Taking Desktop Dungeons from Prototype to Pre-Order to Steam

[Music] sorry that you guys couldn't get into Indy soapbox I guess but thanks for coming we appreciate it my name is Danny and I'm Marc and we're from South Africa literally the other side of the world there were involved in a growing in growing and local games industry and running qcf design where we made a game called desktop dungeons desktop dungeons is a quick play puzzle roguelike from the mind of Rodin you bear DeeDee challenges you to complete single screen dungeons with weird heroes by defeating enemies in order to become powerful enough to take on a boss and sell their mounted head to upgrade your kingdom unlock more heroes dungeons and loot along the way the kicker is that exploration is a resource you regenerate health and mana when you uncover new terrain people love arguing that it's not a roguelike so desktop dungeons first released on the 7th of January

2010 and it looked like that then it released again two days later twice more the following week five times over the next month and 16 more times up until the end of 2010 in 2011 the game took a brief break from being continuously released to win an IGF Ward for excellence in design so that was fun and then it started right up again in June releasing another 134 times once a week for two and a half years since releasing on Steam on November 7th in 2013 the releases have slowed down a little but we're planning another one next week and then two more for your favorite mobile devices come April we often get asked if the game is out yet you see desktop dungeons was in open development and at first this was quite by accident but once we saw what we've done we doubled down and just stuck with it because open development is actually a really powerful way to make games and it's a really really interesting and

useful mindset that we wish more Indies would use so time for some definitions and controversial stations to open development is putting the latest version of your game out there for people to play and constantly collecting their feedback open development is not designed by committee the wisdom of crowds or abandoning your design to metrics it needs engaged game designers to make it work it's not about giving people what they want it's about getting them to react the way you want them to open development is a methodology that helps you focus on the real problems experienced by your players and constantly iterate on those solutions instead of doing weird things like optimizing your renderer for the fifth time and open development is not Kickstarter surprisingly enough Kickstarter needs you to tell potential backers exactly what you're going to liver upfront or else open development is about exploring your game design with your players as you're building the game

open development is a great way to greenlight projects and make sure you spend most of your time working on games with potential opening your prototypes from the start lets you kill the ones that suck earlier open development is not early access seems that the access is a great platform to open development but you can't put prototypes on there so it's probably not a great place to start and open development is easier on PC while maybe you might be able to develop open on mobile or consoles it's really really hard to keep your game up-to-date on those platforms and on PC you can literally just make a prototype shove it out there and see what people think and open development is not asking to be learned yeah okay desktop dungeons was cloned as there's nearly every Flamm beer game but the reason you know about this is because of open development urban development and being open is actually a really great way to defend against learning because people know about your game it's out there it's visible cloners can't say they didn't

see it they can't lie and your community is going to back you up if push comes to shove now that you disagree with a few of our statements why should anyone try to be an open developer yeah being open helps you design better games there's no denying the value of play testing knowing how your players are interacting with your game is a must and taking your game open well that's just play testing on a massive scale it may not always be in the room to watch every player but the amount of information you receive will more than make up for it the cycle of a release play tests release does a strange thing to your design it gives you the luxury of knowing you can eventually know if your UI is clear know if your game is balanced or know if your progression is engaging you just have to keep releasing the game and asking questions you can ask players about something specific sure but you can also let the gameplay

ask questions for you we first learned this completely by accident when we stumbled upon a way to weed out controversial strategies now sorry weed out overpowered strategies we were trying to slow down our most hardcore players because they were destroying new content the moment we put it out there so we added a new boss the indomitable who had to be killed 100 times we literally thought this guy would be impossible to beat so they beat it in a week all sorts of crazy edge case strategies were being used and we could easily see the ones that were overpowered and nerf them after that we started releasing all of our content at a ridiculous difficulty level this made something else interesting happen because new stuff came out crazy difficult our hardcore players with B lines straight for it with like new strats ready to go and they try to be the first to beat the new challenge so it focused our players but it also gated many of them at the same time we could slowly lower the difficulty of that piece of content and select fit naturally into our progression with players who could who could defeat it

