How to Make and Self-Publish a Game in 12 Months

[Music] so my name is Matthew the only I'm a Founder at S sim games um and I'd like first how many people saw me at Flash Forward I'm just curious okay a few um so I just want to start with a hypothetical um let's say that you just put your job uh you cast out some savings got rid of a 401k convinced your spouse or significant other that one mortgage is good but two is even better better um and you're going to use that money to do a crazy or maybe stupid thing which is make your first indie game um so from that very first moment you're now on the clock you've got to get that game done out there and making money before your money goes away um there's a lot of other stuff that you have to do and do well in that first year that first while you're making that first game and that's what I'm going to talk about today is all that other stuff that you need to do to make sure that your first indie game isn't your last indie game

um so we made our first indie game called 1849 we released it in uh May of 2014 it is a city Builder sort of in the classic uh Caesar Sierra Impressions late '90s early 2000s genre of game like where City Builder and tycoon game sort of run into one another um and we've been planning to do this for a while uh we really wanted to make our own game and make our own Studio focused on making simulation games so we planned we talked to friends we got all the information we possibly could saved money um and really got ready to release our first indie game and then in April of 2013 we quit our jobs yay um and our first question was how much time do we have we have this savings realistically how much time do we have before that money runs out and we have to unfortunately go get real jobs again and then how do we make this our

first indie game and not our only indie game like I said we really wanted to focus on building a studio based on making these kinds of simulation games that we really like so today I'm this is basically what I'm going to talk about real fast um is the preparation the self marketing and the self-publishing that we did while we were making our game and while we were releasing it and I'm going to have some help from some people who um from the time when my country decided to go IND from the British Empire um so Ben is right here if you want to arrive at a given point at a given time you have to plan your journey very carefully if you don't do that you're going to get lost and wander around in the woods so we had quit and we were talking about our big game design dreams and we had four or five games that we wanted to make and we very quickly realized that they were just beyond the scope of a year we talked about them and we just couldn't make them work to our vision in that year so then we decided let's flip that around so we have about a year to make a game what game can we make that

we want to make that will inspire us can we make in one year and we did pretty good um we planned for a year we made it in about 14 months um the first thing I want to talk about is how we got to that plan on that one side of the slide we use something called swag scheduling which I think we took from some friends at Microsoft and SWAG stands for stupid wild ass guest um the first step of making a stupid wild ass guest schedule is you just cut up items into a week or larger and again it's stupid wild ass guest just go with your gut um approximate like I thought uh I think it's going to take about a month to write the scenarios for the game so I said it's going to take a month to write the scenarios for the game and annotate with costs as well with benefits as well as costs like we were making a campaign-based game so that month on the scenarios was really important so it took a lot longer than other things but crucial to the game and

make sure you multiply for relative risk um if you look at each other and say you know how to do that no do you uhuh it's going to take longer than you think so give yourself more time for the I don't know how to do that part of the plan process so then we broke everything up into these little chunks and we put them on Post-its and then put them on a bigger Post-it um unfortunately there weren't bigger Post-its otherwise we would have probably done that too um and then we sort of ran a meta little sum function on all of this and lo and behold we came up with about 16 months to make a game that's longer than a year swag scheduling has a tool for that and it is called Butchery this is the unpleasant part of Swag scheduling this is where you take the design you've lovingly crafted and kneaded and honed and then hack out big chunks of it that big pile of poits in the bottom there like over there that sort of messy looking pile that's our multiplayer

system we looked at it and said that's 4 months of work 16us 4 is 12 so unfortunately our beautiful multiplayer system and do this early because you know taking out a multiplayer system in a game and changing it to a pure single player that's a big design decision if we had done that 6 months in we could have had a lot of stuff built in multiplayer that never see the light of day so butcher early butcher often and again if you have a tight schedule reduce risk for us that meant Tech um we knew how to use flash with our eyes closed blindfolded in the dark not the sexiest Tech in the world and it wasn't Unity which is the new hotness at the time um so we just decided let's not worry about learning a whole new engine let's do what we know and that let us take some risks in some other places because we already knew the tech we were going to use and you're probably going to have to have contract work done um make sure

