Slashdot Mirror
Throwing Himself On the Innovation Grenade
spidweb writes "A long-time Indie game developer writes on IGN.com about trying to make innovative games, and the occasionally painful consequences. From the article: 'Like all (or many, or some, or none at all) other game developers, I spend a lot of time staring into the void of my own uselessness. So, to try to give my life a sense of meaning and accomplishment, I occasionally try to innovate. I really hate trying to do something new. Sure, it gives personal satisfaction. But you know what else is fulfilling? Staying in business. Not losing your house. And you can't pay for food with Creativity checks. But, every five years or so, I try to do something that isn't the standard material.'"
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
So much for innovation. Personally, I prefer to throw myself on the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch.
Well, there's risk involved in posting anything new. Dupes pay the bills.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I feel his pain, but I'm not sure I buy his message.
/. audience, other games from 1998:
"Innvoative" does not necessarily mean good.
I agree with him that a lot of cool indie games (Nethergate might be an example, King of Dragon Pass another similar one) get 'missed' because they simply don't have the exposure to the market stream - for this I largely blame the gaming press, who'd apparently rather review the umpteenth incarnation of the Sims or Civ or Generic First-Person Shooter X, than to invest their precious reviewers' time in exploring some of the indy games.
In Nethergate's particular case it DID get good press - but not very wide coverage.
* 4 Stars - Computer Games Online
* Computer Games Magazine RPG of the Year - Honorable Mention
* Vault Network Shareware RPG of the Year
so it's a damn shame that it didn't do better. It WAS a decent, if not stellar-quality game. You had one media outlet (CGO=CGM) giving it rave reviews and that's it. Where's PC Gamer? Where's Byte? It was a while ago: was Gamespot around? Gamespy?
In the end, I'd have to answer his questoin "Why didn't Nethergate do better?" with "You DID get pwned by the competition. Not for your excessive innovation, just that you were swamped by other great titles. 1998 was a good year for gamers, suckage for Indy developers."
For the
Thief:Dark Project,
RRTycoon2
Grim Fandango
Unreal
Baldur's Gate
Tribes
Starcraft
Half Life
Rainbow 6
Fallout 2
(holy crap was that a bad year to intro a new game)
-Styopa
'Like all (or many, or some, or none at all) other game developers, I spend a lot of time staring into the void of my own uselessness.'
So, that statement should've just read "I spend a lot of time staring into the void of my own uselessness."
Anyway, about innovation, creativity, and doing new things. People get burned out. You can't constantly come up with new things, at least not ones that are actually better than what you have come up with before. If you could then we wouldn't have the word 'progress' because everything would have been done by now. There's a natural progression to the creation of new things. And the creativity most people seek is found not by trying to stimulate some secret, hidden creative organ, but by a multitude of things. First and foremost is maintaining a healthy body and mind. That means exercise, not just eating right. After that you need to have a well-rounded appetite for activities outside of the normal grind of whatever you do for a living, be it game design or anything else.
The point is, if you want to be creative, just sitting there trying to be creative isn't going to help. The most creative moments I've ever had were the result of a culmination of many things in my life, at which point mentally I reached an apex of sorts, and something clicked. And then I realized something or thought of something in a new way.
I'm not saying that you can't spend time, and a lot of it, doing what you love, and not still be able to churn out a high degree of creative products. You can. I'm just pointing out that if you burn yourself out on it by not moderating what you do with the rest of your life, or having no rest of your life to speak of for that matter.. then you are doing more harm than good.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Well, it's not really a dupe since it's a different article in the series. I get your joke, though, and it's astonishing how well it fits Slashdot.
Rob
It got good reviews for an indie game, and a lot of people really loved it. I didn't lose my shirt. But it sold much worse than the standard fantasy game that came before it. And I don't think that it was a terrible game. It was about the same quality as the standard fantasy games I wrote before and after it, both of which sold much better.
