So here it is. Here is what I’m going to link when that rare situation arises again, because it’s too much work to write it up more than once! This is advice that I feel may actually be practical to someone who is just starting out as an indie game developer. Hope it helps!

INDIEPENDENT

So yeah, what does being “indie” even mean? Is “indie” short for independent? Is this game “indie”? Is “indie” a genre? IT’S CONFUSING - WHY DO WE NEED THE WORD “INDIE” AT ALL.

To answer the last question, I offer the following scenarios. Scenario 1: a person is looking to make games, and perhaps start their own studio. They type “game development” into a search engine. The results, to say the least, are underwhelming. Dry. Academic. Programming-centric. (Try it yourself and see.)

Scenario 2: the person instead types “indie games” into a search engine. Instead of pages upon pages of conferences, bachelor’s degrees, and programming tools, that person is met instead with pages upon pages of games to play and vibrant communities filled with people who are doing exactly what he or she wants to be doing. Some of them went to school, but many did not. A wealth of different ideas and tools are used. There are even documentaries about making games! It’s not just something where you get a degree and wait in line for a job. You can start making games RIGHT NOW.

The word “indie” is more than just a way to describe a type of developmental process… like any label, it actually provides an avenue for people to explore that process and then flourish within it. It has a real purpose. It serves real lessons on game creation and entrepreneurialism. It offers real motivation!

Of course, it can be irritating to see the term misused, or become a vehicle for pretentiousness and arrogance. Like any label, “indie” also breeds a certain amount dogmatism, croneyism, and other -isms. But the net result is really worth something. As someone who once gave up on professional game-making because I thought it meant a 9-to-5, I can tell you that it’s genuinely valuable.

As for what games are “truly” indie, we’ll never fully agree, and that’s probably for the best. But I can tell you the criteria I’ve devised for The Independent Gaming Source to determine whether a game is fit for coverage:

1. “Independent”, as in no publisher.

2. Small studio (roughly 20 members or less).

I choose that definition because it’s the most useful one. Someone who is looking to become an “indie” game developer is interested in what is possible under those constraints and how those types of studios operate. It excludes companies like Valve and Double Fine, which are certainly independent but too large to be “indie”. It also excludes “feels indie”-type games that are not self-published.

Under that definition you still run into gray areas, but hey, just because we don’t know when “red” turns into “purple” doesn’t mean the words aren’t useful. Just think about someone who wants to make a game with a small team and self-publish it… what should they type into Google for inspiration, advice, community, etc.? “Indie” is still as good a word as any, in my opinion.

So, should I go to school to learn how to make games?

The most important thing to know about video game development and schooling is that no one, whether it’s an indie studio or big company, cares about degrees. How could it, when some of its most prominent members are drop-outs or never-beens? John Carmack, Cliff Bleszinski, Jonathan Blow, and Team Meat are all prominent members of this club.

A degree is a piece of paper that says you can do something in theory - game developers want to know that you have enough passion to do real work, regardless of whether you’re being graded on it. And if you’re thinking of going indie, it won’t matter what other people think - you’ll simply need that passion to succeed or else you won’t. You’re the only one holding the door open in that case.

This isn’t to dissuade you from going to college, per se (I studied computer science in college, and while it was far from a perfect experience, I also gained a lot from both the curriculum and the friends I made there). The point is make something - games, mods, art, and music. If school helps you with that, great. If it doesn’t, then you need to rethink how you’re spending your most valuable resources: time and money (both of which can be exorbitant costs for schooling).

If I go to school, what should I study?

At a regular university, I would suggest majoring in computer science, even if you “just want to be a designer”. The design of games is very much tied to how they are made.

At an art school, illustration, concept art, and 3d modeling courses are probably the most useful for games.

At a game school, they will hopefully try to involve you in all aspects of game creation, from programming to design. I would stay far away from design-only schools or curricula - those are either scams or are better suited to academia than actual game-making. Also, it’s worth finding out whether or not the school owns what you make while you’re a student there.

See also: Jonathan Blow - How to Program Independent Games (read the comments as well as watch the video)

Okay, you say make something. How do I start?

My best advice for those starting out is not to get ahead of themselves. It’s easy to start worrying about tools, teams, platforms, deals, marketing, awards, and whatever else before you’ve even gotten a sprite moving around the screen. Those stars in your eyes will blind you. They’ll freeze you up. You need to be actively making games all the time.

If we were talking about painting, I’d tell you to pick up a painting kit and a sketchpad at your local art store ASAP and just have at it. You’d proceed to put absolute crap down on the pad and get frustrated. But it’d also be kind of fun - so you’d keep doing it. Along the way you’d read some theory and study other people’s work. With good taste and under a critical eye, you would keep doing that until the day you painted something good.

We’re talking about games, though. I recommend Game Maker and Unity as two all-purpose game-making suites. They both have a good balance of power versus ease-of-use; they’re both affordable or have free demos, and they both have a wealth of tutorials and plug-ins online. Both are used by professional developers (Unity in particular). Grab one of those and start running through the tutorials. When you run into trouble, ask for help. Give help back when you begin figuring things out. Get active in a game-making community.

