f a l l o u t

Now, maybe your school has a super organized, secure, online hub that can walk kids through each activity they’re doing during the day, but since e-learning is super new to most schools in the US, there’s a good chance that that is not something most folks have access to at the moment. Also there’s a very good chance that whatever that is isn’t going to help integrate whatever material you’re doing outside of the small amount of material your school is required to organize and share.

So yeah, kind of stressful, since this is in addition to our other work-from-home responsibilities and our run-a-home-during-a-quarantine responsibilities.

A small thing we just instituted earlier today that seems to help is to set up view-only Google docs - a separate one for each kid. Bek and I both have edit access to these documents, and can paste in all the video links we need to, plus extra helpful notes or instructions (e.g. instead of “do this worksheet”, which has to be printed, it can say “look in your folder for this worksheet” or “ask mama to print this worksheet for you”. Tailored to your home, basically).

We can also use this to plan out what other homeschool activities we are going to be doing in addition to the school-mandated activities, and where / when we will likely be able to do those. We can open this page right from their desktop by using the browser’s “Create Shortcut” function while viewing the online Google doc. We can ensure that the formatting is easy for a kid to read and follow. We can include their e-learning passwords as a reminder at the top of the page. We can also lean on this to swap out who is the school-monitoring parent more easily and with less verbal catchup during the day. If Bek has a meeting, I can just go out to The Learning Zome and the kids can show me where they are on today’s activities. Nice and smooth.

Basic steps to set this up:

1 - Create a new Google doc for each kiddo. Just call it “<CHILDNAME> Homeschool”.

2 - Click the "Share” button in the upper right corner, and invite any other parents or guardians who want or need editing access on the document.

For example, I invited Bekah, since she knows the school website better than I do and has been taking point on the home curriculum.

3 - Use the same “Share” feature to create a view-only, sharable link. Copy that URL to a text file on a USB thumb drive, or find some other easy way to open this URL from the child’s secure laptop.

4 - Open the Google doc on the child’s secure laptop, and use your browser’s “Create Shortcut” feature to make a desktop shortcut. Some browsers also allow you to just click and drag the web address bar to your computer’s desktop.

5 - Now you have desktop shortcuts to unique, read-only, customizable curriculum pages that you can update as often as you need.

If you click that desktop shortcut, it should take you straight to this page:

First, disclaimers: what follows is super subjective, pretty picky, and likely unjustified. I love a good mobility shooter - Doom 2016 and Titanfall 2 are the only western shooters I really enjoy, and each do super interesting things spatially, mechanically, etc. However, I’ve never worked on any kind of FPS type of game, and never worked on a AAA game, nor shipped a game during a global pandemic, and there’s a lot that I don’t understand about what goes into making this kind of thing, much less how it’s even possible. Making a followup to a well-loved and hugely successful game is also a terrifying prospect. Finally, I am about to "dwell” on what I perceive to be “negative” things about the game, which is pretty unfair, because there’s a LOT of positives (it’s fun, it’s gorgeous, the load times are crazy short, the vistas slay again, amazing accessibility options, perfect audio, etc etc). But I think this is a game where a lot of the positives are really in your face, and what again I personally perceive to be the negatives are a little bit harder to put your finger on. And this isn’t a review, and definitely isn’t yucking anyone’s yums. This is me trying to figure out why this one feels a bit different to play. Hopefully the unanimously positive reception of the game by literally everyone everywhere (including myself) balances out whatever acid might be in these queries.

OK!

Jungle Gyms Versus Canyons

Ok, so. Doom Eternal is structured a lot like 2016 in that it’s corridors linking big wave-based arenas, which is a good structure for a game about shooting all the things. Arenas can be flat-ish or tall-ish. Tall-ish arenas seem to roughly come in two flavors: jungle gyms, and canyons. Jungle gym arenas are the ones that I feel like took centerstage in the marketing and gameplay of Doom 2016, as a way of showing off the double-jump / ledge grab / launchpad vertical mobility stuff, and because they make narrative / thematic sense in the human-built oil rig environments that comprise much of Doom 2016′s level architecture. Jungle gyms are distinguished somewhat from canyons by generally having what feel like distinct “floors”, or solid planes creating multiple separated levels of combat. Canyons, even if they have some transverse traversal elements, are more open and chaotic, with less concrete divisions between elevations. I’m belaboring this essential difference because it has a bunch of second-order effects on gameplay - jungle gyms allow you to jump from skirmish to skirmish, you can use your mobility options to “interrupt” combat, while canyons are more continuous. Jungle gyms usually have more obstacles (like the aforementioned distinct floors) which make it slightly harder for long range enemy attacks to land, which reduces the overall ambient damage-soak.

The key thing about all these arenas - flat open spaces, distinct jungle gym environments, and canyon style playgrounds - is that you definitely want all of them in your game, because the strategy and tactics for playing these fights changes a lot based on these constraints. When do you want a roof over your head? When do you not? When do you want your back to a wall? These are valid and important differences for these games specifically, especially when basic resource management strategies in these encounters is pretty similar, and because the enemy behaviors and attacks have so much variety.

