Ain’t much to this post.  You are looking for high quality sound and music to use in your game.  You don’t know where to get it.  You are a cheap bastard.  Try these links:

sounddogs

audiojungle

soundrangers

IBAudio

ShockwaveSound

Opuzz

voice123

Freesound.org

Incompetech

Sound Effect Generator (sfxr)

Anyone else have favorite places not mentioned here?

This post is a continuation of The Indie Infrastructure, a series for those thinking about “going indie” or still getting their bearings once casting off from salaried shores.

• The Indie Infrastructure #1: Game Engines
• The Indie Infrastructure #2: e-commerce
• The Indie Infrastructure #3: Employees
• The Indie Infrastructure #4: Scheduling

Building Sticky

New (blue) vs. returning (green) visitors for the Pocketwatch site, I have no idea if this ratio is any good.

Are you amazed at how well Wolfire has managed to mobilize a web community for the upcoming game Overgrowth based largely on the reputation of one lesser-known game (Lugaru)? They are beating the marketing drum with everything they’ve got, and it’s working.  How are they doing it?  Well, by doing everything: marketing on Facebook, reaching out to mod communities, Mac and Linux fans, game developers, blogging, creating an IRC channel, and more.  Are you jealous of the attention they’ve gotten?  Put in the hard work.  And start with a CMS.

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We always knew “indie” meant SOMETHING.  But no one could ever define what it was.  With the success of high-wattage IGF winners, the divorce of the casual gaming market from the indie gaming market, and the continued commoditization of free-to-play flash games, the beast has finally emerged from the mud.  It has become clear what indie games are.

This article is on the evolution of indie games distribution and how it has shaped the content and helped to finally define what “indie” means as a genre of game.

The 80′s were defined by the golden age of computer games, the rise of the console, and the apex of the arcade.  The 90′s will probably be remembered best for the move to 3D.  And it is becoming clear that the 2000′s are defined by the rise of the casual game and the subsequent birth of the modern “indie” game.

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This post is a continuation of The Indie Infrastructure, a series for those thinking about “going indie” or still getting their bearings once casting off from salaried shores.

• The Indie Infrastructure #1: Game Engines
• The Indie Infrastructure #2: e-commerce
• The Indie Infrastructure #3: Employees

In my last Dinosauria update post, one of the commenters asked how I came up with the “Percent Complete” metric.

[pfmeter id=2 target=100 progress=9 display=4]

Answer: Microsoft Project.

If you are making games on a development schedule over 6 months, or you are an aspiring game producer, you owe it to yourself to learn to use this program.  Project will help you with three things:

1. Recognize dependencies (so you can make sure no one is waiting around for someone else to finish an asset or feature)
2. Schedule your tasks and create milestones
3. Track progress

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A character sketch for Dinodrop, the game design that inspired the Venture series

Don’t throw away your old game designs.

This is the story of how Dinosauria came to be.  In fact, the entire Venture series was born in a dorm room in 1998, and has been percolating in my head all these years.  I also owe thanks to Tom Wexler (now an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Denison University), who was my game design collaborator back then, and has never been properly thanked for helping to develop many of the ideas that form the basis of the Venture series today

The Early Years

It has always been my dream to start a game development company.  I was already programming when I was 8 and in junior high I finished my first game, a multiplayer top-down arena combat game with magicians and skeletons.  Next, I made a Warlords clone with randomized maps called Servants of Darkness.  I wish this game was still functional, my family used to gather around and play against one another all afternoon.

Flush with success on my first couple of games, I started building bigger and better games while developing a bigger and better ego about my game development abilities.  I started thinking about actually trying to sell my games.  As usual when money becomes involved, this is when things went bad.

Big dreams, Few Results

By the time I went to college (1996), games weren’t made by one guy in his garage anymore.  I made a friend in Tom Wexler, a brilliant Math major who shared my interest in making games.  We started work on a game called VOID.  Between game development, ultimate frisbee, and sleep, my schoolwork and prospects for summer jobs fell through.

This game was XCOM-ish with a more real-time approach to the tactical battles.  I took a summer off from working (actually I failed to get re-hired at my job making games for one of the earliest internet game portals in 1997) and tried to finish the game, but I just wasn’t mature enough then to have the work ethic necessary for commercial game development.  When I realized that the project was too big and my motivation to finish it too meager, I told Tom that I couldn’t continue and that we were going to have to shelve it.

Shelving the Dreams

His idea was that we stop trying to “start a company” and start just trying to finish a small, casual game.  So we started working on a little game called DinoDrop.

The original sketch of Dinodrop, a 2-player same-screen RTS

Dinodrop was a split screen, multiplayer game, in which you battled for territory by dropping dinosaur eggs onto a map.  When those eggs hatched, they would become autonomous dinosaurs, hopefully behaving in such a way that would allow you to take over your opponent’s lands.

Unfortunately, we never finished this one either.  The idea sat there, nagging me, like the last little black space on the Warcraft map covered by the fog of war.

Academic AI

My academic focus in college had always been in Artificial Intelligence, and I continued to be really interested in this idea of autonomous creatures which the player could influence, but not control.

These thoughts continued to grow with a Machine Learning course I took at UMass.  Each student had to program an AI to compete in a checkers tournament every night.  The trick was, you could teach your AI HOW TO LEARN strategies, but you could not teach them the strategies of checkers directly.  They had to learn them on their own.  So during the day, we trained our AIs against themselves, and at night they would play in the tournament.

