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.

This one was completely stolen from our buddy Darius Kazemi over at Tiny Subversions. A great little piece on how some big studios might might develop an Indie game…

Okay team. Word’s come on down from high: inexplicably we are realigning our resources and focusing on the, um, burgeoning Xbox Live Indie Games market. Our analysts have determined that XBLIG is a hit-driven business. Well by god then we’re going to need to come up with a hit game.

Market analysis time, you know the drill! Jenkins, load up that PowerPoint deck and give it to me straight.

Yes sir. Top 10 best selling Xbox Live Indie Games at the moment:

1. I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1
2. Baby Maker Extreme
3. The Impossible Game
4. Avatar Ninja
5. Try Not to Fart
6. Avatar Paintball
7. Super Avatar World
8. How Smart Are You? IQ Test
9. Zombie Estate
10. Avatar Racedrome

Four avatar games (4, 6, 7, 10). Two zombie games (1, 9). Two games whose primary appeal is to a nine-year-old boy’s sense of humor (2, 5). Two games that position themselves as a direct challenge to the talents of the player (3, 8). And those are simply categorized by primary characteristics. Several games share many of the other characteristsics.

Sir, in my opinion, if we want a hit game on XBLIG, it needs to contain avatars, zombies, puerile humor, and some kind of macho posturing.

[A hit game on XBLIG] needs to contain avatars, zombies, puerile humor, and some kind of macho posturing.

Thanks Jenkins. Who’s here with the presentation from the research group? Ah, Peabody, excellent. What have you got for us?

Sir, we’ve played through every one of the top 10 XBLIG games. We lost three good researchers, but I believe you will find what we gained in intel is well worth the cost. Sir, it appears that Try Not To Fart is simply masquerading as a game about farting. Our research shows that Try Not To Fart is actually a dating simulator. The game’s story stars a male protagonist and begins at his first date with a young woman, through the first kiss, up through marriage and the couple having their first child. The humor comes from the juxtaposition of important life events with a series of quick time events where you must successfully not fart during these interactions.

However, the the humor appears to be a clever decoy. What actually happens as you play the game, particularly if you play it well, is you are treated to a movie where a gamer geek somewhat successfully navigates a relationship with an attractive woman.

Sir, it our opinion that the true draw of Try Not To Fart is that it is an instructional video which allows a 12-year-old boy to learn about dating while being able to save face if his peers find it installed on his Xbox. “It’s not a dating game! It’s a game about FARTING, which all of us young whippersnappers know is hilarious and awesome.” Try Not To Fart is made by Silver Dollar Games, who have many dating-related titles on Xbox Live Indie Games, including one called Don’t B Nervous Talking 2 Girls. This game is an overt instructional program which is heavily mocked on the internet, yet is the 2nd-best-selling title in the “role playing” category on XBLIG. We believe that Silver Dollar learned their lesson, and decided to create a covert dating instructor with Try Not To Fart. The strategy appears successful.

Excellent work as always, Peabody. Send flowers to the families of your departed researchers.

Gentlemen, it appears we have our formula for a hit game. We’re going to have to create a stealth dating simulator with avatars, zombies, and poopie humor that positions itself as a direct challenge to the masculinity of the player.

Wait. I’ve got it.

Don’t Poop On Your Zombie Girlfriend Or She’ll Leave Your Avatar For Me Instead!1!

[applause, standing ovation]

Now now. Thank you. Thank you. That’s why they pay me the big bucks.

What secrets do indie game developers keep from you? Fresh off the gossip mill, three more wildly insightful Indies quench their developer thirst in this edition of Indie Water Cooler: Adam Saltsman, who designed Canabalt and the free Flash game dev library Flixel, Andy Schatz, who made the IGF nominated Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, Venture Arctic, and the IGF Grand Prize winning Monaco: The Grace Kelly Story, and Chris DeLeon of Topple, burnit, and other iPhone and freeware games.

Just like any other water cooler, anything goes. There’s even a rare glimpse at the not-so-subtle mating rituals of two of the industry’s finest.  It’s all about keeping that Indie pedigree pure!

Question 1: What’s the Indie scene truly like in your eyes? Why might gamers perceive a disconnect among Indie developers?

