Back in 1997 and 1998, Pollyanna, a Legendary Player of the original game, composed these songs for us, gratis. I’ve had a few requests for the songs over the years. Today I dug around in the voluminous archive repository that is my hard drive and found these:
(dreams).it – “Dreams turn to nightmares!”
(INVADE).IT – Invaders theme. “You attacked the bot! You have heard the word and disobeyed!”
(ohyes).it – “Oh, yes!”
(PBN1).IT
(PBN2).IT
(PBN3).IT
(pbn4).it
(PBN5).IT
(PBTRAD).IT – “Show him what tradition is all about!”
(stop).it – “And now, a lesson from your DJ”
Yes, they’re all Impulse Tracker tracks. Fortunately, I think most players today will handle them. Some of the songs are duplicates, or only marginally different. I just picked ‘em all up and zipped ‘em all together.
Listening to these songs today brought back a lot of memories: of playing, of chatting, of Polly, QtPie, Chorus, rares, hacks, fixes, new eq, old eq, free paint, cks, grenades… Good times.
-David
PS I miss you, Polly. Thanks again, for everything. You rocked.
In his 2003 book, Sometimes the Magic Works, in a chapter titled “Luck”, Terry Brooks described how his first novel, The Sword of Shannara, was picked up and marketed by Ballantine Books:
“The perception in publishing at the time [1974] was that fantasy did not sell, that its readership was small and not broad based, and that the potential for expansion was limited. Yes, J. R. R. Tolkien had sold hundreds of thousands of copies of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. But that was because he was J. R. R. Tolkien, and no one else was. Fantasy, as a form of category fiction, was too esoteric to be widely marketable.
“Lester [del Ray] believed that this was horse pucky. He believed the market was huge, the readership vast and hungry, and the potential for sales enormous.
“He decided to use The Sword of Shannara to prove his point.” [p. 15]
I won’t go into the details of how well Lester del Ray proved that point. I read The Sword of Shannara too much past the age of 17 to ever think it was a great book, but it’s entertaining, and there can be little argument that it helped create the market for fantasy fiction in the 1970’s and helped it grow in the 1980’s and 1990’s.
What’s the lesson to be learned?
To the inobservant and lazy, the most obvious lesson is: Convince someone you’re the next Tolkien and cash in.
Except that Brooks didn’t convince anyone he was the next Tolkien. He was the lucky author who had written a Tolkien-esque book and happened to have submitted it at the right time to the right publisher when someone working there was looking for exactly that kind of book. No cookie for you.
And no cookies for anyone who points out the early days of fantasy fiction are over and there are no more chances to be lucky in that manner. Or that it’s harder than ever to launch a career writing fantasy fiction. Both are incorrect.
The lesson is that sometimes we all get lucky. We’re in the right place at the right time and doing the right thing. The bitch is that you can’t know when that’s going to happen. All you can do is: keep doing your best and never give up.
Without the near-immediate success of The Sword of Shannara, Brooks might not have written so many Shannara books, but (a) I have no doubt the first book would have been published anyway; and (b) since he would’ve continued writing (it was what he wanted to do) he would’ve had other books published and likely have had growing success with each book. That is, after all, the standard road to success as a writer. And as an actor, filmmaker, restaurant chef, and even game developer.
When a success story like that of Terry Brooks (or Pretty Good Solitaire, or Snood, or WinZip, or Firefox) comes along, there are always people who deride the simplicity or obviousness of the book/game/product. “Damn. I could do better than that,” they say. Often, rather than doing better, though, they do the same damn thing.
And even if they manage to do better, they’re still following someone else’s path to success. Someone else’s well-trodden, paved-over road to success, I mean. Because they weren’t the only one who thought they could do better and/or duplicate the success by duplicating the product.
The most common result, of course, is frustration: with being noticed in a crowded marketplace and/or the ever shrinking profit margins that come from having to compete on price. They get fed up with it, declare the whole thing to be a bust and go back to what they were doing before they got “suckered in” to this whole useless endeavor. It’s not what they really wanted to do, anyway. Just something they thought they could do and make some easy money. AKA: Probably the worst reason to ever do anything.
