Deciding What to Make: A Greenlight Process for Commercial Indies

[Music] good alright this is definitely the full 30 minutes I don't want to start too late before I get started everybody makes sure you turned off your cell phones and all of that stuff so we're not accidentally disrupting the very important things I have to say I also just found out I was quoted in The New York Times today so you can tell them important the exact quote was nerds like to party and make stuff so yeah my name's Adam making a game called Overland are also publishing a game called night in the woods and we're doing some other things I've been a self-employed game maker since about 2006 and I wanted to kind of present to you guys a guide to the Singhji greenlight process which is sort of how we decide what to work on and what to invest in the simplest way to describe indie games I think is that the bar for selling games used to be really

really really low indie games used to be way worse uh in almost every way I feel like in the last five years weird games got like way weirder polish games got more polished big games got bigger small games got smaller and this was never a particularly low-risk industry to begin with democratization game making tools flood of earnest and brilliant students maybe a few triple a midlife crises these things have all kind of raised the bar I think and there are games that I feel like we're huge hits five years ago that wouldn't really stand out today there are lots of pros and cons here I think there's lots of things about this that are amazing but regardless of all that this is still a real thing that's actually happening and on a more personal note the bar has kind of been raised for us my wife and I run this company together we have a couple of kids now the stakes for making and selling indie games feel pretty real I think all the time 24/7 and so what we

work on how we work on it all the potential upsides and downsides of those choices impact not just my wife and I now but our kids are stupid dogs so what do we do as a company folks that sit around making indie games all day to sort of survive in this new environment my notes here as they ruined hellscape that seems a little strong for some reason all you can do is hedge your bets right there are many parts of commercial game making that are just kind of out of our control and this is not about guaranteeing a studio survival which i think is kind of impossible anyways this is not about sort of slavishly adopting conventional wisdom and everything that you do what I want to try to talk about is sort of doing the opposite let's talk about minimizing damage from and/or justifying making a weird passion project into a commercial thing so I think there's lots of talks and articles and blogs about how to hedge your bets during development and

release and even post release but what about before I you know if if you've been making games for a while you have probably noticed that the earlier you can discover flaws or errors the more flexibility you have to adapt and either solve those problems or resolve them or dissolve them and strengthen your design and I think this holds for projects as a whole design and production and marketing and technological and artistic components the earlier you find the landmines your path the more time you have to adapt it's good to have a strong process it's good to take your releases seriously but I think for some problems that's kind of too little too late so what about before there is even a game there's a lot of advice conventional wisdom right don't make an experimental game don't make a clone don't make a premium game don't make a free-to-play game don't make a casual game don't make a hardcore game right but making a

commercial game is really risky it's usually a bad idea it's not a thing to be done lightly so if you are going to do it let's at least maybe acknowledge potentially mitigate some of the risks involved let's try to still work on something that we love and so this is kind of our mantra heads early hedge often and these are our I wrote pro strats for pre pre-production which doesn't really quite roll off the tongue quite right that's okay these are things that help us vet an idea before we even start work on a prototype sometimes the first one is called platonic scope it's kind of a dorky name for a thing but I want to explain what I mean real quick there's this thing that you can think of is like a game production server Asst this three-headed thing there's scope and budget and schedule these are basically fancy abstractions for some pretty discrete resources that you have as a game maker there's sort of game

quality or whatever you're building and whatever you're trying to output there's the money you have there's the time that you have and if you imagine these as kind of like three points of a triangle different games are going to sort of have different triangles and different game ideas react to changes in these variables differently increasing the budget or the amount of time you have to build something may or may not affect the ship date or the budget or the output quality since we're trying to make games commercially and somehow also eat food time and money obviously matter a lot but this quality question is kind of weird there's this sort of philosophical notion of the Platonic ideal this is something that is like the most perfect or true version of itself it's somehow perfectly authentic it's it's an earth thing it is like it's perfect essence or whatever our target for this quality thing that we're trying to achieve I think is to somehow create

the Platonic version of any given game idea so this is weird is radically different from game to game the ideal sandbox game is going to be really different from the ideal RPG and it's also totally impossible to actually do nobody's actually going to achieve this or pull this off but I think it's still useful as sort of a target or something to aim at or something to think about when we're trying to kind of balance quality and money and time so I have these three variables usually for us time and money have kind an upper boundary and then we have this sort of like what is the best version of any particular game according to its own rules what is the Platonic ideal of that particular game idea and so the first way that we try to manage risk when we're in the early stages of trying to decide what to work on next is to just ask this question given the time and money that we have access to which of