Adam Saltsman: Is “family” too warm and fuzzy a word?  I don’t know if there is a disconnect or not, but I do know some people are surprised when I am excited to go to conferences. They don’t understand that I only see my best friends a few times a year, and that is an overwhelming and inspiring thing every time I do.

Chris DeLeon: While I don’t consider myself in competition with anyone, I’m deliberately not tightly-knit with the rest of the Indie community, either. I know these people, I value and love these people, but I’m wary of Indies forming a clique [leading to] groupthink or accidentally becoming an ad hoc “brand” to the public eye. I find that when I keep my communications relatively rare, I have more to share when paths do cross, and I’m happiest when it feels like what I’ve been making is out in left field – when I finally do catch up on what others are doing, it’s similarly a genuine surprise to me.

“I’m wary of Indies forming a clique [leading to] groupthink or accidentally becoming an ad hoc ‘brand’ to the public eye.”

Andy Schatz: I don’t think gamers think too much about this stuff.  They mostly care about the games, not the developers.  And in the cases where they seem to know the development side of things, they often understand the truth behind it all, which is that Adam Saltsman is my father.

Question #2: Can the following be “indie” studios?

A studio that has more than 20 people working for it?

Adam Saltsman: Yes

Andy Schatz: Yes

More than 100?

Adam Saltsman: Yes

Andy Schatz: Despite there being nothing that precludes a big studio from being technically “indie”, it’s hard to imagine feeling comfortable describing a 100 person company as indie. I always laugh when I hear a big studio that self-publishes describe themselves as indie, it always seems like they are trying to cash in on the cache’ of the term.

A studio that’s owned by another company?

Adam Saltsman: Presents challenges

Andy Schatz: No, most definitely not indie.

A 5-person studio owned by a small publisher?

Adam Saltsman: Also presents challenges

Andy Schatz: Nope

A studio that works solely on publisher-owned IP?

Adam Saltsman: Presents even more challanges.

Andy Schatz: Yes, but their games aren’t indie.

id Software, before they were purchased?

Adam Saltsman: Totally!

Andy Schatz: Yeah, I definitely think id was indie for most of that time.

A studio that earns more than ten million dollars a year?

Adam Saltsman: Not sure what money has to do with it…

Andy Schatz: Sure, why not? We can all dream.

The Behemoth?

Adam Saltsman: Obviously!

Andy Schatz: Yes

Zynga?

Adam Saltsman: No, a thousand times no! never.

Andy Schatz: Maybe, who cares, fuck them.

Got anything else to add here?

Adam Saltsman: To me the only metric that is useful or interesting is “do you get to make the thing you are passionate about” because that means the thing you are making is made with LOVE and that is important.

Question #3: So, how would you define “Indie,” anyway? Who, specifically, isn’t Indie?

Andy Schatz: Adam Saltsman.  For both questions.

People like to say that this question doesn’t matter, but for me it does. Not so much in terms of grouping other developers but in having an internal directive for the type of work I do. Also, [being] Indie is having complete creative control and the ability to make one’s own business decisions. I think one reason it feels weird to call a giant company “Indie” is that size constrains the types of business and creative decisions that you can make. I can only think of one company (Valve) that just kind of does what they want regardless of size.  And that’s probably a misconception in itself.

I am certainly not immune to my environment, making decisions solely based on my whims.  But for the most part, Pocketwatch Games is steered by the future, not the present conditions of the company.

“[Being] Indie is having complete creative control and the ability to make one’s own business decisions.”

Adam Saltsman: Labels are just that, but I find Indie as a label personally useful for studios that use things that seem like constraints to pursue their passions. Not having millions of dollars and not having hundreds of employees mean you can do things they can’t; you’re risking less. That is interesting because it creates things that wouldn’t exist in a purely commercial industry.

Chris DeLeon: If someone’s primary goal is to make money, and that’s what they’re optimizing against, I don’t consider them Indie. If money is secondary to someone’s artistic principles, creative exploration, or sense of craftsmanship, then they’re either a hobbyist (meaning they don’t make a living from it, and don’t care if they do) or Indie (they have made this work their primary source of income, and use the money earned from it to support committing their full attention to doing it more).

