Two days ago Darek Rusin made a comment on my blog and because I haven’t heard from him for a while I went to his website to check out what he’s up to.  He started Orchid Games and released Heartwild Solitaire.  So far his website is dedicated to just this one game and that made it easier for me to spot the thing that made me mention his website. Right under the title he put Author’s Edition. That made me very interested and I immediately wanted to check out what is so special about this version. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find any info about it. Too bad. It could help “steal” customers from portals.

When we worked on Runes of Avalon we had to remove very nice feature in my opinion – Amulet of Spells. We had to remove it because it didn’t work so great and we didn’t have time to find out how to fix it, but I really believed in Amulet of Spells (you don’t earn money by having great ideas, but by releasing games). This made me thinking about releasing developer’s version of Runes of Avalon. It never happened in the way we know it from movie industry. It was much better for us to release this version as Runes of Avalon 2, as we figured out that amount of changes is too big to make it “just” a special edition.

So you see, it’s worth commenting on blogs. You might get a link to your website for  free ;-)

Just don’t do it.

Find a game that you like to play and would like to develop and clone it. Really! It’s so much easier and you’ll get things done so much quickier. And when you’re small, you shouldn’t waste to much time on research. It’s not that you won’t be able to develop new and fun gameplay mechanic, but the chances are minimal… and you’ll either find it on the first try or give up in the middle of the project.

This is my third innovative game (after Runes of Avalon and Pony World). We will make it fun. It’s fun already, but can you imagine how much effort it took to make it fun? How many times I wanted to quit and would quit if my partners didn’t push on me to move further?

Generally, innovative games are too risky… but may be also very rewarding as everything that is risky (have you put your savings in stocks lately?). What’s your take on this?

How did you start your game development adventure? How big is your studio now?

I knew I wanted to make games since high school. Soon I began learning C++ on my own and made a minesweeper clone and a simple top-down shooter. It was extremely hard to find info on making games though here in Thailand. About the time when I got to college, the internet explosion was just beginning, so with my top-end (at the time) US Robotics 33.6K modem I tried to find and learn everything I could about making games.

Fast forward 5 years later, I got bored with my enterprise software development job after a year and decided to resign and start a software company, thus ViquaSoft was born. At that time J2ME games on cell phones was supposed to be the next big thing, so we did a few games for that, but then I discovered the Dexterity forums and decided that developing casual downloadable games on PC was more exciting and might be more lucrative. So we started developing Tommy and the Magical Words and have focused on downloadable casual games ever since.

Right now we have 8 full-time people at our office here in Bangkok. We started with 3 in the beginning about 4 years ago and have been expanding continuously. Right now we’re expanding again and are looking for some more good programmers.

I am impressed by execution of themes in your game. You surely get maximum fun out of it. Who designs your games?

Thanks :)

The answer to that question is all of us. All 8 of us are the designers of our games.

The process goes like this:

First when we need to come up with a new game idea, we have everyone go back and try to come up with some and we meet and have everyone pitch their concepts. Then we kind of vote to choose the best one. But I still have the final say of course :)

Then when it comes to the actual designing, we do a lot of brainstorming together. We try to gather everyone’s ideas for the game and choose the best ones. This period consists of lots of meetings where we iteratively refine the details of the game design.

You could call this design-by-committee which some say is bad. I’d rather call it design-by-passionate-team :) From our experience if it is managed well then it leads to a well thought out design pretty quickly. With this method everyone in the team gets to exercise their creativity and build their game design skills. Just by listening to the more experienced team members discuss about the design issues, the less experienced team members learn a lot. Also each team member has a lot more personal investment in the game’s design and the game’s outcome. In any case, the producer (me) has the final say though.

Everyone understands the reasons behind every design decision which helps a lot, otherwise you have team members arguing and complaining to each other (and me) on design decisions all the time which makes everything go slower.

I believe that if you have programmers and artists just developing according to a designer’s vision without being able to give any input, they will feel like machines. Additionally the team members wouldn’t really be growing as “game developers” as design is a big part of game development. So the aim for me is to build everyone’s skill in game design so that together we can create better and better games more effortlessly.

And it is tons of fun discussing the game designs together, bouncing ideas off each other. During the design phase it really makes work feel like play and I sometimes feel guilty that I have a job that is so fun.

So how do you create a best seller game?

I’m definitely not an expert about this as I’m never 100% sure that any of our games will do well before releasing it. It’s been good to see though that we’re seeming to do better with each release. So hopefully that is proof that my strategy of incrementally building everyone’s game design skills with each game works :)

BTW, for our latest game Shop-n-Spree a lot of credit goes to BFG as they helped tons in adjusting our original design to better fit their target market.

Back on topic, I gave a talk at a local game developer conference recently where I listed the main attributes of a “good game” as:

1. FUN
2. Good production values
3. Accessible
4. No bugs
5. Appeals to a viable target market

Compared to Jake’s 10 secrets it looks like I’m missing a few :) But I guess mine are just a little broader and maybe are just the basics. But these really are the basics that you need to begin with. Each of them is only a few words, but I could go into the details of what I learned about each for pages.

