PC and switch on the kettle.
Once everything is warmed up, including the coffee, I go through my emails, read some blogs and websites and check the news. Then I have to decide, based on the emails for the day, what kind of day it's going to be: business or development. Usually when I do art and design I need to create a mindset. I start the ball rolling, even if it is difficult at first, I end up on a roll and can easily end up in 12 hour workdays, forgetting to eat and shower. But I am very bad at starting on one task in the morning, switch to do a couple of hours of art and then go back. I like to focus, hard, on one thing.
A business day usually involves paperwork, a trip to the bank or dealing with whatever our accountant requires. As I am based in Tokyo, and Paul isn't, it's easiest for me to take charge of all these little tasks. I might take a trip to our post box, check the company accounts, go to the bank to pay withholding taxes or invoices, etc. It could also be a PR day. I would spend an entire day seeking out blogs and websites that might be interested in reviewing our games or covering our company and send out email after email. I'd update our Flickr page, take new screenshots, check out our sales reports. It could also include writing out design documents, making asset lists or blog posts, like this one. I never feel like I'm being a real developer on days like these, but it's important work that needs to be done.
A development day means I will focus on creating art, assets or using our toolset to actually create our game. I usually start early in the workday until I'm on a roll and just keep on going until I'm tired. I'll have several art creation packages open at the same time, have a chat window open with Paul so I can ask him questions or chew the fat, and either listen to podcasts or BBC radio through their iplayer. Depending on the task I usually end up creating a lot of art on good days. Rather than create everything and then put it in the game, I create one aspect, or part of it, say the front-end or some particular in-game assets, load up the tool and see how they work immediately. Nothing is worse than creating a folder full of art only to find out it doesn't quite fit, or is too big or generally needs redoing. The way Paul developed our tool it's very easy to drop my work in the game, press a button and see it running immediately.
I might have discussions with Paul through the chat window about how I see a particular element working, or how he intends to do something specific, which in turn means I'll have to make sure my artwork is to spec. Occasionally we send each other links to pertinent (or funny) websites or news reports, constantly keeping ourselves up to date on what is going on out there.
For a better insight into my personal work processes check back for the next blog post where I'll be talking about one of our new projects, currently in development. I'll explain how we decide who "takes charge", how I'm trying to develop a character for a particular series of games we've planned and all the coffee I drink during the day.
If you have any questions or comments feel free to contact us via info@score-studios.jp. We always love to hear from you!
Comment in our forums ...
Jan
Flock It! post mortem24
posted by James Kay
One of the great things about the independent development scene is that many take the time to write a post mortem, a document looking back at the development of a title to examine what went right and, more importantly, what went wrong. Often too people post them on-line for others to learn from. The time pressure and secrecy of big studio development usually doesn't allow for this necessary "luxury". Here, then, is the post mortem for our main title Flock It! released first in late October of 2009.
What went right
1. The design
Though the Appstore is filled with great titles that force traditional d-pad and button game controls onto the platform, and I have played and enjoyed many of them, they do not, in my estimation, get the best out of the iPhone's strengths: touch control. From the outset we designed Flock It! to be designed specifically for iPhone controls, ie. touch controls. Though sheep flocking games have been around for a while, we were very happy with our interpretation of it, keeping input simple and responsive. We've had reports from customers and our extended circle of friends that everybody has been able to enjoy it, from four year old cousins to people our own age who don't usually play games. On top of that we also enabled replayability and extra objectives per level that more seasoned gamers could find a real challenge too, but all within the simple framework of touching the screen to herd sheep around.
2. The design process
Ideas are our industry's cheapest current coin; everybody has ideas. Indeed, we found we had too many and early design ideas for Flock It! spanned page upon page in our respective notebooks. That is until one day Paul and I spent a few hours in a central Tokyo pub and over a few pints took the knife to our designs. It is said that a piece of writing is finished when there is nothing left to cut out, and in that way we approached all our ambitious ideas until we distilled the design to a simple yet strong core. Things we cut out would not have added to the overall experience or would simply take too much time for the returns they would deliver. The great thing about this was also that the design that was left was focused and allowed us to spend more time on the important basics to make sure they looked and played exactly how we wanted them to. Some of the scrapped ideas would crop up again during development, at which point we could easily remember why exactly we cut it in the first place and keep ourselves focused on what we decided was more important.