So far, though, Doom Eternal feels like it has a WHOLE LOT of canyons, and NOT a whole lot of jungle gyms. It’s possible that this changes later in the game, so take all this with a big grain of salt. But the first 3-4 hours of gameplay are really dominated by canyon-style vertical arenas, which isn’t necessarily ideal in terms of variety (and makes you angst a little harder for the wall-run affordances of other mobility shooters). They also tend to be slightly same-y, outdoor, rocky environments, versus the more oil rig-inspired, recognizably human-scale mining structures of 2016 (I’m sure this changes later in the game too). The oil rig-inspired stuff also lends itself to jungle gyms a lot more naturally, so I feel like these choices of arena shapes and environment types are kind of an interconnected and difficult problem.

None of this would really even qualify as a problem, either - this is nitpicking nitpicks, at this point - except relying on canyons so much exacerbates some of the “fussiness” of the combat changes (those are next). For me, anyways - I’m not sure anyone else is feeling like these are problems haha. And it’s a big game, so I’m not sure how much this stuff changes across the whole campaign yet!

Tactical Ballistics

A Doom thing I adored in 2016 and am continuing to enjoy in Eternal is the way ammo, health, and other arcade-style upgrades are thoughtfully placed around the arenas. It’s a nod to the strongest parts of Vanquish’s level design, and goes all the way back to using coins in Super Mario to lure players out to new places they might not explore otherwise. It’s a huge part of what gives the nu-Doom arenas their “chess-like” feel, and shifts the fights away from Serious Sam-style battles and makes them into four-dimensional puzzles. 2016 doubles down on this tactical approach by leveraging a kind of resource triangle of chainsaw kills, glory kills, and just plain firefights.

A lot of Eternal’s design seems committed to upping the ante on all of these strengths. Lower ammo capacities puts more pressure on the chainsaw kills. There’s a new technique called “flame belch” that turns the resource triangle into a resource square to accommodate armor. Monsters have “weak points” now, shortcuts that change their behavior or get you fast glory kills. It’s a pretty compelling jigsaw puzzle of abilities.

It also places a lot of strain on player attention and cognition, because all this is running on top of straight-up arena-wave firefights (with 7+ enemy types at a time, all with unique behaviors and optimal strats) AND beefy mobility controls (swinging, dashing, double-jumps, ledge grabs, launch pads, etc). It’s kind of a lot. But I don’t think this is necessarily the place for saying “this is DOOM, man, you got to keep it simple, just shoot the monsters, how come there’s even upgrades” or whatever. For so many reasons, but the primary of which is that most of this stuff rules, and throwing it away would suck. So what do you do?

I want to focus on two small, specific things that really stand out to me - I’m not totally sure that they’re actually “bad”, but I think they have a lot of weird secondary and tertiary effects that contribute to some perceptions of “fussiness” in some of the battles.

Weak Points

This is a big enough change that it is repeatedly tutorialized through video on every loading screen, after every game over, and after every new enemy is introduced... so I know it was on the designers’ radar haha. And it's an interesting addition - chess fights in Doom are already about hierarchies, and adding another tiny hierarchy within an existing hierarchy is a NICE bit of tension to add, it gives a kind of scrambly feeling that is good overall. The issue for me arises from an apparent or perceived damage scaling issue around these weak points. For example, the optional sniper rifle upgrade to the heavy cannon and the optional sticky bombs upgrade to the shotgun insta-wreck the arachnotron and revenant enemies’ weak points, while sustained plasma rifle fire doesn’t seem to ever do the job. Which makes sense on paper - this is a nice way of putting pressure on the player’s weapon choices and ammo, which is what it’s all about. Although I guess you could argue that it’s also all about movement, and that this particular combat pressure has a pretty tenuous relationship with mobility in general.

Either way, it means you spend a lot of time squinting at your weapon wheel mid-battle to see how many shots your shotgun still has, because you ran out of chainsaw fuel a while ago, and are still being actively bombarded at a pretty long distance (because its a canyon and not a jungle gym). I know, I need to git gud, trust me, i KNOW. But check out the weapon wheel ammo display size in Doom 2016 versus Doom Eternal:

I love the new color scheme and ammo icons in Eternal! But it’s 3-4x harder to read the actual, very important ammo counts.

All these small changes add up to something that feels like a pretty different gameplay experience compared to the more spatial (read: movement-based) and literally easier-to-read resource management stuff from 2016. Which, it’s a sequel - failing to sufficiently differentiate it is its own huge risk. And, to be fair, 2016 had its fair share of fussy (though more legible) weapon switching. But when you add this stuff up, the matrix of considerations in moment-to-moment combat in Eternal is pretty different from 2016, and I think it largely comes down to the damage scaling around the weak points. While you can technically choose to play through battles without leveraging weakpoints (thus sidestepping most of these cascading issues), this approach is heavily incentivized by the major behavior changes that happen after you hit weak points (in addition to the constant tutorializing) and the waves appear to have been balanced around taking advantage of these things. Whether or not these are even flaws, technically, whatever they are is exacerbated by the UI design of the weapon wheel AND the relatively popularity of the relatively unobscured canyon arenas. So it’s hard for me to judge weak point damage scaling in a vacuum.

Overall, these new combat options make the arenas feel more constrained and more prescribed. Design is a nightmare this way: sometimes by giving people more choices, you’re actually giving them less. My pitch for a small tweak that might engage with some of these issues would be to keep weak points, but get rid of the damage scaling and maybe make the hitboxes a little bigger. The goal here is NOT to make weak point enemies easier so much as to open up options about what weapons you can use against them, thereby reducing wheel squinting, thereby freeing up more attention to movement and all the other stuff that ruuuules about nu-Doom in general.

