Wasn’t there something I used to get on holidays? Started with a “p”…or a “v”…maybe both?
Oh, I remember: I used to get paid vacation on holidays.
Some days I really miss corporate welfare.
On the other hand, as I spent the afternoon tweaking a new Dungeons & Dragons™ prestige class for my current character (warforged cleric/fighter in an Eberron campaign)–which is probably a lot like what I would’ve done even back when I worked full time–I earned more from today’s sales of The Journal than I ever received from 8 hours of paid vacation.
Not a *lot* more, and it’s only been the past year that has seen The Journal out-earning my days on the corporate payroll, but still…I shouldn’t complain. And don’t.
In fact, in the spirit of the Thanksgiving Weekend, I’d like to say that I’m thankful for what I’ve received this past year. Business has improved for The Journal, my second book managed to get written and published, and the Paintball Net project came back to life bearing a bit of funding.
Going back to the topic of corporate welfare: The indie/shareware business model is ideally suited to replace the benefits of paid holidays, sick leave, and paid time off. As Steve Pavlina likes to describe it, with this kind of product you can “make money in your sleep.” That’s a benefit all but impossible to duplicate as wage slave.
I’m still working to replace cost effective health care and spiffy retirement plans like 401k’s, though. This year I (finally) put plans into place to cover these. I look forward to making those plans much more substantial in 2006.
This year (2005), my wife & I decided we needed to start saving money for our 2 kids. Education keeps getting more expensive, financial aid for tuition is getting harder to come by (or more expensive to borrow), and so on. We should’ve started long ago, of course, especially for the 12-year-old, but that’s beside the point. We’re wrapping up our first year of the program, and I decided to share how we’ve been going about it.
‘Tis a Gift to be Simple
As I mentioned before in my “Simple Tax Plan” post, I like to keep things as simple as possible, at least at the beginning. After the plan has been underway a while, and I feel comfortable with the progress and the process, then I can add a bit of complexity without worrying that I’m about to screw it up.
To that end, we didn’t start out with any of the various tax-deferred education savings plans that are now available. Instead, we just created sub-accounts with the kids’s names on them (but not in the kids’s names) in our credit union account. And then, every month, we send a fixed amount to the account.
What could be simpler?
When we started out we didn’t have any target amounts in mind. We figured it was more important to get the habit going and the money flowing than to be concerned with targeting a specific amount. Also, we figured that when we could afford to put away more for them, we would, and we’d still get some interest-earning benefit in the meantime. And, of course, with kids you do get the benefit of a long-ish timeframe. If you start early enough, you have as long as 18 years. (We’ll be a bit pressed to pull it together for the 12-year-old, but the 3-year-old has over twice as long still; even “a little bit” accumulates to “quite a bit” over 15 years.)
Since the beginning of the year, we’ve adjusted the savings program twice. The first was simply moving the children’s accounts from the credit union to another bank to take advantage of much higher savings interest rates.
The second change came after the move to the new accounts, as I considered other ways to increase the return. I call these the “Birthday CD’s”.
Birthday CD’s
This is the first real “additional wrinkle” I’ve added to the savings program. Here it is in a nutshell:
Every month, contribute $X to the account.
Each year, on the kid’s birthday, take the accumulated amount in the account and buy a 1-year (12 month) Certificate of Deposit (CD).
This approach has a few benefits that I like:
The current year’s accumulation is still very liquid, while earning a useful interest rate.
Previous years savings earn a higher rate of interest in a nice-sized chunk by swapping away that liquidity.
You always know about when all the Cd’s will mature, which simplifies planning and administration.
CD’s are hardly an aggressive investment vehicle. But they fit my current level of comfort. As we continue to save money for the kids over the coming years, we’ll doubtless add a few other wrinkles and new ideas.
The Most Important Thing, as I see it, is that we’re doing something constructive immediately, and not just waiting for the “best idea” to occur to us–probably too late.
I’d love to hear back from others about how they’re saving for their children–what’s worked, what hasn’t worked as well as expected, and so on.
A winning attitude, we hear so often, is the key ingredient of becoming successful.
Of course, it also helps if you have some skill too (someone has to do the work around here). And a bit of business savvy (profit = revenue – expenses). And the persistence to see a project through to completion (if it were easy, everyone would be doing it). And a smidgen (or two) of luck (you can’t control everything).