Some ideas have not been completely abandoned though, and I'm sure we'll revisit some of the more heartbreaking cuts for other games or, maybe, a sequel.
3. The tools
A lot of time was spent in advance of development on our bespoke toolset. Having both worked in large-scale development we knew the value of a good tool and with Paul's almost compulsive obsession with expandability and well designed code he crafted a tool in which we created all our games with relative ease. This took some time of course, and though Flock It! could possibly have been developed a lot quicker had we hard-coded everything, we wouldn't be able to create extra content so easily, nor would it save time on our next projects where everything would have to be built from scratch. For the first major Flock It! update, for example, I discussed a few ideas with Paul but then set to work on my own, created all the new levels and art by myself within the tool and handed him an art-complete project which Paul added scripts to, in his own simple yet powerful scripting language. Though we spent a lot of time on polish, the update barely took any time at all thanks to the way our tools work, and that is very well worth the initial time investment. Work on the tool continues constantly and at some point it will be powerful enough, and easy enough to use, that hardly any programmer intervention is required in the creation of games. That, at least, is the goal and Flock It! was a great test case in achieving the first steps towards it.
4. Doing it our way
Either we are lucky or we sought each other out, but Paul and I are on pretty much the exact same page when it comes to game development and business direction. When it came to the development of Flock It! we both had our part to play; we had been looking forward to this, the autonomy, the freedom and the responsibility, for a while now and it was time to put our money where our mouths were. I could trust Paul to do his part in the area of coding and do it well. Paul, I would hope to be able to say, could trust me to focus on the design of the levels and art without having to look over my shoulder. We both hunkered down and just got on with it. We found we both were responsible enough not to get precious or sidetracked by self-criticism, we finished our work and we did it to a level we were both pleased with with pretty much no interference from one another. And this, for a developer, is the perfect way to work. I don't have to tell Paul how to do his work or what I expect from him, as he is way ahead of me on that front. Likewise, though I ask for feedback of course, Paul doesn't have to keep checking my artwork to see if it is on spec or good enough. The way Paul created the tool made it very easy for him to implement features I eventually found out I could use to speed up my work. Paul would get ideas which he threw my way which I found myself agreeing with and implementing. Not having to be careful to step on each others' toes and being able to rely on your team makes for a very smooth development process.
What went wrong
1. Ignorance about the Appstore
We knew we still had a lot to learn, about everything. Just because we have both worked a decade or more at big studios we don't know everything about development, even if we like to think we do. One thing we didn't research enough, for example, was the way the Appstore handles certain issues. When our first batch of games was released we were in a flurry of excitement. I created and sent out masses of press releases and links to various websites. To try and "play the system" we set the release date to that very day to hopefully appear at he top of new releases lists. However, the Appstore was on American time, and Tokyo time was a day ahead. Suddenly we had told the Appstore to release the games "tomorrow" instead of today, we found, and they promptly disappeared from the store. With the emails sent out already this caused rather a panic, and it takes a few hours for changes to go through, so we were in a limbo for a while. This and many other smaller issues could have easily been avoided had we taken the time to research our platform better. We have learned by now, of course, but we did miss a few good opportunities and windows because of our ignorance.
2. Ignorance about the audience
Alongside learning about the Appstore we should also have taken more time researching our audience. Though we felt confident the style and design of the game made it accessible to anyone, but what we didn't realise was how people use their iPhones outside of gaming. As tech geeks ourselves it never occurred to us people wouldn't upgrade their firmware, so when we released our game to work on the latest version of the iPhone's OS alone we didn't realise we were only targeting 10% of users. During this time we were proud to be listed under the "Staff Picks" section of the Appstore, but partly because of this oversight we simply weren't reaching the customers. We quickly updated the game to be playable from OS 2.2.1 upwards, instead of just OS 3 upwards, but at the time the staff handling submissions were swamped with the pre-Christmas rush and getting approval took a good two weeks, at which time the "Staff Picks" section had cycled through and Flock It! was no longer on it. This was a great opportunity we wasted simply by not knowing the facts and figures of iPhone users.
