The Decoy Games Journey: From Gaming Brothers to Console Devs

[Music] [Applause] what's going on everybody uh welcome to our presentation we're really excited we've been wanting to do this for a long time so we're just had to be part of gdc um i'm ahmed abdullah it's my brother khalil and we're gonna tell you about our journey our journey to get on consoles and we're gonna have a good time you know we're also hopefully you can learn something from things that we've learned and maybe things that work well for us and also our mistakes as well so really excited to go through this presentation with y'all let's do it so who are we again so i'm ahmed so i'm the younger brother you're older like i'm the veteran of the team he's he's a better guy about a year and a half so you can see there that's the circa 90s over there us playing consoles on nintendo playing a little mario but we've been playing games our whole lives something we love doing and from very young we always love

building games as well uh we've kind of found time during the week as we couldn't play games during school week to build our own so that was our workaround so we always wanted to be developers and the thing that we found was just it was really hard to know what that really meant what it meant to go on that journey to actually become developers and we loved consoles so specifically you want to be on consoles so we're going to talk about that we're going to talk about you know how we kind of became these two little guys playing nintendo to actually being console developers i'm going to next slide here so so that was us but maybe it's all about decoy games our company yeah so you know fast forward you know 30-something years or so now we're decoy games we are our own self-published indie studio um we're actually launching our first games from sanity um it's built right now the team consists of myself my brother and also uh shout out to chris vent who does all of our

visual art for our game right now um someone that we've actually known since childhood i think since preschool or so right very young yeah very young and we just kind of got together and built this thing um from the ground up right to kind of self-taught um as we saw that self-taught so me and my brother um taught us how to do development through like youtube google basically from scratch understanding the intricacies and the beginnings of game development meanwhile chris who was just a graffiti artist um he's actually self-taught uh just we showed him how to use the software and then from there just kind of year after year he just built his skills um we're also self-funded uh so everything that we've done everything that we've funded for ourselves has actually come from us working part-time we'll get inside a little bit later in the in the presentation and then on the last thing that we're also going to tap on a bit here is the fact that we're self-published so we are bringing our own game to market we want to tell you guys exactly how you can publish your own game

so he said this will actually be a talk that ranges from you know if you're a beginner or if you've even been to publishing yourself publishing business so hopefully things that we can touch as well but so what was our game so our debut game is swim sanity you might have heard it before it's a multiplayer underwater shooter competitor and cooperative game modes uh you can play online or locally we'll be launching on cross play as well uh we've been fortunate enough to win a few awards going to different like showcases and things like that it will come out on all platforms uh in august if we fast forward time to real time that would actually be tonight tonight when you're watching this live so uh we'll see if this all worked or not but uh i wanna show you guys some gameplay uh you guys check it out and let us know what you think here

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[Music] cool all right and that's what i'm saying we're done all right can we audit can we edit in our own our own cheers yeah you know that that was our some sandy coming out august 7th um the game looked nothing like that when we first started so that's kind of the whole part of our talk as well um and we want to talk about kind of these five steps it took us to get to that point for our first game so the first thing we'll talk about is making a good game one of my favorite subjects it's so simple and why are we talking making a good game but we'll go over that number two is preparing for visibility so talking about starting a company getting your game out there so people can see it what that all

means number three is showcasing and networking something that we love to do we're just very people person people uh we just love interacting with people so that's our brand so talk about how that worked for us and how that may work for you and then we'll talk about console approval and development some of the gotchas that hit us in my eu as well and then building a go-to-market strategy which is very important to make sure you have a plan going into market but very first number one is making a good game so let me make a good game sir i mean it's funny because it's such a simple thing right you say of course i'm trying to make a good game but it that goes so much deeper than just developing a good game so let's go into some of that and let's start with how we made what we consider a good game so as he said before there's some sandy you see today is not the some sanity that has started right so this is a journey it's a long run thing so about um what is it nine sorry ten years ago uh we started i started with some sandy the avengers the movie driver the scuba diver it was just a simple flash game where the scuba diver tried to swim down

to the bottom of the ocean collect gold and bring it out back up to its boat when these horribly designed sea creatures were tried to attack them your art was impeccable my heart yes you know it looked a lot better in my head when i was making it but you know i gotta start somewhere yeah gotta start somewhere so yeah this was just like the basic fundamentals um of what became some sanity today uh fast forward about two years later we started working on the xna framework um along this way we started to really understand what game development really meant what it felt like to use at least a framework of an engine um add like physics and stuff to our game chris just started jumping on board around this time um he was just getting used to doing digital art so everything still well it definitely was not as bad as my art things still just kind of didn't really mesh together right you could see improvements here but i mean clearly some issues you guys are probably pointing out the huds are basically in the middle of gameplay the background looks like it's on the

