My literary agent hunt took a big step forward today by me actually doing something. Last week I signed up for WritersMarket.com and rooted around in their searchable list of literary agents for friendly sounding types who represent fantasy novels. I located 29 that seemed workable. I went through that list again today and narrowed it down further to 19.
11 of those 19 want only a “Query with SASE” (SASE is an acronym for “If You’ve Ever Wanted to be a Writer You Probably Know What This Is”). I have spent the past several days condensing a 145,000 manuscript by 3 orders of magnitude to fit into a 180-ish word summary paragraph. I took that summary and put together the query packages and sent them out this afternoon.
Progress.
Now to wait patiently. Or as patiently as I’m capable of.
For the remaining 8 agent prospects, I have to put together more involved packages. Some want a synopsis, others a longer outline, still others the first 5 pages or the first 3 chapters, and so on.
I’d like to think that my future lies with one of the simple queries sent out today. But I prefer to stack the odds a bit more by keeping at it. Besides, some of those remaining 8 sound like great people to work with. Why pass up a possible perfect match just because my lazy programmer’s nature wants to take the easy way out?
What does this have to do with indie games or indie software? Well…not so much. However, there is one aspect of indie-ness that has played heavily in my writing career (such as it is thus far). As an employee somewhere I doubt I would’ve been able to allocate 2-3 hours of my workday for months at a time to crank out the necessary verbiage to create a novel. Or, for that matter, The Indie Game Development Survival Guide and Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform.
Writing is a flexible hobby, of course, and can usually be indulged in simultaneous with other careers. In fact, writing has made a great secondary career for a lot of people over the years. But as an indie, I think, it’s a perfect fit. If you’ve read the biographies and autobiographies of some of the biggest selling writers, you know that few of them put in more than 2-4 hours of writing a day. Why? Mostly because it’s damn difficult to be consistently productive with a longer “writing work day.” Don’t believe me? You try it. Let me know how it goes.
1000 to 2000 words (5-10 double spaced manuscript pages) is a good daily production. Do that 5 days per week and you can generate a mid-length novel in about 4 months. Do that once a year from the age of 30 and you will out produce J. K. Rowling in less than a decade.
Spend 2-3 hours per day writing, and that still leaves 5-6 hours in the typical 8-hour work day. It’s easier than it sounds because what you’re writing about and what your working on for your indie projects are often going to be very different. That helps keep your brain from burning out with subject fatigue, and can even make you more alert and productive since you’re not focusing on the same thing all day every day.
The possibility of getting a novel published excites me. Since I first read Tolkien in the spring of 1982, I’ve had this compulsion to create new worlds and tell stories about what happens there. I’ve had lots of false starts and self sabotage along the way. I can see, looking back, that I’ve used programming and game development and dice-and-paper role-playing game design and even nonfiction writing as “novel writing surrogates”. However, now that I’ve built my confidence up with those surrogate activities, and proven that I can finish what I start, it’s time to get back to who what brung me.
“Follow your passion,” Jeff Tunnell said at IGC 2003. As a full time indie, I’ve found it’s possible to follow more than one. Sometimes one might distract from another, but that seems OK too. And even if it’s not, I’m unlikely to fire myself.
(Note: To those of you who track plans at Garage Games, this might not be news, but I wanted to talk about it.)
Last year at the Free Play conference in Melbourne, Australia, I met Skye Gellmann. Skye is multi-faceted individual: a circus performer in training, a budding Australian indie game designer and developer, and proof that the hair styles of Dragonball Z really can be transferred to the real world.
Skye emailed me after Free Play 2005 to tell me about his new game in development, BLINDSCAPE. From the Misnomer Web page:
BLINDSCAPE is a game played completely in the dark. The user is blind, so they must feels the environments through sound not sight. The screen is totally black, and I’m currently experimenting with ways to make this work.
I’m looking at the concepts behind the way we create images using only sound, and experiment with the perceptions on life with no image. I would like to challenge the notion that graphics are the be all to end all, as it is a gross overstatement. Also the faceless hero is attractive to me.. how we imagine this person would be different for everybody, so in a way, I guess what I’m working on is similar to books in many ways, but different in the way that it is interactive and has many interesting choices.