3. PR and marketing
It is a cliché that game developers hate their company's marketing department; they always make silly requests for art, screenshots and information when we are busy finishing the game. However, every developer secretly know that PR and marketing are one of the most important aspects of the video game market and that without it there simply wouldn't be an industry, or at least not one as huge as today's. We knew we would have to do all the marketing ourselves, and we knew it was important, but we were both relatively new to the processes behind it. We did what we thought was best; we sent our press releases, created a great little trailer, pulled strings, cold-called (emailed) journalists, went on Twitter, tried everything and found it was a tough, uphill battle. We still have to find the best way of getting the word out and Flock It!, as well as our other games, have certainly been a learning process, but it is undeniable our lack of experience in this field has harmed Flock It! sales and exposure. It's something we will continuously learn about and train ourselves in, it is unavoidable, but had we had the money hiring a PR person with the knowledge and contacts would have helped tremendously.
4. Timing
We released Flock It! when it was ready. Maybe we should have planned it better. It was around Halloween when the Appstore was awash with Halloween-themed games and updates. What followed was Thanksgiving, when everybody and their cats has special offers, free giveaways and extra marketing pushes. Thereafter it was Christmas where people were giving away games for free and offering more special deals. It is extremely hard for a newcomer to the scene to get noticed as it is, but during the madness of the holiday seasons it is even worse. We participated with our own competitions, Twitter giveaways and special deals, but in the end they got drowned out by the millions of others, better established names and games, doing the exact same thing. On the one hand it was good for us, as having Flock It! out there gave us the feedback we needed to create the updates and get the ball rolling on our marketing, but it was too tough a battle to pick and made us rely more on the "long tail" of sales as opposed to the initial push we had been hoping. Some better planning, stricter milestones and more strategic marketing and timing are called for.
Conclusions
Flock It! was very much a learning experience on many fronts, but in the end it's a title we are proud of. Pride butters no turnips, of course, and we are constantly learning, improving our games to meet the demands of our audience while at the same time developing our technology and new games. Going independent, we knew, was never going to be a cakewalk, and our initial experiences certainly bear this out; it is what we always wanted to do, so despite the fact it is hard, hard work we are thoroughly enjoying it.
While developing our new titles we can use what we have learned so far, but be prepared to read some more post mortems later, as we know we still have a long road ahead of us, and mistakes will be made!
I hope this post mortem was useful or insightful. If you are an independent developer and have posted your own post mortem, or are simply interested and have questions or comments we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via info@score-studios.jp
Comment in our forums ...
What went right
1. The design
Though the Appstore is filled with great titles that force traditional d-pad and button game controls onto the platform, and I have played and enjoyed many of them, they do not, in my estimation, get the best out of the iPhone's strengths: touch control. From the outset we designed Flock It! to be designed specifically for iPhone controls, ie. touch controls. Though sheep flocking games have been around for a while, we were very happy with our interpretation of it, keeping input simple and responsive. We've had reports from customers and our extended circle of friends that everybody has been able to enjoy it, from four year old cousins to people our own age who don't usually play games. On top of that we also enabled replayability and extra objectives per level that more seasoned gamers could find a real challenge too, but all within the simple framework of touching the screen to herd sheep around.
2. The design process
Ideas are our industry's cheapest current coin; everybody has ideas. Indeed, we found we had too many and early design ideas for Flock It! spanned page upon page in our respective notebooks. That is until one day Paul and I spent a few hours in a central Tokyo pub and over a few pints took the knife to our designs. It is said that a piece of writing is finished when there is nothing left to cut out, and in that way we approached all our ambitious ideas until we distilled the design to a simple yet strong core. Things we cut out would not have added to the overall experience or would simply take too much time for the returns they would deliver. The great thing about this was also that the design that was left was focused and allowed us to spend more time on the important basics to make sure they looked and played exactly how we wanted them to. Some of the scrapped ideas would crop up again during development, at which point we could easily remember why exactly we cut it in the first place and keep ourselves focused on what we decided was more important.
Some ideas have not been completely abandoned though, and I'm sure we'll revisit some of the more heartbreaking cuts for other games or, maybe, a sequel.
