Friendship, Curiosity & Challenge: Focusing Your Career as an Indie Dev

thanks for coming to uh thanks for coming to the independent game Summit I have the pleasure to introduce uh Jen sandercock who's going to talk about focusing your in career let's give her a warm hand of Applause hi um hopefully you can hear me here I was going to stand there but then I realized all you'd see was my head so I thought I would stand over here instead um so yes I'm obviously Jen sandercock um and I'm going to begin with a little Story Once upon a time once upon a time I didn't make games um I used to work at the Australian Department of Defense doing air operations research I then um switched to do a masters in artificial intelligence at um and I was looking at how to create diverse character Personalities in sort of very academic games um I sort of thought I wanted to do games but I was like oh games isn't a

real career or you know that's not going to be a thing and then when I start of realized games was a real career I'm like oh well I'm like coding maybe I should be a coder and I met a bunch of people who are a lot better at coding than I was and so I was like oh well that's not so good and I don't know if I necessarily enjoy coding that much to do it full-time I then had an epiphany I'm a game designer I'm not really a coder I can code but it's not you know what I'm best at so I set out uh I gave myself a new goal I just wanted to get experience in games um and thus began my non-ind games career uh the first job that I had in the games industry um I got uh I'd gone for the interview and then I got the call that I you know they wanted me to take the job it was uh working on LA Noir for team Bondi um as a Junior game designer working on the tutorial levels the uh the company reputation wasn't particularly good um shall I say

poly um but at the time my only goal was to get experience um and then I sort of looked a little deeper at the game as well and LA Noir although it's sort of a firstperson shooter it's also an adventure game and I love adventure games um it's also set in the 1940s which is a period of time I very much like um and also it was a contract position so I knew it wasn't going to be forever so I took the job I worked at um LA Noir we shipped the game awesome um and then next I went to work on a little educational game that was teaching Australian 12 13 year olds how to um teaching them English I it was a relatively small team and I ended up having quite a bit of responsibilities um I somehow became somewhat the lead game designer on the team and then I was doing some producer stuff and I just didn't feel like I had the experience to have such a role I wanted to learn from other people um so I packed up and uh moved from the USA

moved to the USA from Australia um because I felt like at the time the Aussie industry wasn't going to give me that experience that I wanted I uh started working for Disney Plum on some hidden object games um and hidden object games are also sort of adventure games somewhat and then um and then I quit my job I quit my job because I had a boss who was making me feel really miserable I was crying a lot of the time and even though quitting meant that I might have to leave the country I was like there has to be something more I shouldn't be crying so frequently I uh I stopped to kind of look around my career and I sort of felt like it had been plateauing I wasn't really sure where I was going I wasn't really making progress I'd uh worked on a bunch of different genres um but like nothing was really holding it all together now I didn't really know what I was going to do about that how to make that work at all but I

did have an idea for a game so I thought great I'm going to work on this game and so I went Indie um so hopefully the majority of people here are Indies and being Indie is basically Freedom it's uh freedom to make whatever I want I can work on whatever genre I want to I can kind of work with whoever I want to because I don't have to work with somebody I don't like um and big problem is there's a bunch of creative decisions that you got to make um you know there's all this Freedom you can do whatever you want what will you do so my uh first decision was what is my game company all about what is incisent Inc that I had just founded going to be all about so I created a list of my core values I'm just going to pause for a moment here because you might have noticed that art is not one of my skills um and so this this little image here is supposed to somewhat be like a fear and then there's like a hole in it

and that's like where your core values go so just that i' better explain that cuz it may not be obvious from just looking at that picture anyway I created a list of my core values it was basically three things that I wanted in the games that I was working on I wanted to make games that Foster friendship curiosity and challenge now what do I mean by that well so friendship to me is about I think that people in the world are pretty lovely people sure there's some not great people but I want to be reminded thir of the nice people in the world um there's a bunch of games out there where it's somewhat violent you're going around killing people and I didn't want that in a game I wanted a game that rather either within the game itself was talking about um friendship so that you would have a new understanding of ways you can have friendship or a game that outside of the game was encouraging you to be better friends with the people your friends you have in the real world I want to work on games that

