The Business & Development of #Sworcery

[Music] you can get calories and caffeine in a bit but Nathan Vella currently president of Cathy and believe is his title Gabby's been around seven eight years they've successfully thrown off the shackles of publisher funding and are now doing more and more of their own stuff including the awesome swords and sorcery who here's played this who here's stuck on Android and wishes they could play it yeah and with that Nathan will take it away nathan bell everybody thank you alrighty just switch over the pit - okay I'm no not two one go alright we got we got a dancing naked bear that's perfect alrighty so we'll do if you want you can just take a peek at that for a little bit okie doke so a very quick

introduction because introductions are not interesting I'm Nathan Bella I'm the co-founder and president of capi you can follow me on the Twitter's so much in the way of super brothers sword & Sworcery EP I have a nice and long title for this talk it's called uh perhaps the time of miracles was at hand the business and development of super brothers sword & Sworcery EP with songs and sounds by Jim Guthrie really though it's like a super long winded way for me to say that I'm gonna just discuss what I think were some of the most useful learnings on the business and development side of the game so this talk is kind is focused obviously how many people here have made are making planning to make or eventually think they will make an iOS game all right so this is relevant I feel much better about myself now thank you for not going to the iOS talks and instead being here

so super really certain sorcery had a whole bunch of people involved super brothers is Craig Craig's over there copies creative director Chris played a huge role Chris is around here somewhere there is a couple programmers John Mara and Franky Lyon we had some QA people that helped out a little bit my role was a little bit different I I actually didn't really ever touch the game I didn't really make the game instead I focused my efforts on ensuring the project was a development and business success and while you know using the word miracle is a little bit of an exaggeration it was still kind of a miraculous event for for everyone involved so this is my favorite slide of the talk it's where I brag a whole lot so but it's actually really important because I want to qualify why I think that this game was a success and I think it's kind of an important thing to recognize because there's different components of

the success and they all kind of feed into the business and development so first of all it sold over 350,000 copies in just under a year that it's been available that's crazy it's been rated a time and most of those are five-star reviews which is super awesome source we've got a ton of critical praise that made us feel really good about ourselves Metacritic lists all kinds of fun Awards and one of the more interesting things is not only did the mainstream kind of gaming press cover it but the non gaming press and the more typical mainstream press covered as well the London Times The New York Times Mashable Fast Company a whole bunch of music blogs even a ton of art sites covered sorcery seriously not just as a video game but of the piece as a piece of culture and lastly sorceries been cited many times in the important discussions surrounding games as a medium the massive and insane games as art debate and also the amazing

disposability of iOS games debate so does anybody want me to give this slide again I really like this slide a lot okay okay I'll skip it so the big question here is how did we turn a wolf 'le risky project into a big success what were the kind of like the key points and how did we leverage those key points now let me kind of again go back into qualifying stuff why do I think this was a World War fully risky project it's not an arcade game it's not twitchy it's not stoppi snappy it's not the style of game you typically see in the top 10 or top 20 or top 100 of the App Store charts you know some people might play it on the toilet but very few people I think plated significant periods of time on the toilet unlike a lot of iOS games it's relatively long-form it's not built for micro play sessions well you could you could sit down and play it for one screen at a time that's not the way the experience was meant to be had and I don't think that that's the way the game

entices you to experience it from the development perspective it was a really long I Oh s project I mean I think a lot of people have heard a lot of talk about iOS games being developed in one line circuit one month or two months or you know if you're Zack gauge like six hours so for us to go over 1.5 years was extremely risky and also very rare it had a very very large comparative to a lot of iOS games budget even with the collaborative development style budget still ended up probably around $200,000 which is nothing to balk at when dealing in the iOS space another big risk on the project was the fact that it was both a first game for both super brothers and for Jim Guthrie obviously first projects are extremely hard and everybody who's gone through that brought that process of making their first game you know that it's a very dangerous rabbit hole to go down and to have two people going down

that rabbit hole at the same time on the same project provides a heck of a lot of risk now the game itself is often obscure it's intentionally self-aware and the single biggest focus on the game is style and music all of those should set off huge warning alarms when we're thinking about the iOS space also there is a relatively small amount of birds there is pretty much no fruit and there's very little water anybody who looks at the charts will understand that that's a joke all right so let's let's look into a few of the these you know specifically now anybody we gave a talk at indicated the kind of covered a bit of the collaboration process but for any of you who are there sorry I'm gonna repeat a bunch of this but deal with it so first and perhaps the most important aspect of sorcery that led to us making a stand out game and a successful game was how we leveraged collaboration of course collaboration isn't anything new in the

independent scene but I do think it's a one of the opportunities that's most unique to the independent scene and be I think a lot of the collaboration in the independent scene happens kinda nepotistic aliy where developer and developer b get together in the case of sorcery it was collaboration between an artist illustrator designer and a musician who had never made music for games and I think that it's also important to say that this was actually you know true crap collaboration this was people getting together in a room and listening to the the ideas that they each had Jim's role on the project wasn't just like you make music Jim would come down to the studio sit in on meetings and provide real quantifiable feedback and and and ideas for the game itself so why is collaboration so important to business and how does collaboration increase the chances for business success well first there's a really important point here that I need to make

