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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.'"
'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.
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.
...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.
The point is, is the game innovative in the right direction?
There are genres and general ideas not followed by any mainstream titles, but have considerable demand from gamers. For example, I always wanted to play a somewhat realistic game with medieval setting and without any magic, basically some kind of freeform RPG game, but without any supernatural nonsense. I finally stumbled upon Mount&Blade. And I found out there are many people who would be waiting for a game like this coming from the mainstream market, but alas, it never came from it.
Of course, if you define innovation as doing something no one ever thought of before, it's something else. But success based on innovation, as in doing something different than others, not doing something previously unthinkable, is not out of reach of indie devs.
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.
If you don't already have a buisness plan, a well fleshed out idea/design for your first product, and have at least one finished major project under your belt, stop now. Running a buisness is hard work. Programming a complex project is hard work, even for those who have experience at it. Doing both at once is exponentially harder.
If you don't already have your product decently fleshed out, you're planning on doing design, development, Q&A, all in under 1 year. At the same time, your only experience is with a class assignment, so you've never done a real product lifecycle before, and have no way to accurately judge how long and difficult it will be for your product (and indeed, as you don't have a product idea yet you couldn't estimate it even if you did have the experience to). And you're going to release it in a year, which is a small time for all but the most modest of games.
At every step of this post, it just smells of failure. You're trying to do too much, with not enough experience. This isn't a hack webpage that made millions like was possible in the 90s- this is a large, complex project. You'd be far better off getting a job, getting some experience, and working in your off hours to design your game. Then, if you think the game can be completed in a reasonable time frame (defined by your budget), quit after a year or 2 and go for it. Your chances of success will be far higher, and you won't have pissed off your seed money on a long shot.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.
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...
There is a big secret to innovation that I've found over the years, and if I may be so pretentious I'd like to share it.
Pretend your game isn't innovative.
This may seem like a weird thing to say, but the fact is that innovation does not promote accessability. Accessability is someone looking at your game, and within the first screenshot and title being able to say "I know what that is. I like that. Let's try that." Then within the first 10 seconds of playing "I know what this is, I'll keep playing." After they have their bearings in the world, that's when you hit them with the innovative parts.
Accessability is key.
The whole Tolkien / DnD world space is instantly recognizable and highly accessable. You know what to do when someone who looks like a dwarf comes to you as much as you do when someone who looks like a goblin does. Sequals are highly accessable for the same reason.
Or use subject matter that is instantly understandable to people even if it is new to gaming. What about a D-Day Landing role playing game? Or a game based in a Santa Claus universe? When players enter, they immediately have some idea of A: who they are, B: who the good guys and bad guys are, (even if this changes over time), and C: what they are supposed to do. They should be able to tell this from the screenshot, the title (Santa vs the Martians) or a one sentence summary.
Having the hook to a larger thing that people really care about, like holidays or issues of national pride, are also useful.
Games have to be accessable to a degree that non-interactive mediums do not. In a story, one can read about what the main character is doing without having to know the rules of the universe they are doing it in. A player could not make the right decisions for the Dread Pirate Roberts through the first 30 minutes of The Princess Bride without knowing that he is really Westley. A player wouldn't survive for any length of time in Hellraiser: the game, if they didn't know the rules of the box.
Ironically sometimes it is easier to be innovative with a big publisher. When we fail in the market (and we do sometimes) we don't exactly lose our house. Of course, we don't get the call on whether or not we get to be expressive, but that is a different issue. But we definitely appreciate it when independent developers step in and write original games.
Oh, and as another poster pointed out your artist and engine could use an overhaul. I'd recommend at least switching to transpartent PNG files and concepting out a more unique and consistently applied style to the imagery. Maybe pull the camera in 30% to emphasize the characters. Even old computers should have no problem supporting all of that. And it shouldn't be too difficult on your engine, as you're on systems with easy PNG support.
The ______ Agenda