Game Development on a Shoestring, part 2

October 27th, 2009

Welcome to the second part of our series on developping commercial-quality games without a budget. This week, we’ll tackle how to get the major pieces, namely programming and art assets, done without significant cash outlay.

First, however, I’d like to clarify something I said in the last column. I mentionned that “legal and management issues are not are not a major decision item.” This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be thinking about finding a way to obtain legal and management support, because that’s extremely useful. But it’s not the first thing to handle - you need to have first-line staff to manage before you need a manager.

So - how can you find your staff?

Programmers

The good news is that finding a programmer willing to try his hand at game programming is easy. Just about every college and university has a computer science program, and someone among the student body will be able and interested to at least try his (or her) hand at it.

Alternately, you can try finding a programmer online - there are many game development websites out there and many of them have a recruitment forum or the equivalent. More traditional resources such as newspapers, job sites, and entrepreneurial fairs might be also worth a look, but usually the people you’ll find through those resources will be looking for paying work. And we’re supposed not to have a budget.

Artists

Depending on the game style, finding artists might be very easy or very hard. Pixel artists are not as sought after as they once were, and while many have retrained into 3D art, they might be willing to put some hours in a project just to do an art style they prefer. On the other hand, talented 3D artists pretty much have paying job offers from the moment they get noticed, so getting one to work with you is tougher.

If you don’t have a budget, your best bet is again students. Young artists really need to develop their portfolio, so they’re more likely to take a risk on your project.

Choosing your Team

So you’ve found a few promising candidates. How do you separate the sheep from the goats?

The first thing you should be looking for is previous experience. Of course, it’s doubtful you found someone with published projects under their belt. But you still need to be reasonably confident that your team will be able to eventually ship a product. Your only way to evaluate your potential team is through examples of their work.

Artists are somewhat easy to evaluate - after all, they must have a portfolio, or you probably wouldn’t have contacted them in the first place. You should be looking for both experience in the subject matter, (for instance, some samples of tiles and sprites) and some degree of polyvalence (such as photorealistic designs, etc.) 

Programmers are tougher to evaluate. It’s easy to eliminate poor candidates, but a lot harder to identify the best one. Certainly, get rid of any programmer who doesn’t have at least a somewhat workable game project to show you, or at least a real project he created on his own. If he didn’t at least attempt some programming in the past, he probably doesn’t realize the scope of work he’ll have to do and is highly likely to quit on you.  Then discuss your project with your remaining candidates. You should be able to get a better read on their understanding of the realities of game development from their ideas.

Once you’ve found a potential team… take the time to get to know them. Go grab a beer and talk game design. Basically, find out if you’ll be able to stand working with those guys. The two or three weekends that will invest may save you a project-killing conflict later on.

Whew - another long post. I thought I’d at least get to setting up a business today. Oh well - there’s always next time.

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Quick Update

October 15th, 2009

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to give an update to you guys, as I’ve been a bit too busy to work on the next post in the Game Development on a Shoestring series. I will get that posted ASAP, I just had to handle some emergencies first.

Thanks for your patience!

Vincent

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Game Development on a Shoestring, part 1

September 16th, 2009

Welcome to our series on ultra-low-budget game development!

The purpose of this series is to serve as a guide for people who attempt to live the Studio Archcraft experience - namely developping a commercial-quality game with little experience and almost no financial resources. I’ll try to indicate the errors to avoid, the best practices to use, and so on.

For today’s post, I’ll focus on the preliminary issues to be handled.

1-So, you want to be a game developper?

The first question you have to ask yourself is how badly you want to be an entrepreneur in the field of game development. If you just want to work in the game industry, there are easier paths. Entrepreneurship, in any field, means long weekends spent working,  fights with your significant other because you’re almost never available, and lower income than if you spent the time working the counter at McDonald’s for minimum wage.

It’s a rewarding experience, and yeah, if you create the next Final Fantasy you can retire early. More to the point, you get to create your games, not those of your boss.  But you have to be willing to pay the price.

