…except this time it’s not mine.

Check it out :

Collywobbles

Sweet aye?

Although I wish I could claim credit for those, I can’t. It belongs to an artist and illustrator named Zach (I’ll not post his full name in-case he’d prefer anonymity). I’ve mentioned that this week has been crazy for me, right, well a few days ago I was still up at 1pm, blearily finishing up some bug-fixing, when I received an email from Zach. Seems he’d been browsing the site/forums and decided to take a stab at some concept pieces for SoW. And the pics on that blog are the result, done with a mouse no less!

Not only that, there is a chance that Zach’s work could end up featuring in SoW directly, depending on whether I can afford him or not, heh. We’ll see what we can wrangle….

(It’s been one of those weeks, so you’ll have to forgive me for the lack of posting.)

Kris asked me a question in the previous post and I wanted to take a moment to answer it. Basically, he asked why I only talked about paid vs free, and not the “middle ground” of finding someone willing to work for royalties.

Well, honestly, the reason is that working for royalties and working for free are effectively the same thing for 99% of the project timeline.

“What!?!” you say. “No they aren’t Gareth, when you work for royalties you’re working for money!”

No, you really aren’t. You’re working for a promise of some unknown amount of money at some unknown time in the future. Which, until that promise manifests, is the same as working for free, ie you’re working purely from passion.

Not only that, you’re working for a very shaky promise. This indie development thing, it’s no sure way to make money. In fact I’m probably earning more right now than I would ever do as a full time indie. There is no guarantee that SoW will come close to making me back enough money to cover my expenses, never mind make any kind of profit!

And I’ve accepted that. If you’ve read anything I’ve posted on various forums about being an indie developer, I have a fairly realistic outlook. In fact I’ve even been accused of having a “grim” outlook on indie development. But really it’s just realism. I am prepared to make a complete loss on SoW. I don’t want to, obviously, but empirical data says that few indies actually have a commercial success on the first try. Maybe your debut game wasn’t as good as you thought it was, maybe it was too buggy, maybe you misjudged the market, maybe nobody knew about your game and so your customer base just didn’t reach critical mass needed to turn a profit. It happens. Pinning all your hopes on the statistically unlikely is…idealistic.

I have personally read about indies who finish their game after X years and then, after not achieving the results they hoped for, pack it up as a waste of time. To me this is like trying to learn archery, going to the range for the first time, taking aim at the target, missing the bulls eye and then immediately declaring the exercise a loss and that you never want to play again. Unrealistic. You put all your eggs in that one basket. You gave up too soon and too easily. I know, developing a game is really tough and time consuming. But you can take another stab at it, quicker this time. It’ll be easier if you already have one under your belt. Make an expansion, a sequel, do a “gold edition” where you fix the problems and hype that to the max. Go all out to support the customers you DO have so they spread the world. People will actually appreciate that more, to accept your mistakes and work to correct them (see the Witcher Enhanced Edition). Every game community appreciates devs who listen to them.

The point is, I’ve spent my time, effort and money knowing it could be a commercial flop; I’m prepared to keep pushing past that till I succeed or die of old age. But it’s a bit unfair, in my mind, to put that burden on others unless they are full partners in the project. For anyone else I would prefer to compensate fairly for their work, directly and at the time they do that work.

And I wouldn’t offer royalties in any case unless they’d already proven they are dedicated to the process and can go the distance. I know what it is like, it’s easy to start but hard to keep going. That’s not a negative judgment on anyone, simply being realistic again. Your job intrudes, you get busy with your personal life and commitments, studies or illness arise. It’s just hard. It’s hard for me, even now. And it would be doubly hard to rely on someone who wanders off after a few months. I always test volunteers/contractors for a while to see what happens.

The basic rule of thumb is that if someone couldn’t stick to it for free or on a contractual basis, they certainly couldn’t stick to it for the promise of royalties.