our game ideas can we have the closest to it's Platonic ideal it's a really insane question there's like so many things going on we may not have a prototype yet even if you do have our prototype the kind of games that we build and the reason that we build them is they tend to grow in really unpredictable ways we think that's a good thing but you can grow a really big tree from a really small seed sometimes so how do you even guess which of these game ideas we can actually get the closest to this desired output quality predicting absolutes is really hard a accuracy in predicting the exact budget and dev time and design complexity and the final output quality of an original game idea is impossible but I think you can kind of make a relative comparison you can hit a handful of ideas against each other you can imagine which one can take you farthest given the resources you have and that might actually help so that's where that dorky name comes from you may be able to make a pretty good call about

which of your game ideas you can take the farthest given the resources that you have and this isn't the end-all be-all of green lighting is kind of just sort of one of our first steps that we like the next one is the inverse pyramid test which I think sounds kind of ominous but inverted pyramid is this kind of nice shape because it maintains the same overall profile over time as you add new layers I think games that have this shape can kind of decrease risk over time because you can stop prototyping at any point and you have a game that has all the properties of the thing that you're trying to achieve if you have vertical strata or you have a regular crappy pyramid it doesn't have the same weird shape maintaining property these shapes I think are really obviously inherently incomplete or unstable until you get all the final touches done so why does this matter sometimes budget and schedule estimates

end up being slightly off so if you end up not having as much time and money as you are hoping some how do you want to end up with game like this or do you want a game that looks more like this there's also kind of known as Minimum Viable Product right I didn't use I didn't make this image but I really really like it because this particular metaphor they're good they're right it's intelligent but you can't use skateboard wheels on a bike so you have to revisit the whole notion of wheels each time you do this next step you have to question your old assumptions which i think is a nice touch when you're trying to sum something up like this not every idea is going to be a good fit for this model right sort of the but this is kind of our whole point these pregame considerations that we're talking about are not best practices we're not talking about design methodologies not talking about workflow processes these are ways

of interrogating or examining an idea or a concept that you have for us the inverse pyramid test usually means that we end up focusing on systems based games as opposed to content based games so a game with a lot of randomly generated content might be a pretty good fit for us it takes a long time to nail down the basics but when you're done with that staff you have a good game that's just very small and then you just have to sort of add new things to it and as you do that it said tends to grow in a kind of an exponential way sandbox games tend to have this property also I think this is you end up in situations where you can add one thing and it actually doubles the size of the game or the expressive space of the game and I think sandbox games being expressive with sandbox games also having this property of oh we didn't get everything in that we wanted but it's still a functioning thing is one reason that they're so popular right now there's a weird thing about the shape of game 2 which is new layers and mechanics as you

go up might be adding disproportionate amounts of new content because this isn't really just a triangle this is like a multi-dimensional sort of prism that you're building as you build your game and each new layer can add a lot and it can alter and augment the existing layers so we're talking about when we're thinking about inverse pyramid or trying to think about Minimum Viable Product those are a bunch of those things that are on our mind when we're looking at game ideas the next thing is the notion of taking creative risks or another way to think about is taking as many risks as possible without producing something that is completely alienating to people in a commercial to commercial audience right and why even bother so I mean one reason to take creative risks as this may be why you went indie in the first place it might be that nobody's making the game that you want to make you notice that there's a gap that needs to be filled or there's wilderness that needs to be explored it's fun and feels really good but it

also is going to help your game differentiate itself from other games that are on the market right now and this is kind of an apparent contradiction of commercial game making in a lot of ways we are trying to make a game that looks like a commercial product that people want to exchange money for but for practical reasons and for personal reasons we need it to be somehow unique and to be new and to be original to have a kind of a unique silhouette and like if you've ever done contract work or something and somebody sends you like email and they're like hey I want something really classic but timeless but modern like that's the thing that we're dealing with right so we're trying to make a game that's not unviable so you know what is this what's this idea of viable what's a viable game what does that even mean and I think there are different ways of thinking about that and defining that but you know how big a game is it how