On the other hand, to pull another example from creative writing, copying the style and subject matter of authors you like is considered part of learning the craft. It’s an inevitable part of the process, and the only way anyone develops their own “voice” as a writer. In a similar vein, Robert Rodriquez, the filmmaker, likes to say that all filmmakers have a dozen or so “bad movies” in them, and should try get past those as quickly as possible.
The only way we’re going to get past the copying and the “bad movies”, though, and have a shot at the luck beyond, is to suck it up and prepare ourselves for the lack of success that is going to dog us in the meantime.
And how does anyone manage to make it through that long, painful, frustrating apprenticeship?
Because it’s what they want to do.
Question: Who in their right mind is going to keep designing and developing games when:
players say the games aren’t that great?
sales grow slowly–or don’t grow at all?
they put years of effort into creating something that hardly breaks even?
time after time, the best they can do just doesn’t seem to be good enough?
Answer: Only someone who really, Really REALLY wants to design and develop games.
(And probably someone who has a separate job that pays their expenses and leaves them enough free time to pursue their non-profitable interest; but I’ve covered that before in The Indie Alternative Part 1 and Part 2).
If you like making games, and its what you want to do, you’ll keep it up, whether you “make it” or not. You might get discouraged every so often, and maybe take some time off to do something else for a while. But if it’s in your blood, if it’s something that you just can’t help wanting to do, and can’t help doing, you’ll come back to it. And you’ll get better each time you do, because you’re learning from your mistakes, honing your skills, and accumulating experience in design and in life.
Maybe you’ll never make it big, or earn enough to retire off of because your games just never clicked with the gameplaying public. That can happen. Life offers none of us any guarantees.
So what? Making a living doing what you love is a perk, a bonus, not a reason to love it. How many people can honestly say that they are spending their time doing what it is they really want to do? Are you one of them? And if not, why? It is, after all, your own choice.
I’ll end with a couple of quotes.
“Don’t let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use.”
– Earl Nightingale
“…For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
–Conclusion to the “St. Crispen’s Day Speech”, Henry V, Shakespeare
This survey is part of the research for an upcoming book about serious game development. The goal is to gather information about serious game developers, the companies and agencies that hire them, and so on.
A serious game is a game that doesn’t have entertainment as its primary goal. Serious games are used to teach, train, and inform.
Who is this survey for?
If you are working or have worked on a serious games project, as a developer, contractor, or sponsor, we want to hear from you.
What’s in it for you?
Information about other serious game developers, sponsors and industries! If you provide your email address, a summary of all the results will be sent to you, so you can see how the serious games industry is coming together, and how you compare to the other respondents.
A chance to win free software! If you provide your name and email address, and answer every question on the survey, you will be eligible to win a free copy of The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com/thejournal/)–normally $39.95. We will give away 10 copies of The Journal, with the winners drawn at random from those eligible (i.e., those who provided email addresses).
We ask that you answer all questions that apply to you, but you can skip all questions marked (Optional) and you will still be eligible for the free software drawing.
NOTE: All information provided will be kept confidential. When the results are made available, all information presented will be aggregated and kept anonymous.
Thanks for taking the time to fill out this survey!
Mark Fassett over at Laughing Dragon Games had a link in his latest blog to a short article by Bob Parsons, founder of Parsons Technology (now owned by Intuit). Titled “They Can’t Eat You”, the article is a list of rules Bob tries to live by. From the introduction:
…I happened to pick up a copy of Men’s Journal. Clint Eastwood was on the cover and an article featured 10 items called “Clint’s rules.” I found his rules to be interesting. They were things like, “You are what you drive,” “avoid extreme makeovers,” and things like that. As Clint Eastwood is a pretty easy guy to respect, I thought the whole rule thing was pretty cool. And the more I thought about it, I realized that over the years I had accumulated a number of principles (or rules) that I tried very hard to adhere to — and these rules (in many ways) have become the foundation for whatever successes I’ve had.
