Indie Superstar

Half a Million Seconds with Celso Riva of Winter Wolves

// July 30th, 2010 // 3 Comments » // Half a Million Seconds

Celso Riva of Winter Wolves lives in Italy and has been involved in game development since he was 20. His primary projects are visual novels (VN), which he feels are similar to interactive illustrated books. Like books, the subjects may vary: romance, mystery, or horror. VN has seen a spike in popularity along with the boom of Japanese anime and manga. Celso reassures us that while “VN have sexual elements, not necessarily all of them have it.”  What follows is a worksafe look at VN and the development trail of one man who had to make the ultimate indie choice between pasta perfection and hamburger heartburn.

For those who do not know you, please introduce yourself! What’s your background as a game developer?

I worked for a very small Italian software house which made domestic products only, mostly adventure games. After it went bankrupt (not my fault, I swear!), I had to choose between emigrating to UK/USA to pursue a game developer career (since in Italy it wasn’t possible) or staying closer to home. It was a tough decision: pudding and cheeseburger or lasagna and pesto alla genovese. In the end, the quality of Italian food prevailed, so I decided to stay here. But only a few years later I found out about the shareware business model, and so I realized I could work in games but still maintain my Mediterranean diet!

Why did you go indie? What did you mum, dad, husband, or wife say when you said you were “going indie”?

Celso: I went indie mostly because I had no choice. Relocating abroad wasn’t something easy to do even if developing games had always been my dream. My English was even worse 10 years ago than now, so you can understand my fears! The reaction from my family was like this:

Mum: “Why don’t you get a normal job like your father?”

Dad: “You’re quitting your job to start a career as starving indie! Great! You must follow your dream, just don’t ask me for more money.”

Little brother: “Does it mean I’ll have free copies of your games?”

The girlfriend: “You’re quitting your job? I’m quitting mine too then.”

Why are your visual novels so popular in Japan?

Celso: I am not an expert, but I believe most Japanese ones involve sex or at least romance. My sexiest VN game, Bionic Heart, was the only one so far to be mentioned on a major Japanese site. So, yes, it must be that!

One day in 2099, your uncle Otto decides that it’s time for a change, and forces you to follow him on a journey to London. How did your fans receive Bionic Heart versus Heileen?

Celso: That bastard uncle Otto, he always comes up with the most insane ideas! Besides, with a hottie like Lora around, why must he always travel around so much? Traditionally, sci-fi [like Bionic Heart] has fewer female fans. The Heileen setting is more similar to fantasy, so clearly it’s more female oriented, despite containing some light lesbian themes. Not hard to guess which game sold more! However, Bionic Heart became a sort of cult game; I even spotted it in a newsgroup (alt.sex.fetish.robots). You know you have “made it” when you’re in such a group! Bionic Heart was the first game to be fully voiced and was quite popular also because of that. Unfortunately after that game, I realized that finding reliable voice actors is like trying to find a needle in a haystack, so I decided to forget about using them, especially for games with lots of text like VN.

“You know you have ‘made it’ when you’re in [alt.sex.fetish.robots]!”

Guide us through the development process for one of your visual novels.

Celso: I believe it’s very similar to what happens in movies. First I write down a basic idea of the game, including the beginning and AN end. Yes, because visual novels traditionally have SEVERAL endings. It is cool to know that if one ending doesn’t come out too good, you can always add another! Then, I start writing down a list of the characters, including their essential traits (scar on the face, breast size D) and making a list of the various poses/clothes that need to be produced. For some scenes, I even do sketches myself. [Below] is my sketch for Heileen 2.

Celso: Rather than describe the pose, I just sent my artist Rebecca that marvelous masterpiece, which she turned into [the image below] (as you can see is hard to spot the difference from my original sketch).

After all the art is ready (even if I often start earlier), I start writing the various dialogues. They look as funny as this interview since my English is far from perfect, so I also need to ask proofreaders to edit all my texts.

