9 nuances in the work of indie developer, which no one told me
We continue to translate foreign articles on the creation of games in the blog program "Management of online gaming projects . " This time the creator of the game SanctuaryRPG , Raghav Mathur will tell us about some of the nuances in the work of an indie developer .
When Daniel and I started working on SanctuaryRPG, I had no idea what it meant to be an indie game producer. Honestly, I don’t think that any of our team thought that SanctuaryRPG would ever become more than just a multi-boot hobby project. Three years, one hundred thousand lines of code, two publications in the Hunble Bundle and five hundred thousand downloads later, I can say with confidence that we were wrong.
The potential for success is every developer. Many people, looking at influential thought leaders, such as Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers) and Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), think that developing indie games is an amazing thing: you start working on video games and earn millions of dollars. Sounds simple and fun, huh? But this is not at all the case.
')
Well, not really. You start working on video games, and if you work hard, you might make millions of dollars. Maybe. There is a lot of work that people don’t realize between the stages called “I want to make a video game” and “I am going to invest profits from my fifth game in the sixth game”. Many blog posts have been written about the complexity of programming, the need for testing and the importance of marketing. In this article I want to talk about several other aspects of the profession - nine, to be exact - which are not so often spoken about. I hope that you will get something for yourself from my observations, regardless of whether you are a novice developer, seeking advice or an experienced nostalgic veteran.
Daniel and I started working on the project and spent 400 hours on it. This is what we achieved after these hours:
That's all we did. Over 400 hours. Four hundred hours. If you work from Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 17:00, it will take 10 weeks. This is more than three months of work. And all we could show was the landing and the skeleton in the raw prototype. If we continued to work on the project, it might have taken 3 to 6 months more before we got the game, and about 6 to 12 more months, so that it would start to make money.
You will have to admit this fact: programming is very difficult. Especially programming in games. If you are working on a bigger project, with a time frame of 12-18 months or more, you should not expect playable demo versions too soon, which also look beautiful. Concept development, team building, organization, programming, drawing, game design and marketing all take a lot of time. If you are going to make an indie game, you should have an idea of ​​how it should turn out at the end of the full development cycle. If you do not have something to rely on that makes you stay motivated to the end, you will inevitably burn out.
A person needs instant rewards. When a reward is delayed for months or years, it goes against our natural desires, and it is very difficult to fight innate instincts. Working on shorter projects or projects where you can very quickly create a prototype will allow you to see the fruits of your work faster and more often. Seeing how the game is going in front of your eyes motivates the indie developer. Observing the jumble of lines of code, while not having anything that could be shown, is not so motivating.
The ability to feel comfortable on a long-term project and remain motivated throughout the process will allow you to finish the work on an indie game.
When I tell family and friends that I produce games, they always answer: “Oh, you mean something like“ Call of Duty ”?”. Then comes an awkward conversation, during which they ask if I worked on something they heard about, and I have to list my projects to a family member with a tight smile, who, obviously feeling uncomfortable, will say “This is amazing ! ”And quickly change the subject.
Indie games, regardless of how popular they become, still remain a fairly niche product. The average person does not even know what “indie” means, not to mention any specific games (except, perhaps, Minecraft). Do not count on understanding when telling people what you are doing, unless you surround yourself exclusively with fellow developers and industry representatives.
You will surely find support from your friends (if not, find other friends!), But here’s another question to discuss: the feeling that what you are doing is not very valuable, because it’s not popular. People are so fascinated by PewDiePie who earns tens of millions of dollars, not because they really respect him, but because it is a bit confusing: how such a stupid pastime as YouTube can become a real career. No matter how progressive society is, niche communities (especially in the entertainment industry) remain only part of the overall performance until they take off.
Indie engineering is undoubtedly such a community. We have to seriously try to attract the attention of the press (although success stories like the story of Jonathan Blow, of course, really help us in this), but until the profession of indie developer becomes as respected as the profession of accountant or engineer We will continue to face some level of distrust and ridicule. Every developer should understand and accept this. Of course, I feel bad when I tell a person not from the industry, what I do, and I get a blank look or awkward inquiries in response, but when I meet with other developers or players, I remember that all this is worth it. Make sure you have one too.