3. The tools
A lot of time was spent in advance of development on our bespoke toolset. Having both worked in large-scale development we knew the value of a good tool and with Paul's almost compulsive obsession with expandability and well designed code he crafted a tool in which we created all our games with relative ease. This took some time of course, and though Flock It! could possibly have been developed a lot quicker had we hard-coded everything, we wouldn't be able to create extra content so easily, nor would it save time on our next projects where everything would have to be built from scratch. For the first major Flock It! update, for example, I discussed a few ideas with Paul but then set to work on my own, created all the new levels and art by myself within the tool and handed him an art-complete project which Paul added scripts to, in his own simple yet powerful scripting language. Though we spent a lot of time on polish, the update barely took any time at all thanks to the way our tools work, and that is very well worth the initial time investment. Work on the tool continues constantly and at some point it will be powerful enough, and easy enough to use, that hardly any programmer intervention is required in the creation of games. That, at least, is the goal and Flock It! was a great test case in achieving the first steps towards it.
4. Doing it our way
Either we are lucky or we sought each other out, but Paul and I are on pretty much the exact same page when it comes to game development and business direction. When it came to the development of Flock It! we both had our part to play; we had been looking forward to this, the autonomy, the freedom and the responsibility, for a while now and it was time to put our money where our mouths were. I could trust Paul to do his part in the area of coding and do it well. Paul, I would hope to be able to say, could trust me to focus on the design of the levels and art without having to look over my shoulder. We both hunkered down and just got on with it. We found we both were responsible enough not to get precious or sidetracked by self-criticism, we finished our work and we did it to a level we were both pleased with with pretty much no interference from one another. And this, for a developer, is the perfect way to work. I don't have to tell Paul how to do his work or what I expect from him, as he is way ahead of me on that front. Likewise, though I ask for feedback of course, Paul doesn't have to keep checking my artwork to see if it is on spec or good enough. The way Paul created the tool made it very easy for him to implement features I eventually found out I could use to speed up my work. Paul would get ideas which he threw my way which I found myself agreeing with and implementing. Not having to be careful to step on each others' toes and being able to rely on your team makes for a very smooth development process.
What went wrong
1. Ignorance about the Appstore
We knew we still had a lot to learn, about everything. Just because we have both worked a decade or more at big studios we don't know everything about development, even if we like to think we do. One thing we didn't research enough, for example, was the way the Appstore handles certain issues. When our first batch of games was released we were in a flurry of excitement. I created and sent out masses of press releases and links to various websites. To try and "play the system" we set the release date to that very day to hopefully appear at he top of new releases lists. However, the Appstore was on American time, and Tokyo time was a day ahead. Suddenly we had told the Appstore to release the games "tomorrow" instead of today, we found, and they promptly disappeared from the store. With the emails sent out already this caused rather a panic, and it takes a few hours for changes to go through, so we were in a limbo for a while. This and many other smaller issues could have easily been avoided had we taken the time to research our platform better. We have learned by now, of course, but we did miss a few good opportunities and windows because of our ignorance.
2. Ignorance about the audience
Alongside learning about the Appstore we should also have taken more time researching our audience. Though we felt confident the style and design of the game made it accessible to anyone, but what we didn't realise was how people use their iPhones outside of gaming. As tech geeks ourselves it never occurred to us people wouldn't upgrade their firmware, so when we released our game to work on the latest version of the iPhone's OS alone we didn't realise we were only targeting 10% of users. During this time we were proud to be listed under the "Staff Picks" section of the Appstore, but partly because of this oversight we simply weren't reaching the customers. We quickly updated the game to be playable from OS 2.2.1 upwards, instead of just OS 3 upwards, but at the time the staff handling submissions were swamped with the pre-Christmas rush and getting approval took a good two weeks, at which time the "Staff Picks" section had cycled through and Flock It! was no longer on it. This was a great opportunity we wasted simply by not knowing the facts and figures of iPhone users.
3. PR and marketing
It is a cliché that game developers hate their company's marketing department; they always make silly requests for art, screenshots and information when we are busy finishing the game. However, every developer secretly know that PR and marketing are one of the most important aspects of the video game market and that without it there simply wouldn't be an industry, or at least not one as huge as today's. We knew we would have to do all the marketing ourselves, and we knew it was important, but we were both relatively new to the processes behind it. We did what we thought was best; we sent our press releases, created a great little trailer, pulled strings, cold-called (emailed) journalists, went on Twitter, tried everything and found it was a tough, uphill battle. We still have to find the best way of getting the word out and Flock It!, as well as our other games, have certainly been a learning process, but it is undeniable our lack of experience in this field has harmed Flock It! sales and exposure. It's something we will continuously learn about and train ourselves in, it is unavoidable, but had we had the money hiring a PR person with the knowledge and contacts would have helped tremendously.