And herein lies the problem. When you innovate, it's not enough for the game to have "about the same quality" as regular dime-a-dozen games. When you innovate, it has to be not only different, but way above average quality as far as gameplay goes to become a hit. If it's original, but only mediocre or good, it won't create the buzz needed to become a good seller. And games that are "different" need buzz to sell well. It's of course hard for an indie developer to make a game that's both spectacular and innovative, but that's beside the point. Innovation is good, but it's never enough to sell a game.
Innovation is neither a formula for success or for destruction. When a game developer chooses to be innovative for the sake of being innovative, without a truly inspired vision, the results will be dismal sells. For innovation to work, a product *must* be *fully-realized*. Many innovative games have done a great job mixing Innovation with Marketability. And just arround the corner is an entire innovative system: Nintendo Revolution. IMO, Innovation is the key to the greatest kind of success in the gaming market because it allows you to shatter the boundries of pre-existing genres to really make your product stand out.
4 words:
Nintendo
Re
Vo
Luscious
...The revolutionary revolution with revolutionize the gaming world. I'd bet on it.
http://www.soundclick.com/g1mike
Innovation is hard. Especially, if you're running a three-person outfit. I'm going to find out exactly how hard when I start my indie outfit this summer. Starting with a business plan and a partner, I'm going to set up the business entity and website, write the design docs, program the game, and released a finished product for the Mac in one year. A modest project considering that my largest programming projects to date includes a database program using XML for persistent storage for a class and the database scripts for my personal website that I'm currently rewriting. As for the game itself, I have no idea what's that going to be yet. Innovation is hard.
...if you are independent and one unsuccessful game still wrecks your place!! The whole reason you run a studio as an independent developer/distributor is so you don't have to make the same stupid marketing/management mistakes as EA or Acclaim or Midway or any of the big giant studios out there. How is it that you run your place so close to the bone that you can't afford to make a slightly experimental game every now and then? Why don't you have your own community site to help promote all your games? Even tiny companies need to promote their work (MoonPod have banners on all the major game-related webcomics for example) (although i see the author is using articles as a way to advertise too, which is pretty clever! he even got onto slashdot...). What happens if the market tanks or a more talented developer moves into your niche? There is plenty of room to innovate, and many video game companies (heard of Nintendo?) actually require innovation in order for their business plan to succeed. 3M does the same in their industry. If you can't innovate without unreasonable risk then it is your fault, not the consumers or the publishers.
:P look at your games' strengths, find your audience, target your niche, and help people find games they love!
I am working on building a self-supporting indie studio right now, and there are plenty of very valid sources of income that can help support you and your studio while you develop innovative titles of your own. They're not my dream projects, but they are short and pay VERY well, and give me lots of free time to pursue my real goals. If you box yourself in, and continue to make titles that sell ok but not great, and you never build yourself a financial cushion so that you can experiment, well then shit man too bad! Don't whinge on the internet about how innovation just doesn't sell; if you're going to innovate, PLAN on it not selling, and build your business around that. Time, word of mouth, and creativity are all on your side here! Just because your first couple experiments didn't sell well, that's no reason to start bitchin and moanin. They might have been bad games; they might be ahead of their time; they might be too late.
Final thought: If the game had real historical content, why do you cringe at its possible Educational (TM) value? There is a market for educational software that badly needs exciting historical games. A man can only play Oregon Trail so many times, and try as it might, Oregon Trail will never be received as the new God of War, especially if its a shareware PC title
There's a simple problem facing most indie games. They simply aren't very good. A few offer innovative concepts, but most are very derivative. The games also seriously lack polish. Often its poorly conceived controls, a sloppy interface or extremely amateurish artwork. The concept might be great, but the game in general is poorly executed.
The standard commercial game is fairly refined despite the occasional bug. Despite contrived content and a general lack of imagination a player can still expect a sufficiently satisfying gameplay experience. That's why these games continue to sell; they're adequately good.
Although I tend to follow whats out there I personally could care less about most games. I haven't played probably 90% of the commercial games available in the past few years and I've purchased even fewer.
I'm not looking necessarily for innovative gameplay. I'm looking for games that are outright fun; that make me feel like they're worth the money. I think there's too much of an emphasis on the latest and greatest 3d graphics with so much potential being wasted.