Now that the downer stuff is out of the way, let’s move on.

2-So, how big is your shoestring, really?

The first thing you should do once you’ve decided to commit to the game entrepreneurship path is figure out exactly what you can invest in the project.

First - what are the skills you bring to the table? Are you a programmer, or an artist? Maybe you’ve got some management skills? More to the point - are you good enough in your field to be able to do the tasks? What do you have to learn? You need to do a pretty brutal self-assessment. The point is not to discourage yourself, but to get a realistic idea of what you can contribute to the project. On that note, if the only thing you can put on the table is “I have great game ideas” - well, that’s not enough. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but “having the game idea” is such a small part of the game development process that it’s not a meaningful contribution.

Beyond skills, what else do you have that a game studio needs? Obviously, if you’re reading this, you have a computer. Is it good enough to do game development on it? Do you have the software you need to do your part of the work?

Third - we’re on a shoestring budget. But exactly how much money can you afford to sink in the venture? Do you have any savings you can afford to put in? Maybe you can afford to divert part of your regular income to the project?

3-And how big is your shoe?

Now that you know what you have, you need to figure out what you need. Obviously, you’re going to need, at least:

  • A detailed game design document;
  • Tools to create your game data;
  • Game engines;
  • Art assets;
  • Musical assets and SFX;
  • Some legal and management support;
  • Eventually, publishing and marketing services.

Then, you need to figure out how to handle the tasks you can’t do. You probably do have some money, but nowhere near enough to be able to afford to outsource everything you can’t do yourself. So - you need to figure out how to get the missing pieces.

At this stage, you probably only need to decide how you’ll get your programming and art needs filled. You’ll probably want to handle design yourself (or with any partners you might have), music and SFX can (and should) wait until design is complete, worrying about publishing and marketing is really premature, and legal and management options are not a major decision item at that point.

Well - that’s running a bit long.  Next week, I’ll tackle various options on how to fill missing art and programming needs. If I have room, I’ll also talk about the various resources available for a start-up.

Vincent

Posted in Game Industry Discussions | 2 Comments »

A Bunch of Things

September 2nd, 2009

Hi everyone,

It’s been a couple of weeks since my last post, so I figure it might be time to put more content onto this blog. So…

News… or the Lack Thereof

There’s not that much new to report on our side. We’re working on our next project, but there’s nothing that really stands out as major news. Simply put, the work we’re doing now will be used no matter which project we decide to focus on - although we could have a decision on that soon.

I’d really like to be able to post more on what else is going on on our side, but that’s premature at this point.

New Blog Series

I’m toying about doing a new series of blog posts on a subject which may interest people - or not. The title of the series would be “Game Development on a Shoestring Budget”. Basically, it would be a guide on what you can expect, and what you should do, if you wish to try your hand at entrepreneurial game development.

I’ll probably post the first article next time (so, in a week or two.)

Fall, or the Return to School

School is back in session - so we at Studio Archcraft would like to wish a great year to every one of you who’s still stuck there. Good luck, and try to enjoy it nonetheless!

And while you’re at it, show the cool new game that you bought this summer to everyone you know. :)

Vincent

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Future Projects

August 10th, 2009

So - the long awaited “What’s the next Studio Archcraft project?” post…

First, a word of warning: any information found here is subject to change - we’re not committing to anything just yet, as there’s still a few things to sort out first. Also - this is strictly Studio Archcraft stuff. Graffiti is, so far, not involved in anything found below.

Now that the disclaimers are out of the way, let’s have a look at future projects Studio Archcraft might do:

1-A Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled prequel or sequel

While Black Sigil’s story stands on its own fairly well, there are still stories to be told in Artania. At some point, we’d like to revisit that world and tell some of those stories. Whether we’ll be able to depends mostly on Black Sigil’s sales. On the other hand, if Black Sigil performs very well (hey, maybe, like Spinal Tap, we’ll be really big in Japan!) this may very well be bumped to priority one.

