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.

A complex web presence can be either invaluable or a waste of time.  If you decide to do any web marketing, like the Wolfire guys, you’d better dive in and do as much as you possibly can.  Finding customers and fans (and then keeping them) is extremely difficult in this era of free-to-play game sites and news aggregators.  Your repeat visitor stat is directly related to the “stickiness” of your website.

One of the primary ways to create a “sticky” website is to constantly have new content.  Daily or weekly blogging is one way to keep people coming back, building a forum community is another.  This (admittedly haphazard) article is on how to build the infrastructure for your web presence that will allow you to update and add to it in data-driven ways.

Free Content Management Systems

A disclaimer – I’m aware that my website is butt-ugly — the old Pocketwatch site was MUCH prettier.  But this one is built upon Wordpress so it IS extensible.  I can add products or reorganize my sales page without having to hire a graphic designer.  My advice in this column is based on several years of working with Wordpress and phpBB.  Assume, for the sake of argument, that someone with graphic design skills beyond the high school-yearbook level made this site.

Content Management Systems (or CMS) run much of the Web 2.0 world.

Chances are you are cheap like me.  Luckily, CMS is one area in which there are a ton of good open source solutions.  Here’s a good Top Ten list which you can use to evaluate your own solution.  If I were starting from scratch today, I would use either Wordpress or Drupal, depending on if I wanted a more blog-centric or professional site.

When you are evaluating, keep in mind that good CMSs are:

• Flexible — Can you build a blog about cat sweaters or a complex and functional online tongue-ring catalog?  One with a navbar on the top and the other on the side?
• Have large libraries of functional add-ons — Tongue-ring image of the day?
• Look good out of the box — Many features you won’t WANT to have to edit
• Are easy to update — Every CMS has security and feature updates… how easy is it to upgrade and how much danger is there of breaking your site?
• Fast — Most PHP-driven sites will break down in high-traffic situations… how long can your site last after being linked from Slashdot or PennyArcade or Tonguerings.com until you have to move to a static page?

This site uses a combination of Wordpress, Gallery2, and phpBB.  Gallery2 serves the images, phpBB handles the forum, and Wordpress handles the blog and all the pages on the site.

Wordpress as CMS

To me, the biggest upside to Wordpress is the huge library of plugins that can extend the functionality of your site.  It’s also fairly easy to upgrade Wordpress.

The biggest downside is the lack of forum integration.  There are plugins for integrating phpBB and Wordpress, but they always seem to be out of date.

(OnePress Community seems to be a pretty good Wordpress-based solution for integrating forums, blogging, and CMS into a single package.  OnePress was cooked up by PushButtonlabs, the company recently formed by a bunch of ex-GarageGamers.  I’m a bit skeptical that PBL will support the mod as Wordpress continues to evolve, since the blogging platform is not their primary business, though I certainly could turn out to be wrong.  I know Jeff Tunnel reads this blog, so maybe he would care to comment.)

Another downside to using Wordpress as your CMS is the lack of separation between your blogging platform and your business-related content.  If you want to build fancy mini-sites for each of your products, or if you plan to add any sort of web-gaming features into your site, Wordpress might actually be a little heavy and rigid for you.  I’ve found myself wanting to build more unique pages for Venture Africa and Venture Arctic in order to improve first impression and SEO, but Wordpress is a bit inflexible in the different ways it allows you to display content.

Plugins

Let’s take a step back for a minute.  What can you do with a CMS like Wordpress?  Well, you can blog.  Duh.  You can add corporate identity pages.  Boooring.  And you can build that all-important stickiness using plugins.

You don’t want to have too many plugins running at once — that can slow down your site, but to give you a taste of what plugins can do for you, here are the plugins I currently use:

• All In One SEO Pack -Optimzes pages for SEO and allows you to enter custom headers for each post
• Contact Form – I use this to power my customer service page.
• EasyTube - Embeds Youtube videos into your posts
  
• Feedburner Feedsmith – Consolidates all your RSS feeds and redirects them to Feedburner
  
• Google Analyticator – Integrates Google Analytics into each of your posts automatically
  
• Google XML Sitemaps – Updates Google with sitemaps when changes are made to the site
  
• phpbb_recent_topics – Powers the forum feed in teh right sidebar on the blog
  
• PHPList – Powers Mailing list integration into Wordpress
• ProgressFly – Powers the Dinosauria progress bar
  
• Random Image Selector – Powers the little animal image in the left sidebar
  
• Twitter for Wordpress – Powers the twitter feed in the sidebar
  
• WPG2 – Embeds Gallery2 images in wordpress posts, powers the game images on the front page and product pages

What’s the Point?