sorry oh all right oh it gated players and that's way too much so having a ton of players is really useful but you still need to be a designer the community doesn't know everything about your game being open lets you refine how you communicate with them inside of the game we have a playable hero class called the monk which for the longest time we considered underpowered which for the longest time was was considered by our player base underpowered we knew the monk was a good class but he couldn't convince our players so we made a lot of little changes I'm a lie just so we knew the

mocha is a good class but our players didn't we made a lot of little changes and eventually someone picked up on how to play this class all right and they just stomped everything they were just destroying everything in their path but what we did is and we balanced the monk back down but the way that our players had been talking to each other about how to play the monk effectively that's now part of the description for the class so maximising open design to get the most out of designing in the open you need to be ok with players being upset players telling you everything is perfect won't help you solve problems when players give you suggestions don't just blindly implement them look deeper into the root of their problem players will ask for things that you know aren't a good idea let us say no but be ready to explain if your claim game plays well but looks terrible that's ok you can always make it look better later so being open also helps your marketing efforts and it's probably

everybody's favorite thing but discoverability is one of the biggest problems you'll face is an indie and the overcrowding in the marketplace is not gonna go away anytime soon so we all know that releasing a game and then only trying to figure out how you're going to market it to people is suicide and if you're gonna be competing with all these other games anyway why not sooner rather than later enter the superfan these people are gonna email press about your game they will unapologetically badger their friends to play this cool new thing they found and they'll post about it anywhere they have a voice they are great and you want to have as many of them as possible we can actually trace desktop dungeons as early press success back to one specific person this guy Duke of prunes he reached out to indie games calm Rock Paper Shotgun tick sauce and generally made a nuisance of himself to anyone that we listen we love him indie games are calm covered us continuously and that dev centric attention probably

helped us do well in the IGF Rock Paper Shotgun has written literally the nicest things about desktop dungeons and they've been the one outlet that has picked up on every late or badly-written press release that we put out Derek you drew some pixel art for this weird prototype that he saw on thick sauce he also helped us define the look of the game later on by helping us find the artists that worked on the beta for us so you want superfans open development is a great way to find them they love unearthing neat concepts and they want to be the ones to tell the world about this thing they found they're attracted to concepts it's like prototype stage and if the current version looks bad they don't really care as long as something in that prototype tickles them they will love it and they're in it for the long haul they want to be there while a game is sort of growing and becoming something much bigger than when it started so they basically want access to you and your game as soon as possible and you're not going to be in control of when or how your game attracts super

fans but you're never gonna attract any if your game isn't out there and if you do open up your game and absolutely nobody likes it cool work on something else if people do pick it up then your marketing practically writes itself as your players and fans tell each other exactly what they liked about your game desktop dungeons is only a quick play puzzle roguelike because that's what people told each other it was so in order to maximize open marketing you want to do things like support the people that want to make things to do with your game which means hosting wiki's retweeting videos holding fan art contests we even had a DD fan try to make an html5 version of the game and it was a bit bad so we send him the source and then we hosted the game for him and it got a continuously better and now it's a great way for people to play the game please make it easy to be reached have a visible email address on the page that your game is played on or wherever people download it that people can send to each other so when somebody new finds your game they know who to talk to you desktop dungeons

is often attributed to Derek you because on the game itself it says tileset by Derek you and that's in a color that draws people's attention they ignore the rest of it have a press kit and use alerts like Google Alerts and your Twitter searches and everything else they really really help you find people talking about your game right now and that's a good way to learn things plus people will always enjoy having a developer interact with them on this game their thing like usually whenever we talk to people who are playing the free version that turns into like five or ten sales pretty much immediately that snowballs from there the open helps you test your game to the breaking point so how many machines do you have to test on your dev you know computers right I bet you manage ten maybe twenty how much time would it take you to set up all those machines how often would you actually test on all those rigs well sure you know where I'm going with this being an open development means that every release is tested by your entire community and they will do that on more