Oh, and the guts to strike out on your own, without any assurance that what you’re working on is ever going to be successful (if it were easy…etc).
And let’s not forget creativity and an ability to look at something old and see how new it can be.
In fact…when you really consider what’s necessary to succeed at anything…”You gotta want it!” starts sounding pretty stupid. Positively stupid.
Is attitude important? Only in so far as it doesn’t get in the way of actually doing something. Obviously, if you can’t be motivated to get up off your ass and do something, you’re unlikely to succeed. On the other hand, the Universe At Large doesn’t give a damn how much you “want it!” if, again, you don’t actually take action to get a hold of this “it” you say you “want!”
Same goes for “intending”. No one cares how many games you “intend” to make, or how much money you “intend” those games to “manifest” your way. Unless you become the cause, the odds of achieving any kind of effect (in your life, in your relationships, in your work, whatever) are about ZERO.
In other words, if you can’t hit the minimum threshold of “positive attitude”, you’ll probably talk yourself out of getting anything done. But once you’ve crossed that threshold, the most positive feelings in the world won’t write a single line of code, won’t texture a single polygon, and won’t teach you how to do either of those things.
The real mantra should be (with appropriate nods to Nike):
You gotta do it!
Wanting is wishing. Anyone can want something. The only way to succeed at anything is to do something.
Imagine that you control a small team of fantasy adventurers: A warrior, a thief, a wizard, and a cleric. Your team is fighting off a horde of evil humans, orcs, fey, and undead. There are 13 of each creature, an unlucky number, an evil number, each one handpicked by the Evil Overlord.
The odds are against you, over 10 to 1, and, even worse, the entire team is 1st level.
But you can win. First, each member of the team must focus on what they do best: the warrior fights the orcs, the thief backstabs the humans, the wizard vanquishes the fey, and the cleric turns the undead. Second, in order to gain experience to face the greater threats, the team members must fight the weakest creatures first, working their way up the ranks.
Finally, each member of your team has a magic item that allows them to capture one creature on the front ranks. The creatures aren’t vanquished, only held, and can only be returned to the front ranks of the attacking horde.
The horde is not organized. And like all evil hordes, there is only an uneasy alliance between the various. Despite this, the enemy horde attacks in 8 queues. The 4 middle queues are 7 deep. The flanks are only 6 deep. Only.
Your team can push the foremost attackers into the other queues. This allows the team to face only those enemies they are capable of handling. However, there are limits to how creatures may be pushed around:
Only creatures at the front of the queues may be pushed.
No intelligent member of a horde wants to be in front. So higher ranked creatures will allow lesser ranked creatures to be pushed in front of them.
Creatures protect their own, and their friends, but don’t really care about “those other guys.” Creatures of a particular type will not allow creatures of the same type (lesser ranked or no) to be pushed in front of them. Nor will they allow creatures that are their close friends to be pushed in front of them. Humans and Fey are friends. Orc and Undead are friends.
Any creature can be pushed into an empty queue. After that, though, the above rules (2 & 3) apply.
Only creatures from the front of the queues can be captured in one of the empty magic items.
Creatures can be moved from the magic items to the front of any queue, so long as rules 2 & 3 are observed.
Can your team stand firm against the oncoming horde, force it to fight on their terms, and emerge victorious?
Have you recognized this game yet?
It’s Freecell.
And I really want to play it. Just seems so much cooler than Freecell.
Damn but I wish the choice were that simple. Then I could flip back and forth as one side of me (or my bank account) needed recharging, letting the other side coast for a bit. Sadly, the Real World ™ is more complicated, and the spectrum from Artiste to Sell Out isn’t even a smooth gradient (or an arc, for that matter).
I’ve evolved a nuanced position on the passion vs. profit debate. Let me see if I can express it somewhat coherently.
1. Start with your passion, because if/when it makes a profit, you won’t mind doing it again.
“Profit”, or even just “revenue”, creates a positive feedback loop. Once you do something that earns you money, you’ll find it difficult to do anything else. That’s how middle-aged professionals find themselves stuck in career ruts. Often these people got out of college and took a less than desirable job, fully intending to get a job more in line with their college degree and/or personal interests later on. More often than not, you can revisit the grad in 10 years and they’ll be right where you left them. After 5-10 years experience in a particular industry or position, moving outside of that industry or position almost invariably involves a loss in revenue. And with the many responsibilities we always seem to accumulate as adults, the idea of taking any kind of income hit is Damn Scary.
