Public Display of Game-Making? See Everything You Didn't Want To See!
Game development out in public? Where... PEOPLE... can... see *gasp*? Shamefulness!

One of the things I learned immediately upon getting a job in the videogame industry in *cough*1994*cough* was how very paranoid it was. There were NDAs (Non-Disclosure Agreements) to sign at interviews, any time you brought guests in, and any time two companies met together to discuss business. There was lots of legal butt-covering going on to make sure that we couldn't be sued by some kid claiming we "stole his idea" of ... say, having cars with guns. There are tons of reasons for keeping game development hidden behind a curtain, including the following (some of which even apply to indies).

Reasons To Stay In The Closet (With Game Development, I Mean...)
Protection of Ideas:
Now, as the old joke goes, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you. And when you are talking major publishers and game companies, the level of mutual screwage going on even WITH the layers of protection really is astonishing. Oftentimes its in the "legal, but ethically ambiguous" territory - but it's there. In fact, I remember my team lead once reporting that the VP of marketing (I think) informed him that what we SHOULD be doing to make budget titles was to simply look at what Microsoft was doing, rip them off, and he'd package them in boxes that looked as close as he could legally get away with. Yessir, it took years for me to learn to give a marketer any amount of respect after that.

And companies at that level are in such a fierce state of competition that they are often pushing products that have to match their competition feature-by-feature. Getting a clue as to what new feature your competitor is throwing into next year's offering early enough to duplicate and add a new twist on it is huge.

Now, as an indie, there's not much reason for the paranoia. As Howard Aiken once put it, "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If you your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." It's not like you are going to be launching a multimillion-dollar marketing effort that people could try and ride the coattails of. Sure, cloning will happen, but usually only after you have been proven successful.

Managing Expectations
One thing many developers have learned the hard way is that the merest hint of a particular feature in a hotly anticipated title can and will be given the full weight of a promise by the fans and press, and you will be held accountable for it by the fullest measure of punative actions your audience and journalists have the power to dish out.

As with most indies, a rabid pack of hardcore fans isn't exactly at the top of my list of problems.

Controlling The Hype
The PR and marketing people at big companies rely upon the careful doling out of information on your game as a way of building and controlling hype. With mainstream retail sales making most of their money during the first six to twelve weeks after release, it's all about making sure the hype peaks at the exact moment the game goes on sale. This means carefully measuring and controlling what information goes out about a game and when. If the hype peaks early, interest will have waned long before the game goes on sale.

Does this apply to an indie? Not so much. Sure, it's still a factor, but indies have a bigger problem getting ANYONE to pay attention to them. Ever. And indie games tend to have longer, slower lifecycles. Even if they do make it out onto the store shelves.

Embarassment
Game development is UGLY. I mean it. You have cancelled and back-burnered projects (I've had TWO since completing Void War). You have bad decisions that you later regret. You have really cool ideas that never make it into the game. You have even cooler ideas that get compromised down to a bastardized shell of their original concept. And you have long stretches of time during mid-development where progress just seems to slow down to a crawl and it's just... well.... BORING. Do you really want your customers and audience to see all the messy crap that goes on when making a game?

Are You Gonna Talk About It Or Do It?
Then there's the problem of spending so much time talking about your project that you never actually... you know, COMPLETE it. That's actually been a problem for me with this blog -I love talking about indie game development and the games industry and games in general, but it sure eats into the limited dev time I have at night. And there's the problem of falling victim to your own hype, and failing to see the reality that your project has become while you've been talking about how cool it is.

Newbie game developers fall into this trap ALL THE TIME. Without the motivating factor of, say, having a paycheck based on performance, its easy for talking about what you are going to be doing act as a psychological substitute for actually doing it. (Incidentally, I'm of a firm belief that this is a problem with people who keep pushing "business meetings" as well...)


Reasons To Let It All Come Out In The Open
The above are some very compelling reasons to follow the lead of our mainstream bretheren, to keep projects under wraps until it is time to do a Great Unveiling to the world and let them marvel at the finished product, and about how you make it look so easy. But could more be gained than risked by a small indie wanting to... er... expose themselves?

Sharing Is Good
I had a great experience many moons ago creating a "micro-project" and doing a write-up, documentary-style, called "How To Build a Game In a Week From Scratch With No Budget." I did it on a dare, and I've been pleased with the response. I've had a lot of people tell me that they learned a lot from it. Considering the failure rate with new game developers hitting the wall about 20% of the way into development, I think a lot of people could benefit from seeing how someone actually managed to plow through those difficult stages. Or maybe see how they floundered and be ready to avoid making the same mistakes.

