Parveen Kaler

DemoCampVancouver06: Gaming Edition

DemoCamp is an adhoc conference where anyone can pitch an idea for a presentation. The goal is to pitch your idea or demo and get solid, constructive feedback. DemoCamp attracts a diversity of people and as a result is a great networking event as well as a great place to take in new ideas.

DemoCampVancouver06 is taking place on April 10, 2008. It will take place at Workspace and start at 5:30PM. This time around DemoCamp will be focused on Game Development. Word on the street is that Sun Microsystems will have a presence.

I know what your thinking. What? Sun a gaming company? Sun is currently focusing on Project Darkstar for gaming. Sun Startup Essentials may also be pertinent for some.

I will be presenting on Bleeding Edge iPhone Game Development. I’ll go over the tools and the platform, the types of games that can be made, and if it makes sense for you from a business perspective. I’ll compare and contrast with XBox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, WiiWare, and other platforms.

Tools For Improving Focus

I recently did a talk for a group of friends on productivity and focusing. I thought that others may also find this talk valuable. I took my notes and put together a Keynote presentation with voice-over. Enjoy.

Let me know if you found it useful.

Rules of Communication: Not Trying To Be Rude

I am connected and online almost all of the time. I’m also known to send almost all of my phone calls to voice mail. I don’t reply to many emails either.

I’m not trying to be rude.

I am busy. You are busy. We are all busy. Myself and most of the people in my life are knowledge workers. That’s just a fancy term that means we turn content and information into something that is actually useful. This requires concentration and blocks of uninterrupted time.

So if you call and I send you to voicemail please don’t be offended. If you message me and I ask you, “Is this urgent?” Don’t be offended.

My attention is interruptible. It is interruptible only if the matter is urgent.

FYI or Actionable

So here are some tips. If you are sending me a piece of communication, please clearly mark what is FOR MY INFORMATION with an “FYI” tag. If you are sending me a piece of communication, please tag what is ACTIONABLE on my part.

Asynchronous vs Synchronous

Use an asynchronous method of communication if your request is not urgent. Email, Twitter, and Jaiku are asynchronous. Instant messenger and the phone is synchronous.

If there is a lot of back-and-forth required to settle a matter, use something synchronous. A good example is trying to set up a meeting time.

Escalate

If there is a long chain of emails to try to resolve an issue and we are running around in circles, please escalate to IM. If we can’t resolve the situation by IM, then please escalate to a phone call. And some meetings just need to happen face-to-face.

If you find yourself resolving the same issue over and over again please archive the resolution in something like a wiki.

Never Eat Alone

There is a very good book named Never Eat Alone, or so I’m told. I’ve never actually read the book but I try to share dinner with someone every single day. So, if you would like to see me face-to-face out there in meatspace, please schedule a dinner with me.

Ways To Save jPod

The CBC has decided to cancel jPod. This is unfortunate because it is the first high-quality show that the CBC has put out in years. The first three episodes of the first season were not so great. It got its legs after that and found its biting satire. Unfortunately, the CBC had moved the show from its Tuesday time slot to Friday nights. They effectively sealed its fate.

There are a few ways that jPod can still be saved. Raugi Yu, the actor that plays Kam Fong, posted to the following message to the jPod group on Facebook:

Dear Friends,

Hi all, Raugi Yu here. I got the call yesterday about it. At first I was upset and disappointed and immediately thought of the great times and experiences I had shooting jPod and how much I would take from that…There was one problem though…I kept wondering why. Why not have a season 2? I started to hear what others were saying. I heard anger, resentment and frustration. So many of you my friends along with thousands, yes thousands, of strangers have expressed outrage over the cancellation of jPod.

I became angry too.

One may think that, “Sure, I’d be angry too if I lost a steady gig like that”. Well that’s not what I’m angry about. Gigs come and go. It is no huge hardship for me to go back to auditioning and booking and living my life as an actor. It is my passion. No. It angers me that the CBC our nation’s television station (yes I know among other things) chooses to cancel a show that is so cutting edge, fun, smart and CANADIAN. So many viewers have gleaned joy from watching jPod week after week. We look forward to it; I dare say we yearn for it.

I’m a pretty chilled out go with the flow kind of guy, but I recognize that there are times in my life when I’ve got to fight. In surveying the land I recognize that I need a lot of help.