As an Indie developer, what’s right and wrong with Steam?

Celso:   Right — They provide a new channel to indies to get known and make money.
Wrong — They don’t carry my games!

Think for a moment from the mind of a player: if I see that my favorite indie game is on Steam, and considering Steam has discounts 350 days a year, I am NOT going to buy directly from the author. There isn’t much that we can do as indies to prevent this. It’s normal in a major channel of distribution to grab more people with discounted sales.

“[Considering] Steam has discounts 350 days a year, I am NOT going to buy directly from the author.”

Got a funny customer story you’d like to share?

Celso: When I was just starting, I got a weird email from a customer asking how he could register my game Universal Boxing Manager. I replied with the info, but the customer said “but I don’t see any way to enter my serial code.” I had left the FULL version uploaded on my site for a week instead of the demo! And what’s even funnier is that in that period I got more sales than usual for that game!

Tell us about your latest project!

Celso: My latest project was Vera Blanc: Full Moon. I wanted to do a mystery/detective VN game with a “comic feeling” typical of film noir. The manga art was clearly not a good choice this time, and I opted for a classic western comic style. You have a map-system and several minigames that will challenge you. Originally, this was conceived to be a series of games, and the second episode is finished (being proofread right now). I’m also working on a sci-fi RPG with beautiful manga art called Planet Stronghold. I plan to release a public alpha very soon with an autoupdating system so people can always play the latest version.

“Celso Riva Rants!” — You have been given 5 minutes on stage at the IGF awards show and asked to tell everyone what is wrong with Indie Gaming. This is your time – make it count!

Celso: When I see people quitting their jobs now, I am scared for them. Don’t listen to the iPhone fables where a peasant finds an iPhone on the ground and in a few days, he codes a super-prankster game and makes a fortune. Also, major corporations are basically destroying game value. What we can see is exactly what happened in various other forms of creative arts in the past:  mass-production, precise standard, high level of polish, but no originality or new mechanics.

Also this year can be called “The Return of the Middlemen.” What made indies so cool, the direct customer contact, is getting lost. Middlemen definitely abandoned the old rusty retail model and jumped in mass on the ESD. You see Apple Appstore; Windows 8 will also ship with an appstore. Then there’s Android, the social games, and the list goes on. I’m not saying that you can’t make good money, only that it is incredibly more difficult, and if you thought you could make money [merely] with something original, think twice.

Half a Million Seconds with Dave Marsh from NimbleBit

// July 22nd, 2010 // No Comments » // Half a Million Seconds

Based on an interview originally featured on ModDB.com

In this latest episode of ” Half a Million Seconds with an Indie Developer, ” we sit down (virtually) with Dave Marsh, one head in the three headed (sprinting) turtle that is NimbleBit. You might know Dave and the Bits from one of their plethora of iPhone games or from their PC title – Zero Gear.

LEO JAITLEY Of DEJOBAAN GAMES: Who are you?

DAVE MARSH: It’s probably best if I do a little personal introduction in the context of our team so that I don’t hog the spotlight:

Hi, my name is David Marsh, and I am one of the three amigos that make up NimbleBit. I make many of the shiny and colorful stuff in our games, as well as pretty much anything else that needs to be done as long as it doesn’t involve touching or writing code (which makes me stutter and drool).

The other two super-friends are my twin brother Ian Marsh, who is an iPhone developer whiz as well as doing a fair share of graphics artistry and Brian Cronin who is a beef jerky and mountain dew fueled engineering and programming evil genius.

LEO JAITLEY: A picture’s worth a thousand words. Got a 10 thousand word picture of your latest project?

LEO JAITLEY: So tell us a bit about your background as a game developer. Why did you go indie and how did NimbleBit come about? What did you friends and fam say when you said you were “going indie”?