I’ll talk a bit about FUN and addictiveness. I consider addictiveness as part of FUN in my list above. On this topic Jake mentioned meta-games .. for me I like to think of it as something – anything that keeps the player going. You have to have a reason for the player to continue playing beyond the current level at all times. They have to always have a reason in their head during the current level and at the end of the level as to why they want to keep playing beyond it. This is about setting short-term and long-term goals and spacing out the “rewards” in a game.

I read about WOW and MMORPG games and about the reason why they were addictive is that players always have something they are about to get if they play just a bit more. It could be a bit more experience to get the next level, or enough money for the new sword, or something else. There’s always something that feels like it is just a few minutes away.

You really have to apply this to your game. The spacing is the important thing. You don’t want to have players have to play too long before seeing the next new thing or even without knowing when or if they will get it. This has been discussed in the Indiegamer forums before but people still don’t do it properly. You really have to make it clear why they should keep on playing, what is waiting for them. Additionally it has to be something significant in the player’s mind. Many times you think you’re giving the player something new, but to them it is just ‘more of the same’.

One of the ways is by increasing and keeping high the frequency of introducing “new gameplay elements”. This way you keep the player interested because they know that by playing just a bit more they will see something new to play with in the game. Look at how World of Goo does it. Early on you notice how every few levels (or actually every level) there is something new .. new mechanics, elements and especially the new types of Goo balls. Each of the new types of Goo balls adds significant gameplay value. So it is not just cosmetic stuff. This is the true genius of the game. If an “amateur” (non-experienced game developer) came up with the idea of World of Goo, they’d believe that the core mechanic was fun enough and have only the standard type of Goo ball and invest a lot of time into making about 50 levels with maybe 5 different “background themes” hoping that would provide enough variety. People would get bored quickly since they’d feel they’ve seen everything .. “it’s just more levels” and the game wouldn’t sell anywhere nearly as well and people who didn’t know better would even say the idea sucked.

I could write pages more about these 5 topics, but I’ll stop here :)

OK, great news is that you don’t have to be an expert to create top selling games. Lets talk more about FUN. How do you find out what is fun for your audience? I consider this as a one of most challenging task for developers. They just seem to like different games than casual audience.

I guess this corresponds to my no.5 above “Appeals to a viable target market” which I think is the first thing you need to get right before you do anything else because if you make a game that “doesn’t appeal to a viable target market” then pretty much by definition, it won’t sell. No amount of polish will help it.

To make a game that appeals to your target market or in other words a game that is FUN for your target market, the key is to remember that just knowing who your target market is isn’t enough, you have to UNDERSTAND them. Only by understanding them can you make a game that is fun for them. The better you understand them, the more successful your game will be.

It is the same as in any business.

How do you understand your target market? The answer is to not be lazy about doing your market research :)

Do you prototype your ideas?

Yes, we start with prototypes. We don’t really think of them as prototypes, more like the first (internal) builds of the game.

We really follow the iterative/agile approach to development. If the game is not fun, we refine it. We try to get to the point of why it isn’t fun – I usually believe there is a reason that can be found and described in this case – and fix that and continue with this iterative approach for the whole game’s development.

The big thing that helps for us is everyone in the team is required to come up with ways to improve the game. So it’s not just me trying to come up with ideas to make the game more fun, it is all of us. This way it is very easy to improve the game as with all 8 of us, we’re always overflowing with ideas to improve the game and the only thing needed is to just pick the best ones which we do through brainstorming sessions.

This kinds of fits with my “everyone is a game designer” principle above in that during the development, everyone still does game design work.

That sounds very interesting. How much of development time you put into design sessions? Do you add new game play elements until very last moments?

For the first month of the project, it is half a day meetings everyday for about a week, then maybe a day or two a week as the prototype progresses. Then when we get into real production period, after each “iteration” which is usually about a month we have a period of maybe 2-3 days up to a week of evaluating the result of the last iteration and designing for the next iteration.

I’d say it is impossible to add new gameplay elements until the very last moments as we’d probably need another pretty large iteration to develop/test/tune/polish it. Gameplay elements are usually locked down earlier so that the final iterations can really be about polish. The final iterations’ lengths will be shorter such as 2 weeks and then 1 week per iteration then maybe 1 day (if you can call those iterations .. more like just “builds”). During those last iterations of a project there are definitely lots of significant improvements (other than bug-fixing) that we do, most of the time related to the UI, gfx, accessibility. Improvements that definitely make the game better so don’t really need too much further testing/balancing.

How do you plan to adjust to lowering average game prices?

Basically our plan is to branch out into new types of games in new markets and business models. We will continue to invest into developing higher quality downloadable casual games, but also invest into new/different markets.

I think in the current climate (and any climate actually) it is best to spread your risk and increase the variety of your revenue sources.

For us, the good thing is I think our experience in designing games for the demanding casual market will help us do better in other markets.

You sell a lot of affiliate games on your site? Doesn’t it hurt your own games sales?

Since most of our games are casual, the direct sales are just a fraction of portal sales so it doesn’t really affect us.

On the other hand affiliate income has been a nice bonus and it is always steady and increasing so I think it is worth it.

What do you do to promote your site?

The best thing you can do is release games on your site before you release it anywhere else. Send it over to review sites such as Gamezebo (if it is a casual game) and they will kindly link back to your site. This results in lots of traffic which you can hopefully turn some of them into repeat visitors / newsletter subscribers.

I don’t really have much knowledge when it comes to promotion for direct sales. Heck, you’re direct sales are tons better than mine!