But above all else, keep making games. It’s the only way to truly answer all of those questions in your head right now.

Also, watch this:

LASTLY, MY TOP 10 TIPS

1. Finish your games.

2. Don’t skimp on artwork. It’s easy to underestimate the importance of artwork to a game. And even if you don’t, it’s easy to underestimate the importance of having a unique style of artwork. The result is that there are many ugly or generic-looking (i.e. “clip-arty”) games failing to capture people’s attention.

If you have no artistic talent, go for style and coherency as many successful indie developers do. And even ugly is probably better than generic, all told. Remember: this is most people’s first impression of your game.

3. Don’t blame marketing (too much). In the indie community it’s become popular to write “how I failed” articles where the screenshots and comments tell the story of an ugly, boring game and yet the article itself tells the story of bad marketing decisions. Let’s face it, no one wants to admit that they lacked any amount of creativity, vision, or talent. It’s much easier to put the blame on release dates, trailers, websites, and whatever else.

This is the internet, though. A good game will make its way out there. Marketing will certainly help, and hype may get you quite far in the short term, but it’s not going to make or break you - it’s only a multiplier of however good your game is. Saying otherwise is only hurting your ability to self-criticize and therefore improve your craft. It’s also encouraging others to do the same.

4. Indie is not a genre or aesthetic. Make the game you want to make, not what you think an indie game “should be”. Recently, the very small and very independent team behind The Legend of Grimrock announced that their very traditional first-person dungeon crawler sold over 600,000 copies. Don’t feel pressured to be dishonest about what you’d like to do - after all, what is independence if not freedom from such pressures?

5. Build yourself a working environment that’s healthy for you. Are you introverted and lose energy around other people or are you extroverted and gain energy that way? Or something in-between? What do you want your average working day to be like?

You’ll want to focus all of the energy available to you toward creating, and it’s amazing how much of it can be lost to seemingly mundane things. Figuring out your physical working space as well as your personal support system is a key part of the solution to this problem, and its vitally important to you as an independent creator.

6. Stay independent! To be sure, going indie can be daunting. There is always going to be the temptation of selling yourself or your ideas to someone else for a bit of a feeling of security. But honestly, once you go down that road it’s hard to come back - every moment you’re simply securing may not be a moment you’re progressing. I’m not recommending recklessness, but it’s important to stay committed and focused on the task at hand. Life is short.

Also, don’t give up your IP or in any way limit your opportunities long term. Keep exclusivity timed. When Aquaria released we weren’t aware of Steam. The Humble Bundle did not yet exist. iPad did not exist. Being on all of those platforms has been great for us. You need to keep your hands untied to take advantage of what future will bring.

7. Create your own luck. As an artist, I owe a lot to the people around me - my family, friends, peers, and idols. I accept that a lot of my success was simply the luck of being born with these people in my life.

But it’s important to realize that you create many of your own opportunities, too. For example, I met Alec (my friend and Aquaria co-creator) because he offered to help work on I’m O.K. I’m O.K. was a game started on the Pix Fu forums. The Pix Fu forums were part of my personal website and its members were friends of mine I’d made much earlier during my Blackeye Software/Klik n’ Play days.

You could trace a similar path from the XBLA version of Spelunky to the original PC version and the TIGSource forums.

The point is - put yourself out there. Make things (I can’t stress that enough!). You never know when serendipity will strike, but when it does it will likely be related to situations in your past when you chose to actively engage someone or some idea.

8. Avoid “business as war”. As a professional you’ll need to do business and make business-related decisions at least occasionally, and as a creative type you might not be that interested in that stuff. Hell, you might even be downright scared of it.

Well, I’m here to tell you that you don’t have to be Gordon Gekko to make it as an indie. And please, don’t try to be. In fact, avoid the Gordon Gekkos. Avoid the people who try to confuse you. Avoid the ones who try and nitpick. Avoid the ones who try and rush you.

If you have a great game, there is no distributor you will absolutely have to work with, platform you have to be on, or person you will have to team up with. Always be willing to walk away from a bad deal, especially if it’s to maintain your independence as a creator. In turn, be a direct and generous person yourself.

People get defensive when they’re scared. Don’t sit at the table with someone like that or as someone like that and doing business should be fairly pleasant! This isn’t Wall Street!

9. No gimmicks. Simply put, focus on making a good game - a deep, interesting, unique game - rather than devising cheap tricks to grab people’s attention. Whether we’re talking about clever-sounding-but-ultimately-shallow game systems or off-the-wall marketing ideas, a gimmick is a gimmick. And you should stay away from them because they’re short-term, high-risk solutions that ultimately cheapen you as an artist, perhaps literally as well as metaphorically.

Certainly, one should take risks in game design as well as in life. My point is that they should be honest, worthwhile ones - those tend to be less risky in the long run.