Foster curiosity so I think the world is pretty amazing I think we can create amazing um digital worlds as well and yet a lot of games kind of just push you through they're like do this do this keep going don't stop and look at the sunset blah go go and so I want to work on games where you know you're somewhat encouraged to take your time and explore there's a bunch of different options and there's not really big penalties if you choose one over the other I want to work on games at Foster challenge um so there are a lot of games out there that aren't necessarily super like gamey they don't have a set of game rules and you don't necessarily win or lose but I like games that make me feel like I've accomplished something and done something um and so that's what I uh that's what I say when I I say challenge so I explicitly listed out my core values this is a picture of me at my uh the little office space that I had at the time

and initially it was just meant for my current game uh Glimpse friends that I was starting work on but then I realized I could apply these core values to a lot more so this is kind of where we get to the guts of the talk we're going to I'm going to talk to you about how using your core values can answer a bunch of questions that are going to come up um while you're developing games and in your career um and I'm going to use some examples of how I've used them so for example you might ask what feature should I Implement next should I Implement multiplayer or a new level or maybe local co-op or perhaps some like quality animations like this I mean is this not quality wouldn't your game be better with this um or perhaps in app purchases or you know smell a vision um so I I'm going to give an example of my game a glimpse friends so in a glimpse friends it's a mobile phone game where you uh taking photos and

sending challenges to friends so basically a friend might have sent me this challenge um something that makes you smile beginning with e and I would go out in the world and I would go o here's Alamo Square and some elegant houses um I would take a photo of that and then I would create a challenge to send back to my friend and we would go back and forwards um so it's was about taking photos and exploring the the real world looking up from your phone so when I was working on it I had a decision between what feature should I put in next should I put in messaging with friends from within the game so that you could say hey sorry about that last photo it was tough for wasn't that funny um or should I put in um offline mode so that you could play it like on the airplane or wherever you were so because I want a game that Fosters friendship curiosity and Challenge online off offline mode doesn't really do that at all so I didn't Implement that another big question you might ask is how can I Market my game so what are

the key themes of the game uh Which con or Expo should I go to uh what social media platforms should I be posting um should I just put on a sandwich board and walk around GDC or maybe I should like beg press to you know be nice to me uh should I be targeting teens or 50-year-old women uh should I be for my merchandise should I be making posters or t-shirts or like underwear who knows so in my example I work on a game called Simple weed Park it's an adventure game in the style of Lucas film games um so some of the games that came out in the late 80s and early 90s it's a single player game but when I was younger I remember playing adventure games with my brother and sister and it was very much about my friendship with them and and working together to solve these puzzles so when it came to I had to create a booth for us at um at PX um I I set up the booth so that they had two

stools per station and also had two sets of headphones and this was so that people could sit next to each other and take their time to play so it's a single player game but I'm adding friendship into the game uh so another big question you will ask is uh what game should I work on next should I work on a zombie shooter or an art walking simulator or maybe a kid-friendly Indie darling uh Audio Only Game or a light-hearted political game cuz politics is light-hearted not um so you I mean like most game developers you probably have a lot of ideas of what you want to work on next but many of these will not fit your core values so for example back in 2013 I did a project a personal project for myself where every month for the year I came up with a different gameplay mechanic and I implemented it so one of the goals of the game was to actually Implement games

and feel like I was doing something um another goal was that I was I wanted to make games that gave me hugs and when I say hugs I I don't necessarily mean physical hugs although they're lovely I kind of meant that feeling of being accepted for who I am and being loved um so I created these 12 games um and they all gave me hugs to some extent or less but if I'm considering like they're all somewhat small games cuz I did them within a month and it was just one gameplay mechanic in each uh in each one so how do they rate if I'm now considering should I work on one of these more should I build it out to be something big bigger how are they going with friendship curiosity and challenge so for example uh my first game was just a little game that you uh played on the back of business cards that I could hand out at GDC it's sure it was about friendship because I was making friends by handing these cards to people but it wasn't really about curiosity uh the next game I did was a game where two people are on the same

