For about a year now I’ve considered starting a business blog. I had a few obstacles that I needed answers to before starting: what am I offering that isn’t already out there? Who is my audience?
My answer: There are few companies out there like Klei Entertainment. We developed an indie game that went casual, and totally missed the sweet spot. We’ve developed for the Xbox Live Arcade. We helped jump start another studio, now making N+. We’ve worked with publishers. We’ve self-published. Certainly, someone can benefit from my experience, and I believe in giving back to the community.
So, starting today, every Thursday I will post a new bit of rambling. Some of it will be technical (I’m a programmer by trade, and much of that geekiness lives), much of it will be my own opinions about the wonderful business we’re in, and most of it I hope you’ll angrily disagree with me so we can have an interesting conversation.
What’s the quote of the day? “Make sure your board is sufficiently weird”.
I love that.
I grabbed that line from a book I’m currently reading: Re-imagine by Tom Peters, and I can’t agree with it more. Klei (that’s pronounced “clay”, by the way) is staffed by a serious hodge podge of people. Sure, we have a couple industry veterans, but several key staff are also weird people who have no preconceptions of what the “right way” to develop a game is. This can bring some amazing results when mixed with people from the industry who are fed up with the “right way” to spend millions of dollars to create a game you’re not sure people will enjoy. Most of the people I trust the most for advice are weird people who don’t deal with inconsequential things like video games (but would love to get a Wii if they could find one).
I believe that there’s a huge opportunity to rethink how we develop games. By developing smarter, and destroying old preconceptions, extremely high quality games can be created with amazingly small budgets. For starters:
- Choose games that won’t break your back developing them. If you’re a small developer tight on cash, WHY are you developing a content intense game? Surely there’s another game you can be excited about that doesn’t kill your staff.
- Destroy old processes that aren’t doing anything. If your employees roll their eyes when you ask them to do something in the process, either get them to buy in or figure out why it’s stupid. For example: the only time I’ve ever seen a smoke test break is when someone forgot to fix the smoke test.
- Challenge notions of what is needed to build a game. Lots of time, lots of people, lots of money? As Gordon Bell says “I’ve never seen a project being worked on by 500 engineers that couldn’t be done better by 50″. Try cutting from 50 to 5, and I think you’ll be amazed at the result.
This blog is all about rethinking how game developers look at games. From the design of games, to the code that makes them, to how different teams interact, to how we look at and treat users — lets create new notions, new systems, new processes, and then destroy them again
Okay, now… disagree!
Edit: I changed the title and wording to better reflect my thoughts. Destroy your preconceptions, dammit!
What I think you’re game concepts prove (and hopefully the ones I am making) is an often lost axiom… “Game Play is EVERYTHING”.
Huge teams, current development practices and pre-conceived notions of what is needed to make a great game has in many ways missed boat. Before outstaning graphics, fast cpu power and almost unlimited rendering capabilities is games should be fun to play. I think we lost that concept along the way… Thankfully the casual game revolution has re-focused attention on games while potentially simple are a blast to play.
[Aside : Gratifying to see a local small game dev doing so well!] Keep up the great work.
Cheers,
Chistopher
Comment by: Studio13
August 21st, 2007 at 2:41 pm
I am really glad your writing this stuff. The game industry really needs a shake-up. Every-time I talk to someone in the game business about introducing ideas from other creative disciplines they have a sort of empty stare . . . . …. Clearly, indie game developers are in the best position to innovate and most likely to be ripped off given the current state of the biz.
Finding a balance between art and business is easier than people think. It just requires mature artists and mature business people.
Thanks for this article. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how I go about making games, and stumbled across this blog while voraciously reading through links and blog posts about the smaller side of the industry.
One of the biggest problems that we’ve faced at our company is that a lot of the processes that don’t seem to do much of anything are externally imposed. Now, there’s some percentage of those that are good ideas that we just don’t know about yet (i.e. the publisher has encountered time and time again a certain oversight on the part of developers, so they made rules that prevent this oversight). But some other percentage of them are old processes that aren’t doing anything.
How do you go about sorting out which is which and what’s the best way to get team buy in when the unfortunate answer is “that’s how they want it, sorry guys”?
News
Destroy your Preconceptions
Date: 9th August 2007
For about a year now I’ve considered starting a business blog. I had a few obstacles that I needed answers to before starting: what am I offering that isn’t already out there? Who is my audience?