You can say that the observation of Jonathan Blow is inspiring, but you need to talk about feeling like a small fish in the vast ocean of indie games. If I’m particularly pessimistic about a particular project, or feel a drop in energy, I’m not comfortable with reading success stories trying to regain hope.
Reading success stories has two possible consequences: either you are inspired and ready to work as a person you are reading about or even better, or it is demotivating and you feel that you will never reach such a level.
Indie games often feature the latter. Market glut, increasing promotion requirements with Steam Greenlight, AAA game releases that dominate the market ... Every developer once lost hope. Therefore, it is important to be able to turn any situation into a source of inspiration, and not allow it to demotivate you.
If you feel that you are not able to ever reach the level of such developers as Rami Ismail, try not only to get upset, but also to learn something! Read about Rami Ismail (he is an amazing guy) and learn his way. What did he do? How did he do it? Where is it published? What makes his games work? How did he structure his team? It is very important to be able to learn, watching someone else's success, and not to perceive it as a threat to unattainable high standards.
Most of the articles for indie developers that I see can fit in one simple phrase: it is vital for an indi developer to devote most of their time to managing and creating games. In the process of producing the game comes a lot of tasks: marketing, programming, design ... The list goes on and on.
When Daniel and I turned Black Shell Games into Black Shell Media, this was partly due to the fact that there were only two of us: juggling with a million tasks would certainly become impossible in the future. We wanted to focus our efforts on what we were good at - marketing and production. Thus, indie developers can come to us if they need help in trying to accomplish everything that is required of them.
If you are an indie developer, you will be faced with the fact that your list of cases will be insanely long. Extremely long. Almost impossible long. How to handle this you choose. You can contact the agency that will be involved in marketing, expand your team, outsource tasks, hire consultants, automate processes or simply try to do everything yourself. In any case, it will be difficult, and even if you have a team that performs all the tasks, you have to manage and deal with administrative and financial issues. The multitude of tasks that seem simple separately become complex, coming together.
Do you know how many volunteers we recruited to work on SanctuaryRPG after she first appeared on the Reddit main page? Almost fifty. Do you know how many of them came with us to run SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition on Steam? Six. Don't get me wrong - we definitely couldn't do it without the contribution of each of those people. But most of our team consisted of students or even younger children or people for whom it was not the main work. Their names are in the credits, because they really helped, but they could not be relied upon and relied on as the backbone of our team.
For a lot of people, indie development is a hobby, as it was for me when I started working on SanctuaryRPG. Not all people come to new projects with extreme optimism, especially at the very beginning of the process. If you do not have a team on a salary or unusual projects behind your back, or the ability to motivate people, you will have to feel how difficult it is to build a reliable team.
If for each volunteer who worked for a share of future earnings who had gone the distance in any of our projects, I would receive one dollar, I would have enough money to hire a person who would complete all that work. that they abandoned.
Trying to get people to invest enough time and energy in your project when they have a permanent job, study or other employment is very difficult. Be prepared to work with strange people and have a backup plan in case someone decides to quit. Programmers, be strict when it comes to commenting code. The situation when the programmer leaves, leaving the code that is not parsed, can destroy your project.
Carry out serious checks, make sure that you trust your team and adhere to open communication. Use clear project management systems like Trello and remind people what they are working on. Make your people feel the most involved in the process. Give them, especially artists and game designers, a little creative freedom, so that they are inspired and come to a new level of work.
You may think that the development team on a successful project that makes money will be ultra-motivated, constantly working hard. That everything is getting better when everyone starts to receive rewards for their hard work. Unfortunately, this does not work. When a team starts making money, satisfaction enters. When you finally release the game after unpaid work for a long time, the last thing everyone wants is to continue working.
Many people set themselves the goal of developing a game release. But in reality, the ultimate goal should be the release of a successful product and the confidence that its story after launch will remain as successful as at the moment of release. We must strive not only to sell the game once, but also to build a community around it and your brand.
You will be surprised how many developers are satisfied with their first test in Steam or the App Store. It seems to them that their work was done when they released the game, and they stop thinking about the production of additional content or modifications. Make sure that you can encourage the team to work in the long run and make them understand that the only way to keep making money is to stay active even after release.
Developers have to deal with all the business tasks that can only be in this world: from tax returns to copyrights and issues of receiving money from stores.