2-Black Sigil 2 - Unrelated story

We’re also planning on taking what we’ve got, improving it, and telling an entirely new story. We’re planning on basically improving everything from Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled. Better visuals, better monster AI, tweaks to the various game mechanics, etc. We’ve also taken good notes of the various criticisms given to us by the general public - while the encounter rate seemed fine to me, it apparently wasn’t for most people. So that’ll go back to the drawing board.

This project is probably the one most likely to hit shelves next. We’ve got an initial storyline down, we’ve got fairly final specs for many art assets, we’ve got a solid design doc… Basically, we’re putting our ducks in a row to develop it as fast as possible.

3-Action RPG unrelated to Black Sigil

Well, Black Sigil is nice, but we do want to branch out a bit as well. This is our other path. So far, we’ve only put down some ideas for that project, so don’t expect any screenshots or videos. On the other hand, the concepts we have written down would require us to work quite a bit less than we did  for Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, which is really interesting from a business perspective.

So - there you go. That’s what we’ll be working on for the next few months. We’d love to hear your thoughts on that!

Posted in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

So, what’s next?

July 19th, 2009

So, Black Sigil is in stores, and slowly reaching new territories (such as the foreign, frontier country of Canada), so it might be time to discuss what we’ve done recently and what’s next for Studio Archcraft.

1-Supporting Black Sigil’s sales

The bulk of the sales and marketing work is handled by Graffiti Entertainment. However, we’ve tried to help anyway we can (for instance, with this blog.) On this matter, if you haven’t purchased your copy of Black Sigil yet, I advise you to do so. And if you’ve pirated it or something, now would be a good time to have pangs of conscience and buy a copy. 

2-Housework

One of the thing I spent much time on in the last couple of months is behind-the-scene administrative stuff. Running a business requires quite a bit of that, and getting that done was becoming fairly important. We still have some of that to do, but that bit of workload is shrinking daily.

3-Designing new projects

Obviously, as a game development studio, we have to design games. This particular task has progressed a lot - we have one game pretty much ready to move into full-scale development, and we’ve also laid the groundwork for additional projects as well. 

4-Preparing for growth

In addition to doing maintenance work, we’ve laid down the groundwork for some real growth - getting real office space, building a larger core team, etc.  The goal is to reduce our development time from one game every seven years to something like a game or two a year. We’re also planning a website redesign (for real, this time - the current design can’t handle two projects.)

So, the next step is getting our next project in development. We’re actually well on our way in this regard - enough that the next blog post will be about our new project.

Posted in Business News | 7 Comments »

Get in the Game, part 2

July 4th, 2009

As discussed in the previous post, I’m now going to tackle the various career tracks found in the game industry. Obviously, every game company is different, but as a rule, the larger the firm, the more structured it is. So while you might be allowed (or even expected) to do some level design work in a small game development studio, this may not be possible in a thousand-plus employees megapublisher.

So… where should we start?

Administration/Support

Let’s start with the easiest to explain. If all you want is to be able to say “I work for BigNamePublisher” to impress the rest of your family, this is probably the easiest path to follow. All those large firms need HR Managers and salespersons. They need administrative assistants. They even need janitors and supply clerks.

Obviously, none of those jobs sound very glamorous.  Also, if you want to do actual game development, well, those aren’t the jobs you should be going for. At best, they’ll be a stepping-stone to an assistant-producer or producer position.  So… let’s skip to the more interesting career tracks.

Music and Sound

That’s another easy one to handle. If you want to do game music or sound effects, you can immediately skip the small development studios. You’ve got three real options: working for the larger studios and publishers, working for specialized sound firms, or starting your own studio.

To get in the large studios as a composer or SFX creator, you’re going to need a track record. Simply put, you need to have worked on some game projects, to show that you understand the whole development process and that you can deliver the goods. You need to have experience on standard equipment and software - even if you created great sounds using only your mouth and a cheap mic from Best Buy, you’ll have to be able to use better tools. And ideally, you should have a degree or certification for your skills.