…I started a software company in the basement of my house. I started it with the little bit of money I had, and named it Parsons Technology. I owned this business for 10 years, grew it to about 1,000 employees and just shy of $100 million a year in sales. Eventually, we sold Parsons Technology to a company named Intuit. Because my then-wife and I were the only investors, and the company had no debt, we received the entire purchase price.
…I’ve read many times that original ideas are rare indeed. This is particularly true when it comes to the rules herein. I can’t imagine that any of my rules represent new ideas.
My contribution is that I’ve assembled these ideas, put them to work in my life, and can attest — that more often than not — they hold true.
The whole list of rules is quite good, but these are the ones that jumped out at me as I was reading it:
3. When you’re ready to quit, you’re closer than you think. There’s an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: “The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed.”
9. Measure everything of significance. I swear this is true. Anything that is measured and watched, improves.
10. Anything that is not managed will deteriorate. If you want to uncover problems you don’t know about, take a few moments and look closely at the areas you haven’t examined for a while. I guarantee you problems will be there.
15. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Lighten up. Often, at least half of what we accomplish is due to luck. None of us are in control as much as we like to think we are.
Like a Tarot card reading, what jumps out at you is usually what’s on your mind and/or what you want to see encouragement about. Maybe someone needs to create an Indie Ching.
From My Own Life
I don’t know that I have many hard and fast rules that I live by. But I have accumulated a handful of insights over the years. Some could qualify as rules. Most, I think, are just me learning more about myself.
1. Anger is no rationale for making destructive decisions. (approx. 5 years) Acting while angry makes rational decision making a challenge, but not impossible. You are just as responsible for angry responses as for any other.
2. I don’t “have” to do anything. (approx. 6 years) Everything I do is by my own choice. A corollary that came later: The only authority over me that anyone has is what I give them. As a teenager, I adapted this into: “You will never do anything you don’t already want to do.”
3. I am the sum total of all my friends, plus a bit. (6 years) I began noticing that I was picking up the mannerisms, speech habits, and even attitudes of the children I spent time with.
4. I will never give away my last dollar. (approx. 13 years) I’m a reasonably generous person unless I need it. I will never give what I can’t afford to lose. Also, I will freely give until the recipient begins to expect it as their due–begins to think I owe them my generosity.
5. Freedom is taking responsibility for all of your own actions. (approx. 18 years) Everything you do is by your own choice, therefore by taking the action you assume any rewards and consequences. This includes decisions made with incorrect information.
6. If you don’t like me the way I am, tough. (approx. 18 years) Between my senior year of high school and my freshman year of college I decided that I was through trying to please people to gain their acceptance. If your friendship required my changing, I wasn’t going to call it friendship.
7. All my beliefs must be consistent with each other. (approx. 20 years) I began analyzing my beliefs as they became apparent (college is good for that). I wanted to know where the belief came from and whether I had any personal basis for holding it.
8. If you think you are working for too little, then work less or quit. (23 years) If the company is mistreating you or not recognizing your addition to the company, you always have the option of quitting. Don’t whine to me about it.
The above were distilled from a journal entry I originally made in 1993. Since then, I’ve learned:
9. Never take a job just for the money.
10. You’ll never get rich as an employee. And being an employee tends to suck in other ways too.
11. Be willing to head out into the unknown. Or to paraphrase Bob Parsons: Don’t get stuck in your comfort zone. If something you figure you should do scares you, get off your ass and face it. Don’t let your fear of the unknown steal a possibly life-changing opportunity.
13. Learn from everybody. Don’t be limited by your formal education or your personal and professional prejudices. Never stop learning.
14. Follow your passions (Jeff Tunnell). I’m not sure Jeff meant it the way I took it, but I’ve hung onto the phrase ever since I heard it.
Reviewing the list before posting, I have to ask: Is it any wonder I ended up an indie?
These are some of the lessons learned, as posted to the thread:
Develop a marketing/sales plan before or in parallel with product development. Knowing there’s a market isn’t enough; have to know just how to reach said market.
