Good Money in Gaming?

#21 @Andy, be careful dealing with the various publishers "value brands" (I'm pretty sure valuesoft is THQ, activision have activision value etc, etc). If you do "too good" work they will try _very_ hard to keep you doing value titles in record speed and on shoestring budgets. I've seen this happen more than once. One of the companies I've worked with that was in this situation have at least gotten out of the "value title rut" now (after years of being the bitches of value branches of various publishers) and FINALLY got the go ahead to make something AAA. =)

I'm not saying don't deal with them, just... be careful.

and @Josh; yep. Some of the crappiest games I've worked on have probably been the most profitable too, hehe. Weird how those things go.

#22 For publishing, what about Alten 8? Has anybody every worked with these people? I talked to them and they say they are getting ready to ship around 12 games for the PC and PS2. And them some more for the GBA. They also say the developer gets 50% of any income a game brings. Are there any better publishers with better deals? Or is that pretty much as good as it gets?

#23 @Josh - from what I can - that crappy game you worked on looks pretty good.

@Magnus - thanks for the heads up :)

#24 Does anybody know if torque can play an animated movie before a game starts? Kinda like the opening cinematic in Killzone. Just a movie to kinda lay down the story and what the games gonna be like.

#25 Yes. You can use the Theora control for rendered cinematics.

#26 Do you think it will render them as good as they were rendered? Like, Theora won't lose any details or damage the sounds?

#27 Colton - download TubeTwist from the GG games page.

#28 One of my worst games also did the best. It basicaly had a low poly car you drove in front of some FMV track and you could rotate the car on its local pivot whist in the air for stunts. Having a well known licence enabled it to sell over 400,000 copies.

With indie games, you will be lucky if your first title does more than get your name out there, help you network and show some credibility with a shipped title. You might make some money but probably not a lot without putting as much effort into marketing as you did developing the game.

Of course a few get lucky, and make a hit straight up, but that is rare, and most often done by teams of proven developers with some experience under their belts.

It's possible to do a fairly polished simple game in 6-8 months working long hours. But it will take a lot longer to do something even slightly ambitious.

#29 Adrian - I did well on my first game... 8 months hard core dev and 36 dollars profit, minus 15% royalties to a musician and artist :P

#30 Adrian-thats good to know. Over 400,000 copies! Thats insane! I'd drop dead if I ever sold that many copies but I'll try my hardest to market my game as best as I can. Speaking of marketing. Does anybody have any good tips for that? I'm just trying to gather as much knowlege as I can about the game industry before I get into it.

#31 Colton - search the forums for my press release resource. It's a thread where I've compiled a wack of sites that accept press releases.

Also there's a list of shareware sites if you want to submit your pad file to them. That's called Submission resource or something like that I think.

#32

Quote:As for game ideas, I can think of some pretty fast. None like hit the tree with the arrow but right now I have a young story kinda like everquest but a little more modern. But I know alot of people like violence so I'll fuse that in......every where.

That line is making me nervous. Your priorities seem to be a bit out of order. Don't even think about money or selling any copies right now. Your first priority should be to get a more solid foundation of what the game is and how it should be played. That should at least help you get a sense of the scale of the game, and hopefully a better esitmation of how long it should take to develop. Second, make a prototype! If your core gameplay isn't fun, any story/violence you stack on top of it will contribute very, very little to the actual game.

If this is your first game and you have one programmer who has never finished a game, for your own sake do not make a game "like everquest". That is by far the most time consuming/frustrating type of game to develop without some advanced networking knowledge and a decent sized/motivated art team.

What I recommend is that you start off making some small-scale games to get the feel of the game development process in general. Make out a detailed plan that you can realisticaly get a timeframe. Don't worry about making any money on your first shot. Don't worry about being published on your first shot. This is a labor of love, but the labor can be a bit back-breaking at times.

#33 Ok chris I'll check that out. And thanks for the heads up jared. I'll just try to make a racing game. And I do have a solid idea of what I want the game to be like but I just don't wanna put it all on here cause that idea might get stolen and get finished before I knew about it(don't have a clue if thats how it works). But I'll try something smaller like a racing game I guess.

#34 Colton - I have less ideas then most people and I have about 50 in my head just at this moment in time.

Any idea you have has been thought of by at least half the devs on here. We all have better ideas, no offence ;)

Your idea will not get stolen. You couldn't give your idea away.

#35 Your mostlikly right.