Also, I should clarify that it’s entirely possible that I completely imagined the weak point damage scaling, and am a big dummy with bad aim.

Flame Belch

This is a pretty small thing, there’s this new “flame belch” move, intended to complement the existing chainsaw and glory kill moves as a way of “farming” resources from combat, one of the things that really defined Doom 2016. It differs in one huge way though, in that it has to be committed to BEFORE killing a monster. Chainsaws and glory kills ARE kills. Flame belch adds a status instead, which is “cashed in” later when you do the kill. If chainsaw kills and glory kills and BFG shots are Super Mario jumps, Flame Belch is more like a Tony Hawk jump - it starts early and is carefully calculated. Which is pretty dope!! But in this environment where weak point damage scaling and canyon layouts are already putting huge strains on the player’s attention, it feels like a big ask. The “triangle button” mechanic from 2016, the BFG, was a kill move with cool-down, so really I’m just suggesting stuff they already tried anyways. There’s no way this is news to anybody, much less the developers haha.

But... I would love to play a build where flame belch was totally a thing, just it was a finishing move, not a status thing. Let it plug into that reload-replacing resource-farming punctuation pacing flow. That shit rules.

Of course, I have to wonder what the unintended secondary and tertiary consequences of these suggestions would be. Good action games are often tenuous and deeply interconnected things where results are really hard to predict. Maybe they already tried these ideas and they sucked, or they know their own game a lot better than I do, and have a big stack of reasons this stuff would suck for most of their player base.

But wait...

Where The Hell Am I?

Last section, I promise.

I am extremely not going to weigh in on whether or not Doom games need “Story” or not, or what that even means.

But...

If you are driving a monster truck, it is probably pretty fun to see a big line of cars in front of you, and know that you are about to drive all over those cars, and that at the end is a really big fancy car... and you are going to drive over that too.

The general conceit of Doom 2016, that you are on one end of a Mars base, and you need to get to the other end, and in between is a whole lot of cars demons, is a good one. It has good monster truck-ness.

So far this is something that I’m struggling to extract from Eternal. I’m not really sure who any of these grumpy folks are, or where it is that they are, or why I am going down this corridor (aside from the very Doom-like fact that it is the only corridor around).

The problem for me is decidedly NOT that I don’t understand the slayer’s emotional whatever, or that I haven’t been painstakingly expositioned into the specific hierarchies of the demon universe, or anything that I think would normally be described as a “narrative”. For me, it’s that I don’t get to sort of soak in the anticipation of the loooong line of cars I’m about to crunch.

Does Doom need a story? Idk. Doom might need a lot of about-to-get-crushed cars though.

Finally finally finally, and this is highly subjective, but I think the slayer is just more fun when he’s an X factor or a rogue agent. NPCs recognizing the slayer feels sort of weird to me? The feeling that he is a fly in the ointment I think is stronger and sexier when he’s like... outside the canon, almost. I’m not totally convinced that having him Kratos around is as fun as having a bunch of demons and priests both confused and terrified of what this dude is doing.

OK

I need to get back to family stuff. They let me sit here and type this out, which was very kind of them. Only five tantrums so far. Either way, I’m looking very forward to playing more Doom Eternal...

...just as soon as I finish designing 17 more shirts in ACNH.

What else, what else... yes, all the usual disclaimers, that we are specifically addressing commercial game-making here and not personal or experimental work, even though maybe under some conditions that’s interesting or something. Finally, I'll do my best to keep everything here useful on its own, but if you're not already familiar with our previous presentation on Exposure Design, or Zach Gage's recent presentation on screenshot design, I would recommend digging into those to kind of add some context to the bigger "picture" here (ha ha god i'm tired)

And so, without further ado...

Get Ready For Some Screenshot Theory

We once pitched that another way of thinking about marketing is thinking about exposure design. "Exposure" is the science word for the 10% of an iceberg that sticks out of the water. The metaphor here is 90% (more like 99%) of your game is gonna be hidden from public view even after launch. So putting extra cycles into designing how the exposed 1% of your thing functions is maybe good.

The thing that we really like about this though is these extra cycles aren't just good for passersby, they're usually good for your players too. You're helping the game do a better job of explaining itself in clever little ways (or big dumb ways), and that's helping people imagine what it might be like to play your game, or giving them fun ideas about different ways to play it now that they're clicking around in there.

In theory and practice, for us at least, most of the exposed part of our games are basically screenshots. Maybe they're actually gifs, or it's a Twitch highlight or something, or it’s someone playing through the first few levels, but probably the design of your game’s screens is going to be this huge component of the little bit of your game that sticks out above the water.

So screenshot theory basically says this: the better our screenshots are, the easier our marketing is going to be, and the better the game will be for players. But what does a "good" screenshot actually do? Just "be better" isn't exactly actionable, is it. How does a good screenshot function? What goals are we trying to achieve with it?

Tentpole Legibility

Tentpole legibility is basically this: wouldn’t it be handy if your screenshots could actually execute your elevator pitch for you? Or, as Max Temkin put in his FAQ recently:

Figure out what's special about the thing you're making and clearly communicate that.

Let’s clarify how we’re using the words “Tentpole Legibility” real quick though. 