Product-based businesses can be extremely profitable for a single operator: the relationship between hours worked and income can be highly nonlinear.
plan, plan, plan. The simple act of forcing yourself to stay in your day job for six months or a year will keep you from jumping at too many bad ideas.
Make yourself an expert. I don’t mean know more than everyone else – although this is nice too. Figure out some way to be at least a minor expert in the eyes of your target audience – speaking, articles, etc.
Never go into business with someone who is already rich enough not to care about money.
Don’t wait for it to happen, it won’t, unless you make it.
If you’re in a saturated market, you’d better be good. In fact, no, you’d better be exceptional. Being exceptional takes a lot of effort and time.
Building products is always better than selling your time to the highest bidder. Your time will always be limited.
Successful businesses are almost always started by just 1 or 2 owners who can keep the business on a consistent direction. If there are more than 2 people in the beginning the rest have to be employees, not equal shareholders.
Mostly what I’ve learned is that no matter how well things are going, always keep your expenses down because you never know what next month will bring.
I learned that the tedious tasks almost never get done unless they lead directly to getting money, and it’s impossible to pawn those tasks off on other people.
Early successes make the later difficulties even harder, and you can get frustrated easily when doing the same thing doesn’t lead to success again.
I learned that people like practical things much more than clever things.
I learned that, while I can develop an instinct about what people will like, I’m always surprised as well.
I learned that you don’t have to be revolutionary, just interesting and timely.
I learned that without failure there is no success. You just have to pick yourself up and get back in the game.
No matter how unemotional/rational you think you are, you’re not. Things look very different when you’re depressed, tired, frustrated etc. ALWAYS CHECK YOUR CONCLUSIONS BY BOUNCING THEM OFF SYMPATHETIC BUT UNINVOLVED PARTIES.
Whoever’s reading this, you’re not gonna internalise any of this until you get burnt. So get burnt quick and cheap.
Those are just the highlights. All of the posts in the thread were a good read, and held some bit of wisdom.
I think I’m pretty much in favor of all of those, and have done what I could over the years to keep The Journal within those parameters. I do succomb to the developer’s disease of Feature Creep, but I still try to stay true to the original design purpose: keeping a journal.
Thomas has an excellent summary/write-up of the article, so I’ll just pass you over to him.
This article should be read by all shareware developers. Eric’s point is that when you are selling software, your customers have to be able to trust you. Software isn’t tangible. People have to trust that it works and will continue to work. But if you want people to trust you, you have to trust them.
…I’d only pay $15 – $20 for the best indie games, and wouldn’t buy 90% of the rest for $5…
Here’s what I have to say to that:
Whoopdee-<bleeping>-<censored>.
Who <edited for content> cares what you would or wouldn’t buy? You’re not the target audience. And if you would recognize that fact, you could give more useful advice. And the rest of the time you might just keep your mouth shut and stay out of the way.
For whoever actually posted that, don’t take what I have to say personally. You’re only repeating what has been said on the forums many times before. This time, though, I decided to take it personally.
Here’s a Simple Fact: Most game developers, indie or retail, including the majority who post on those forums, are not Not NOT the target audience for the majority of independent games.
What does this fact mean? Mostly that game developers are the Absolute Last people you should ask:
If your basic idea is a good one.
If your price is reasonable.
If you should get better graphics.
Etc.
Why? Because:
It’s not a game they would play. (And if it was, they would design it differently.)
It’s not a game they would pay for. (Though this never seems to stop them from actually suggesting price points.)
The answer will always be “Yes.” (Ignoring such glaring counterexamples as Snood, Pretty Good Solitaire, and all of the butt-ugly Web games that actually built the PopCap empire.)
Etc.
Maybe Svero and the other Gloomy Guses on the forums are right: maybe things really are different now, and it’s harder to succeed.
But not because there are fewer opportunities and a higher barrier to entry (or whatever the complaint du jour is).
Maybe it’s because those people who started as indies “back then” “just did it” and didn’t waste their time asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. With no established community, there were no clueless naysayers who couldn’t see past the end of their own creative noses and personal likes and dislikes. With no forums to search through, they couldn’t find all the reasons why someone who had never even tried figured it wouldn’t work.
