The Still of the Night Causes a Storm in the Mind

10 years ago yesterday I was a college student enrolled in a computer science program.  I spent most of my time programming games on my TI-85 calculator during class but still managed to take something away from the experience.  I was also a gamer and September 9th, 1999 was a big day.  Anticipation grew throughout the day as I waited for classes to end.  The afternoon and evening couldn’t fly by quick enough. The moment I was waiting for was midnight, when I could finally wrap my arms around my very own Dreamcast at the local EB.

Finally, the night was getting long in the tooth.  At around 10PM a friend and I headed out to Lynnhaven Mall stopping at Wendy’s for some late night spicy chicken sandwiches (a favorite during the college years). Then we finally landed in line for the hotly anticipated Dreamcast.  The line was long but people were stoked.  Everyone and their brother wanted to support Sega after the dismal failure of the Saturn.  There was a hint of nostalgia in the air.  Older gamers didn’t want Sony to put Sega out of commission even if they liked the Playstation.  Thus, the calvary lined up at the stroke of midnight to put Sega back on the map.

The line was exciting initially but it was nothing in comparison to the first time they pulled out a working Dreamcast running Soul Calibur for everyone to try.  The next thing you knew there was a line embedded within the first line as people tried their hand at this new game with the most amazing graphics ever witnessed on a home console.  Remarkably, Soul Calibur played as good as it looked.

The crew at EB was extremely cool and efficient that night.  Dreamcast systems, games and accessories had all been bundled up according to customer pre-orders prior to the big launch.  As such we really didn’t have to wait too long.  After finally getting our systems we returned to my place and continued playing all our new games into the wee hours of the morning.  It’s hard to believe it was a decade ago!

Last night I had to do it, I had to pull the Dreamcast and co out of their bin and hook it up alongside my 360 and PS3.  Much to my surprise Soul Calibur has held up really well.  It’s still graphically impressive and the control and collision is super tight.  I never understood why Sega gave up. In my idealists eyes the Dreamcast could be a competitor today.  After reading the Gamasutra article with interviews of all the major executives involved I think the demise of the Dreamcast was pretty fishy.  But what’s done is done.  At least we got to enjoy the system for a while.

Of course I can’t just recap that launch night without explaining how it had some profound effect on me. Back then I was a college student who had programmed a few games on his calculator.  Now it’s a decade later and I’ve become the game developer I had dreamed of.  The largest effect that night had on me was a new found love for midnight launches and the excitement involved.  The studio title Midnight Status is a direct result of that launch night (which as far as I can remember was the first midnight video game launch I took part in).  Midnight Status is the excitement people feel for their entertainment.  It’s what happens when people wait in line in the middle of the night with strangers who share a passion.  It’s what runs through your mind when you didn’t pre-order an XBox and you’re running from store to store in the middle of the night trying to find a location with a short enough line to guarantee you a system.  Midnight Status came from a seed that was planted in my mind 10 years ago when the Dreamcast arrived.  It seems the name was quite suitable now doesn’t it?

Well, summer’s over and it is time to go back to work full time.  This year has been a wild roller coaster of ups and downs.  It kicked off with me having just turned 30 and finally getting to become a full time game developer thanks to the iPhone.  This was just about my biggest dream come true … finally after years and years of work.  Not all has been well though, during the month of March I lost my dear mother who I loved very much.  Losing a parent has been, up to this point, one of if not my biggest nightmares.  As such the year suddenly seemed to come right back to neutral if not go completely negative for me.  In the months after that though friends and family gathered around me to help me through the toughest thing I’ve ever faced in my life and they helped me stay on track.  Also, my wife and I got a new golden retriever puppy named Maeby which didn’t hurt (so long as she wasn’t peeing inside).

Not coincidentally, the puppy was our 1st year anniversary gift to each other.  Again, things were looking somewhat positive … even if a bit of depression was lingering from my mother’s passing.  Of course what goes up must come down as I found out that a friend of mine lost his wife.  Again, I felt that negativity.  Life is short and sometimes it’s very painful for you and those around you.  It’s all we can do sometimes just to hold each other up.

Of course that was the beginning of the summer and I knew that better things (like the beach) were just on the horizon.  Since my mother passed I haven’t done too much work.  I hit a deadline for the book I’m writing, created Disco Pool, and also put out a little game called Kube Killer.  All in all it was really nice to live off the work I had done earlier in the year with Skyline Blade which has been my most successful game.  As I’ve written before, it’s not a crazy amount of money but it does pay the rent and when you don’t have to worry about that it helps … a lot.  I got to do a lot of swimming, sunning, and puppy watching which has been therapeutic.  I can now swim a kilometer (~0.6 of a mile) which is pretty cool considering that a month ago I could barely swim 50 meters or 1 lap in an Olympic size swimming pool.