When people start to change their game for marketing reasons, that also reeks of non-indieness. At least for my side/hobby/experimental projects, I would rather say more to few people, than say less to more people, even if it means smaller numbers in my bank account.

There was a GDC panel years ago where all four Indies present were under a completely different assumption of what Indie meant to them – experimental, poetic, passionate, or shoestring budget. If you ask someone what Indie means, and they go on and on about it, or have a very clear answer, that’s generally a good sign. If they start giving developer names or listing game titles, they probably don’t get it.

Adam Saltsman: So this is probably a tangent but I’ve been thinking some about “being Indie,” whatever that means, and “running an Indie company,” which is a little bit different. I treat my personal projects differently from how I treat my company projects, but I think that’s a necessity. I’m really proud of and happy with the work we’ve done as a company, but BECAUSE it’s company work, it can’t be PURELY experimental – we definitely have to stick to stuff we think a lot of people will enjoy because otherwise there’s a good chance we’re going to run out of money.

Doing work for the company that exists ONLY to help me learn something or to do an experiment definitely strikes me as just irresponsible, whereas doing that stuff in my personal projects I view as a sacred necessity. I think of game development as being on three tiers:

1 – pure unsullied experimentation and passion
2 – interesting work that I control and am proud of
3 – shitty work that I can’t control and am embarrassed of and for

Is that a useful view or is that just obsessing over semantics? I view my personal projects as Tier 1, my internal dev projects for work as Tier 2, and some (but not all) of my past commercial freelance work as Tier 3. I guess.

I am more Indie than Andy.

I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there is a little AAA in all of us (except Stephen Lavelle aka Increpare).

“[There] is a little AAA in all of us.”

Chris DeLeon: This was the sort of distinction I was aiming to draw between Indie and hobbyist, although only a few years ago I think both fell under the Indie umbrella. Pure development for its own sake (may or may not be experimental); the type Adam sees as irresponsible if done as part of company business is what I consider hobby development.

If it’s a game I’m making to pay the bills, but I still have creative control over it (tier 2): Indie. The other half of my projects that I pull together to test ideas or get things out of my system, that I have no expectation to make any money from (tier 1): hobby.

Leo Jaitley of Dejobaan: While there are many different ways you can describe what is Indie, I don’t agree with the argument that thinking commercially or making money = bad. I think it is perfectly ok to love gaming, making games AND money. I think to some extent it is about what you make and how you make it. That said, I bet any one of you could come up with 100 ideas for a game that you WOULD want to make, if given 10 hours, AND many of those ideas would be commercially viable… Even if we don’t admit it, those of us who pay the bills through game development NEED to think about this and consciously or subconsciously do it, while making the games we love….

Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan: Bla bla bla this Venn Diagram:

Adam Saltsman: That [diagram is] pretty much exactly our biz strategy!  I guess for me the solid red part is what I feel is REALLY Indie.  But the black part is pretty great, and it helps pay the mortgage.

Chris DeLeon: I don’t agree with [Leo's] argument either. I must have caused confusion or not written clearly. What you are replying to is not what I said.

There are two differences between what you’re arguing against and what I intended to say:

1.) A company, project, or person not being Indie doesn’t make it/him/her bad. The Sims is a good business, and there’s nothing invalid against making things for people that they want. There’s nothing bad about being commercially driven, provided a company isn’t doing things that are unethical. Those projects just aren’t particularly Indie.

“A company, project, or person not being Indie doesn’t make it/him/her bad.”

2.) Making money is different than optimizing against making money. There’s a difference between making money from what we make, as a painter that sells her painting, and making something specifically with the mission to make money from it, as with a poster maker that is trying to design the ultimate 50 Cent, unicorn, or Mickey Mouse poster. The former is making at least a little money, which is all fine and well, especially if the money is used to enable that person to continue focusing on painting. The latter is a purely commercial artifact, built more for a known audience than for the builder of a yet-unknown crowd of fans-to-be, and has little artistic or creative passion underlying its development.

