Tips from the Trenches: An Indie Guide to Contracting

[Music] hey everyone thanks so much for coming it's great to see you all here today happy first day of GDC how how's everyone holding up so far pacing ourselves excellent well welcome it's great to see you all here today by the way I can barely see anybody in the audience because the lights are super bright but let's talk about contracting and before we do that though I just want to acknowledge that probably most of you are sitting out there thinking I really wish I could be in some other session than this one because let's just acknowledge how much of it sucks that we're talking about contracting in the Indy track of GDC right because in an ideal world we'd be making the games that we want to make charging a fair amount for our work and earning a decent living doing the work that we love to do I don't think anyone would dispute that that's the ideal but unfortunately this right here is our far less than ideal reality that is the deep dark truthful mirror of tweets right

there so yeah as we all know sometimes the road to success is not quite as straightforward as we might like and when that happens sometimes you just got to do what you got to do to keep your team together so you can live to fight another day and contracting is a great way to do that but it definitely helps to know what you're doing so that's what we're gonna talk about and hey by the way I'm Amy Dallas hi and I run clutch play games out of Portland Oregon and my company just turned seven last month which kind of blows my mind thank you only a room full of Indies can appreciate what a huge accomplishment that is and I don't think if I'm gonna keep it real I don't think that would have been possible without contracting to be perfectly honest and I think our story started out like we're like a lot of teams out there I think we were once part of a corporate studio system and the satellite office where we work got totally downsized out of existence and

we happen to live in a place where that was literally the only paying game job anywhere near where we lived so we didn't really feel like we had a lot of options because we didn't want to leave games so four of us got together and we went all-in on being in so we work for 10 months without a paycheck which I fully don't recommend by the way and so when we got to the end of the development cycle on that first game we were so relieved were like oh thank god we are so ready to make some money so we put our game out there we were super excited we're full of new indie optimism and and guess what we found out man a co-working space dude knows what he's talking about because that time around the risk just did not pay off for us not at all and thus began our journey into contracting and I think when we started out our our goals were really simple we just wanted to you know maybe pick up one or two gigs earn just enough money to fund the development of another game and then hopefully if we

learn from our mistakes and we did a little better we could go back to just being a full-time any development team and that's almost what happened so we were pretty fortunate our first time out we had a pretty good client they paid us pretty well and it took us about 10 months to earn enough money to start our second game skullduggery and we did actually learn from our mistakes we did a lot better on that game and we certainly earned enough to jump back in and work on more indie games right away and yet when the time came we kind of surprised ourselves by deciding that we would go back and take on some more contracting work and at the time we made that decision because we had some clients that we really liked who were reaching out to us and asking us for help but also we kind of recognized that we ended up liking it a whole lot more than we expected to which was a surprise to us you know as far as we're concerned we get to solve really hard interesting problems for people that we really like and also gives us some predictability of income which as we all know as Indies is

a good thing and it's also allowed us to hire more people and pay them fairly to do work that they love to do so it's actually been pretty good for us but I will say as the studio head in the beginning it was super stressful because I suddenly realized man I don't think I know everything I need to know to make sure we're successful as we take on this kind of work so I better go do my diligence my due diligence and go out and see what other people think who are experienced in contract games and so I did that and I basically went to all these different teams I knew and said tell me what I need to know about contracting in games and pretty much the messages that I got overwhelmingly was that it sucked I heard it over and over again all the same reasons that you all hear all the time right it's the it's the India mantra that as Indies we have no power when you're negotiating with a big company you know they're the ones who have the power and you don't so there's no room to negotiate it's hard to get

people to pay you fairly because why would they pay an indie team fairly when they can actually pay an overseas team pennies on the dollar do the same work that's that's the thing I just was talking to someone about that the other day that that's still a thing that people worry about a lot and when I ask some specific questions about how people structured their projects like how do you do it do you do it as a time and materials project or a fixed bid I heard overwhelmingly from every single person I talked to you that there was only one way to do these kinds of projects and that was as a fixed bid and the reasons given it was basically all the same reasons that people were saying you know that these kinds of projects suck because again it goes back to the idea that the clients have all the power and a fixed bid model tends to be a little better for them right because they know what they're gonna get when they're gonna get it and how much it's going to cost and if you as the developer underbid the project you're going to end up probably having to do a little bit of extra work for without the extra pay so