that you hire carefully hire friends hire friends of friends um if your gut tells you uh that guy's a little cray cray go with your gut you don't have time for cray cray when you only have a year and there's a lot of documentation to keep up with contractors from tax forms to time sheets um and checks because contractors they like money um and managing contractors is a lot different than working with a cooworker if a co-worker goes off on a tangent yeah it's problematic but it's not fatal if you only have a year and a contractor's off doing some crazy stuff that's your money and your year so make sure that you stay on top of contractors uh it's important to incorporate right away it lets you sign documents as a corporation and not as yourself um you can sign distribution agreements and all that other stuff as a corporation and not as yourself and get an accountant tax laws in every country are designed to just annoy and frustrate and these are people that specialize in annoyance and frustration so then we went and made a

game um about 9 months later we were in beta or Alpha and I'm going to skip all of that um if the ins and outs Charles and tribulations of making an indie simulation game or another talk um so 9 months later and it's about time to start self-marketing and self-promoting Tom Payne here is correct publicity is sort of voodoo black magic and the black magic gets stronger all the time before that sort of N9 month in 3 months from release window we started doing things like building a community from scratch um and we started on social media um Facebook is useless when you want to build a community uh unless you're willing to pay Facebook money you're not going to get anywhere there's no virality on Facebook anymore Twitter isn't right above Facebook for one big reason and that is journalists love Twitter they spend all

their time on Twitter some of them even have some compensation based on what they tweet and how they tweet so that's a great place to find people who are covering your game your genre and your people in the media uh Reddit can be dangerous one day we decided ooh a new subred that looks like it's great for our game here's a screenshot and some stuff about the game 10 minutes later it was gone seems to fit Why didn't it go away so we asked the redditor what's up and he said not now so then we asked oh well can you tell us some pointers like what could we do to fit in more with the community and he said not now um so make sure you get to know the Reddit you're posting in even post there get to know that Community before you do otherwise you could get not now we also started a devlog and we began sharing that on TIG Source crossposting on Reddit um it was a really good way of getting our screenshots out there information about our game out there to a wider community

doing email and having a mailing list is really important because these are people who came to your site found your signup form put in their name put in their email address they want to hear from you so use your email list uh sparingly and communicate efficiently and it's a really great tool of getting your game out there screenshot Saturday was also a fantastic way of getting things in front of people if you don't know about screenshot Saturday you should know about screenshot Saturday and it also starts on Friday not Saturday but um every time we had new art that came in we put it up every time we had a new game feature we talked about it probably a couple times a month seemed to us to be about the right time the right amount of time to share on screenshots Saturday and then it comes to doing press Outreach and PR um in a past life I was a director of communications and I know what it takes to do PR it's a full-time job and I'm a need developer now so I have like five of those so we found a really good contractor to handle some of our PR but that still means that there's a lot of work that you have to do on your end the first thing to do is

come up with a really tight elevator pitch um these few words took about two months of work repeating them to ourselves in the mirror in the shower to friends to like they were like yeah I know what your game is already stop talking to me um and 1849 is a city management game set in the California Gold Rush it's quick it's concise and it's modifiable so if we're talking to the Mobile Press we can say 1849 is a city management game for tablets set in the California Gold Rush um one thing um that I would avoid is mentioning other games in your elevator pitch at this conference about five people have come to me to tell me about their game mentioning other games that I have never heard of so I have no idea what their game is now and you're also running a risk what if I hate one of those games um so just be clear on your pitch and game media these are this is where you should start these are the trend setters taste makers in our

