Archive for the ‘Success and Failure’ tag

Business Model… the missing link…

I have to say I’m still doubtful if I should address this in our blog. I will not go into the details of what a business model is what it is not, how it influences strategy and all that stuff. For that a Wikipedia link to Business Model is more than enough.

As I think it notices in other posts in our blog, I still feel that developers are not fully aware of where they are positioned in the flash game market. I’m not 100% sure but I think that what I spoke most with other developers was about business. I admit I feel quite comfortable with the business side of things and I understand that with the average age and work experience of most flash game developers, business is not something they feel comfortable or knowledgeable.

On the other hand there’s the problem of developers that feel they have a life of experience because they sold one game for $100. They use the word “noob” like there were no mirrors left on Earth. I would add to these a significant number of developers that advice others not to do something that they haven’t tried.

And where does a business model fit into this? Well, most of what defines a business model is well known by developers. What is relevant to discuss, in my opinion, is what are the options available in terms of activities and revenue. Many developers ask me how did Vortix achieve this or achieve that. How do we do it? How much do we earn… stuff like that… I can only be theoretical about it because I’m not fully aware the most sensitive piece of information: THE DEVELOPER!

You need to know yourself, you need to understand, not business but your business and you need to neglect all opinions that are negative in nature to what models, activities and revenue streams that are available to you as a flash game developer.

In the next few days I’ll address Sponsorship and Licensing, Collaborative Projects and Contract Projects as activities and their revenues but I feel that what is important is how do these activities affected us at Vortix so you can relate to your own business model. Because there is no perfect or good business model, there’s only YOUR business model.

Sorting out some random thoughts

I’m cleaning up my brain today. It has been cluttered with code and projects and today after almost six months I’ve managed to stop and think. At first my objective was to code but while I was pulling some design decisions I noticed I was also organizing my own brain.

Projects

We are now in the final ‘meters’ of a long race. This race was a nice and big contract project we are just just just about done with. As it is approaching the end we have more opportunities in front of us.

Less than a week ago all we had was this current project, the japanese themed game being coded by Pedro that Marco has spoke about lately and Mechs and Drones in a full stop. It was only natural that our option would be to pick up where Mechs and Drones was left, but suddenly another possible contract landed on our hands and the doubts start.

We’ve passed the startup phase with no investment capital but our own work, which is a huge victory. I wonder what we could have done with venture capital… We are currently in the consolidation stage, so these crossroads are always a doubt. Go for the stability of the project or the chance of a game like Mechs and Drones?

Bold Pixel Engine

A lot of stuff planned for v2. We’re implementing Box2D in it, plus camera and more and more behaviors. We will migrate all time based stuff to Greensock’s Tween Platform.

With this a lot of questions appear also…

Will the engine stay modular? By this I mean, right now I’m not dependent of the blit engine, but to implement Box2D I have to decide if only the blit engine will be served by the physics wrapper. I want to write a simple collision system. Should I implement it with sensors in Box2D? Or create a separate one?

I can even go backwards… should the current animation of the blit engine be able to be applied to MovieClips? And the list could go on and on…

I know what will decide all this: simplicity and minimalism. Whatever makes Bold Pixel Engine be more simple and minimalist will probably be chosen.

Sorting it out

Monday marks the beginning of March. I’m betting it will be a defining month for us this year. For starters the japan game will walk the extra mile in terms of content, quality and so on. Then, depending on what we will be doing, a lot of extra effort is needed… that’s what I think right now. We’ll see how it goes.

By the way… thanks for reading

Our actions don’t affect us because we are not professionals

Rant mode on…

Saying you believe in your own potential and in the quality of what you do or create is a huge measure of your own success and value. The rest is proving it. This is true when you want to improve everyday of your professional life and it is damn difficult to prove it. Bottom line is that no one takes your word for it, you have to prove it by showing your potential and quality, therefor your success and value.

Nothing is more a reflection of this than it’s exact opposite. If you say you don’t believe your own quality and potential people around you will take that for granted! No one needs prove of the lack of value, quality or success of someone that says it! Everyone will take your word for it!

Now transpose this to a reality where money is involved, let’s say, for some reason, I’m talking about the flash game market reality. The portals want to buy content at the lowest possible cost, which is only natural. The developers want to sell that content for the highest possible margin.

Portals do their best to have a professional behavior. Portals excel at saying they are good and to prove it. Obviously if it’s proven, we all know they are or at least they do their best to be.

But I just read that developers are not professionals said by a developer and the context of this is unprofessional behavior. What I read (and it’s just my opinion) is that the developers as a whole have a low potential, low quality and that they do it for the love of games. A developer said it… no need to prove it.