10. You are your game - understand and develop yourself. As an indie game developer your game will likely be more “you” than a game made by hundreds or thousands of people. You have to understand yourself quite well in order to make a truly successful game. Fortunately, the unraveling of what makes you “you” - your taste, what you care about, your abilities - is one of the great pleasures in life and goes hand in hand with your goal of being an independent creator. Treasure it!

Introducing Armored Drive

• Originally developed for Windows Phone by Elbert Perez, a developer with 2M+ game downloads on Windows Phone
• Ported to iPhone by Nick Gravelyn and Elbert Perez, published by 4gency
• Built with an in-app purchase (IAP) model, in-app advertising included later
• Launched worldwide on iPhone around Thanksgiving 2012

Design Considerations

Pricing Considerations

How We Did

What Worked, What Didn’t

• Good engagement – 180 seconds per session, 2.8 sessions a month, above Action games average
• Bad acquisition - less than 10% used viral “recruit” feature, less than 1% crossover with 4gency’s other game
• Bad monetization - DARPU $0.03, IAP < 20% of all revenue earned on the game including ads and paid downloads

• Paid and free users are different creatures: while many paid users monetized, almost no free users paid for any IAP in the initial free weekend in December 2012. At our DARPU, to even get the same amount of IAP revenue from free users that we got from paid/ads, we’d need to get 70x more, or close to 700,000 users.
• Finding whales is hard: Tied to the item above, assuming average IAP spend is $14 as Flurry suggests, that’s less than 7 IAP buyers (and probably 3 of them are “whales” > $10 spend). This suggests we missed the deepest, most spend-eager market. Our ability to pivot our metrics on just the big spenders got hobbled by a wave of false events thanks to IAP hackers (see below).
• Getting free users can happen almost automatically: users in the low-thousands will respond to a price-drop to free without any additional marketing – Twitter bots will pick up the change and drive traffic virally.
• Ads can work well, but they need to be heavily targeted: in January, we went to ad support – targeted ads (via PlayHaven) drove 13x the revenue of non-targeted ads, and made close to the amount we made with paid downloads in just a few months.
• You’ll get hacked: Just 24 hours after releasing, our metrics sent back hundreds of false “purchase completed” events for our most expensive items. 5,000 of these events were reported over several months, while only 60 legit purchases were ever made. About 50% of this traffic came from China, where 50% of our game’s total userbase was located.
• Aquisition means nothing without monetization: we investigated several acquisition mechanisms, such as FreeAppADay and Flurry and PlayHaven acquisition departments – in general, user acquisition for mobile is between $2.00 and $2.50 per person – absolutely out of the question unless DARPU can rise above those levels. At our $0.03 DARPU this would be an almost suicidal waste of money.

So, What Happened?

    
    Image Source

• Understand the micro-market: we chased the “iOS gamer”, when we really needed to be chasing the “iOS action-arcade gamer”. This more specific market has different spending limits, hooks, and likes/dislikes from the aggregate market, and we should ensure we target it directly.
• Be vocal, early: Acquisition was not something we paid for. If we wanted to get big and dig into the paying markets, we needed exposure, and that means being known. In the end, our groundswell contacts gave us very little – only two articles were ever published about Armored Drive. We needed to court media earlier, more aggressively, and with dedicated partners to help us.
• Believe the test market: In the end, the test marketing effort found the problem with IAP, and we moved forward with the launch. We may not have been able to predict the genre-wide issue with IAP that all action-arcade titles had, but we might have taken the data to heart and constructed a Plan B for our game.

Conclusion

Why not earlier?

• Experience and some actual knowledge about other team members’ work will come in handy when working in a team
• Maybe you will find your hidden talent?
• If your idea won’t look so awesome anymore after you create prototype, you won’t waste other people’s time
• There’s a much higher chance that someone will join your project if they see your own contribution
• If in the middle of the project you will start to get lazy and somewhere lose motivation (and trust me, it happens quite often even if you feel like there’s no way for it to happen at the start of the project) again: you won’t waste other people’s time
• There’s no point in committing too much time to work with random volunteers instead of working on the prototype
• It will turn out what sprites and sounds are needed for sure (will save artists’ time when they’d create assets that would have to be changed or god forbid completely discarded)
• There’s very little chance that someone will want to join you seeing only scratches of an idea from a guy with no experience or a portfolio. And if you happen to receive any offers at that stage, they’re most likely not going to be serious and eventually they’ll just waste your time.