Please call CBC at: 1-866-306-4636, choose option 1 for English programming and choose option 1 again for the “Attendant” then ask for “Audience Services”. Audience Services will answer and at that point tell them how you feel about jPod being cancelled and how you would like to see a season 2.
OR
E-mail them at http://www.cbc.ca/contact/

I alone can reach out to all of you and if all of you can reach out to even 2 other people and we get that people ball rolling…we could possibly be jamming up some phone lines at CBC.

Am I being naïve and hopeful? I hope so; it feels better than lying down and taking it.

Thanks everyone! I really appreciate all of you for watching the show and for all the great things you’ve all been saying about it. I send my love to you all and just to be clear, that love stays whether you phone, e-mail, write or not.

Thank you all,
Raugi Yu
A.K.A Kam Fong

iPhone App Store Revenue Split

Last week Apple released a BETA version of the iPhone Software Development Kit. They also announced the iPhone Apps Store. Users will be able to download applications through iTunes on their Mac or PC. Applications can also be downloaded directly from the iPhone or iPod Touch too.

This essentially makes Apple the gatekeeper. There are pros and cons to this but what I really want to talk about is the revenue split for developers.

Apple will test and approve applications before they appear in the Apps Store. They will also host these applications. For this service and for being the platform holder, Apple is taking a 70/30 split. 70% of revenue goes to the developer and 30% of the revenue goes to Apple.

For Apple this means bucket loads of cash in their coffers every single quarter. They have a vested interest in having as many apps sold on their platform as possible.

What does this mean for the developer though? Currently games sell for $5.99 on iTunes. This means $4.20 goes straight to the developer.

Guy Kawasaki interviewed Steve Ballmer the day of the announcement at MIX08.  Ballmer claimed that the 70/30 revenue split was too high.  That’s a fairly hypocritical thing to say.  Recently, Kotaku broke the story that Microsoft halved royalties for games on XBox Live Arcade.  The revenue split they mention is 35/65.  Everyone that I spoke with at GDC actually said that number was more like 30/70.

Let me restate that to be clear:  Microsoft is taking 65-70% of revenue for each item sold on XBLA.

Pot, kettle, black Mr Ballmer.  Pot, kettle, black.

February Recap

February was an excellent month!

February 1st was my last day at work. I spent the rest of the month getting the business up and running. From incorporation to marketing to accounting there were a lot of things to get out of the way. Frankly, there was a lot to learn. I was starting from zero. I have a number of friends that had gone through the exercise in the past so there are a lot of brains I can pick from.

The task seems daunting at first. But really it isn’t all that hard once that first step is figured out. It is as easy as going to Amazon and picking up the highest rated books on marketing, bookkeeping, and management. I sat down with a few friends to figure out how they had gotten their businesses off the ground. A couple of quick Google searches after that I had a pretty good action plan for the month.

There was infrastructure that had to be built up too. I went with DreamHost for web hosting. They also host my Subversion repository and other data.

In the past, most businesses install an Exchange server somewhere in a back room to give everyone Outlook email and calendar access. I am convinced that this is absolutely the wrong thing to do for almost all new organizations!

Google Applications for Domains provides email, calendar, instant message, and documents for your organization. There really is no need to have a full-time IT person on staff. I recommend intelligent outsourcing of almost everything that is not core to your business and does not bring in any actual revenue. Reading and writing email shouldn’t be a core function of any business.

In the future, I will also get FogBugz on Demand up and running.

I do have a company name and website picked out. Stay tuned. I will be unveiling it soon!

Game Developer’s Conference

I was in San Francisco for a full week in February for GDC. It had been a few years since my last GDC. I stuck mostly to sessions on business and production rather than programming sessions that I had attended in the past. The first two days of GDC were actually the best. Both the Indie Games Summit and Worlds In Motion Summit were very information dense. There were fewer attendees and more tight-knit groups these days. I didn’t even bother with Expo floor this year. I had a quick walk through and that was about it.

I met a ton of absolutely brilliant people this year. I still need to send follow up emails to everyone that I met.

Running

I’m still on track to run the Vancouver Half-Marathon in early May. My last run was 15km. I was able to run the first 10km in an hour. But the last 5km took me 45 minutes. I need to start carrying water and possibly gel packs for my longer runs.