I don't have a problem with sequels. I like the familiarity of playing the same characters and seeing their worlds evolve and grow. What I dislike is when they're called franchises. Because it means the sequel is nothing more than a way of making money on the reputation of the first game, which inevitably means insufficient effort is put into making the sequel good.
There seems to be this fixation on innovation like that's somehow going to eliminate the glut of uninspired gaming. I don't need to wave around a wand like a fool in order to experience great gameplay. It might make for a great party game, but do I really want to physically move something every single time I play a game? There's already the problem on the DS with developers who are feel they absolutely must utilize the touch screen an end up with a weak game as a result. Those tools are great, but they just wont work with the majority of games.
Just focus on good gameplay. Blizzard has done well for a long time because they'd take an existing genre, strip it down, and focus on the elements that made that genre fun. Nintendo also has great games because they generally understand what's fun.
The problem is that game development is a time consuming process. I've developed a few flash games and most of it I've never finished beyond a basic proof of concept because of how involving it can be, although I tend to get too ambitious. I've also tried to initiate some projects with friends but those go nowhere fast and again, it can be a daunting process. You either need too much free time on your hands or a group of people who are committed to giving up their spare time to develop something. Creating artwork is overwhelming let alone actually coding these games.
One other problem is that of all the people out there trying to create games only a handful really have the skill to produce something truly good. The problem is that the ones who are that good probably end up working for the big developers in one form or another. That's probably why we rarely see outstanding indie work, because the ones that good are usually swallowed up by commercial gaming.
With a shooter, at least when it has decent graphics and more story than "kill all the robots", you simply know it will sell. Certainly not to me, but I'm hardly the mainstream anyway.
Same with real-time strategy. Make a Command and Conquer 2007, throw in a few "upgrades" and a few ways to "tune" your strategy, and it will sell.
Everything else is a risk. It's not a proven concept. It isn't known to sell. And most of all, the audience doesn't know what to expect. Or, worse, the audience expects something different.
Take "Black and White". Innovative? Most certainly. Sure, it had "build up" elements, but by far less than any given RTS game. It had a very detailed AI for the creature (which, unfortunately, was more a nuisance than something that increased gameplay), but it failed for so many different tiny problems.
Biggest problem: Wrong expectations. People heard "god game" and were thinking of something akin to Populous or, if they're younger, some RTS game. Of course, they were disappointed.
When you hear "shooter", you know what to expect. When you hear "RTS", same. Even with "Adventure", you have an idea what course it will go. But if you really dare to come up with something completely new, you're going on thin ice. If you're successful, all the other studios will copy your idea 'til it doesn't move anymore. If you're not, you're out of biz.
It's sad, but you're best off if you just copy what was already there. It sells. And as much as I hate it, that's the way to success.
I'd buy a good, innovative game, even if it costs 100 bucks instead of the usual 50. The problem is, few others would, and are instead satisfied with the n-th copy of Doom.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thank you all for the comments on my article ... very interesting reading.
:-)
I think that, if there is any point I'm trying to make, it's how terrifying trying to do something different is. I really do try to do new things with the RPG genre. But, when I do, I can picture in my mind the dollar bills flying out the window. If we care about games, we developers have to try to do new stuff. But, once I've taken my turn in the barrel, I let other people do it for a few years.
I love Nethergate, and I have every plan to make a v2.0 shinier, improved version in the next year or two.
But if the experience taught me anything, it is how hard it is to not have your next game be Previous Game [n + 1]. I am starting to get the itch to try to do something new. I hope I don't end up killing myself this time.
- Jeff Vogel
Spiderweb Software
Fantasy RPGs for Mac and Windows.
http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com
Hire better artists next time. Your art assets are consistently very, very weak.
You need someone who understands composition, balance, contrast, and a number of other things that are missing. What you appear to have is someone who can do decent, not fantastic, cartoons.
Take a look at Heroes of Might and Magic or Warcraft III. Every single screen could have been painted by hand. You can hardly tell the characters are sprites or 3-D models.