Feedback Is Good
I had a really positive experience soliticing opinions about my Apocalypse Cow screenshot last week. It's kinda nice to solicit opinions BEFORE the game is "final" and you are asking people to shell out real money for it. There are several experienced indie developers with better eyes towards production values (and a greater disgust of the Comic Sans MS font) who had some great bits of advice. Not all perfectly useful at face value, but a lot of suggestions for new ways to look at things.

And it's really useful to have people to act as a sounding board when you are kicking ideas around. You lose that a lot when you are working on your own.

Its A Good Way To Learn
I'm not a productivity expert, or even a game development expert. Sure, I've done my time in the mainstream game industry, I've been making and selling indie games for a couple of years, and I've spent a lot of time (virtually) rubbing elbows with some really smart indie game developers and learning quite a bit from them. And I'm happy to pass what I've learned around. But the more I learn, the more I realize I still don't know.

One thing I have discovered is that when you talk about and explain what you are doing to other people, or when you teach other people something, the person who often learns the most is you. Any professional programmer can tell you experiences of how they figured how to fix a really frustrating bug only after they tried to explain to a coworker the nature of the bug in hopes of hearing a simple solution. In the process of explaining what's going on, the solution just dawns on you. It's fun being the coworker in this situation too, seeing the dawn of realization occur on the programmers face as they suddenly figure out the answer, when you STILL have no clue what they are talking about, and then just grinning and saying "Glad to help."

It Enhances Commitment
Steve Taylor once called this "throwing your hat over the fence." When you say you are going to do something, you are committing to something and you know you are going to be embarassed about it if you don't follow through. If you throw your hat over the fence, then you are committed to climb over the fence to retrieve it. This can help motivate you on those days you really feel like surfing the web or playing Fastcrawl instead of working. (Argh, what am I saying? Play Fastcrawl anyway!!! It only takes like twenty minutes!)

And... Aw, Shucks, It Sounds Like Fun
I'm not doing indie game development as a principle means of income. Maybe someday (yes, it is a goal), but not now. If I was totally in it for the money, I'd be doing somethig else far more valuable with my time. But I'm in it because - well, I love doing it. I love talking about it. It excites me. So if there's an opportunity to do something even more fun with it... I'm game.

Coming Soon: A Weekly Diary of Indie Game Development
Well, as an indie, I'm gonna say the pros have it over the cons. So I'm going to maintain a development diary of the making a commercial indie game from start to finish. Updated weekly. It'll be as interactive as you like. Feel free to offer suggestions, ask questions, hoot, jeer, whatever. I may not reveal everything (there's gotta be some surprises in the game itself, after all - it IS an RPG), but for the most part it will be kind of an "Anti-NDA" event. Developing right out in the open, where anyone interested can see it and comment on it.

Right now, I am imagining a format similar to what I used for the Hackenslash "Game In A Week" article. But it'll be more of a game-in-a-year project (appropriate, as I'm still considering that contest at MyDreamRPG.com. Though they haven't followed through on releasing the judging criteria yet.) Each week, I'll update you on what I have done, what I am doing, and where I think I'm going with it, and invite your participation and feedback.

I won't pretend this is like a totally revolutionary idea. Mike Hommel already mentioned in a comment earlier this week that he's already doing something like this too. And the great Sid Meier did it once for a game that ended up being cancelled (probably why he doesn't do it anymore). And lotsa folks have maintained public project updates. But this will be an interesting experiment (for me, at least) in really opening up the process to scrutiny and discussion.

This will not be slick marketing hype disguised as a development diary. It'll be embarassing. It'll show you just what a crappy game developer I am. It'll be full of wasted time and effort, bad judgement calls, shattered dreams, stupid ideas, dissapointments, confusion, and compromises. It'll be written as it happens, without the advantage of a post-mortem's hindsight. It might ruin my already questionable reputation. It may totally ruin the chances of the game selling a single copy.

And, probably, nobody will really care or pay attention to it.

But it kinda sounds like fun, doesn't it? Well, fun for me, at least in a self-flagellating kinda way. I hope it'll prove at least mildly entertaining, and enlightening (if only to reveal what not to do). While it won't be a community effort, I would love for it to be something of a collaborative exercise, as I bounce ideas off of people and get feedback on what I'm doing. And hopefully I'll learn more from the process than "this was a really bad idea."

I hope you enjoy the ride in spite of the bumps. There's bound to be a lot of 'em.


(Vaguely) related writings of less career-limiting nature:
* How To Build a Game In A Week From Scratch With No Budget
* Productivity Tip: The List!
* The First Playable Level
* Fitting Game Development Into a Full-Time Schedule
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Labels: Biz, Frayed Knights, Indie Evangelism, productivity

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:00 AM (Permalink)