Which is why, if you hang out around the indie scene, you will notice a general pattern. Most of the noobs who have yet to experience this difficulty advertise for help wanted by offering royalties instead of anything concrete, whereas the pros offer money or exchange services. Likewise, most of the experienced or skilled people only work for money. Those of us who’ve been around a while look on people who banter around royalties as a sole means of payment fairly skeptically. It generally means they’re still fairly new and/or naive. And new/naive people are rarely of the highest quality, work wise. No offense meant to anyone, but the people who can do professional art or coding and have been doing it for a while generally want to be paid for their time. Even if they believe in the project and want it to succeed, talented people who work for free are few and far between, and few have enough free time to do that continually. Maybe you could find people who will work for reduced rates and a royalty cut, but that’s a huge maybe.

So why don’t I just find someone, use them until they give up, then find someone else, etc etc? Consistency of art style, the hassle of contracts and suchlike when the person has wandered off to do something else while you’re still using his work, etc etc. Bleh. Pain in the behind.

Which isn’t to say I’d turn down any offers to help, quite the contrary. But I always offer money first and I always require some test work done before I commit.

Idealism is great and all but I’m in it for the results. I have to deal with the real world, and the real world is a gritty, difficult place, filled with pitfalls and disappointment. We do the best we can with what we have.

How many people who read this blog are Project Managers? Ok, everyone who put up their hands, let me take a moment to preemptively apologize for what I’m about to say : Sorry.

In general, I find Project Management to be a combination of boredom and annoyance. Yes, I know, it’s a necessary and useful discipline within the corporate structure blah blah but that doesn’t change the fact that, as a software developer, Project Managers (PMs) are the people who run around scheduling meetings and checking up on your progress every day “just to see how ‘we’re’ doing". They generally wear this slightly worried look on their faces, the kind that says they are hoping for the best but braced for the bad news. And when you really need them they are almost always in meetings with other PMs, trying to get their graphs to align.

Which is fair, I suppose. Software development is something of a black art, especially when it comes to predicting how long some programming task will take. I hear that some companies are actually able to accurately predict their timelines most of the time, but I also hear stories of Bigfoot. I’ve yet to experience it, personally. As I grow older I simply add more slack to my initial estimates, even if I don’t think I’ll need it. If I think it will take 4 days, better mark it down as 6. It still doesn’t work and I still find myself at work on a Sunday sometime during the project, sadly, but that is the life of a programmer. What, do you think the reason that games always seem to run overtime is because game programmers are lazy? Hah! No. It’s either ‘cause we suck at estimates or no-one listens to them.

So anyway, yes, Project Management, as a discipline, is something I generally don’t choose to participate in on my own time. It’s for Work, when I’m trying to get on with being productive and someone wants to chase me with a time sheet that we both know is a thumb-sucked estimate, soon to be derailed by Real Life.

Which means that it feels fairly odd to be doing it for SoW. To be firing up, of all things, the very tool of the devil, MS Project, and building a detailed breakdown of yet more thumb-suckery for my own indie game, a project I never thought to taint with that kind of nonsense.

Heh. You can probably tell, I’m not the type who is very organized. My desk, like my mind, is a chaotic and cluttered thing. My plans tend to run towards “well, go at it full tilt until it’s done". It’s served me fairly well, generally, but I’ve decided (4 years after starting) that SoW may just be a big enough project to justify getting serious with the plannage.

It’s the Body-For-Life thing again, really. I hate failing, and admitting that I couldn’t maintain the BFL program 100% for 3 months and still make good progress on SoW felt like a personal failure. It should be do-able, part of me insists. If I can optimize my time enough, surely…

So I went a bit crazy last week, digging into time and project management software and attempting to analyze my schedule and work habits. I created exel spreadsheets mapping my day-to-day life into pie charts and evaluating task slippage. I shit you not, I may have gone slightly…nuts. I evaluated a whole series of freeware and demo programs, created to-do lists and daily schedules. I had the amusement of telling Denb that I’d scheduled her in for “relationship time” for a few hours later in the evening, while pointing at her allocated block on the schedule. Watching her expression when I said that was good fun.

After playing with things from different angles I decided that I was just creating graphs for the hell of it and scrapped most of them, settling on a much simpler plan, your bog standard project file/timeline thingy in Project. Not unlike this. (Check out the rest of that blog for more about Andy’s next game btw. It’s a casual title but you manage Dinosaurs!!! Hand’s up anyone who doesn’t love Dinosaurs? You there, you say you don’t love Dinosaurs? Well then get the hell off my web domain, you filthy heathen! We don’t take kindly to your type around here.)