Tentpole: this is your game's main attraction. In Overland, it's a fantasy of taking care of a group of vulnerable people on a post-apocalyptic road trip. In Canabalt, it's a fantasy of leaping from rooftop to rooftop. In Night in the Woods, it's a fantasy of hanging out with your friends in a place that feels like it has a life of its own.

For a lot of commercial games the tentpole is a kind of mechanic or hook or gimmick or something basically systemic in nature. But you owe it to yourself and your game to think about whether your "core mechanic" (if you even have one) is actually your tentpole or not. Overland has a few core mechanics, but it turns out it's the underlying fantasy revealed by those mechanics that is the actual tentpole. Night in the Woods' tentpole is not platforming or pressing A to advance text, even though that's mostly what you actually are "doing". For a puzzle game, the tentpole might not actually be the core mechanic(s), but the feeling you get when you finally solve the current puzzle, the "ah ha" bit, the sense of having done something seemingly impossible with this tiny toolset.

I guess just consider very seriously that your game’s tentpole might be a feeling and not a feature. Even when your game is pretty “core” or whatever.

Also, you probably don’t know what the main attraction is yet. Even though you’re the lead designer or the co-creator or whatever. Even though you've been designing the game for a year now, and doing a good job. Games are complex and the way they function psychologically is extremely complicated and it's going to be an ongoing and iterative thing to get to know your game's tentpole and that's ok.

For a long time we thought that Overland’s main attraction was that it was just hard af. Gradually that got more nuanced and we started to realize that the real thing of it was essentially close calls and narrow escapes. That started to point at maybe some of the guts of the thing was more character-based, but it wasn’t super clear yet. Eventually we realized that actually connecting with your little characters does matter, and narrow escapes are thrilling, but only because of this feeling that you’re taking care of this group on their trip. Maybe in six months we’ll have an even more refined notion of what this actually is.

The other annoying thing is sometimes the tentpole is a bit fuzzy. Maybe it's not a single specific emotion or a single specific moment, maybe it's a whole range of feelings or a set of interactions or some little arcs or something else entirely. And that's ok too, as long as you can find a way to talk about it.

The only other thing I want to add here is that trying to make a good screenshot or do good screen layouts without understanding your game’s main attraction as fully as you can is an absolute nightmare. It’s just nonstop second-guessing and an almost complete lack of ability to make good, satisfying judgment calls about whether this approach is better or this other one is worse or whatever. So it’s possible if not likely that the exercises below aren’t actually very relevant or useful if you don’t have a pretty high level of confidence in your assessment of your game’s tentpole.

Legibility: this is just how clear or readable something is in your screenshot. The thing that we've been realizing more and more over the last couple of years is that while legibility itself is a good goal, it can be a little undirected or confusing sometimes as a designer. What exactly is it that I'm trying to clarify? What parts of my game design should be prioritized visually?

Into the Breach by Subset Games is legible af.

Tentpole legibility is our attempt to answer these questions at our studio. If you're trying to figure out where to spend these legibility cycles, well, spend 'em on stuff that speaks to your main attraction. In Canabalt this means that almost the only things you can actually see are A) rooftops and B) a jumpin' fella. Obviously for more complex games the analysis isn't quite so simple!

That Does Sound Easy, Thanks

I literally just said the opposite of that but whatever. Ok, here's the first problem: strangers tend to have a lot of difficulty valuing the tentpole experience of your game without some context for it, which is often as simple as "what is the basic genre here?" So for a game like Overland, it's extremely important that at first glance it is pretty strongly referencing previous isometric strategy and tactics games, in terms of having an angled grid full of evenly-spaced objects. That's the ground that holds the tentpole up.

Oh hey, it’s an isometric diorama floating in a gradient void.

In a game like Dead Cells, if the tentpole is the satisfaction of unlocking new abilities for the next run, it's pretty important that you see that oh yeah also it's a 2D action platformer. Otherwise it's really hard to imagine what those unlocks might be, both in terms of theming but also in terms of how they're going to add value to replays etc.

This is oversimplifying a bit but for us a good rule of thumb has been to trying to broadly establish but not overly emphasize genre in screenshots. In an elevator pitch scenario, we always try to mention it first, but almost as a disclaimer or aside. You're really just setting up a foundation so that your tentpole can stand up and mean something.

Interrogations

Ok let's say you've already somehow achieved the double-miracle of A) figuring out your game's tentpole and B) your basic visual presentation manages to establish a genre foundation one way or another. Congratulations, you have even more work ahead of you, because there’s a bunch of ways to kind of min-max the way you’re presenting the main attraction now.

Refining the emphasis: what can you do to continue to emphasize your game's unique tentpole and downplay aspects that, necessary as they may be, are ultimately boring or over-familiar for your audience? As a game designer, this might mean culling systems that you carried over from your inspiration sources but that are no longer as necessary in this new environment. It might mean simplifying or encapsulating some clearly-established genre conventions in a sort of shorthand or shortcut. It might mean shifting design elements back and forth a bit between an abstract UI layer and a more diegetic world layer. You’ll be iterating on highlighting and drawing more attention to your main attraction, and minimizing the impact of everything else, probably for a long time.

It took us ages to figure out that the UI should have that little player-party profile view where you can see your group hanging out side by side. This is so important to our game and not really a thing that other games want or need.

