Dead in the water

Fuck. Thats about all I can say. The entire project has stalled. The reasons are obvious: no money, no resources. In a project like ours, which relies solely on the enthusiasm of the people involved, it equals to long down times, which equals to loss of momentum, which equals to loss the enthusiasm - and that - equals to loss of the people.

And it goes like this: we have the vision, we have the concept, we have the framework, we even have a coder who is willing to put long hours to make this work. We, however, lack the visuals. None of us who are involved in the project to make “Gentlemen at Arms: Tea Time Tactics” into reality has any visual skills. And let me tell you (nothing original here): thats a huge show stopper.

We can’t turn our ideas into visual sketches. We can’t turn the sketches to 3D. Which means that we can’t breath life into our ideas and the existing code. Hence we are dead in the water, even when the underlying structure is beautifully built. 

And we are moving on, but not as a project, but as individuals.

Increasingly so, unless new opportunities - that means people with the needed talents - emerge. 

What to do now? Frankly, I’m out of ideas. We don’t have enough money to hire a person to deliver the needed visual looks, not to mention 3D modeling, texturing and animation. The demand for visually skilled people -especially in the gaming industry in Finland - is savage. Anyone with any skills at all gets recruited into much better resourced game studios (digital advertising agencies) before blink of an eye. According to some statistics Finland gets about 40 qualified graphics people to the gaming industry per annum, while the demand is in hundreds…so you can guess how much there are volunteers to “make some graphics for fun, just to see if it goes somewhere”…

While we can’t find any visual direction and execution, I think the morale for our group is down the drain, because nothing can move forward from here.

So thats why I haven’t even bothered to write anything here as I have been so busy changing IRL jobs to build my career as the hopes of ever making a career in the game business have waned. The same goes for all the others. While we are all doing great career wise - some of us even more than great - its a killer for this project.

And if things continue like they do, we all end up somewhere high in corporate hierarchies long, long, long, before we have our own game studio (which tells nothing about how likely we are ever to make it big in corporate world. It just tells that we are unlikely to make it anywhere in the game business).

So I think its now time to face the reality and make the obvious conclusions:

 

10  We find the money to hire visual artists, who can do 3D and texturing (and get really lucky of actually attracting one, even with above the industry salary)

20 We make a game without any graphics at all

30 We give up for now and try to make enough money so that we can: Goto 10

 

The will, will prevail nevertheless. What the will is, is entirely another matter. And if tautology would be a punishable crime, I would be facing some community service, or at least a small fine right after pressing ‘publish’

- Tuukka, Producer (bard)

Did I hear a f*ck you?

Check out this stupid clip

Communities and Games

We have spent quite a while (=rather many beers) figuring out how the massive trend of communities and social networks should and will change the computer games industry. Significance of this trend should not be underestimated. For example, mobile social networks are one of the fastest growing areas at the moment (according to Tomi T. Ahonen in he’s speech in Helsinki).

I was very happy to read Joshua’s blog where he introduces 80 ways of adding community features to games. Reading the article certainly made us re-think some of the concepts in Gentlemen at Arms. I have listed my favorites and reflected on how we see them fitting to our plans.

• Making a game multiplayer does not qualify for community. Oui! We’ve been thinking a lot about social nature of gaming, be it with your peers in the same space or virtually over the network. We think there’s hell of a lot to improve in this area. We are obsessed to introduce the best and the most innovative multiplayer/social gaming dynamics ever including intra-team and inter-team relations.
• Player-created content (a bit like UGC, but with a twist). We’ll allow our community to design more hordes, levels and stuff. Only the sky is the limit.
• Ranking and “social rating” the players and giving prestige to active ones in all possible occasions within the game and also make the ranking visible to “outsiders” in forms of badges to be integrated to blogs and sites. These will also serve the purpose of marketing and drive more traffic to our pages.
• Game replays and viewing ongoing “tournaments” was something we just discussed over dinner few days ago at KOM. We planned to allow community to follow the ongoing games form the birds eye perspective and give players the possibility to save best moves and situations from the games. Maybe we could even auto-recognize significant events and suggest them to “Top 10 moments”.
• Provided that we are not giving the first game for free, we could actually reward the “winners” with free subscription and this way kind of share the revenue to the users. Affiliate program was also good idea!
• Website, blogs, communities, goodies, giveaways, art, mobile reminders, special minigames and all that stuff. Hell yes!

