Despite the rapid development of game tools that allow more and more people to become developers, with the arrival of the stock market, game development is actually more difficult than ever, especially for independent game teams with limited funds, resources and manpower, and the risks of game development are greater than ever.
Many times, when a game development encounters a problem, it is actually too late to solve it, because it has consumed a lot of resources and time for the team. In this regard, indie game studio Finji has continued to be successful, from its self-developed Overland to Night in the Woods to Chicory: A Colorful Tale. Finji co-founder Adam Saltsman shared the studio's indie game project approval process in a previous GDC talk.
Here's the full content of Gamelook's transcription:
Adam Saltsman：
The barrier to entry for indie games is getting higher and higher, and it is important to reduce the risk in advance
My name is Adam, I made a game called Doomsday, I also released Night in the Woods, I also did a few other things, I am also a self-taught game developer, I have been making games since 2006, and the main thing I want to share today is how Finji Studios decided what we do next through the project.
In simple terms, indie games used to have very, very low sales thresholds, and in every way they were much lower than they are now. I remember a few years ago there was a very strange game Way Weirder, and nowadays, the high-quality games are getting better and better, the big games are getting bigger, and the small games are getting smaller.
With the popularity of R&D tools, even college students can develop their own games, all of which has made the standard of games higher and higher, and what we thought of as masterpieces five years ago may now become mediocre products. There are good and bad things about these trends, but there are some things I know very well:
We have a higher and higher threshold for making games, we run a studio, and now we have several children, the pressure to develop and sell independent games has always been real, what we have to do, how to do, all the potential, the advantages and disadvantages of these decisions, not only affect both of us as a couple, but also affect our children and the stupid dogs at home.
So how did we survive an increasingly competitive environment for studios that rely on indie games to survive? My advice may seem a bit mundane, all you can do is bet on both sides. There's so much to do with commercial game development and distribution that we can't control.
So, what I'm sharing today is not teaching indie game studios how to survive, which I don't think is possible anyway, nor the wisdom of R&D that everyone can learn, but rather, I'm sharing how to minimize the harm of strange projects and how to make such projects into a commercial game.
There's a lot of sharing in the industry about how to succeed before or after a game is released, but what about before a game project starts? If you've been working on a game for a while, you might agree that the sooner you find flaws and bugs in your game, the more flexible your follow-up will be.
You'll try to solve these problems or avoid them and reinforce your design, which I think will help the project as a whole, including planning, production, marketing, and so on.
But for some types of problems, it's actually too late. For example, why not do these things before the project is set up?
For game projects, there are a lot of traditional wisdom and suggestions in the industry, such as don't do copycats, don't do experimental games, don't do paid games, don't do free games, don't do casual games, don't do hardcore games....
Doing business games is very risky, this decision should not be made easily, professional advice is, do not make a game, if you are sure to make a business game, stop loss as soon as possible, often do stop loss evaluation.
The four rules for Finji project establishment
1: Platonic scope
These things help us a lot when we do a project, even before we make creative prototypes. The first one is called Plato Vision, and while it sounds strange, I'll briefly introduce what it is, which is actually like a multi-faceted measure before doing a project, such as budget, plan, scale.
As a game developer, you have resource limitations, but at the same time, you also have your own requirements for the quality of the game, the time and money you invest in this project, etc. From this point of view, each independent game can have such a triangle, different games will focus on different corners, and different game ideas will make different feedback on these aspects of decisions.
Increasing R&D time or funding may (or may not) affect the game's release time and final game quality. Because what we do is a business game, and everyone has to live, so the meaning of time and capital investment is very important.
The problem with the quality of the game is somewhat strange, there is a psychological definition of platonic ideals, that is, the most perfect form of a thing. Our requirement for the quality of the game is actually the ideal version of Plato's idea of the game, and this quality criterion is differentiated according to the difference in the game project. For example, the ideal sandbox game and RPG game may be very different, and it is actually impossible to complete, no one can really do it, but I still think it is useful, at least as a goal or direction we pursue, to help make decisions when we need to balance quality, money and time.
Usually, for us indie developers, there are boundaries between time and money in these three aspects, and what we have to do is in different game projects, according to their limitations, what is the ideal version of Plato that we can achieve?