Anyway, now that September’s here I’m back to work and I’m thinking ambitious again.  Over the summer I put something secret together but realized it was too ambitious.  I then proceeded to put that project on hold for a short while longer to pursue another project.  As it turns out I don’t do simple.  It just doesn’t happen, at least not well.  My new project which started out simple has now become a mini-epic.  It’s still not as ambitious as my secret project so that’s good but it’s going to take longer than the few weeks I had hoped to invest.

This brings me to what’s really been on my mind lately.  Is it wise to really invest myself in a game again? In 2002 and 2003 I created 2 large games which took about a year each to complete.  Aerial Antics is the game I’m probably still most well known for although my iPhone games have sold many more copies.  Ever since Aerial Antics flopped I cannot will myself to develop something with a lot of care.  That’s not to say I haven’t worked hard.  I have worked hard this past year and I really pushed myself on Full Contact Debate as well but I haven’t committed myself to a project like I did with Aerial Antics.  At least it doesn’t feel that way.  It’s very hard to fully commit yourself when every time you do your project flops.  Then it gets to the point where you start going for the quick and easy project instead of something you’re truly proud of.

I feel like I’m making myself sound really lazy here.  Anyone who knows me also knows this isn’t true.  The point is though, if you push yourself will anyone really notice or care?  Well, I think they well.  The iPhone games I’ve developed actually seem to sell in direct proportion to how much time and money I invested in them and of course money is really just tangible condensed time.  In the end I suppose I’m answering my own question.  If you make it they will come and they will notice that you worked your ass off.  However, if you waiver even for a split second people will identify the chinks in your armor.  Don’t waiver, be obsessive, create something you think is perfect and even if someone thinks they’ve found a weakness you’ll be able to deflect them because you’ll know in your own heart that you did absolutely all you can.

So here I am after years of time, a better coder, a better artist, with better tools ready to commit myself to a truly ambitious (yet not overly so like FCD) project once again.  Wish me luck!

Although I don’t consider myself to be particularly successful (I’m probably behind the curve considering how much time I’ve spent developing games). I do have a few techniques which I’ve learned along the way that I think aid in the quest for success in game development.

1 - If you’re having trouble with motivation tackle a technical problem.  The creative aspects of game development are great but usually the great creative sparks come when you least expect them.  I don’t believe you can control the creative juices per se, only nurture them.  What you can control though are technical hang-ups.  Next time you’re stuck trying to come up with a game concept engage in a technical activity you hadn’t previously conquered and you’ll find yourself in awe of the creative possibilities your knew found technical knowledge provides.

2 - Always think in terms of IP, just scope it right.  Massive IP’s like Star Wars are fantastic.  The idea of creating an imaginary universe that generates a cult-like following is the creator’s dream.  The only problem with big IP’s is that they are often too ambitious to complete correctly. Every now and then someone like George Lucas comes along and does it but situations like his are the exception.  Still, any concept you come up with can contain cross platform/medium functionality.  For instance I’m working on an iPhone game/concept which I can sell, create an article about, and include in a book I’m writing.  In this sense I’m still creating and leveraging an intellectual property just not on the epic scale we all usually think of as it relates to IP.

3 - Don’t ever give up and don’t listen to anyone or anything but your gut instinct.  I’ve been through it all.  People in high school told me I wasn’t intelligent enough to develop games, game reviewers have thrashed my work as have publishers, mentors, and friends … heck even my own mother told me I wasn’t good enough at math to make them.  I couldn’t care less what anyone ever said because I knew in my gut that I was going to do this no matter what anyone ever said.  Shigeru Miyamoto himself could tell me to hang it up and I would do nothing short of consider him an amateur with no vision and continue on my merry way.  No one, and I mean NO ONE can tell you it’s impossible to succeed except yourself.

A big dream of mine has always been to appear on late night TV with a host like Jay Leno because I created the next great video game. To me, this sort of accomplishment would signify the real rise of video games as a cultural phenomenon. Writers, actors, musicians, and animal trainers appear on these type of shows all the time, but you never see anyone promoting a video game unless they’re Tiger Woods which just doesn’t count. I wanted to see an actual game developer on late night TV, not someone else who just happened to have a video game made after them because they were good at something else.

