Category Archives: indie life

dealing with publishers mini-guide

Too many times I’ve heard developers complaints because they were ripped off by some bad publishers. I’ve decided to write this short guide for anyone interested in dealing with publishers, hope you’ll find it useful.

  1. Inform yourself about the publisher’s background and past deals. Ask in forums, ask the publisher himself for past references (people he worked with in the past or games he published). If he never made a deal before, doesn’t necessarily means is bad, but surely isn’t very encouraging. If he is reluctant to give you any contact with previous people, stay away – he has no reason to avoid you contacting his past clients!
  2. Ask for advance royalty. This is so common but still many newbie developer don’t know about that. NEVER make any deals based on royalties AFTER the game is published. Ask immediatly and advance royalty. The form may vary, 50% royalty advance now and 50% later, etc, but always ask money BEFORE. After all, what’s the problem? you have a product finished, ready to sell (or maybe already selling well from your site), so the publisher knows what he pays for.
  3. Put fixed dates in the contract. This should become much more popular than it is. What does it means? it means that there’s no longer “XXX dollars after 30 days the game is relased on country YYY”. Unless you live in the country where you are licensing the game for, how you know IF/WHEN the game is actually released there? So, instead, put fixed date like “xxx dollars to be paid no later than 10th of december 2007”. That way you’re SURE you get your money!
  4. Check for tricks. Most common tricks consist in the “bug” clause. Something like “if a bug is present on product X, we are entitled to ask all advance money back and you’ll never see any money”. Seriously. Has happened so many times! Publisher/distributors pretending there is bug XXX (maybe even non-existent) and asking all money back as compensation. Always sell your products “as is” basis.
  5. Product price changes. This point is more about personal tastes. If is ok for publisher to sell your game regardless of the price, skip it. What I’m talking about here? I’m talking about the fact that most publisher, retail or online, will / can lower the price of your product for promotions, etc. So while you’re still selling it on your site for 20usd, they sell it for 9 euros, 6.99usd and so on. Guess where the potential customers are going to buy it?

Ok that’s all. Those are, in my opinion, the five most important points where people should be careful. Of course there are many other things to be careful. Always take your time and read the contracts they propose you at least three times! better, have it read by several people!

the newbie indie first steps

Ok I want to have a bit of fun so I decided to write the:

typical average newbie indie developer first steps into the business!

Note: the following text is probably exaggerated a bit, but is based on real facts! I’ll call the developer Joe Smith.

  1. Joe looking for porn sites finds by accident one of those new blogs/sites that claim online business is the new golden age and starts to read it. Obviously he finds a reference to the famed Pavlina articles and goes to that site to read them.
  2. Joe starts to get interested by the sales figures. 100k/year here, another 50k prepay there and then he thinks “wow a tetris clone can make me 25k$ / year? pfui is a joke”
  3. he obviously joins indiegamer community and announces he is going to change the world with his first game
  4. he ignores any advice given there
  5. he realize that even making a simple tetris clone isn’t so easy, and his initial “short 2 weeks game project” takes in the end 6 months
  6. he announces his game to the world, expecting 100 sales overnight
  7. after 3 months and 3 sales (of which 1 refund because “the game made my kid cry for 1 week”) he starts to wonder what’s going on
  8. he is very angry and posts on indiegamer, “oh wtf, why my great exceptional original game doesn’t sell?! any suggestions?”
  9. after wasting money in PR servies or adwords without any sales improvement, he realizes that yes, there are people earning 100k, but like in any other industry,the remaining 99,9% earns less than a street-sweeper
  10. after 1 year of no-sex, his wife leaves him to go living with a famous black pornstar in a caribbean island

Ok hope you had a good laugh. That’s what happened to myself too, except for point 10 luckily! 😀

Portals are the doomsday messengers!

LOL! well, I just read this post from cliffsky blog… and must admit that I agree with most he said in there. I’m sure he won’t put his games on any portals in future 😉

However, a thing nobody says is that when you’re selling directly, you must expect very little earnings until 1-2 years have passed and several games have been released by you. Seriously, even a good game, if is the only one you have, won’t make you more than 200$/month. Surely there can be exceptions… but is more like 1 out of 1000 than 1 out of 10 !

usm2 delayed

After some recent troubles I decided to postpone the deadline for estimated release of usm2… I hoped to finish the beta for end of september, and indeed there isn’t much left to do. But I’m not a machine, I’m a human 🙂 so I really needed a break. After working hard for almost 2 years, I decided to take a small break of a week or so.

I was getting to a point where I could stare at the code for 2 hours and not find a very trivial bug! quite a signal of stress… 😀

Also I don’t want to ruin usm2 making a quick release. I want to plan carefully and release already a good beta. I want people to say “ooh great game!” already by playing the beta version. For this, I think I need 1 month more…!

difficulty levels balancing

One of the hardest tasks when making a game, is the difficulty level balancing. No matter what you do, there will be always someone that will say “game is too easy” and someone else that will say “game is too hard”!

For this I think that a classic difficulty level setting in options menu should be required for almost every game. For simple games like arcade/action ones is hard to balance them, so I would suggest to do like Atlantis Sky Patrol: first levels are easy, then the difficulty generally increases as you play more of the game.

Various tricks have been implemented both in retail or in shareware scene. I remember many times to have read games that “auto-adjust” their difficulty based on player’s performances! like PES5 for example. If you win several matches in a row, to break the monotony you face sometime opponents playing tougher, even if this has a downside – playing with Brazil and having hard time to score 1 goal vs Burkina Faso (with all respect to this team!) spoils the overall game feeling.

If your game is complex like my rpg Magic Stones however you can use a nice trick: I have difficulty level too, but I added a new Quest Mode that has much tougher battles and some really requires lot of skill. But there’s a trick: since the game has strong rpg elements, you can just go aronud the lands and battle other monsters, collecting several avatar stones. Indeed, every time you get 10 stones of same avatar, your knowledge on this particular avatar increases, thus empowering it. So even a very weak level 1 avatar, once leveled this way, can become really a great weapon of destruction at your disposal.

This way, even players not very skilled can just wait and build up a strong deck of cards (avatars) then get back to that impossible battle in quest mode that had them almost give up the game 😉 in my opinion this is a very good way to keep the player playing the games even if he finds one particular points too hard, because he knows that he’ll be able to come back and eventually beat the opponent!