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Whoa! I never realized Dwarf Fortress was being rendered with OpenGL! I wonder why they chose that instead of just plain ol' console output.
To be extensible and allow graphics in the future (which is sort of the direction it's going in).
Also possibly because it's part of a platform/engine that he was already familiar with.
Also, console graphics in windows really really sucks, plus you're limited to a relatively small area and I think it uses more than 256 unique tiles anyway
Not to trivialize the depth and nuances of the lessons to learn from this, but that was one hell of a read. I'm impressed that you guys got on WiiWare but also shocked that Nintendo's threshold for payouts is so high as to fail to remunerate you guys in any way, shape, or form.
Also, what notes of caution would you have to other would-be indie developers out there? I work on Xbox Live Indie Games in my spare time, but I'd never go so far as to estrange myself from my friends and family, for instance.
Yeah, it was definitely an interesting experience. We basically got grandfathered in from the pre-WiiWare days when the people at Nintendo of America seemed to think it was going to be a platform for Indie developers. My friend pitched an idea, the guy at NoA said "great! You can be part of our indie WiiWare platform!" and gave us a developers' license. (We were definitely grateful for the opportunity of course, and still appreciative of it )
As the WiiWare idea developed, however, it became quickly obvious that it wasn't going to actually be meant for indie developers. Things like that minimum sales threshold (which apparently I'm not supposed to even talk about... but what are they going to do, take our non-money from us? lol I guess they could take away our developer license, but it's not like we'll ever be able to justify the cost of releasing to WiiWare again given the risk involved), requirements to pay for an ESRB rating (those things are expensive, eek) and such made it pretty clear that if it ever was meant to be for Indie developers, that ship had sailed before the first WiiWare game ever actually got released.
My advice would definitely be to:
A) Hit up a platform that is cheap or free to release to start. XBLA Indie is great for that, and that's where our next game is going to be. No paying for translations, no paying for ESRB ratings, no paying for expensive specialized development hardware, no giant tome of lotcheck requirements to fulfill (there still are requirements, but not as huge), no requirement to have your own office (yes, Nintendo requires that you house their specialized equipment in a "secure business facility," which means you can't shoestring it from your garage), no required liability insurance, and a much richer and higher-level API to work with. Once you have completed and released a game, see if you still have the heart to continue... and if you do, then consider those more expensive options I'd say.
Don't kill yourself over it. Every time we bought a giant rack worth of energy drinks at Medaverse, we took a picture of it because at the time we were proud of the insane sleepless hours we were doing. (Luckily for us from a financial perspective, we were next to a place that sold this aweful swig of an energy drink for less than 1$ a can, so we could pile it almost to the ceiling of the little closet we worked in) We went through two stacks that were taller than a man in our sleepless nights and weekends of development (and when I was bucket man, I tackled one of those unhealthy mountains pretty much entirely on my own), and I don't think that was good for any of our longevity. If you have to keep yourself awake through artificial means, consider shifting your schedule forward and sleeping instead. It was an experience, but not one that I think I would live through should I attempt to do it again.
C) Don't kill relationships over it. I hardly saw my wife for the 6 months where I was the "bucket man" in our bucket brigade of development. By "Bucket man," I refer to our development methodology which consisted of one developer working in every spare moment of his life until he burned out from exhaustion, to be replaced by another one of our friends who would become the new "bucket man." I was bucket man from around Late December/Early January 2008 to probably mid May 2008, and in that six month span I only saw my wife while she was asleep, or sometimes when I'd come home after a sleepless night to get ready for work in the morning and she's already be awake. That was... trying on us. How she put up with it, I'm not sure. Don't let that happen to you. If you see that work is only being done on the back of a single person and you're falling into a "bucket brigade" mentality to get the job done, call a meeting and make sure everyone identifies and helps to fix the situation. It burned out two of my other friends, and myself as well, doing that... and definitely strained relationships. Again, find a way to extend the schedule, force people to work together, or seek external help if needed. Anything to avoid that.
