Indie Flash Developer Discusses Making Online Games

Rob discusses getting into developing web games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/cc-indie-flash.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at Casual Connect in Seattle, and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Rob: Hi, my name is Rob Anderson. I’m from the eastern coast of Canada, New Brunswick, to be exact.

Interviewer: And you’re kind of a new game designer to an extent, and you’re experimenting with some of the more up and coming games, well, kind of established game technologies but kind of more web technologies. Can you talk about that some more?

Rob: Sure, I can do that. I have been working in the animation industry since 1986. I spent a lot of years during project management for a lot of different companies. I spent a lot of time failing myself and watching other processes fail. I’ve always been very frustrated with sort of the linear process that is inherent within a large format, like a television production or a feature film and it’s expensive, and it’s a long, painful expensive process, much like a AAA game.

I’ve always loved the short sprint, simple casual game, if you will. I’ll play a couple for 10 minutes a day, or else I’ll just go and congregate and find something fun to play for a while.

It’s always sort of fascinating to me that one or two guys could spend a month or two weeks coming up with some really fascinating innovative ideas, like Steam Birds and Andy Moore, what he’s done. The World of Goo, that was done at a Game Jam in 48 hours, the original version of that.

I’m like, “Wow, what’s going on here?” So, I decided over the last year to just spend every free moment of my life, other than my kids – I have three kids, who also love games – just immersing myself with as much information as I could on websites, contacting different developers, going to different conferences and just absorbing whatever I could as to how these guys entered the indie game market, how they were doing the prototyping.

There’s a lot of really, really intelligent guys, ex-MIT graduates and just people with really, really sound concepts. It’s like a mecca. It was a religious experience. This is what I’ve been looking for all my life, and I want to get involved in it.

So, I’m going to try to do… I’ve done a couple of Game Jams myself where we developed in 24 hours a game that we actually sold for $1,000.

Interviewer: Yeah, awesome.

Rob: Which is cool.

Interviewer: Can you talk about Game Jams, how they have actually helped you complete games, or have you been able to do it without Game Jams because I think some of the issues that people face is that, at least, these Game Jams force you, like, you have to force you to finish the game. There’s no excuses. There’s no nothing. You have to get it out in 24 hours versus have you been able to make games without a Game Jam?

Rob: Well, up to this point my own company, Noise2Signal, which I just developed a month and a half ago, I haven’t yet. It’s funny because you create this fictitious constraint. A Game Jam is a fictitious constraint. You’re giving yourself 24 hours or 48 hours, and the reason why it’s successful is because you have agreed collectively, other than yourself.

You have made it public that you are going to do something in 24 hours, and you have a group of guys or girls that have also agreed that they are going to do whatever it takes to get it done. It’s an interesting step. Why can’t you not do that on your own? Why can’t you not make that commitment on your own?

So far, I’ve tried to give myself 30 days for an app, and I’m into day 15 and I’m probably 10 days behind my own schedule.

Interviewer: Honestly, I don’t even know if that would exactly work. What I’ve seen very effective is that you just meet someone else and just do it. There is something about just kind of having everyone in the same boat. I know it’s not perfect. I guess that’s the anti definition of indie.

It kind of helps to have other people who are with you, at least. They can push you or if you’re stuck on something, sometimes they’ll just be able to push through that and vice versa you kind of help each other find the model.

Rob: I completely agree, and I think that’s something that I’ve always loved about working in film. It’s that I got to work on a very small project when I was at IMAX in Montreal, and a director by the name of Nicholas Meyer, showed up. He did “Wrath of Khan” which I was like a little kid in the room.

And I asked him, I said… He came with a script. I was a [?] at the time, and I asked him, “Is it OK if I go through the script and got to make points where I know it’s going to be difficult to deal with the technologies we had.” He went, “Oh, no, of course.” Because film making is a collaborative process..

Games are a collaborative process. I think the best games are the ones where it’s multiple feedback, and people are feeding information off of each other and just doing it. And when you’re writing a script, the very first version you make is going to be crap. It’s going to be garbage, but there’s a kernel of an idea in there.

It’s the same with the Game Jam. If you hesitate, if you start to second guess yourself, you’re going to miss what is the fundamental idea that you are trying to get across. Even if it’s garbage in 24 hours, it’s not the point. The point is giving yourself a short period of time in which to try something. And if you fail, learn from your failure.

Interviewer: At least, the constraint doesn’t force you to be, like, oh, I need to make this perfect. You just focus on the game play.

Rob: Exactly. It’s not about making a perfect game. It’s about getting an idea out so that other people can see it.

Interviewer: How many Game Jams have you gone to, and can you talk about what led up to selling this game for $1,000 which is, hey, a pretty profitable experience from Game Jams?

Rob: Sure. The first Game Jam I went to was the Global Game Jam this past January.

Interviewer: Was that in Toronto or something?