medium um get to know who covers your genre talk to them follow them on Twitter um we were greenlit about 4 days after we got featured on raw paper shotgun I don't think that's a coincidence YouTubers um as anybody who's been at this conference probably knows are a big and increasingly important way of getting your game out there I'm not going to talk about the ins and outs of YouTubers but um one of the things that is really nice about YouTube is that it advertises your game in a way that screenshots can't people can see the motion of your game they can see what things do they can see how the UI works and that really gets them into your game in a way that a screenshot or text just can't um one other thing is we used some you we reach out to some YouTubers during early access and for us it was really valuable to see our game being played by other people in Early Access we got to see them do things that we had never seen any play testers do we're like why are they clicking over there why are they building that like that it was a really

um educational process during early access and then there's the non-game media and I think reaching out to the non-gaming media gets ignored in our industry to our own Peril um our game is set in 20 real cities in California and six real cities in Nevada so we reached out to the media radio stations newspapers TV stations in every Market where our game has City in every city where our game is set and we did things like hey we made a game that has Stockton in It Isn't that cool and the Stockton Record said yeah that's really cool and we got our game above the Mast head and the Stockton record and then a full parade spread inside so we talked to people from the Sacramento beach Nevada magazine to the Maryville Mountain Gazette which was big hit um and it was actually a lot of fun to talk to these noname media uh reporters so find out like what is a

hook in your game that the media might be interested in and Pitch it to them you get a lot more coverage that way we also did Early Access and green light at the same time so obviously we weren't in Early Access on Steam um we did it on a site called indie game standand and we had a lot of success doing Early Access this way um we got to really work with that community that they have there we would we basically had a game that was system complete but we still had a lot of scenarios to offer and content to write so we would put out chunks of content and say fun broken just plain sucks and they got back to us and then we release more content and we actually really enjoyed building our game with this smaller Community like that and even next time when we do Early Access we are probably going to start with this community and not with the Steam Community um the Steam Community um has high expectations of Polish and refin in your game and so we're

going to try to get that right in Early Access elsewhere and then maybe do a short period of Early Access on Steam shows and Expos are great if your game has a controller if it's multiplayer if it has VR if you have a simulation game with a tutorial that takes 8 minutes if you're the designer and don't have to read it and really about half an hour to get into the meat of the game shows on Expos M that be the best place for you to show your game we did it a few of them and they were great experiences but not really right for our game so if I'm not right for your game don't feel like because everybody goes to PAX East you have to be on the plane to PAX East so we did all of that PR all of our marketing and then it came time to see if it was all worth it and going to work it came time for us to release our game and we did a multiplatform AC crossplatform multiplatform release

simultaneously we sent out a media story that said we made a simulation game that you can play on your tablet and on your PC isn't that awesome and the PC players a vocal small minority of them said no it's a mobile Port gross um and the mobile audience like cool PC gaming like we don't care if it's a cool PC game is a cool mobile game and lesson learned from this is that if you're doing a cross platform launch make sure you have two distinct game stories one for the PC audience one for the mobile audience um we're going to spend a lot more time customizing our UI ux for mobile and for PC to make sure that we're really speaking to the strengths and the expectations of both audiences that sort of leads into picking a price point when you're on PC on Steam you have the luxury of really being able to charge what you think your

game is worth you can go hunt about and see other similar games in your genre um you can really price appropriately Mobile pricing sucks nuts um you can charge $6.99 for your game if you're Minecraft or Final Fantasy Final Fantasy game I mean what kind of universe do we live in when a Final Fantasy game costs 8 I mean it's crazy time um but we all know that most of these games are free 99 Cents the huge variety of those 500 games that are coming out every day on mobile are free or incredibly cheap um I don't know about you guys but I can't run a studio on games that cost 9 cents this is all a lead in to what I call the Kobayashi Maru it's the no- win scenario of crossplatform pricing