There are two points to building a web presence:

1. Creating fans (to power word-of-mouth marketing or to generate UGC)
2. Finding customers

FUN STATS HERE!!! Building a community for fans is actually the easy part.  Converting visitors to customers is the hard part.  On a typical indie website, only 15-40% of visitors will actually download a demo to a game.  Only 0.5-3% of those demo downloaders actually buy the game.  That means somewhere around 3 out of 1000 visitors to your site actually buy a game.

I wont get into how to improve the visitor->customer process, but surely your CMS can help facilitate this transition.  Any thoughts on this subject from readers?

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.

What blessed road hath led us here? (2003-2007)

The first half of the decade saw the rise of the portals on the strength of sales from games like Diner Dash (2004) and Zuma (2004).  This opened up a digital distribution route for smaller games made by small “proto-indie” teams.  The fact that some of these small teams were making buckets of cash turned the heads of game industry execs and spurred many devs to quit their jobs working on AAA games to try to strike it rich working on smaller, more personal projects (see LastDayOfWork, makers of Virtual Villagers).

During these times, “indie” just meant small and unfettered.  A majority of the people making “indie” games were actually making “casual” games intended for distribution on portals like Yahoo Games, MSN, and the like.

From 2004 to 2007, two things began to happen:

1) So many people were trying to get into the game that production values (and thus cost) started going up.

2) Portals began to switch from finding games with hidden potential to spending their time and money on sure-bets – games in proven genres like Click-Management (Diner Dash) and Hidden Object (Mystery Case Files).

Then, portals like BigFishGames started the price wars.  Big Fish started offering “game passes” to customers, where they would pay a subscription fee in order to pay a small amount (7 bucks) per game purchased.  Eventually, the other portals followed suit, most recently with Reflexive’s price drop across the board to <$10 per game.

The Road Forks (2007-2008)

The next two years will be remembered as the high-water-mark for indie games.

As the casual game market became inhospitable for indie developers, a few other big players saw the casual portals covered in cash and decided to open up their own distribution portals.  Like the earlier web portals, Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, Valve, and others decided that there was a fortune to be made on the backs of indie developers.  Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, PSN, iTunes, Facebook, and Steam all offered distribution routes for the indie devs who made games that no longer fit into the narrowing definition of “casual”.

Like the golden age of the casual games, these new portals are still searching for a formula for success.  Every time it seems that they have it figured out (XBLA with retro and casual games, WiiWare with their Nintendo back catalog), an indie game comes along to break the mold: World of Goo, Castle Crashers, Audiosurf, Braid, Everyday Shooter, and fl0w have all broken rules and bended genres and proven that in the entertainment world, there is still lots of money to be made with innovation.

There may be dark times ahead, though.  Microsoft dropped the developer’s share of the royalties in half on Xbox Live Arcade.  After a very strong start with the iPhone store, games have been dropping in price dramatically and the indie applications are slowly getting choked out by licensed brands.

New Allies

Luckily, indies have a new ally in their relationship with distribution portals.  Indies have a new ally in the Gaming Press.

Hard-core gaming has plateaued in popularity with this round of consoles.  The PS3 flopped, the Wii attracted a big casual audience but has failed to excite the hardcore audience, and the Xbox 360, while the best of the bunch, feels mechanical and corporate (a little like a really good Led Zeppelin cover band).

The lack of excitement about hardcore gaming has left the gaming press starving for content.  Low and behold, indies come along to save the day.  Sites like Kotaku and TigSource have benefited hugely from the oddities coming out of the indie gaming world.  And their attention has allowed indie devs to command more lucrative deals and even make a fortune on direct sales.  Distribution is no longer the only key to success in the indie world; PR is the second avenue to indie success.

A sidenote: GameTunnel used to be the authoritative voice on indie gaming back when indies were focused on casual games.  The editor of that site, Russ Carroll, has broad tastes that do tend to skew towards casual games.  These days, TigSource, run by Derek Yu, is pretty much the undisputed king of indie gaming news.  Derek’s tastes run more towards retro-arcade games and “weird” games.  It’s a chicken-or-the-egg situation: did the attention of these sites shape the content or did the content provide the audience for the sites?

Is THIS the Promised Land?

If the quality and innovation of the content is defined by the distribution opportunities, we are currently hitting a high point in independent game development.  The “core portals” (steam, XBLA, etc) are still experimenting, and smaller distribution avenues are opening up as well (see Kongregate and Newgrounds).

In 2006, indie games were lumped with serious games and casual games, because they all had one thing in common: they were less expensive to make than AAA games.  But the changes in funding and distribution has split those markets from one another and helped define what “indie” games mean to the customer.