D) Like I said before, value the act of completion over any perception of potential success you may anticipate. The former will *always* be there if you value it, the latter may be there but there are no guarantees. If you lean on the latter, you may end up terribly disappointed.
Anyways, hopefully this information is helpful to someone out there!
EDIT: Also, if it helps... admittedly it's not so much that Nintendo's minimum sales threshold is too high, it's really that our sales were very, very low. If you own Gravitronix, you're in an incredibly extreme minority. Though if they were a more indie friendly platform, there wouldn't *be* a minimum sales threshold admittedly... and we could go buy a soda or a nice dinner from the proceeds or something.
I just wanna jump in here to add something to all the excellent advice so far:
While the moment of "completion" of your game is a pretty solid, excellent moment, consider another alternative: Learn to value every moment of game development.
Seriously, game development jobs are basically guaranteed to pay worse than any other equivalent job in a similar industry. If you're not enjoying the process, you're robbing yourself of money while subjecting yourself to a shitty job.
Notch of Minecraft fame is an excellent example of this - he doesn't work weekends. He used to push himself to work through them, but is now very disciplined about balancing work and life and keeps weekends for himself, not for Minecraft.
Also consider that for a lot of types of games these days, there is no "done". I'm working on a web-based MMO (think Kingdom of Loathing or Urban Dead), and while at some point I will have an official "launch" where I declare the game to be 1.0-complete and send out a bajillion press releases, there will be constant updates to the game thereafter, adding new content and fixing old bugs. If I didn't enjoy the process and just wanted to get to "done" so I could relax, I just couldn't work on a game with goals like these.
On a different topic, if you're stuck for a "simple" game to develop, a web MMO's not a bad idea. For one, it scratches the RPG itch a lot of folks seem to have, AND it can scratch the MMO itch you have too. Plus, it's not complex like writing a true real-time MMORPG with a 3d client is. There's discrete steps that you can take to expand your game, and they all make sense and you have a fun game while you're doing it:
- Player/character log-in
- Display world nearby as a grid of squares
- Let players click on squares to move there
- Add monsters into the world
- Develop some battle mechanics, implement
And from there, you've got options. Do monsters give XP? Do you spend XP on skills, or raise a level in a class? What powers does each class have? And all of these things can be implemented in a single, discrete step.
This is opposed to something like trying to write an FPS, where you can spend a year getting the graphics engine not looking awful and reasonably lag-free network code, and then find out that your FPS ideas are actually terrible and no fun and nobody will ever play it.
I'm kinda popping in here after just skimming the thread, but like the other posters said, one good way to try this is to learn programming. I realize you said you're not the most technical person, but I still think it's worth a shot.
I'd recommend something like Python for learning to program. It's quite a bit less Byzantine than a lot of programming languages, like Java/C#/C++, and is a good beginner's language from what I hear.
There are a lot of interesting looking tutorials, like this one
[Does anyone else with technical experience know of any good tutorials for novice programmers? This is just the best looking one I could find on python.org]
Once you get a decent grasp of Python, you could move on to something like Pygame which provides a nice set of tools for game design.
[Does anyone know if there's a novice oriented tutorial that integrates basic programming with pygame? That would be a cool way to start, IMO. It would give a nice bit of motivation for the occasionally dry early stages of learning to program.]
Seriously, though, like a lot of other people have said, I regret not doing more stuff like that when I was in high school. Either you'll find out that it's not your cup of tea, or you'll learn a cool skill that you enjoy. If it seems interesting, you totally should try it!
Indeed, Imperfect is right: if you can enjoy the actual time of developing as well, that's definitely a good thing.
I hesitated from saying that this should be a motivating factor because sometimes the act of developing itself is going to be a lot of fun - when you're on a roll, figuring out exactly what you want done, or solving a hard problem - but sometimes it is brutal and painful, so when those latter times come around you'll want to remember that you *do* have an end goal in mind and you don't want to give up just because it's not become fun.