#36 I'm impressed; you're asking the right kinds of questions, and you're also not getting offended at the sniping :)

First of all, don't worry at all about the idea being stolen, because it's the *implementation* of the idea that makes the game good - the process of making a game requires blending lots of different disciplines(programming, art, sound, story, etc.) and small tweaks in timing or visibility of gameplay elements can make a huge difference in how people play the game and correspondingly how much they enjoy it - and in turn how well it will perform as a marketplace product as people become informed of whether your game is any fun to play. So even if two development teams implement the same game concept, their takes on the idea will vary greatly as they make different decisions and trade-offs to make what they think is the "best" way to do a game.

Also, it's highly likely any idea you get, no matter how far-fetched, has been done in some manner by a previous game. By pitching the idea, we can tell you about any previous games in that vein, and then you can go try to find and play them, or at least read a few reviews. It usually doesn't matter if you're copying an old game design because the game market easily forgets old genres. (especially if they were only available on personal computer platforms and not consoles) So playing an old game lets you see how well your game might play when it's finished, which in turn means you can focus on how to make your game a better and more refined version of the concept.

Game design is especially important for an indie because a sound understanding of design lets you avoid features that are costly to implement - what I personally have reduced "costly features" to are two more specific things: simulations, and cinematics. Creating a simulation is a difficult programming task, and creating a cinematic requires lots of content(levels/artwork/sound/music). These are terms I use loosely - simulation can refer just to basic things like moving a character on the screen, but on the most complicated levels it means physics, AI, multiplayer elements, or economic models - and cinematics are the kinds of content that are *hard to build and to reuse*; the player enjoys seeing frequent new content during play, but if it only appears once and has little impact, it may not have been worth creating.

So if you develop a game with a very flexible and easy-to-use level editor, you can make lots of level content and by including the editor, also allow the player to make level content and get a lot of play value at relatively low cost. Thus we can say that good level-editing tools, as an example, are probably valuable enough to be a no-brainer feature if the game you're making can support their inclusion. But if you want to add a pre-rendered cutscene, that's a "cinematic" addition; it had better be something people want to watch more than once. There are lots of no-brainer features if you go looking, but past a certain point the line blurs. Games that allow save-anywhere are usually a little harder to make than save-point only games, for example, but it depends on how the game is programmed. This is where having knowledge of these skills comes in handy, since if you don't know yourself, you have to keep consulting with a programmer or artist every time you consider a feature.

Minimally-designed games that are only simulation or cinematic in nature are either very abstract like tic-tac-toe or Tetris, or they are extremely limited like a choose-your-own-adventure book. You have to have some of both the simulation and cinematic elements to really interest people in a video game; but as a designer you have to figure out what things are the most important given a small team and (in your ideal situation) a small timeframe. The mantra of making indie games "small" means - design out anything that's costly and tangental to the player experience. If you think you designed something "too small" then what you really did is make a "casual" game ;)

#37 Great write up James. What James said is all very true. I'd just like to add one thing under costly items... Sometimes a game can seem small until you look at just how much art is going to be needed.

For example, I have an idea for a simple game where 2 players fight using magic. I designed the game top to bottom including the 101 spells and their effects... I created my cost assesment and realized that I had a massive amount of art I needed, from player models to spell effects, etc. So that one's on the backburner.

As for simulations. The game I am currently programming is a complex simulation in t2D that deals with volumetric flow and fluid mixing. The code has been a huge undertaking and usually would have been put in the "this game's too big" category, but it required a very small amount of art to work, so it is currently in development. I traded off art for code. Lots of code, small amount of art.

I wish I could rate this thread, as James' writeup would up it to 5 stars :)

#38

Quote:Do you think it will render them as good as they were rendered? Like, Theora won't lose any details or damage the sounds?

Theora site. You will want to use some form of compression with your audio/video. If you are familiar with video codecs, you shouldn't have too much of a problem. If you're most failiair with raw video, you know that rendering out 15 minutes can be a couple of gigabytes of data. And most of the time you will lose something in the compression. Getting familiar with different codecs will help you manage what you lose.

You could ship a multiple dual-layered data DVD game without MPEG-2 compression if you wanted...but I wouldn't necessarily recommend it.

#39 Okay, this is semi-off-topic....

But I wanted to say this is one of the most REASONABLE threads I have seen dealing with this topic, both from those asking the questions and those providing their best guess as to answers.

My hat is off to the GG community.

Tales of the Rampant Coyote

#40 Can you make good money in games? Like many here, I too did an indie game. Worked on it for two years, and ended up selling it to SSI and making about what I would have been paid for a couple years salary. The moral is that it is possible to make a living, but it's not "good money", unless you're very fast, very good, and very lucky.