and it's making games that stand out it is surprisingly important for the business side of game development especially for independent developers I think it's a it's one of those things where making a game is just as much about making a game that you care about as it is about making a game that you care about enough to make it stand out and so what we did was we brought in different people that provided new perspectives on the actual development process so the games director artists and writers super brothers and the gates position Jim Guthrie actually came in and provided their own unique piece of standout power and actually built that into the game from the very ground up so collaboration with Jim gave us standout music but it also provided this unique perspective that we could make a game about music then we could actually develop an entire an entire title around the music itself next using collaboration as a core business and development component means

that the vision of the game is inherently built into the team you don't have an idea build a team around it and hope that you can spread that idea and vision out to the people in the team the people in the team are the vision there's a lot of time and a lot of money spent trying to convince people what the game is about trying to convince you know employees or friends that you're working with it what your idea really is but since the genesis of sorcery was you know people coming together and collaborating on an idea it meant that no one ever had to really question what the idea was and it really even though later on I'm gonna talk about how much Bob we went over budget and over schedule and all that kind of stuff this part of it I think actually saved us a ton of development time and a ton of money because we didn't have to worry that nobody got it now speaking straight from the like pay and money standpoint collaboration has a huge benefit everyone shares the financial risk this share in the

opportunity and they also share in the opportunity cost so basically a it means that if you get people to truly collaborate with you you can find ways to solve that I don't have enough money to make my game because everybody can get in from the ground up and know that making something together is is is the benefit has the ability to build a financial success collaboration also adds a lot of firepower it means you get the supreme talent without having to actually go out and hire them so when we started the project we immediately got my favorite pixel artist without having to go out and look for a favorite pixel artist for the project you don't have to show I also you also don't have to shove an employee or a friend into a role that they don't fit it means that if you have an amazing chiptunes musician who's your best friend or something and you really want to you really want music for your project but you really want that music to be you know ambient or or maybe some

like drum and bass or something you don't have to force them to make something that they're not actually good and that really does avoid the risk of somebody really resenting the situation that they're in on a project now a really scary part about collaborating is the fact that you're likely adding people to a game that have never actually made a game before and especially when you're talking about collaboration with people outside of the Indies dev scene well super brothers had spent a bunch of time toiling away at koi Canada he had never actually made a full game Jim had never actually made music for a game although he had made different formats of music for commercials or for him himself but the good thing is the risk can actually be mitigated because you're adding experienced people or somebody who's made a project before and kind of having those people back those people up you know when when and when mistakes are made somebody's there to say like you know hey no worries he was the direction we can actually go and I think that in a

kind of weird way although for a significant part of the project we weren't doing this I think that you know cappy's having Cappy having made iOS games before solved some of the inexperience problems that we had with you know bringing fresh people into making a game alright let's move forward so now there's there's a kind of an interesting distinction that I'd like to make here and the distinction is there's there's you know collaboration and there's contributors and and another really huge component of the success of sword and sorcery was that we opened up the development of the game and almost the entire development process two contributors it's a no cost no risk high reward bonus to having friends and the best way that we could possibly think of to you know find contributors was to go out for a beer with people talk about the project with people make some friends with people and then if they were at all interested figure out if

they were interested enough to help us out a little bit here and there so for example our buddy Corey Schmidt's decided on you know we're whorl friends and can I contribute to the project oh I'll make this awesome print that you can see right here that ended up in the first run of the sword & Sworcery LP or my pal Ron caramel I could send him a message and today I have no clue what I'm doing Ron save me and Ron would offer a piece of advice and we could figure stuff out and it meant that none of these people were costing money none of these people were doing it for the wrong reasons and all of them were providing a real tangible benefit to the project so we're gonna have awesome fire flame effects going on your poll so people like Brandon Boyer Robert Ashley gorsh MIT's scientific Ron Carmel charleen Shaw Clive Holden mark Rob Oh Craig's brother Mac even people like Penn Ward who makes Adventure Time all got in touch with us or were friends of ours that we got in touch with and we could actually you

know when we had a question we could find an answer that wasn't just coming from internally and I think that's also super important because everybody knows that at a certain point in your project you're so deep in your project that you don't know what you're doing you don't know if it's good you don't know if there's even an end to it so having those outside perspectives really helped a lot now that's mark Robbo doing a pop a wheelie by the way he's a badass so another kind of like weird thing and I always kind of feel strange talking about this because it sounds like I'm totally using people and maybe we work but one of these weird benefits of having people contribute to your projects is it grows the number of eyeballs on your project and it grows them in the best possible way contributes contributors will only contribute to your project if they actually believe in the project so no one's going to donate time or effort or something awesome to a project that they think sucks and if they believe in those