But indeed, it will be those fun times during the development process (if you find them fun, that is - if you find that you had no "fun times" during the development process, again you'll want to reconsider this as your career because it likely won't get much more fun) that will keep you striving towards your goal, and as such you should definitely, 100% embrace those times with open arms. And indeed on the other side of the coin, don't let those times (or drive to meet your end goal) cause you to lose sight of the world and the people around you.
I also need to correct myself on something I said earlier... I just realized it last night while I was falling asleep. I think my wife probably didn't leave me over that six months because I was telecommuting for my day job. It played such a secondary role in my life at the time that I'd forgotten! We *did* get to see each other during the day, even if it was only an occasional glance up from the computer while I was working. It was probably those few moments of interaction - moments that I forgot amidst the endless sea of day and night labor - that kept my marriage afloat through those hard times.
I should write something up about how SWERY65 (Deadly Premonition) got to be a developer, because his is a very interesting story and DP is clearly one of those rare cases where they basically let one guy run everything. Part of it has to do with the studio system in Japan I suppose, but there's a lot of other interesting factors that went into it.
SOME NOTES ON SWERY:
-Played games as a kid, but had zero experience making them and had no intention of doing it as a career.
-Spent four years in film college.
-Was asked by a friend to come work in games with him. He said yes, in much the same vein Neil Gaiman said he'd go into comics when asked by a buddy; not because he had it in mind, just because why the hell not?
-Got a job at SNK directing cutscenes and planning storylines. Ironically the friend who had asked him in the first place didn't make the interview.
-Gradually moved up in the production cycle to the point where he helped found Access Games and was able to take greater creative control of his projects. I have no idea how much programming he knew at this point, it's unclear from reading his autobio. Even to this day he usually talks about more about coming up with story and characters than the actual coding process, but I'm guessing he picked up on a few things during his pre-Access days.
-Directed Spy Fiction in 2002 for PS2.
-Development of Deadly Premonition starts soon after. They started planning it even before they knew the specs of the 360. Nobody on the team knew anything about the console; instead they threw in as many ideas as possible and started panicking when they realized they had vastly overestimated the amount of resources the 360 would offer them. The project gets cancelled... Then it comes back, vastly overhauled. Technical issues still abound but they make it a fight to the finish anyway. SWERY, throughout, insists on keeping as many of the bizarre ideas they had for the game in the first place in the final product. In the Game Developer Magazine post-mortem, it's stated that he cried at least once during the production.
-The way he talks about making DP makes it sound like he spent most of his time writing dialogue, so I don't really know what else he did besides making sure everyone knew what it was they were supposed to be doing. Apparently he had a really enthusiastic team though, so maybe he has insane administrative and people skills as opposed to being able to program everything himself. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass but if you want to be in a position of directing people towards your vision, rather than working under someone else, I think leadership skills are more important than being able to code well. Walt Disney might be the ultimate example; man couldn't animate one iota as well as the people working for him.
-Later in interviews, SWERY says the producers basically let him get away with just about everything, and that he was very lucky to be in a position where he had direct control over both the writing and direction as well as administration of the game. He's also made a statement to the effect that the Japanese game industry puts more emphasis on individual creators than in NA; haven't really looked into that so maybe someone can expound on this.
-He also mentioned that his team learned a lot from the experience and that he's sure their next game will be vastly improved because of the stress and technical issues they faced in DP.
Regardless of what you actually think about DP and it's insane production process, SWERY seems to fit the mould of the OP in that he's an idea man who throws concepts around like confetti and doesn't seem to bother himself with technicalities. Or, rather, he started off not knowing anything about the technical process, but due to his creativity and sheer will power (Ryan Payton, formerly from Kojima Productions, has a lot of very positive things to say about the man's humility, personality and work ethic- three things that I've heard can take you much farther in a field than just being a genius who is also a jerk), he eventually worked his way up from a film student who knew nothing about the game-making process to someone who makes exactly the kinds of games he wants to make and has a fair amount of creative control. He's also not an "independent" gamemaker either; he does work within the system, but somewhat on his own terms. He might be one-of-a-kind but it's nice to know someone like him exists out there: A hard-working, humble lunatic who sky-dives in his spare time, writes game dialogue based on drunken conversations he had with a friend, somehow gets his vision onto a next-gen console and generally has a great time doing it. Not a bad gig, if you can swing it.