foreground it doesn't even look underwater uh sorry i'm bashing chris and stuff here but he'll have a good kick out of this but but yeah but we the the art got better but it still just wasn't there right so what would be the next phase here so um and we talked about the journey right so actually still within xna our experience started to get better you see this is about five years from the start um and we just year after year we kind of picked up our skills um kind of recrafted our game you can see it kind of starting to take a life a bit here you see like some a little bit better background design some characters kind of popping a bit more um and so basically this is like our skills are kind of starting to develop as game developers yeah and at this point you know this the background was still a little busy still huds were kind of on the screen but this build was actually good enough to start getting the console you know attention to actually have us be self-published so at this point too what you don't see in a screenshot is our gameplay loop was really a lot more crisp at this point it played a lot like some saying it just didn't look like some sandy at this point

but uh this is before we jumped on unity right started teaching ourselves unity yet and then uh you know we started as you said before we got unity license actually from a convention um that we we won essentially an award to give you unity license and from there that's when we really started developing with some sandy west today combining our experience with also the power of the engine that allowed us to kind of leverage you know some of the great things that unity brings the game today so um this is the swim sanity that you see now and let's talk about exactly what were the steps that we took along this journey to make the decisions um that became you know what a lot of people are you know playing right now so insanity um what what decisions really went into that into making that good game so um one of the things that we say first and foremost especially for any beginner developers who are watching this it's never too early to get started right so there's especially today back when we started it was really hard to find like game engines that are accessible by developers

nowadays you have like unity unreal game maker i can keep going on but there are free demos for these engines that you can download and just start messing around with today find the one that suits you best and really just start from anything simple even if you are getting like a block moving across the screen um that's a goal that you want you want to keep building on these goals and moving forward so one thing and the reason why we start with make a good game because to be honest this is where a lot of things fall off right because to me you got to make a good game to sell a good game i think that's something that we need to be more honest with ourselves when entering this industry that maybe our game just wasn't good enough so how do we get it to that point for us uh as cool said getting honest game testers and getting feedback was really key for us to make sure we iterate on that um for us it was friends and family just to start and they were pretty brutal in the beginning but it helped a lot um one thing we say a lot is within your game community there's always stuff where there's like meetup.com or different

things where you can find uh discord uh there's so many people that are just willing to play games um so if you can't if you think it's something that you need to pay for in order to get people to play i i don't think that's true i think there are a lot of people that are willing to just play and just want to enjoy playing games and if anything they feel almost honored to be in that prototype phase yeah and i really want to hammer on this one because the the whole game tester saying i do feel like that's where a lot of indies fall short they play their own games and once their own game is good enough to them they're like oh this game is definitely good enough now let's try to market it and sell it make sure that you are actually testing with other individuals who have unbiased opinions but also taking their feedback to heart right so if someone does not have a positive opinion every game it's not always oh he doesn't know what he doesn't understand my game he doesn't he doesn't really understand the art of what i'm trying to do you have to take especially if you are in the business of trying to sell your game to others you have to take the feedback of others as a group somebody like a survey and apply it to what you do right be honest with yourself be honest with the

feedback that you're getting back um basically just have an unbiased view that that really that circular um kind of flow of testing a game and then developing it is really what you know makes a good game again absolutely so okay we have a good game we're good now we have to prepare for visibility so we have to get into the industry so another step that i feel like is very key here is when you're doing this we're starting a business right so if you're selling something in any industry you have to start a business because once you sell it you have to pay taxes all these things go into that uh for some reason i think as gamers we really feel like it's uh maybe we have this pass to not have to do the business part but it's very key it really is something that will establish what how your game sells and how well you can get into the game industry and especially if we're talking about consoles once you're dealing with those type of businesses i mean they really are want to deal with you from a business perspective not necessarily someone that might look this as a hobby so