In a nutshell: I’m pissed off that I didn’t think of this idea. It’s <censored> brilliant.
Your first thought might that this a “game for the blind.” You’d be wrong. This is a game where seeing people get a taste of what it’s like to be blind.
More:
Yesterday [10 July] I made the fire level, and in it, I felt frantic and scared and confused inside when I first started playing.. and that’s when I realized that I could never feel or emote like that in a normal game, but somehow, in letting my mind do all the imaging, I was feeling something I’d never felt in any game before. True, I have thought about horror in BLINDSCAPE, and I hope to have alien encounters because everyone would imagine the aliens differently.
Who’s to tell what you’re REALLY talking to, is really what you think it is. It all could just be a figment of your imagination, or something more! I don’t want to give away too much just yet. But Aliens and Horror, and modern twisted worlds are swimming in the storyboard of my mine. I hope to turn the whole thing into one big mind fsck.. Enjoyable mind fsck I should say!
This is what indie game development should be about: experimentation with and exploration of new game styles.
Sure, I like making a buck as much as the next guy, but at heart I’m more of a programmer than a businessman. As a programmer, I’d rather be working on something <BLEEPING> COOL with low pay and lousy benefits than on a boring HCFA report about childhood immunization rates for an insurance company while taking home a solid salary and 3 weeks of paid time off each year. It’s probably a character flaw (and, no doubt, part of the reason “quality of life” in the game development currently sucks), but there it is.
BLINDSCAPE could be the future. It inspires me, pointing to entirely new possibilities. I look forward to seeing this project grow.
-David
PS Maybe I can badger Skye to let me have a demo I can showcase at the Indie Games Con in October. That would rock, I’m thinking.
The thread eventually got derailed by a troll, but the earlier threads listed fairly typical items:
Up to date hardware and development tools
An office with a door
Smart co-workers
Good pay (strategically listed in the middle, though probably moved there during editing )
Good benefits (401k, 2-3 weeks paid vacation, health insurance, flextime, etc)
Training
40 hour work week
As I blinked and struggled to remember what “benefits” are, amidst curious flashbacks of “paid vacations” that I might have made in the distant past, I realized how far I had meandered from the Employee Mindset.
Because none of the responses mentioned the first thing that would be on my list:
Ownership Equity and/or Profit Sharing
Good tools are a joy to work with, of course, as are smart co-workers available for a quick chat in the middle of the day. I had an office with a door once. It rocked. Mostly because I could play my music as loud as I wanted, headphones not required. Sometimes I miss a 401k that gets contributions from more than just me, and the whole paid time off scene could be fun.
But I’ll forego most of those, or accept reduced versions of them, for a piece of the pie.
Back in 1999, before I left my full time job, I had been assigned to a project I despised. Not only was the project distasteful for personal reasons, I knew beyond any shadow of a doubt that it would never recoup its development costs. Management believed otherwise, though, and the ball started rolling. However, a couple months in, as we were getting further and further behind for a number of reasons (most of it technology related), I made an offer to my VP: “Buy me a Ferrarri and I’ll guarantee it gets done on time.”
I was only half joking, because as I said it, I saw in my mind how I could do it. Not surprisingly, though, my VP took a pass on that. A $500,000 car just seemed too much to pay.
He should’ve taken the deal (I would’ve accepted a counteroffer of a $40,000 Lexus LS 400). Or just canceled the project.
When I left to become a full time indie, the project was about 5 months from its scheduled roll out date. Not only did the project go over schedule by at least 6 months, tying up staff and resources across 3 departments, but, as I had predicted over and over in the beginning, the resulting product never generated significant revenue [*].
If a company believes they can make significant revenue from a product, they should be willing offer a slice of that to the developers who make it happen. Hell, even “bloodsucking video game publishers” offer royalties. They may cook the books a bit to make sure they keep as much as possible before the developer sees anything, but at least they go through the motions.