I really need to step up my diet and nutrition too. I still haven’t figured out the correct amount of carb intake. I need to limit my intake to make sure I keep dropping weight while still having energy to power through workouts.

I am fairly carb sensitive. To drop weight, I really have to increase my protein intake and limit my carb intake. Too many carbs for lunch and I start falling asleep in the afternoon. This is probably going to require a lot of tweaking over the next month to figure out what my body actually considers optimal.

What’s Next

The plan for March is to write a lot of code. There is nothing like walking, talking code to actually attract funding and a great team.

I do have a few months of runway for myself. But I’ll have to decide if I want to take on funding, court a publisher, or do contract work to extend that runway. There is actually a ton of government funding to be had through art and heritage programs. There is also a lot of funding to be had for tech startups. I’ll have to explore this further over the next month too.

GDC 2008 : N+ Postmortem

N+ is a game that game out on XBox Live Arcade this weekend. The orginal game, N, was developed by Metanet Software. Slick Entertainment took this game and ported it to XBLA. One of the cofounders of Slick is Nick Waanders. Nick is another one of the guys that I worked with back in the day at Relic Entertainment.

The session started with a number of production and business issues that the project had to deal with. The project had a budget of about $220,000. This money was raised through savings, grants, and loans. A big chunk of the funding came from Telefilm.

The rest of the session was a month-by-month breakdown of the major tasks that were required to complete the game.

The production schedule started in February of 2007. Nick started by implementing a prototype of the game in C#. The main goal was to figure out how exactly the controller would work and get a general feel of the gameplay. This prototype was later ported to C++. The Eets codebase was used as a starting point.

If you’ve worked at Relic then you’ve probably used the amazing Profiler Tool that Nick wrote. I’ve heard that this tool is now being used across multiple THQ studios. Nick is a huge believer in creating absolutely kick ass tools that smooth out development. For N+, a Character Editor, Level Editor, UI Editor, Localization Tool, and Debug Tool were created. These tools were all written in C#. This is a lot of tools for an independent studio to be creating. However, Nick feels that this definitely shortened the length of development. This was especially true of the Debug Tool.

What Went Right

- Design was set very early in production
- The homebuilt tools helped a lot
- Focus Testing at PAX improved the game
- Hit all milestones except for the last certification milestone

What To Improve

- Don’t fail certification
- The game contained way too many features and options. As a result there was a lot of extra bugs
- They would add an extra programmer at bug fixing time to help ship the game

GDC 2008: PixelJunk Series Postmortem

Dylan Cuthbert of Q-Games did a postmortem on the first two games in the PixelJunk series.  He previously worked at Sony on the Ape Escape series out of the Japan studio.

There are a number of common themes that are consistent through the PixelJunk series of games.
1) Simplicity
2) Familiarity
3) Originality
4) High-definition (1080p @ 60Hz)

There are a series of PixelJunk games for a number of reasons.  It is important from a branding perspective.  Since the games have a familiar feel, players can expect what type of game that they are getting.  It also increases awareness of the other games in a series if a player enjoys one of the games.

The other main issue was about design.  There were a number of ideas that the developers had.  To keep each of the individual games simple, it was important to release each game separately.  Releasing one mega-game with a number of mini-games would have been possible for a larger studio.  Q-Games can spread the financial risk of development over a series of games.

One of the impressive accomplishments of Q-Games is that they self-published these titles in Japan.  This is possible because the digital distribution system in place on the PlayStation Network.  Self-publishing is really important for an independent.  It is one more step along the chain that an independent can own for themselves.  This means more money in the independent studio’s pocket.

There are a number of design and production constraints that Q-Games places on themselves.  They limited themselves to teams of 5 people or less for the development of a game and a production schedule of 6 months.  They also limit themselves to 2D games for at least this series of games.

From the players point of view, they get a game that is in Full HD and easy to pick up and play.

The production constraints that Q-Games puts on themselves and the design themes in the games that they create allow for a very sustainable business model.  With respect to funding, the entire series of games are being bootstrapped.  Each game in the series is also developed using a staggered schedule.  This allows them to shift resources to where they would be most effective.

The same engine is used for each game in the series.  Big chunks of logic for the game is pushed out to script.  Q-Games use GameMonkey as their scripting language.  This allows designers and artists to write code for the game too.