Do you plan to become more portal independent?

As I said above, we are trying to branch out into different markets, so the answer is yes. It is only the smart thing to do. On the other hand, portals have been extremely good for us so we aren’t going to just stop using them either.

Any last words?

It’s like I’m some kind of expert to be giving this kind of interview, but actually I believe me and my team are still pretty new and still have tons to learn about all aspects of game development. The methods I described above are just what we found to work for us through trial and error and noticing what works and what doesn’t after developing 6 casual titles.

Finally I would like to use this opportunity to again thank all the good folks at the Indiegamer forums who have helped us during the years both directly and also indirectly by just creating so many damn interesting discussions :) And I have to give extra special thanks to svero (Steve Verrault) who has helped me a lot all these years. And last, BIG thanks to my team for doing such great work!

Thanks for your time.

Thank you too!

NOTE: In this interview Jake speaks for himself and not as BFG representative in any way.

Fairway Solitaire was published over 14 months ago. Isn’t it the time for a new release? When we can expect it?

You can expect it around the Weekend of Sat 21st Feb.  This is 100% certain now unless something crazy happens.  I’ve spent a long time on this game (about 11 months) but I’ve been pretty busy moving continent and other stuff…

Should we expect another hidden object game?

No.  BFG in Seattle makes those, we are tasked with making other games in Vancouver.  It will be fun to hear what people say about it – mixed opinions no doubt, but as long as the customer love it (and express their love with their credit cards) then I’m happy.

Ok, so how did you get started in game development?

In 2005 I went full-time Indie after making business software for 9 years in Delphi and SQL.  I’ve always made games as a hobby since the age of 8 (I’m 33 now) in BASIC, assembly, C, C++, Delphi, Blitz and probably a few other things along the way.  I reached a certain point where I realised that I enjoyed making games so much that I just *had* to do it for a living – so I stopped doing business software and started writing games professionally.  I made two downloadable match-3 games and was contracted by Injoy Games to make a 3rd, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which went well.

Match-3 as a jump start in game development career? That’s how you’ve met BFG?

Emmanuel from Big Fish Games Europe saw Oz and thought it was programmed well and asked if I would be interested in programming a game for them.  I had to think about this quite hard because I saw it as great opportunity to learn more about casual games from some of the most knowledgeable people in the industry, yet I also was keen on building up my own business and working for BFG would slow that down.  Also frankly at the time I needed the money because, as many Indies will know, it takes quite a long time to build your business up to the point where you are making a half-decent living.  In the end I said “yes” and signed a contract to program Fairway Solitaire.  However, before I started work on that game I quickly launched Holiday Bonus using an upgraded Oz engine, and it’s done really well for me over the last 2 years.

Fairway Solitaire was a great success for BFG. Why solitaire? Solitaires were not so popular at that time?

So Fairway Solitaire was a downloadable conversion of an existing on-line Java game.  Big Fish Games have an online community site with lots of casual games on it, many of which were designed by John Cutter.  Fairway was one of the most popular at the time.  I worked closely with John to make the download version and to add in lots of improvements and to give it a good level of polish.  It took a long time but when it launched it was BFG’s most successful card game ever.  It got to no.3 and stayed in the top 100 for over a year.  I also made French, Spanish and German versions and a Mac version too.

Why did you make the transition to BFG instead of working as a freelancer for them?

After the success of Fairway they offered me a contract to make two more games for them and I agreed and started on the first new game in late February 2008.  By this point I’d talked to Helen, my fiancée, about the idea of living abroad for a couple of months at a time whilst we worked (we both just need a PC and the Internet to work – she is a freelance Science writer), and we were going to try it out for fun.  Then in the summer I got a speculative email from BFG offering me a job in their new Vancouver studio.  Because we were open to the idea of moving abroad I said “tell me more” and then BFG flew us to Seattle to meet the team and to visit Vancouver to see if we liked it.  I got on really well with the people at BFG and knew that it would be a great learning experience to work with them but in a new studio (kind of like a start up company except you get paid!).  BFG have great designers, artists and QA on tap and will fund and market my games so it’s a really great opportunity.  So I said “yes” and we moved here in November 2008.  I figure that I’ll either stay working for them for a long time, or maybe after a couple of years I’ll use the experience and contacts to run my own business again – I’m flexible, I’ll see what happens.

What is your role at BFG?

I’m Lead Programmer/Designer.  At the moment this is a bit of a glorified title because I’m the *only* programmer/designer in Vancouver.  But soon we are hiring more programmers who’ll work with me on my next game.  Then we’ll expand to more teams and I’ll be overseeing them all.  That’s where the “Lead” bit comes in.  Basically I’ll be co-designing games with the designers at BFG in Seattle then programming one myself and assisting the other teams with theirs.  I’ll also be applying my polishing skills to all the games to make sure that they shine with quality.

A lot of people on the net asks you about perception of BlitzMax at BFG? Do they even care what you make your games with as long as they get what they ask for?