How many indies have started with a casual game “just to get some money flowing”, with the intent to use the money to fund “the games we really want to make”? Quite a few. What percentage of them then create “just one more” such “get the money flowing” game, over and over? Probably the bulk of them. Why? Because “the games we really want to make” remain an unknown quantity. There’s no evidence that the project would make money. But that first, simple, “get some money flowing” project *did* make money. Maybe not much, but some. And in the battle of Short Term Revenue vs Long Term Goals, the Short Term Revenue tends to come out ahead.
Like it or not, the market rewards specialization. So pick your specialty with care.
2. Focus on your passion, but keep an eye out for how to make it profitable.
I tend to think that anything I create I can also sell. Arrogant? Probably. But in this Internet Age, the odds are good that I can find at least one other person whose tastes are enough like mine to sell them my creation, whatever it might be. Maybe not for a Huge Profit, but still, salable. A few years ago trying to work in such small niches would’ve been the height of folly. But now, with a bit of work, you can probably turn a profit even selling pre-fab crayon drawings and refrigerator magnets to hold them up (perhaps to people who want to pretend they have lives outside of work and/or creative children).
Despite that belief (delusion? maybe), I recognize that not every Great Idea I have is either a) that great, or b) likely to prove profitable. Still, as I work on the idea, fleshing it out past the initial stages, I keep an eye out for how I could make it more likely to show a profit while retaining its integrity. Sometimes I find a way to do it. Sometimes I don’t. The important thing to me is that I’m hammering on my idea.
Take a passion you have, and look for how you can be profitable following that passion. You will probably have to look at other people have turned a profit at something similar. But that’s not a bad thing. If you completely bastardize your idea just to make a profit, I would say that you’ve wandered into “bad thing” territory. But if you’re staying true to the idea (and only you know if you are), then it remains your idea, your passion regardless of where you picked up additional inspiration.
The reverse of this is to take someone else’s idea and trying to add enough of yourself to it that you don’t mind working on it. I haven’t noticed as much success in this area. Just seems harder, like forcing yourself to believe your corporate masters when they tell you, “If it’s good for the company, it’s good for the employees.”
Or look at it this way: If you start with the idea of making a game about toy trains and how fun they are to collect, you might come up with a casual game that captures the feel of the hobby and even though it has some similarities to other games, it’s still your game. On the other hand, if you decide your going to create a casual game (because that’s how PopCap is making its millions) and then you pick trains as a topic, you are more likely to create “Be-Train-ed” or “Train-uzzle” than anything more original.
3. If necessary, get a job you don’t hate and that pays well enough so you can afford your passion.
If you can land a gig that pays well enough to support your lifestyle and leaves you enough time to pursue the indie game of your choice: Score!
With this kind of setup you can (mostly) ignore profit for a while as you explore your passions. You can still turn a profit this way, of course. In fact, I think you’re more likely to turn a profit this way. Maybe not a quick profit, but a more long lasting one. Why? Because the long term approach almost always pays better returns over time than the short term, profit-now approach.
4. Allow yourself to not have a profit motive. Sometimes.
Finally, I think its important for all of us to have stuff we do with no regard for profit. Spouses, children, friends, hobbies of all sorts. These are where you get to focus on Pure Passion.
Profit isn’t everything. And the relentless pursuit of profit can easily eclipse the parts of our lives that make our lives worth living. Money is nice, don’t get me wrong, but so is snuggling under the covers on cool autumn evenings, a warm hug from a 3 year old, and rolling a Natural 20 at the crucial point in a D&D battle. In no particular order.
So…where does that leave the Passion vs Profit debate? Obviously, I fall closer to passion than to profit, but I still try to consider the potential profit of any new venture. It’s rather a habit anymore.
In the end, though, it’s all about your own goals as a game developer, as an indie, and even as a person.