DAVE MARSH: I started mucking about with level editors for Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and Half-Life in the very last bit of the 1990′s and my passion for constructing games has been set in stone since then. Eventually a few of my levels made their way into the original Counter-Strike which in turn landed me the opportunity to work at Troika Games on Vampire: Bloodlines. Working at Troika was my first chance to be involved with working on games along side many talented and passionate people, and it really was a great high to do so.

Right after the project shipped, the studio was forced to shut down, and it was in that time of turbulence that I really started to understand how the game industry worked, and how out of control you actually had to be in much of the time in order to be granted the opportunity to make games that way. For 5 or 6 years after that I hopped from studio to studio and it was confirmed further each place I went that this whole business structure was totally wrecking the high that I first got from working on games.

All three of us NimbleBit members ended up working at the same company when our cynicism about making games for interests other than our own reached critical mass. Eventually I think we came to the conclusion that we were still so enamored with the possibilities of making games that we had to try to do it on our own terms. We had been following the independent game development scene with great interest, and we thought that if other people were doing it, why not us! So eventually we found the three of us making games together as NimbleBit.

When we decided to try and make our own independent games, most of our friends and family wished us luck because we had been talking about how “I think we could do this too!” for so long.

LEO JAITLEY: Tell us about your workspace – are you a “work from home while watching Oprah” kinda dev, a “get out of bed and trudge through the snow to the office” kind, or something else?

DAVE MARSH: We have worked in a lot of different combinations of living rooms and spare bedrooms. Our current situation is a bit split up, so my brother and I work from a one room office in San Diego, and Brian works from home in San Francisco with his two cats, Dr. Snuggles and professor John K. Wiggles. When we really need to focus on one thing we try to all get in the same place to work as much as possible.

LEO JAITLEY: You wake up on a Wednesday morning. Congratulations — you have a full day’s work ahead of you! What do you get done in the first hour? (Okay, go on and tell us about the subsequent 10 hours.)

DAVE MARSH: I usually leave for the office at 9:00 and get there around 9:20. The very first thing I do is start booting up my laptop, and immediately start the coffee making. This is probably the most pivotal part of my entire day. I check my mail and whatever else is interesting at the moment on the interwebs and shoot the shit with Ian until the coffee is brewed, which means my brain can start functioning and I can get on about making games. We usually have a little Google voice conference call with Brian at this point, to keep us all on the same page and then we go about our business.

For me, it could almost be something different every day. When you only have a few developers, everyone has to wear a lot of different hats. So I might be modeling something, or making a website, or scripting a level or trying to promote one of our games. A lot of stuff we do is actually the first time we have tried our hand at things, which usually is pretty exciting. Some other aspects of having a studio, like dealing with the legal and business side of things is not very exciting to be doing for the first time at all.

LEO JAITLEY: Would you classify yourself as more of an artist or a tech wiz? Master of biz? Maybe you do it all, tell us about it Jack…

DAVE MARSH: I am very much an artist / designer type, but I will try my hand at almost anything!

LEO JAITLEY: We have a few favorite moments in our studio’s history — care to share one of yours?

DAVE MARSH: We are still a very young studio, so I hope most of my most memorable moments are still to come. The two moments that personally stick out for me, is the point when the three of us finally decided to band together and make games together. We all have a lot of respect for each other as developers and I think it gave us a lot of confidence to know that we trust each others abilities that much.

As of this writing, I think the most recent milestone for NimbleBit was finally seeing our game Zero Gear up for pre-order on Steam[UPDATE: Zero Gear is now out!!]. Zero Gear is our first big project, and seeing it up there after 2 and a half years of work somehow finally made it “real” and that we are finally going to be able to see what kind of a path we can carve out for NimbleBit.

LEO JAITLEY: Tell us about a game that inspired you to MAKE games.

DAVE MARSH: I would have to say that my biggest inspiration was actually an engine, not a game. I’m not sure I would be making games if I hadn’t been completely obsessed (to the detriment of my teenage social life) with the half-life modding scene. There was such an explosion of game development that came out of the half-life engine then, it was a very exciting time for me. There was tons of people just like me who were new to making games, but had lots of ambitious ideas and were eager to explore them with others.