You probably need the same type of credentials to get a job at a specialized sound firm. However, these firms sometime offer internships, which can be your opportunity to earn that experience you need.

Finally,  small studios can’t afford a full-time composer/SFX guy. Which means there’s a fairly high demand for independent composers and SFX persons. So they’re a great opportunity to get that experience you need, and to get your name out. Unfortunately, getting that first game out is very difficult, so if you go that route, be aware that you might be putting your time in a doomed project.

Art

The good news: there are always openings for artists in the game industry.

The bad news: by the time you see the job opening on BigNameStudio’s website, fifty people have applied on it.

Simply put, as an artist, you live and die by your portfolio.  Experience helps, of course, as does a degree, but as long as you have the basic skills (i.e. know how to use the relevant software) to do the job for which you’re applying, the only thing that matters is how good an artist you are.

If you’re applying at a large firm, you’re going to need to prepare The Perfect Portfolio For The Job.  If it’s animation, include humans, animals, mythic monsters, moving chunks of environment, the works. The employer is probably looking for someone to handle a specific set of animations (ex: mostly monsters) so if you don’t include that, you won’t get a call back. In addition, showing flexibility is a good thing - if you just do monsters, you’re not going to be able to help the guy handling humans when the schedule starts slipping.

If applying at a smaller firm, you’ll get a bit more slack. For starters, a more generic portfolio can usually do the job. Also, small firms get a lot less applications, so they can’t be as picky. And they can also take the time to ask you for a sample  if they need a specific type of art asset, whereas a big firm can just pick from the dozens of portfolios that they received.

Programming

So you’re a programmer… first, congratulations, you’re pretty guaranteed a job somewhere, if not ncessarily in the game industry.

In the gaming industry, frankly, you’ve got it easy… if you’re good and can convince someone you are. The unfortunate truth is that the programmers bear the brunt of the crunch time, and that results in high turnover. So the big firms are always looking for new programmers. What they can’t afford is to give on-the-job training - after two years of training, the programmer will be on his third burn-out and will be looking for work somewhere less stressful (like Afghanistan or Iraq.) 

Kidding aside, if you want a job as a programmer, the easiest way is to show a game you’ve programmed (in something like C++). If you’ve got something (a gameplay demo suffices, no need for fifty hours of content) you’ll get a job.

If you don’t… it’ll be a lot harder. Programming degrees aren’t that hard to come by, so they’re the bare minimum. If you don’t have either a game demo or a degree, don’t bother applying.

If you do have a degree, you’ll be asked to show projects you made in school (or in your free time, or at work), and let’s be honest - you’ll be up against guys who spent their whole summers, nights, and weekends creating various projects. On the other hand, if you have a degree and can’t get in the industry, you’ll still be able to find a well-paying job.

Producing

Producing is probably the hardest field to define. Most producers start out as either game testers or as assistant-producers, which is basically a nice way to say they do whatever unskilled work is necessary to finish the game, such as data entry.

A producer’s job is to act as project manager. This is why most producers start out in entry-level positions - the only thing that is really needed to work as a producer is experience in the field of game development, and experience managing projects.

While being an assistant-producer or a tester is about as unglamorous a job as can exist, pretty much anyone can apply for those jobs. Of course, only the best will be promoted to producer, but at least you’ll have the opportunity to show your abilities.

Design

A few years ago, taking classes in game design was an excellent way to move to the front of the unemployment line. That is not true anymore. Having graduated from the various game design programs is an help in landing an entry-level design job. That said, it is not yet a necessity - you can still work your way into these jobs through testing or assistant-producer jobs.

If you’ve set your sights on senior or lead designer positions, however, you’ve got your work cut our for you. Those are, understandably, the most coveted jobs in the industry. Typically, lead designers come from the ranks of producers, programmers, and designers. Some firms prefer to draft their designers specifically from one of the three specialties, others give those jobs as rewards to well-performing employees. The best strategy is probably to just secure a job in the right field, then figure out exactly how your employer assigns those positions.