A “cottage industry” is a small-scale industry that can be carried on at home by family members using their own equipment. Historically, cottage industries focused on manufacturing, with products like sewing and lace making. Today, the phrase is more often applied to people like J-Lo who have created an entire industry based on nothing but their own name. Despite that, the historical definition still has meaning, especially among indies.
Another aspect of pre-industrial revolution cottage industries is that families would specialize on a particular aspect of the product they manufactured. When they had created a sufficient number of their part, they would take them to market and trade with families that specialized in creating the other parts. Then the whole product could be assembled and sold.
Sounds even more indie, doesn’t it?
I started thinking about cottage industries over the past week when my son (who recently turned 12), proudly showed me his 3D model of a “paintball minigun”. He created the model in Milkshape 3D, using concept drawings created by Spencer Boomhower for our new Paintball Net project.
It’s not fully usable in a game, of course, for a handful of reasons. But I was damn proud. He learned to do this on his own. I’m no help at 3D modeling or pixel pushing.
Suddenly, I had this vision of the Indie Game Development Family: Me, designing and programming and managing the business, working with my son, who kicks out the artwork I’ve never been able to do on my own and maybe even helping with the programming (something I might be able to teach). Given time, maybe even my daughter could be involved (she’s 3 right now).
Farming families often scraped by until they could raise enough children to be really helpful around the farm. Maybe indies can use the same strategy.
Fairies is an unabashed Chuzzle clone, a game developed by Rapitsoft for PopCap Games.
Chuzzle, by Raptisoft/PopCap Games
Jason Kapalka, Creative Director for PopCap Games, started the Clone Wars with a somewhat innocuous post:
“[Fairies] does have nice production values, but it sure looks like a blatant Chuzzle clone to me (with graphic reskinning). I know the old saying about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, but this along with the waves of other clones in recent months (and clones of clones!) have certainly left me feeling somewhat disappointed by the ‘indie’ game community.
“I’ve heard all the arguments about games being ‘genres,’ or ‘homages,’ or whatever, and certainly games do evolve over time, building on ones that have come before. But to my mind there is a big difference between a game that adds vital, new, interesting elements to a base idea– such as JewelQuest or Big Kahuna Reef did with Bejeweled– and games where the only changes are cosmetic tweaks to dodge legal ramifications. This newer wave of clones don’t even have the justification of updating ancient, out-of-print MAME-only titles for a modern audience… they seem patently aimed at cannibalizing the sales of other peoples’ recent hit titles as quickly as possible.
“For the ‘indie’ game community, supposedly united by a desire to make the kinds of games the big mainstream developers aren’t willing or able to do, it’s kind of depressing to see such blatant unoriginality; more depressing still to see it being lauded as a good thing.”
The discussion continued in the Fairies announcement thread for a while, and then split out into separate threads:
The Big Questions of the Clone Wars boiled down to:
1. Is cloning always wrong? Sometimes wrong? Always right?
2. Is cloning a viable way for new developers to get started? Or is it a vacuous lack of creativity, devoid of all artistic integrity?
3. When is a clone a real clone instead of a “graphic reskinning”?
4. Does cloning apply to pure gameplay mechanics (sliding vs …uh…non-sliding) or to content (fairies vs fuzzy mutants)? Both? Neither?
5. If a game can be pried out of the (relatively brief) history of video games that demonstrates a similar gameplay mechanic or content, does that make the newly popular (and hence heavily cloned) game also a clone?
6. Does cloning steal revenue from the game being cloned? Or does it expand the market for the cloned genre?
7. PopCap Games is complaining about cloning casual games? The hell?
My own, rather brief responses to each of these Big Questions is:
1. All art begins with copying. Copying the work other artists is how new artists learn. Eventually, the artist develops his own “style” (or “voice” or whatever). There is also the whole “nothing new under the sun” angle. So cloning is neither always wrong, and its certainly not always right. But it is inevitable.
2. So, yes, cloning is a viable way to get started. Look at PopCap’s early days. They might be setting the tempo now, but that was certainly not always the case. Anyone who thinks Bejeweled sprang whole and complete and uncopied from the mind of a PopCap Founding Father is Officially Adorable. I’ve always advocated that new indies start with a small, doable project. This often means a clone or a simple casual game (or maybe a clone of a simple casual game). After all, if you can’t do something simple, the odds of accomplishing something complex are abysmal.