Many developers want to stay in their bubble, where there will be only programming and creative and no thoughts about marketing or business commitments. In such cases, the games fail to realize their potential (or have to close because of fixed frauds with taxes).
If you feel uncomfortable with your company's business (yes, even as an indie developer, you are still a company. You are a company even if you are the only one), then hire someone who can help you with this. It does not matter whether it is an accountant or a lawyer, with whom you consult or a specially hired person in your team, you need to be sure that you are not only fulfilling business obligations, but are also engaged in analytics, pricing, sales, and preparing profit and loss reports .
Even such a seemingly simple thing as pricing is, in fact, very serious, because it can make you a sale or kill them. People study pricing in universities because it is a field related to data analysis. Many developers put a price tag on their game, without having to do this before any analysis. All questions from pricing to the texts of your letters are related to business and marketing.
When planning to become an individual developer, do not forget that you are an entrepreneur not only in a formal sense, but also from the point of view of your thinking. You work independently of anyone, go your own way and create your own career. There is a lot that entrepreneurs should keep in mind.
From a formal point of view, starting your gaming business, you can act as a sole proprietor to get your taxes back. You will be able to cover your expenses for work and life. You can also register an LLC (Limited Liability Company) or another type of company and, possibly, get other bonuses and opportunities. Talk to an accountant and conduct your own research, as any entrepreneur would do. No matter who you are: Facebook, Google or Alex from Minneapolis, you have to keep track of your business operations and think about your tax obligations and opportunities.
If we talk about thoughts, then you should think like “traditional” entrepreneurs. People like Elon Mask or Mark Zuckerberg probably experienced the difficulties that indie developers face: trying to achieve results with a low or zero budget, deciding on positioning, marketing strategy, the need to motivate people working for free ... We have more in common with startups than we are thinking!
Listen to famous entrepreneurs. Stories about how people solved their problems and turned difficult situations into opportunities for growth are very motivating.
It seems to me that everything I wrote sounds like the development of games is a complete mess, consisting of managing people and filling out tax returns. This is true. I'm not trying to embellish something, I myself had to go through all this in the last three years. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that despite all these long hours, low pay and strange people, I wouldn’t change anything.
When we started posting posts about SanctuaryRPG and eventually released the game on Steam, the feedback we received from people who loved the game was amazing. One of the Steam users left us a review: “The perfect game to play while you are cooking dinner for children (I'm not kidding, I set the computer on my kitchen bench to kill monsters between cutting vegetables and boiling pasta, while time, as my daughters scream to me: “NERD!” from the living room. ”They write that SanctuaryRPG is“ the only ray of light among the tiring day. ”When I first read it, I almost cried from happiness.
Every person who buys SanctuaryRPG on Steam doesn’t just give us numbers, each of them devotes a certain amount of time in his life to play my game. These people could devote their day to anything, but they choose to spend time on what I have created. And after that they decide to spend time also in order to write me that they are very pleased that they have chosen our game, that they are going to support us and continue to tell about the game to their friends.
Watching the community grow around the game, hearing reviews from journalists, video bloggers and fans is the best reward for me. When I started working on SanctuaryRPG, I couldn’t even think that I was doing a game that would become popular. It seemed to me that people would say: “well, well done” and go on. I never thought that I would become partly responsible for someone who would spend dozens of hours exploring the world and killing monsters.
If you ever feel a breakdown and fear of creating a game, just remember that games exist to help people relax and feel joy and excitement, sadness and fear. Spend a huge amount of time without money, reward and recognition? Sounds exhausting and demotivating. Get an opportunity to cause someone's joy and excitement? Absolutely priceless.
Keep creating. And thanks for reading.
We hope the article was interesting and useful for you. Soon we will post new translations, but for now we invite you to our free offline game development events. In particular, this Saturday there will be a master class on work in the gaming industry , and by the end of the month there will be an open lecture with an overview of the gaming market .
All the best to you and to new meetings.
9 nuances in the work of indie developer, which no one told me
When Daniel and I started working on SanctuaryRPG, I had no idea what it meant to be an indie game producer. Honestly, I don’t think that any of our team thought that SanctuaryRPG would ever become more than just a multi-boot hobby project. Three years, one hundred thousand lines of code, two publications in the Hunble Bundle and five hundred thousand downloads later, I can say with confidence that we were wrong.