Where does your game spend all its time? Action RPGs are semi-notorious for having these huge 3D worlds, but a certain kind of player ends up mostly just looking at icons on the mini-map as they move from quest to quest. Do players split their time evenly between the upgrade tree screen and stabbing rats in a dungeon somewhere? Are players mostly messing about in the extremely satisfying inventory screen, sorting their grenades by color (I'm looking at you, RE4)? Our rule of thumb is basically the more time your game spends in its "tentpole view" the better. Whatever part of the game you cooked up where that core experience happens, try to keep things happening right there as much as possible.

In a game about being a forest fire lookout, it makes sense for you to spend 95% of your time in the forest and lookout tower. Power move.

This is not the same thing as “make your whole game one core mechanic” or whatever. It’s about the game tending to just be in the place where your tentpole experience tends to happen.

Hey, here’s some basic questions that a lot of games and screenshots absolutely fail to answer:

What is the player’s identity? Can a complete stranger tell who they would "be" as a player just by looking at a random screenshot?

What are the player’s actions? Can they tell what the heck that can (or can't) do in this game?

What sort of objects or items are there? Can they tell what the world is made of? What sorts of things the player can (or can't) interact with?

The player isn’t even visible in Papers, Please! and you can still tell who they are, what they can do, and what all that stuff is.

Before, during, and after: can a passerby tell what just happened in the game by glancing at a screenshot? Can they tell what's happening now? Can they make a guess at what might happen next? These deductions depend a lot on being able to parse the identity, actions, and objects in the scene, and are a good way of double-checking that you're actually hitting those goals.

Line of action: where did you come from and where are you going? This obviously depends on both the previous deductions, but addressing directionality in your screenshots can be a real nice place to spend some cycles. It's often relatively cheap to address compared to other things, and provides a big shared win for your active players and for those strangers walking by and taking a glance. Addressing this can also start to chip away at bigger problems, like how do you show medium- to long-term goals and your progress toward them?

This lends itself more to certain genres than others, but you might be surprised how helpful it is to consider or identify what this might be in your game even if it’s pretty non-traditional. It was a big deal for Overland when we decided that every level would have a west-leading road cutting through the middle of it. Even Night in the Woods has these really clearly described paths through the environment that help players and strangers form ideas about where they came from and where they might be going next. And I think you can find these things in much weirder games too.

What's the loop? Do your screenshots communicate anything about what changes in your game as you move through it? Are the environments or backdrops quite different from screenshot to screenshot? Does the player identity change or shift? Do the actions available to them change from screenshot to screenshot? These things tell players and passersby a lot about how the game might change or grow over the first few hours of play.

Fluency barriers: how much domain knowledge does a stranger have to bring to the table to understand what's going on in the screenshot in terms of interactions or the experience of the game? Do they need to have played this actual game in order to tell what's up in the screenshot? Do they only need to have played other games in your genre? Do they only need to be vaguely aware of the notion of what a videogame is? Not every screenshot can say everything to everyone, but are there places in your visual design where you’re gating comprehension unnecessarily?

Let’s Wrap This Up Already

Even these small questions are the tip of the iceberg in some ways, but hopefully they provide helpful starting points in terms of nudging your commercial projects in the direction of being a bit more self-explanatory. This is not the same as "letting your game market itself". It's more about building something that you will even be able to market, because it's able to at least explain what it is and maybe a bit about why that’s interesting.

Oh and as my wonderful friend George would remind me to state: I am not a lawyer, and nothing in this post can be interpreted as or understood to be legal advice under any circumstances. I’m a idiot dad who makes vidja gams and is two beers down at the time of writing this post already. Not a lawyer.

this.lawyer = false;

Not a lawyer. Not legal advice. Ok. So! Notes on indie publishing! We’ve got a two parter here: terms, and “should I?” Let’s go over terms first so you have a little context for the “should I?” part.

Also, while I help run an indie publisher myself, our docket is full as heck and we are not currently looking to take on any new projects.

Ok!

Indie Publishing Terms

The terms of your publishing deal are basically your rules of engagement, and while a lot of terms are shared between platforms and publishers in this glorious era, there’s still a few things to keep a close eye on as you get down to business.

Revenue Share

70/30 seems to be the standard pretty much across the board. This means the developer keeps 70% of the revenue, and the publisher keeps 30% of the revenue. This is usually calculated after whatever platform takes their standard 70/30 cut - so you get 70% of 70%. So if you are selling your game through a publisher on Steam for $19.99, you will earn about $9.80 per copy sold, or 49% of whatever your list price is basically. That’s a big slice of the pie, but even if you were self-publishing you would barely even be getting $14 from every major digital storefront, and it’s a heck of noisy market, so yeah maybe it’s worth it to collaborate with the right publisher.

DISCLAIMER: I currently help run an indie publisher, and at the time of writing we’ve never retained more than 15%. This is sustainable but not particularly sexy. We’re weirdos and literally no one else does it this way. That we know of. God it would be fun to be wrong about this one though. Ok let’s keep going.

IP Entanglement

This is an umbrella term that can encapsulate a lot of different legal concepts. The most common one is the nebulous “right of first refusal” on related projects to the one you are signing, which can mean anything from “hey we want first dibs on the sequel” to “you literally can’t even tell anyone else about your future projects until we say you can”. There’s another “right of first something” that sucks either more or less I can’t remember but also watch out for that one.