machines than you could ever hope to manage they will also try all of the crazy that you are never gonna gonna think about trying desktop dungeons had 15,000 piata players during the beta and they found a lot of bugs for instance our assumption about reasonable save game sizes proved slightly inaccurate DD saves or regenerative we didn't want to reset anyone's progress if we took things out or change the games during beta sales were also stored in our server because the game ran in unities Web Player and it wasn't like the saves are inefficient our tests with thousands of games have stored in two to three Meg's but some players were downloading orders of magnitude more than that every time causing memory memory issues and timeouts and stuff it turns out that if we hadn't been open we don't even seen similar symptoms months after release when people were at the like 200 plus hours of play time and that would have been pretty terrible that fix is now one

of just nine hundred bugs that's in our bug tracker that we closed before release that much testing meant the eventual steam release was much smoother than expected the contrast that we have is our Linux build which we released off the PC and Mac we couldn't test it on the web pet player despite being less than 1% of our total sales more people posted post release bugs on Linux there for PC and Mac combined here are some ways to get the most out of your testing make sure everyone is playing the latest version there is no value in getting reports of bugs that already been fixed make sure your game reports crashes back to you tons of players are gonna play and just assume that bugs are gonna get fixed so you can't rely on everyone to report their bugs and have a single thread or reporter for your bugs you don't to go trawling through your forums to find every bug that's out there so being open often can help you get paid to so I guess that sounds pretty awesome

but if you think about it that might be a little bit counterintuitive why would giving something away for free for a pretty long time help you earn money two reasons obscurity kills and there are a lot more ways to get paid than you think if you jealously guard what you're working on until it's done and release it you're gonna have to spend a ton marketing your game to people and if you do there's no guarantee they're gonna like the thing after they see it and buy it to us that feels pretty risky so we'd rather do that green-lighting thing and find out early if people like the seed of our game and let them spread that seed to other people if we see how many people they spread it to we know how well it might do in the future the free version of desktop dungeons is still downloaded today players often recommend it to other players that are on the fence that tends to happen quite a bit and yes people will get annoyed that you're charging for something that used to be free or saying that what you're doing now is not that wonderful but your players tend to make your day in the

strangest ways and selling your game means that you need to understand the value of the players seeing it confusion over value is at the heart of why games are marketed with these weird ancient technical bullet points and weird bargains about the price of cups of coffee or movies if you don't know what makes you gain valuable you're gonna have a hard time selling the thing so the right time to monetize your game is when people enjoy it enough to ask you for money or to ask you how they can give you money for it sorry if they ask you for money you've done something wrong but every game in team is different with different needs in different player communities and different people that enjoy the game so there's no one-size-fits-all approach to getting paid for an open game exactly how you start monetizing your game is going to depend on your own development situation and what you're trying to make and that's why so much innovation in getting paid for games comes out of games that are currently in open development or have been in open development maybe increasing your prices

you add content it's gonna work for you all rolling your own Kickstarter to a tier driven thing or maybe a pre-order beta or any access system would have hordes of players replaying your game who knows maybe you've got a great idea for some other way to fund your development by a patreon or hio or some system that we've never heard of yet because it doesn't exist whatever it is I suggest treating it like everything else in open development build a prototype test it and see where it goes from there and trying to get paid is actually what took desktop dungeons back to open development because we stopped just are just sort of before the IGF award around that time after a euro serf releasing the game for free we felt we understood we wanted to take it and we were pretty sure that if we closed this thing and worked on it furiously we'd finish it in a couple of months except by the middle of 2011 we were dead broke and the game wasn't done yet but it was still earning accolades desktop dungeons was invited to e3 as part of the indicate showcase and we had no way to get there so in desperation and because PayPal had

literally just launched in South Africa we started offering pre-orders just as I climbed onto a plane heading to e3 by the time I got to LA we could afford not only the trip but also the next year of development time so that was a pretty good flight giving our fans away to pay us only worked because we'd been open I mean if we hadn't we wouldn't even have fans so we figured that out took the game back open again and we had we didn't look back after that point so maximizing your chances of not starving revolve mainly around waiting so wait as long as you can before you start taking money that way you're more likely to know what people find valuable in your game and try and let people pay you more the CD pre-orders had a support the devs tier that was twice the pre-order price so instead of ten dollars it was twenty and more than 50% of the pre-order players bought that game bought that and because they liked us they liked the game and as much as it feels like you