one of the things we always tell people to do and for us is we create our business plan very early and set our expectations very early and one of the expectations for us was making sure that we can develop the game while having a good life balance with the game development and make sure that we you know have money to just live so what we did is we were working full-time jobs while working for a majority i'd say about 90 of the development of some sanity make sure we have full-time jobs we worked uh at nights weekends and that gave us the ability to make sure that we wouldn't feel like we were rushing ourselves which our budget was really pushing us in decisions gave us time to just understand business not just what the game but also no jobs that we worked at the corporate jobs we worked at and allowed us to kind of build our brand today so whatever that what that means for you for us that was something that we knew we just had to have patience and prepare ourselves for the long run but it really gave us kind of this peaceful state of mind to be able to do both and also feel like we're growing up with our game as well so having that business plan put

together is really key and that was ours to make sure that we were able to kind of get into the different conventions and showcase the way that we felt we're comfortable and want to present our title speaking specifically to the game developers of the room i just want to say that you actually have a skill that while it is crafted for game development you have a skill that you can take to other industries and you know work and get your foundation down because things are just a lot easier once you can fund yourself not just for your game but just paying rent and stuff like that as soon as you start crashing because you know you don't have the means to you know make a living and stuff your game journey will actually burn out way sooner than you want to so um just specifically talking to game developers don't feel that you need to have a game development job right when you start right like i said we worked in sales i did sales for healthcare which i would person this has nothing to do with my personal interests but it just it laid the foundation for me to then focus on my game on nights and weeks let us understand business really well too yeah so at taking sales and things like that um so as you said make a business plan that's something you definitely want to do

early that means how do you establish your business are you llc your partnership things like that um learning about how your teams will be funded learning about taxes learning about what your goals are defining what your success is success is different for everybody i mean success really depends on where you are where your happiness is with your title knowing what that is in the beginning will help you define where you should be putting your game who you should be talking to i listed some books up here that i read personally that really helped me um some great stuff there that are really gaming focus and some that are just strictly just talking about how to start a business as i said i feel like it's really important to go outside of just gaming as far as business starting because a lot of things you might miss if you just think about game development because even some successful games out there you know they're the game developers but really the publisher is handling all the business parts so if you're doing both you need to make sure you understand what those publishers understand and they understand really the business part as well just one quick thing too about kind of once you started visibility is also to

make sure that your social media your press get and things are all set up because you want to make sure all this hard work you put into preparing your business is visual to the consoles uh to other press or anything that'll just give you more legitimacy and open doors for you all right so that's a perfect segue into showcasing and networking right so you have your good game you got your business plan created we're looking good you're looking good right we have uh we have our press kit so online you know we have like a trailer we have a demo um now we just need to show it off to people um this is one of our favorite parts is you know once you have everything together now let's start to show it you know let's let's move around and show it off to people i know some of this stuff is a little bit more difficult doing during these times but uh we're pretty confident these times will event that these uh conventions that will eventually come back but there's also a lot of like digital platforms that allow you to share to share your game for us we built a lot of our brand off going to various showcases right um you guys know some of the big ones out there like your packs east pax west e3 uh dream hack things like that

um but there's also local conventions and stuff too that you can go to right so depending on where you are um you'd be surprised what you can find when you just search you know local game convention local meetups um if you especially if you're just getting started and you just need you know like 10 to 50 people to come and try out your game and get some really genuine feedback conventions are really good for getting people to test and play your game um getting eyes on your game from you know important influencers youtubers podcasters these guys always go to these conventions and whatnot and then also connecting to like the distributors and whatnot in the industry one of the things with us is all the distributors that we actually connected with nintendo xbox and sony we met them at conventions but we actually met them at very small conventions right so we didn't meet them at your like e3 or um for like microsoft we met them at a local convention in boston that's actually held in a gym we met our nintendo contact at a small convention in harlem

um that might not be any more than maybe three hundred people yeah game that was a color yeah it's a great convention only about 500 people is right in harlem that started a great relationship with us with nintendo um as cool saying it was just like those small conventions really were big for us to actually build personal relationships uh with the the publishers the distributors of the platforms and since we are self-published that was very key for us we need to have a very one-to-one contact from a business perspective understanding how to get into you know the market um and i i just another thing i just want to add is that a lot of opportunities are easier if you're actually going out there and networking and that doesn't always mean that you're flying around the world or anything like that but instead of you know just sitting behind your computer hoping people come to your game you have to be aggressive right so if you're you gotta send emails you gotta call numbers you gotta go shake hands um if you don't go out and show people that you want them to play your game people are unlikely they're not likely just come to you and have this like quick viral turnaround you want to make sure you're doing that outreach on

