This is the first in what I expect to be a series of blog-posts about stupid noob indies. It will be one man’s opinion of how you can screw up indie development and some ideas on how to side-step them.

In this series, I will avoid picking on failed indies or creating theoretical companies that will then fail spectacularly in my fantasy land.  Instead, I will focus on what I have been doing wrong.  I founded my company with the expectation of making mistakes which I would learn from, so I might as well share the lessons I learned.

So, without further ado…

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Those of you who know me well will probably be aware that I can often be a slow learner.  Oh, I might have a knack for mysteries ranging from mathematical formulae to new languages, but that’s just my ‘Jack of all trades’ aptitude for new tasks.  Or maybe it is just dilettantism…  I’d love to think it was a side-effect of being a polymath, but I’m not sure I think that highly of myself just yet.

So…  Back on track, yes…

I’ve been working on stuff for a little while.  Since I was made redundant last year, in fact, I have been ‘pushing the boundaries’ and ‘exploring my options’ as I assert this mastery of my own fate.

So, what have I discovered?

1. When your ‘current projects’ list contains more items than you have staff in a company, this may be a sign of poor focus.
2. Going a year without a long-term vision and a short-term plan is not a sign of independence, but may be a sign of poor focus.
3. Doing what you love is no substitute for getting paid.
4. Getting paid is no substitute for doing what you love.
5. Going ‘Indie’ is a lonely path.

The biggest issue I have found is that I lost my drive.  I had options, which prevented me from having solid goals.  I also had nobody pushing me, no deadlines or managers, so I lost that sense of urgency which tends to cause crunch, but also drives productivity.

As my own boss, I was able to set my own priorities and deadlines.

I am not the best boss I have ever had.  I let my employees slack off, I took them to cafés instead of making them work, I declared days off just because Deus Ex had been released.  I would shift from one project to another as enthusiasm waxed and waned; one morning it was a space-sim on Facebook, the next a fantasy RPG written in C++.

I was the only person working for the company and I still let me walk all over myself.

And yet…  Things did get done.  I have two playable (if pre-alpha) games on Facebook.  I even got a story written, submitted and published.  Wherever I could, I set deadlines and set up week-long sprints on my Scrum whiteboard.  Sadly, I never stuck my head above the parapet to really take stock; I was thinking like an employee and working blindly on whatever was in front of me.

In hind-sight, one of the Facebook games was only really useful as a learning experience and the other (which I set aside) was the one that really had legs.  My writing was the most profitable and successful thing I was doing, but I was setting it aside to work on the ‘big’ game projects.

Today, I think this stops.  I am looking at these things with a critical eye and I think it is time to stop working blindly.

I think it is time to put Legacy of Heroes to bed, which would be a good start.  Deep Space will get a reprieve for now, until I work out how viable it is, but it’s still on hold for now. 

I am a writer.  Say whatever else you will; I am a decent designer, but I excel as a writer and narrative designer.  It is time to get Jack Flint [link to proof of concept, if you are curious] out and ready for release.

Intro

Piracy is about as old as copyright; it’s possible that the first time some caveman poet said ‘no copying my work’, someone would have gone home and tried to write a particularly pleasant poem in pictures.  Denying it exists is just naive. 

For the sake of this discussion, I’ll focus on videogame piracy - that’s the industry I’m in, so it’s the one I feel most passionately about - but I think the theories will be applicable to many other media.  Even a play can be captured by the camera on a mobile phone, just as a book can be either re-typed or scanned into a PDF. 

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I think it’s time to face facts; I am a(n almost) full-time indie.  For nearly five years, I have been making games, so going indie was always more likely than going into banking or quantum-physics.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not something I am ashamed of, but it is something I wasn’t really expecting.  Life is not quite the same as salaried employment (the wages suck for a start - Freya’s Aett earns me about 10% of my old job), but I am actually happier than I have been in a long time.

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Today, I’d like to address one of the big misconceptions in games writing.

Have you ever asked yourself who writes the story for a AAA game? (the kind you pay £50 for on Amazon) Let’s be honest, the first reaction is ‘the writer’… 

Er…  Nope… 

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This was just something I was thinking about.  The way that young animals (and young humans) learn the skills they need for later life is often by playing.  Kittens pounce on each other, most prey animals run around…

On the other hand, human children (if they are lucky) often sit in an overcrowded classroom and listen to someone talking about a subject they are only half interested in and only a small number of them will use in many cases.  I mean, I have used trigonometry a few times and even calculus once (working out the distance travelled by a space-ship with constant acceleration in a videogame, which had to be accurate regardless of frame-rate), but the only time I have ever really been called on to discuss the Russian revolution or the causes of World War II are when I am talking to people who have had a few drinks.

The simple thing is that we learn best when we are interested and we are most interested when we being entertained rather than being talked at.  The details might not be accurate, but 300 probably did more to get people interested in Sparta and the Battle of Thermopylae than any Classical-Civilisations course.  Schindler’s List probably helped the average school-child care about the Holocaust than a page of statistics and the accounts of the first allied soldiers to actually see Auschwitz.

We can do better, so why don’t we?  I mean, you have ‘Darfur is dying’, but that game is bleak and not very well-known. For example…

We have the opportunity to immerse people in Shakespeare’s world, talking to Hamlet and to Othello.  We can show them Shylock and the awful conditions Venetian Jews endured in the Ghettos.  We can give context to his plays by letting the player walk out of the main scenes and see how Verona’s nobility lived for instance, why Capulet and Montague were at each other’s throats. 

The Assassin’s Creed games are set in some fascinating (and still culturally-relevant) periods of history, with political nuances that are actually quite fascinating.  What could we teach if we pushed it a little more toward the real events of the time and the real world?

I am not sure we could ever teach quantum-physics in a videogame (actually, I have some ideas on how), but why not play to our strengths?  I am sure there’s profit in it too…

Now that I am thirty, I am finally coming to terms with the idea that my D&D days are over, at least until Freya can play, but they do have one enduring legacy for me as a games-designer.

I think I am burning out as a player…

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