project they're going to talk about that project they're going to be interested in being involved and interesting they're interested in spreading their involvement we had a whole ton of people comment that they couldn't believe that log fellow was actually voiced by Robert Ashley and that was something that got talked a lot about a lot and that was that was an amazing scenario where you know Craig talks to Robert Ashley Robert actually decides to you know record a whole bunch of joke statements it was as a dry run for getting a voice to log fella and then Craig decided that those were actually perfect for the voice and there was no final recording and the it provides this kind of unique thing because any fan of robert actually is going to hear robert actually talking about the game because he actually really cared about the game further and and i think most importantly it has this amazing fringe benefit of community building it extends the reach of the entire independent game scene from just you know the the people in the

scene to people outside of it to it it draws in people of different talents and and of different interests and and lets them experience how amazing this community actually is and entices them to become more active in that community so the next key component that i'm going to talk about is making the concrete decision to be risky games probably shouldn't just trip and fall and end up being risky you should probably go into a project at least on a high level knowing what you're getting into and you should know that a risky project is risky and you should make the the definite decision to leverage that risk to your benefit so I personally believe that one of the scariest parts of the massive success of the iOS platform is that it's taught everyone and in a lot of ways especially independent developers that they should try to make

games for everyone seems like an obvious choice because games like Angry Birds and fruit ninja and cut the rope and I could probably list a ton of others sold 10 million 20 million copies but believe it or not I actually think that that's a really really bad business move everyone actually isn't a demographic everyone is not a target and everyone are not the people that you care about as a game developer when you say everyone you so when you say oh I'm making a game for everyone it actually means that you're not really making a game for anyone everyone wants to make a million selling game that's a fact and that's totally cool but the problem with the hit based mentality is it puts you in direct competition with all the other people who have the same hit based mentality the people that aren't creative enough to make a unique game and the people who aren't willing to the risk necessary to develop something that actually has a soul or as fresh or flies in the face of conventional wisdom internally a copy we always talked a lot

about playing the iPhone lottery and basically that's what happens when you try to compete against everyone else who's trying to do the same thing you're trying to make the next Angry Birds so what you're doing is basically walking up to a slot machine putting the budget of your game into the slot pulling a lever and praying to God you get three cherries in reality one in 10,000 maybe you do okay maybe even worse than that I don't even know the odds but instead I really think that sorcery provides some proof that there's another Avenue to success on the iOS platform and I do think that this actually does translate as well to other just digital distribution platforms it's not I owe a specific necessarily but because I should only talk about what I know that's all I'm gonna do so I believe that you know there is that kind of different path success on iOS and to be clear making a sports game or games for fans of arcade games isn't an issue it's too wide it's

too generic and it and it doesn't actually allow you to do any direct speaking to the consumer base for sorcery the niche that we targeted was I'm going to air quote here a culturally literate audience who are interested in style the blending of games in art and who want music to be a core component of game design this is a very specific audience or so we thought when we started making the game we kind of thought yeah there's that's probably 20,000 people I don't know maybe enough people that we could probably make our money back on the project but we also didn't know if there was actually two point five million people in that niche or 20 million people in that niche but we knew that it was a specific enough group of people that they would understand what we were saying to them another great example might be Kairosoft's micromanagement games where you know to me that style of game is extremely kind enishi yet it's you know games like game dev story have been massive financial successes what we've learned and what I believe to be

factually true is that due to the massive proliferation and popularity of iOS devices you can have the seemingly smallest niche and that niche can actually be quite large oh cool my my graph is gone that's okay dude it's a mushroom there supposed to be some numbers on that slide but it's not there anymore that that mushroom actually represents a graph that shows that two-thirds of our sales were on iPad and universal so just let's we'll put on we'll put on goggles and pretend that we see that so as I mentioned we were targeting literate players because of this we knew we could take steps after that to actually understanding who the audience for the game actually were and making real smart business decisions based on that so one belief that came out of knowing who we were targeting was that many players who would care about sorcery would probably want to play it on an

iPad now through this we decided to like spend most of our time leading up to the game's launch making sure that the iPad version was as perfect as possible now kind of in conflict with traditional business sense which would say there's 10 times more iPhones and there are iPads why not put it out for everything but for us it was really more important to make sure that the people who we thought would be kind of like the core consumer to get the best experience possible first and in this case our hunch turned out to be pretty right because the game did extremely well hit number four on iPad before even getting featured and perhaps one of the most interesting things is two-thirds of all of our sales were on iPad or once we turned at Universal Universal and even more than that over three-quarters of the entire revenue the project was generated from those builds so when we went out and said we think that these people are going to be on those platforms because we want to play it on those platforms I

think that that turned out to be correct and another kind of interesting fact about sword-and-sorcery on cut the kind of knowing your audience side is that only 10% of our total sales were generated during sale periods so even when we put the game on sale like crazy it still really didn't mean that much to us from like big kind of like financial success standpoint we knew that our the people that we were making the game for were you know the people in this room and the people like us and we knew that if they were interested in this project they would be interested enough to buy it at the price that we thought was correct for it and and I think that that's pretty awesome now like I I definitely don't want to stand up here and be that dude it says like you should make a game this way this is the right way to do it only do it this way everybody you know should be making the games they want to make but I also think that if you love your project enough you should be putting the effort in to make it stand out and it's very