BFG has seen Fairway do really well and that was made with BlitzMax as were my previous two games (and yours are too right?).  In fact QA said they’d never tested such a stable bug-free game as mine.  BFG care about results and I was able to deliver the results with BlitzMax and they are happy with that.  Ideally the new teams in Vancouver will use it too so that they can get a head start by using my BlitzMax Game Framework, but if they end up using C++ or Flash then that’s OK too.  Blitzmax is easy to use yet powerful.  It’s an OOP feature-rich language built on C++ modules and has a great community.  People who don’t know any better may turn their nose up at it, but don’t forget that I’ve used over 30 languages including assembly, Delphi and C++ and I’ve chosen BlitzMax because I think that it’s the best for rapidly making games in – not because I’m a noob who can’t cope with anything else.

Can you tell us what are the differences between working on a game on your own and within a corporation?

For my own games I looked at the top 10 on various sites over time and what was selling and what I thought I could program easily and selected match-3. That turned out to be an OK decision but I sorta wished I’d made some Hidden Object Games a couple of years back (when they were simpler).  BFG has a huge wealth of data to analyze in order to choose a new title.  But to be honest I think that BFG are mainly interested in building up their existing brands, and developing new IP (that’s where I come in) – although they have many other plans too that I don’t know about.  Also Fairway Solitaire was a conversion of one of the online community games that was very popular.  So basically if I was still Indie I think I’d use similar methods to BFG – basically analyze data and use gut feeling based on industry experience and make a choice.  I think that a good method is stick to what is familiar but try to innovate in some way that makes it stand out from the crowd + add in buckets of quality + polish + marketing, which seems to work.

Technically you are not indie now, but I’ve got the feeling that you do still feel so…

Ha ha, yes good point – I’m now an employee but I do still feel like an entrepreneur.  My own games are still selling and generating royalties for my UK-based company (which I kept) and I still have a website and blog.  I’m also still interested in business ideas that don’t clash with my BFG job.  I see it as a two way thing working for BFG; I’m giving them my skills and they are giving me opportunities and experience.

How do you create a best seller?

Lol.  Well actually last Sunday at the Vancouver Game Design Expo I co-presented a presentation called “10 Secrets to Designing Instantly Enjoyable and Addictive Games” that was practically a manual for how to make best sellers. There are many things that help to create a best seller including: having a good idea that is original but not so far out that no one will try it, making the game addictive and fun with great player-feedback, making it accessible, making the game super-polished, getting the learning curve right, building in a meta-game (or three), testing it loads and loads, and tons of marketing :-)  I could talk for days about each of those points (and there’s more), but that will have to do for now.  Of course I’m not saying I have all the answers as games can still miss the target, even if they seem to have all the points, but I’m getting a better idea of how to apply those points as I make more games and study other games.

What comes first – meta game or game mechanic? What is more important for game success?

Both are important.  Game mechanic must be utterly solid and fun and can be found out in the prototyping stage (but hopefully you’ve thought up an interesting overall concept to fit the game mechanic in).  Then a meta game can be layered on top but only if it compliments the game mechanic and better still if it can feed back into the game mechanic somehow (this is a whole topic in itself).  A pure game mechanic these days would feel like a 4 year old game so a meta game is required to add depth, variation and longevity to a title – it will increase conversion rate too.

What would you consider prime indie sin in game development?

This is a good question as there are several answers of similar importance.  Um, perhaps the prime sin is not marketing your game enough, because without good marketing it’s pretty much bound to fail unless it’s amazing and the press hears about it via a 3rd party somehow.  Also I would say another sin is not testing your game on other people enough – so basically making what you want to play and ignoring all (sensible) advice.  Other sins include not polishing it enough (and not spending enough money developing it).

Basically sins are like failing to do the sensible things, or going in completely the opposite direction.  For example you need a good number of the “10 secrets” I mentioned earlier, and if you miss out too many or do the opposite of them, then you’ve “sinned” and your game will probably flop.

So the secret “good idea that is original but not so far out that no one will try it” sounds great, but I’ve not seen that many games that follow it. Why?

I don’t know, maybe the developers just haven’t figured this out yet.  People either seem to make straight clones that don’t stand out and thus fail, or they believe they have to make something totally original and then no one wants to play it (this is not always true in some rare cases).  However, I think there are quite a few games that pick something not new and innovate a bit both in casual and AAA games, and these games are actually often the successful ones.  My next game does exactly this so we shall see if it works again…

Do you have your dream game that you would like to develop?

I might have to be a bit Gemini about this and choose two games.  One would be to resurrect my Iron Fist game that I started in late 2004.  It’s a Kung Fu platform/adventure game.  At the time I realised that there was not really a decent market for it, so I made a Bejewelled clone instead and thus my career in casual games began.  However, now with the success of XBLA, it could be viable again.  I’d like to make that game just for pure fun factor – I’d also like to make a shoot ’em up.  However, my second type of dream game would be an awesome casual game that defines a new genre and that everyone loves and that of course makes me loads of money.  Money isn’t evil, contrary to what some people seem to believe, it can be very liberating.  I see nothing wrong in wanting to earn lots as long as you do so ethically, and are generous with it, and realise that money can’t make you happy, only your inner-self can – although money certainly helps! ;-).

What do you think will be a next big thing in casual games?