I hope this can serve as a good primer on the various ways to get into the industry. It was certainly fun to write (if a bit long.)

Vincent

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Get in the Game, part 1

June 23rd, 2009

Apart from “When is Black Sigil coming out?”, the question I have to answer the most is “So, how can I get a job in the game industry?” So I might as well get that answer out once and for all.

First, a disclaimer. I’m nowhere near an authority on the subject. I’ve talked with several people in the industry, and I run a game studio that produced one game. That’s the extent of my qualifications. I’m not a HR manager at a big publisher, and there may very well be some tricks I’m not aware of.

Also, getting in the game industry is tough, and I won’t sugarcoat it. You’ve been warmed. This will probably be a series of blog posts - there’s a lot to be said on the subject. So…

Three Tips to get Started

First, let’s get the obvious out of the way. These tips apply to everyone, even for other industries. But they’re worth stating nonetheless:

  1. Be employable: simply put, if you’re underage, or can’t legally work for some reason, you’re not getting in the industry.  Nobody’s going to break the law to get you into the game. So that’s the first thing you should work on - get your work permit if you need it. Getting older by a couple of years takes time, but if you’re really sure you want to work in the game industry, you should see those years as an opportunity to make yourself a better game developper.
  2. Find out where the work is: don’t assume that you know where all the jobs are. Sure, you should consider relocating if necessary, but there are studios in small towns as well - and some of those offer really interesting positions. In addition, getting your foot in is the hardest part - don’t be too picky. If the openings are at cell-phone game studios, then that’s where they are. Once you have a couple of years’ worth of commercial products under your belt, you’ll have an easier time switching to a position more to your liking.
  3. Be the best candidate: on any given position, there are undoubtedly several applicants - and the big names have so many applicants for each position that they don’t even bother responding to most candidates. Get a degree if there’s one in your field. Create a solid portfolio. Get any experience you can. Do volunteer work. Anything to get your resume in the “at least worth a phone call” pile.

Hopefully that didn’t discourage too many of you. Next time, I’ll be talking about the possible career tracks you can take to get one of those cool project leads positions.

Posted in Game Industry Discussions | 1 Comment »

Creating the Art for Black Sigil

June 12th, 2009

Hi, I’m Maya, the former Art Director for Studio Archcraft. I was invited by the CEO of Studio Archcraft, Vincent Dehaut, to talk about the art for “Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled”, recently released for the NDS.

I have been told that many people, including those who have been following Black Sigil from its GBA days (when it was still called “Project Exile”, where in fact it was already Black Sigil before that!), are interested in how the art came to be. Thanks, and I’ll do my best to explain why and how.

I think I should first explain how I got into pixel art. When I was about six, I was blown away by Akira Toriyama’s design work in Dragon Quest I and II. Combined with the amazing interactive worlds the games offered - the art, the music, the story, the characters, I was just sucked right in! Cute little slimes, the tension of going somewhere new and frightening, and the excitement of finding Roto’s Armor set… who wouldn’t fall in love?

When I was in high school, games like Final Fantasy V, Estopolis (Lufia), Dragon Quest V, Secret of Mana, Illusion of Gaia, Romancing Saga 2, Shining Force 2, and Lunar were the golden games. I wanted to start making game art, so I scoured the net looking for amateur game studios to see if I can join in on the fun! I joined two teams - Project Whitehole in Japan, and Red Rain in Canada. Red Rain was a game being developed by Studio Archcraft’s programmer, Pierre Leclerc. At that point, I started to study pixel art. There were a lot of pixel art communities online where you can share your work with fellow pixelers: Pixelation, Kema’s (Japanese), and the forums found on the site that hosted Edge, the premier pixeling software in Japan (though I use Adobe Photoshop). I learned a lot about shading and rendering in a three pixel radius, and other obscure techniques there. As I continued to make design and pixel work with these groups, Pierre and I realized we worked really well together. That’s when we started up Studio Archcraft to make Black Sigil.