important that your game does that that your game does stand out because as we all know digital platforms especially the App Store are a sea of games and basically every day that sees tide rises is ten thousand or whatever it is more games get added to the store in the case of certain sorcery you know we're talking specifically about iOS but I also do think that this is you know happening slowly but surely on to other digital distribution platforms as well and the interesting thing about digital platforms is that while all the games are competing with each other most of them are actually slightly different variations of the last one you know shooter ABC x y&z or semi generic real-time strategy ABC or XYZ D and I personally think that the gamers out there are smart enough to know that going into a store they're they know that they're getting into a situation where they're going on to a platform that has thousands and thousands of

games that are almost exactly the same different and risky games in reality are a very much rare thing on iOS I I'm gonna throw some numbers based on a complete and under guess I think maybe one to two percent on of all games on iOS fall into that risky category so when standing out is so critical is making something risky really that risky or is it actually riskier make something that doesn't stand out something that is kind of more generic or making design or business decisions to make your game appeal to a wider audience thus watering it down and eliminating some of the perceived risk but actually making it have much less if no chance of standing out on the platform so the reason for this is pretty simple there are a large subset of gamers who

actually just want to play something new if you provide them something worth playing you're not actually competing against 99% of the market you're competing against the other risky games or the 1% sure you might not be reaching for the biggest slice of the money pie but you're ensuring that your project has a really good chance of a being successful and B being successful the right way communicating with people that you care about as a game developer and I think it's it's it's you know really critical to spend the time to think about who you're making the game for I'm totally I love games that are made by people for themselves but the reality is is that even when you're making a game for yourself there's a whole lot of other people out there a lot of them are in this room and a lot of them can't even make it here that are the same as you and they want to play your stuff so the next component of the talk dives into one of the hardest part of making a risky game keeping calm in the face of

insanely ridiculous piles of that you have to eat in order to complete a game and then actually completing it the right way so in short I'm going to use the ridiculously overused adage of keep calm and carry on the game is that everyone in this room are making are probably the easiest games in the world to go over schedule and over budget they're games that are trying to do outside of the known they're usually experimental in some way shape or form and they're pretty much always personal games this is a dangerous concoction that means the schedules get missed and budgets get flushed down the toilet and we all know that this is stressful as the stress isn't just a personal one they're like I need to finish my game or we need to finish our game or were a failure but it's also a business stress so I had this discussion with some friends a while ago and over the course of this discussion I came to this weird

understanding that all independent developers are inherently entrepreneurs there's there's a like a built in entrepreneurial component of making and releasing your own stuff and while you're not necessarily looking at it as an entrepreneurial venture while you're not thinking business first if you're putting out a game to a public or to the public for sale that is something that you kind of have to come to terms with and going over budget going over schedule puts a significant amount of stress on the business component of what you're doing and this stress pretty much exclusively leads to making really stupid calls I am over budget I need to finish the game I don't have any money so I'll sign with the publisher because they're gonna give me money I might even not read the contract because god had just got to finish the game I or another one is I'm over schedule I'm terrified of losing my slot on a distribution platform so I'm just gonna hire a bunch

of really smart people that I don't know to cram on the game for for three months and finish it there's like a laundry list of those kind of like difficult and and and poor business decisions decisions that come out of the stress of your project going longer than you want it to but in the end the only way to finish these games is to sacrifice something the sacrifice is sometimes personal and it's almost always a business sacrifice and but what I mean from sacrifice is you know going to your parents and sucking it up and asking for some money and I know pretty much every project that everybody has ever done has had that moment where you need to go somewhere and do something that requires you to just suck it up and ask for it and that's you know that is a big sacrifice sacrifice pride or it even couldn't you know changing the scope of the project while not losing the vision so

here's what happened to us to the extreme during sorcery so here's a little bit of history here after a Kris and Craig and I sobered up after the meeting that we had at GDC where we were super hammered and yelled each other and grabbed each other and shook each other about making a game we came back to Toronto and started planning it with the actual collaboration it was gonna be sorcery we figured yeah we can make a crazy little iOS game in eight to ten months no problem and we could probably find it with like a hundred and ten thousand dollars that's crazy that's lots of money so you know and we've got a little bit little bit of help from the Ontario government so we figured well this is this isn't risky this is no problem we're gonna we're gonna totally hit this and then this was out of phase during cappy's life when you know if it went over budget it was gonna be a big problem so we put together the igf GDC demo and super brothers are well

in the IDF mobile art award and we were you know riding really high and then we got back to Toronto and started working on the actual game and then seven or eight months passed and we kind of realized that we weren't even half done so we have about two to three months from the original schedule to finish something that we kinda didn't even really know what it was so we were just kind of like trying to find the project trying to figure out what it was and this harsh reality set in this project is going to go really really long and really over budget and so as one of the guys who was overseeing the whole kind of like schedule and financial component of the project I stepped in and started making these kind of crazy plans to slash and burn sorcery to get it out in three months Craig who was already knee-deep in the project and who trusted me kind of came along on that ride and