Even if one developer thinks that his unprofessional behavior won’t affect him because he is not a professional, it will, hard but I’m not worried at all. What worries me is that it is extended to the whole flash developers present in that community as if it was cool not to be professional. The value of the whole community will lower if that mentality spreads, thus lowering the potential for margin. Professional developers will do their best to prove they are not part of the pack, and probably will manage to do so, but the idea that actions don’t affect hobbyist developers will at least affect all hobbyist developers, some of them amazingly talented.

Rant mode off…

Fun: The final achievement

A long time ago I read a thread on a gamedev forum where the opening poster asked what was ‘fun’ and how was it achievable in a way that would raise the ‘addiction’ factor. I found the question to be very interesting but the debate around it, considering that was a gamedev forum, extremely poor.

Most of the people that participated in the thread could not separate their development background from their playing background. Remember the Gamer != Game Designer post? It’s pretty much the same argument but on a later stage. Why is this important or relevant? Read on…

Copying formulas

I’m betting that a huge percentage of flash game developers/designers implement features in their games because they’ve seen it in sucessful games. If it is successful it is usually named: high-scores, achievements and so on are excellent examples of successful features.

Implementing it enhances a game, for sure, but does it increase the fun and entertainment value? I bet you’ll say YEAH! but can you explain why? We are just copying formulas, not really digging why we are doing it.

Categorizing

Well we keep doing it… When we do a certain game genre, we are categorizing our game. Again we are copying a formula but by doing it we are giving the player an opportunity to filter what he wants to play. Don’t take me wrong, this is more than fine. After all we do want players to play what they want or that will take the fun out of the experience. Why does it take the fun out of the experience?

Understanding the factors

By copying formulas we are adding factors such has re-playability  and by categorizing we channeling that value. Both work if the game has value on its own and most don’t! It does not matter how many success formulas you include or how you categorize your game if you ultimately fail to understand why is a game fun and entertaining.

Some developers simply copy entire games and it works for them. I think they are convinced they have achieved a higher state of game design knowledge… well… I’d love to see them do something new under a different name, just to see what would the reaction of their fans be.

On the other hand, developers that understand the factors that create a great experience do wonders, they create new genres, make the gamedev theorists and journalist come up with new terms and I’m under the impression they don’t even think about it. The mob simply follows their lead.

So what are the factors?

That’s up to each one of us to find out I guess. Being a Raph Koster fan I believe that factors reside in the purest of forms, in understanding how the brain processes the experience. My personal view on it is that if you apply that basic processing to a target audience, it will work. Our talent and experience only makes it work more or less, but it will work! That’s the basis of how I design.

I bet other developers will have other ideas, but this whole post is a “think out of the box” kind of thing. What I’m trying to express is that if you don’t think in terms of your own gamer clichets. Don’t think that you like multiplayer, or that a certain game was cool because it had swords. Think on what will the reaction be to something you create. Think what is the typical player of the game you are creating. Think on how you’ll reach him or her individually. Stereotype your player, not you as a player.

Our Second (Official) Birthday

And I mean official because the whole thing started a long time ago. Pull a chair, relax and enjoy this little story.

There was this artist dude, who we will call Marco for no particular reason. He had his share of game development work done, mostly for startups and community contests. He had a gig set to go work on a game development company that was doing some nice stuff over the web.

Then there was this coder dude, who we will call Diogo for no particular reason. He was a student, a game development enthusiast. Somewhere between the geek and genius but with the aspect of a normal human being.

And finally there was this consultant dude, who we will call Vlad for no particular reason, who had a lot of experience managing contracts and projects, that loved game development, that had a crush for game design but that the best he could do was a text game in high-school and all the other gamedev projects failed miserably.

Well this Vlad fellow was tired of being a ‘suit’ so he started to read and do some game design stuff. One day he was frustrated of not being able to kick start a game because his coding ability was far lost for more than 10 years where Pascal was the king of the hill. A friend of his whose name is James said the the magic sentence that triggered hell: “If you ever coded, just pick code again and hire an artist.” And so Vlad did and he was lucky enough to meet Marco.

They worked on a game that was so bad it would never be understandable, Vlad’s fault by the way… but a friendship was born and that’s where it all started. Later on they were making plans about a lot of stuff but all around a game development studio. They then picked a project and started working on it.

In the meantime they decided to try to support several projects. Oh the failure… it was rather easy to find talented people, the problem was that talent and hard work rarely meet so projects failed one after the other. Until one day Vlad opened his mailbox and there it was… an email from Diogo, one of the many that Vlad and Marco met, saying that he was able to work hard and so he did.

Some months later, February 13th 2008, they all met and registered what is known has Vortix Games Studio. Their first game was almost finished and some weeks later they were able to show it to the world.

The rest is written somewhere along the lines of this blog. But the bottom line of this story is that Diogo, Marco and Vlad did it and February 13th will always be remembered as the day that they made it official to the world.

Vortix Games Studio is alive and kicking!

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