To the extent that business thinking drives visibility (marketing in some sense), that’s important and valid even for Indies because even if everyone in the world would love it, if no one knows about it, then it’s not going to reach anyone.  But there’s a difference between, “Here’s this awesome game we couldn’t help but make. You might like it, too,” versus “We designed this game around what interests and demographics we thought had the largest untapped market potential.”

Question #4: What do you think about AAA studios trying to attach themselves to the “Indie” brand? (For example, Activision’s Indie game competition.)

Adam Saltsman: Fuck those guys.

Chris DeLeon: I’m torn on this point, actually. Sony, through its partnership years ago with thatgamecompany, has built a bridge to the Indie community. I think most of us are glad that Valve ate the Digipen team that made Narbacular Drop to help bring us Portal.  The trade-off [like Activision crowd sourcing their R& D] is, in principle, not far from poorly paid internships:  exploitation in exchange for credential, the latter of which really can go a long way in improving future opportunities. Meanwhile, it will probably prompt a lot of people who were on the fence thinking about it to get off their asses and actually build something presentable, a bit like the purpose that competitions of any sort serve.

Andy Schatz: AAA companies that are trying to make money off Indies are going to find that it’s a very hard road.  They need to stop looking to Indies for the next big hit and look at Indies as a source of renown and buzz. Activision can shape their image by helping out and attaching to truly Indie games only if they do it in such a way that the truly creative Indies will be happy to go along.  Like I said, if they are just trying to grab a piece of the “Indie” pie, they will find it’s not a very filling or tasty piece of pie.  They will end up getting the crusty, moldy piece that’s been lying in the fridge for a month.

“[AAA companies that are just trying to grab a piece of the 'Indie' pie] will end up getting the crusty, moldy piece that’s been lying in the fridge for a month.”

What happens during overtime at the water cooler and these devs start talking to themselves?

Chris DeLeon: What effect do I want my upcoming projects to have on players?

I want them to equip players with new mental tools, to prompt ways of thinking that have relevance to challenges outside of the video game. I want to motivate players to explore, improve, experiment, cooperate, doubt, and create in real life. I worry that video games have an expectation of either being non-stop addictive engagement or otherwise being judged as unworthy of our attention; I’m not concerned with someone’s happiness while they play so much as I hope that they’ll later be glad that they did.

Adam Saltsman: How beautiful is Andy Schatz?   Really beautiful.

Andy Schatz: What do I smell like?  Walnuts and summer evenings.

Please introduce yourself and why you’re awesome.

Adam Saltsman: My name is Adam Saltsman, I designed Canabalt and the free Flash game dev library Flixel, and I live in Austin, TX.

Andy Schatz: I’m Andy Schatz!  I’ve been indie for over 5 years, making the IGF nominated Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa, Venture Arctic, and the IGF Grand Prize winning Monaco. (www.monacoismine.com)

So, there you have it! Does everyone need a little Andy spritz in his or her life?  Is his smell only part of what charms devs like Adam?  What do you think of Chris’s kick-ass contentions or Ichiro’s Venn Diagram skills? Join in on the water cooler action in the comments below. Are you a now-inspired AAA game dev that has that “indie itch” to go and create something REMARKABLE? And check out our previous Indie Water Cooler piece for more!

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.

James thinks Indies must be passionate about their work, having “limited audiences, shaky revenue streams, exceptionally long hours required — all without the slightest guarantee of return in the form of monetary gain or recognition.” What makes their stories so compelling is not the glitz and glam of multimillion dollar budgeted cash cow sequels, rather that “[indie developers] are doing what the majority of us are frightened to do:  they’re following their dreams.”

Follow the dreams and vision of Blinkworks as they share intimate details about IGTM with us below.

“[Indie developers] are doing what the majority of us are frightened to do:  they’re following their dreams.”

Indie Superstar: Everyone already knows about you! But for those who don’t, please introduce yourself and the project.

“We’re a pair of filmmakers from Winnipeg, MB, Canada that like telling stories about creative people. IGTM is our first feature documentary that will look at the lives and connections between independent game developers and their games. Along with personal stories, we’ll be looking at aspects of video game theory like why games are made the way they are.”

Your interviews with Edmund McMillen and Alec Holowka touch on the topics of isolation and alienation. From your research, what is it about that upbringing that leads us to become game developers?