um upon hearing all this I'm like wow you're right everybody this does sound like it sucks this sounds terrible why would anyone want to do this but at that point again I didn't have a lot of choices we needed to make sure we got some money in the door so rather than taking all the kind of negativity on board I kind of recognized that I had a choice to make I could either accept everything I was being told as the truth and just brace myself for my team and I to have a terrible experience or I could focus my energies on trying to prove that it's possible to have a better experience taking on work-for-hire projects as an indie and I think I've actually accomplished that over I've never felt like I couldn't negotiate with a client as long as I was clear about what I wanted and what I was willing up willing to give up to get it I've never felt like I wouldn't pay us fairly like I have to work for it I have to push for you know getting the best rate I can but I never felt like someone

was like you're just not worth that money and I never felt like I couldn't sell a client on a particular type of affect as long as I her about how it was in their best interest also as well as mine so that didn't happen by accident that happened by staying really focused on what was important and this is kind of how I maintain that level of focus all I cared about as we were starting out was who we were what we wanted what was possible for us and what tools and structures I needed to put in place to make sure we were successful so let's start off by talking about the first item which is the who you are part sorry I totally turn into Marco Rubio when I'm giving a talk I just get the huge dry mouth so apology I'm gonna be drinking some water today okay defining your identity I imagine a

lot of you are probably sitting there thinking I can probably skip this part we know how our team is we know who we are we've worked together for a long time and if you're tempted to think that that's the case I just want to offer you this one potentially kind of gross sounding piece of advice and it is gross sounding but it's true and that is this there's a really big difference between being an indie team that makes products and an indie team that is a product and that's essentially what you're doing you're productizing your team and you're selling your services to a client so to be successful at doing that you kind of have to start looking at your team through the eyes of someone who might want to hire you so what makes you a cool team why would someone want to work with you what stuff have you worked on how many games have you worked on how complicated were they what what kind of experience do you bring to bear do you have any to fools or processes or philosophies that you've applied your own projects that

you could then apply to a client's work and help them be successful so what's your origin story as a contract team and once you've answered some of those foundational questions the next thing you have to figure out is codify what you're selling right so you know are you looking to market yourselves as a team that can take on an entire game or are you more interested in taking on parts or pieces of a game like tools dev LiveOps feature development QA any one of the thousand things that go into making a game so do you want short term work or long term work so these are all questions that you have to answer and once you kind of know who you are as a team in what you're selling that's going to help to inform who your potential clients are now when I'm actually pitching my team I position us in in the following way so we're a bunch of triple-a vets it's me I'm a triple-a producer and my team are a bunch of

Triple A engineers and so we're pretty experienced and we're pretty bomb-proof temperament wise because we've been through the wars so the way I often describe us to clients is we're like an engineering seal team and that you can actually drop us into any situation doesn't matter how crazy it is bombs could be going off trap no flying everywhere and we will very calmly be able to go into the situation assess what's going on come up with a plan and then execute against that plan and we've actually the course of our our time consulting we've had to take on some really crazy projects really high pressure high stakes type time tight timelines and we have a 100 track record of delivering on time and on budget so we're kind of known in the industry as being a high performance low drama team so because I have that really clear understanding of who we are that naturally kind of informs what kind of clients what might be interested in working with us right there they tend to be larger companies that need some

flexibility and there are technical resourcing they need senior people to make their problems go away without a lot of hand-holding and so that's what we do now I imagine a lot of you if you're if you've got a an indie team where you've got a bunch of designers and artists and as well as programmers you might be thinking that doesn't resonate with me at all so let me give you another example that I think is really interesting I mentor a lot of teams all over the place and one of my favorites is a team in Australia called harmonious games and I don't know if you've heard of them they're great bunch of people and they made a really cool game a couple years ago that did pretty well on the switch is it's called putty pals and it's a co-op platformer where you have to work together with another player to navigate the world and solve problems and I thought it was just a pretty legit fun game but what I didn't know about it and and I had known these guys for a long time before they they told me this that putty pals isn't just a fun game it was actually designed based on the principles of promoting the emotional intelligence of their players the

