Making Games. Faster.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 10, 2012

I was reading a little bit this weekend about fiction writers “going indie.” I’m not very in tune with the fiction biz, but what little I gleaned sounded like indie is progressing in that industry about at the same pace as indie games, maybe a couple of years behind. However, those writers who have effectively “gone indie” have a little bit of a leg up on their game-making cousins, due to experience in a far more mature industry, and the fact that there isn’t such a huge difference between the two in terms of content.  A novel is still a novel whether it’s published by Bantam or self-published.

One thing that struck me was that success in the indie book field – in general – is not too different from success as an indie game developer. It often comes down to perseverance, having several titles for sale, and some pretty good marketing / salesmanship. An indie author cannot expect to release a novel they haven’t managed to sell to a publisher and expect to see hundreds of thousands (let alone millions) of dollars start rolling in from Amazon.  One article suggested that newcomers find a day job (where have I heard that before?) while generating a number of novels and short stories to offer to readers.

And the number… well, that’s where things get interesting. In the Amazon world, the above link recommended somewhere around ten stories (or novels) where – if you are good and once you are “found” – things go dramatically from next-to-nothing to something that might, on a good day, resemble a living wage if you squint really hard.

The rate of production which an author can create short stories and novels is a lot faster than what most indies could hope to achieve. I’ve seen some small studios, particularly during the heyday of the iPhone boom (it’s still booming, just really, really saturated) produce roughly a game every 4-8 weeks, often with gameplay no more deep than Simon Says.  Hey, if it worked and kept them in business, good for them.

But where a novelist might be able to produce 2-4 novels a year, your average small-team (1-4 developers) indie game studio would have a pretty tough time maintaining that pace unless they are consistently re-using the same engine, and re-using as many game mechanics and content as they can.

And maybe that’s the trick of it.

I had a really good time making that 0-hour game a few weeks ago. That’s the video game equivalent of a thumbnail sketch or one-page vignette, I guess.  But taking the kind of time it took to make Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon? Or even Void War? Unacceptable.  Even as a part-timer, I should be able to do better than that. Okay, maybe not when the day job is working me over 60 hours a week or stuff like that, but in general.

There are a ton of games I want to make. Soon. But a nagging feeling I’ve been dealing with lately has been this:

Let’s say Frayed Knights 1 had done well enough all by itself for me to quit the day job that’s currently running me ragged, and made enough besides for me to hire a couple of guys and go full-time. Could I do it? Do I feel confident in my abilities as a game producer, manager, whatever, to transition to full-time and feel like I wasn’t going to pull a Duke Nukem Forever?

To be brutally honest, I don’t know that I’m quite there yet.  Particularly for making RPGs. I don’t have a process down. Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon was a great learning experience, and I’m trying to apply what I’ve learned to the sequel.  But I haven’t taken the effort to break it down into a process.  It’s still kind of seat-of-the-pants development now tempered with greater experience.  That’s not something I’d feel willing to gamble the house on.

I don’t know if most indies think of these things. I expect many of the long-time successes out there, if they haven’t actually been through the effort to formally codify a process, nevertheless have evolved something along those lines which they now practice intuitively.

What that doesn’t mean is breaking it down into a formula. Yes, I know, there are many authors out there who do quite well writing to formula. And some game developers out there who prosper (for a while) effectively re-skinning a game.  That’s not where I want to be. But it does seem like there is a lot more I should be doing to make what time I am spending making games more productive.

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