“I think you can take that concept beyond game designers and apply it to most creative endeavors. I know I strongly identified with Edmund’s story – to the point where it is, oddly, one of the most personal pieces I’ve produced. There is likely something to be said about the combination of a loneliness leading to creative pursuits and vice versa. “All things being equal, the more creative you are, the less likely you are to engage in the normal everyday flow of life.  And the less you ‘participate’ in a social sense, the more important creative expression becomes to one’s well-being. Creative people tend to express themselves in different, and often more methodical, contemplative forms – be it painting, writing, film-making or, in this case, video games.”

James was/is a bit of loner by the way. He spent most of his childhood alone making films, drawing and writing stories. And, I think our team is all the better for that.

What’s been the biggest surprise so far?

Everyone we’ve reached out to has been really generous with their time, information, contacts and general encouragement.  And of course, the whole Kickstarter experience is mind boggling, humbling and so much more encouraging than we could have ever hoped for.

Ok, spill the beans — deep down, have you always dreamed of being a game developer?

I think all 80‘s-90‘s video game kids have had those schoolyard discussions of what they would do if they were in charge.  But from the moment I received my first and last game coding book (requiring you to type what seemed like an endless lines of cryptic symbols into your Commodore 64), I’ve always known that game creation resides a few rungs above my technical competence.

Even though we’re making a video game movie, it all remains a confusing alchemy to me.

“I think all 80‘s-90‘s video game kids have had those schoolyard discussions of what they would do if they were in charge”

You’re covering the West Coast big-time, but you’re leaving us New Englanders out — tell us the truth: is it the crappy weather? What about the international scene, any plans to cover the scene in Slovakia?

New England having crappy weather? Have you been to the middle of Canada in January? Now that’s crappy. :) When we launched the project, we had a modest plan. But now, we may broaden our initial scope. We’d sincerely love to cover more of North America and go to Europe. Right now, we’re primarily making our plans based on the stories. If there’s a compelling story to take us somewhere, we’ll be there.

I could see a scenario where we did a follow-up mini-doc on the European scene.

In May, 2010, a hundred of the world’s best-known indies are at a single bar in California. A meteor strikes, destroying the bar and all of its patrons. What does the world lose?

I think the world of video games would immediately be sent back a step or two in the process of reclaiming a true sense of diversity and innovation. With the evolution of indie game developers and related market forces, one strongly gets the sense that real diversity is returning to games. Wiping out those 100 guys would kill some awesome future games and stymie the development of legitimate AAA alternatives.

“Growing Up Edmund” from James and Lisanne’s Indie Game: The Movie made me remember my lonely childhood.

Indie game devs. Indie musicians. Indie moviemakers. Where are we brothers and sisters? Where are we estranged siblings?

Definitely brothers and sisters, with indie music and movies being the considerably older siblings.  It would seem that Indie games are coming of age before our eyes – experiencing the same growth and excitement that indie music and movies experienced decades before. But at the same time, there are a lot of market factors in terms of barriers to entry, means or production and market accessibility that we all have in common right now.  It’s an extremely exciting time to be a filmmaker these days, and I imagine the same can be said about game development.

We’re a studio of two people, working hard and leveraging new technologies to produce a product comparable and able to occupy the same marketplace (to some degree) with major studio fare.  The same is happening with indie games right now. We definitely see indie developers as kindred spirits.  And that was a huge part of the attraction we had to this project.  There is nothing we admire more than people with creative, enterprising spirits.

“There is nothing we admire more than people with creative, enterprising spirits.”

If Indie Game: The Movie accomplishes only one thing on launch, what should that be?

A viewer appreciation for the effort, thought and heart that goes into games.

Who will not make it in the movie because they are not Indie enough?

We don’t have a blacklist of ‘non-indie indies’ as we could never really make that call.  That’s for the always informative, often scary and slightly crazed TIGsource forums to decide.

In fact, we may have to stay away from certain people because they’re just so damn indie we could never capture their indie-ness on film.

There you have it! Keep an eye on the progress of IGTM at www.indiegamethemovie.com. And drop us your comments below — tell these documentarians what you feel about their project’s progress and which sensational indie stories should be included in their film.