was like yeah okay let's let's cut all this crazy let's finish it in three months or so and at the time because of the stress we had that seemed like the smart call but it was really the stress talking so in a meeting with copies creator director Chris who at that time was starting to play a giant role in what the project became we kind of came to this understanding and the understanding was that it was a far bigger risk to copy two super brothers into Jim as a business to hustle through some half-baked game and then throw it out we realized that finishing the game finding more money taking more time was actually less of a business risk than throwing out garbage so this risk required way more trust from everyone around we had to trust that Kris and Craig together together could solve many of the design issues around the project I had to trust that Chris playing a larger role in the project could could help be that driving factor that I personally

couldn't be we had to trust that super brothers could keep working on the project when his money had ran out and his soul was was was pushed to the brink when he was at his dark at darkest moment that he could actually go on we had to trust that the Jim would continue to work on the project and be a key part of that project long after his music had actually been created so the real big business decision and the one that had the biggest impact on sorcery was the intense belief in a very simple statement a rush game will not sell as well as a finished game in sine side this is doubly true with the projects that most people in this room create their riskier they're more they're more explorative and and then by definition an unfinished version of that is just not going to touch the right people another purely business component to that decision was these weird but insanely huge intangibles that come out of finishing a project correctly beyond

the critical success of sorcery we've had this kind of beautiful beautiful storm of business benefit all of which comes from the fact that we took the time to actually finish it I'm probably up here talking to everybody because there's this belief that sorcery was a hit in a lot of ways it really was but if you compare it to what a hit is iOS were like 10% of the way to a hit you know 350,000 copies in typical iOS logic does a hit does not make but when we talk about the project with anyone with everyone the tone of the discussion is like wow you guys you guys made something cool and it was a hit and that kind of like really makes it easier to talk about making your next project with anyone whether it's the people around you or it's it's a distributor like the app store or like Steam or like anything else finishing a game especially a risky

game well opens the these immeasurable amount of doors for whatever you want to do next and I really do think that it had this kind of fringe benefit for everybody involved this isn't just a Cappy benefit I mean I think a lot of the reason why Jim got to do such amazing music on indie game the movie was because indie game the movie heard it James and his aunt heard it in sorcery and I think that that happened because the dialogue of the game was one of like this was a success and and I don't know about you guys but I really really like working on projects that when they're done that's the tone and it's really motivational okay so here's a here's you know I feel like I've kind of crammed in like this is my like fifth awesome buzzword in my presentation PR voice what is that that sounds stupid I apologize for that but I think it's a very important lesson that

we learned on the promotional side of the project which was everyone working on the project understood the voice of the project and we could actually make the concrete decision to leverage that all the way through promotion of the game we didn't just finish the game and then throw a bunch of like bullet points like 55 different levels you know you can take a million steps we just we chose to make every part of the promotion of the game an extension of the vision of the game so I got I got a really awesome chart here they I'm sure you all understand immediately right it makes total sense so let me explain this a bit normally and especially when you're working with publishers there's this waterfall flow that starts with the game vision the vision informs of the game and then when the game is done the game itself defines all the promotion for that game and that's kind of stupid in sorcery we took a completely different approach to that typical model so the vision definitely informed the game but the vision also

informed the PR just as much as the game itself or more than the game itself pretty much all of the promotion we did for the game the trailers superbrothers teletext emails even the actual sale periods for the game are tied into the vision for the project and that means that everything feels like a part of a whole why do you want to do this that sounds crazy still so anyone who enjoys the promotions for the game will likely enjoy the game itself it's much more honest and it allows for honest communication between action view as a developer and the people who are going to be interested in your game you're not going to end up in a scenario where you trick someone into being interested in your game by selling them something that your game isn't if the promotion for the game is an extension of the vision of the game itself so promotion with vision will make your game stand out plain and

simple so we we put out that sword and Sworcery audience calibration trailer and it's got three hundred and fifty thousand views just on the Vimeo alone and I think the main reason why people were attracted to that trailer was because the trailer wasn't really about the game the trailer was about the tone of the game and the language of the game and the vision of the game there's really not that much of the game in that trailer but that trailer really did like spoke about the game now another kind of like I talked a bit about like you know target target the the the niche like you know try to get a hundred percent of the ten percent and when you're communicating the vision rather than just selling bullet points you actually have this a really great communication with that niche it gives them kind of like an extra step into your mind and it gives them points to discuss them with you so after that

trailer came out Craig fortunately who is very Twitter friendly and Chris who was very Twitter friendly and myself who pretty Twitter friendly had discussions with people about the trailer itself and how it related to the game okay so also this is a business talk so that means that I'm gonna talk a bit about brand uh-huh brand the the thing that you don't want to do is try to force your game or the brand branding and brand of your game outside of a space that it doesn't exist in you're not gonna try to just say like alright my game is gonna do this so I'm just gonna shove all the marketing in this direction so that it ends up being what I think it should be using the vision that started and is the foundation of the project as you're kind of key and former for promotion allows you to just basically let it grow you don't even have to worry about it it's just gonna do that so even something as