Last night we finally hit the big time as Kudo Tsunoda took the stage to showcase Project Natal on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. I had some mixed feelings about Project Natal as a gamer but I do think it will revolutionize gaming with regard to the mass market. The Wii showed everyone the door but I think Natal has the potential to really welcome everyone through it. However you feel about Natal though it was totally rad to see an actual game developer up on late night TV with Hollywood and all the rockers.

The funny thing was that I made a joke to my friend 2 days ago that Kudo looked like a Bono wannabe during his E3 presentation. What the heck though, if that’s what it takes to legitimize game development as an art form so be it. People like interesting people and Kudo definitely had that going for him at E3 and on Jimmy last night.

Of course I also think this breakthrough has a lot to do with the type of games we’re getting into these days. E3 was quite a bit different this year with all the human performances to go along with the games. Between the Wii and Rock Band we finally have games that appeal to people not just nerds. Before now the best the industry could muster was to mimmic Hollywood and make epic looking pre-rendered trailers.

At E3 this year the most boring presentations were old school gamer gamers like Modern Warfare 2 and God of War III … I almost fell asleep watching people play them. Second up was the epic trailers, which needless to say were also pretty boring. The best presentations were the Wii, Beatles Rock Band, Playstation Eye/Motion, and Natal demos where real live people were performing in sync with fine cinematic sequences in the backdrop along with real gameplay that the players were interacting with but in a way that was also entertaining for a crowd. By comparison the old school way of playing games seemed really archaic.

That’s not to say that I don’t like old school gameplay. I think it’s fine for 1-4 people to sit down and play together. However, it was never going to be an all consuming force like music or movies until you could simultaneously enjoy other people playing. The human element that music and movies contain was simply missing.

Anyway, congratulations Kudo and I hope to see many more game developers appear side by side with actors and rockers in the future!

I wrote a while back about The Craft, that desire to fully master the art of developing games. I’m proud to say that since I’ve gone full time as an iPhone developer it’s been getting easier and easier with each game to perfect that art. Debris was a prototype that I had sitting around for years and years. I could never quite get the concept implemented correctly but I had this feeling that I just had to get it out there. For some reason I’m always in a rush to get the “working idea” out as if that matters at all.

Pretty much everyone knows that execution is the key to success when it comes to making games but I have always felt that it’s a combination of timing and execution. With Debris iPhone I decided it needed to be the best game I could make in a month while simultaneously learning a new engine and platform. As it turns out, most people “Don’t get it”. The up side though is that I learned a lot and Debris was the first game to sell a reasonable number of copies for me. While it’s not the best game, it was the best game I could make at the time.

Sometimes the most important thing with game development is “shipping” the game. It might sell, it might not but I can guarantee you from experience that a title which sells well but receives poor reviews is a better motivating force than a title that gets good reviews and poor sales. In the case of Aerial Antics years ago I spent over a year developing a game to fit within a publisher’s lineup, I contracted an artist, and was late to my “real” job many times. The end result was a lot of pats on the back and no money which meant that I had to keep working a job that had nothing to do with games and I lost all motivation because I didn’t know what went wrong.

Fast forward to November 2008. I had almost no money, I experienced my worst year in business in 5 years, and I only spent 1 month developing my game. As it turns out this game made enough money during the month of January to convince me that it was worth pursuing full time. The early reviews were pretty good but then as time went on it was apparent that only a small percentage of the population understood the game. But … that was OK, because I didn’t spend that much time on it and it was making me enough money to think about this stuff FULL TIME. With a poorly reviewed but decent selling game you know what went wrong and you also get the opportunity to fix it.

Since the beginning of 2009 I have created 4 more iPhone games; Cosmosis, SkylineBlade, Disco Pool, and Kube Killer. Each game has become more and more polished and the reviews continually get better. There’s no substitute for time. When you get the chance to think about something like game development full time you have to jump at it no matter how risky it seems.

I read this Gamasutra Interview with Tim Sweeney and he outlined his career from the beginning. He knew that he was going to be doing it full time when his first game started brining in just $100 a day. He acknowledged that it wasn’t much but that it was an income, something you could technically live on. From that point on is when things began to take off for him in a seemingly exponential fashion.

Since I posted about my iSales I’ve gotten a few “concerned” sounding emails. No, I’m not making a lot of money … yet. The important thing though is that I can afford my bills and I can afford to spend all of my working hours on game development resulting in a better game every 2 months. Considering the fact that we work in a “hit driven” industry this is a great strategy.

A while back when I first jumped into iPhone development I told Jeff Tunnell I’d give him a heads up on the sales figures. Anyone who actually reads this blog might have noticed Jeff’s comment under the Disco Pool release post about revealing some iPhone sales statistics whether they be good, bad, or ugly.