keyboard and they're you know trying to navigate their little characters in sync with the other person again about friendship but there wasn't really anything curious about it uh the next game I did was one of my first edible games so a game where you eat the pizzas um in this game you would actually um you you know You' be around a table you would compete for um ingredients and then you would make cookies and eat the cookies at the end so it was definitely about friendship cuz you're eating cookies with friends and that's what friends are about uh but it wasn't really about curiosity other than is this going to taste super gross or nice um but by the time I look at this uh fourth game uh Marie Mr W um this one does meet all of my criteria the game itself is a little text based game where you get one line of the story at a time and you need to decide whether that line of story is important to remember or not

if it is important and you remember it then the story will Branch differently and you'll end up with different endings so it's about friendship because it's about this woman um deciding whether she should be staying with her boyfriend or whether he's really just a friend and um not a romantic interest at all it's about curiosity because you're just sort of exploring these like weird little paths and seeing what happens um and it's about challenge because it's actually very difficult to get what I call the happy ending um so I can keep going through and looking at uh all of the other games and kind of raing them so there's like a a game where you you've got uh Dix at cards you're telling stories I did an audio only game because people said they like the sound of my voice um I worked with a team of other people on a game about uh we've got like a comic strip and you're you're editing what people will say uh this game the AI with a broken heart was basically about breakups and this was not about friendship it made made me feel horrible

it was very depressing and I learned I do not like to work on depressing games um so keep you on going through you know there's uh this is one of my favorites Dragon Whispers this is a game where you you're sitting next to somebody else and you each have half of a dictionary and you're trying to work out what the dragon's saying to you was a game where um there's two sisters dividing up uh the what their father has left them in his will and then there was a very stressful game which is about driving on the road and calling out gestate and being wrong and it was not a good game anyway um in summary 50% of these games are not suitable for me to work on currently with the current set of core values that I have so that's great I don't need to consider the other ones so pushing this idea further back in late 2009 I did another personal project where I came up with a different game idea every week for the course of the year now I didn't Implement these games they were just game ideas and that created these 52

ideas um and then if I now go through and consider the lens of friendship curiosity and challenge I can kind of you know Mark each one and go yep tick tick cross cross whatever and in the end there's only 17 that would fit my core values of friendship curiosity and challenge that's under 33% of those games would be suitable for me to work on now um so another big question that one might ask uh that core value can help you with is who should I work with should I work with a team of 20 people should I work by myself or with some billionaire who's going to pay me tons of money or should I like work with my best mate um the important thing to note is that other people don't need to share your core values you need to talk to the other person about your uh what your core values are and then you need to ask am I going to need to compromise my core values to work with this person are your core both of your own individual core values compatible so all of the decisions that you've been

making kind of lead up to this how do I build a legacy of games that I'm proud of how do I create like an over of work a portfolio or whatever you want to call it how do you kind of get that coherence like you're really um making something bigger or making progress and it's kind of what I was lacking before so well the answer is pretty simple you just follow your core values because if you follow your core values you'll end up having games that all have something very much in common they'll have those core values in common and they'll feel like a wholeness so let me talk a bit about some of the games that I've worked on since I came up with my core values so a glimpse friends as I said was about um it's about staying in touch with your friends so it's definitely about friendship um it's about curiosity because I'm encouraging you to put your phone down and look at the world and it's about challenge because you're actually sending individual challenges to people now this game was a total and absolute Financial failure I spent like two years of my life on it um I hardly

had any downloads I made like it was it was financially terrible but I am like super proud of this game this game is very much the epitome of friendship curiosity and challenge so that brings me to a side benefit if your game fails but you followed your core values at least you can kind of feel okay about yourself you may not feel great cuz your games failed but you're not going to like hate yourself in the sense that hey I did something that I didn't really like and it failed and well so another game uh I've been working on uh since I came up with my core values is Thimble we park and as I said it's not really about friendship within the game because it's a single player game and the story itself is about two agents who don't like each other in a weird Town um but it's about the people playing it uh and and the way that you play it so we've brought in a bunch of play testers and we often bring in like a a couple to play test and what's fascinating is that since only