The potential for success is every developer. Many people, looking at influential thought leaders, such as Rami Ismail (Nuclear Throne, Luftrausers) and Jonathan Blow (Braid, The Witness), think that developing indie games is an amazing thing: you start working on video games and earn millions of dollars. Sounds simple and fun, huh? But this is not at all the case.
')
Well, not really. You start working on video games, and if you work hard, you might make millions of dollars. Maybe. There is a lot of work that people don’t realize between the stages called “I want to make a video game” and “I am going to invest profits from my fifth game in the sixth game”. Many blog posts have been written about the complexity of programming, the need for testing and the importance of marketing. In this article I want to talk about several other aspects of the profession - nine, to be exact - which are not so often spoken about. I hope that you will get something for yourself from my observations, regardless of whether you are a novice developer, seeking advice or an experienced nostalgic veteran.
1: You will have to work for a long time without any reward.
Daniel and I started working on the project and spent 400 hours on it. This is what we achieved after these hours:
- We did a primitive landing
- Gathered the team and gave the task to start developing the creative part
- Prepared a number of sketches
- Created a primary prototype in which you could move along with the bot that follows you
- Hired a new programmer
- This programmer has fallen off
- We realized that we did not have the resources to continue and froze the project
That's all we did. Over 400 hours. Four hundred hours. If you work from Monday to Friday from 9:00 to 17:00, it will take 10 weeks. This is more than three months of work. And all we could show was the landing and the skeleton in the raw prototype. If we continued to work on the project, it might have taken 3 to 6 months more before we got the game, and about 6 to 12 more months, so that it would start to make money.
You will have to admit this fact: programming is very difficult. Especially programming in games. If you are working on a bigger project, with a time frame of 12-18 months or more, you should not expect playable demo versions too soon, which also look beautiful. Concept development, team building, organization, programming, drawing, game design and marketing all take a lot of time. If you are going to make an indie game, you should have an idea of ​​how it should turn out at the end of the full development cycle. If you do not have something to rely on that makes you stay motivated to the end, you will inevitably burn out.
A person needs instant rewards. When a reward is delayed for months or years, it goes against our natural desires, and it is very difficult to fight innate instincts. Working on shorter projects or projects where you can very quickly create a prototype will allow you to see the fruits of your work faster and more often. Seeing how the game is going in front of your eyes motivates the indie developer. Observing the jumble of lines of code, while not having anything that could be shown, is not so motivating.
The ability to feel comfortable on a long-term project and remain motivated throughout the process will allow you to finish the work on an indie game.
2: No one will take seriously what you do
When I tell family and friends that I produce games, they always answer: “Oh, you mean something like“ Call of Duty ”?”. Then comes an awkward conversation, during which they ask if I worked on something they heard about, and I have to list my projects to a family member with a tight smile, who, obviously feeling uncomfortable, will say “This is amazing ! ”And quickly change the subject.
Indie games, regardless of how popular they become, still remain a fairly niche product. The average person does not even know what “indie” means, not to mention any specific games (except, perhaps, Minecraft). Do not count on understanding when telling people what you are doing, unless you surround yourself exclusively with fellow developers and industry representatives.
You will surely find support from your friends (if not, find other friends!), But here’s another question to discuss: the feeling that what you are doing is not very valuable, because it’s not popular. People are so fascinated by PewDiePie who earns tens of millions of dollars, not because they really respect him, but because it is a bit confusing: how such a stupid pastime as YouTube can become a real career. No matter how progressive society is, niche communities (especially in the entertainment industry) remain only part of the overall performance until they take off.
Indie engineering is undoubtedly such a community. We have to seriously try to attract the attention of the press (although success stories like the story of Jonathan Blow, of course, really help us in this), but until the profession of indie developer becomes as respected as the profession of accountant or engineer We will continue to face some level of distrust and ridicule. Every developer should understand and accept this. Of course, I feel bad when I tell a person not from the industry, what I do, and I get a blank look or awkward inquiries in response, but when I meet with other developers or players, I remember that all this is worth it. Make sure you have one too.