4. Timing
We released Flock It! when it was ready. Maybe we should have planned it better. It was around Halloween when the Appstore was awash with Halloween-themed games and updates. What followed was Thanksgiving, when everybody and their cats has special offers, free giveaways and extra marketing pushes. Thereafter it was Christmas where people were giving away games for free and offering more special deals. It is extremely hard for a newcomer to the scene to get noticed as it is, but during the madness of the holiday seasons it is even worse. We participated with our own competitions, Twitter giveaways and special deals, but in the end they got drowned out by the millions of others, better established names and games, doing the exact same thing. On the one hand it was good for us, as having Flock It! out there gave us the feedback we needed to create the updates and get the ball rolling on our marketing, but it was too tough a battle to pick and made us rely more on the "long tail" of sales as opposed to the initial push we had been hoping. Some better planning, stricter milestones and more strategic marketing and timing are called for.
Conclusions
Flock It! was very much a learning experience on many fronts, but in the end it's a title we are proud of. Pride butters no turnips, of course, and we are constantly learning, improving our games to meet the demands of our audience while at the same time developing our technology and new games. Going independent, we knew, was never going to be a cakewalk, and our initial experiences certainly bear this out; it is what we always wanted to do, so despite the fact it is hard, hard work we are thoroughly enjoying it.
While developing our new titles we can use what we have learned so far, but be prepared to read some more post mortems later, as we know we still have a long road ahead of us, and mistakes will be made!
I hope this post mortem was useful or insightful. If you are an independent developer and have posted your own post mortem, or are simply interested and have questions or comments we'd love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via info@score-studios.jp
Comment in our forums ...
Jan
The making of Flock It! graphics17
posted by James Kay
I've always been a fan of and enjoyed making what is called "pixel art", a process where you basically draw every individual pixel by hand in an art package like Adobe Photoshop. This not only gives you a lot of control but also gives a game a distinctive visual style. But it is also very time consuming!
When creating Flock It! I partly used "pixel art" and supplemented that with 3D rendered objects I created in Autodesk Maya. These renders I then brushed up a little in Adobe Photoshop and added black outlines to.
Take this farm house, for example. Here you can see the 3D object I created in Maya. I pre-lit it, a technique where the lighting is baked onto the texture, the image I wrap around the 3D object, so I can keep the global lighting very strong, giving a nice, cartoony feel. Before rendering it I made the camera orthographic; which means it has no perspective at all, as the game is from a top-down view and objects with a perspective would look odd.
I then imported the rendered image in Photoshop where I scaled it to the proper size, adjusted the colours and added a black outline to enhance the cartoony nature of the game. After this it was just a matter of exporting it as a PNG image and using it in our proprietary toolset to use them as props in creating the levels.
The benefit of making props this way is that once I've created a model I can easily reposition it, render it out again and make variations, like I did with the barn. Using a single model I easily created 3 different barn graphics, which would have taken longer had I drawn them by hand from the outset. The different farm buildings created in 3D were also used to make a nicely rendered image of the farm that you can see in the background of the game's menu.
Some other elements, though, were created with pixel-perfect precision from scratch. These include the fences, rocks, grassy backgrounds and, of course, all the sheep which were hand animated for each action they perform, in each direction and for each version of the sheep (woolly, shorn and fat). This took a long time to do, as you can imagine. I did experiment with creating sheep in 3D, renders of which do appear in the background of the main menu, but decided in the end doing it by hand gave a nicer visual style to the whole game.
Other elements of the game, like the graphical user interface (GUI) and the main menu and game title were initially created in Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based art package. The benefit of doing this is that it's far easier to keep colours conform over all the different elements, as you can simply copy fill-gradients and colour sets from previous elements, and it allowed me to scale these elements without loss of quality. Things like the game's title logo would have to be used in other areas too outside the game, like in the official trailer, on the website and on printed marketing materials, so being able to scale it up without loss of quality was important. Had I created it specifically for the iPhone's screen alone in Photoshop it would have looked very blocky and blurry when scaled up for printed materials. On top of that I also really enjoy working in Adobe Illustrator; it gives me a lot of control I feel.