The classic question.  The next big thing in casual games will be my next game :-) (after the one I’m just finishing now.)  At the moment Hidden Object games still rule but many people are getting into hidden object games with adventure game elements, which is great because I love adventure games.  Also the success of the Build-a-Lot franchise shows that the casual market is ready for strategy/sim games if they are done right, so we may well see an explosion there (it’s already beginning).  Oh and Farm games have been pretty popular this last year (but they won’t become a big thing).  There may be a brand new genre someone is working on right now…

Of course this is just downloadable games I’m talking about.  We’ve also got on-line community based casual games, and they are very popular, and MMO games (soon one is coming out that heavily focuses on Coop games, which I love), and social games, and mobile games, and console games etc.  So there are many things that could be the next big thing but I don’t have a crystal ball so I’m just as excited as you are to find out what happens.

Your best match-3 game, Wizard of Oz is based on a book for kids. Do you think that childish theme hurt sales? A lot of developers says that while casual games should be kids safe it hurts sales when they look like games for kids.

The guy that thought up the idea, Alex Ahlund, realized that a lot of adults in America are very fond of this story and they are probably smack bang in the target market, plus the game was “family friendly”.  It is listed on the BFG match-3 page AND the kids page and got mentioned in some family magazines/radio shows.  The game did pretty well but could have done better.  Perhaps more levels, more features, more polish and a meta-game would have turned it into a mega hit, but it was just taking ages to develop and so we had to release it.  I could probably improve it tons now.

Also, I think my best match-3 is actually Holiday Bonus, it’s more polished in a number of ways.  Both games have sold similar numbers but Oz is ahead by about 1000 units.  This is largely due to Holiday Bonus being a seasonal game, which is generally thought of as a bad idea (limited window for sales) – although I’ve made money from it three Christmases running and the last Christmas was the best (note to self: seriously consider a Gold version or sequel again for 2009).

How do you think the market will look like in 2010? Will indies survive clone and pricing wars?

Yeah good question.  2010 is only 1 year away so I think it will probably look largely the same.  We’ll have even more top quality games being produced in-house by portals and by third-parties that they hire (maybe more Indies like me will have ended up working for portals, especially if I hire them!)  Portal pricing may well alter again as a reaction to Amazon’s entry into the market place, but I hope not.  Indies will need to decide if they should keep their prices higher because they believe that they represent better value (although I don’t think this is true in many cases), or drop them to fall in line with the price-warring portals.  If they do that then they’ll have to work even harder at their marketing strategies.  Certainly we’ll see lots of Indies who’ve never made decent money just give in, sad, but that’s just business – the strongest survive.   Oh and I predict that a new genre will have taken over (or nearly taken over) from Hidden Object games (that’s bold prediction that could land flat on it’s face).

One complete wildcard is the global economy.  Perhaps the US dollar will go crazy, and seeing as most of the casual game business is done in the US at the moment, this could cause massive disruption.  Although, apart from Nexon, the casual game industry seems to be weathering the storm better than mainstream game companies who are laying off staff on a daily basis it seems like.  It could mean that some portals get bought by the stronger ones or even that non-US portals (European or Asian for example) start to grow in stature.

Meanwhile we’ve got the whole online gaming, mobile gaming and console casual gaming stuff going on which I’m a bit more removed from.  But we’ll see growth in many existing and new areas, and some things becoming less popular (like maybe ad driven revenue as people stop spending money advertising due to the economy).  It’s actually a very exciting time to be making games in.  Lots of uncertainty.  I wonder how we’ll all look back on it in say 2011 :-)

If indie team was to hire just one person to improve their newest game, who should that be?

Me, but I’m unavailable, sorry.  Actually the answer is the Indie team needs to hire the person that they are missing!  So if your team is just a programmer and a musician, get an artist.  A good artist can make such a difference to the game and basically eye-candy sells when it’s slapped on a good solid base.  If your team doesn’t have a marketing expert on-board, get one or get a publisher otherwise your game will sink even if it’s great.  If you can program like a master but your game designs stink, get a decent designer!  You could even hire QA staff but hopefully you can get people to beta test it for free.  Also don’t scrimp on sounds and music, these are key elements to giving your game the correct atmosphere.

Sorry I couldn’t name just one person, because it really depends on who is in the team already.  But let’s say for example that most Indie teams are in reality only a single a designer/programmer – then HIRE AN ARTIST.  It makes such a big difference.

We can see a lot of indie games with crap art, but great art alone doesn’t sell the game (unless you’re EA). The bar for casual games has risen a lot. Where is the end?

At the current market size (and low price points) the limit is defined by how much profit you can make after paying for great art, sound and programming.  So maybe the games will not rise above a certain peak of quality and depth until the market grows bigger and companies can afford to invest more money in the hope of greater returns.  Possibly though, if the work can be outsourced to cheaper countries, then you can cram in more quality for the same price, and we might start seeing lots more of that (there’s already a lot happening now).

Also right now some games I’ve seen (like the recent Call of Atlantis (match-3) and Return to Ravenhearst (hidden object/adventure)) seem to have reached a peak of quality.  How do you improve upon that level of visual quality anyway?  It’s already better than many AAA games.  There must also be a point of diminishing returns where you spend more time and money on tiny details that yields basically no extra return.  Many games probably hit that level, and it’s more cost effective just to start a new game.

How indies that don’t have budgets to compete can compete with those games?