specific as Clive Holden who's this really awesome dude from Toronto who makes short films and some new media stuff and a whole bunch of other things when we convinced him to do the voice of the archetype in the trailer it was this real obvious extension of the vision like yeah sure of course our friend Clive is the voice of the archetype why wouldn't he be and he sounds the way that he should sound we didn't try to like go out and hire something like awesome voice actor we found people who we really thought fit the vision of the game and also the vision of the development so how do you do this I'll run through this very quickly take the core values the ideas the aesthetics the tone and the soul of the game and just let that be the promotion you know I Kurt is going to come up here and talk about how to make rad trailers and you should listen to everything he has to say because pretty much all he does is make rad trailers but I

the reason why they work so well is because they're not there they're all about having sold they're all about putting something out there that speaks about the game another big thing is maintaining a common written voice for stuff like web and promotion and trailers and social media and so on like making sure that it all sounds the way that you want it to sound this is gonna sound like I feel kinda dumb saying this but don't use fonts that you don't use in the game in your promotion don't use colors that you don't use in the game in the promotion don't use sound effects that you source from a site that you just found in order to just have that one sound in the trailer none of it is gonna feel like a cohesive piece and none of it is going to end up with a common vision make make good trailers that's that's a pretty good one and I think the biggest thing is if you have multiple people working on a project even if you're one of those

people that really likes working with with PR companies or whatever make sure the people who informed and had that vision of the game are actually directly involved in promotion it's it's so easy to promote your game correctly when someone who cares about it is talking about it and I think we all know that there's a lot of gamers out there who care about who makes their games and you can make that a part of how you talk about your game you can tell that story of your game by you know being the person who cares the most about the game and being in front of people so here's some direct sorcery examples of how we did that Kris and Craig wrote all the promotional text for everything we did Craig always gave a final pass to all the text to make sure that it sounded like sorcery every single solitary thing we did had to share the sorcery tone had to have some mysterious elements and had to have a couple of tongue-in-cheek jokes while still kind of being serious it always had to have music at the

forefront even if it wasn't even video there were often times that we were thinking about what music would fit what we were talking about even though we were just making promotional still art there's also a kind of amazing things that can happen through giving voices to characters when you can't even do voice like I talked about with Clive but also just you know the way that you think about the characters and how you're able to you know write text thinking about how they sound in the case of sorcery a lot of the promotional art added characters to the world even though they weren't in the game so there's a lot of like weird doctors and children and knights and horses and monsters in the promotional artwork none of which appear in the game but all of which seem to help build out the vision of what sorcery was so even like putting out sails on the solstices so the only time the sword and sorcery goes on sale is during each spring

solstice winter solstice all of that even when we we time sales is based on the vision for the game the soundtrack releases itself was a big component of the vision of the game from the very beginning one of the pieces of the vision was to get Jim's music out there specifically on vinyl and so doing that was like a key part of promoting the game while maintaining that that kind of like really intense vision so let's go to the next slide here so in conclusion take some risks collaborate to make your project better keep calm in the face of insurmountable odds and think of promotion as an extension of your vision super easy just you know no problem so for me traditionally independent developers are known for making unique and risky games and this is kind of like

Maya this isn't actually the real conclusion this is just like a kind of a plea to two people so we're normally the people in this room are making you know the most interesting unique risky games and a lot of you seem like you're going to be making stuff on iOS so please make risky stuff on iOS we all want to play it we all we all want to play the stuff that you guys are going to make on a platform that doesn't have that much of them on it but just make sure the game's awesome thank you go uh people want to ask questions and stuff some people want to ask okay yeah you talk about collaboration a lot you ever during the process if you have a problem with team members trying to pull the vision or the game in different directions from each other well I think that well in the case of sword and

sorcery the entire like the the the whole thing started based on a vision like it was always kind of about then oh this one kind of overarching idea and I think that the fact that like Chris Craig Jim bought into that from the very beginning even when one of the three or two of the three wanted to go in a different direction there was always that chance to say just like we all know what this game is supposed to be because we you know we know what this is and I mean really for us we never ended up in a scenario where people were trying to take the pie mean probably the most obvious chance that we had to take the project in the different direction was when we were like we gotta get it out really quick and in that case there was always something to bring us back to that point where like nope this is the vision of the game and it did help a ton that the foundation of the game was like we already knew Craig's art we already knew Jim's music we already knew that Cathy could put games out and and and

and you know have had a really strong design sensibility so we knew that there were gonna be problems but everybody kind of knew coming in what they all added to the project so I don't know if they I feel like that doesn't answer your question at all but sorry I'm wondering if you could say more about what what exactly mean by standing out maybe you just mean beep awesome what I mean I think standing out is kind of this like byproduct of making a game that a you care about but B isn't safe I mean I think the easiest way to stand out is to make something weird as or make like make something that just basically flies right in the face of what everyone else is doing as long as you care about doing that I'm definitely not advocating that everybody should drop the project they'd love to make something that they think is weird but I think that people should not be afraid of making those weird games they're not be you know embrace it and love it and then talk about why it's