And while I did scrap most of the exel mucking about that I’d done, I did learn something useful from this exercise, enough to make it worth it, hopefully. Overall, the timeline wasn’t that different from what I’d imagined, but the individual breakdown made the best optimization strategy abundantly clear. I’ve been pretty stupid.

You see the human mind is a fuzzy thing, and mine fuzzier than most. (It’s like a hand-knitted lazer beam, my brain ). We are amazing at most abstract conceptualization, but shite at really grasping numbers. Generally, anything beyond a certain amount is just shoved under the mental category known as “Lots". 1, 2, 3….Lots! We can remember the numbers, sure, but it is hard for us to really grasp the full scope of those numbers in our head. Putting them on paper helps bring home the reality.

And the reality it brought home is that I really should contract out some of the art.

For example, the next milestone I have set, about 75% of the time allocated to it is generating artwork, an uneven allocation which surprised me seeing as it isn’t that much art (hell, it’s a fraction of what I will need for the finished game!). I expected it to account for less than half. If I had someone else doing art, where most of the time burden is, I could get that milestone done in half or even a third of the time (depending on how fast they are).

My problem is that mental categorization thing…

- programming left to do : Lots!
- Art left to do : Lots!
- Lots = Lots

…and the fact that I’m a bit of a Jack of All Trades. I’m a good programmer but I also dabble in writing, 2D and 3D game art, illustration, animation…about the only thing I don’t do is sound. And art contractors are pretty damn expensive for a lone guy working in his spare time and spending his disposable income.

So when someone quotes me a fifth of what I have left at the end of the month when I’m done paying the bills, for a single house model, and I think “you know, I really could do that myself given a day or two", well, you find yourself thinking about the financial hit and ignoring the time hit. And then you look at the list of art assets remaining to do and your mind lumps it all together into “Lots” and you don’t fully realize just how costly it is in terms of time, only that it will cost a lot of money.

So much for that old chestnut “you can’t buy time". Yes you can, it’s just bloody expensive.

And yes, I know, people have been telling me something similar for a while. MS Project is harder to dismiss, with it’s cold, hard numbers showing a undeniable 75% time expenditure on art. Of course, it’s a thumb suck so maybe it’s not that bad. But I’m better at programming than art so I’m also probably better at estimating the duration of the programming tasks than the art tasks. Which means it’s probably worse rather than better. Sigh.

I guess I’m going to have to burn cash then. So much for saving up for a trip to Egypt this year.

(And for anyone who is thinking of suggesting I look for free volunteers, it’s not that easy to find good, reliable volunteers. So far most (but not all ) of the offers to help I’ve had have fizzled out. I don’t blame them, life gets in the way, I know. And I’d certainly welcome any future offers to help out. But I think if I want to make a real dent in the load I’m going to have to suck it up and pay the big money.)

After cleaning up my forum I felt in the mood for a quick doodle. Enjoy.

*Action movie voice-over voice*

In the grim future of the 21st century, only one man stands between humanity and automated annoyance!

Spambot Attack

Gah. My forum has suffered a wave of spam bots recently, hardcore pr0n and WoW advertising in every board. I’ve spent a few hours cleaning up the spam and upgrading the forum software, installing upgraded security modules, getting the upgrades to work properly with each other etc. I’m an amateur when it comes to web dev and admin, it’s pretty much all trial and error and delving into support forum posts.

So please bear with me, hitches may occur in the near future which I need to iron out if I’ve missed something. The forum is backed up so I can happily break it, your posts won’t be lost. Except for spam bot posts, obviously.

And please, if you are a legit browser and have an issue registering don’t hesitate to mail me or leave a comment on this blog, I’ll sort you out. The new image validation safeguards I have in place may make it harder for a human to register (hint : READ the instructions!), hopefully everyone can agree it is a small price to pay so that I can spend my time actually making SoW instead of playing forum janitor. But if I find a lot of people are having issues registering I will tone it down.

I know the forum is fairly dead, activity wise, but that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned it to the machinations of the filthy robots, no. Not on my watch, you bastards!