• Include a short description of your project with the most essential info: genre of the game, art style (b&w, vector graphics, 3d, isometric, top-down or something else?), short gameplay overview
• Freeware/commercial
• Targeted platforms
• Estimated time in which you want to finish project
• Who you’re looking for and what you demand from them
• Contact
• Screens and prototype download link
• What you can bring into the project
• Show your portfolio if you got one

• Look here for paid collaborator
• Here for unpaid/revenue share ones
• If you’re looking for an artist why not ask artists from deviantArt directly?
• Also try /r/IndieGaming and /r/gamedev if you have something to show
• Try gamedev.net for programmers
• Various engines’ communities may also be a good source of programmers/developers
• Same goes with various art websites/forums

Note:  
This article was originally published on Jeff Tunnel's blog Make It Big In Games back in 2007. In 2008 it was included in the book Business and Production: A GameDev.net Collection, which is one of 4 books collecting both popular GameDev.net articls and new original content in print format.

Research the Publisher

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

“No” Can Happen in One Sentence

Have Many Things to Pitch

Be Professional

Be Passionate about What you Pitch

Know What you are Making

Know Budgets

You can be Greedy or Stupid but not Both

Be Almost-Greedy

License and Registration, Please

When’s it Shipping?

Competitors

Now with 8-way Joystick and Second Button!

“It’s for Hardcore Gamers… AND my little sister!”

What you Do, Do That

To the Point

Business is Business

Don’t Ramble (like me)

Tie-in

Originality

Orson Welles Syndrome

I am Error

“Zzzz...” is not the Sound of Approval

Who What Where When How Why

LET ME PLAY!!!

Mess Up

Why Kickstarters Fail

1. Understand the Difference Between the "Developer-Publisher" Partnership and the "Developer-Community" Partnership

2. The Project Isn’t Far Enough Along

Note:  So, in summary: don’t start a Kickstarter campaign unless you’d be ready to let fans try a demo of your game already at this point.

3. The Target Is Too High

4. Lack of PR

• indiegames.com
• Jayisgames
• Rockpapershotgun
• TIGSource
• Indiegamemag
• DIYgamer

• Venturebeat/Gamesbeat
• Gamesradar
• Kotaku
• Joystiq
• Gameinformer
• Shacknews
• Eurogamer
• Destructoid
• Escapist Magazine
• VG247
• Videogamer.com
• Gamezone.com
• PC Gamer
• Gamasutra
• Polygon

Note:  It is not my aim within these articles to ‘name and shame’ the best, or worst, Universities in the UK. It would be irresponsible to do so. In these articles, I am looking to provide a set of tools and reference points, which a prospective student can use to research the best University for them. Also, I am writing from the perspective of a UK Graduate and therefore I make reference to policies or organisations (i.e. UCAS; a UK Organisation dealing with student applications to University) that are part of the UK University system. This does not mean that the skills can't be extrapolated and applied elsewhere, I am just unfamiliar with the policies of other education systems.

Choosing your Subject Area

My Experience

Where to begin?

Types of Course

1. Computer Games Programming. Usually awards a BSc.
2. Computer Games Art. Usually awards a BA.
3. Computer Games Design. Awards either degree type, depending on specific content weighting.
4. Computer Science, with modules specifically tailored to Game Development. Usually awards a BSc

Note:  There are also other courses that are concerned with Sound Engineering and the Business of Games that one could look into. I will not be going into these as it might dilute the article, but it is something that can be easily researched, should this be of more interest. I have also listed the types of degree (abbreviated) that these award, please see the Glossary for more details.

Note:  It is not necessarily true that each of these courses is specifically isolated to itself and, more likely than not, you will be provided complimentary/optional Modules to delve into various aspects of the other, in a lighter way. For example, a programming course with an art module that allow you to put your own artwork, into what you code.

Don't be scared of Rejection

1. Computer Games (insert general Technology/Development Noun here); a course that usually has low, previous education requirements, covers all 3 of the major areas and is tailored to the beginner.
2. [Specific Area] Foundation; a pre-cursor to the course at your ideal University. It is usually a catch-up on what may not have been achieved through A-Levels and, as long as it is completed to a reasonable level, can get you doing what you want.

Commitment is the Key

Conclusion

Further Reading

Glossary

Qualifications

Article Update Log

Note:  Please keep this article "Under Review" while it is being completed with help from the community!  This article still needs a lot of work and is meant to serve as a starting point for beginners.  If you have some resources you'd like me to consider linking to, please PM them to me.

The Fields of Game Development

Programming

Art

Music and Sound

Note:  Unfinished.  I don't know enough about music and sound to make this section!  Other members will have to fill in for me.

Writing

Note:  Unfinished.  I've heard that game companies often don't actually seek out writers, and you kind of have to work your way up if you ever want to be a game writer (like it is with game designers).  However, I'm not in the industry, so I need someone to clarify here.

Getting Started

Programming

Ultimately it isn't hugely important; programming languages are just tools, and if you follow through and become an experienced developer you will end up using a huge range of languages throughout your career. After learning your first language, and more importantly the underlying concepts of programming, it becomes significantly easier to learn additional languages as needed, and a skilled programmer can pick up a similar language in a couple of hours and will usually need only around a week to become familiar with a very different language from those they already know. Remember that your choices are not forever, and that the most important thing is to choose any language and actually get started.