you can pick a price point on mobile that's close to your price point on PC if you're interested in selling no games at all um or you can really reduce the price of your PC game but then that's not what your PC game is worth you did that price analysis on Steam and determined it's worth $15 so why would you not charge $15 for it um I don't really have a good answer for how you can do a crossplatform pricing um except that justify your PC price give the PC player something that the mobile players don't have or break out your content for mobile such that eventually to get all the content that they would get on PC they are paying somewhere near that price um crossplatform pricing is just sort of an unpleasant situation and it's important to go on really all the stores that you

can um these are our Revenue sources for 2014 we made about 60% of our revenue on um PC and about 40% on mobile and really that 40% on mobile if we hadn't have done a crossplatform release is probably the difference between us making our second game and not making our second game so it was important for us to be on both platforms um I I think the best practice now is PC first use that to build up some audience for your mobile game and then release on mobile later after you've had the time to really work out the Kinks for a mobile release um they're a lot more complicated than a PC release a lot of the time um just little further breakdown um about 40% 45% of our uh PC Revenue came straight from Steam um Android and was 10% and then iOS was 30% this year

we're seeing the Android come a lot closer to um the iOS and my best is that those start to converge and get closer as time goes on and also if you look at that Indie gamand number um Indie gamand is a smaller small fairly small stor in community but you really see the impact that our community building and our work with their Community had on our sales on India game stand there's still even what eight nine months from release a big chunk of our revenues we got featured yay both Apple and Android um but we're a $4 title $5 title um I know how much my game is really um and so that meant we got released and we were up there for the period of our featuring and because we were a more expensive title we didn't have the momentum the buzz that apple looks for to repeat the featuring so it was really great in getting our um first Spike of

sales up there while we were new and spreading some word of mouth but it wasn't like raining money cuz we got featured unfortunately um and getting featured isn't like black magic Apple and Google have business bis Dev guys who go out and look for games that really showcase their platform um so we just found a bis Dev guy that knows their bis Dev guys we said can you talk about our game to them and they said sure and we got featured um there are a few annoying things you just have to make sure that you follow all the platform rules like for us that meant the annoying back button on Android was a lot of work to get to do what Google thinks the back button on Android should do so just be warned for little pitfalls like that so then you release your game and this is really you know it's the hockey stick it's what you hope for and Dread at the same time so you yay release the Kraken game's out there and then over the first few week over the first week or so you see a go like this as you fall off the front pages as as the buzz dies down and now it is your

job unfortunately to fog the tail forever and ever and ever those little bumps are the regular sales that you see go on um just make sure that you're in them they're not automatic you have to opt in um and they're a natural way of getting your game out there and increasing the tail that little bump right there was our DLC launch and it was a nice little bump in sales but really I think the impact of the DLC was if you look at the level of the tail after the DLC like that sort of base level and then before you'll see how it's come up um so the DLC really helped get just to raise the tide and that one actually just happened and this was cool this was our first out of ban sale like there was nothing else on sale and it's February like it's a slow month um and there's sort of a reservoir of um wish lists and

recommendations that people build up in their queue and then you go on sale when there's not a lot going on and all of a sudden you have your best month since launch um so you know just be aware that that can be powerful and um don't schedule it during Christmas another part of fogging the tail can be ads um we did some ads when there was nothing going on we had nothing to announce nothing to say other than and play our game those didn't really do so great um we found that when we treated ads as a communication device when we had something to say when we had something some kind of urgency they really started to work better so on sale 40% off new game um play now this one performed pretty well because it had an urgency and it had a message to communicate and also like ads are you talking yeah you're paying for it but are you talking to a community of

people so make sure that your ads are consistent with your voice um and for us that meant bad puns um the game writer me um really liked these kind of terrible puns like these um ready for a minor distraction or loads of fun we found that the more that we went oh God that's bad while we were writing them the better they performed so like the ready for minor distraction did great we also had fully loaded simulation and a whole bunch of other bad load puns and then really it's just keep at it um rev reviews and ratings are important um you can't really respond to review to to player reviews but just try to keep on top of them you know if you see that you're like at that cusp between mixed and mostly positive see what you can do to get it into mostly positive it helps your sales was a great deal we had some people on our steam