one person can control the mouse the other person often doesn't even necessarily notice that they're not controlling the mouse they feel like they're part of the game and they're contributing just by saying hey how about you try combining this or doing this the game is definitely about curiosity because there's a bunch of like really pretty um environments and places to explore there's a library that's filled with over a thousand books to read and the game does a like you know lets you take your time with it um and it's about challenge because there's a lot of puzzles in it um Adventure game puzzles and the adventure game puzzles that uh kind of respect you they're not super obtuse um so I've been doing a series of edible games um and there's a lot of things that you could do with food that aren't really very friendly for example I could make people eat really gross things or have people competing a lot more um for food so that you're back

stemming each other but I choose not to make games like that in my series because I really want to have games that are encouraging people to actually like the other people around them um in terms of curiosity many of the games themselves aren't super about curiosity but for me while I'm coming up with all these games I'm like oo what can I do with food and so I'm really exploring my own curiosity and I always try to make sure that the games actually have challenge so you're not just sitting down and eating food you have to earn the right to be able to do that so for example one of the games I came up with is called gingerbread friends it's a slow game about getting to know friends and asking these very awkward questions of people um I showed this at uh baby castles in New York and one uh group of people who were playing were mostly strangers before the start of the game and then by the end they were exchanging contact details and had basically become friends which which seemed perfect to

me um this game the order of the oven mitt um the game itself doesn't uh say that you have to pay play cooperatively or competitively it's totally up to you and the friendship that you have with people you're playing with um it's it was fascinating I showed it at XOXO and I think absolutely everybody at that Festival um played cooperatively they were like hey which things do you like best if if I give you that will you help me have this other candy that I like um whereas other places I've showed it uh people have been a little bit uh less friendly but still generally pretty friendly it's about eating cookies that's friendly so by now I bet you're thinking hey Jen these cool value sound like super awesome um but Jen I'm not really into friendship curiosity and challenge it's not really my bag that is totally cool you need to come up with core values that work for you so how do you do that you B basically come up with a big list of a whole bunch of words that

might mean something to you maybe you want to have a sense of empowerment uh maybe you want to create amazing cinematic art um maybe you just want to have a sense of Joy so you basically list out all the things that you could possibly care about you then start bunching them down into groups and then once you've got those groups you try to pull out one like word that might mean most of the stuff in that group and you try to reduce it right down to the bare minimum three is a nice number uh and you're aiming to make a really short and memorable um partly so you can remember it yourself but also so you can tell other people so you can you know be hey I'm doing this thing and it's awesome uh you need to update your core values regularly life changes you can change and your values can change too now sometimes you got to do a project that compromises your core values because you need to pay rent you should totally pay rent and be able to eat that's super important um you

shouldn't you know core values come on top of like the basics of living sometimes you want to work on a project that isn't really 100% with uh in line with your core values but you maybe you want to do it for you want more experience or you want to do a favor for a friend or perhaps you just want a little extra money would be nice and that can also be okay too but you need to be making that decision consciously if the compromise that you're making on your core values is minor or the timeline is pretty short then sure that's fine but if you're making like serious compromises on your core values maybe you need to check to see if your core values need to change or you might end up pretty miserable because you know at the end of day of the day being inde D should be about Freedom if it isn't you're doing something wrong so in summary you should find your core values list them out explicitly use them believe them and live them update them as Life Changes uh so just follow

your core values make amazing games you're proud of and yeah that is all don't forget to fill in evaluations so I can come back some other time cool do we do we have I think we've got time for questions any questions not so much oh no somebody's coming up yeah thanks for the nice talk and did you um updated your Co value along the way you talked about the updating your Co value right so have you done that yeah well so I guess uh initially my core value was just I just wanted experience and so that was all I cared about when I was starting out in the industry and so now I have my friendship curiosity and challenge if I find that's not working for me then I will I will definitely reconsider and and change

what's what I'm doing cool well thanks everyone for [Applause] coming