accessible is it how sort of fair is it is it a you know an exciting power fantasy or is this like a brutal and accessible thing how deep you have to dig to get to the interesting stuff versus how much it has been kind of presented to you by the designer the thing is breaking some of these rules I think is a really great way to differentiate your game and it's a way of kind of resolving this tension between making sort of a commercial product and making something original at the same time so you guys know as game minecraft it's it's been pretty hot lately I don't think it's actually a particularly accessible game I don't think it's actually that much of a polished game I think it actually breaks a bunch of these rules but if you go back to this list the how much game is their part it's really really really good at that gone home is a pretty short game there's not a lot of game there in a classic traditional sense it's very polished it's pretty

accessible it's about stories and themes that are new and have a kind of a broad audience another thing these games really follow all the normal buyable formulation for a game and admire the way that these games take some progressive or challenging ideas and they find a way to sort of somehow still fit them just enough into this commercial game box to find a big audience and to support those developers doing their stuff and there are lots of games that do follow all the rules and they're still really neat games these games though tend to be differentiated by just raw quality or out you know a raw superficial quality even you know they're very long games or very large games they have very beautiful graphics that you can see and notice immediately this game blood-borne games pretty good right so these games in some ways I think are taking fewer creative risks

but they're actually a lot riskier to do as a commercial venture they have to have extremely good content they tend to be really expensive to produce you know if the witness had puzzles that were just bad like that's not a thing that can support itself anymore suddenly so there's a lot of kind of internal pressure there that you have to handle and I think it's easier for small devs to differentiate by breaking some of these rules so another way of looking at this idea that you can't make everyone happy all the time which we've all heard a million times we understand this on a cognitive level on an emotional level but when you're making aren't you're trying to share it with the world there's lots of like tension or pressure to make concessions to reach out to new audiences to draw in people who might not know about the thing that you're making but you think that they'll totally love it and if you're not careful it's really easy to kind of sort of stair step your way into suddenly trying to design for all audiences even

though you knew at the start that that was kind of a bad idea and I think when you do this you're kind of undermining the things that made your games so interesting and so different in the first place if you crowd you tack on a crafting system or an RPG system and you're starting to dilute the thing that maybe got people's attention in the first place so creative risks feels good helps you stand out it's a tricky balance though you have to have a lot of confidence and humility at the same time it's not easy I think it's totally worth it though last but not least the final thing is something that we call exposure design which is basically this and it's not a thing that you do or don't do marketing sort of just is it's the part of your game that people can see or hear about the first time someone sees a screenshot of your game is kind of also the first time they experience your game and I think those first impressions matter a lot some things that are marketing let's

play singing on someone's like phone on the bus you saw a cool screenshot on tumblr you're looking at the loading screen waiting for the game to actually start eventually somebody was just shouting at you last night about how cool it was so if your project your game is an iceberg I kind of think of marketing as the 10% that sticks up out of the water and that's called exposure so marketing to us is basically exposure design and I think it's really really really important it's the only way that people get into the strange world that you put inside your game and for us exposure designs the idea that you can and should pay a lot of attention to designing that little top piece because it bears a huge design burden it's kind of a gate into your game it's often it's kind of a teacher it means to sort of be tempting in some ways it's sort of like a restaurant menu it's kind of this it's the outer layer of this weird psychic playground thing

that you build and that you're trying to share with other people and it's a fundamental part of building a commercial game and it's not a question that you can answer before you started working on the game anymore then you can sit down and write a full game design document without even starting your prototype right building original games tends to be the process of designing them and vice versa but you can still think about this starting really really early so these are kind of within this way of interrogating our early game ideas or early prototype ideas we also can sort of interrogate our marketing ideas does the 10% that's sticking out of the water communicate on some of the qualities that make the game fit into that kind of marketing box does it also communicate the part where you broke the rules and you did things that don't normally fit in the box and then make it stand out and make it seem different and does it say that clearly and

efficiently to the people who are going to like those things that you put into your iceberg this is really difficult it's also really really easy to test on a lot of previous games that we've worked on we've been able to come up with a pitch decide like oh these are the magic words is the elevator pitch this is the screenshot we need to show show it to people and if they don't care then you're doing it wrong and you just go back and try again so that part of it is kind of nice there's a lot of trial and error but at least you can get really clear feedback really really easily the other thing as weird is it's not about explaining the whole game in five seconds it's way weirder than that you're trying to communicate some kind of essential experience and not just game mechanics so there's a reason that this list doesn't include over explaining everything that your game does all the time I and because you are trying to communicate this essential experience not just mechanics or story the way that