designer actually studied psychology and she was really interested to figure out how games could could accomplish that goal and so I was like wow that's really interesting I didn't know that I can see that because you do have to work pretty closely together with your with another player under stressful circumstances and so they then proceeded to tell me that one of their former college professors at one point approached them and said you know this whole thing you've done with putty pals the the the design based on emotional intelligence is really interesting and there's a study going on in the Australian penal system and they want to understand how technology and games could potentially be used to increase the communication skills of like to improve the communication skills of the inmate population and we think putty pals could be a great pilot so they're like great sure so they gave these researchers early version of putty pals they put in the hands of hardcore villains and over the course of the study they found that this game actually did increase the EQ of the inmates they

were able to communicate more effectively under stressful circumstances and and when they told me this I'm like holy crap that is so interesting and this was in the context of talking with them about where they could focus their bids efforts for doing some contract work and I'm like I can't believe I didn't know this before because your clients aren't just game is ain't game industry people or companies your clients are anybody who might be interested in understanding how a game or technology could be used to positively impact people's behavior so I tell you this for one very important reason and that is that often there's this there's this idea that as Indies we're all competing for the same small number of jobs so it promotes this idea that there's just a lot of scarcity in the industry and that's why going through this process and being clear on who you are and what skills and resources you bring to bear actually goes a long way towards opening up new potential avenues for work because the

skills that you have in making games can be used to solve other problems and so that's what the harmonious team did and they're actually having some interesting luck pursuing academic work and government grants as well as game companies Marco Rubio mouths sorry and so last piece of the puzzle here in addition to kind of figuring out who you are who your clients might be what you're selling it's figuring out what you should charge and this is a hard one because quite frankly most of you should probably charge different rates based on your relative experience so if you want to range I would say that the range the low ends we're dealing with corporate clients would be if you're an inexperienced team maybe 40 an hour and that can go up to over 200 an hour but the average what most contract clients will probably pay is between sixty and a

hundred that's an average but in terms of figuring out what you and your team should charge that's gonna be based on stuff that's individual to you also again skills and experience how many games you've worked on years in the industry how complex the games were that you've worked on as a team you probably want to have a range of cost by the way depending on the kinds of projects if you want to take on crazy firefighting projects like we do you can potentially charge a little more for those sometimes than longer-term work your geographical location can also impact what you can charge right because certain markets will will pay more than others but I think one of the most important things in determining what you should charge is what your goals are so I think that's a good point to segue into our next section we've talked about who you are now let's talk about what you want and I imagine most you probably

want money whenever I start working with a team I'm entering that's that's what they always say when I say what do you want out of this they'll say money if I'm not working on my own games I just want to make as much as possible and I totally get that I've been in that position that makes perfect sense to me but I would also say this sometimes we do ourselves a big disservice by thinking as Indies money's the only thing we should care about when we're doing contract work because there's a lot of other stuff that might be equally if not more important to you when push comes to shove like the kinds of projects you want to work on I think it's really important to not only know what kinds of projects you want to work on whether it's a genre or platform but you also need to know what you don't want to work on right because that's going to help to inform your biz dev efforts and also if a project comes your way that you think is really cool and interesting you might be willing to take a little less money if that makes sense at the time for you as a team another

often really underlooked are undervalued upside of doing contract work is experience we do a lot of co-development with incredibly amazing world-class companies and every single time we do a project with them we learn something that potentially makes us better when we're developing our own indie projects so focusing your biz dev efforts on working with a company that could teach you something that you might need to learn is also a really good thing now I have credit listed on here as well and I want to note this because if you've never been through the process of negotiating a contract with a corporate client it's easy to assume that oh this will be great because I can actually put something up on my website and talk about the work I've done with these clients and it was a really cool gig and I can use that to promote myself and what you should be aware of is that a lot of corporate contracts have boilerplate language of them that says that you're not allowed to talk about anything related to the project you worked on unless the client gives you