We spent the first year pretty much writing the story, building tools, and making mock ups. Originally I wanted to go for a more western look, with realistic proportions and large, detailed environments. I wasn’t too happy with the outcome on the GBA screen. First, the characters were too serious looking. The small, undescriptive faces felt too impersonal. To show any details in the face I had to make the sprites huge, which made movement impossible. I then tried the super deformed style (two head lengths) but it was too cutesy and lacked character in the body. I tried out a few things here and there and ended up with what’s in the game now.

For the environments, I wanted to make a massive world filled to the brim with details. I wanted people’s rooms to look different, stew to be cooking on the stoves, and kings sitting in lavish, over the top throne rooms. I didn’t want “screen after screen of pretty illustrations”, but a whole connected world you can really feel and understand, and most importantly participate in! For the world and map designs I was really inspired by Bethesda Softwork’s Morrowind (my favorite RPG of all time, bless that company!). Everything in that world was logical, and I just “get it” and feel so immersed. Everything belongs in just the right places, and isn’t a mess of rooms and corridors like in most SNES-era games. I wanted the world design itself, just by the visuals, to allow the player to be able to imagine
that area being built, expanded, and populated. I wanted each place to make sense according to the world map, and the player to be able to understand why each town was built where it was built. The biggest problem was that the GBA had limited memory and I couldn’t use too many tiles (and darn it, too few artists!). Tiles are square building
blocks (in Black Sigil’s case, 8×8 pixels) that you align on a grid to make a map. I guess you can imagine building something using legos, where the basic shape would be a 2×1 box. It sort of made the maps a bit clunkier than I wanted and I couldn’t add in all the details, so I tried to focus a lot on layout and having one, simple theme for each
area by having a (hopefully) memorable layout and one or two unique objects (such as ice and height for Bel Lenora, the gated wood community of Fort Domfriu surrounded by forest, and the water towers of Cythere).

The user interface was pretty fun. The one I worked on was the GBA one, and it was interesting trying to show the mass amount of information available onto a tiny screen. Having only 4 buttons (L, R, A and B) was challenging too. I tried to make sure the player knew exactly what was happening when swapping inventory and changing equipment, since I think it’s really important to show the before and after for stats, rather than just the after. I wanted everything to be easily accessible too. I avoided submenus as much as possible, since it’ll be a chore to have to cycle in and out of so many menus, which would happen since there’s only “A” to select and “B” to cancel/go back. L and R were reserved mostly for switching through characters.

For the battle interface I wanted the player to not really have to look at the screen, because honestly the GBA screen was very dim and I found it hard to make out things. Also, I couldn’t have huge boxy menus block the screen since the battle is in real time. I tried to make a system where players can remember button combinations, like “down, right, right” for heal instead of relying on visuals. I think it is similar to Mash (Sabin)’s button entry system in Final Fantasy VI. A lot of the challenges were for the GBA so I guess I don’t need to go into that too much.

For the character illustrations, I started with pure anime, eastern style, but as production went on I tried going for a blend of western and eastern style, at least with rendering. I think it’ll look more eastern or western depending on who’s looking. From my standpoint, Ni no Kuni and 7th dragon looks very eastern, while Mass Effect and Oblivion looks very western.

All in all, art is always a learning process. I learned a lot while I made Black Sigil, and I could go on forever about what I want to fix/change but I’ll have to save that for the next game! :)

Thanks for having me here. It was a pleasure, and I hope everyone has a fun time with Black Sigil.

Posted in Art Discussion | 11 Comments »

IT’S OUT!

June 9th, 2009

I’m thinking that the blog post says all.

Now, it’s up to you guys - get the game, play it, discuss it, buy ten copies for your family… It makes a great Christmas gift!

Seriously, we’d like to thank all of you for your support so far, for the encouraging emails, for your nearly infinite patience - and we hope that you’ll enjoy Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled.

Thanks again, and good gaming!

Posted in General Announcement | 9 Comments »

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