Consider it our little contribution towards your PhD in indie gaming. Also this site is new, so if you like how we do the do that we do, tell a friend, tweet about it or join our Facebook group! So, without further ado…

Question #1: Many gamers don’t realize how truly tightly-knit the indie game community is. Tell our readers about the secret society that is Indie Game Development?

Andy Moore: I can’t speak on behalf of the “big studios” out there, but I really do consider the Indie community a “family,” with a deeper-than-friends real sense of comraderie. I’ve been offered places to live if times get tough, and sometimes my direct competitors have offered to lend me a few hundred bucks to make it through a tight spot. A guy I collaborated with a while ago passed up a contract job so that I could get it and reap the substantial rewards. I’d take a bullet for some of those guys, and I really believe there is legitimate “familial love” in our little niche. When we meet, we [indie developers] hug. We don’t shake hands.

When we meet, we [indie developers] hug. We don’t shake hands.

You can extrapolate from there how that affects the business side of things; instead of hidden books, secret deals, and mysterious business practices, everything is laid out in the open. People have given me the full source code to their games just to help out, and things that large corporations normally guard with their lives are shared freely.

Jeff Rosen: The indie community is really tight knit and awesome. If two indies don’t know each other personally from events like GDC, they probably are just one indie removed. It’s always easy to contact us, whether you’re a developer or a gamer. Why do “competitors” stay so closely in touch? One way I like to think of it is that indies are sort of like farmers selling their fruits and vegetables directly in a tiny little farmer’s market.

One way I like to think of it is that indies are sort of like farmers selling their fruits and vegetables directly in a tiny little farmer’s market.

This humble farmer’s market happens to be located right next to a gigantic combination of a Walmart SuperCenter, Target, Safeway, etc. The guy selling his homegrown corn doesn’t try to sabotage the guy selling his pumpkins! Instead, they will share tips like how to grow their crops better and just be happy that they can get 0.001% of the Walmart, etc. visitors to know they exist at all!

Eitan Glinert: The indie scene is basically a vibrant online community and a monthly meet up for me. Generally speaking I don’t draw a giant difference between us and “non-indie” studios. I see us as a new start up trying to claw their way up in the gaming world. If it wasn’t for the online community, I’d probably have very little connection with other indie devs outside of IGF. That said, I think that the indies I interact with are super helpful and friendly, and it’s great moral support for me that other people are trying to do the same stupid start up type stuff.

Question #2: Independent game development is fun. It’s also sometimes rage-inducing — we’ve had our low points. What’s pissed you off most about the indie scene?

Andy Moore: I think the thing that made me the most upset by our little niche was not feeling “included” in all the events. I’m sure it’s as much my introversion as it was others not even thinking about it or making it intentional, but there’s a few cliques that just didn’t pay any attention to me for the longest time. I felt pretty beat up about that at times, but thankfully I’ve always known and been on really good terms with a dozen or so in the community. I can’t imagine how other folks feel that don’t have those connections.

Jeff Rosen: I really have no complaints about fellow developers, but there are some aspects of the indie scene that I find frustrating. We were recently asked to speak at GDC San Francisco, and thus got invited to an exclusive GDC speaker / press mingling event. This was right when we were beginning development of the Humble Bundle, and we thought it would be a great way to explain it to some press people and drop some exclusive info. I remember walking up to a group of 5 journalists from top gaming sites, hanging out amongst themselves. I sort of wedged myself in there during a lull in the conversation and introduced myself as an indie developer. I kid you not, they dispersed before I could even say “Humble Indie Bundle.”

I remember walking up to a group of 5 journalists from top gaming sites… I [introduced] myself as an indie developer. I kid you not, they dispersed before I could even say “Humble Indie Bundle.”

I have never been so snubbed in my life; it was as if I forgot to put on pants or something! That was a pretty low-point for me, and it’s hard not to take personally.

