Developing an Indie Graphics Engine

Kevin, from Bootstrap Studios, talks about the graphics engine

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/agdc-kevin-graphics-engine-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Austin Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Kevin: I’m Kevin Bray.

Interviewer: What’s your game about?

Kevin: Well, we have an engine. It is a graphics, rendering and animation engine. Its main feature is something we’re calling Uber Textures. Its maximum texture size is 131,072 pixels by 131,072 pixels. You can have up to 255 of them in a single frame. There are three channels to work with. There is diffuse, normal and specular, and that works out to be roughly 34.6 terabytes of texture data that can be visible at any one time.

Interviewer: Are you doing this through DirectX? To handle that kind of scale, do you have to apply it directly to the hardware?

Kevin: No, we are using OpenGL. Direct 3D doesn’t have the functionality that’s required to implement this kind of feature set.

Interviewer: So, this is kind of like an indie graphics engine studio for games, right?

Kevin: Yes, that’s correct.

Interviewer: What are the challenges then of running this indie graphics engine studio because there’s so many of these kind of well known engines that are complete, that have networking, that have all of these other things? How do you compete, and how do you differentiate?

Kevin: Well, originally when we started this, it was just a hobby. It was kind of a fun thing that I did. It was basically my employer said no to various technologies, and I went home and implemented them. It kind of grew to a point where we had something that was unique enough that we felt that we could then turn to the middleware market just because we had a unique feature.

That’s kind of what we’re trying to do, and hopefully the appeal of that feature will draw a studio or two our way so that we can continue to evolve and grow our software.

Interviewer: How are you doing that? How are you convincing other studios or potential studios to actually go with your product?

Kevin: Well, what we’re doing is we’re offering them a deal basically where if they go with our technology, I will support it on-site, if necessary, and I will give it to them for an extreme discount. So, it’s basically like if you take our software for cheap I’ll come and be on-site, and help you integrate it and get set up and get started working with it.

Interviewer: What size studio then are you focusing towards? What types of games are you going to try to target when you are trying to pitch this?

Kevin: We don’t really have a target in mind. It’s just kind of one of those things where I think we’ll know it when we see it. My history is I prefer to work for independent studios, nothing that was owned by publishers, and so the companies that I worked for in the past were smaller. They were 50 people or less. And those are the guys that really need this kind of technology.

A publisher can throw a hundred million dollars at a product whereas a little developer they’re going to get 10 million at the most, and that’s what they’ve got to work with, and something like this will help them better compete with a larger competitor.

Interviewer: From a marketing point of view, how are you promoting this, and do you have an online blog? Do you have a community around it?

Kevin: Well, right now I have a really crappy website. I am hoping to use that like a blog. I’m basically just going to do… There’s a lot of temptation to just make some press releases. I would personally prefer to do a blog, but there’s a weird element of professionalism because my clients are fairly professional, like I feel like I have to form to that to some degree.

So, on the website I basically have a new section. I’m trying to walk the line between not sounding ridiculous like corporatey and at the same time maintain some sense of self-identity, and that’s going to be it.

Interviewer: Are you going to hire some marketing people to find potential clients for you? How are you going to do that? How are you push through because you’ve mainly been doing development?

Kevin: You know, I have any idea. The whole business thing is new to me. I’m kind of just jumping into this. I effectively am paying for the booth myself out of pocket with the help of friends and family. So, really I have no budget to work with. So, I have to try to market it myself and just hope for the best. At some point I’d like to get a marketing team, I’m sure, but whether or not I’ll ever get to that point, I don’t know. We’ll see.

Interviewer: How is the booth working out for you then in terms of generating interest or finding a potential partner?

Kevin: Well, I found that as soon as I explain the main features that I’m surprised the reaction has been fairly consistent, kind of a surprise, kind of a “Wow, I like that”. And that’s really promising. It’s mainly just for getting in touch with people, finding people who are leads, finding people that might become customers in the future. It’s like a social event, basically. It’s a way to socialize.

Interviewer: And so, what’s next in store then the next few months for your plan to get customers?

Kevin: Videos. We’re going to put out as many videos as we can. We’re going to show off the tool pipeline. We’re going to do some videos that demonstrate how the artist created it, things of that nature, so that way people can see how easy it is to texture and how much time it saves.

It’s really apples to oranges. You can’t really say that, “Oh, this is 10 times faster”, but in the end it’s ridiculously faster. It’s just to some degree, but I am hoping that people will see that with the videos.

Interviewer: What’s the website that people can visit to find out more about the product?

Kevin: Well, the website is www.BootstrapStudios.com. Please bear with me. It needs updating. I am going to put some better screen shots up there and better graphics. And there will be a video up there probably within a month.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.