Rob: No, I was in New Brunswick at the time. It was the World Game Jam so the community college set up their facilities to allow people to use their computers.

Interviewer: Oh, gotcha.

Rob: And there was five teams. It was really interesting to see. A lot of college students were there. There was one group in what’s called the pre-animation course. People are just learning how to draw and learning what a computer is. And they said, “Heck, we’re going to do a Game Jam, too.” And I think they came up with some of the most interesting stuff. They didn’t finish the game, but, like I said, it’s not about finishing the game. It’s about trying to get the idea out so that people can understand what you’re trying to do, and they came up with some really innovative stuff. I hope they’re still continuing it.

Of course, I was very tired. I’m an old guy. But, we did finish the game, and it wasn’t the game that we necessarily wanted when we began, but it was something that we all felt it was kind of fun. And we put it on the shelf, and sadly we all went our different ways and didn’t actually do anything else with it.

So, this past month or so, Andy Moore, he came down for a festival called Shaloo, and we got together. There was another really fantastic artisan I worked with named Gene Fowler. He’s an amazing artist., really, really great designer.

And we said, “Let’s get involved in this Game Jam.” So, in 24 hours we came up with a little game called Shadow Defense which is a tower defense game. You can’t win. It’s a destruction kind of game.

I did all the sound effects for it. Andy did all the coding. I think he got the base coding down in about three hours.

Interviewer: Awesome.

Rob: And then, Gene did not leave his chair for 24 straight hours. He did all the art work. It helps that we all had our own backgrounds in different things. And you know, probably unfairly, because there was a lot of other college students there and we were grumbling and stuff, but they did amazing stuff.

And it was fun, and we went, “OK, we made mistakes. We know we made mistakes, but let’s look at the end product and let’s just see if somebody would buy it anyway.” And sure enough, somebody was willing to pay for it.

Interviewer: Did you go online to try to sell it, or how did you do that?

Rob: Flash Game licensed it. Andy had already sold several games of his own through Flash Game license, so we put it up on his space.

Interviewer: So now that you’ve seen the success of Game Jams and these other things, are you going to start organizing your own Game Jams? And what are your thoughts, or how are you going to keep this innovation going?

Rob: I am most certainly going to be formulating our own Game Jams, and there’s already about 12 or 15 guys in the area where I live that are completely behind doing it on a weekend every couple of months.

And also, I’m trying to make a commitment to myself to give myself time lines. I’m actually telling my kids what my time line is because, like, my oldest is 15 and I have a 13 year old and a 10 year old. There’s nothing more honest than kids. If you tell them, “I’m going to do this in X amount of time”, they’re going to remind you.

Interviewer: Exactly.

Rob: I really appreciate that from them, so that’s what I’m hoping to do.

Interviewer: Any last words then or suggestions for other indie game developers or small game developers looking to get into a kind of new space or an innovative space or trying to get games done?

Rob: Don’t be afraid to try because if you don’t try, then you’re not going to do anything. Experimentation, even the greatest innovators of our times, failed a thousand times before… There were a thousand different failures before the light bulb showed up. You’ve got to keep trying. You’ve just really got to want to do it.

Interviewer: And in the pre-interview you were talking about iteration and actually getting feedback from the community and stuff like that, can you mention that? Exactly where do you see some of the new ways to develop and design games instead of the monolithic way of two year or three years to develop a game? Can you talk about it?

Rob: Sure. For the smaller type of social game, the reason why we like playing board games or card games is because we’re communicating with other human beings.

Interviewer: It’s a lot more fun.

Rob: It is, totally. And it adds something that it’s not part of the original game. There’s the mechanics, and then there’s the social interaction. And I think when you’re building a flash game that you want to have a community enjoy.

Listening to the community is as important as your effort into developing the game mechanics, and in some ways more so because through their feedback you’re making something that is a collaborative process. You may not know who they are.

Interviewer: Yeah, exactly.

Rob: That doesn’t matter. And, you know, some of the feedback, of course, can be painful, and they’re going to call you an idiot or it’s garbage or crap or whatever. But you still have to take it all with a grain of salt. And don’t just listen to what they say, pay attention to what they do.

Find a way to see the metrics of what they do with your game, like, how long does it take them to get from level one to level two, or did anybody go past level five? Did they turn off the music? There are ways to find these metrics which will help you understand their enjoyment of the game and how you can develop it further so they enjoy it more.

Because, really, it’s entertainment. Games are entertainment, and you want to make the best thing, the most enjoyable product that you can, that you want to play but also what other people want to play.

Interviewer: Great. And do you have a website up now for your new company yet, or is that…

Rob: No, I do have a website, but it’s a temporary website right now. And I’ve actually had to lock it this week because I had a client who was doing compositing and stuff for other companies, and I had to sign a NDA with the company. But it’s Noise2Signal.com. It’s Noise, the number 2, Signal.com, and it’ll be up and running again next week.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.