LEO JAITLEY: How does NimbleBit keep their beards so healthy and lustrous?

DAVE MARSH: This is probably one of the most often asked questions we hear, and I can’t divulge too much information other than to say it involves a steady diet of beef jerky and orange oil treatments. The overwhelming scent has the additional bonus of keeping one’s self awake during late night game jamming.

So, there you have it. An interview by Dejobaan Games with fellow indie NimbleBit.

Half a Million Seconds with an Indie Developer: Alex from Gaijin Games

// June 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Half a Million Seconds

In this series of articles from team Dejobaan on Indie development, we interview Alex Neuse of Gaijin Games in a piece we are calling “Half a Million Seconds with and Indie Developer”. Alex tells us about his Studio’s work on WiiWare games and why other Indies should get in on the action!

Before we jump in, just a reminder. If you played AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity and loved it, please vote for us  for Indie Game of the Year: http://www.moddb.com/games/aaaaa-a-reckless-disregard-for-gravity

In slow-mo blow-by-blow action here’s Alex….

LEO JAITLEY OF DEJOBAAN: Please introduce yourself! What’s your background as a game developer? Why did you go indie and what did you friends and family say when you said you were “going indie”?
ALEX: My name is Alex Neuse, and I’m the designer/CEO at Gaijin Games. I’ve been in the industry for over a decade and initially got into it for my deep deep love of the medium. I ultimately decided to “go indie” because I was sick of workin’ for The Man. I was sick of people other than myself holding the creative control on every project I worked on. I had creative game ideas, and by gum I was going to show the world! I found two other like-minded dudes, and away we soared into creative freedom! Friends and family have been (and continue to be) very supportive. It could be because now I don’t complain about work as much, but I like to think it’s because they believe in me. ;)

LEO JAITLEY: What’s your favorite 6502-based computer?

ALEX: Dude. If you have to ask, you clearly don’t know me as well as I thought you might! 2600, holmes! In all honesty, though, this is a tough question, as the NES also had the chip (I think). But seeing as how the 2600 was so influential in my life, I have to go with the 2600. Mind you, I play my NES a buttload more than I play my 2600.

LEO JAITLEY: WiiWare – something every Indie should get into?

ALEX: WiiWare is interesting. It’s a great platform for original, off-the-wall game ideas that are of a smaller scale. I think this is what Nintendo wanted when they launched the service as well. The download limitations and system constraints make certain that developers think outside of the box. I would love to see more indies supporting the service, because I think it could become a great home for small, innovative games. However, I would honestly recommend that indies try to go multi-platform. This is something that we’re toying with at the moment, because there just aren’t enough WiiWare consumers to justify WiiWare exclusivity–at least not yet (CONNECT YOUR WIIS TO THE INTERNETZ, FOLKS!)

LEO JAITLEY: Tell us about your workspace – are you a “work from home while watching Oprah” kinda dev, a “get out of bed and trudge through the snow to the office” kind, or something else?

ALEX: All of us at Gaijin Games are snow-trudging-office-goers. Having a place to go to focus 100% on work has been huge for us. There are just too many distractions at home. And if we were at home, our constant “off-gassing” might irritate those around us. Having an office is a great benefit. It’s dedicated workspace. It’s a meeting place for business cohorts/partners. It’s a legitimizing thing as well. Banks and other business partners just love seeing “Suite 29-204″ on your address.

LEO JAITLEY: You wake up on a Wednesday morning. Congratulations — you have a full day’s work ahead of you! What do you get done in the first hour? (Okay, go on and tell us about the subsequent 10 hours.)