Joshua starts he’s article by stating that “In the rush to improve the most surface aspect of games - the graphics - other important aspects like building community have been ignored”. I could not agree more. That’s the whole idea behind Herring Rouge Studios. I’m glad to see that somebody else agrees and sees community features as a possibility for indie vendor to rival the big productions.

Tommi, Directeur Général de HRS.

Enter the Bard

Some time ago we were talking about the different roles we have in this project. Arto called me a bard: the character from RPGs who is jack-of-all-trades and master of none. This was not a compliment, as he laughed to the extent of being insulting. He also made some rude gestures and implied all sorts of things which I won’t repeat here. He is my best friend.

As a hard boiled consultant Tommi tried to accommodate the insult and be the mediator in our little workshop, so he said: “all people have value and none shall feel left out”… So he called me a producer instead.

I took pride: Producer. That’s who I am. Not with a insignificant a, but with a capitol P with The; not a bard who just sings gay songs while playing a sorry arse flute, but a producer who is a gay friend of everyone, saying all sorts of gay things about everything in the project…did I say gay? I didn’t.

So I’m Producer. Now what?

After they stopped laughing, they said I should do some blog entries. “I will”, I said, “I know how this stuff works”. I work as a digital media consultant and the last years I have been ranting about the whole web 2.0, convergence, RSS and the tyranny of transparency etc. thingies to my colleagues and clients, while thinking: “Only if I could turn my knowledge into something interesting to write”…

I couldn’t.

So I decided to do 3D instead.

Me.

I’m artistically multi-challenged: I can’t draw and my hand wrought signature is embarrassing -at the age of eight, I even tried cheating my blind music teacher in the recorder trial by whistling instead of playing the damn thing due to lack of talent and obviously got caught: “what are you doing?” she asked…so I got fail…(true story).

But I wanted!

I wanted to do something to make the whole process of our game development to go forward: I came up with the concept. I wanted to make it true. I wanted to create.

So I did. I took up the challenge, made some searches and found Google Sketch-up.

Brilliant: 3D made easy was the promise, and I took it.

After 6h of learning & labor, I had something. A sketch. Something to show to my friends, a rudimentary torso it was, but a starting point!

Making the sketch brought up problematics that were not even thought before: Where do the stairs go to? Where do I place the entry points to the gatling guns, where does the supply tent reside, what are the distances?

The questions were endless and the learning profound: If you have a high-level concept, convert it into a real item. With free tools, like Sketch-up, any silly bugger can start working toward the intended end result. Think of it as a wireframe model and don’t worry how it looks like -that is the fastest way to get yourself thinking what needs to be done and thought of, and more importantly, get it out there for your mates to comment & build upon (the 3D model that is).

- Tuukka, Producer (bard)

Ps. This is the first model I ever made some months ago…the concept has evolved since Enjoy, and mind the gaps!

Show some backbone, man!

Had some spare time today and decided to start working on the back-end of our forthcoming flash game. It all began by installing SmartFoxServer on our Ubuntu Linux server. SmartFoxServer should dramatically decrease the initial effort of server-side development. So far it looks promising.

The installation itself was a breeze. Just under a minute and couple of commands and presto, we were on the roll! Haven’t actually gotten any client code working yet. There’s also some more configuring to do (yup, already changed the default username and password, in case you’re wondering We start by using the free LITE version and probably we will upgrade to BASIC or PRO after some evaluation.

We already had an existing version control system, namely Subversion. SVN has many benefits, it’s cost (0€, $0, £0) being one of the most important ones. And honestly, I think Subversion beats many of the pricy commercial products, at least in reliability and flexibility. The repository will be used to store our code (all of the code, both flash- and XNA-specific), as well as our art assets. This usually requires some effort from the art department to learn new practices, since version control systems are traditionally only used by software developers.

“Wind it up!”

Jani.

May I introduce: Sir Henry and Sir John!

As it seems, these two tea-sipping chaps require an introduction, so jolly good, here it comes!

Sir Henry is a member of the Conservative Party, British officer in the seventh generation and a tea-fundamentalist par excellence. As a rather pedant chap standing against all that is modern he might be seen as a grumpy old man. Yet to those who know him personally, he is exactly that.

Sir John is known by his peers (Sir Henry that is) as mellow and easy to get along type of fellow endowed with sarcastic humor, but don’t get fooled, he has just as stiff upper lip as his comrade and loves Her Majesty the Queen more than many British officers love themselves. He prefers Earl-Grey over war, but on most occasions that just isn’t an option!