I suppose this doesn't really apply to North American folk who already know this is what they want to do, but I thought it was a neat example of how there's a lot of ways into the industry, if you're the sort of person who's meant to work there. I don't really have intentions of working my way towards a job in gaming myself (I'm a classical animator/storyboard artist by training with above-average writing skills), but I do have several friends who are, one of whom has already been offered the chance to make creative dev. decisions for a small games company looking to break out of Facebook apps. If I ever in the future want to get my foot in the door, I have people I can contact. I am also not a jerkwad, which will come in handy if people are going to recommend hiring me to their superiors.
Posts
Also, console graphics in windows really really sucks, plus you're limited to a relatively small area and I think it uses more than 256 unique tiles anyway
Yeah, it was definitely an interesting experience. We basically got grandfathered in from the pre-WiiWare days when the people at Nintendo of America seemed to think it was going to be a platform for Indie developers. My friend pitched an idea, the guy at NoA said "great! You can be part of our indie WiiWare platform!" and gave us a developers' license. (We were definitely grateful for the opportunity of course, and still appreciative of it
As the WiiWare idea developed, however, it became quickly obvious that it wasn't going to actually be meant for indie developers. Things like that minimum sales threshold (which apparently I'm not supposed to even talk about... but what are they going to do, take our non-money from us?
My advice would definitely be to:
A) Hit up a platform that is cheap or free to release to start. XBLA Indie is great for that, and that's where our next game is going to be. No paying for translations, no paying for ESRB ratings, no paying for expensive specialized development hardware, no giant tome of lotcheck requirements to fulfill (there still are requirements, but not as huge), no requirement to have your own office (yes, Nintendo requires that you house their specialized equipment in a "secure business facility," which means you can't shoestring it from your garage), no required liability insurance, and a much richer and higher-level API to work with. Once you have completed and released a game, see if you still have the heart to continue... and if you do, then consider those more expensive options I'd say.
C) Don't kill relationships over it. I hardly saw my wife for the 6 months where I was the "bucket man" in our bucket brigade of development. By "Bucket man," I refer to our development methodology which consisted of one developer working in every spare moment of his life until he burned out from exhaustion, to be replaced by another one of our friends who would become the new "bucket man." I was bucket man from around Late December/Early January 2008 to probably mid May 2008, and in that six month span I only saw my wife while she was asleep, or sometimes when I'd come home after a sleepless night to get ready for work in the morning and she's already be awake. That was... trying on us. How she put up with it, I'm not sure. Don't let that happen to you. If you see that work is only being done on the back of a single person and you're falling into a "bucket brigade" mentality to get the job done, call a meeting and make sure everyone identifies and helps to fix the situation. It burned out two of my other friends, and myself as well, doing that... and definitely strained relationships. Again, find a way to extend the schedule, force people to work together, or seek external help if needed. Anything to avoid that.
D) Like I said before, value the act of completion over any perception of potential success you may anticipate. The former will *always* be there if you value it, the latter may be there but there are no guarantees. If you lean on the latter, you may end up terribly disappointed.
Anyways, hopefully this information is helpful to someone out there!
EDIT: Also, if it helps... admittedly it's not so much that Nintendo's minimum sales threshold is too high, it's really that our sales were very, very low. If you own Gravitronix, you're in an incredibly extreme minority. Though if they were a more indie friendly platform, there wouldn't *be* a minimum sales threshold admittedly... and we could go buy a soda or a nice dinner from the proceeds or something.