I feel like indie developers can sometimes be the same way though, and that’s something the community can work on. I try to keep Wolfire in check by perpetually idling in our public IRC channel. John mans a live chat widget, and we respond to all email usually within hours. We try to blog every day to keep people up to date with what we’re doing. People have accused us of being naive and this sort of transparency can’t scale. However, we sold 130,000 Humble Indie Bundles and, despite that volume, were able to maintain inbox zero throughout the whole promotion (although at some points it was tough). It’s hard for me to imagine a scenario where you have so many customers and are drowning in money so badly that you just don’t have the time to talk to someone.

Eitan Glinert: The indie scene hasn’t pissed me off too much, to be honest. Game development in general has, and I can definitely point to some big annoying things there, but the indie aspect of it hasn’t really bothered me.

In case you were wondering: yes, Jeff is a superstar, and he is talking about that Humble Indie Bundle!

Question #4: Just ’cause you made an iPhone game doesn’t make you indie… or does it?

Jeff Rosen: I think it does, assuming the qualifications above are met. Whether an iPhone game developer considers himself “indie” or even cares is another question. I feel like most iPhone developers have their own tight-knit community around WWDC and elsewhere and don’t really identify with the “indie scene” that we are discussing, but they are more than welcome!

Eitan Glinert: If it was a thing you are trying to make a living off the iPhone game then yeah, you’re indie. If you have a full time job and are trying to switch to full time game dev by working on the iPhone game at night then yeah, you’re indie. If you are a hobbyist and flooding the market with another shitty shovelware game with nothing innovative then no, you’re not indie.

Andy Moore: The whole question of “what is Indie” is really subjective; we might as well touch on “art” while we’re at it and call Ebert in here. *rolls eyes* But I’ll give you my opinion!

First, I don’t believe being “Indie” is a black-or-white proposition. It’s a sliding scale! By thinking of things this way, you can dodge around a variety of arguments on this subject. Secondly, I think the foundation of “Indie” is the sense of creative control on the product you are making.

Secondly, I think the foundation of “Indie” is the sense of creative control on the product you are making.

A programmer-for-hire for a big company isn’t Indie, but the company itself might be. People within the company might be more indie than others. But smaller teams are more likely to have more creative control, and thus will have a higher Indie-rating than others.

I’m working on SteamBirds 2 right now, and I’m getting a lot of advice and help from outside parties, and teaming up with quite a few people on implementation. This means I’m not entirely 100% indie, but I’m still retaining all of my creative control and only dealing with other indie folks. I figure I’m down to a 95% Indie rating.

The obvious conclusion from this is that if your company is publicly traded — or you are working with or for a company that is — there are certain things you can’t do (no bare tits in Disney games!) and thus your creativity is throttled way back. You suddenly can’t innovate. You start getting marketing folks telling you what to do, and investors laying down demands. Your Indie cred starts scaling back.

That said, your “Indie status” changes from project-to-project, as far as I’m concerned. I was 0% indie for that contract job I did last year, but I’m 95% on the game I’m making now. Does that make me 45% on average? I don’t care! All I know is how I feel now.

Eitan Glinert (after pondering over Jeff’s response): If you are a hobbyist and flooding the market with another shitty shovelware game with nothing innovative then no, you’re not indie.

Andy Moore: I’m going to strongly disagree with you on this point. Being a hobbyist and having direct control over your product is – to me – the very definition of Indie. What you produce with your Indie status may very well be shitty, but it doesn’t make you less Indie. You’re just a Shitty Indie. :P

Eitan Glinert: Yes, if you’re heaping shovelware onto the iPhone you are indie because you did make a game, and that is no small feat. However that doesn’t mean you’re a *good*indie.

So there you have it, folks. Those in the know giving you a sense of how things work on the inside as well as a little insight into what we Indie devs consider to be Indie. Stay tuned for more!

Andy Moore is an Indie Game Developer whose most recent success is SteamBirds, which is playable at ArmorGames right now. He also worked on Fantastic Contraption and its just-launched sequel, FC2. He is currently living in a van while he drives across Canada! Check out his game dev blog here, which includes all sorts of numbers that explain how he can afford to travel the country haphazardly.