It is not uncommon in video game development to use a large variety of art creation software packages. Some things are best created in Photoshop, some in Illustrator and some in 3D packages and often I will have all three programs open simultaneously, which can put quite a strain on my PC. I really enjoyed making the Flock It! art as I am a big fan of the more cartoony, colourful types of art styles, as opposed to highly detailed and realistic video game art. I also think the subtle mix of pre-rendered art with pixel art works well making the game look both slightly "retro" as well as solid enough for today's discriminating customers.
If you disagree, or have comments or questions, why not email us at info@score-studios.jp. We always enjoy hearing from you!
Comment in our forums ...
When creating Flock It! I partly used "pixel art" and supplemented that with 3D rendered objects I created in Autodesk Maya. These renders I then brushed up a little in Adobe Photoshop and added black outlines to.
Take this farm house, for example. Here you can see the 3D object I created in Maya. I pre-lit it, a technique where the lighting is baked onto the texture, the image I wrap around the 3D object, so I can keep the global lighting very strong, giving a nice, cartoony feel. Before rendering it I made the camera orthographic; which means it has no perspective at all, as the game is from a top-down view and objects with a perspective would look odd.
I then imported the rendered image in Photoshop where I scaled it to the proper size, adjusted the colours and added a black outline to enhance the cartoony nature of the game. After this it was just a matter of exporting it as a PNG image and using it in our proprietary toolset to use them as props in creating the levels.
The benefit of making props this way is that once I've created a model I can easily reposition it, render it out again and make variations, like I did with the barn. Using a single model I easily created 3 different barn graphics, which would have taken longer had I drawn them by hand from the outset. The different farm buildings created in 3D were also used to make a nicely rendered image of the farm that you can see in the background of the game's menu.
Some other elements, though, were created with pixel-perfect precision from scratch. These include the fences, rocks, grassy backgrounds and, of course, all the sheep which were hand animated for each action they perform, in each direction and for each version of the sheep (woolly, shorn and fat). This took a long time to do, as you can imagine. I did experiment with creating sheep in 3D, renders of which do appear in the background of the main menu, but decided in the end doing it by hand gave a nicer visual style to the whole game.
Other elements of the game, like the graphical user interface (GUI) and the main menu and game title were initially created in Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based art package. The benefit of doing this is that it's far easier to keep colours conform over all the different elements, as you can simply copy fill-gradients and colour sets from previous elements, and it allowed me to scale these elements without loss of quality. Things like the game's title logo would have to be used in other areas too outside the game, like in the official trailer, on the website and on printed marketing materials, so being able to scale it up without loss of quality was important. Had I created it specifically for the iPhone's screen alone in Photoshop it would have looked very blocky and blurry when scaled up for printed materials. On top of that I also really enjoy working in Adobe Illustrator; it gives me a lot of control I feel.
It is not uncommon in video game development to use a large variety of art creation software packages. Some things are best created in Photoshop, some in Illustrator and some in 3D packages and often I will have all three programs open simultaneously, which can put quite a strain on my PC. I really enjoyed making the Flock It! art as I am a big fan of the more cartoony, colourful types of art styles, as opposed to highly detailed and realistic video game art. I also think the subtle mix of pre-rendered art with pixel art works well making the game look both slightly "retro" as well as solid enough for today's discriminating customers.
If you disagree, or have comments or questions, why not email us at info@score-studios.jp. We always enjoy hearing from you!
Comment in our forums ...
Jan
Flock It! update on its way12
posted by James Kay
We're very pleased to start the new decade with Flock It! making the final nominations list on the 2009 Best App Ever Awards in three categories! It has been nominated for Best Action Game, Best Casual Game and Best Game Controls, and this is all thanks to you voting for us! The voting for the finals ends this month, so please go over there again and vote for Flock It!
This hasn't meant that we've been resting on our laurels, of course! Though we did enjoy a little break over the festive season, we've been hard at work on several updates, including the Flock It! one, which we're play-testing right now!