their express written permission and in some really extreme cases they'll tell you you can't even mention that you've worked with the client themselves by name so if that's something that you feel is going to be really important to getting more work going forward that's a point you probably have to negotiate for and so sometimes that can involve giving a client a break on the rate sometimes you negotiate for something else you if you throw in something else that they might actually want or appreciate to get them to agree to that autonomy is also a really big deal right because I think one of the best parts of being an indie is feeling like you have some kind of control over your destiny and in my experience debt autonomy kind of comes in two forms creative and operational so creative autonomy means you have a lot of say over what you're making and operational autonomy means you have to say over how you're gonna make it how you run your team how you run your company how you run the project and so if having a lot of autonomy and control

is really important to you then you might want to actually look for projects that are those kind of self-contained ones where you're taking on development of a project from beginning to end because in my experience you don't have quite as much client contact on those you you meet with them a lot in the beginning you check in periodically and key milestone points and then you hand it off in the end you're done that's a really different situation than Co development where you literally take members of your team and you plug them into an existing client project structure to give them some flexible resourcing so you walk in you check your ego at the door and you basically say I'm here to do whatever you need me to do scenario 1 lots of control scenario 2 not so much guess which one pays more the one where you have less control so if control is important to you you got to recognize that upfront stability is another one like understanding what your tolerance for stability and risk is is another key

thing when you start to do business I cannot tell you the number of people over time who have come to me and basically said oh I've got this really cool opportunity if you work for us for free or really drastically reduced rate you can get on the ground floor of this cool tech idea I haven't I don't know about you if I'm gonna take a risk I'm gonna risk stuff on my own project not on someone else's ever so if you don't have a high tolerance for risk you're going to want to look for companies that have you know they're stable they're well-funded they can pay you on time and they can pay you on your terms by terms I mean net 30 and net 30 means you will be paid 30 days after they receive the invoice and it's also worth noting that a lot of corporate clients in their contracts they'll they'll have standard terms being net 60 or net 90 and that's the thing that you can negotiate for that's a really easy point of negotiation I have never had a client say nope we will not pay you on net 30 terms cuz because all you have to do is

explain we're a tiny indie studio and for cash flow reasons we need you to pay us sooner than that and it's it's often literally just that simple no it's entirely possible that you're gonna find a cool project it's going to come your way that meets a lot of these goals it's interesting your team wants to work on it potentially can give you some experience that will help you be good at you know developing your own games but the client just doesn't have enough budget to pay you your your rates so how do you handle that well you can certainly just say okay I'm going to give you the lower rate and just kind of forget about it but there's a more productive way of handling that which I highly recommend which is applying a formal sales discount so sales discount that's exactly what it sounds like you're agreeing to give the client a reduced rate for for the duration of a single project and I've found that these are really effective as long as they're visible so for the first time in a

really long time I gave a sales discount to a client because it was really interesting work and so every month when I invoice them I have three line items on the invoice the top line is how much I would have charged if was charging my full rate bottom line is what I agreed to charge them and in the middle I have I subtract the difference between the two and I have a sales discount and that's an actual dollar figure the client sees every month now you might think well that's a lot of extra work why would you do that well because it codifies my investment in the project and it makes it much easier for me to have a hard conversation with a client down the line if they want to keep working with us for another phase of the project I can say look look at how much money I've invested in this project so this is below our normal rate and I'd like to figure out a way to get closer to what I would normally charge and if you can't do that then let's figure out some other way that you know we might be able to come up with an equitable situation so sales discounts

are your friend use them okay so I can go on and on I'm running a little late on time here so let me move on to the third item on my list my original list which is understanding what your options are now here I'm talking about something very specific and that is again how you structure projects around compensation this goes back to what I said in the beginning about asking people how date how they did that and hearing over and over again that the only option for games was time and material I'm sorry fixed bid and I didn't find that especially good news at the time because I don't think fixed bids are a good model for games at all I'll explain why in a minute but I'm quite serious I don't think it's it's an ideal model for the games industry and I also wasn't happy to hear that at the time because I feel like whenever anyone says there's only one way to do something if the minute you accept that that's true you stop looking for other options and there actually are some really good options out there that are not only good for you