3: You will always feel that you are not good enough
You can say that the observation of Jonathan Blow is inspiring, but you need to talk about feeling like a small fish in the vast ocean of indie games. If I’m particularly pessimistic about a particular project, or feel a drop in energy, I’m not comfortable with reading success stories trying to regain hope.
Reading success stories has two possible consequences: either you are inspired and ready to work as a person you are reading about or even better, or it is demotivating and you feel that you will never reach such a level.
Indie games often feature the latter. Market glut, increasing promotion requirements with Steam Greenlight, AAA game releases that dominate the market ... Every developer once lost hope. Therefore, it is important to be able to turn any situation into a source of inspiration, and not allow it to demotivate you.
If you feel that you are not able to ever reach the level of such developers as Rami Ismail, try not only to get upset, but also to learn something! Read about Rami Ismail (he is an amazing guy) and learn his way. What did he do? How did he do it? Where is it published? What makes his games work? How did he structure his team? It is very important to be able to learn, watching someone else's success, and not to perceive it as a threat to unattainable high standards.
4: Doing everything is really hard
Most of the articles for indie developers that I see can fit in one simple phrase: it is vital for an indi developer to devote most of their time to managing and creating games. In the process of producing the game comes a lot of tasks: marketing, programming, design ... The list goes on and on.
When Daniel and I turned Black Shell Games into Black Shell Media, this was partly due to the fact that there were only two of us: juggling with a million tasks would certainly become impossible in the future. We wanted to focus our efforts on what we were good at - marketing and production. Thus, indie developers can come to us if they need help in trying to accomplish everything that is required of them.
If you are an indie developer, you will be faced with the fact that your list of cases will be insanely long. Extremely long. Almost impossible long. How to handle this you choose. You can contact the agency that will be involved in marketing, expand your team, outsource tasks, hire consultants, automate processes or simply try to do everything yourself. In any case, it will be difficult, and even if you have a team that performs all the tasks, you have to manage and deal with administrative and financial issues. The multitude of tasks that seem simple separately become complex, coming together.
5: People behave strangely, especially if there is no money in your relationship
Do you know how many volunteers we recruited to work on SanctuaryRPG after she first appeared on the Reddit main page? Almost fifty. Do you know how many of them came with us to run SanctuaryRPG: Black Edition on Steam? Six. Don't get me wrong - we definitely couldn't do it without the contribution of each of those people. But most of our team consisted of students or even younger children or people for whom it was not the main work. Their names are in the credits, because they really helped, but they could not be relied upon and relied on as the backbone of our team.
For a lot of people, indie development is a hobby, as it was for me when I started working on SanctuaryRPG. Not all people come to new projects with extreme optimism, especially at the very beginning of the process. If you do not have a team on a salary or unusual projects behind your back, or the ability to motivate people, you will have to feel how difficult it is to build a reliable team.
If for each volunteer who worked for a share of future earnings who had gone the distance in any of our projects, I would receive one dollar, I would have enough money to hire a person who would complete all that work. that they abandoned.
Trying to get people to invest enough time and energy in your project when they have a permanent job, study or other employment is very difficult. Be prepared to work with strange people and have a backup plan in case someone decides to quit. Programmers, be strict when it comes to commenting code. The situation when the programmer leaves, leaving the code that is not parsed, can destroy your project.
Carry out serious checks, make sure that you trust your team and adhere to open communication. Use clear project management systems like Trello and remind people what they are working on. Make your people feel the most involved in the process. Give them, especially artists and game designers, a little creative freedom, so that they are inspired and come to a new level of work.
6: People behave strangely, especially if there is money in your relationship
You may think that the development team on a successful project that makes money will be ultra-motivated, constantly working hard. That everything is getting better when everyone starts to receive rewards for their hard work. Unfortunately, this does not work. When a team starts making money, satisfaction enters. When you finally release the game after unpaid work for a long time, the last thing everyone wants is to continue working.
Many people set themselves the goal of developing a game release. But in reality, the ultimate goal should be the release of a successful product and the confidence that its story after launch will remain as successful as at the moment of release. We must strive not only to sell the game once, but also to build a community around it and your brand.
You will be surprised how many developers are satisfied with their first test in Steam or the App Store. It seems to them that their work was done when they released the game, and they stop thinking about the production of additional content or modifications. Make sure that you can encourage the team to work in the long run and make them understand that the only way to keep making money is to stay active even after release.