ALEX: The first hour is usually eaten up by doing businessy things. I catch up on emails, interviews, friend requests, and blog comment moderation. After that, we get down to the fun stuff. The other dudes usually roll in about an hour after I do, and we start by talking about our loved ones and how awesome they are as we finish off our morning coffee. Post coffee-time, we get our Scrum on. Our morning scrum consists of the usual scrumlike behavior. What happened, what’s happening, what’s not happening… After that, on the best days, we’ll have a few more post-scrum conversations about how to make things more awesome, and then we’ll all plug in and work in COMPLETE SILENCE. We are very strict.

But actually, we do spend a lot of time in quietude, working on our own disciplinary tasks. Often, we’ll ask each other to play something or try something new out. Oh, and we belch constantly. After a good 8 – 10 hours of that, we hit the road and walk, bike, or drive home to get more good stories about our loved ones for coffee the next day. We try to work very hard during the day to minimize crunch and general overtime/slackagawea.

LEO JAITLEY: Would you classify yourself as more of an artist or a tech wiz? Master of biz? Maybe you do it all, tell us about it Jack…

ALEX: I would classify myself as a dreamer. I don’t think I’m a wiz at anything that can’t be preceded by a good old fashioned “what if…” I’m a decent/good designer. Decent/poor artist and poor/embarrassing tech guy. My business acumen is ever growing, and I think I do ok on that front. Being that there are only 3 of us, we all wear multiple hats, and help out any way we can.

LEO JAITLEY: Dejobaan has a few favorite moments in our studio’s history — care to share one of yours?

ALEX: One of our favorite moments was when we deciphered a very challenging puzzle presented at a GDC lecture using nothing more than unbridled video game knowledge and were awarded with the Tomb Raider game of our choice by Tim Longo over at Crystal Dynamics. Oh wait. That hasn’t happened yet.

LEO JAITLEY: Tell us about a game that inspired you to MAKE games.

ALEX: Rez. It’s a game that you know about. If by chance you don’t, then color me very VERY disappointed. Rez has so much depth which is only discovered once you really start thinking about the game and pondering its meaning. Now, of course, you don’t have to get into the depth of the game to enjoy it–it works on a completely brainless level as well. But there is so much going on in the “heart” of that game that it has been (and continues to be) one of my biggest inspirations. I may have beaten that game more than 100 times. Oh. Oh yes. I play Rez.

LEO JAITLEY: A picture’s worth a thousand words. Got any 10,000,000 word pictures?

LEO JAITLEY: Is there a question you wish we had just asked you (and what’s the answer?)?

ALEX: I wish you had asked me to do a speed Q/A live, while wearing a toga and being suspended above a tank of Thai iced tea and if I didn’t get through all the questions, then I would be dropped into the iced tea and pointed and laughed at by Japanese omelet chefs who would then serve me warm omelets once I was backstage. If I had answered the questions right, the stagehands would tip the iced tea onto you, and the chefs would point and laugh at you instead. I would still get the omelets backstage though.

Half a Million Seconds with Cliffski, Wildly Successful Indie Developer

// June 9th, 2010 // Comments Off // Half a Million Seconds

This is the face of a British indie game developer. Examine it. Imagine your hands caressing his cheeks. Feel your fingers play over his ears. You are touching Cliff Harris of Positech Games.

–> LEO JAITLEY OF DEJOBAAN GAMES: Please introduce yourself! Who are you, and what’s your background as a game developer?
CLIFFSKI: I’m Cliff Harris, an English geek who started programming age 11 (yes really), but had a detour as a rock star wannabe before ending up working at Elixir, and then at Lionhead before eventually going full time as bedroom coder, about 20 years after everyone else did it.

–> LEO JAITLEY: I’ve heard through the grapevine that you just bought a new mansion. Congratulations! Care to tell us about it?
CLIFFSKI: I have indeed moved out into ‘the sticks’ as we say over here. I used to live near Guildford, but I’ve moved to deepest Wiltshire into a very strange house built 20 years before Napoleon was born. It has a well in the cellar and we occasionally find pheasants and deer in the garden. It’s about as English as it could possibly be. If you ignore the TV aerial it would actually look at home in a BBC costume drama. Plus it’s not far from Salisbury plain where they train British tanks, so you see ‘warning, tanks crossing’ signs locally. It’s cool.