In your games, every character is an awful, two-dimensional thing slapped down without blended edges. If you don't want to devote the hardware to blending it in real time, at least *pre* blend the art with a background of approximately the same brightness as the one you intend using.
This is inexcusable.
It's one thing to say gameplay is more important than graphical glitz. This is true. It's entirely something else if your graphics actively interfere with seeing how the gameplay is progressing.
Real animators don't make all that much money, and they turn out a fuckton of drawings in a day. Find one. Hire him for a couple of weekends.
"Maybe the whole historical thing made the game sound like it was (ugh) Educational (vomit). Truly the kiss of death."
Unfortunately Jeff, for whom I have a great deal of respect, and whose games I've positively reviewed for Gamespy before, is flat wrong about the correlation of educational games to economic success. Education is most certainly not the kiss of death. The mega-bestselling Civ series is arguably more history-laden than any game I can think of, short of very specific wargames (and those only in a localized and usually strongly military-biased sense). I can't frankly think of a game that's *more* educational at all sorts of levels (from literal to abstract) than Civilization, whether you're giving someone a basic sense of how socio-politico-economics works in abstract, teaching them fairly intricate game strategies from a gameplay standpoint, or offering them Britannica-level factoids on anything from ancient Sumeria to the invention of the printing press and beyond.
Matt
mattpeckham.1up.com
It sounds like a marketing problem to me. Does he know his audience and market to them? His games seem interesting to me but I run Linux and it looks like his games don't run on Linux. Thus the type of customer that would buy his games, a geek that uses Linux, won't because he has excluded them. I'm sure there are people besides Linux geeks that'd be interested but is he targeting them any better than he is targeting me? If you're doing something a little different than the usual then you really have to let the people that like things out of the norm know about it if you want to PROFIT!
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I think he was speaking a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but still, he does have a point.
Did the ad copy for Civ read "Learn history while commanding an empire!"? No it did not. When I think of a Civ game, my first thought is "That's a sweetass epic strategy game". The education just happens to be snuck in there. Many games have some educational aspects snuck in. They sell despite that, because no fuss is made about it during the sales pitch. Most people equate more educational with less fun. When playing most "somewhat educational" games, you find out about the educational bits afterwards. By then it's okay, because you already know the game is fun.
When you're trying to get someone to buy a game (or most anything else for that matter), education just doesn't sell. It never really has. Perhaps we should blame our education system for instilling us with a basic belief that education is not fun.
Random and weird software I've written.
Hi, Jeff.
Loved Nethegate, bought it and subsequently several more Avernum/Generforge titles. Looking forward to Nethergate 2.0.
Speaking of indie rpgs, have you tried the Mount and Blade betas?
Spiderweb needs a better engine, those guys need a plot and an English spellchecker -> a marriage made in heaven!
While we are on the subject of innovative games that didn't succeed. OMF: Battlegrounds was a 3D sequel to the old dos fighting game. What was innovative is that it was a multiplayer online fighting game in 3D. It came out in like 2002/3. It never got enough press to help it, that and the company didnt have enough funds to really put on the extra polish of eye candy. The graphics were good, but one of the things so many reviews rated down on it, was that the graphics werent modern enough. But the gameplay was pretty good, you could even make teams and have team matches. If they would of been backed by a major studio more people would of heard about it, thats for sure.
Look at the Avernum games that they are releasing now. They are just remakes of the old exile games they made. That would be *great* if the remake was an appreciable improvement on the original. Exile I, II, and III were great games, especially for mac users, since there were so few other rpgs for the mac at the time. If you haven't played them before, check out Exile III/Avernum III. Exile III was kind of a cross between elder scrolls and a tactical RPG. However, the only real improvement between the exile series and the avernum series is that they switched from low res grid graphics... to low res isometric graphics... They also keep reusing art between games, and I often recognize "stock" sounds from exile in other games. Although to their credit, I fondly associate those stock sounds the most with exile.
I played the Nethergate demo back in the day, and it was actually pretty cool. All of their stories have cool plots, and their gameplay mechanic *is* actually pretty enjoyable, even if it hasn't changed in over a decade... What they really need is to get out of their rut, get some outside investment, hire a few full time fantasy artists, and maybe another programmer, and put together a game that has the great stories, combat, and quests of the previous ones, but also has nice looking *graphics* to appeal to a wider audience... maybe even get it sold at retail.