And then there’s full-on studio-level versions of this, like whatever you make next, sequel or not, it’s ours, deal with it. And the idea behind this is when someone invests a lot of time and money in you, the developer, they want maybe a little edge when you inevitably have this huge shared success together, just in case. Which is pretty understandable, since these investments can get pretty huge. But the downside to this for the developer can be weeks or months of bitter uncertainty and lopsided negotiations that can be destructive to a creative team.

The thing is, if it’s a good collaboration between a good dev and a good publisher, working together on the next thing should happen organically. If it’s not a good collaboration, and people would rather work with other people next time, what, are you actually going to force a deal to happen? Are you out of your mind? Do you enjoy suffering?

On the other other hand, when funding crosses that magic $1m line, investors and publishers tend to want a little bit of insurance on such a big bet. Maybe this is one of the things that can be carefully negotiated in that high-investment case. Otherwise it should get in the sea.

DISCLAIMER: I currently help run an indie publisher, and we have never and will never do IP entanglement because it is dumb.

Funding

One thing we ran into multiple times this month is developer budgets that are too high. Or rather, they will take care of the team that wants to make the game, and they’re very carefully thought out in that regard, but the sales thresholds that the game would have to hit after release are extremely ambitious in the current market.

This is a slide we produced for a talk up in Winnipeg on February 2nd, 2018. This is our understanding of the indie games market right now, in terms of relatively full-price-ish, non-bundled, non-mobile, premium games. There’s a bit of elasticity across other markets and models but we’re not gonna go there for now. The point is, most commercial games released this year will never meaningfully breach the 3000 copies barrier.

A spare few will hit 30,000 copies. If you’re selling $20 games, then moving 30,000 copies at full price, which is extremely rare, means break-even cash budgets of $500k USD or smaller. We all hope to get into that 300,000 copies ballpark, but planning your budget around that even more rare tier of sales is a very risky move.

For mobile the math is even more complex - if you don’t get strong featuring in the digital storefronts, cracking that 30,000 copies sales figure is mostly out of your control for a premium game, and the retail prices are much lower.

These are all just things to keep in mind when you’re pitching publishers on your budget. If you ask for $1m USD, not only is it the kind of budget that will likely come with IP entanglement, but they have to do the math - do they think they can hit those tier 4 sales or better? Otherwise it’s a pretty risky move for them.

Recoup

This is a little mini 3-parter, hopefully this doesn’t get too confusing.

Recoup is basically the thing where investors earn their investment back before devs start earning their full revenue share. This can be in the form of a different temporary split (e.g. developer earns 10% and publisher earns 90% until they have earned back their funding investment, then it flips back to standard 70/30) or it can be structured more like a loan, where it doesn’t come off the top but earns higher interest, or it can just be that the investors recoup their funds and bail out (these are particularly nice angels), and so on. There’s a lot of options here.

Recoup on initial investment: the standard model for this by my understanding is that it’s 100% up-front. If the publisher funds your development to the tune of $100,000, they earn that full amount back out of 100% of the sales before they start doing the standard 70/30 split. Maybe not all publishers have to do this because their 30% is worth so much, and I know some other publishers do more of a split during this phase so they recoup quickly but devs have access to some revenue still. There’s a range of things here, but basically it is standard practice for investors to get something like up-front recoup.

Recoup on large expenses: at Finji this basically amounts to things like console ports. Maybe this could be like a ... really nice trailer? Or a tremendous specific merch thing? But since ports run in the low five-figures, they’re pretty substantial expenses, and they contribute to the game’s overall revenue, so we treat these as essentially additional recoupable investments in the project. Everybody chips in and everybody benefits, and it’s treated like extended dev costs basically.

Recoup on marketing expenses: a lot of contracts still have carve-outs for this and historically this has been the place where publishers kind of intensely screw over developers. The idea used to be that publishers would say “well marketing expenses are like ports, they benefit the project, so we treat it like additional investment.” Sounds like a good deal!

Except that every time a developer would check in to see when they were getting their rev share, somehow the publisher still hadn’t quite paid back that marketing expense yet. Just... there were just a lot of marketing expenses, ok? A lot. No, we can’t say exactly what we spent it all on (IT WAS CHAMPAGNE BTW) but there was a lot of those. Expenses I mean.

Soooo the modern version of this is not as bad, but still pretty dangerous. The modern version of this is “itemized marketing expenses”. So the publisher spends a bunch of money making you a huge trailer or doing something else, and then they itemize out your share of those expenses, and only those things can be treated as recoupable. Sounds like a good deal!

Except that things that seem like a great idea during development (a huge booth, a really slick promo campaign, a crazy trailer), sometimes seem like not so great an idea later, especially if you’re not keeping the modern sales market in mind.

So the thing here is two-fold: first, whatever math you’re doing for figuring out that initial investment, do that same math for your marketing expenses because chances are they’re going to be treated like additional investment. And these things can add up fast - don’t be afraid to talk about the details up front.

Second, consider that if a potential publisher is recouping their marketing expenses up-front, then they’re drastically reducing the risk they’re taking on your project. They break even before you do, and then start collecting 30% of your revenue.

Something about that seems off to me.

Track Record

This is a simple one: if you’re talking to an outfit, ask for a breakdown of what percentage of their titles get close to Tier 3 (30k copies) at full price in the first 12 months, and what percentage of their titles get close to Tier 4 (300k copies) at full price in the first 12 months. This should give you a sense of their ability to effectively market a game.