should be trying to discount your game upfront resist the urge discounts are for when you can no longer change your game to make it better or to make that value more visible so don't do weird things like releasing your game or releasing your pre-orders with like a bundle deal or something like that that will literally kill you rather focus on producing the best game you can if you need to charge more for it charge more for it you will get more interested players maybe not as many but they'll be more interested hopefully we've convinced you to try out this open thing so what do you need for open development well you need something playable you need to put your prototypes out there and see the ones that are getting the most attention and being shared take those ones further need to control your communication channels no you don't control the steam forums what you want is players coming to your site talking to you on your phone you probably also want the game itself to be sending you information you need a release schedule

having a schedule keeps you on track and gives your players something to look forward to you need someone that loves people for playing your game they've got to help the community grow they have to be a gardener not like a PR drone if this isn't you hire someone you need to be flexible and capable of change responding to your community is going to take your game to places you never imagined you have to be open to opportunities and you need to get very very zen if somebody's angry about a bug and it's gonna happen or a payment problem or anything like that just take a step back breathe and formulate a calm response love and tolerate the out of everyone so open development may not be a panacea for every problem India's faced but what it does offer are ways to be more efficient with the resources that you have available mainly by allowing a community to help you solve problems in the development is risky

enough as it is so anything that makes life a little bit easier it's probably something it should be explored interestingly enough you don't have to be 100 percent open or streaming every second of your day to the interwebs just in order to make this work it's possible to be as open as you're comfortable with for as long as you're comfortable with on your current project as long as you're getting things out of the relationship with your players everything is good and we suspect that open development is actually going to be a large part of any development in the future especially for new developers who don't necessarily have reputations and we hope you're as keen to try it after some of these things and questions that you guys might have as we are to keep doing it on our next projects we're actually so used to being open that we gave a version of this talk last week so thanks for enjoying the currently in progress version and please leave feedback on the evaluations and come chat to us in the wrap-up room or ask your questions now and we'll be sure to use that in next week's release of this same talk so

questions if anyone has [Applause] yeah my apologies for not getting the time line right or if I've missed something with the talk but it sounds like you started the game as open your prototype tit then you went closed for a little bit then you're like oh we need money so then you made it open again but when you went open again you made a gate so a pay gate so it's like your open development but yet you have to pay to be the open built it's not like you guys had the game free out there the whole time and you know anybody could get it it was you had to pay for early access and he also said in the beginning that it's not early access so do you excuse me did you use early access and have your own pay gate as well a little bit okay so um we so is the question why did we say open development isn't Steam early access but

we still had our own pay gate okay cool so the reason we say it's not only access is because people tend to release on early access way too early it's often a thing I mean like Steam is a firehose of users you do not want to send that at like a prototype that is not going to catch a bunch of people up front like maybe it's a good prototype and you know two out of every 50 people are gonna really love it and that's like a good rate for a prototype most people pay everything so that's cool but if you that prototype could be made better and better and better until it's gonna catch like say 2 out of every 10 people that's the stage you want to put it on early access because it's as this firehose of users so do early access once you've been doing kind of like some sort of open development even if it's a gated pay system on your own site for a while until you understand your game that's kind of the reason we were talking about that does that answer the question

who is it it no one else all right just to preempt one question that's probably gonna like bounce around a bunch of people's heads you can make a narrative heavy game open you turn you can it's just maybe you don't open it to game players maybe you open it to people who are on a writing forum or maybe you open it to other people who are focusing on narrative there are communities that you can use there are places that you can test things on in fact these days I would say it's probably a really good idea to make a narrative game open because with inclusivity and diversity and everything else being such a big focus as a single writer you're not going to be very good at that and it's best to get more voices and more people playing and looking into your story and everything else you're focusing on so try and make narrative stuff open I think it would be interesting yeah thanks for coming to our talk instead of the soapbox

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