7: There is more business here than you think
Developers have to deal with all the business tasks that can only be in this world: from tax returns to copyrights and issues of receiving money from stores.
Many developers want to stay in their bubble, where there will be only programming and creative and no thoughts about marketing or business commitments. In such cases, the games fail to realize their potential (or have to close because of fixed frauds with taxes).
If you feel uncomfortable with your company's business (yes, even as an indie developer, you are still a company. You are a company even if you are the only one), then hire someone who can help you with this. It does not matter whether it is an accountant or a lawyer, with whom you consult or a specially hired person in your team, you need to be sure that you are not only fulfilling business obligations, but are also engaged in analytics, pricing, sales, and preparing profit and loss reports .
Even such a seemingly simple thing as pricing is, in fact, very serious, because it can make you a sale or kill them. People study pricing in universities because it is a field related to data analysis. Many developers put a price tag on their game, without having to do this before any analysis. All questions from pricing to the texts of your letters are related to business and marketing.
8: You are an entrepreneur and must behave accordingly
When planning to become an individual developer, do not forget that you are an entrepreneur not only in a formal sense, but also from the point of view of your thinking. You work independently of anyone, go your own way and create your own career. There is a lot that entrepreneurs should keep in mind.
From a formal point of view, starting your gaming business, you can act as a sole proprietor to get your taxes back. You will be able to cover your expenses for work and life. You can also register an LLC (Limited Liability Company) or another type of company and, possibly, get other bonuses and opportunities. Talk to an accountant and conduct your own research, as any entrepreneur would do. No matter who you are: Facebook, Google or Alex from Minneapolis, you have to keep track of your business operations and think about your tax obligations and opportunities.
If we talk about thoughts, then you should think like “traditional” entrepreneurs. People like Elon Mask or Mark Zuckerberg probably experienced the difficulties that indie developers face: trying to achieve results with a low or zero budget, deciding on positioning, marketing strategy, the need to motivate people working for free ... We have more in common with startups than we are thinking!
Listen to famous entrepreneurs. Stories about how people solved their problems and turned difficult situations into opportunities for growth are very motivating.
9: You can’t even imagine how much it is worth trying
It seems to me that everything I wrote sounds like the development of games is a complete mess, consisting of managing people and filling out tax returns. This is true. I'm not trying to embellish something, I myself had to go through all this in the last three years. The only thing I didn’t tell you was that despite all these long hours, low pay and strange people, I wouldn’t change anything.
When we started posting posts about SanctuaryRPG and eventually released the game on Steam, the feedback we received from people who loved the game was amazing. One of the Steam users left us a review: “The perfect game to play while you are cooking dinner for children (I'm not kidding, I set the computer on my kitchen bench to kill monsters between cutting vegetables and boiling pasta, while time, as my daughters scream to me: “NERD!” from the living room. ”They write that SanctuaryRPG is“ the only ray of light among the tiring day. ”When I first read it, I almost cried from happiness.
Every person who buys SanctuaryRPG on Steam doesn’t just give us numbers, each of them devotes a certain amount of time in his life to play my game. These people could devote their day to anything, but they choose to spend time on what I have created. And after that they decide to spend time also in order to write me that they are very pleased that they have chosen our game, that they are going to support us and continue to tell about the game to their friends.
Watching the community grow around the game, hearing reviews from journalists, video bloggers and fans is the best reward for me. When I started working on SanctuaryRPG, I couldn’t even think that I was doing a game that would become popular. It seemed to me that people would say: “well, well done” and go on. I never thought that I would become partly responsible for someone who would spend dozens of hours exploring the world and killing monsters.
If you ever feel a breakdown and fear of creating a game, just remember that games exist to help people relax and feel joy and excitement, sadness and fear. Spend a huge amount of time without money, reward and recognition? Sounds exhausting and demotivating. Get an opportunity to cause someone's joy and excitement? Absolutely priceless.
Keep creating. And thanks for reading.
We hope the article was interesting and useful for you. Soon we will post new translations, but for now we invite you to our free offline game development events. In particular, this Saturday there will be a master class on work in the gaming industry , and by the end of the month there will be an open lecture with an overview of the gaming market .
All the best to you and to new meetings.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/316472/
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