weird like don't don't try to hide the weirdness in you know making a really you know serious publisher style trailer are putting out press releases with like you know official company letterhead or whatever just you know own up to what you're making and talk about it the way that you feel about it and I think a lot of that does help with the standing out but I mean most of all I think it's about thinking like okay what do I want to make and how like how do I think how do I talk about it and a lot of games that aren't even that super strange even ones that have a small strange component that's the component that often excites the game developer or the person making it and so not being afraid to talk about that piece of it I think is really important when it comes to standing out um you talked a lot about the PR as like a after thought kind of of the game and I was wondering one of the things I thought was really awesome about the game was the way that you the whole

concept was kind of based almost around this kind of PR message or kind of like it was almost like this ingenious marketing scheme I don't know like if you could talk about that a little bit do you mean like the the Twitter's writer stuff and also the whole idea of the real world events like the cycle of the Moon yep kind of organizing the fan base to be talking about it at certain times yeah I I mean it's hard to like you know Cathy's been around for quite a while so it's hard for us not to think about promoting stuff even when we're making it but all of the decisions made in developing the game were made because we thought it was better for the game not because we thought it would be good PR like the entire Twitter component of the game was never conceived to be a PR or marketing component I mean you know everybody knew that it might have this fringe benefit of doing it but you know the core behind the Twitter integration or the core behind the moon phases was because you

know we thought it was a really awesome piece of the design puzzle that was sorcery or the vision puzzle that was sorcery I mean I think like you know anybody who's making games nowadays thinks about like if the plan is to commercially release it pretty much everybody's thinking about how they're going to commercially release it even while they're making it and so that does kind of inform the decisions but I don't I don't think at any time during the development of sorcery we were like we really want to do this thing but it'd be way better for promotion if we did that thing and and I honestly think that that's part of like you know making something that's easy to promote you know people smell marketing ideas from a mile away these days you know I people are a lot smarter than I think you know a lot of us give them credit for and they know when something is done from the heart and something is done just because you think it'll sell twenty thousand more copies so yeah I do like we definitely thought a lot about promotion we talked a lot about trailers before we were anywhere close to being finished just because we were really excited about the vision of the game

because we knew that we could make something cool and trailer format or and like we knew Craig could make really rad promotional art so yeah bounce over there so whatever any small studio embarks on an entrepreneurial venture it's always a okay let's just push this Boulder down the hill and pick up the moss on the experiences we go we just have to take what we get invariably you'll have a world of things that you didn't know that you didn't know what did you learn from this process that you didn't know when you started which you would embark to people pursuing this um good question yeah like that well I I definitely think that well I'll speak for Cappy specifically we spent a lot of time making like we spent a bunch of time doing contract work we spent a while after that working with some publishers and we made some

decisions that were based on oh this is a smart businessman did like this is the right business call well you know we made critic on Chen and Clash of Heroes so we should make another puzzle style game because that's you know someone's gonna find it his perfect idea and this project I mean this is something that we had talked about a bunch in the studio before but this project really solidified the belief that any business call that you make because it's a safe business call is actually the least safe business call of all time it's those are the inherent risks those are the ones that you get by contracts those are the ones that you get you know screwed into putting some earth you screw yourself into putting something out that you don't care about and then you can't actually promote it because everybody knows that you're just talking about something you don't care about so definitely I think that you know going into it knowing that like doing the thing that matters the most is probably the best business call you can make was a really important learning and I think another one is is you know really I've worked with with like the

people at Cappy the founders of Cappy for a really long time and I just I I know when to trust them I know you know when they make a call that it's it's the right call when you bring people in like you know I knew Craig and I kind of knew Jim when we started it's really hard to like let them into that same trust level as people that you've known like for in the case of like Chris like 13 years so I think one of the other thing I learned is the the sooner or the faster that we truck got like you know went out for a few beers or a lot of beers and had you know just time to like talk abut talk together about the project and the endeavor we were going on the sooner we were able to like just skip over that whole like I don't know if I trust this guy I mean we obviously trusted him right away because we set out to make the game right away but it kind of helped get us over that hump when you know Craig would fight for something or Jim would fight for something and I knew it was going to push the schedule or we knew it was gonna add more money you could just kind

of say okay it's ID I know what he's talking about and I trust that fight fight okay go PC version question mark no comment question mark speaking of a PR I was wondering you didn't mention one thing that I I found to be incredibly important and that's a product demo like a playable product demo because when we've been promoting our games you know we've been putting you know oh hey there's a there's a trailer for a Foresta tear up and it's up on game trailers I know it's already lost in the sea of trailers and nobody actually cares but when we put out the the demo for Reza tear back in a July of 2010 our servers literally began

belching fire and people were begging steam data to pick us up and I'm sure wondering if is different on iOS like you know do demos get lost the same way evil games get lost due to the way the App Store works demos don't really this really AppStore I mean they kind like you can kind of maybe do that I don't really know the exact logistics but you can't call anything a demo you can have like a lite version or some like that but so maybe it's just semantics and you can demo all you want but III do think that like we put sorcery and people and early not even like knowing that it was gonna be that early like after two months of making a few a small little like prototype we basically put it in people's hands and then we went quiet for a really long period of time when we weren't ready to sell the game or even

