Charlie Cleveland founded Unknown Worlds Entertainment back in 2001 in San Francisco with two full-time founders and 5-10 distributed collborators with roots in core (hardcore) games. Their goal? unite the world through play. To this end they began by releasing a total conversion of the Half-Life engine in 2002 as a game called Natural Selection, which was a real-time strategy/first-person shooter hybrid - a Marines vs. Aliens online team game. Their budget was $30,000, took 18 months to develop to v1.0 and included 65,000 lines of C++ code. They were planning on building a solid IP and for the most part suceeded, as well as learning how to make an online RTS/FPS and hire and run a distributed team. Also, instead of outright selling the game, they made use of player donations, which amassed a whopping $22k/yr - something for indies to think about if they're unsure about even digital distribution. However critical errors were made in thinking it would be easy to get investors, hire a team, make the game and reap some serious cash.

Charlie's first attempt at funding was to get investment, thinking it would be a slam-dunk. However the reality of the situation is that it can take at least six months to sign a deal. It's also a lot harder than it seems, and Charlie learned quite a few things you simply don't say to investors like:

"Our team is mostly college kids in other time zones"
"Why would I want to sell the company?"
"profit isn't our goal - we want to unite the world"

Everyone in the room got a chuckle from that last one. The first one is pretty obvious as well, and the meaning behind the second one is that it's always important to remember that investors aren't really interested in the game you're looking to make, they're interested in your company. They want to build you up and sell you to earn back their investment plus change. So in the end Charlie determined that this is the most expensive way to get any money, and the worst part is that investors will never say "no". They'll always tell you what they would like to see instead and keep stringing you along until you produce something that they like.

So the second thing that was considered was bootstrapping through contracting, like Gearbox and Demiurge. Obviously however in order to do this you first need a team with which to contract yourselves out. While it is good business development, you are also forced to work on other people's projects, and this can pigeon-hole you, meaning that you can get stuck pulling the same kind of contract work over and over again.

Ok so what about just plain old bootstrapping? Certainly this is how the companies of yesteryear worked, and it's still a possibility even today thanks to the casual games market. Because of the simplistic nature of many casual games, it's easy to have a short development cycle and start your cash flow. Focusing on profit isn't the goal here, as it's more important at this point to have recurring revenue so you can continue to fund your long-term game development projects. Since retail can take to long to actually get to market, it's best to piggy-back on an existing product or service with a large install base if possible. The added benefit of a short development cycle is that you don't really have to predict the market, you don't need to look ahead and ask yourself if in a few years this game will still be in demand.

Charlie's first attempt was Zen of Sudoku, which he designed to be the most accessible and relaxing Sudoku, with no game timer and unlimited puzzles that teaches you all apects of the game. It was made in 10 months, although the beta started selling after 5 months, and consisted of 22,000 lines of C++ code using the Popcap framework. He had a part-time artist, composer and sound fx totalling 40 hours that was free (friendly favors) or paidon the back-end after the game was shipped. After demoing it to distributors at Casuality in 2006 he's since signed with Steam, Oberon, Shockwave, Garage Games, and Retail (Best Buy, Target, Walmart, CompUSA). So for the most part Charlie succeeded at getting his cash flow going, even if it wasn't that much since the Sudoku theme was quickly becoming saturated in the casual games space. And even though it took only 10 months that was still longer than expected. Still he did wind up with some happy customers, becoming and Sudoku master and also closer to his dad.

There are several things to keep in mind when designing for casual games. For one thing it's okay to go after familiar games but add your own unique twist. Since these games will be played in a short span of time, it's important to try and break the game up into small chunks so that the player can feel that they've accomplished something in this minimal amount of game playing. The most successful casual games are easily accessible, meaning they use only the mouse or a few select keys on the keyboard. Because these games won't be played by hardcore users, software rendering is a key factor since there are still plenty of old computers out there owned by casual game players with no 3D hardware support.

When considering the technology for developing casual games, one of the most popular solutions is the Popcap framework because it's free, with the exception of the ~$200 BASS audio library license, and simple (36,000 lines of C++); it has software rendering support (unlike engines such as Torque Game Builder) as well as good community support; While the user-interface code is tedious and you generally have to roll your own GUIs, portals are simply used to dealing with the framework and will be more comfortable deploying a game created with it. There is also the Flash/Zinc solution which is good for games with a lot of action/redraw that doesn't render well enough in software. You can shorten your develeopment time to ~3 months, but the Flash Pro 8 + Zinc package will set you back $1000.

Finally there's distributing your game. Early on you shold make sure that it's easy to build different versions of your game as each portal you publish in will require different logos to be shown when the game loads, and you may have to change/remove external URLs as well. The main approach is to shop the game to every portal yourself, however in some cases its best to shop your game to a portal and let that portal in turn shop your game for you. You could also sell your game/IP outright or license the source for re-branding. Stay far away from exclusive distribution deals, as the more you can land the better it is for you. Typical return is ~25-50% royalties + ad revenue. In addition to the previously mentioned Casuality event, there's also the Minna Mingle that happens at GDC, and sending games via email works as well.

Check out the complete slides for Charlie's lecture as well.