Gamers, CUSTOMERS, now see indie games as the poetry, the short stories of the gaming world.  They are different, they are thoughtful, and they make you appreciate nuance.  As Kyle Gabler said in his recent Global Game Jam keynote the best games made in game-jams “introduce one new concept to gaming as fast and as clear as possible”.  This is largely true for all of indie games as well.  The finalists in this year’s IGF competition also tend towards this concept.

Why is this important?  Because in the past, “indie” games didn’t mean anything to customers.  WE, the DEVELOPERS, knew what it meant — it was important to us because it meant that we were unfettered.  But customers didn’t have expectations about what an indie game was.

Customers DO have expectations now.  Indie games are games that, by definition, don’t fit into any other box.  They cost from 0 to 30 dollars.  They are “cool” — knowing about them is “cool”.

5 years ago, the market looking for games that fit this description was very small.  Today, it’s a viable market, and one that is likely to be resistant to overly oppressive distribution portals.

The Future of Indie Games

It is ALWAYS true that EVERY business-related article in ANY publication is WRONG.  It is the visionaries that find and exploit exceptions to the rules.  Take Grubby Games for example, they still manage to exploit the casual gaming market with My Tribe, while developing the ultra-indie, ultry-nerdy, web-based community game, Incredibots.

Indie games will change.  But “indie” has finally emerged from its adolescence and found its own identity, unique from “casual games”.  Indie games have come of age.

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.

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

Having a solid idea of when things SHOULD be done is important, because otherwise it’s all too easy to dither around on unimportant features, leading to overall schedule slippage and eventual cancellation.

Project can be a difficult beast, though.  It is an open-ended program, and if you don’t learn to use it efficiently, you can waste a lot of time fiddling with schedules without gaining any additional insight into your production pipeline.  This post is about how to set up a game development project file that is sufficiently detailed and malleable for a small, dynamic team.

Step 1: Create a broad set of tasks broken down by category

For instance, I have 1 main task called “Dinosauria”.  Under that, I have “Code”, “Assets”, and “Misc”.  Under “Assets”, I have categories for “Models”, “Animation”, “2D Design”, “Concept Art”, “Environments”, etc.  Under each of these I have tasks broken down to 1-5 day long tasks.

Step 2: Estimate Durations, Set up dependencies, and assign resources

Next, I go in and assign resource names to each task.  For resources I haven’t yet hired, I use a temporary name.  This part is usually pretty easy for a small team, but it can help you to figure out how many you need to hire in order to get the game done on the desired schedule.

By the way, you can also edit an inidividual resource’s availability by changing that resource’s calendar.  For instance, I set up the Andy Schatz resource to only work on the project Tuesday-Friday, since I usually use Monday and one weekend day for non-development related tasks (support, website, blogging).

After that, I estimate the durations of each task.  If any particular task takes more than 5 work days, I try to split that task into multiple tasks.

Finally, I set up dependencies with the “Predecessor” column.  This step can be tricky.  If you get too stringent about setting up individual predecessors for all your tasks, you project will start to look like spaghetti and it will be very difficult to adjust the schedule to changing circumstances.

For this reason, I prefer to be a bit lax about setting up individual dependencies, we will come back to this in the next step when we create our milestones.

Step 3: Set up milestones

One of Project’s interesting features is called Level Resources.  This uses your task information to automatically set dates for each of those tasks.  It essentially creates your schedule for you.

The weakness of leveling is that Project has no idea which tasks you want to finish first and which you want to finish last, except in the case that you have predecessors set.

The WRONG thing to do it to set up predecessors for EVERYTHING so that Level Resources builds the schedule the way you want.

The RIGHT thing to do is to set up milestones as tasks in your project, create “predecessors” to those as the tasks you want complete in each, and then level.  You can then go back and assign the milestones themselves as predecessors to task categories so that you make sure certain tasks don’t even start until after certain milestones have been hit.

Once you’ve done this, Level Resources can help expose what tasks have not been figured into the schedule and what tasks may blow your project’s schedule.  Adjust the milestone in which each task’s category is due in order to fit the project to your schedule.

Step 4: Track your progress!

Once this is all done, you can start checking off tasks as complete.  Then you can use the “Tracking Gantt” to see what percent complete the entire project is.

One final note: You should NOT adjust your task estimates in order to make your project fit your schedule.  It’s awfully tempting to say “oh, we’ll just work extra hard and get this tasks done in 3 days instead of 4″, in order to make the Project file fit your overall timetable.  One of Microsoft Project’s most important benefits is exposing to the developer when their ambitions for a project are too big for the reality of the budget or timeframe.