That being said, given the choice of Python, Java or C++ I would probably rank them in that order of preference. I usually recommend beginners stay away from C++ because it can have a steeper learning curve and is often considered more difficult, and usually encourage higher level languages such as Python because they will allow you to concentrate on the fundamentals of programming and game development without having to worry about so many of the nitty-gritty details of memory management and weird errors that can be difficult for a beginner to understand and solve.

• What programming language should I use?
• Should I use an engine, or create my own?
• What library/tools should I use?

Art

Note:  Unfinished.

Music and Sound

Note:  Unfinished.

Writing

Note:  Unfinished.

Article Update Log

Federal Labor Law

The FTC's Endorsement Guidelines

Potential Conflict?

Additional Suggestions Based on Federal Labor Law

Click here to view more event footage by design3.

  

design3 is celebrating game development this "Dev-ember" (December) by offering 50% Off memberships and giving away prizes worth over $2,500 all month long. Prizes include: Xperia™ PLAYs (on the Verizon Network), Kinects for Xbox 360, games, design3 memberships and exclusive design3 T-shirts. Learn more about the month long design3 "Dev-ember" giveaways.

  The New York Games Conference is focused very heavily on the business aspects of mobile and social game development. Given the prevalence of techniques from mobile and social migrating to console gaming, it is useful for game developers of all interests to learn the terms and acronyms common in this space, such as MAU, DAU, ARPU, K-factor and many more, as well as learn how game developers are shaping ongoing relationships with their players in social and mobile games.

  To summarize several of the main points discussed during the day: the sector is maturing and there is less room for small start-ups, major industry players have staked out territory in social and mobile game development, there is a large difference between the skillset needed to make the game initially and to manage the ongoing game design tasks and metric analysis after launch, the task of having potential players discover your game is difficult given the state of the app stores and recent limitations of viral promotion of games, and the choice of which platform for which to develop your game needs to be driven by factors deeper than a summary statistic such as adoption rate.

Acronyms and terms

  Metrics – data collected to inform the effectiveness of design decisions and to drive ongoing feature development of games deployed on social networks

  MAU – monthly active users -  a measure of how popular a game is. At its peak Zynga’sCityville had over 100 million MAU as compared to World of Warcraft’s11.4 million active subscribers in May 2011

  DAU – Daily active users – a measure of the ‘stickiness’ of the game play, drawing players back to the game repeatedly as well as a way to examine the effectiveness of viral touch points and marketing campaigns

  ARPU – Average revenue per user – a measure of how well the company is monetizing the game play across the user base. ARPUs in the range of 4 to 8 cents are commonplace

  K-factor–A measure of a game’s success at viral marketing as a means of expanding its userbase. A K-factor of 1 designates that each register user will bring 1 new registered user in to the game (who will in turn bring in another user and so on.) For more details see http://www.stateofse...xt-web-economy/

  Touch points–These are areas in your game design that utilize the interaction between the player, your game implementation and the social features allowed by the underlying platform API to help drive notifications about the player’s achievements out to her social graph

  Discovery–The process by which a potential player learns of, searches for and finds your game. Current app stores are very bad at this.

  Virality–A measure of how well the attracts new users by the game play either causes the player to advertise the existence of the game to her friends or how well the game utilizes the platform API to advertise the existence of the game to its friends

  Cloud gaming–A new game distribution paradigm where the game runs completely on servers, including video frame rendering, and the client is used simply to handle input reads and displaying video streams

  Mid-core–A game genre emerging on social network platforms that utilizes the social media platform but incorporates higher strategic demands upon its players

  UDID – Unique Device Identifier. Deprecated by Apple for future iOS game development, leading mobile developers to seek new methods of tracking players for metrics collection..


Notes from the sessions

The State of the Games Industry - View From The Top

  The first session attended was titled “A View from the Top” and was designed to let mobile and social game company executives discuss what the perceived as the direction the industry was headed. The panel was made up of Matt Hulett, GameHouse (Real Networks); OwaisFarooqui,  Atari;  Julie Shumaker, RockYou; Sean Spector,  GameFly; Omar Abdelwahed, Ubisoft Entertainment and was moderated by  Eric Goldberg, Crossover Technologies.

  The discussion was lively as Goldberg kept the panelists on their toes. He started by asking if there was still room for start-ups to be successful in the social network games space. The panel advised that the bar has been raised quite high for a game entering this market. They thought there is still room for small developers to find a niche market and serve it well, but that the gold rush years were behind us. The panelists mentioned that there are still under-served markets in the social network games space, and that oddly enough, it is the market of 18-34 year old males that is so well served in other sectors of the industry. The game company, Kabam!, has emerged as a leader in the newly emerging mid-core game space by building games on Facebook that require more strategic decisions of their players.

