One of the weirdest things about being an indie game developer is the work schedule. Have you ever worked as your own boss? What about being your own boss as well as trying to coordinate a team of other people?
The idea of setting your own pace and being in charge of your own schedule might sound pretty good. And in many ways, it is. If you’re running your own game project, you get to choose what the priorities are, when you get up and when you go to bed, how many hours per day you should spend working on various tasks – etc.
However, by deciding to go down this path your responsibilities begin to increase exponentially. If you were working for a large company with several layers of managers, the managers would be the one keeping track of where the project is supposed to be. You’d only have to worry about your block of work; the rest of the project would be taken care of.
When you’re running your own project though, its success or failure is ultimately resting entirely on your shoulders. So it’s not as if you’re “more free” in the sense that you can just take whole days off to be lazy – in fact, your workload is going to be much larger…
Last time I promised to talk about business… Oh joy!
One of the unfortunate side-effects of running your own little game development team is that you have to pay everyone. Not that that in-and-of itself is a big deal, but there is a lot of paperwork and procedure that goes along with it.
In our case, we have a bit more of a headache because we’re using “government funding”.
What Funding?
The fund in question is called MIDMF… the “Manitoba Interactive Digital Media Fund”. It has three sections: prototyping, development and marketing. We’ve been in the prototype stage.
For Marian Mondays today, we bring you a glimpse into the past… all the way back to one of the first concept pieces for the character. (by Katie de Sousa)
… from way back in the day, when we were playing around with building little physics demos a modified version of the Aquaria engine. (and thinking of calling ourselves “Bit-Blot North”) After many trials and tribulations, the game is alive and evolving in Unity.
Usually when you start something, it’s all smiles and hope. It’s thinking “this will be the best ___ ever!” You’re not worried about how it’ll all come together exactly, you’re just excited and giddy – ready to jump in and give it everything you’ve got.
But life can be a dick, especially where creative motivations are concerned. Working on a big (i.e. multi-year) project can be very difficult at times. Even if you’re working on something you care very much about, and you want to make it the best thing it can be – some days you have to dig really deep into your soul to find the motivation to carry on. It’s not just sunshine and giggles and then a game pops out!
If you want to finish something that’s larger in scope, you have to muster up a great deal of tenacity on a regular basis. There are times when you’ll feel like throwing in the towel – or just throwing up. It’ll start to seem like taking that position as janitor at the local McDonald’s may not be such a bad idea after all…
But in the end, you love your baby too much to just give up. You find a way to ride out the bad times and discover that you still love your project – but in a whole new way. You break down the parts that don’t work, and rebuild them better than they were initially (and naively) planned to be.
Hopefully.
Next week I’d like to talk a bit about one of the “least fun” elements of commercial game development – BUSINESS.
Game/music reporter extraordinaire Jeriaska posted a video of my Independent Game Summit talk on IndieGames.com. This is the first time any of my talks have slipped from the grip of the GDC lawyers to reach the public.
This talk relates to Marian in a couple ways: First there are a couple examples that reference experiences developing Marian, and secondly the entire development process of Marian is inspired by ideas of “storytelling” and holistic design.
This talk is actually a slimmed down version of one I gave back in September at Austin GDC. Originally this version was going to be just as long, but whoever organizes things over in GDC land ended up turning my slot into a 3-way talk with Adam Saltsman and Andy Schatz. Originally going to be an hour, it was cut to half an hour, then we were told it was going to be bumped up to 45 minutes at the last minute… When we finally delivered the talk, expecting it to be a 45 minute slot, we only ended up with about 35 minutes – unfortunately losing the end of our talk.
We were each going to wrap up our respective sections with a final message, and I think it’s a shame that we didn’t get the opportunity to do so… I’d like to post a rough paraphrasing of my coda here:
“Games are a vast, unexplored space – and this means not a single one of us knows all the right answers on design.
Find your own voice, explore your own creative process.
If it happens to be completely different than mine or Adam’s or Andy’s… or anyone else’s – that’s awesome. Experiencing vivid and diverse points of view is a beautiful thing.
I look forward to seeing what you all come up with!”
I’m really grateful to be in a position where I have the freedom to work on the projects that I want to – using the methods that I find most valuable. I also can’t wait til all you folks get to play the results! (hint: it’ll be quite a while yet)
Recently we purchased an HDTV for the purpose of testing “Marian” at various HD resolutions – but it also happened to be my first HDTV ever, so I was pretty anxious to see some of my games running at epic sizes.
The Latest Marian Prototype…
Back in the day when Derek and I were working on Aquaria (circa 2006), widescreen monitors weren’t a big deal. Everything was 4:3, and we designed the game accordingly. However, by the time the game was released in late 2007, 16:10 and 16:9 had caught on in a big way. We ended up releasing a major patch of the game that added full widescreen support – and it was a lot of work. Beyond the code changes, we had to create new artwork to extend the edges of certain scenes, edit all the levels so that the game wouldn’t spoil anything major, etc.
Aquaria: still sexy at 1080p/46”
Designing with multiple aspect ratios in mind from the start is a little bit tedious, but it definitely saves a lot of heartache down the road.
Today I’d like to explain another part of our prototyping process, something we call “Level Snippets”. Essentially they’re just little sketches of a piece of gameplay drawn up by Kyle, which I’ll implement in the engine to test out various core gameplay mechanics.
We’re only going to show you one of the most basic ideas that we’ve prototyped as an example right now, because we don’t want to give away any of the exciting stuff just yet. This doesn’t even scratch the surface. (in fact, this particular piece is a bit misleading, as “Marian” is not a traditional platforming game)
Once I get a sketch like this and we’ve talked about it a bit, I’ll get it up and running in Unity with some boxes to block it out. If there are reusable components, I’ll build them as prefabs. (in this case, platforms that fly in) Then all the work done for the small test level can be reused in larger areas!
(in fact, this particular piece is a bit misleading, as “Marian” is not a traditional platforming game)