–> LEO JAITLEY: They call you Cliffski – I thought you were English, not Polish! (Who came up with your nickname?)
CLIFFSKI: I worked for a guy who was called muffski, so they called me cliffski. I don’t know why. I’m not polish. It was best not to ask questions back then.

–> LEO JAITLEY: Gratuitous Space Battles. A good name or a great name for a space game?
CLIFFSKI: An awesome name. Plus it doubles up as a great headline for reviews.

–> LEO JAITLEY:Why did you go indie? What did you mum, dad, husband, or wife say when you said you were “going indie”?
CLIFFSKI: My better half is very supportive. Other relatives are suspicious. I’m not sure they really understand that I don’t have a boss, or that I’m not unemployed. People in my family don’t start businesses as a rule. There is always a lot of nervous twiddling of thumbs when we all get together and people bitch about their employer. Still, I was a boatbuilder, then a musician, then I worked on financial software, so it’s nothing new for them to not really understand what I do for a living.

–> LEO JAITLEY:Tell us about your workspace – are you a “work from home while watching Oprah” kinda dev, a “get out of bed and trudge through the snow to the office” kind, or something else?
CLIFFSKI: I only trudge downstairs to the office, but it is freezing in this house, so I wouldn’t rule out snow in the living room. I do actually leap out of bed and code straight away. I’m not the stereotypical lazy geek who starts at 10AM. I’m coding by 8.30 most days. To clarify, that’s in the morning…

–> LEO JAITLEY: You wake up on a Wednesday morning. Congratulations — you have a full day’s work ahead of you! What do you get done in the first hour?
CLIFFSKI: Email. Email is the first warning sign of disaster, so I check it first. I always check the sales to make sure they haven’t totally collapsed, and I zap through my website forums to check for anything really urgent. I have this guarantee that people can redownload a game they bought even 10 years ago, so over the years that builds up into a constant trickle of emails from people who need their download link re-activated, so there are always some of them. I flip through a lot of games news sites quickly as I eat my bacon butty too.

–> LEO JAITLEY: Okay, go on and tell us about the subsequent 10 hours.
CLIFFSKI: Lots of staring at code, then some typing. A bacon sandwich. Then some frowning. Some Tea. Then some more typing. Some staring at code. A bigger sandwich and maybe crisps. Then some frowning. Some Tea. Then some staring at code. Some typing. Then lamb meatballs with spaghetti. Then a game of Company of heroes, accompanied by white wine. Then some typing, some staring at code, some tea, and bed.

–> LEO JAITLEY: Would you classify yourself as more of an artist or a tech wiz? Master of biz? Maybe you do it all, tell us about it Jack…ummm Cliff
CLIFFSKI: I do everything at a level slightly above mediocre. hence my immense success. I’m probably not a tech wiz. I’m very good at working out what I need to know, and working with it. I know the C++ and the php and the marketing that I need. A lot of tech geeks become experts on irrelevant stuff they never use. I think it’s called .Net. I just don’t waste time learning stuff I don’t need. That’s why I can’t swim or click my fingers. If I did a game about an underwater wizard who cast spells by clicking his fingers, clearly I’d rectify that.

–> LEO JAITLEY: We have a few favorite moments in our studio’s history — care to share one of yours?
CLIFFSKI: Feargal Sharky led a chorus of Happy Birthday to me at a press conference on my last birthday. That never happened when I was a boatbuilder. I was very happy to get the boxed copy of Kudos, just because the box looks fantastic. I also got to write an article on games for the national ‘Guardian’ newspaper, and thus tell everyone I was a proper paid journalist. That was fun.