  Goldberg also asked the panel about the choice of mobile platform development and whether there was more opportunity in the emerging Android market. Across the board the panel agreed that no matter which mobile device you choose to develop for, the prime hurdle to overcome is discovery, getting players to find your game. The game stores serve developers quite poorly in this regard. Short of being in the top ten for the category that your game is in, it is very difficult to build awareness of your masterpiece with potential buyers. Farooqui drew a comparison with traditional game retail saying that in this environment there is no way to buy prime locations. There are no aisle ‘end-caps’ in a virtual store, just a single very long shelf. The volume of products available makes it extremely difficult for any game to rise up to become an industry standard. And once one does, such as Angry Birds, it tends to stay at the top, reducing the likelihood of other games drawing players.

  When asked to compare the development opportunities on iOS versus Android, the panel was surprisingly cautious about Google’s platform. Everyone acknowledged that Android has momentum, but the challenge from a development perspective is the lack of a unified hardware platform and single store. From a development perspective, these leaders see the Android platform as bringing back the ‘bad old days’ of mobile development with developers needing to cut deals with multiple distribution channels and to support a multitude of hardware specifications.

  They acknowledged that Google’s handling of Android was what the platform needed at this time, an openness that allows content to easily be developed, but predicted that it is likely that the search giant will need to shift gears in the future to a more curated market place. However, the panel was also interested to see how Google would act as a publisher. Both Facebook and Apple take a portion of every sale. Shumaker bemoaned the fact that this was the only business model those companies were set up to do. The idea of Google potentially offering a greater share of income to developers by leveraging its impressive ad serving capabilities clearly is keeping these executives from discounting a future with Android.

  When Goldberg asked about the apparent lack of innovation in the space Abdelwahed (Ubisoft) was unapologetic. For these leaders the perceived future in the social network space is going to be traditional industry players bringing their IP over from consoles and PC gaming. Shumaker was quick to point out that the innovation is taking place after launch, not necessarily in the initial development. While it is important to have a solid game, she stated that the skillsets needed before launch and after launch, where the game is running as a persistent service, are significantly different. Before launch there are all of the needs for designing game play and infrastructure but once the game is in the players’ hands, there is a greater need to focus on how users are playing the game and to tune the game play and to introduce features to increase retention and to monetize the player experience.

  If the perceived closing of the space is discouraging, there is a silver lining for developers looking to carve out a business for themselves. The market is still young and the infrastructure to make these products easy to implement and manage is yet to be built. There is tremendous opportunity for those looking to build the core technologies for this market segment. All of the panelists were interested in seeing greater use of HTML5 to drive discovery and if someone can create a better virtual store-front, there will a huge market for your product.

  Finally, it is useful to remember that Social and Mobile game production techniques are moving in to other game segments as publishers and developers outside of this space look to capitalize on the monetization models that have proven successful and produced industry juggernauts over the past three years.

Debate Club: Is there a need for portable consoles like  PS Vita or Nintendo 3DS after the meteoric rise of iOS and Android  smartphones?

    The next session pitted Gene Hoffman, CEO, Vindicia and Alex. St. John, CEO, Hi5 supporting the need for portables against Andrew Schneider, President, Live Game rand Teemu Huuhtanen, EVP, Sulake Corporation (Habbo) who argued the supremacy of the smartphone and eventual demise of the dedicated portable.
   An informal poll was taken before the session with half of the respondents supporting the pro console side and half coming down on the smartphone side of the debate.

  Arguing for the pro side Hoffman and St. John scored points by playing to parents’ fears, stating that as long as they are used as digital babysitters, there will be a market for devices that are a safe sand box. They asked “Do you want your child to possess a device that is constantly connected to everything the internet has to offer?” Furthermore, they posited, “aren’t there some things on your phone you would rather your children not see.”

  Gaining momentum and seriousness, they also argued that some games shouldn’t be controlled via a touch interface. Dedicated control buttons and sticks still have a place in the world of 3D navigation and shooter style gameplay. They then returned to the reality of the business of game development and pointed out that targeting a known hardware specification was much easier than dealing with the severe fragmentation in the Android market and that there was not a clear path to successfully earning a living on the smartphone platforms for the majority of developers.

  They closed their time by turning their attention to the difference between the focus of a dedicated device versus the multiple purposes of a smartphone. St. John was adamant that a notification from other apps interrupting game play was as bad as game notifications interrupting his other uses of his smartphone.

  Speaking in favor of the position, Schneider and Huuhtanen pointed out that smartphones are near ubiquitous. The adoption graphs of the two technologies show a definite decline in the purchase of dedicated portable consoles that is directly offset by the rise of in smartphones. Furthermore, the technical advantage of the dedicated consoles is being reduced by high quality graphics chips and fast processors being released for mobile devices. As more games are made for mobile with engines like Unreal, gamers will come to expect the same experience from mobile as console.

  With regards to the question of whether children should have cell phones, Schneider pointed to the ‘pass-back’ effect where a parent will pass the phone to a child in the back seat to keep them amused while traveling. The argument is that with the parents having the device on them at all times, it will inevitably become to be seen as a game console. Furthermore, the diversity, quality, convenience and cost of games will be a major driver for adoption of the technology within families.