So, the first risk we try to manage is to ask ourselves, based on the time and resources available to us, before deciding on the approval of a game project, which of our game ideas can be as close as possible to this Platonic ideal?
These are all very crazy questions because a lot of things are happening, we probably don't have a creative prototype yet, and even if you have a creative prototype, the way we develop the game will make it grow in unpredictable ways. We think that's a good thing because sometimes, your idea can grow from a seed to a towering tree, but the question is how to choose such an idea.
Forecasting is difficult, it's impossible to precisely control R&D time, budget funding, and ultimate quality, but I think you can make a correlation, you can compare a lot of ideas, and then judge which ideas or ideas will go further based on the available funds and time.
2. Invert the pyramid
It sounds a bit mundane to write down an inverted pyramid, but if your game has such a shape, it will lose more and more things and eventually get closer and closer to your ideal version.
If it's an incomplete pyramid or a vertical striped shape, I think these ways are inherently unstable until you finally get everything done.
Why is the inverted pyramid important? Sometimes there will be a slight gap in budget and planning, and if you don't end up with as much time or money as you would like, what shape would you like your game to be?
This idea is also called MVP (Minimize Viable Products), this picture is not what I did, but I like it because it is a very vivid metaphor, you can't skip the wheels of a bicycle, every time you do iterations, the wheels need to be redesigned, you have to question all your assumptions.
Not every game adapts to this model, but the problem is that we're talking about things that happen before the game starts to develop, not the best development methods, the theory of planning, or the workflow, but the way to examine and evaluate the idea of the game.
For us, the inverted pyramid is more about making a system-based game than a content-based game. So, a game with a lot of random content might be a great fit for us, and while it can take a long time to fix the basic problems, once you solve them, you can make a small game that's better. When you add something new to it, it can grow exponentially.
Sandbox games also have this tendency, for example, if you add a function, you may increase the gameplay or content of the game a lot. Although sandbox games have features that allow users to express themselves, if we don't have enough time and resources, we can also make functional games, which is one of the reasons why sandbox games are very popular.
This shape starts strangely, as the number of layers increases, it needs to grow exponentially, because this is not just a triangle, but multi-dimensional, it can add a lot of things to the existing content. When we talk about inverted pyramids, we think of products that minimize viability.
3. Creative risk (differentiation)
Next up is the concept of creative risk, which refers to creating something as differentiated as possible, rather than letting people experience a lot of similar things. A lot of times, taking creative risks is probably the number one reason you get into independent game development, perhaps because no one is making the game you want to make, you find a gap in demand that needs to be filled or an area that needs to be explored, and these things can also help your game be different.
This is contradictory to many aspects of traditional commercial game development, we want to do a creative product that makes people want to pay, but for practical or personal reasons, we need to be unique, for example, sometimes you may want to do some classic content, but at the same time want to do it outdated, modern.
So, what do we want to do is a game that can be purchased, what does that mean? While there are many definitions, it's basically how big is your game? Is it easy to reach users and fair? Is its fun superficial or hidden in the game (or both)? Breaking some rules can help differentiate your game, taking into account the needs of both commercial and original games.
I've been putting a lot of time into playing Minecraft lately, and essentially, I don't think it's a game with a low barrier to entry, it's not a very polished game, and it breaks a lot of rules.
Gone Home is a very short-lived game that doesn't have as many similar products on the market in the traditional sense, it's very difficult to get started, it's very well polished, and it's positioned with a new user base.
There are also many games that break the traditional rules to some extent, and find the theme or unique content that suits their game, and find a large user base, so that developers can get enough income to support the team's operations.
There are a lot of games that follow all the rules, and they're still very good games, and the difference between these games is that they are extremely high- or even superficial, such as their long play time, extremely much content, or very high picture quality that you can notice immediately.
These games take less creative risk, but as commercial games, that's not a risk for everyone, because the content is very expensive to build, and assuming that the puzzle quality in The Witness is not good, then its quality will be untenable, so they need to bear a lot of internal pressure. For small teams, taking risks to differentiate is a great option.