The Machine

Last but not least, if you’re talking to an outfit, ask for a breakdown of their internal PR, production, marketing, and show staff. Who’s writing the press releases? Who’s staffing the booth? Who’s going to be checking in on your schedule? Do they have designers on staff to help kick ideas around? Do they have pinch technical staff who can help get those last couple bugs done before launch?

Find out who you’re working with.

Indie Publishing: Should I?

Well maybe after reading all that stuff you already made up your mind, but just in case, here’s some other ways of looking at this problem.

One way of looking at this problem is that we started our own publisher because we wanted to do something that nobody else is doing right now. We have hangups. We have weird ideas about how to approach this thing. So, if you’re us, maybe the answer is no, you shouldn’t get a publisher.

BUT

BUUUUTTTTT

The other way of looking at it is that it took us like ten years to figure out how to do this and not everybody has ten years to fumble around making a weird publishing company for themselves. And our company does a lot of stuff that we consider to be integral to shipping games in the current market: show presence, community management, PR, design mentorship, managing press & platform relationships, development funding, producing console ports, and so on. If you simply don’t do those things, then you may find yourself taking more risks than is strictly necessary. If you delegate your developers to do these things, then in our experience, you get unhappy, burned out devs who are spending more time doing weird publisher stuff than they are doing the thing they’re good at which is making games.

In other words, if you want to mitigate some risks around your commercial game dev, somebody needs to do this junk. Somebody needs to figure out funding. Somebody needs to figure out ports. Somebody needs to say hi to that journalist that loves your game even though it’s not even a prototype yet. And if you make the devs do it, they will crash eventually.

So what are your options? Well, publishers are one option, obviously! But you can also break up these responsibilities. Maybe your art director has a huge following and is a kind of a natural at the whole PR thing in terms of strategy / vibe, so really you don’t even need a publisher or even a PR firm, you need someone to send a bunch of emails around shows and launches. Or maybe you do need a PR firm. Or maybe you have a savvy business half in your studio already, you just need funding - you can hit up banks, angel investors, dev grants, and so on. Maybe you just need a community manager while you’re in Early Access and the rest of your issues will kind of fix themselves. Maybe you need a design mentor. Maybe you just need a porting studio. Maybe you need two of these things and one other thing I forgot.

The point is you can roll your own thing. That in and of itself also takes time, but it’s closer to how I operate as part of a developer and self-publisher: we use a mix of in-house staff, freelancers, and out-sourced work. But maybe even trying to think about how you would start to plan something like this sounds like such a nightmare that a publisher would be a relief just to take on that load.

Different developers need different things, and I can’t end this with some kind of “well, thankfully, all devs can just do ____________ and then everything is good” ultimatum. Just be aware that publishers are there to solve some problems, and they’re not the only way to solve it anymore, even though they are a convenient way of doing that. And should you find a publisher you like, hopefully the terms section above will come in handy as you navigate these weird and unpredictable seas.

Best of luck, and somehow, despite this ludicrous volume of text, this is actually only part 1 of my GDC wrap-up. Part 2 hopefully will be up by the weekend, and is a lot more focused on design, marketing, and pitching.

Also, I’d strongly suggest checking out blogs like Muddy Colors or google searching visual arts communities and blogs for other freelancing advice. Illustrators frequently have a tremendous amount of experience with this stuff and their advice and ideas often sync up with my experience on the more tech side of things.

Say Yes

This is something that I’ve noticed more when trying to hire people more than when I was seeking out work, but non-white-males tend, in the generalized case, to emphasize reasons to not apply for gigs. What we’ve seen a lot is “oh I would have applied for this but I don’t know how to do this one small part.” Say yes - if you have 50% of the skills for a gig, get up in there! Be honest about your experience and your desire to learn new things. Crappy clients might balk at this, but we’re about to talk about them anyways.

Say No

It’s important to develop what we used to call “weasel radar”. During your first few contract gigs, which will likely be a mixed bag in terms of collaborators and output, take as many mental notes as you can about warning signs for the ones that didn’t pan out, and promising signs for the ones that did pan out. I will expand on this in a minute, but the hardest part of contracting isn’t getting paid, it’s finding people that will let you do good work. And getting to do good work is the thing that will save you in the long run, mentally and financially.

Schedule Slack

When you first start freelancing, you probably won’t have any work. That’s fine - you can put extra time into finding new jobs and making self-guided material for your portfolio. But as you start to get busy, you might find yourself telling a client “yup, I can definitely do 40 hours a week on this project for the next 8 weeks,” since you don’t have anything scheduled. This is a thing I did a lot. This caused me two huge problems: I didn’t have enough time left over to chase down my next gig, and I didn’t have enough time left over to slot in last-minute emergency gigs (which often would pay better because of the short timelines). As my schedule ramped up over the years, I took pains to only take long term schedules at 20 hours a week, so I had time to job-hunt and help out with panic gigs in the meantime.

Err On The Side of Busy

Depending on where you are in your career, this may mean less or more, but I often felt most comfortable when our schedule was pretty full after all, especially when the clients were good. Our work was satisfying, our portfolio was growing, and our bills were getting paid. It can be a fine line. Scheduling slack often really meant leaving room for ourselves to keep the work steady and to keep the quality high and to be able to help people with emergency jobs, rather than simply working less hours. I am not going to go out on a limb here and say that freelancing 50 hours a week was healthier than freelancing 30 hours a week, but in controlled bursts or to accommodate certain projects, I think some of those sacrifices paid off a lot in terms of generating a better website and portfolio (and paying off the occasional tax bill).