–> LEO JAITLEY: Tell us about a game that inspired you to MAKE games.
CLIFFSKI: Elite. Or Sim City. They are both so staggeringly awesome given how small the code was, that it just boggles my mind. I always feel that the ghost of the still-alive David Braben is sitting on my shoulder saying “You have 2 gig of RAM, is that the best you can do?”

–> LEO JAITLEY: A picture’s worth a thousand words. Got any photos you’d like to share of…yourself, your team. (Before coffee. After coffee. Whatevs.)
CLIFFSKI: I am the team. I hire people to do work for different games, depending on requirements. I’ve used the composer Jesse Hopkins a lot. I used a great spacehip artist called Charles Oines too. I have visual studio dominating my workspace. That and the windows sidebar, just so I can watch the value of the dollar exchange rate through gritted teeth, and grumble about the weather on twitter. Back in meatspace, my new office is pretty good because there is a tree right by the window that has a bird feeder on it, and I often spot a squirrel hanging on to it by his teeth, which amuses me vastly.

–> LEO JAITLEY: Got some screenies of something you have in progress?

–> LEO JAITLEY: Is there a question you wish we had just asked you (and what’s the answer?)?
CLIFFSKI: You didn’t ask me if I was really married at Vegas by Elvis, or about driving that Challenger Tank. Or if it’s true that I taught Richard E Grant to use a computer, Or me winning a helicopter lesson in a gunfight, Or about my father being a redshirt in Star Trek TOS. And you certainly didn’t ask me which one of those I made up.

[Answer: E]

So, there you have it. An interview by Dejobaan Games with fellow indie Positech Games.

Half a Million Seconds with Dejobaan Games’ Ichiro Lambe

// May 30th, 2010 // 1 Comment » // Half a Million Seconds

My name is Ichiro Lambe, and I’m the President of Dejobaan Games, LLC. This is like saying you’re the Grand High Emperor of Monaco. It’s awesome, but to put things into perspective, big studios such as Electronic Arts spend as much money throwing a cocktail party as we do developing an entire game. I’m going to tell you a bit about the life of our studio during the development of our 13th title, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity (Aaaaa! for short). If you haven’t played it yet, give it a try: www.dejobaan.com/aaaaa. Its available on our site as well as on Steam etc… We launched it on September 3rd.

Dejobaan Games is tiny and lightning fast. A half dozen people worked on Aaaaa! Total dev time will come to somewhere between 3,000 and 6,000 man-hours — we like to compare that to a larger studio, which might hit upwards of a million man-hours for a single title. There’s a balance here: their games are huge and gorgeous, but ours are quirky, and only need to sell a quarter million dollars worth for us to be able to pay for food.

We work with a hodgepodge of different systems. We’ve established the absolute minimum equipment you can get away with thusly:

• 1.5MHz single core CPU
• Windows XP
• 2GB RAM
• 512MB 3D card
• Dual displays
• Probably a mouse

Based on those stats, you likely have enough processing power on your desktop to start two indie game studios.

Our core team comprises three people (a company/dev lead, a pr/marketing guy, and a gameplay architect). It’s one of the best teams I’ve had the pleasure of working with since my first exposure to the industry in ’92. By the end of any given day, we’ll typically a) do one extraordinary great thing, and b) avert one crisis. For example, the day we wrote this, we had just finished a massive promo on Steam that managed to double sales in 2 days! We file that under “great.” We also managed not to get arrested for necrophilia. We file that under “crisis averted.”

We get our inspiration from things we see in everyday life. The whole concept of Aaaaa! came when our creative guy, Dan Brainerd sent around BASE jumping videos. Here’s a picture of Dan in a hospital, with a hole the size of a #2 pencil in his left leg. He claims that the idea for the game’s “Flip-It” Glove (which allows you to flip off protesters for points) came from the hand in the foreground.