By getting out loans or getting investment from venture capitalists, or by teaming up with people who are prepared to work for royalties because their living situation is not pressurised (no mortgage or kids for example).  OR working for a portal as an external developer.  Then the portal spends the money and owns the IP, but you get paid to make it  + royalties – this can make good money (I can say this from first-hand experience of course).  I’m only talking about high gloss casual games here.  If you are making more niche indie games then you can still get away without that top level of polish and make good sales.  But I still feel it’s important to invest good money to see a good return – but make sure you know what you are doing and don’t just end up losing loads of money.  Oh one more thing, you could always make a game with some kind of minimalist graphics style that doesn’t require loads of money, just programming skills, and that might work (until it gets cloned better).

Wow OK so I typed way too much in this interview – I should have been programming!  Thanks for interviewing me, it was fun and I hope that people can take away something useful from it.  Oh and keep an eye out for my next game.  Good luck in 2009 everyone!

Thanks Jake!

It seems that finding good freelancers is as hard as finding good employees (not to mention friends). Indie Gamer Forums had a nice thread about working with freelancers and we could hear opinions from both sides. There are two posts that are worth repeating.

Alex Weldon created a wish list for both developers and freelancers.

As a developer, if I was to hire an artist, I would expect the artist to:

• Take constructive criticism without getting too defensive.
• Work within the technical constraints of the project.
• Indulge my preferences insofar as they do not conflict with their own aesthetic sensibilities.
• Explain clearly and politely to me their reasons for disagreeing with my ideas, when they do.
• Ask me before doing anything that goes against something specifically stated in the spec.
• Be proactive about offering advice on stylistic decisions and suggestions for letting the art influence the gameplay.
• Be able to make minor decisions on their own, but ask for clarification if there is a major choice to be made that I didn’t include in my spec.
• Give me their honest best guess about how much the job will cost, and do everything they can to stay on budget.
• Let me know if they think the current course of action is going to go over budget for reasons beyond their control, provide an estimate of how much more I should expect to pay, and suggestions for how we can get back on budget if I can’t afford it.
• Fix their own mistakes on their own time.
• Expect a certain amount of revision to be necessary.
• Do small bits of follow-up work (e.g. fixing a mistake we both missed, or providing me a layered PSD if I discover I need it) and answer questions for free even after they’ve been paid.
• Answer emails promptly.
• Set their own reasonable deadlines, and meet them.
• Be willing to sign a contract, and give me the exclusive rights to the work.
• Link to the game if they use the work in their portfolio.
• Be upfront about any references they might be using, so I can veto anything that seems to be bordering on copyright violation.

As an artist, I expect a client to:

• Respect my experience and judgement.
• Pay a rate that is in line with what other, non-artist freelancers of comparable education and experience can expect.
• Be polite in their criticism.
• Understand that only reasonable revisions are included in a quote.
• Be clear about their expectations and the technical constraints of the project.
• Not change their mind on important issues without good reason, and be apologetic and willing to pay more if they find they have to.
• Understand that the result might not look exactly like what they had in their head, if they weren’t able to describe it precisely in their spec.
• Give my advice serious consideration.
• Not ask for my opinion on something if they don’t actually want to hear it.
• Understand that I have a style, and that my work is still going to look like my work, regardless of the genre.
• Allow a reasonable time for the job, taking into account possible unforeseen circumstances.
• Answer emails promptly.
• Pay immediately when the work is done, without being asked more than once – being proactive and saying “I think we’re done, how much do I owe you?” is even better, but not obligatory.
• Give credit where credit is due. In game, preferably.
• Allow me to use the work in my portfolio.
• Give me a favourable reference and recommend me to others if they liked what I did for them.

I can’t agree more as a developer and I fully understand the artist point of view. As always, budget is probably the key issue for both sides. Developers want to get art cheaply and artists want to get paid well. Very often we, developers, can’t provide detailed work list, but still require cost estimation. We know you might be more experienced than we are when it comes to art creation. You may see things that have to be done that we don’t see. Don’t be afraid to tell us about them. Don’t be afraid to say this is just estimation. I usually need to know a rough figure to find out if I can afford your work or not. If the budget will change because there’s more work than expected then it’s fine.

Hippocoder made a great post from a full time freelancer point of view:

How to get a reliable freelancer

1. When you contact them, they reply within ONE working day. If its later than a day, move on. Trust me. This is the number one sign someone isn’t a “true” freelancer. A true freelancer who does it as a job, who will see your project through, is ALWAYS OBTAINABLE, and if he won’t be – he makes it clear ie sat and sun.

2. when negotiating, he knows how much stuff costs, and how long it will take. If he is an amateur after beer money he will not have a clue what to charge nor will he have any idea how much it’ll cost. An amateur won’t know how long it will take him. Avoid people who don’t know their own business. When I used to freelance I knew from experience how long it’d take me then I’d add one working day to the total to be safe. That extra working day isn’t charged for, as I used to do work based on a milestone fee each time a bit of work was handed over.

3. Say you negotiate x work for y money. The final test for you is setting “milestones”. If the work isn’t done by that time, tell him he won’t get paid. You are the customer, you set the rules (within reason). Always ask if they will be available for the full duration of the project. Ask, ask ask. It is a typically male thing to do to wink, nudge and say awight mate, its cool.. its not cool. It means your game won’t be finished and he’s happy and you’re not. You pay for this, business is business.