  Huuhtanen rounded out the argument by pointing out that Sony has been relatively unsuccessful with its portable devices and that Nintendo, while successful in the past, has stumbled with the release of the 3DS. The physical fatigue of 3D for some users limits its appeal, and he further pointed out Nintendo’s over reliance on re-purposing its catalog of intellectual property.

  In the end, both sides managed to convince some of the supporters from their opponents. The debate ended, and the moderator swears he didn’t rig the results, in a tie.

Sifteo – Special presentation by David Merrill, President and co-founder of Sifteo

  For me, the quote of the day was made in this session: “Bad interface design violates the Human Spec Sheet”

  Merrill is an MIT interface guru/entrepreneur who has commercialized his research and started a company named Sifteo. The focus of his company is leveraging new user interface mechanisms to get computers to work more in the way that we work as humans. The Sifteo cube set is interesting in that it allows us to interact with physical objects that have a digital core.

    The reason this should be interesting to you is because Sifteo is a new platform for game development. It is made up of blocks with a processor, display and sensors that can detect which blocks are next to each other. The platform was just released to the public and there is an SDK based on C# and the MonoDevelop platform for interested developers.

   Visit Sifteo.com/developers  for more information.

Cloud Gaming – Evolution or Revolution?

    The next panel in the track I attended was with panelists David Wilson, GameStop;Tom DuBois, OnLive; Sean Kane, Counsel, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP; Eric Anderson, Samsung Electronics; Chris Lee, Publishing VP, En Masse Entertainment and moderated by Michael Cai, Vice President of Video Games, Interpret.

  We already do a lot of our work in the cloud, email, document production, video sharing with friends, keeping up with one another’s lives. How about playing games? You could claim we are already there through matchmaking services like Xbox live and digital distribution platforms like Steam. But this session was about moving the game processing and rendering in to the cloud as well and the production and legal implications for this shift.

  Wilson stated the central thesis for this panel, “It is important to keep in mind that cloud is a tool, not the tool. It is good for some things and not for others.” As such, it will end up as a part of a larger corporate strategy for distribution of games.

  From a developer’s standpoint, one advantage of cloud processing is that it places PC gaming on an even footing with console development. It will allow programmers to target a single spec on the server side and know that the system is consistent. Lee stated that it’s important to maintain a flexible stance from a development and a publishing end. While there is no guarantee the cloud will be successful for every developer of in distributing for every platform, there will be some combinations that will be profitable. He concluded that there are advantages to targeting that single hardware specification because “right now developing for the PC is like developing for Android. It’s hard to be successful.”

  Anderson stated that Samsung is investing in cloud infrastructure because the projected growth of smart TVs is high. This might provide a development and distribution path for a percentage of the market segment that do not want to purchase a console, but still want to play a wide array of games in the living room. The path is yet to be blazed in this regard, but electronics manufacturers are forming strategic partnerships based on cloud distribution of casual games.

  Cai asked the panel “Is cloud gaming a way to render existing games or is it a way to change the way games get designed?” The panelists initially agreed that the focus is distribution rather than new game play possibilities. There are hurdles to overcome first such as multiple input devices within a single binary. But upon further prompting one proposed extension of Cloud computing is the ability to take a single game and play across the same game across multiple devices. You could start playing a game on your TV, leave the home and the same game is being played, appropriately scaled back for mobile device/tablet, or even showing up on the embedded screen in your refrigerator. It sounds pie in the sky, and I don’t know that I want to play a game in my kitchen, but it’s interesting in theory.

  A major limitation to adopting this method as the sole means of distribution is broadband policy in the United States. In order to stream the video for a HD data stream the client needs 3Mbps download, but there is still a significant percentage of households at less than 2Mbps. In this emerging sector the question is market timing. Finally, the logical place to experiment with this is game trials with digital distribution to consoles, PCs for full game, or episodic content in the cloud.

Smart phones and handhelds – latest in games for portable devices

    The next session was with panelists Sean Vanderdasson, SVP, Wildtangent; Volker Hirsch, Research In Motion (RIM); Charles Yim, Google; Stanley Kwon, CBS Interactive; Nathan Camarillo, Freeverse  and moderated by Billy Pidgeon, Senior Analyst, M2 Research

  The session opened with the panelists mentioning the rise of mid-core gaming and marveling at the ARPU being generated by Kabam!which was significantly higher than other players in the social space. The major point raised here is the migration of console style game play to both social and mobile, markets that are traditionally dominated by more casual game mechanics.

  When asked if introducing new people to gaming led to higher revenues, the panelists skirted the issue, instead focusing on platform growth and usage patterns. Kwon was quite optimistic about tablets as an emerging media entertainment device and predicted significant growth in the larger format.Echoing comments made in the portable console/smartphone debate from earlier in the day, Vanderdasson was adamant that game play on smart phones needs to be easily interruptable; arguing that developers should not assume their game is the primary application being used. Tablets, though, have a different usage pattern. The greater screen size and the ability to focus on a single task on a tablet for a longer period of time allows for deeper experiences to be created. The business side note is that the price point for these products could conceivably stabilize at a $20-$30 price point instead of the unsustainable for creators$2.99 – free price point.Finally returning to the question, Hirsch noted that except for Angry Birds, there are no huge franchises that started on this platform. The conclusion he drew is that in this area it is quite difficult to make money.