you design the exposure the way that you do your marketing is going to vary enormous ly from project to project and differentiation in exposure design and marketing has even more pressure because they don't even get to spend time with the whole game yet they just have this little piece at the top that they're trying to check out so what's going to make someone's eyes or ears or brain kind of stop and rest on that point before moving on to the next thing what's going to sort of engender desire in them to talk about the little bit that they saw and to share it with their friends this sounds really dramatic but in a world of infinite icebergs what makes yours so special whatever that quality is can you tell by looking at that little top piece and it's really tempting the thing things like well the game is going to speak for itself or I told lots of people about it I already posted about it on Twitter twice so we're pretty much fine and in any games for a while we can talk

about this this idea of the Qiang infinity hypothesis which is named after Jamie Chang from clay who's been a big inspiration for us it's sort of the notion that there are always more people out there who want to know about the thing that you made and Tom Francis who's a former game journalist and now game designer made a game called gunpoint a little while ago that was by all accounts a pretty pretty great successful indie game and he went and crunched the numbers and found that if you round to the closest integer zero percent of Steam users own a copy of gunpoint and he still sold more than enough to fund his entire current project which is looking really good anyway I I think it's really tempting to think of marketing as something that you do later is something that you do external to your game and instead I think you have to it's not even whether or not you want to do this whether you like it or not marketing is a very integral and natural part of your game

design so yeah so these are kind of our main pregame considerations when we are green lighting projects at synergy we try to think about how good can we get this idea with the resources that we have access to what happens if we run out of time or money is the project going to be salvageable or is it going to be kind of time to start scrambling is this an idea that we that we personally are passionate about and that what we think will stand out because it's so different from everything else that's out there and how hard are we going to have to work to be able to expose those special qualities to people who have never played this before and have no idea what it is in kind of as a counterpoint so I had all these games up here before because I think they take really interesting creative risks FMV games were not a superhot genre up until pretty recently these games are expressive they're

beautiful they're smart they're also really bad fits for the way that we actually make games I probably wouldn't greenlight these projects because I don't know how to manage their scope I don't know what to do if their budget was running low part way through I but I think these games are very good fits for the people that actually made them these are games that were playing to the strengths of those teams in a really powerful way this is a recent example of a game that I think is really smart and this is the kind of thing that that I feel like I understand pretty well and I think that we would have probably greenlit and gone forward with is called Devil daggers it doesn't have a whole lot of moving parts if they decide to expand it later by adding a new piece the core game is still there the new piece isn't going to change the overall shape of that but it may potentially make it bigger deeper more complex more interesting in the future it breaks some

rules it's a 3d FPS that just doesn't have any levels at all and I think the screenshots have a pretty clear identity and they do a pretty good job of showing most of what you do in this game that's pretty much you shoot orange finger lasers at skulls that that's everything that's the whole game they boxed it up so does this mean all arena shooters are a really good idea no but the mix of ingredients and ideas for this particular thing I think is really intelligent so it may not even be that important that you follow all of our rules or whatever right instead you can start to think about you know what do these mean for you what do they mean for your background whether they mean for your skills what do they mean for your audience what do they mean for your creative needs and even more broadly just like think about anything kind of ever so like we've had this

experience over and over and over in the last year where somebody runs up and they say hey just quit our job invest our life savings in this thing we didn't pay attention we didn't do any of these steps at all we just went in we made something that looks a lot like other things and it's halfway done but we ran out of money and we're just kind of wondering you know what's the next step do we do some marketing or get a loan or what and like and it's like way too late like there's no good version of what to do next in that scenario and I think a little bit more care a little bit earlier just like in a game design where you would you know start prototyping some your core mechanics before you decide what the final boss battle is getting this some of this stuff earlier I think helps a lot so that's our advice heads early edged often and that's

actually all I have I think I was done like a minute early or something so yeah thank you oh and I will be in the wrap-up room afterward if you guys want to hang out or chat and also they are going to email you some evaluations about this session I would encourage you to compliment me on my looks and yeah that's about it thanks you [Applause]