4. Contract to sign over the work, and be liable for copyright infringements is necessary when you’re making a published game. This cannot be skipped. If you are selling your game and you do not have a contract YOU are liable for damages, not the artist who is having a beer. So word a contract out saying that the artist is liable for any copyright infringements should the artwork not be original. Any freelancer who does his own work will not be worried by this. Back when I did work for the games creators, I had to sign such a document. A lot of people who contracted me didn’t though. I didn’t push them to give me a contract simply because its easier for me not to sign. I would always agree to a contract if I had to though.

I paint freelancers here as the bad guys, because they often are. There is a gulf between amateur who realises he can bang a few pixels out and a pro who wants to build a good solid rep up for repeat work. In the guide above, I lived by those guidelines. Often a customer would not ask for a contract though. That was fine by me because I’m not in any way liable. The onus is on *you* not the freelancer to get it in writing and signed over when the works done before final payment.

This means you can have peace of mind knowing you own the work outright and you likewise won’t be sued if he actually ripped the textures from another game or non royalty free source.

As the indie market becomes more competitive, higher quality work is required, with a higher standard of professional conduct. If you want to compete then do it right. A TRUE freelancer will *always* expect these questions from you. Yes they will be a bit more expensive but you get what you pay for – and not just in pixels.

I would also add that you should always require sample work and freelancers should not mind doing sample work. Why? I’ve dozens of great portfolios, but when I asked 12 artists to make a barn for Simon the Farmer game (light color, game for kids) only one made what I needed (and another one was close). I had the same situation with my newest game – even if artist is great it doesn’t mean that one will do the art you envisioned.

Few seconds later after I published this post I received a great comment from Alex Weldon regarding sample work.

creative freelancers are, for the most part, strongly opposed to working on spec. A few reasons are:

A) That you’d then have to raise your hourly rate for the jobs you do get in order to cover the hours lost when you do spec work for a client who then ends up choosing another artist, and

B) That it isn’t really such a great way of finding the best artist for the job – the best artists probably have so much paid work coming in that they can’t afford to spend too long on a piece they won’t necessarily get paid for, while the less professional ones might spend longer on the piece to get the job than they will on the actual work. Thus, the quality of the spec pieces might not reflect the artists’ true abilities.

C) Just through experience, people asking you to do any work for free even (especially!) if they say they’ll probably have paid work for you later is a big red flag. These guys are often bad clients in other ways, and the promised paid work rarely comes to pass.

D) If they’re not paying for the sample, there’s no reason they shouldn’t be asking 20 other artists for a free sample, which means they probably are, which means you’re investing your time for what’s probably a very small chance of actually getting the job. The worst case of this is the “Design the New Smarties Box and Win $100,000″ type of promotion that big companies sometimes get up to… first of all, $100,000 is probably less than a company of that size would be paying for a new package design from a major design firm. Secondly, if 10,000 people enter, you’re statistically only making $10 for a piece of work that you’d have to spend dozens of hours on to have a chance of winning. Thirdly, the contest itself serves as an advertising gimmick (and the $100,000 is less than the millions they give away in a normal lift-the-lid-and-win contest). It’s a win on all fronts for them, and really not a great deal for the artists.

So, if you like the work in an artist’s portfolio, but none of it is really close to what you want, and they claim they can do what you need but you want to be sure, then you should offer to pay them to do one small piece of the job – a sprite, a few tiles, a menu button, whatever – and assuming that works for you, hire them to do the rest. It’ll only cost you maybe $25, and it’ll gain the artist’s trust, and show him that you’re actually interested in his work, and not just asking every artist they can find for a freebie.

The problem is that we sometimes can’t make a decision based on portfolio. We like it, it looks like what we need, but if you have to chose one of ten then you either have to draw one or… ask for a sample. If you have so much paid work then simply say so to me: “I can’t make a sample work for you for free”. Then if I had to pay $25 for each sample it adds up to $250. Someone has to take the risk… it’s either you or me.

Experienced freelancer can be a blessing for your game. Not only you’ll get assets for your game done, but also a fresh point of view. And testing the game is crucial to it’s success.

Or do you develop games that you want to play? I know a lot of indies takes the latter aproach. I do (or actually did). We hope that games that we want to play and develop are also the games that sell. And once those games are done and hit the market we end up disappointed that they dind’t reach the top 10 charts.

Do you want an example? Here’s one: Runes of Avalon 2. This is one of my games that is highly rated by reviewers and developers. It’s chellenging, forces you to use your brain, has a lot of particles… all the stuff that developers love. But what masses think? It was just a #32 on the top 100 chart at Big Fish Games. (but there are still customers that love my game though I don’t know how to reach them without losing money).

So if you want to sell more games, then make games that sell. Russell Carroll made a great post on Indie Gamer Forums and here’s a quote for you:

I think there are two separate issues in the article presented as one.
1 – It’s more difficult to make money on casual games
2 – It’s more difficult to make money on games with ‘New kinds of game play’

I think 1 is true to a point, but not for the reasons mentioned.
I disagree with 2 as well, but just because I think it’s always been next to impossible to have experimental game play and make money at the same time. Most experiments fail, it’s part of life.

Some misconceptions that despite saying the same thing over and over again, no-one seems to listen to.

– The portals launch a wide variety of game types.
(For 2006-2007 on Reflexive for example, HO, Match-3 and Click Management accounted for 28% of the new games, meaning 72% were something else. HOWEVER, 40% of the revenue came from those game types and 58% of our Revenue growth came from those game types. If you do the math it means you did better making one of those games than anything else…taken as an aggregate it was safer…but in that same aggregate you see MOST of the games on the portals didn’t fit into that group).

