An Independent Game Developer’s Diary

So I’ve gotten a twitter account (twitter.com/mibgames if you care) and I’ve noticed a couple of things.

I get followed occasionally by a complete stranger, and I look at their profile.  Some of them are following nearly 2000 people.  Surely that defeats the point of twitter?  I follow only people I either personally know, or people I admire in the podosphere and feel they might say something interesting. But other than that I’m only interested in kearing what interestng people have to say.

Secondly, Twitter came up trumps the other night on Launch night at the Guardian.  We had a question that we couldn’t answer, and were worried about something.  I twittered to one of the devs on the team, and lo and behold 5 minutes later he walked into the office to find out what we wanted.  It turned out he was in the pub just down the road, and got my twitter so popped in to see if he could help.  It was a moment that I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

Emma Nash writes in itWeek that previously people said that having only 39% of the country having broadband was indicating a digital divide between the rich and poor has been proved false by the eAdmissions national project being so readily taken up.
Now skipping the staggering jump of logic (Yes, because people used an online system to choose their secondary school in places like Hertfordshire and Hackney, we can see that poorer people have and want broadband!) It’s a reminder that today 39% of people have broadband.
For us indie developer, it means that you can count on at least 2 in 5 visitors to your site will be on broadband speeds (more if you target the 4 countries with better takeup, Holland, Sweden, Japan and Spain). So take your pick when it comes to making your games distributable, small files for non-broadband users, or big content fillled files for the wealthy broadband elite?

Naming a game is hard!

When you decide upon a project, you will almost certainly give it a code name, thats something you can name the source code tree, something to call it while working on it.   But invariably, the game design will change, or the name will just be rubbish.

With my game, I named it Robot Rumble  as the code name.  The original design called for small robots, running around an arena, fighting each other.

Now we’ve developed a lot of the game, and I’ve spent time with the artist, the design has changed a little.  The units are now vehicles, with a couple of people inside, and the arena’s, a post apocalyptic ruined city that is overrun with gangs.  So the name Robot Rumble just doesn’t seem to match anymore.

So what to do, well this calls for everybodies favourite tool, brainstorming.

Brainstorming is much maligned as useless corporate crap, and the reason is that it is often done completely wrong.  Good brainstorming involves a number of things, the first is that absolutely anything goes on the page or board.

Brainstorming for a name, what you really want is a good number of words that are representative of your game.  So when we brainstormed we came up with the following words: City, Urban, Street, Road, Gang, Wars, UrbanZone, DeUrbanizedZone, Slum, City Of Angels, Lost Angels, Los Diablos, Tank, Tactics, Tactical, Innercity, Battle, Fight, Rumble, Guerilla, Tarmac, Warfare, Cleanup, Clean.

There were more as I’m sure you can imagine.

Now for the easy and fun bit.  Select two random words, and see how they fit together, examples of ones we tried,

Tank Tactics (theres a Tantix out which sounds like that), Street Wars, Gang War, Tarmac Tactics, Urban Tactics, Tactical Urban Warfare,
Tactical Urban Cleanup, Tarmac Gangs, Road Gangs.

We kept going for about half an hour, just saying names at each other.

Finally when naming something, the other thing we also did, was to google for the term and think about domain names.  some that we liked, just didn’t google well, and some tha googled well, we felt didn’t give the right feel for the game.

Anyway, we still have to make a final choice for the game name, so I’ll post again when we’ve decided, maybe with a screenshot to tease you all with the upcoming game.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=10704

Juuso of GameProducer.net has highlighted the results of the Gamer Market Survery 2006, which led me to read some of the information at their press release and at gamasutra. And it is, I can say most interesting reading.

It seems that the Hardcore gamer, while still definately in existence, and accounting for a third of gaming spend in the market, is not the only game buying public around. The list of gaming groups shows that Power Gamers are in fact only 11% of the group that was surveyed.

The bugoneing Casual market is most likely taken up with mostly the leisure gamers and some of the incedental and dormant gamers, but not all of those markets are being focused on by casual gamers.

When writing your game and deciding who is going to play it, think about the market that might play it. If you are thinking of focusing a casual gamer market, the dormant gamers for exmaple are people who would like to paly games but dont have time. If thats who you are interested in targetting, then ensuring that quick play is available is important.

If you are targetting social gamers, and your deciding what to spend time on, a nice 3d engine that will make your game look amazing, or an online chat / email interface, then amybe graphics aren’t king anymore!

To be honest, the results of this survey are not earth shattering. they ahven’t changed the market, but maybe they should serve as a wakeup call. most indie developers from what I’ve seen are pretty close to the hardcore market, and so they’re tastes and priorities in games development reflect that. Maybe you should do that dreaded “focus group” thing and think about what your customers want from your games.