That’s it, happy Project-ing!

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:

Overhead: The cost of an employee can be from 10-100% greater than their salary.  In my experience, if you aren’t offering health care or other benefits, it’s around 25%.  You will have to pay Social Security and unemployment, you will have payroll expenses, you need insurance (workers comp and such) and you are likely to have more office-related expenses.  Health care can make the cost of having employees go through the roof.

Management: Even the best employees will increase management time.  You will also likely spend more time working to keep your employees motivated and happy.  My development time typically goes down by 25% when I am managing full-time employees rather than contractors.

Professionalism: You will probably want to maintain some semblance of professionalism once you have employees – you will find that once you are spending YOUR MONEY to pay other people, you become very aware of how productive they are.  You will have to decide how much you want your workplace to look like the one you left to go indie.  How many sick days do your employees have?  How strict will you be about counting them?  What is the process for delegating work and what do you do when your employee over or underperforms?  How much of a personal relationship do you want to have with these people?

The two questions you  have to ask yourself:

1. Can I afford employees?
2. Do I need employees to accomplish my goals as a business?

If you answer ‘yes’ to both of these, you owe it to yourself to getting your ducks in a row with regards to payroll, contracts, and HR standards.

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!

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.

Affiliate Program

Some e-commerce providers are also an affiliate program, allowing you to sell other people’s games from your site and your own games from other people’s sites (with your permission).  BMT, Plimus, and eSellerate all fit into this category.  In fact, it may even be in your interest to sell the game from your own site through a company like Real or Reflexive, though you will be required to put your game up on their affiliate program and you will have no control over who can sell your game.  Generally, more managed experiences like Reflexive will lead to a lower royalty rate for yourself, but may be easier to set up and maintain, and you may get wider distribution.  Other e-commerce providers like Paypal provide no affiliate program.

If the provider DOES have an affiliate network, does it have other games you might be interested in selling?  I use eSellerate but their afiiliate network for games is incredibly weak.  Trymedia/Real has a great catalog of games like mine.  Reflexive’s stuff is mostly casual.  I can’t speak for BMT and Plimus.

DRM integration

If you go with the Google or Paypal route, you will likely need to create your own DRM solution.  Either customers can download a separate, full version of the game after purchase (linked to in the receipt), or you can provide an unlock code that they can use to unlock the full version from the demo.  Without a built in solution, you will have to code this yourself or use a DRM solution like Armadillo.

Some providers include DRM in API format, which you can integrate into your code or wrap around the software.  This can allow your to include an unlock feature directly inside the game.  esellerate and the larger affiliate systems like Reflexive and Real allow for this.  I’m not sure about Plimus or BMT.  It’s also worth noting that these prepackaged DRM solutions are not particularly difficult to crack: Reflexive’s DRM is notoriously porous (though they claim it doesn’t really matter).

Royalty rate

Each of these providers will take a percentage of your sales.  The percentage generally scales from 35% for the most feature rich of the services to ~2% for paypal or Google Checkout.  BMT, eSellerate and Plimus are all in the 10-15% range.  Reflexive takes 20% (?) if you are selling from your own site.

File Hosting

Will the provider host the demo file for you?  If so, you can save yourself from having to get a dedicated server or pay for a file hosting service like Amazon S3 (which incidentally has a great reputation).  Be careful, though, the provider might charge for bandwidth, which is NEVER good, distributors and e-commerce providers LOVE to take advantage of customers by charging exorbitant bandwidth fees.  I got screwed by eSellerate on this one.

Sales Reports

What does their online reporting look like?  What kind of data can you get on your customers?  Is it easy to send out a newsletter to customers that want to be contacted?

Storefront

Is it easy to set up a storefront that is branded to look like your website?  Is their default stuff attractive?  The key here is clean and simple.  The more complex this stuff gets, the more likely your customers will get confused or bored and will give up on their purchase.

Other Fees

I used to hear a lot of complaining about the way Plimus handled chargebacks (chargebacks result in a fee to the publisher, meaning you).  Pay attention to any clauses that state that you can be charged for something… often those clauses will be vague.  Make sure you clear those up and speak with other people using the service to find out how often they see those types of charges.

Other Features

Other features that may be of interest to you:

• Coupons
• Cross-sell discounts
• Multiple item discounts
• Platform (I use esellerate because their DRM solution is PC/Mac, the only one in the business to my knowledge)

And finally, you should look into the reputation of their customer service.  Smaller companies like BMT, Plimus, and eSellerate generally work pretty hard to keep their publishers happy.  Paypal, of course, has an awful reputation in this regard.  In any case, choose the solution that’s right for you, but remember, you can always switch!