– The portals launch a wide variety of game types.(not a typo)
Take a look at BFG last month and you’ll find everything from crazy indie game Bloom Busters to platformer Turtix 2 to quirky sports title Elf Bowling to a few ‘different’ puzzle games: World Mosaics (picross) & Space Journey. On Reflexive for the last month we had games like Starscape, Laser Dolphin, Oval Office & Depths of Peril (mac). The issue isn’t variety in catalog. The issue is that most of that variety isn’t selling well. However, I state again, that ‘original’ doesn’t usually sell well. Original needs friends and word-of-mouth and can become huge mega-hits, but typically it’s ignored because it is original. Perhaps the portals are the cause for that (though this goes beyond just the casual games industry). I can’t speak for other portals, but for Reflexive’s part we work hard to get original content…and are sad when it doesn’t sell. I too believe it will come back to bite the industry in the behind, but so far our approach of diversifying hasn’t shown that it is grabbing a different customer. Despite our best intent and wishes. Still we continue to carry original because we like it .

So that said, I do agree that it is getting harder, in some ways, to make money. Some of that is self-induced as we narrowly define what the casual market is. If you define the casual market as the portals, then you have to know what type of customers you have on the portals. If you want to make a game for those customers (again assuming you understand them, which many people don’t), you have a great audience who is ready to buy!

If you don’t want to make games for that customer type (the portal customer type), you will sell a few copies, maybe even the 3k Lloyd suggests, but you will have a harder time making money. Think of it as trying to sell helicopters or bicycles at a car dealership. Some people will be intrigued and buy one, but that isn’t why the person went to the car dealership. They went for a car. If you try to sell a car at a car dealership, you’ll see higher sales.

That doesn’t mean the sky is falling or that it’s good to hate on casual games because they are successfully selling and those same customers don’t want to buy your games.

It just means you need to decide what you are doing and do it. It means the casual portals might not have your customer and you need to find them or make games for customers who have already been found. You can be successful doing a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean everything you want to do can be successful.

Many here have mentioned going for a different market. I think there is some sense to that, though I don’t envy the journey, it’s by no means as easy, in my mind, as going after a known audience.

Keep that in mind just in case you want to make a living developing games. I do.

After examining 4,615 achievements incorporated in 124 retail and 63 downloadable game titles available for the Xbox 360 during the period November 1, 2005 through June 1, 2007, EEDAR found that in general that titles that have a higher volume of Accomplishments (EEDAR’s platform agnostic term) correlate with both a higher Metacritic Metascore and higher gross sales in the U.S.

The study, Accomplishments Unlocked 2007, also discovered that a number of developers aren’t necessarily making the best use of the achievements system. 29 percent of all Accomplishments were Completion Accomplishments, which is naturally the easiest type to develop and integrate into a game. Having a variety of Accomplishments is key, the research firm noted. “The results showed a strong connection between a game title’s diversity of Accomplishment types with that game’s profitability – pointing to the idea that the more diverse the Accomplishments available to the user, the more enjoyable the game, higher review scores, more units sold,” explained EEDAR.

Many times I thought that developers put achievements in games just because other developers do so. Most achievement systems looks like this. The best use of achievement I’ve ever seen has PlayFirst. All achievements player gets in their games are integrated into the PlayFirst portal players profile, so it automatically creates competition betweem players. Find one of the PlayFirst games (ie. Diner Dash) and pick one of the players on the highscores list, then go to Medals & Badges.

We didn’t put trophies/achievements in Runes of Avalon, neither in Pony World, but… we will fix it. Next release of Pony World, Pony World Deluxe, will have trophies in. Runes of Avalon 2 will have at least online highscore system, but I am sure we will find some achievements that will suit the game as well. I want to integrate them with my website. It will create Unique Selling Point for ANAWIKI, portals don’t want to mess with online features.

Integrating games with your website is not an easy task, but if you succeed and combine it with downloadable and user created content and give achievements for creating content for your games, you will have something that will stick players to your site. Content, that will be not available anywhere else!

And then you can easily create competitions that will create viral marketing for your website and games! Competitions you can send PR’s about: competition announcement and winner announcement. Combine it with appealing prize and your sales will skyrocket.

Games with downloadable content sell 114% more, says EEDAR. Research firm Electronic Entertainment Design and Research (EEDAR) have found that publishers have the potential to nearly double their profit on any given game through revenue generated by both purchasable and sponsored downloadable content. “…console storefronts represent a major opportunity to offset growing development costs and stabilize revenue momentum between major releases,” EEDAR stated.

After examining 180 downloadable games and 2,100 pieces of downloadable content for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii, EEDAR found that Xbox 360 games offering downloadable content sell 129 percent more and PS3 games sell 16 percent more (Wii offers no extra downloadable content currently).

You can read the whole story here.

While EEDAR examined console games I am sure this can be applied to indie/casual games. My games don’t have downloadable content yet, but releasing a level pack for Runes of Avalon at least doubled my monthly income. Prof. Fizzwizzle has a lot of downloadable content and it is one of the best selling affiliate games on my site. Make sure your next game can have downloadable content. It’s one of the easiest ways to increase your revenues.