Being an indy developer shouldn't mean that you have no budget whatsoever for your product... no company should be run like that. It's impossible to compete.
The only reason nethergate failed, is that spiderweb has locked itself into the "retro rpg" niche market. The "hisorical retro rpg" is a niche within a niche. Also, it would be nice if they kept supporting the project... you can no longer run it on the latest (intel) macs, which kind of hampers it from becoming some future "cult classic."
I fondly look forward to the day when spiderweb either gets outside investment, or Vogel goes to work for a larger company as a game designer. However, that doesn't seem likely, as they seem pretty committed to doing extremely low budget games...
That's maybe a little bit the point though, Cecil. I'd never suggest that selling something as "educational" in the current market would make it more saleable, but regardless, it's vastly more educational even taken without the factoids than, say, Half Life 2. Just learning the basic abstract (and I grant, hugely simplified) differences between various politico-economic systems can have a fundamentally grounding impact on especially younger minds learning to juggle various systems and get a better sense for, say, communism than sadly inaccurate propaganda like "that thing the evil Soviets did that involved beating up and killing and silencing people."
Even playing it as a strategy game has enormous educational implications. Just that it's a strategy game...it teaches certain highly organized and strategic problem-solving skills that apply to everything, from how you structure your daily schedule to how you interact with daily problems and solutions.
Matt
"Biggest problem: Wrong expectations. People heard "god game" and were thinking of something akin to Populous or, if they're younger, some RTS game. Of course, they were disappointed."
The biggest problem with Black and White was that it was two separate games badly merged together. The creature training and play was pretty innovative. It was wed to a sort of thrown together version of Populous.
I don't think the problem was one of expectations - the prerelease hype was entirely around the creature aspect of the game. I definately wasn't expecting a traditional RTS from Black and White and what we got was entirely too much of a traditional RTS.
It felt like the developers loved the idea of the pet and spent 90% of their time on it and then when the release deadline grew near they said "oh shit we need a game to go around this concept".
Sometimes my arms bend back.
From the linked article:
Feom what I read, this guy seems to regard creativity as this terrible call of duty. No kidding his games are going to suck in that case. From what I've experienced in my own life, and what I've read, creativity isn't simply "forced." It's a combination of vision and and practice.
Take for example, what I know of Shigeru Miyamoto. He gets his best games ideas from life - Nintendogs from the purchase of a new pet, Pikmin from gardening, Zelda from his childhood adventures in Japan's natural places. Sure, there are times when Miyamoto needs a good idea, I'm sure, but having a lifetime of experience behind you, in both life and gaming, allows him to come up with things.
But often the best creativity comes from inspiration, sometimes from hardship. Star Wars was made on a low budget. Katamari Damashii was made by Namco employees who were thought to be doing substandard work on more convential projects.
More over, for every creative game, there are plenty that suck. Even from Miyamoto and Nintendo, there are have been plenty of half baked ideas (Virtual Boy?). A lot of it takes innovating, throwing stuff at the wall until something sticks.
My advice is to go live life and let inspiration find you.
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
Puh-lease. "Wah, I can't be creative all the time or I can't feed my children, so I have to pump out crappy sequels and clones to keep driving my BMW." What a total load of bullshit.
Make one truly creative game, sell a million+ copies and sit back and cash the checks. Not only that, but take a gander at the greatest artists and creative minds of all time... most were poor and down and out for the majority of their lives. Sure, Einstein could have wasted time writing and selling 5th grade math books, or Van Gogh couls have sat in the square drawing cariactures, but they DIDN'T. They stayed true to their hearts, and their passion... something YOU obviously cannot do, or do not have the talent to do.
Do us all a favor and get out of the business. Rather than flood the shelves with derivitive crap to make a buck, go work a 9-5 and collect a steady paychek.