your own other thing too we talk about building your brand for us we always want to have a very consistent brand we just really love interacting with people so you see a lot of pitches here we're always taking pictures with cosplayers we always make sure running tournaments were interactive uh we found that that consistency wanted to make sure that was always there whether it was a big convention or we're just throwing our tv on one single table wanted to make sure that experience was always the same uh we found that that was that the public the publishers and the consoles were actually very keen to seeing how we actually took that approach um and they would state to us i said honestly we just really like how you guys present yourself we really like your brand going there and that was that was important for us and we're glad that kind of worked out so building your own brand what that is for you um as khalil said there are a lot of digital showcases now that have a lot of eyes on it and definitely things that people pay attention to but whatever works for you is something you want to make sure you're consistent with so yeah just to review um one one of our recommendations like i said there's a lot of ways to do this one thing that

works for us is going to conventions with goals in mind what are you trying to get out of the convention do i want to go to this convention so i can test play my game and get critical feedback am i trying to go to convention to get media so what what do i need to do to attract media have goals in mind have strategy how you want to actually accomplish those goals and then like i said a huge takeaway small small conventions small stroke cases small digital showcases don't don't turn away from those just because you see that they have small numbers numbers are do not mean everything right some of these have small numbers but important influences some of these have small numbers of people who are definitely going to play your game right so um if you have 10 people who love your game are going to play your game grab those 10 people so they can share what they're following yeah and just and just getting that one person like we have people that just would play okay play our game for a real long time um and that really have tested us and it's close to that champion that's a great segue into our next part because when you do make these connections with the consoles uh now there's a process of make sure

you get approval and the development of consoles and we do want to talk about kind of a few things and stories that we had as far as you know building these connections and it's cool said having a champion is the most important thing i think a mixture of building kind of towards a successful release so what is a champion for us it's someone that is within that business whether it's nintendo playstation xbox steam that basically really likes your game and have some pull in meetings to say yeah you guys we should push this title um it takes time to try to find that person is it's always good to have multiple if you can but having a champion within these different businesses will really get you to different places it might get you in different showcases it might also get you into different things that are going through a release uh for us um kind of one of the things we had was going into like the mini showcase and building these champions to actually get us into these different available areas the other thing too

is when you have a champion it might be someone a different company and people move a lot so we've have people where you want to make sure when you're talking to them you don't really know where they will end up being we have people that are now our champions or we would we just talked to them and you know got along with them really well that worked at a different company so billy's relationships is very key especially when you're self-publishing because these are the people that you're going to be working with and getting to approval there and i mean a champion doesn't have to be somebody who's working with the company right it might be some it might be the person who runs a convention and while you're going and showcasing you go up because you see them walking around you come and shake their hand and say hey i'm khalil i work at depot games thank you for having your convention i like to work and you know get that conversation going you know build those genuine friendships those genuine connections that become genuine business connections it's kind of they're both sides of the the table on that one so yeah so and that's key because you can always submit online to get approval on these consoles um but as you know just i kind of compare it to submitting a resume so like a monster it might just hit the

bottom of the deck so i always feel like it's it's going to take time to figure out a strategy how to meet these people with a face to face or just in a different way where you can leave a lasting impression uh where they either seeing your game or see you those are things that would be very helpful so that's the approval part i just want to talk a little about development um you know there's always things that you can't talk about but they're always those sorts of things that you definitely want to make sure you understand uh when you're developing now for multiple platforms even though you're using something like unity you know there's always things you want to make sure you're you need to be prepared to develop specifically for different platforms a lot of these things go into this certification process that a lot of console developers know that it basically you need to go through testing to make sure your stuff is following a lot of their guidelines if you do not plan this within your release cycle this can really screw up things for you this process could take long for us our first time going into it was pretty long for us because it's just a new experience but making sure that you have that all planned

is really key is something that you want to make sure is there and you want to make sure since we're using unity one of the tips i have for uni developers is any of the assets that you're pulling off the store and going into your product make sure that they are console compatible make sure that the support is there because if you might put yourself into a corner if uh you might you know something that ran really good on pc might not run very well on one of the consoles you want to make sure that support is there the more complex your game is the more you might you know have these different things come up so a lot of things got to handle a lot of hats you gotta wear in order to release on all platforms yeah so just reviewing that find a champion where you can for your game across any organization not just consoles but anything that can help try to find you that champion make a genuine connection um don't just kind of you know use these people make general connection with that champion and then kind of utilize that for your own business purposes um like you said plan for console certification um the the