While the moment of "completion" of your game is a pretty solid, excellent moment, consider another alternative: Learn to value every moment of game development.
Seriously, game development jobs are basically guaranteed to pay worse than any other equivalent job in a similar industry. If you're not enjoying the process, you're robbing yourself of money while subjecting yourself to a shitty job.
Notch of Minecraft fame is an excellent example of this - he doesn't work weekends. He used to push himself to work through them, but is now very disciplined about balancing work and life and keeps weekends for himself, not for Minecraft.
Also consider that for a lot of types of games these days, there is no "done". I'm working on a web-based MMO (think Kingdom of Loathing or Urban Dead), and while at some point I will have an official "launch" where I declare the game to be 1.0-complete and send out a bajillion press releases, there will be constant updates to the game thereafter, adding new content and fixing old bugs. If I didn't enjoy the process and just wanted to get to "done" so I could relax, I just couldn't work on a game with goals like these.
On a different topic, if you're stuck for a "simple" game to develop, a web MMO's not a bad idea. For one, it scratches the RPG itch a lot of folks seem to have, AND it can scratch the MMO itch you have too. Plus, it's not complex like writing a true real-time MMORPG with a 3d client is. There's discrete steps that you can take to expand your game, and they all make sense and you have a fun game while you're doing it:
- Player/character log-in
- Display world nearby as a grid of squares
- Let players click on squares to move there
- Add monsters into the world
- Develop some battle mechanics, implement
And from there, you've got options. Do monsters give XP? Do you spend XP on skills, or raise a level in a class? What powers does each class have? And all of these things can be implemented in a single, discrete step.
This is opposed to something like trying to write an FPS, where you can spend a year getting the graphics engine not looking awful and reasonably lag-free network code, and then find out that your FPS ideas are actually terrible and no fun and nobody will ever play it.
I'd recommend something like Python for learning to program. It's quite a bit less Byzantine than a lot of programming languages, like Java/C#/C++, and is a good beginner's language from what I hear.
There are a lot of interesting looking tutorials, like this one
[Does anyone else with technical experience know of any good tutorials for novice programmers? This is just the best looking one I could find on python.org]
Once you get a decent grasp of Python, you could move on to something like Pygame which provides a nice set of tools for game design.
[Does anyone know if there's a novice oriented tutorial that integrates basic programming with pygame? That would be a cool way to start, IMO. It would give a nice bit of motivation for the occasionally dry early stages of learning to program.]
Seriously, though, like a lot of other people have said, I regret not doing more stuff like that when I was in high school. Either you'll find out that it's not your cup of tea, or you'll learn a cool skill that you enjoy. If it seems interesting, you totally should try it!
I hesitated from saying that this should be a motivating factor because sometimes the act of developing itself is going to be a lot of fun - when you're on a roll, figuring out exactly what you want done, or solving a hard problem - but sometimes it is brutal and painful, so when those latter times come around you'll want to remember that you *do* have an end goal in mind and you don't want to give up just because it's not become fun.
But indeed, it will be those fun times during the development process (if you find them fun, that is - if you find that you had no "fun times" during the development process, again you'll want to reconsider this as your career because it likely won't get much more fun) that will keep you striving towards your goal, and as such you should definitely, 100% embrace those times with open arms. And indeed on the other side of the coin, don't let those times (or drive to meet your end goal) cause you to lose sight of the world and the people around you.
I also need to correct myself on something I said earlier... I just realized it last night while I was falling asleep. I think my wife probably didn't leave me over that six months because I was telecommuting for my day job. It played such a secondary role in my life at the time that I'd forgotten! We *did* get to see each other during the day, even if it was only an occasional glance up from the computer while I was working. It was probably those few moments of interaction - moments that I forgot amidst the endless sea of day and night labor - that kept my marriage afloat through those hard times.