forums and Community say can we have trading cards sure you can have trading cards I don't know if I can quantify that it bumped sales any but I know it helped the community we had a lot of people oh trading cards cool thank you we also noticed that we were selling a lot of games in Germany but our game was only in English so we did a German localization and Germany went from being sort of three or four in sales to being a really strong number two behind the United States we sell more games in Germany than we do anywhere except the US and then we also noticed that people in France weren't playing our game very much um France is a big country with a big economy and a lot of people and a lot of Gamers so we said let's try localizing our game in French and see how that does um and that just came out on February 13th so we don't have a lot of solid data but so far anecdotally it looks like we're doing very well in France and French speaking countries so we are indeed making game number two we sort of did all these

things and um we are making our second indie game um you can go check it out um it's very early in the Prototype phase and we hope to be talking about it next GDC um so that's about all I have today I have some steam keys for 1849 up here if anybody wants one afterwards um so yeah if anybody has any questions come to the Center and I'll try my best to [Applause] answer hi you mentioned that going to Expos wasn't a great way to get uh test plays on your simulation games did you find uh a venue to find test players for a Sim game that's more appropriate yeah Early Access like I said was a great help because people played our game lot there um we also bothered a lot of our friends

and family that are also into simulation games um the email the email list helped too like people came to us and said cool game how can I help how can I be involved and we said you want to play test a broken game and they that that was a really good way of doing it oh great thanks uh if I can go back to your anecdote in the beginning the imagine you just quit your job scenario did you guys uh spend any time looking for investors to help fund your game in the beginning or was it totally self-funded no it it's all bootstrapped okay um yeah we wanted to we really wanted to make our first game really our game and you know if you go to an investors you might end up making their game gotta thanks hi this was very helpful thank you um I hope this isn't a breach but I'm a composer so if anyone is looking for music for their game um I'm staying in this room for the next talk so come see me thanks I have a question about uh getting Outreach uh when you say you you went out to

um things like rock paper shotgun polygon yeah was this like uh all online you know you're bring them with emails hitting them up on Twitter or are you like meeting them in person you know or maybe all of the above you know do everything you can yeah really all of the above um when you're making this game we still lived in San Francisco so it was possible for us to talk to some of the press more directly um but it was a lot of emails a lot of tradition PR where we would do announcements and press releases that they would then follow up on with us and our consultant um but yeah everything like if you find out a you know a game journalist like just talk about your game talk about what they like too so make out a conversation all right so I noticed this talk was obviously that you did a game in a year um you're now making your second game have you changed that scope to be a larger amount of time so you can have things like your multiplayer features now that you're not Starving Artists or

so to speak a little bit better off than you were before definitely uh one of our second game that we're making is one of the games that we put aside like we don't have time to make that in a year so that's one of the games we're building next it's probably going to take about two years hopefully but we're keeping the same sort of urgency like it's important to say we have two years to make this game and really like we kind of view it as like we're starting over every time when we're when it comes to our game we're not counting on that first game to keep keep us going the second game needs to keep us going now so yeah just keep urgent hopefully this isn't too personal but uh I'm interested in when you first set out uh were you venture back or how did you put food on the table for a year uh while you were keeping this going you mentioned savings but yeah remember that like after years of planning like we this is something that we sort of I think four or five years ago said that we wanted to do and it was saving and working and keeping like that long-term goal in plan in in View and that's really what only had a year cuz you can

only save so much money thanks okay I'm getting the so I can do one more quick okay uh what kind of um uh work did you contract out and then how did you go about finding those contractors uh it was Art and art um you don't want to see any of the stuff that we draw um and really it was like our own personal Network like the artist that we work with worked with for the first game and we're still working with um we found it through uh actually her Twitter feed um and we just like I said we love your stuff would you be interested in working with us and um we got lucky essentially cool and the other artist was a friend from an from an old job who wasn't looking for work so yeah we minded our networks thank you [Applause] everybody