Anyway, maybe I’ve become a bit too demanding for the general purpose developer market. Ah, well.
-David
[*] That I ever heard. My last information was a year or two after shipping. I don’t think the product is still being peddled.
Today, thinking about my professional life since the early 1990’s, I noticed something of a pattern.
The odd years (1993, 1997, 2003, etc) seem to be when I finish up the projects (or clean up the mess; however you want to look at it) of the even years (1992, 1996, 2002).
Example A: Though I released the first versions of The Journal and Paintball Net in 1996, it was in 1997 that the development/evolution of those products really hit a stride.
Example B: The Journal 2 was released in 1998 but saw its most significant growth in 1999 and 2001. The Journal 4 was released in 2004, but saw similar stabilizing and growth in 2005.
Example C: Both of my book contracts have been signed in even years (2002 and 2004), but the books themselves have had the bulk of their text written, and were then published, in odd years (2003 and 2005).
Of course, like all broad generalizations, this one also proves to be false (or at least not entirely true) when you move from the general to the specific. Some odd years (like 1995) have been complete busts. And some even years (like 1998) have seen little new work started.
Example D: The Journal 3 was released in 2001, spurring significant growth and new development in 2002.
And sometimes…things just get odd.
Example E: The Journal 3 development actually started in 1999, was put off due to other projects in 2000, and was completed after working on it nearly the entire year of 2001.
Example F: Artifact was designed in 1996, saw little to no development in 1997, finally got going in 1998, and was eventually released in 1999.
Example G: The new Paintball Net project, based on Torque, started in 2002, was canceled in 2004, and then restarted in 2005. Estimated completion is 2006.
So, odd or even really hasn’t made much of a difference. But the odd years seem to be more about completing things than even years.
As of today, I am now the sole owner of Paintball Net, including all rights to the name, assets, domain name, et al.
The process felt a bit odd, though.
First, I had to negotiate a price with…well…myself, and the other Samu Games co-owner, my brother Dug. And then I had to sign the purchase agreement twice: once as one of the sellers, and again as the buyer. After that, I wrote a check to Samu Games…and I’ll get half of it back when we disburse the money to the shareholders (both of us).
Seems like a lot of paperwork and gyrations to clearly establish full ownership of something I already owned half of.
It’s a short-lived full ownership, though. In the next week or so, I’ll be contributing Paintball Net’s IP as my half of a new partnership. The other half of the partnership is putting up the money to get the new version of the game built.
It’s taken a bit longer than expected to get to this point in the revived Paintball Net project, but at least we got here.
On 27 June my co-author, Sande Chen, and I delivered the final manuscript of our book, Serious Games: A Guide to Games that Educate, Train, and Inform. In the weeks since then I’ve mostly been working to catch up on projects and responsibilities that had been largely ignored in the final 6 weeks of getting the book written. The sale/purchase of PBN was one of those. As was an update of my software, The Journal, which I rolled out yesterday.
For the next 5-6 months, I have the following to work on (in no particular order):
Write a serious games-related article (also with Sande) for Game Developer magazine (November issue, due 1 September).
Prepare serious games-related presentations for a couple conferences (still to be determined).
Form new LLC to develop and market Paintball Net.
Build Paintball Net.
Extend The Journal.
Find an agent for my first novel.
2005 has proven to be a busier and more complex year than originally planned. On the other hand, that’s not always a bad thing.
The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) has launched a game industry demographics and diversity survey. The anonymous survey will compile data on the gaming industry’s workforce so the IGDA can get a better sense of who’s working on games and of the industry as a whole.
Having attended 4 GDC’s and actually looked at the people there, I can save them a lot of work. Here is the Unofficial Informal DavidRM Joe Indie Collaborative Survey of Who’s Working on Games:
51% White males of European descent
30% Asian males
15% Asian females
3% White females
1% Other
The good news is, the numbers are much more diverse now than they were in 2001, even. The face of the industry is changing, and changing rapidly. In a couple more years, for instance, the number of Indian males (and females) will probably surpass the number of white females.