KWITCHERBITCHEN.
http://teasphere.wordpress.com - A little spot of tea
"Geneforge 3 casts you as a Shaper, a member of a powerful guild whose members share the amazing ability to create life forms that can then be molded to serve your needs and goals"
p er_Caste
Gee sorta like the yuuzahn vong shapers from the new jedi order series....sorta EXACTLY. There is no such thing as original thought anymore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuuzhan_Vong#The_Sha
I agree. I have learned so much about locomotives playing the Railroad Tycoon series. Now that I have a kid who's into Thomas the Tank Engine, I can explain why a Fairlie engine would be used in the mountains.
It's also fun learning about people like Isambard Brunel, JJ Hill, et. al.
I think most innovation in the gaming world is a gradual evolution. For starters, you have to rate the amount of change the gaming audience is willing to take. Creating something wildly different may be difficult for mass audiences to pick up and understand. One of the reasons World of Warcraft is so successful is that it didn't dramatically innovate, but rather took all the gameplay elements that worked well in the MMORPG realm and polished them all to a beautiful shine.
If you wish to innovate, try to do so one element at a time. Introducing a morality system in Ultima IV was it's big new thing. Some innovations are stylistic, such as the post-apocalyptic worlds of Wasteland and Fallout.
Probably the hardest thing to judge is whether or not a new gameplay element is fun, innovation or otherwise. I'm working on a complicated system for Neverwinter Nights 2 that involves ship-to-ship combat, trading, and more. I'm so close to development that it's hard to say if it's fun or not. I'll probably have to wait for my QA folks to hopefully give me the honest truth.
So, best of luck to you. Hopefully you can keep your soul intact and your bills paid.
I didn't see a single ~gameplay~ innovation mentioned in the article apart from playing both sides (but apparently playing them through entirely conventional means). The setting did sound quite unlike the usual fantasy fare, but I don't really associate a new setting or plot with true videogame innovation.
You've clearly made games that people enjoyed and will remember. I'd hardly call that a pointless existence in a world where so many people can't make that claim. Really Jeff, if you've got a model that works for you, nobody expects you to change just for the sake of change. Sure, I'm one of those people that will complain about our tired old rehashed models. But I'm not the guy you're trying to sell old school RPG's to either.
Don't make a historical RPG unless you LOVE history, and desperately want to play a historical RPG. If you're doing it JUST to say you're doing something different, the passion won't be there and everybody will know it. Did you love making the game? Then make another one, and make it better. Listen to feedback, find out what it needs. Then do it. You of all people should know that success with something just isn't going to fall out of the sky. It may take more than one game to get your newly envisioned formula right. No, it won't be a financial cakewalk, but passion and success don't always meet with each other right away.
From the Oxford American English Dictionary:
snuck informal past and past participle of sneak
ORIGIN late 16th cent.: probably dialect; perhaps related to obsolete snike [to creep.]
USAGE The traditional standard past form of sneak is sneaked (: she sneaked around the corner). An alternative past form, snuck ( | she snuck past me), arose in the U.S. in the 19th century. Until very recently, snuck was confined to U.S. dialect use and was regarded as nonstandard, but in the last few decades its use has spread, particularly in the U.S., where it is now generally regarded as a standard alternative to sneaked. In formal contexts, however, sneaked remains the preferred form.
oh my god someone put shit in my pants
the true problem with indy games is that they try to go after the same lowest common denominator market that all the big financed games go after. They really need to look around the gaming community and see what niches haven't been filled. for example, there has yet to be a decents sports mmo, a decent non-ship based space/sci-fi mmo (swg was innovative but not fun, now it is neither innovative nor fun). wizardry 8 was the last decent turn based rpg, there is not a decent 3d roleplay mmo yet, not a one has captured the feel of pen and paper games, um, etc...
Otherwise, how can you explain the success of cable networks like TLC, History Channel, and Discovery? Your point is still valid, in that games are well.. games. Learning is not a selling point for a game. Gameplay, graphics, story line, etc. are the primary selling points for games. Any game that is packaged as an "educational game" will not sell very well, because education is seen, rightfully so, as an obligation/duty/chore in nearly every society in the world, certainly within the cultures being marketed to for games.