The new update, which is free for everybody who has bought the game, will double the number of levels (from 15 to 30!), add two more manic minigames (making that a total of 6 now), add special awards for achieving special milestones in the game and Facebook support so you can show off to your friends how good a shepherd you are! The extra levels aren't just challenging, they also introduce new graphics; there are now winter themed levels, autumn levels and spring levels, each with a unique visual style. There are also scarecrows now, extra elements in the game that the sheep don't particularly like. They won't harm the sheep, but they will try to avoid them unless you really push them hard.
There have also been several tweaks, like the noisy sheep and dog sounds, which have been toned down a little, better flocking and general smoother gameplay. We really hope you'll enjoy the update as much as we did making it. And we're not finished yet. We didn't have time to include all the ideas we had for this update, so we are already thinking of the next one. If you have anything specific you want to see in Flock It! why not let us know by emailing info@score-studios.jp?
On top of that two previous games, BailOut and Score Videopoker have their own minor updates coming, concerning visual tweaks and global leaderboards. These too will soon go into submission, so keep your eyes open!
Comment in our forums ...
This hasn't meant that we've been resting on our laurels, of course! Though we did enjoy a little break over the festive season, we've been hard at work on several updates, including the Flock It! one, which we're play-testing right now!
The new update, which is free for everybody who has bought the game, will double the number of levels (from 15 to 30!), add two more manic minigames (making that a total of 6 now), add special awards for achieving special milestones in the game and Facebook support so you can show off to your friends how good a shepherd you are! The extra levels aren't just challenging, they also introduce new graphics; there are now winter themed levels, autumn levels and spring levels, each with a unique visual style. There are also scarecrows now, extra elements in the game that the sheep don't particularly like. They won't harm the sheep, but they will try to avoid them unless you really push them hard.
There have also been several tweaks, like the noisy sheep and dog sounds, which have been toned down a little, better flocking and general smoother gameplay. We really hope you'll enjoy the update as much as we did making it. And we're not finished yet. We didn't have time to include all the ideas we had for this update, so we are already thinking of the next one. If you have anything specific you want to see in Flock It! why not let us know by emailing info@score-studios.jp?
On top of that two previous games, BailOut and Score Videopoker have their own minor updates coming, concerning visual tweaks and global leaderboards. These too will soon go into submission, so keep your eyes open!
Comment in our forums ...
Dec
Welcome to the brand new dev blog!16
posted by James Kay
Welcome to our blog, where we plan to talk at length about our processes, upcoming games and general development pitfalls we are dealing with, peppered with little insights into what it's like working and living in Japan as a penniless independent game developer. If you have any questions, feedback, comments or requests for us to tackle specific topics, drop us a line at info@score-studios.jp. At some point we will have a forum up for people to comment in, but for now we would still like to hear from you through email!
We plan to regularly update this blog in the new year, so this is in some ways a little test post. That said, we would like this opportunity to tease a little screenshot of the upcoming Flock It! update, which will be entirely free for everybody who has bought the game. It makes the original literally twice the game it already is! There will be 15 more levels, two more mini-games, a new type of obstacle, new graphics set in autumn, winter and spring and special awards for achieving specific feats in the game.
We're working hard on getting this update finished and up on the Appstore but you can get Flock It! right now, start playing and upgrade to the new version when it's released without losing any of your progress!
We wish you all the best wishes for this holiday season and we hope you'll have a splendid 2010! Keep an eye open on our website, Facebook page and Twitter feed as we have big plans for the new decade!
Comment in our forums ...
We plan to regularly update this blog in the new year, so this is in some ways a little test post. That said, we would like this opportunity to tease a little screenshot of the upcoming Flock It! update, which will be entirely free for everybody who has bought the game. It makes the original literally twice the game it already is! There will be 15 more levels, two more mini-games, a new type of obstacle, new graphics set in autumn, winter and spring and special awards for achieving specific feats in the game.
We're working hard on getting this update finished and up on the Appstore but you can get Flock It! right now, start playing and upgrade to the new version when it's released without losing any of your progress!
We wish you all the best wishes for this holiday season and we hope you'll have a splendid 2010! Keep an eye open on our website, Facebook page and Twitter feed as we have big plans for the new decade!
Comment in our forums ...