  An interesting side comment bubbled up through the panelists with regard to UI in touch games. The panelists agreed that a very large challenge facing developers is the creation of new user interface paradigms. There was general disapproval for the virtual joystick interaction on screen. It is likely that a creative developer who finds a new interaction paradigm on touch will have an advantage in the near term.

  Pidgeon asked if ads were going to help developers monetize more players. Yim drew an interesting parallel of the current state of the games industry to the early days of cable television. The fracturing of the media space into multiple channels allows for there to be more niche content, but that getting the content to the player does not equate with successfully getting them to pay for the game.Yim went on to state that the challenges facing developers in this area continue to grow as more potential revenue channels emerge. For example in 2008/09 the main drivers of revenue for iOS platform offerings was paid download and advertisements. Now the main driver is in app purchases. He wouldn’t hazard a guess as to what might be the next revenue model. The warning is that developers need to be nimble in thinking how they are going to keep the revenue stream flowing so that they can keep creating new games. He concluded that “Being a game developer is much more complex than it was just two or three years ago.”

  The moderator then set his sights on the opportunities in the android market, and asked “is it just numbers?”

  This brought up a lively discussion. The overall feeling in the room was that right now, Android is too fragmented a platform to develop for if you are serious about surviving as a developer.Yim began by arguing that the question comes down to distribution and monetization. Just because you acquire a user does not mean you can monetize the user. He offered that the most attractive deployment option might be the Barnes & Noble app store for the Nook. Hirsch followed on with the question every publisher needs to be asking , “Is Google going to go Apple route?” and develop a single Android store. Google has been a hands off partner, allowing for many different stores to exists from different providers. But the flip side is that this makes some industry players remember the “bad old days” of an unfavorable development environment of different platforms, different handsets and most importantly different publishing and distribution deals.

Viral gaming – trends in discovery and promotion

    Closing the day out was a panel with Jeff Anderson, Majesco Entertainment; Mihir Shah, Tapjoy; Douglas Yellin, Large Animal Games; Daniel Cheng, Greystripe; and moderated by Brad Hargreaves, General Assembly.

  The panel started by examining what had happened with recent changes in patterns of discovery of new games after Facebook changed the manner that developers could push notifications to users’ walls. Facebook users loved that they stopped getting new notification from games, but for developers a major viral channel for discovery had been removed.

  Anderson noted that games are driving revenue for Facebook.Accordingly, Facebook will be likely be adding back in some features that developers can use to attract customers through either the ticker of possibly sponsored stories.

  With the changes on the Facebook platform, developers have had to innovate to overcome the limitations imposed upon virality. Yellin argued that as a result developers have needed to up the quality of the game to allow the developer to ‘own’ the customer, to make them willing to share their accomplishments in the game with their friends rather than push the notifications out to their news feed from the game directly.The panel agreed that they had witnessed ‘notification fatigue’ with players willing to pay directly rather than spam friends for in game benefits. Yellin went on to give the example of an in game ‘re-mix’ station that Large Animal created which allows their players to generate new content and then to share that with their social network. He stated that this one viral touch-point accounted for 57% of their new traffic generation.

  As a group, all panel members agree that there has been a shift away from incentivized campaigns. They wondered if there are certain ads that it makes sense for a player to interact with to unlock content? The general feeling of the panel was that using ads to drive player acquisition was a losing proposition. However, this panel also acknowledged the great difficulty relying on users finding your product in the infinite shelves of an online store. At present they suggested that the best hope for the future is to use ‘vertically striped’ HTML 5 sites to drive traffic toward your game. This could leave companies like Facebook, Apple and other hub owners starving for revenue as stores diminish in importance as the place new products are discovered.

  The panel concluded with a final question – is there room for small developers in the social games space? There was agreement across the panel that the land grab days of social game development are over. The bar for content is set too high and the likelihood of gaining an 50 million MAU level is low. Given that USA Today recently reported that Zynga’s next title, Castleville, boasts movie quality production and a soundtrack recorded with a 75 piece orchestra and a choir, I am inclined to agree with the panel. But the panelists also stressed that there are still plenty of opportunities in mobile development. Developers wading in to those waters will need to keep in mind that the development cycles are brutally short, with development complete in one to two weeks and patches delivered in a single day.

Written by Bill Crosbie, photos and editing by Drew Sikora

We’ve also added a simplified editor for creating all the basic sound effects in a game. With this new editor the sound designer can setup a playlist, apply randomization, and assign bank and resampling settings all in the one screen. This will really speed up the creation of assets in projects large and small.