These two distinguished gentlemen shall be the stars of our first production: Gentlemen at Arms: Tea time tactics.

- Arto, Concept Designer at HRS

Picture by Kiira Kalliomäki!

Herring Rouge Studios Manifesto

I’ve been asking the same question from myself many times during past weeks: what is the reason and the ultimate driver that makes somebody even think about game development. I must admit, at first it didn’t make any sense. It’s a big player’s business. You know, EA and stuff.

Fuck that! I bet that a small ensemble of really skilled and creative guys can shine in this industry and we are obsessed to prove our case. I tell you why.

• Current game business suffers from the same syndrome of dullness as Hollywood. All the big stuff looks the same and costs like hell. We hate that. We prefer stuff that is different, controversial and causes some real debate.
• Games are developed “by the gamers for the gamers”. Yeah right. The buyers (the other side of the equation) got older and we think the developers missed that. Vast majority of the games are still developed in an assumption that the polygon count is relevant for the customer. We think that the overall experience makes the difference, not the state-of-the-art technical excellence.
• We also think that the social nature of gaming will continue to gain momentum and that many of the current solutions suck. We will be better.
• We believe, that future delivery channel will not be WalMart. It’s online. Online will include much more than just selling the game. It’ll be about communities, social encounter and experiences.

We’ll start the journey armed with these arguments and our creativity. Guys at EA, don’t forget the name Herring Rouge Studios!

Tommi.

Paris Game Developers Conference 08

After the San Francisco Game Developers Conference 08 held in February, it is now Europe’s turn. The registration for Paris GDC 08 has opened today. It will be held on June 23-24 at the Coeur Défense Convention Center in Paris.

More than 50 sessions are offered by 70 presenters. To find the most interesting sessions, visitors may focus on one of the predefined tracks. These tracks are: Programming, Game Design, Production, Visual Arts, and Business/Management. More info at the official website.

So, the registration for “Super Early Bird” passes is now open and the price is 275€ + VAT. Not bad, I’d say.

Jani.

Research on multiplayer Flash games

I was doing some research on current multiplayer Flash games, and I must say I’m impressed with what you can actually do with it. There’s amazing examples like Arthic and Music Is Your Weapon (which is not impressive as a game, but the graphics are pretty nice).

Seems that some of the best multiplayer browser games are built on SmartFoxServer, so we definitely need to take a closer look at the product. This was also the case with Arthic (Browser Game of Year 2007) and actually the Dev team shares some insight on the tools and principles they were using during the development. That’s good reading for our team!

But I guess one of the best examples must be Club Penguin from Disney with more than 12 million registered users in less than 2 years. That’s pretty amazing, considering the registration process was absolutely frustrating. The game is for the kids and could be maybe compared to Habbo Hotel.

The cost of SmartFoxServer Pro edition license is 2000€, which I guess is manageable if the product saves effort in the development phase.

Tommi.

Ready, Fire, Aim

Last Friday we were planning how to get started with the business and how we should spent our limited resources. The conclusion was to invest more in proof-of-concept approach. In practice, this means that one of the first steps is to create web version of our game concentrating on the core of our idea. This will allow us to achieve two or three goals:

Test our ideas with real gamers and get valuable feedback for the “real game”.

Combined with web marketing efforts, it will make our name known for the public.

Leverage our position in the eyes of potential investors (provided that we’ll succeed in two previous tasks).

So stay tuned, I’m confident that we’ll have some visible results pretty soon here. I’m enthusiastic reader of Drew’s Marketing Minute blog and today he wrote about new book from Michael Masterson titled Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat. It discusses about starting business and that selling is the key to success.

“Nothing matters more than selling. Many first-time entrepreneurs have the impression that they are doing things in a logical order when they look for the perfect office space, have logos designed, and order a lot of inventory. The reality is they are wasting valuable resources on secondary and tertiary endeavors. If no one is going to buy what you want to sell, you’ve just wasted a bunch of money on a business that will never be.”

The strategy to follow, according to Masterson, when starting a new business is to get the product ready enough to sell, but not worry about perfecting it. (Light Flash proof-of-concept, that is for us.) Then sell like hell and if there’s results, then it’s time to make it better (which is for consoles and stuff for us). I already ordered the book, this is a must read!

I’m quite sure we have chosen the right path to follow. Now it’s pure execution. One of my favorite quotes is from Jack Welch in his book Winning: “In real life, strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” That’s what we need to do right now.

Tommi.