Something I want to preface this post with is that my sales numbers are a little better than average for the app store. I’ve hinted several times over the past 4 months or so that I’m able to scoot by on what I’m making but not much more. I’ve recently been reading the comments to this Gamasutra Article and I’m glad someone else spoke up about what constitutes a livable income.

From Dave Stein:

I thought this quote was very disturbing, mostly because I’ve been seeing these kinds of quotes all over the place lately:

“Mark Johnson recently published sales data for his game Hit Tennis, which has netted around $10k since its release six months ago. Not bad, but not an income either. ”

Not an income? Tell that to real indie developers in the trenches. I’m one of the folks referenced above, who quit his day job to write iPhone/Mac software. I would be all smiles today if I was pulling in $20k a year. But I’m not, and now I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my cat if I can’t make rent.

I might be going a little offtopic here, but I can’t help but commenting on this obsession with money in our culture that has deluded people into thinking they’re poor if they can’t afford a new $300 phone every few months. People who think $20k/yr is not an income are delusional and out of touch with reality, and the rest of the planet. We’re in a global recession right now. Want to see just how little you can live off of? Take a look at people living outside your own borders… or just outside your local Starbucks or Apple store, for god’s sake.

$20k a year _is_ a livable income, even in America for a software developer. I have the expense sheet to prove it.

In short I think an income like that is pretty good when you’re doing what you love and you don’t have to answer to anyone. I also posted a comment on Gamasutra asserting that I thought the revenue numbers cited in the article were low. This was first of all based on a different application of the basic math used in response to the statistics provided from Ian’s links but also because I felt that I probably represented the average developer developing fairly average games for the platform.

I won’t be revealing specific numbers just yet but every month that I’ve been developing iPhone games my monthly income has been increasing by an average of ~120%. If I extrapolate out using my average growth rate then my income for the month of December alone should be around 7k. This could be a pipe dream of course but I don’t see why since my numbers have steadily increased so far. In fact I’m willing to bet that my increase is probably representative of the App Store’s total average monthly sales increase since I began … just a hunch.

There are some interesting bits which affected my sales numbers.

-The average price point for the Apps I’ve released is $2.28.
-I doubled my income from December to January by “working” the App Store’s various Top 100 lists to maintain visibility.
-My 2nd game Cosmosis tanked as a paid App and now makes more money as a freebie via an AdMob revenue stream.
-I’m approximately representative of the average iPhone developer/publisher not only in sales but in the fact that I have exactly 3.5 Apps out currently (Cosmosis counts as a half). Though it should be noted that the sales numbers I based my above statistics on were primarily from 2 games. My 4th App was just released and has no bearing on my stats yet, although it’s currently selling better than Debris.
-I made more money in the first 4 months of 2009 as an iPhone develper then I did in the first 4 months of 2008 with my old business.
-Debris made more money in its first 2 months than Aerial Antics made in 5 years and Aerial Antics required ~20X the number of man hours to develop.

Simply put I’ve been living “indie” since 2002. I’ve worked odd jobs while developing games and run my own contracting business while developing games. It was cool to see Aerial Antics get nods like a Sim Game of The Year Nomination from Game Tunnel, a Top 5 Physics Download spot from Computer Gaming World, and even a cable network slot on Cinematech via G4 but when all was said and done there was no cash profit and a huge amount of time was spent developing it compared to iPhone games. Between Aerial Antics and now I developed dozens of prototypes, several shareware titles, and even some grandiose pipe dream concepts like Full Contact Debate but none of them panned out.

If the goal is to independently do what you love AND make a living doing it then I think the App Store provides the best opportunity around. Before iPhone development I had been chasing the dream for 7 years, now I live it … albeit somewhat modestly at the moment.

Disco Pool is live on the App Store! This was the last game my mother played and I hope that people like it.

Here’s an early YouTube video:

I’ve blogged about The Singularity is Near and the not so warm fuzzy feeling it left me with months ago. Two weeks ago I watched the new Star Trek and loved it. This week I caught a YouTube video called 2008 Latest Edition Did You Know 3.0. What does it all add up to? Basically, I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with this equation. As much as I love computers, information, progress, and buzz this stuff scares the hell out of me. By 2049 a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational power of the entire human race. What does that even mean?

It means to me that there’ll be a day like Star Trek all right but that the ships will be computers with thrusters attached and no crew. When amoebas evolved did the next iteration really care or include amoebas in their processes? Sure amoebas still survive today but let’s face it they still do what amoebas do. If we create computers with more computational capabilities than the entire human race then I don’t see a place for us to be exploring the universe at the speed of light. Sure the machines will probably need us for a while to repair them and such but eventually we’ll be obsolete as evolution keeps moving on. Terminator here we come.