Torque - Torque comes in several flavors, the two 3D versions are Torque Game Engine and Torque Game Engine Advanced.  TGEA adds shaders, a large terrain rendering system, material stuff.  To be honest, it’s not that huge of a leap over TGE basic.  In fact, GarageGames recently announced that the TGE branch is essentially dead and TGEA would be receiving all their attention for the forseeable future.

Torque is often difficult to work with, and I hate the scripting language (boy do I wish they would build support for a standard scripting language).  The engine is also a bit messy and buggy — it’s poorly documented and if you don’t use it in exactly the way it was intended, it’s really easy to break things.  It also has a fairly large memory footprint and distribution file size.

That said, Torque is hands-down the most powerful, most feature rich engine available at indie prices.  Torque has strong networking, and tons of ugly but useful hobbiest-written third party code.  And the best thing about Torque is that it has a very strong future: subsequent to the IAC buyout of GarageGames last year, they have been putting some really solid attention into the engine and it’s made a ton of progress.  A few big-name games like the Penny Arcade series are built on Torque.  Various versions of Torque can build on iPhone, Xbox360, Wii, PC and Mac.

If you are capable and willing to put the work in, Torque probably provides the highest cieling amonst all the indie engines.  If you are a weekend coder, you might want to go with something simpler, even 2D.

Unity - I have not personally used Unity, but it is starting to gain a solid reputation in indie circles.  Notably, the games on Blurst are built with Unity.  Unity’s strongest selling point in my opinion is in-browser support.  However, you don’t get source code, and as of this post, you have to develop on a Mac (PC dev support is in the works).  Their physics is miles ahead of GarageGames.  However, I have yet to see a “large-scale” game made with Unity, meaning anything beyond a mini-game.  That’s not to say it can’t be done, just saying I haven’t seen it.  It also seems to be a cleaner engine than Torque.  Unity can build for Wii, iPhone, PC and Mac.

Bottom line, if in-browser support or physics are your thing, or if you really want to use a 3D engine but you dont want the trouble that Torque offers (and you don’t mind developing on a Mac), Unity is the way to go.

XNA – XNA is used for the XBox 360 Creator’s Club, allowing anyone to publish their game on the 360.  The only cost is for an XBox Live Gold membership, which is 10 bucks a month.  XNA uses C#, which may make production easier, but leaves it somewhat underpowered as compared to other game engines.  However, as long as your game isn’t too graphics intensive, this may actually be the easiest way to go.  This is more of an API rather than a game engine, but many people prefer a cleaner, smaller architecture to the monolithic, tools-laden 3D game engines.

If you want to get going on the 360 quickly, this is the way to go.

Unreal, Source – In a few cases, indies and students have made deals with Epic and Valveto license their game engines.  I don’t honestly know the details of these deals, but I suspect they arose from personal connections within those companies.  I probably wouldn’t consider using these unless youve got experience with them, and if you do, well then, you probably don’t need this list.  The best choice is usually whatever you are most familiar and comfortable with.

2D Engines

I have less experience with 2D engines (despite a fair amount of work with Flash), but here are my thoughts for what they are worth:

Flash - Flash/Flex is becoming incredibly powerful.  It’s everywhere, it’s powerful, and CS3 offers true object-oriented coding.  It now offers standalone executable support.  Sprite rendering is fast now.  Unless another engine or API offers very specific tools that are perfect for your project, there’s really no reason to use anything but Flash.  You can practically make an MMO out of the box using SmartfoxServer, Electrotank, or Multiverse, and Box2D offers great 2D physics  with a 3 hour setup time.  By the way, if you are confused about the difference between Flash and Flex, they both use Actionscript, but Flash is built around the concept of movies and the timeline, whereas Flex is a cleaner coder’s environment.

GameMaker, RPGMaker - Simple engines for non-coders.  These are probably the way to go if you just have no interest in trying to wrap your head around coding.

PTK – PTK has a good reputation amongst casual game development crowd.  If I were making a 2D casual game for the PC, I’d probably want to evaluate this one.

Popcap Framework – Same as PTK.

Torque - Torque2D is essentially the same engine as TGEA, but does not include the 3D stuff, and includes some extra toolsets that are supposed to make creating 2d games extremely quickly out-of-the-box.  The whole thing is a bit too overblown for my taste – a 2D engine should be simple and clean.  This probably has the strongest toolset of any of the 2D engines, but it also comes with many of the same problems of the 3D engine.

XNA – If you want on the 360 and quickly, this is the way to go!

Blitzmax – An API, not an engine, but I’ve heard good things.