but they're also good for the client as well but before we get into that do you guys know what a fixed bid is we heard of a term it's basically like it's a contractual agreement to you know to make a thing and charge a set amount of money for that thing and you deliver it within a specific time period so the secret of the fixed bid project is just a ton of planning goes into making those successful you have to be very very careful in how you plan a fixed bid project you have to come in with an airtight scope a lot of document detailed milestone deliverables with with also due to equally detailed tasks associated with each one and the reason why you have to have all that is in preparation for that inevitable moment when the client says to you you know I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be in scope and that's gonna happen every time on every project and I'm gonna say clients aren't evil when they do that it is their job to try and get as much as

they possibly can in and get the best possible thing from anyone that they work with but ideally you you know want to have to do that at your expense right so you have to be prepared with with some kind of argument that says no as you can see clearly that's not part of scope but I can actually give you a change order and I'd be happy to do it for X amount more money so ya fixed bids they're a little bit tricky and I gotta say I spent a little bit of time outside of games several years ago working for companies that did work for hire in webapp and software development so just straight tech projects and I got to say I think tech projects compared to games are just so much more simple because your ability to be successful on those kinds of projects are based on three things and three things only is it on time is it on budget did you nail your scope and if you can say yes yes and yes you're good you're done you were successful in running that project but with games we have this fourth factor of

is it fun and as we all know fun is really hard to schedule for sometimes right like sometimes a project to just really nail your core game loop it requires a lot more iteration than you expected or you know maybe it requires a lot of collaboration and iteration and collaboration and fixed bids are antithetical to each other they are absolutely functioning at cross-purposes mm-hmm and by the way if anyone ever comes to you and says hey I love working give me a fixed bid and by the way I love working with my vendors in a really collaborative way the answer should just be nope that's not going to work out well and if so one says hey I want to do a fixed bid project with you but we also we do agile development the answer is hell nope No do not do that that's not gonna work out well for you so obviously you know it's not easy to plan every project perfectly

because sometimes the clients themselves don't know exactly what they're gonna need from you so for clients that need more flexibility and and they want to collaborate obviously a fixed bids a bad option so there is a second option and that's time and materials basically a time and materials project think of it as just an hourly engagement where you're selling your time to a client by the hour so you basically come in and say my rate is X I have you know Y number of people coming on the project so we're just going to keep building until the job is done and it's good that's good for you because you're gonna get paid for every hour that you work and it's good for the clients because it does give them some flexibility but it's also not so great for the clients because kind of makes them feel like they're signing up to hand you a blank check right like I'm in the middle of getting my porch rebuilt and I've been interviewing contractors and I have to say if one of them turned up and said you know I don't really know how long this is going to take or what

materials I'm gonna need but I'm just gonna show up with my crew on Monday and we're just gonna start doing stuff and I'm gonna hand you an invoice once this is over I'd be like oh my god that sounds terrifying never and so you know the clients often feel the same but there is actually a third option and that is called time and materials not to exceed and this is something that is much better known in tech consulting circles but not so much in games and I would really love to see this change because this is I think a much better model for our industry so this is kind of like a tweener between time and materials and fixed bids right so you go in and you start it off like you would a fixed bid project you understand what the client is trying to achieve you do you do diligence you go off and you plan and say I think that we're gonna need X number of people for X number of time and it's gonna cost this much and you basically say here is my plan of how I'm going to attack this

problem but this is where diverges from a fixed bid because instead of committing to a very specific set of deliverables and a specific scope you're basically committing to keep within your price range and work with the client on an ongoing flexible basis so with us when we do these kinds of projects we sit down with the clients every week and we say here's where we're tracking against our original plan do you feel like we need to change course if if we feel that the project needs to change course we'll make some recommendations then when we sit down and work work with the client to figure out what the impact of that will be so if it's going to take more time or more budget then and they don't have that then we will sit back down with them and say okay well let's figure out how we can reduce scope to get you the click to the closest point of what you actually need for the money that you actually have so time materials nte is a great