From: Everything You Need to Know About Writing Successfully: in Ten Minutes
http://brutalgamer.com/2010/10/31/grillin%E2%80%99-super-meat-boy/
Twitter
SOME NOTES ON SWERY:
-Played games as a kid, but had zero experience making them and had no intention of doing it as a career.
-Spent four years in film college.
-Was asked by a friend to come work in games with him. He said yes, in much the same vein Neil Gaiman said he'd go into comics when asked by a buddy; not because he had it in mind, just because why the hell not?
-Got a job at SNK directing cutscenes and planning storylines. Ironically the friend who had asked him in the first place didn't make the interview.
-Gradually moved up in the production cycle to the point where he helped found Access Games and was able to take greater creative control of his projects. I have no idea how much programming he knew at this point, it's unclear from reading his autobio. Even to this day he usually talks about more about coming up with story and characters than the actual coding process, but I'm guessing he picked up on a few things during his pre-Access days.
-Directed Spy Fiction in 2002 for PS2.
-Development of Deadly Premonition starts soon after. They started planning it even before they knew the specs of the 360. Nobody on the team knew anything about the console; instead they threw in as many ideas as possible and started panicking when they realized they had vastly overestimated the amount of resources the 360 would offer them. The project gets cancelled... Then it comes back, vastly overhauled. Technical issues still abound but they make it a fight to the finish anyway. SWERY, throughout, insists on keeping as many of the bizarre ideas they had for the game in the first place in the final product. In the Game Developer Magazine post-mortem, it's stated that he cried at least once during the production.
-The way he talks about making DP makes it sound like he spent most of his time writing dialogue, so I don't really know what else he did besides making sure everyone knew what it was they were supposed to be doing. Apparently he had a really enthusiastic team though, so maybe he has insane administrative and people skills as opposed to being able to program everything himself. Maybe I'm talking out of my ass but if you want to be in a position of directing people towards your vision, rather than working under someone else, I think leadership skills are more important than being able to code well. Walt Disney might be the ultimate example; man couldn't animate one iota as well as the people working for him.
-Later in interviews, SWERY says the producers basically let him get away with just about everything, and that he was very lucky to be in a position where he had direct control over both the writing and direction as well as administration of the game. He's also made a statement to the effect that the Japanese game industry puts more emphasis on individual creators than in NA; haven't really looked into that so maybe someone can expound on this.
-He also mentioned that his team learned a lot from the experience and that he's sure their next game will be vastly improved because of the stress and technical issues they faced in DP.
Regardless of what you actually think about DP and it's insane production process, SWERY seems to fit the mould of the OP in that he's an idea man who throws concepts around like confetti and doesn't seem to bother himself with technicalities. Or, rather, he started off not knowing anything about the technical process, but due to his creativity and sheer will power (Ryan Payton, formerly from Kojima Productions, has a lot of very positive things to say about the man's humility, personality and work ethic- three things that I've heard can take you much farther in a field than just being a genius who is also a jerk), he eventually worked his way up from a film student who knew nothing about the game-making process to someone who makes exactly the kinds of games he wants to make and has a fair amount of creative control. He's also not an "independent" gamemaker either; he does work within the system, but somewhat on his own terms. He might be one-of-a-kind but it's nice to know someone like him exists out there: A hard-working, humble lunatic who sky-dives in his spare time, writes game dialogue based on drunken conversations he had with a friend, somehow gets his vision onto a next-gen console and generally has a great time doing it. Not a bad gig, if you can swing it.
I suppose this doesn't really apply to North American folk who already know this is what they want to do, but I thought it was a neat example of how there's a lot of ways into the industry, if you're the sort of person who's meant to work there. I don't really have intentions of working my way towards a job in gaming myself (I'm a classical animator/storyboard artist by training with above-average writing skills), but I do have several friends who are, one of whom has already been offered the chance to make creative dev. decisions for a small games company looking to break out of Facebook apps. If I ever in the future want to get my foot in the door, I have people I can contact. I am also not a jerkwad, which will come in handy if people are going to recommend hiring me to their superiors.