Again, our indie studio is like Monaco to the AAA’s European Union. Monaco has a GDP of about $976 million. The EU’s GDP is twenty thousand times as large. Crazy! To keep costs down, we’ll often snag our friends for bit parts. The singer at the center of the photo is Alicia F, whose voice is so expressive that we asked her to do the game’s opening monologue, and so lovely that we couldn’t resist asking her to sing some of the songs. I hope she’s reading this now. Similarly, we have offered summer internships as a cost-effective way to get talented undergrads in exchange for industry experience.

We tend to wear many hats, in contrast to the specialized roles you find in larger studios. The same guy who does voice-overs also builds levels and writes back-story. Our Business Development guy writes press releases, but he also helps design algorithms for procedural content generation. Generalization is fun, but it has its tricky bits. For example…

…there are probably thousands of people in the world who are more familiar with mixers than I am. The reason that most of the knobs are dusty is because I don’t actually know what they all do. What does PFL mean? I could slog through a manual, but I’d have to stop writing this article to make time for that.

A healthy handful of indies make good out there. I’ll always scan the aisles of gaming stores for their titles — these are generally priced below larger ones, but the development overhead’s smaller, making them profitable. Here’s one from PomPom games, based in the UK. Do you know what else they have in the UK? They have Vindaloo, which is great, and will put hair on your chest. Other people’s hair.

Boston has a vibrant game development community, with companies like Harmonix (Guitar Hero), Turbine (Lord of the Rings Online), and ATI (now part of AMD) within two miles of us. Every month, industry members get together at the Boston Post Mortem to drink and talk at each other. This is a good place to network, and we learn lessons from other studios. What’s the best way to tune gameplay for a hardcore audience? How do you keep it accessible to casual gamers? What was your last big screw-up, and how do we avoid screwing up too?

I just noticed that the two people towards the center of the photo are wearing matching sweaters. Isn’t that adorable? The game development industry is sometimes style-conscious. To wit:

[Photo Credit: Sheraz C.]
There I am. To stand out in a sea of developers, we follow these dress guidelines:

• Sport coat. This says: “I am totally probably a real businessman.”
• Casual dress shirt. I’m ridiculously skinny, so I like to wear fitted shirts. Otherwise, I look like I’m wearing a sack.
• Designer jeans. We could wear slacks, but we’d look like we were trying too hard.
• Good shoes. My BizDev guy says that you can wear the rattiest jeans, and if you have a well-polished, stylish shoe, you’ll look fabuloso. Since he goes around with a petite blonde who’s also a scientist, I trust him. But come to think of it, he’s almost obnoxious about shoes. You know what? Go ask him about fashion advice for geeks: ljaitley-at-dejobaan-dot-com. I’ve threatened to fill up his inbox for a long time, and it’s time I followed through.
• Thousand-yard stare with half-grin. People don’t know what it means, so they are often inclined to think you know something they don’t. With that kind of expression, you could be armed. I am not armed.

The dress code is actually important here. Publishers will take you seriously if you’re not wearing a black gaming T and Vans. Go figure.

As with everything good in life, the first half of Aaaaa!’s development ended with a party. The pre-order launch event was a way to try the game out on people who weren’t familiar with it. Alcohol Alcohol Alcohol. We tested whether they could navigate the new menuing interface; whether the gameplay tutorials made sense; whether they could hit the landing platform on the first try; and so forth. The earlier levels turned out to be accessible to non-gamers and gamers-alike, which meant: success! (The black bars are to protect the testers’ identities. Also, one of them them is a lawyer.)

So, what’s next? Many, many late nights. Lots of mucking around, trying to hammer game mechanics from our prototypes into something unique and fun for the next game. There really is lots of work, but I’m happy to say that come Sunday night, we’re always excited to go back to it. And when we’re done, we enjoy the euphoria of launching our 14th title. Check out some prototype videos now.

We Interview Indie Developer Lazy 8′s Rob Jagnow

// March 2nd, 2010 // Comments Off // Half a Million Seconds