Get Paid

Be picky about contracts, be honest about your rates, be sensitive to the status and needs of your clients, and be an absolutely relentless a-hole about invoicing. Your clients wouldn’t be hiring you if they didn’t value your output, so you should value it too. Not all clients are the same though - a small studio working a passion project might not be able to pay the 5x/10x multiplier of a coastal advertising agency.

Not All Pay Is Money

I hesitate to even say this in this particular way, especially in an environment where scammers and fraudsters looking for free work in exchange for “exposure” are literally everywhere, but in my experience there have been times and projects where substandard rates were acceptable and even advantageous in the big picture. Maybe it meant working on something you truly loved, and it was just good for your heart to do that. Maybe it meant getting to collaborate with someone who has a bad budget on this project, but usually has good budgets, and is just an amazing person period. Relationships, if they’re not everything, are pretty dang close to everything. The occasional tactical sacrifice on the financial front can pay off in the long run if you’re careful.

Repeat Gigs

In my pre-Canabalt days, most of my work came from doing a good job for good clients, and getting rehired for their next project, or having them tell friends that I was reliable and good enough. This was my bread-and-butter for years. No big scores, just steady work that built up my portfolio and was satisfying to do.

Beef That Folio

This was probably the most important single rule or guideline that we developed over our decade of contract work. The principle is this: every good gig that you get to do, every nice piece that you add to your portfolio, has the potential to generate several more gigs over the following years. Because of this, the option to do good work for someone, the ability to build something that you can show off and be proud of, has exponentially more value than something that won’t generate more work but pay well in the short term. Filling your schedule and selecting your gigs will probably need to be a mix of these things, especially at first, and especially with underdeveloped “weasel radar,” but each time you are able to concretely improve your portfolio, you are increasing your chances of cooler future work with better clients. Each good gig you get now might be 3 or 5 or 10 good gigs down the line. Weight these opportunities appropriately; this is the single most important thing you can do as a long term freelancer, in my opinion.

The Long Term

God this stuff can take a long time. I did contract work for 18 months on the side before I quit my day job. My wife Bekah kept her full-time, health-care-providing position for a further 30 months while I built up my portfolio and rolodex. It would be very fair to say that it took me somewhere between three and four years to level up enough and meet enough people to be able to do this sustainably. There are folks who can and have done it faster, but especially if you are fresh out of school and trying to work in a competitive field like video games, where you’re often up against people with more experience than you, and more connections than you, you have to be patient and put in the time.

Adjacent Industries

A very, very small fraction of my contract work over the last decade was done in what you might call the mainstream game industry. My biggest, most reliable clients were usually in marketing and advertising. I did some neat work in education and scientific research spaces. I did some good collabs with independent studios. We did a very brief stint doing previz for EA. Video games are a multidisciplinary medium and that usually means that there are other industries that value your output as much or more than the big game studios, and the work is so similar and so satisfying that you might not mind.

Spatial Tactics: This is the most obvious place where Mario & Rabbids absolutely kills it. Movement is just a range and can be done in any order. The ranges are marked off in really clear and easy to understand ways. They made a cursor into a character even! The simplified cover-percentage system is great. Slide tackles feel amazing. Team jumps help solve a lot of grouping / flanking problems and are super satisfying. Upgrading into multi-bounces and head-stomps just feels soooo good.

Legibility: Destructible cover versus non-destructible, fast-travel tiles, character positions and status (exposed, half-cover, full-cover, HP, etc), special ability effects, all this stuff is like extremely pro-tier and much more reminiscent of an internal Nintendo title than an Ubisoft title (sorry Ubi <3 ) The enemy designs so far do a great job of communicating their behaviors and abilities too.

Fluff: There’s just an enormous amount of fluff in this game. Like 300 guns that are pretty hard to differentiate, super flaky small percentages in the tech tree and in the weapon statuses, weird travel time and “exploration” segments between battles, 6000 collectible something or others. Some of this fluff I think does add to the experience (especially the super juicy animations) but a lot of it feels more like a F2P mobile game, there’s just so many popups and obscure resources. All the chunky legible stuff in combat doesn’t really apply to the rest of the experience in a lot of ways.

Part of me can’t help but compare and contrast it to another extremely good X-COM lite, Steamworld Heist ($14.99 to M&R’s $59.99) by a medium-size indie studio. It’s 2D instead of 3D, but it’s got almost no fluff, superior controls, equal degree of accessibility, and so far comparable depth. What sets M&R apart from Heist? Number of menu items? Amount of background meshes? A Nintendo license? All of the above to some degree probably.

Go back in time a few years wait no decades and check out a AAA strategy title like Front Mission 3, and it’s structured a lot more like Heist than like M&R. FM3 is mostly mech battles, with some upgrade and config in between, navigation and choices happening on maps and through dialog boxes. M&R’s contiguous 3D spaces and relentless cutscenes are a distinctly different approach that makes it harder to play at your own pace and also creates a kind of presentation standard that is hyper-unrealistic for smaller teams who are executing on gameplay and experience at the same level otherwise.

This isn’t gonna blow anyone’s mind but the current standard for scope for a $59.99 game feels super messed up to me. Like the line between the game that’s there and all the stuff that’s been glommed on to it to justify this arbitrary price point isn’t really doing anybody any favors.