talk about the game but then when we were started ready to ready to show it again we did go and put it in people's hands and we never really shied away from letting anybody interested play it press or whatever yeah I do think it's a little like it's I don't think that you can do on iOS what you can do on Steam when it comes to that style of like getting it out there that style of you know selling it through a demo yeah basically like let people try it first and then decide if they want to I mean you could throw our ways you could probably do it on iOS but I don't think that it's built into the like consumers mindset to do things that way yeah yeah oh yeah I was just saying hi to make that powerful cohesive vision that you talk about that informs the pure is that something that you had crystallized from the start of the project or was

something that continued to coagulate and form up until the moment of release well there was I mean there were core components of it that basically like you know spread out into more ideas but there was that kind of like you know make a game with soul a record you could hang out in really about Craig's visual style and and and really about like you know really about when you play the game it's not about you know pressure or whatever it's just this you know experience that you're you know chilling out in Jim's music looking at Craig's art and having that kind of flowing experience but then from there like a ton of different stuff spread it out of it but at anytime that stuff would spread out it would kind of always come back to you does that fit into this like the guts of it all and I think that that I mean for us like the people off the project just kind of did that I mean that's not something that we had to kind of set out or like mandate like every idea put the you give it the like

original source revision stamp of approval it just kind of like it existed and people understood it and I think that's how like when when we talk about collaboration it was such a great experience because you know Kris and Craig and Jim just they just got it they didn't really have to spend a lot of time I mean most of the time that there was disagreements it was kind of like how central to the source revision is it rather than like I really want to do this thing like a mile away and that's it's it's that or break so I heard about you talk at Nek which I think was similar to this one there was like the first couple of slides was similar yeah well anyway I heard like a gist of part of it was like don't try to make Angry Birds because it's a lottery and you're not gonna win and it kind of like and and do it something for the 10% which I totally think is cool but I've also can't count the number of times that I've said

meaning or someone else's said in a meeting recently on my new two projects that what Angry Birds didn't like this so or cut the rope is like this and we should do something like that and it's kind of like is it do you think that it's wrong to try to make something with the super broad appeal because like the game will suffer or because you actually think that a game like Angry Birds released at the same times Angry Birds will make zero money compared just because it is a lottery or but I feel like capturing 10% of Angry Birds or 5% of Angry Birds will pay for me for 10 years so it'll pay for everyone in this room I'm ok with only picking up like a tiny percentage of what anger will do but I think like a broad-based appeal game like that's what I'm working on that I I don't Lee don't want to like make it sound like I don't think people should make a game that has broad appeal I think that you should know what you're making going into it right like you know that you're competing against a much huger number of people developers many

of whom have like EA to pull the sale switch meaning that they can ruin the entire app store for a week by putting all their games on sale when they launch a game that happened to us during sorcery and had no effect on and I think that that was because it was you know in a different side but I think when it comes down to and and I was really weary about parts of this talk because I it does make it sound like I'm like no don't do it the way that you want to do it do it this way this is the right way and I don't think that's the case but I think that like I think it's actually you're actually incapable of making a game that has the same approach as Angry Birds you're automatically gonna have like a design perspective a creative perspective an aesthetic perspective the right puts it in a different class that's where I worry like are you saying like I'm trying to be something that I'm not another I'm gonna make a game that's not like I'm trying to be like Angry Birds and I'm not gonna it's gonna be like half and a half and not as good no no I think I think it's more like the

components of like you could make a make and make an angry but don't make an Angry Birds clone but like you can make you can make a game that fits the exact same mentalities the exact same kind of like sensibilities the exact same goals but if you do it like the way that you know you're passionate about and if you do it you have like a vision for the game you know you know like gasket ball like when I look at that I'm not that I don't think I think that that's a game that could reach a mass market but I don't think that its goal is to compete with Angry Birds I think it's being made by it you know it's a really interesting unique game even though the target audience might be wider than sorcery so I think kind of like hopefully the the message that doesn't get lost is it like even though you're to me playing the lottery is starting a game to try to make Angry Birds sure to try to hit Angry Birds success like saying like oh I got I got three months I can make I can make cut the rope here I go

if you start the project with that in mind I think that's when you're actually directly competing with everyone else outside of this room at this conference because they're all seeing the dollar signs flashing in their face but if you're starting out saying I got this great idea for a game I really think that this is like an awesome idea I can really like you know I can make something rad out of this and it just so happens that it's also in the kind of more mass markets I think I don't think you're in the same space I don't think you're setting yourself up to try to like you know I'm gonna sell this game to everyone that's not the way you're approaching it it might be more mainstream but it I'm gonna air quote mainstream because I don't even know if that's the case but it might be more mass-market focused than say something targeting Anish Anish but that doesn't necessarily mean that you're just pull on that lottery you know what you're getting into you and you know the game that you're making whereas you're not just making money and wrapping a game around it or trying to make money and wrap a game around it cool I'm done alright sorry guy over there