Maybe isolation, from the overall game development industry as well as other indies, was the best thing that ever happened to the would-be indie game developer.
I don’t believe it. Not really. But sometimes…sometimes…I wonder…
On the forums I frequent, mostly for people with similar interests as mine (meaning game development forums), there’s a constant discussion about the best way to turn a game making hobby into a game making business.
There are several theories of course.
A) Make one game and keep revising it forever
B) Make lots of different games constantly to keep people coming back for more
C) Make games and have the portals (Real, Yahoo, the Zone) sell them
A “Gold Rush” mentality has taken root in the indie game dev arena. The success of the casual game market, especially of such independent developers as PopCap and such games as Pretty Good Solitaire and Snood, has captured the attention of the game development industry–and even beyond.
I’m not against making a lot of money as an indie. Hell, it’s one of my own goals. What I want do to is suggest a possible alternative to trying to strike it rich.
There’s a story that Robert Heinlein started writing to pay off the mortgage on a newly purchased house. And then after that there was the car to pay off. And then other bills. And a vacation. On and on. There was always some new expense, so he just kept on writing. Love him or hate him, he was one of the most influential science fiction writers of the 20th Century. Because he wanted to pay the mortgage. [*]
This Dilbert cartoon is more about the foibles of management and incentive programs than anything else, but I like that phrase: “I’m gonna write me a new mini-van this afternoon.”
What I want to suggest to you is a middle path between “I want to make million$” and “I want to make a few extra buck$”. Instead of trying to replace your fulltime income with indie income all at once, focus on smaller, more easily managed targets. Like writing yourself a minivan.
We all have certain living expenses:
Mortgage payments (or rent)
Car payments and maintenance
Utility bills (gas, electric, water, etc.)
And so on.
Beyond living expenses, there are the luxury items and consumer spending that drives the American economy:
Eating out, going to movies, shopping
DVD’s, CD’s, books, a widescreen TV
Sports car (for that mid-life crisis)
And more and more and more.
Use these expenses and luxuries as the targets of your indie income. For example, say you need $100/month to cover the electric bill. Create a game or expansion or other product that you figure can generate at least $100/month in net income. Assuming the New Standard Indie Game Price of $20, with a profit margin of 50% (gotta pay those affiliates), that requires only 10 sales per month.
*Poof* No more electric bill. You get to put the $100 you would’ve spent from your regular income back in your pocket. Maybe you’ll even save it in your retirement fund. And then if the game does better than $100/month: it’s gone past “successful” and into “gravy train.” Maybe it’ll pay the gas bill too.
Or maybe you want to buy a couple DVD’s every month, because you just like collecting good movies. That’s only about $50/month. Think you can handle that as a target income for a game? And again, you get to take money you would’ve spent and save it or apply it to something else you want.
So maybe you really do want a minivan. For a new minivan, your monthly payments will be from $300-$600, depending on your negotiating skills and options packages. Do you think you could create a game that could hit that level of income per month? I think you could.
Besides slowly handing off your living expenses to Other People, you free up a lot of resources that you already have. So long as you can keep your expenses to the same basic level, and not just soak up your indie income and newly freed money with meaningless consumer spending, you could write yourself a new minivan, a new house, out of debt, and more.
This approach also has the advantage of getting your mind off of “striking it rich” with a single game. Instead, you consider the advantages of multiple products, all contributing their modest incomes to your bottom line. Every product you have out there selling increases your chances of having what the fiction world calls a “breakout” book, a book that moves an obscure writer into the ranks of mid-lists, or a mid-list writer into bestsellerdom.
Another advantage of creating several products is that you stop trying to perfect the first one. You move on. A career isn’t built out of one game.
Think big, of course. Map out how your current project will take over the world one day. But in the meantime, see if it can’t help keep the lights on.
-David
[*] This story is probably apocryphal, since Robert Heinlein seems to have made up most of the stories he told about himself. But it’s still a good story.
