Discretion: Post-mortem of an Android game

Is it true that the best post-mortem is written after a decent cool-down period, giving the author time to gain some good old-fashioned perspective? Maybe. In my case, I told people on the libgdx forums back in January that I'd be writing a post-mortem of Discretion "soon". Well, soon has come and gone, but I'm sure there is advice in here somewhere that is useful and relevant to game development, and building/shipping your own product. Without further ado...

Background

I've wanted to make my own games since I learned programming in BASIC. I got into 3D programming back in the days of DOS4GW and directly accessing your graphics memory at 0xA000. I did some time in the games industry in my 20's, ending up working on a full blown, "triple A" PS3 first person shooter title. I gained lots of valuable experience, so when my friend suggested Android development I was very optimistic: history was repeating, and it was really possible again for a single indie dev to create and distribute a game with an actual chance at commercial success. The barrier to entry is absurdly low: the only money you need to spend to sell an Android game is the $100 or whatever for your Android Market key. Of course, it helps to have an Android phone to test your app on and make sure silly things like alignment, SD card settings and all those other little bits don't suck. But really, $100 and you can ship a product that's available to buy from millions of users worldwide.

Of course, shipping a successful product is another thing...

Role-Playing Games: The Terror of Scope

I came up with a lot of ideas while I was backpacking in India, and wrote them down. There were a lot of ideas, but one thing became clear very quickly: I wanted to make a role-playing game. I've worked on a variety of different kinds of games, on a variety of platforms, some for personal projects and some for work, but I've always loved the genre and always will. Yes, I'm a "swords and elves" geek. Yes, I think Tolkien is the God of modern literature. And yes, I believe the genre is overdue a healthy shot of creativity, as with many other genres -- the time has never been better for devs to really flex their imaginations and give the tired old paradigms a good kicking.

But a Role-Playing Game, for my first indie project, on a tiny budget with no outside investment. What was I thinking? After writing a few dozen pages of my design wiki, I came to realise: The scope was terrifying. But then I asked myself, what's the point of doing a startup if you're not doing something you love, something you're truly passionate about? And can you trust yourself to stay motivated making a Bejeweled Clone or the next Angry Birds? The thing I feared more than failing was failing to release anything. It was a big question mark for me, because although I've had one or two personal projects that did get off the ground, I've had many more that never saw the light of day.

So, a RPG it was. On a fairly new platform. With 3D graphics.

One of my friends who I met in the games industry thought I was crazy. As if making a RPG wasn't enough work - now you want to do one with 3D graphics, on smartphones? How are you going to do animation!? (3D animation is very resource intensive, and back then most Android phones didn't support hardware shaders). Indeed, this decision came back to bite me on the ass. But looking back, I can't say I truly regret it, because some things are actually easier in 3D, and I had more faith in my ability to make assets myself in a 3D editor than in Photoshop. Focus on your strengths.

Development: Winter of 2010

Winter was coming. What a winter it was: we had thick snow covering the country for weeks on end in the Netherlands. But it didn't affect me so much: I was working from home! What a joy it is, to sit at your computer and stare at the white vista outside of your window without having to go out in it. I put my head down and coded, day after day, relentless, unstoppable. I was a machine. Early on, I made one of the best decisions for the project: I chose a small open source multi-platform library called libgdx, primarily for its 3D animation support and because you could build and run on your desktop machine, only deploying to a handset when you wanted to test. This was before the other popular commercial engines added Android targets. I ended up contributing back to the project, my first ever participation in open source. It felt good, and the community was great. I'll never forget the owner Mario and his biggest contributor Nate, tirelessly answering questions on the forums, showing people the way. It paid off. Books and job offers aside, libgdx is now starred by 839 users. I am proud to have been a small part of that.

The game came along. I did beta testing with friends. It was hard getting people to try; being part of a bigger network would have been useful then, but I was (and still am) small fry on Twitter and in the larger community. But it was okay - I nailed most of the major bugs and the final release onto the Market was pretty damn stable for somebody who once caused 50% of all crash reports in a web design application release. The big day came. Four months of hard work and no income; something that I could really say was a labour of love. I launched. The first few sales trickled in. I shot off endless emails to Android blogs, posted on Android and gaming forums, day after day. A few more sales trickled in. I lowered the price from my somewhat optimistic $5 initial offering to the 99c "sweet spot". There was a small bump in sales. I got some fanmail that made me really happy, and I released a small but neat "content expansion", another area of the world with its own enemies and quests.