My answer: There are few companies out there like Klei Entertainment. We developed an indie game that went casual, and totally missed the sweet spot. We’ve developed for the Xbox Live Arcade. We helped jump start another studio, now making N+. We’ve worked with publishers. We’ve self-published. Certainly, someone can benefit from my experience, and I believe in giving back to the community.
So, starting today, every Thursday I will post a new bit of rambling. Some of it will be technical (I’m a programmer by trade, and much of that geekiness lives), much of it will be my own opinions about the wonderful business we’re in, and most of it I hope you’ll angrily disagree with me so we can have an interesting conversation.
What’s the quote of the day? “Make sure your board is sufficiently weird”.
I love that.
I grabbed that line from a book I’m currently reading: Re-imagine by Tom Peters, and I can’t agree with it more. Klei (that’s pronounced “clay”, by the way) is staffed by a serious hodge podge of people. Sure, we have a couple industry veterans, but several key staff are also weird people who have no preconceptions of what the “right way” to develop a game is. This can bring some amazing results when mixed with people from the industry who are fed up with the “right way” to spend millions of dollars to create a game you’re not sure people will enjoy. Most of the people I trust the most for advice are weird people who don’t deal with inconsequential things like video games (but would love to get a Wii if they could find one).
I believe that there’s a huge opportunity to rethink how we develop games. By developing smarter, and destroying old preconceptions, extremely high quality games can be created with amazingly small budgets. For starters:
- Choose games that won’t break your back developing them. If you’re a small developer tight on cash, WHY are you developing a content intense game? Surely there’s another game you can be excited about that doesn’t kill your staff.
- Destroy old processes that aren’t doing anything. If your employees roll their eyes when you ask them to do something in the process, either get them to buy in or figure out why it’s stupid. For example: the only time I’ve ever seen a smoke test break is when someone forgot to fix the smoke test.
- Challenge notions of what is needed to build a game. Lots of time, lots of people, lots of money? As Gordon Bell says “I’ve never seen a project being worked on by 500 engineers that couldn’t be done better by 50″. Try cutting from 50 to 5, and I think you’ll be amazed at the result.
This blog is all about rethinking how game developers look at games. From the design of games, to the code that makes them, to how different teams interact, to how we look at and treat users — lets create new notions, new systems, new processes, and then destroy them again
Okay, now… disagree!
Edit: I changed the title and wording to better reflect my thoughts. Destroy your preconceptions, dammit!
Categories: Business, N+, ramblings
Comments:
Comment by: Christopher
August 9th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
Do I have to disagree???
What I think you’re game concepts prove (and hopefully the ones I am making) is an often lost axiom… “Game Play is EVERYTHING”.
Huge teams, current development practices and pre-conceived notions of what is needed to make a great game has in many ways missed boat. Before outstaning graphics, fast cpu power and almost unlimited rendering capabilities is games should be fun to play. I think we lost that concept along the way… Thankfully the casual game revolution has re-focused attention on games while potentially simple are a blast to play.
[Aside : Gratifying to see a local small game dev doing so well!] Keep up the great work.
Cheers,
Chistopher
Comment by: Studio13
August 21st, 2007 at 2:41 pm
I am really glad your writing this stuff. The game industry really needs a shake-up. Every-time I talk to someone in the game business about introducing ideas from other creative disciplines they have a sort of empty stare . . . . …. Clearly, indie game developers are in the best position to innovate and most likely to be ripped off given the current state of the biz.
Finding a balance between art and business is easier than people think. It just requires mature artists and mature business people.
Comment by: Tim
December 22nd, 2007 at 9:26 am
Thanks for this article. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how I go about making games, and stumbled across this blog while voraciously reading through links and blog posts about the smaller side of the industry.
One of the biggest problems that we’ve faced at our company is that a lot of the processes that don’t seem to do much of anything are externally imposed. Now, there’s some percentage of those that are good ideas that we just don’t know about yet (i.e. the publisher has encountered time and time again a certain oversight on the part of developers, so they made rules that prevent this oversight). But some other percentage of them are old processes that aren’t doing anything.
How do you go about sorting out which is which and what’s the best way to get team buy in when the unfortunate answer is “that’s how they want it, sorry guys”?
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