Eitan Glinert is the founder and creative director of Fire Hose Games, a new Cam­bridge based indie studio mak­ing down­load­able con­sole games that’ll rock your world. Awe­some! Their first title, Slam Bolt Scrappers, is an inno­v­a­tive mash up of build­ing and brawl­ing. Play­ers will reach for the sky and build the great­est tow­ers in Slam Bolt City while defend­ing against devi­ously charm­ing bad­dies and epic bosses. The game fea­tures 4 way co-op and head to head mul­ti­player, and boasts sim­ple yet sur­pris­ingly deep com­pet­i­tive bat­tle mode. Before Fire Hose Eitan spent sev­eral years mak­ing edu­ca­tional and acces­si­ble games, includ­ing AudiOdyssey, the first Wii Remote game acces­si­ble to the blind. Eitan plays ice hockey reli­giously and thinks Lem­mings is the great­est game ever made.

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.

–> 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.

Caitilin Lynch, PR/Marketing Intern, Dejobaan Games

Children, when your parents lovingly take you on their knees and tell you about the miraculous and beautiful process by which new indie games are made, they probably are not telling you the truth. Games do not spring, fully-formed, from the heads of their godlike creators. Nor are they delivered by busty women in skimpy armor piloting spacecraft, unless you reside in Middle Earth, Bowerstone, Theramore, or some other fictional area code, in which case you’re probably having an awesome time and can disregard this article.

No, the game-making process is an arduous one, and the clever folks at Dejobaan have streamlined the prototyping process by recycling components of previous titles to piece together elements of new prototypes. Like a cute interactive Frankenstein, one of the latest creations is codenamed “DRP :]” — including the smileyface. The prototype’s speedy rate of construction and wild talk around the studio (“Scrap those robots!” and “Increase flamethrower range!”) got me to wondering about how a prototype like this is actually made. Despite the pure and totally invested love I have for video games, I don’t really know what goes into getting one out. Prototyping is just the first step, but in many ways the most important step.

So, for all you out there who feel like there’s something missing in your relationship to your electronic media, here’s a short, 5-step rundown of the prototype development process, according to a learned member of the Dejobaan dev team. He even has a long white beard and pointy hat with stars (although he does not wear it all the time). In a future piece we just might tell you how we go from prototype to published title…but only if you are good.

1. The whole process starts with “Hey, I have an idea.” And then spirals wildly out of control. What’s the basis for the idea? Pain? Lust? Combat? What would robots act like if they could get drunk? What’s a new way to control sound? Who would play this game?

2. It does seem to get crazy during the prototyping phase — the developers combine the detritus from huge brainstorms with assets from previous projects — 3d models, illustration, sounds, and game logic — and toss them together into a shaky, smoking, but workable prototype. That answers the question: Is it fun?

3. After this comes a lengthy cleanup. Dev team members wade through thousands of lines of code, getting rid of excess. If something makes the prototype unenjoyable, axe it! As the quote goes: “A prototype is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

4. Is it marketable? Does anyone want to play it? Does it already exist elsewhere? When we show it off, does it make people drool in anticipation? Would anyone want to buy it? If the team can say, without hesitation, that they can get someone to open up their wallet, remove their hard-earned cash, and give it to us, then we have a marketable game. There are perfectly good games out there that won’t sell — if we make those, we go out of business. Easier said than done, right? For us this means exposing the prototype to friends, enemies, fans and grandmothers and recording their brain activity. When our brain data acquisition system is down, we watch facial expressions, and body language as they play the game (or watch a video) and when they describe their experience.

5. Set it aside. Wait, what? Hey, it’s easy to fall in love with your own creation. Pygmalion did this with Galatea, and ended up in a world of pain (at least until Aphrodite came along). You can create something that excites you, but isn’t going to be any fun for anyone else. As the old saying goes: sometimes you have to kill your babies.

Rolllll out! The game is done. Wasn’t that easy?

Well it seems simple from this side, but after the prototyping phase, games take months (if you’re lucky) to years to create. Breaking the prototyping process into 5 steps is handy for a general overview, but, as with any creative endeavor, these stages tend to blur together until the whole approach looks more like a Pollock than a Mondrian.

(Did you like the art history reference? I think it ties gaming in with fine art, a powerful statement on the bright future of interactive media. And stuff.)

And that’s it! Be awesome — go make your own game!

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.