A corporate greeting card with autonomous AI

Early Career

My thoughts on autonomous AI games continued after college as well.  My first job out of college was for a “viral” marketing company called e-tractions.  There I built a Christmas Snowglobe in 2000 as a corporate greeting card.  Little people inside the snowglobe would walk around doing wintery things.  But you could pick it up with your mouse and shake it, with the little people screaming and bouncing around inside.

At my various console game development jobs between then and starting Pocketwatch, I continued to play with these ideas, implementing dynamic bird flocking behaviours in a Medal of Honor game, and another autonomous pirate monkey game that was the brainchild of Justin Chin (famous for designing the game Jedi Knight).

More character sketches for Dinodrop

Full Circle

I eventually left the world of AAA game development to start Pocketwatch and the Venture series.  I’ve been dieing to make Venture Dinosauria for years now.  But I never felt like the Torque engine was up to the task of rendering dense forests.  So I started with Africa, which is pretty sparse, then went to the Arctic, which is even more sparse.  There are plenty of other ideas in the hopper, but I always intended on doing these three environments first.

Finally, the tech has caught up to my dreams.  Forests can be lush, dinosaurs can be shiny and mean: It’s finally time to make this game.  I can’t wait for y’all to play it.

This post is a continuation of The Indie Infrastructure, a series for those thinking about “going indie” or still getting their bearings once casting off from salaried shores.

• The Indie Infrastructure #1: Game Engines
• The Indie Infrastructure #2: e-commerce
  

Say you are a lone wolf and you want your company to grow, what do you have to keep in mind?

Do you want to hire salaried employees, hourly employees or contractors?  Full-time salaried employees provide stability and are probably best if you expect to mentor them at all.  Contractors provide flexibility — you only pay them when you need them, but they are often more expensive and they may not be there for you when you need them.

If you are thinking about hiring full-time employees, keep these things in mind:

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December 24.  I wake up feeling a little impulsive.

I’ve been trying to get people to play Venture Arctic for a year and a half now.  I’m sure I haven’t done everything perfectly, but too few people played this game considering that it is (IMO) groundbreaking, fun, and noteworthy.

So I decided to give it away over the Christmas holiday, while people are at home, disappointed that the game they got under the tree sucks because it was made by a marketing department.  Here are the results of that experiment:

• Primary Objective Accomplished!  1548% increase in people playing Venture Arctic over the previous 7.5 day period.  A free game, coupled with being a newsworthy giveaway, made people flock to the site to try the game out.
• Secondary Objective Accomplished!  32.6% of people that got the free game also signed up for the newsletter.  Newsletter signups are typically much higher conversions than average customers, so it’s nice to have identified all of these interested customers.
• Tertiary Objective Accomplished!  This one wasn’t even on my radar: 117% increase in revenue compared to the previous 7.5 day period.  When you purchase a game at Pocketwatch, we offer 50% off any other game in our catalog.  With all the people coming in to get free version of Venture Arctic, a number of people bit on the cross-sell and bought Venture Africa for $9.99.  We also sold a site license of Venture Arctic to a school.

Some other interesting stats:

588 percent increase in traffic to the Pocketwatch Games site, largely due to postings on the front page of TigSource, Rock Paper Shotgun, and Mac4ever.com.  Mac4ever was the strongest referral, RPS was second, TigSource was third, though RPS gets credit for generating the site license sale.

I saw almost no change in the number of Venture Africa downloads from the previous period, though a much higher conversion rate, probably due to the cross-sell promotion.

I was also wondering if the increase in revenue was due to the fact that I was comparing Xmas week with the week before Xmas, so I compared those two weeks of revenue in 2007.  In 2007, I saw a 66% increase in revenue during that time period, so the Venture Arctic giveaway can more accurately be credited with a 51% increase in sales (117 – 66).

All this said, the real goal of this experiment was to get more people playing Venture Arctic.  It has always been severely overlooked.  There was some press about it when it came out, but even great coverage wasn’t capable of convincing people to try it out.  By making it free, I certainly wasn’t expecting an increase in revenue, but that’s what I ended up getting.

Ya gotta do drastic things to get attention in today’s world… *sigh*  Happy 2009 everyone!

Just one day left in the Venture Arctic giveaway, and I thought I would share an interesting chart with y’all.  This is traffic to the Pocketwatch site.  Unsurprisingly, it skyrocketed when a bunch of links came in for a free game.  I was surprised at the power of the French Mac fans, though.  Mac4ever.com, a french mac enthusiast site is da bomb.

This post is a continuation of The Indie Infrastructure, a series for those thinking about “going indie” or still getting their bearings once casting off from salaried shores.

• The Indie Infrastructure #1: Game Engines

There’s a lot of ways you can go about selling your game directly from your website.  So what are the considerations when you are looking for an e-commerce provider?

Options to consider:

• Google Checkout
• Paypal
• BMT
• Plimus
• eSellerate
• FastSpring
• Reflexive
• Real/Trymedia

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but rather a list of the ones I know anything about.  If you have experience with these or others, I’d love to hear about them!

These essentially fall into 3 categories — simple e-commerce systems with no DRM integration but very low fees (Google, Paypal), e-commerce systems built for shareware, some with built in DRM and an affiliate program (BMT, Plimus, eSellerate, Fastspring), and full-service “whitebox” distribution systems, with pre-built web design elements, large back catalogs of other games you can sell alongside your own, but higher fees.
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While it’s possible to roll your own engine, if you are looking to create a 3D game you probably will want to work with 3D middleware.  If you are new to indie development, take a gander at this list:

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