3. Doing a simple “graphic reskinning” of a game is certainly one way to make a clone. Moving past the simple fact that the new game wasn’t built using the engine of the older game (meaning that the developer had to code this on his own), graphics are the visual representation of the game. Which means that the graphics are the content of the game, much more so than the gameplay.
4. Content is why players play games. How the players interact with the content is of lesser importance, so long as the interaction fits their expectations. Even if they are just killing time, the game played reflects on the person playing it. They have to like the content, or they won’t play it. If you take an existing gameplay mechanic and apply it to new content, you have, in many ways, created a new game that will appeal to players who like that content–possibly even people who would never have played the original game. The new content can even cast the gameplay mechanic in an entirely new light. Like replacing the demons in Doom with pedestrians and co-workers, the way Postal did. To game developers and hard-core game players, its obvious those two are essentially the same game. But to the other 99.9999% of the population, they’re very different games. In the same way, humanity at large is more likely to consider to games with similar content as “clones”, regardless of the gameplay mechanics employed in each.
5. There really is nothing new coming down the pike. All culture is built from existing culture, all ideas created within the context of existing ideas. The combinations of what’s possible, though, are effectively infinite. So who gives a shit who thought of it first? If I have never played the earlier game, I can still enjoy the new one. When I discover that something I like (a movie, a song, whatever) is based on an earlier work, I like to go back and experience that work. That doesn’t change my appreciation for the new work, though–especially if the new work adds something different even as it retains the spirit of the original. Sometimes you get situations like The Magnificent Seven, a Western based on Seven Samurai, a Japanese samurai film. However, if you do any research at all you’ll discover that Seven Samurai was an adaptation of the Hollywood Western set in Medieval Japan. It’s all one big circle, but each time we go around, it’s still exciting (or it can be; sometimes, though, you get dreadful “reskinnings” of High Plains Drifter).
6. My basic response to this was made earlier this week. Cloning can be profitable for both (or all) sides of the issue. When it stops being profitable, people will find some other product to clone/expand.
7. Indies created the current casual games market, often by cloning games originally created for earlier console generations. So long as indies can be profitable doing it (and by “doing it” I mean “cloning the hell out of each other’s good ideas”), I say let them do it. Of course, I don’t see it being profitable much longer, but why not have fun until then?
Monday & Tuesday of this week Sande Chen & I attended the Serious Games Summit in Washington, DC. We missed out on a huge opportunity, though, by not bringing enough copies of our new book, Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform. Luggage constraints and (for some reason) believing that there would be a booth selling books (like there is at GDC) caused us to guess low. We could’ve sold about 4-5 times as many copies as we did. Let that be a lesson to you other authors out there.
Dynamic Animation Systems (DAS)’s training product for the United States Forestry Service was featured in the book, and even shows up in the cover collage.
Before the release of the book, I was worried about not being first, but now that I’m well past that, I’m looking forward to the next book on the topic. Not just a book that indies can use (there are a number of those), but one that is, like mine, SPECIFICALLY TARGETTED AT INDIES, up to and including using the phrase “indie/independent game development/developer” in the title (or sub-title).
“Why?” you may ask.
“Because,” I will tell you, “it takes more than one book on a topic (or any product) to define a market.” And because the people who buy one book are very likely to also buy the other.
In other words: I expect my sales to go UP (not down) when a similar book is released.
I suppose there is a point where too much copying of my subject matter would start to erode the sales for all of us. With too many choices, the readers wouldn’t be able to buy all of the variations. But even then, the overall market has still expanded, and it’s possible to continue to have greater unit sales even while your percentage of the total market decreases.
Now, if you plagiarize my book, I’ll send the lawyers after you. But since covering indie game development is going to require that you cover the same aspects (team building, design, development, management, marketing, sales, customer service, and more), there will be a lot of overlap. This is fine, and expected. In fact, I look forward to is seeing other views about the process and experience of indie games.
My book was hardly the Last Word on indie game development. There’s a lot yet to be said.
![match1[1].jpg (400x300 pixels)](http://joeindie.com/blog/images/tj200511041530-1.jpg)
![ss_one[1].jpg (400x300 pixels)](http://joeindie.com/blog/images/tj200511041530-2.jpg)