model again if if you have any questions about how to potentially sell this into your teams or your clients feel free to reach out to me I'd be happy to help you because I would love to see this be more pervasive I think it's really good for all of us and I am almost running out of time so I've got one last section to cover and that is the stuff you need to put in place to be successful so we talked about who you are what you want what's possible now let's talk about all the things you need to do to make sure you're successful and I saved the worst for last because I know it's eating you know thing that's tough in front of a roomful if it needs you're gonna hate everything I'm about to say so brace yourselves if you're gonna do these kinds of projects I'm sorry you're gonna probably have to implement some timesheets and it's a really hard transition your team will hate you they'll be super angry because it's there's a big difference between being free and easy Indies I'm being consultants that have to keep

track of their hours but she's still got to do it if you're doing any kind of time and materials work you have to be pretty scrupulous about what you charge if you charge thirty eight point two five hours that's all you can if that's how long you spent that's all you can bill for it you don't build for 40 like you would on a fixed bid so necessary for time materials but also really important for fixed bids as well because I know quite a few Indies that have taken on fully self-contained projects and they end up under bidding the work and working 60 70 hours a week to actually make up for it and so it's really important to understand where your time is going so the next time you take on a project like that you can actually understand how long things actually take so it's gonna help you to improve your your bidding skills and abilities so another thing that I highly recommend is that you get a project manager and I know many of you are probably in really groaning going I can we can barely feed ourselves we can't take on another person and it's easy to

see how taking on a project manager would feel like another mouth to feed but I will say this when you're doing consulting projects a project manager is not a cost center it's a revenue generator you actually bill for their time as you would anyone else on your team and project managers I find are really good to have on the team especially when you have a team that's that's not happy about doing consulting projects and I think one of the reasons why people feel unhappy about doing consulting aside from all the obvious is they feel like they have to spend time doing things they don't like to do like managing projects and handling clients so it's a lot better if you can just let your team be good at what they're do it you know good at what they do and let someone else handle all the tedious project management and managing client expectations and managing client expectations is a huge part of being successful when you do any kind of consulting which brings me to my next thing whether

you have a project manager or not unfortunately it got to do status reports when you do this kind of work because I'm a big believer and nothing should ever be an unhappy surprise for your clients or for you for that matter and so doing status reports is a really great way of of heading those potential unhappy surprises off at the pass now I don't obviously because I'm out of time I don't have a lot of time to get into how how you could actually use status reports to help manage client expectations but I did do a talk at GDC a couple years ago called up creek managing the unmanageable project and GDC just put it up on their YouTube channel for free so about a third of the way through I spend a lot of time talking about managing expectations on really difficult projects and so there's a bunch of potentially useful information in there about how to use status reports to keep the clients happy and last but not least this is another thing that goes against the grain for a

lot of Indies but you probably need to get an attorney if you're taking on any kind of contract work where you have a you know you have a client giving you a legal agreement and asking you to sign it and if you are actually going to take on an attorney I would highly recommend you find someone who's actually Indy friendly and there are several out there because their job is to actually make you smarter their job isn't to negotiate the contract for you that's not what they're there for they're there to make you make you smarter help you to understand how to make smart choices based on it you know the information you have in front of you and to show you where there's potential to negotiate which is not always obvious to all of us if we haven't gone through that process so if you're interested in finding a good attorney I can certainly recommend ours or I might be able to point you in some other directions from some other attorneys that I know that work with Indies but definitely get one it'll change your life it's worth doing and one final thought I want to leave

you with so we're here G to see you this week and this is a time where a lot of people are going to be looking for work and be really stressed out and steeped in that idea of scale our city there's not enough good to go around there's wrote no room to negotiate it's hard doing this kind of work so I just want to leave you this one final thought you can't allow other people's bad experiences in fear to define what's possible for you because the minute you accept other people's limitations as your own you're horribly horribly screwed you're never going to be able to get past them that is good advice for contracting and it's good advice for life so I just want to thank you all so much and if there's anything I can do to help you I'll be bumping around GDC this week I'd be happy to help out or you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter unless you're trying to sell me middleware in which case please do not reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter but thank you so much and I genuinely really wish you all the best [Applause]