Another way of looking at indie games is that you can't make all users happy, we may have heard this sentence millions of times, whether it is cognitive or emotional, when you want to share ideas with the world, there will be a lot of pressure and tension, so that you can not accurately reach new users, it is possible to reach users who are completely uninterested, but you feel that they will love your game.
If you're not careful, it's easy to fall into the trap of designing games for everyone, so it's best to be clear at the outset that your ideas might be interesting, but if you're going to build a system or an RPG system, it might distract people from the initial stages.
So the creative risk feel is good, it can differentiate your game, but it's tricky to do a good balance, you need a lot of confidence, but at the same time you need to be very humble, although it's not easy, but I think it's totally worth it.
4. Exposure Design
Last but not least is exposure design, which is actually mostly marketing.
It's not something you do or don't do, marketing is part of your game, that part of what people can hear or see. The first time people see a screenshot of your game, or the first experience or something like that, I think first impressions are very important.
Some things are marketing campaigns, like live trials, seeing someone else's phone screen on the bus, seeing a cool screenshot on social media, seeing it on the loading screen when logging into a game, or a friend's high recommendation one night.
If you think of a game project as an iceberg, marketing is the 10% of exposure on it, that's exposure, and for us, marketing is very much about exposure design, which is the only way people can get into the strange world of your game, and we think you should put a lot of attention into exposure design.
Because it's a big design burden, it could be a door in your game, it's a teacher in a sense, and sometimes it's a restaurant menu, like you've created a weird playground layout and tried to share it with other people.
Marketing is part of the business game and can't be asked questions before it's developed. Still, you can do design documentation without creative prototypes, and creating original games is like designing them all the time, but you can still start thinking about these things early.
Just as we look at game design, we can also think about the marketing side of the question, for example, can the exposed 10% make people understand the quality of the game as one of the marketing materials? Does it let people know that you've done something out of the box and something you can't see in a regular game? Does it explain the content clearly and clearly to people who might like the game?
These are difficult, but also very easy to test, like a lot of previous games, we tend to expose the game idea to the user very early, if many of them don't care, then the way you do it is wrong, you need to try again. It's a trial-and-error process, but you can easily get clear feedback.
The tricky thing here is that you're not talking about the game in 5 seconds, but you're talking about the best part of the game but not the gameplay mechanics, which is why our list doesn't explain the gameplay in detail.
Because what you need to do is communicate, you don't have to expose the gameplay or storyline to the player, of course, doing marketing or exposure design will also differentiate according to different projects, which is more challenging.
In a world full of icebergs, what makes the tip of your iceberg so unique? Can you tell people about its quality through this?
It's easy to think that the game is going to promote itself, or that I've told a lot of people and I've posted on social media twice, so our exposure is pretty good. But for indie games, there are always more people who want to know what the game you make is, and even a very successful indie game may still not reach 1% of Steam users.
It's also easy for indie developers to think that marketing is the last step in R&D or should be done externally, but whether you want to do it or not, marketing is an intrinsic, natural part of your game project.
So, those are the four factors we considered when reviewing projects at Finji Studios, and we tried to figure out how far these ideas can go within the constraints of existing resources. What happens if we don't have the time or the financial backing? Is this project something we are very passionate about or do we think we can stand out? How hard do we need to expose these special qualities to people who have never been exposed to our games, or who don't know about them?
There are also games that I personally appreciate, they may not be polished very good games, and even added unconventional design, in fact, the way we usually do games, or even the opposite, some projects I may not let it through the project, because I don't know how to manage its scale, how to use the existing resources to make it good, these games are very suitable for their developers, because they play the team advantage in a very powerful way.
This is a game I recently saw, Devil Daggers, if it was our internal game idea I might give it through, it also broke some rules, such as this is a 3D FPS game without any levels, the game interface is very clear, you can almost clearly see what you can do in the game, that is, design the green things on the screen, that is, the game is all about.
So, making an indie shooter might not be a good idea, but the way they fuse these things together I think is very sensible.
You don't have to follow our approach to setting up a project, but instead, you can think about what this means for you. What does it mean for your background, skills, target users, creative needs? For a small team, when you find that the funds or time are not enough to complete the game when you are halfway through the development, it is too late, and solving these problems earlier can be of great help, and this is our advice.
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