Of course Terminator is really bleak and that’s not my style. I don’t really see the future like that. I don’t think that a machine with more computational capability than the entire human race combined would really pay attention to us. The machine would definitely just leave Earth. In Terminator the machines view us as a threat. When was the last time you perceived an amoeba as a threat?

Intelligence is nothing more than the evolution algorithm but quicker. Our brains can run the evolution algorithm abstractly and predict the future to a degree. Computers can already out predict human beings, the catch though is that the algorithms they run are created by people. At some point in the near future computers will not only run the numbers but they’ll create the algorithms as well. Once we cross that threshold intelligence will be as outdated as evolution. If intelligence is evolution squared then what comes next will be expolution or expotelligence. The speed at which our successors think will blow our heads off our shoulders and we’ll be left here to surf the web, social network, and play casual games all day … and I was soooo looking forward to space travel. Maybe they’ll take us with them like pet chimps.

I guess my wife summed it up the best by calling Wall-E out as the most realistic movie portrayal of the future. Take 1 part Star Trek, 1 part Terminator, 1 part pet chimps, and voila … it’s our future! I need to go eat something and do some Skynet programming in preparation, good night!

I try not to complain but the App Store’s review upon delete feature is really ticking me off. This past weekend I released Cosmosis for free with AdMob in-game advertising as its new revenue stream. Now Cosmosis had a pretty solid rating of 3 and 1/2 Stars for the paid version. Over the weekend it was download several thousand times. The first day though was the best. Unfortunately, after the first day 1% of the players who downloaded the game used the old “delete and 1-star review” on the title. The game’s leaderboards have been jumping with players having a good time and the AdMob revenue stream is netting more money than selling the game so those are 2 big pluses. However, in order to take full advantage of AdMob the game needs lots of players. The 3.5 star review the game had attracted many people the first day (nearly 2,000). After the first day 12 people deleted and gave it 1-star. This very vocal minority dragged the review score down to 2 stars which pulled the downloads to less than 500 the next day. After the first day the game jumped into the ~Top 50 free puzzle games so I know it had plenty of visibility and the written reviews that people left have been good.

So what’s the problem? Naturally, people are 80% more likely to complain about something they don’t like than they are to compliment something they do like. Apple only makes this easier by allowing users to rate Apps upon deletion. This is by far the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard of. If someone’s deleting an App that means they don’t like it so the reviews skew way negative, this of course is on top of the fact that people are already statistically proven to be 80% more likely to bitch about something than they are to rave about something. The bottomline is that I’ve put out a fun game according to the leaderboards but that super vocal minority is dragging the game down and stopping other people (99% of which would have fun with it) from downloading. I don’t like it.

Now for the positive, Cosmosis is actually getting played a lot and people are grooving with it, the game made $10 in ad revenue over the weekend which means it would have had to sell 15 copies at $0.99 to match the ads. This is by far my poorest performing game but still I’ll take $10 over $1 - $2 any day of the week. Furthermore the sales of my strongest performing title SkylineBlade went up 30% which means that free Cosmosis actually made well over $100 for me this weekend. As a small iPhone developer who’s just scooting by that’s great news.

This past Friday a good friend and I flew up to Boston to attend the MIT BIG conference. There were a variety of high profile industry guys there including Ken Levine and Curt Schilling. Overall this was probably the best conference I’ve been too. I enjoyed GDC and of course IGC was also fantastic back in the day but MIT BIG seemed to cover more ground in far less time. The panel discussions were almost all interesting with the only downfall being the QA sessions, which were far too limited. Overall, I’m looking forward to attending again next year and hopefully there’ll be some more iPhone discussion.

On a side note, Boston is a great city. This was my first time visiting and I’m already excited at the prospect of a return visit. This particular trip was a whirlwind. We woke up at 4AM on Friday to catch a 7AM flight. We arrived in Boston at 8:30 and hot footed it over to the conference (the T helped). The conference lasted until 6 including the reception and then we made our way over to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game. We scalped some decent seats and drank beer until our hearts were content. Finally, we made our way back to a relative’s house to spend the night. The coolest part about that was waiting on Commonwealth Ave. for our ride. I decided to see what would happen if I let out a little scream of joy (a whooooOOOH if you will). The response my scream elicited was pretty cool. Two blocks down someone screamed back, then another from 2 blocks in the other direction, before long people in their cars were honking and screaming into a crescendo of joy over the Red Sox victory. It was all in good fun, and good fun it was!