But it wasn't enough. It wasn't anywhere near enough. My product failed.

So the post-mortem didn't get written. I did some other much smaller projects, but the wind slowly fell out of my sails. Motivation slowly but surely ebbed away, and around April I bit the bullet and took a permanent job as a Java developer. The company put a "no working for yourself" clause in my contract. I took my apps off the Market. Discretion faded away into memory.

And now we come to the part that I hope can help others who want to make it in the brave new world of app development. Particularly game developers like me, who have dreams, not business plans. (Well, I actually did write a business plan! But because I never sought outside investment I never needed it.)

Where did I go wrong?

Major points first:

• Market / platform mismatch: Android and iPhone games are a firmly casual market. Duh. People want to pick up these games, play them on the train, and put them down again. They like to play for short times. Many of them like simple, social games, like Wordfeud. The platform for the RPG market is PC and console: successful games like The Witcher, Fable, Oblivion and Skyrim prove this. World of Warcraft proves this. It is undeniable. I chose Android for its low barrier to entry and its (for indies) awesome distribution network, but I missed my market.
• Production costs: any game requires artwork. On Android I thought I had a chance to make a low budget game, because smartphones aren't as "hardcore" as desktops or consoles; they don't have the raw processing power, so people don't expect as much, right? Wrong. People still have standards. Not the same standards they expect from that $60 PS3 game they queued up in the middle of the night on launch day for, but still, it can't look crappy. Now, it is possible to make a low budget game that doesn't look crappy - but damn, you need to choose a genre that doesn't have requirements like 50 different character textures and 10 outside areas with rocks, trees, roads, houses, and 10 different weapons, and realtime lighting, and skeletal animation..... I just couldn't afford to make a good looking Role-Playing Game. It cost me bad reviews (the Market can be pretty hard, especially on free demos). It cost me conversions. It probably also cost me reviews on blogs too. Who wants to review a crappy looking game?
• Marketing: for some reason, up till almost the end of my development time, I thought all I had to do was upload it to the Market and the money would roll in. Luckily I came to my senses and shortly before release, sent out emails to blogs, posted on forums, spammed the hell out of my poor friends on Facebook and Twitter followers. I even made a promotional YouTube video (it sucked - see above point for why), something I never had a clue about before. The great thing is, there are lots of free ways of marketing your product these days - it's really never been cheaper. The downside is, these channels are open to everybody else too. I don't envy the editors of big Android or iPhone blogs. So in the end, my marketing efforts weren't enough: I should have spent a small budget on actual advertising (places like Reddit.com might have been good for this, and Facebook offers really focused advertising campaigns). I should have spent more time Photoshopping my screenshots. (Everyone in the AAA industry does this, and everyone knows about the airbrushing that goes on in mainstream advertising. It may still have been lipstick on a pig, but it would have helped: first impressions matter). Still, marketing apps is hard. The sheer volume of the competition is incredible. How do you stand out?

There were other smaller things too, like failing to get dynamic lighting working at an acceptable framerate: it would have instantly made the game look better, given it more of an atmosphere. But I had a deadline, and I had some pretty fearsome technical constraints. Some features just aren't realistic.

Where now?

The big question for me, is what next? I've had almost a year to think about it, but I knew quite soon after making my first RPG what I wanted to do next: make another RPG. I already had ideas for a more involved game when I first started writing down ideas for Discretion. The wiki is already there: it's called Game 2.

But it's not the genre with the most potential for getting rich, and it's not the easiest to develop, and there are 1001 better ideas for making a living from a startup, right?

I've looked into some of these ideas. I even played around with a prototype for a website in Grails. Believe me, after coming home from a Java shop, Grails is a damn nice breath of fresh air! I've read Hackernews, read the success stories there; I know that with hard work, patience, dedication and a bit of luck, it's possible to make more than a sufficient living from web startups or the App markets. Hell, it's possible to get really fucking rich.

But it's not enough.

I can't get excited enough about writing another web app. Grails is nice but technology alone is only part of the story. The functional programming renaissance is fascinating to watch unfold, but it hasn't really pulled me in: the elegance is fantastic, but it's still just a different way of swinging your hammer in the end.

The technologies that excite me the most are OpenGL, DirectX, terrain engines, UDK and Unity.

Because I want to make another RPG.

And I will.