majority of console development is that certification chances are the actual core of your game will actually be the same from console to console but the specific guidelines that you need to hit to like follow these following these certification requirements for each console is where you're going to spend most of your console development the one tip i can say about certification that we learned is and this is pretty consistent across all of them it's like when you're when you're doing these things there are sdk requirements so these things might get upgraded and make sure you submit these on time especially if you're developing for multiple platforms uh making sure you understand what that minimum requirement is in your third-party tools um they are able to support those it's talking about it's very sdk versions is very key uh for us since we are like an online game that's cross-play uh we have tools uh they have to handle voice chat we have tools that handle our architecture for the online play we have tools to handle our controller to make sure those are all lined up for all platforms

it's very key to know that consistent because that can change your release date that can change a lot of things so that's one tip i say if i take away from what we're doing is make sure those are always lined up so make sure you have consistent releases across all platforms you're trying to release on the same day all right so we have a good game we got a business uh we've showed that showed it and we have now console approval now we need to go to market strategy this is also another thing that we say you got to take a good amount of time to make sure you have because once you complete a game just like any business you want to make sure that the game has time to get out to the public it has time for people to consume it understand it and a lot of times i know you've been working so many years on this game or whatever time you just want to get out to market you want to make sure you do take time so people uh can know what the game is so um let me talk about a little bit our marketing strategy how we did that or how we're doing that right now yeah so and we knew that especially

being a first-time developers our first game regardless of how well received our game was in order to have the game played nationally or globally really we needed to set them aside enough time for us to spread that message to people and we knew that with our current following we would not be able to spread that message ourselves so one of the things that we did is we leveraged console marketing or just leveraged partners in general so some examples of what we did um we reached out to nintendo early on and actually caught them right on time for their spring nindy showcase um that was uh broadcasted to millions of people around the world we did specific console events such as the id and xbox pre-packs event also got involved with ibm xbox summer spotlight but reach out to these console guys early especially if you have dev kits and find out exactly where and if you fit into their marketing plans it's actually a set amount of things that they will give you by default but depending on what your relationships are with them depending on your game and how it fits with their brand they'll give you extra things as well also leveraging marketing partners in

general as you guys probably know it's not just about the council guys right there's certain whether they're streaming organizations maybe third-party organizations um don't be afraid to reach out to these guys as well because they'll they actually have a lot of leverage in the industry also especially if you're a small team like us who doesn't have a humongous following um leverage other people's following so that so that it can then boost yours right and we use examples like razer and unity so we have where razer our razer proxy compatible with our game using the razer chroma parts of the product and you know they as long as we're using dev kits that they provided and have in the game they want to showcase that they want to be able to promote that uh same with unity i mean you built a game on unity if they think it's great you know they're gonna go share through their channels as well this is our favorite uh bit of advice but do not be afraid to ask for anything literally if you had a like a camera following us for everything that we've done the repeated pattern is we ask for something way out of the ballpark all the time to someone who's like organizing an event like we'll go out

and be like hey we want our own room for our own tournament we want a hundred and we own a hundred inch screen actually 200 inch screens we want our own announcer and they're like okay we're actually going to give you a table with two tvs and we'll put your tournament on our front page we're like all right cool we'll take it always go the full mile and if they scale back to half a mile take a half mile but don't be afraid to ask the worst thing they can say is it no and then no will never end your journey that is if you remember anything please remember that we asked for like just the most ridiculous things and sometimes we've gotten some pretty awesome stuff so um as we were saying before uh take advantage of the console marketing that's just a lot of things are provided like by default i think a lot of developers might not know that once they're there but just make sure you plan and ask playing that time for the certification that's very key and also we talk about once you want to get your game out there you want to get reviews and get keys out there don't ignore the small press building that hype within a small press actually has the bigger press start

looking at that as well and that can really have a lot of a lot of impact so make sure you spend time for that and then just kind of wrapping this up a bit this is an iterative process right so don't be afraid if you're on step four to go back to step three or even go all the way back to step one right this just like development chances are when you're developing something got to compile it multiple times before it actually works don't be afraid to go back to the drawing board start over again and go you know go in different paths this is an iterative long long term process and that is it for the journey um thank you guys so much for being a part of this just want to let you guys know we do have a discord uh for some sanity we love talking developers up there not sharing anybody or anyone just really interacting as we said quality social media decoy games twitter facebook or also instagram eco games underscore official it's been amazing uh i guess tonight in the future we're playing some sandy tonight yeah so love to play with you guys and uh thank

you so much [Applause] you