Q-Games uses a 3 phase development strategy.
1) Prototype
2) Discovery
3) Production

A prototype is a simple visual demo of the look and feel of a game.  It doesn’t necessarily have to be a functional computer program.  It can be a pen and paper design or mockups.

Discovery entails actually figuring out what the game is.  At the end of this phase the game is fun to play for the developers.  All of the gameplay features are in place.

The production phase involves taking a game that is fun for the developers to play and making it into a product that users will purchase.  This involves fulfilling all of the platform standards and requirements.  There is also polishing of features that takes place.

This entire 3 phase development strategy is executed in 6 months.  Impressive!

GDC 2008: Spreading Your Message As An Indie Developer

Introversion Software considers themselves The Last of the Bedroom Programmers. They are company of 8 full-time employees based out of the UK. They have made the games Uplink, Darwinia, and Defcon.

Victoria Arundel, their Marketing & PR person, did a talk about how Introversion goes about creating buzz about their company and their products. Introversion has a very small advertising budget, so they spend a lot of their attention creating a clear, coherent brand.

I’ve been spending the last few weeks thinking about and building a brand for my own, currently stealth, company. This talk was very pertinent for me.

How Can I Compete?

Victoria spoke about how Introversion competes with the monolithic, big-brand studios. They rely on procedurally generated content to create unique games. They pick topics that the big studios wouldn’t really touch. They also focus on audio and immersion rather than purely graphics to stylize their games.

Brand Leaders Versus Brand Challengers

The book Eating The Big Fish by Adam Morgan was specifically mentioned as a source of inspiration and information. Virgin and Apple were mentioned as good examples of brand challengers. Both companies have a very strong face attached to their image. Richard Branson and Steve Jobs make their companies more than just faceless corporations. This is very important for brand challengers.

The 1984 Apple Superbowl ad was also mentioned. However, it was mentioned in a context that I hadn’t really thought about in the past. Apple was originally the brand leader in personal computer industry until IBM (along with Microsoft) came along and ate their lunch. That Superbowl ad was the turning point where Apple transformed themselves from being the Brand Leader to the Brand Challenger.

To boil down the talk into one statement: Say who you are not just what you sell.

GDC 2008: The Power of Free to Play

I worked with Adrian Crook back in the day at Relic Entertainment. Adrian was the producer on The Outfit for the XBox 360 team that I was on for a few months.

These days, Adrian is working as a consultant on a number of games. He also runs FreeToPlay.biz. Adrian has become one of the leading experts in this space.

Adrian started his talk by mentioning Chris Anderson of Wired Magazine. Anderson wrote the book called The Long Tail. His next book is planned to be simply titled, Free. Here is a good video explaining the content of his new book.

Adrian then spoke about free in the real world outside of games. Radiohead’s recent album release, RyanAir, and free-to-poop toilet on the corner of Richard’s and Davie were mentioned. Radiohead released an album over the web for free and relied on donations for revenue. RyanAir sells airline tickets in Europe for nearly free and then upsells for vacation packages and luggage transportation. The toilet in Yaletown allows you to poop-for-free and relies on advertising.

Free To Play works for video games by monetizing attention. Good examples of the free to play model are games by Nexon, Runescape, Webkinz, and Runescape, Webkinz, and Club Penguin. Jamie from Klei Entertainment just announced that they are making a FreeToPlay game for Nexon as well.

Currently, about 91% of Free To Play users are under the age of 18 years old. This can be seen in the subject matter in the aforementioned games. NPD says that a huge chunk of these users leave after they turn 18.

Adrian went on to talk about revenue models in the Free To Play world. A good overview of the topic is a post named Top 10 Revenue Models for Free To Play Games over at his blog.

Design Tips

To make a Free To Play game work you must respect all of your users. Most games rely on a very low conversion rate that hovers around 5%. You still need to build a community that respects the other 95% of users that won’t spend a dime.

Consider how a nightclub works. The five people sitting behind the purple, velvet rope are the ones spending thousands of dollars that night and keeping the club open. But the other 200 people are required to create ambiance. The other 200 people may pay cover and have enough drinks to get absolutely hammered. But they still will only spend $100 or so at most and more likely only $20. The five sitting behind that purple, velvet rope will be dropping $10,000 that night.