Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about finishing everything and moving on. 

Between content creation, level design, gameplay, playtesting, getting people involved, and debugging, there’s a lot that goes into making a video game. Even with all the fancy open source libraries one can use, and all the tools that make creating art, sound, and interface resources easy, it’s still a big undertaking to put together a game. Super Psychic Chibi Fighters started up in June, and it’s now November. The game will probably be in the app store in early December. Six months and about 800 hours of development time later, the final product is ready to see the world. 

Will people like it? I feel really confident that they will. I’ve played it just about every day for these six months, and I can say that it’s still pretty fun to try and beat my high scores on the minigames, or accumulate medals, or even click through the stories and relive all the silly jokes and boss fights. Will people know about it? I really hope so. Even once the game is released, the ongoing task of marketing, advertising, and getting people to talk about the game carry on. There’s always more to do, and of course, the next project is already looming on the horizon.

In the last few days of development, I’m jamming SPCF3 full of secret features, additional content, game polish, and bonuses. There are new cheat codes (one of which I’ll be revealing here on Snackbar once the game is complete!), a few new cameo characters that appear only in the story, and additional gallery content and bonus scenes that bring out the characters’ backstories and world. Ultimately, I want to go the extra mile and deliver more to gamers than they expect when they download the app. Who knows—maybe I’ll get as well known as Angry Birds and Plants vs. Zombies? Unlikely, but possible in the world of direct App Store marketing.

Super Psychic Chibi Fighters has a lot going for it. From the fun stories to the stylized eye-catching characters, I expect that it will get a lot of attention in the App Store and on websites where I advertise it. Everyone loves Victoria’s art, and reception so far to the personality and humor of the characters has been nothing but positive.

One of the fun, experimental things that I’m trying out in Chibi Fighters is DLC. Some people love it, some people hate it. Personally, I really like it when my favorite fighting games offer new characters as DLC, rather than making me buy the whole game over again to get the eight new fighters (yes, I’m talking about you, Street Fighter 4). So I included two additional characters for SPCF3 that wouldn’t have otherwise appeared in the game. One is a guest character, Cosette Garidion, from my old web series Dark Magical Orchestra. The other is Cecil Kaine, a story character who is not playable, but makes several cameos. I plan to see which one of these two sells better, and if DLC sells at all, really. If Cosette sells, expect more guest characters from webcomics and other indie games. If Cecil sells, expect the world of SPCF to expand as more minor characters from the story make full-fledged appearances. With any luck, the world of Chibi Fighters will continue to expand with more exciting content and levels even after the initial release.

SPCF3 has pushed the limits of my game design ability and programming from the very beginning to the very end. I’ve learned a bunch about programming, about making the game fun, about balancing abilities and skills, and about creating engaging level. The things that I’ve learned in the course of doing this game will hopefully filter into the next thing I go about developing. I’m thinking perhaps a tactical strategy game, something in the same vein as FF Tactics and Disgaea, to offset the frantic action gaming in my two existing titles. Online play would be a fun option to explore in the next gaming endeavor.Of course, whether I’ll be able to do more gaming depends on how well SPCF does. Such is the way of indie development.

Though Chibi Fighters is coming to an end, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to put an end to Indie Dev Diary. I’m working on plenty of card and board games, as well as the RPG Mystic Empyrean, and there will be another video gaming project someday, of course.

Next time, Brad will celebrate the release of his game in style, as well as introduce some of his other projects.

Character art by Victoria Parker for Level 99 Games.

Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about getting the word out about your project. 

At this point in the development, when the modes are laid out and the graphics are starting to come in, it’s important to get started on spreading the word about the game. I’ve learned the hard way that generating excitement isn’t easy, and it doesn’t happen on its own. Posting “here’s my cool game” on your niche blog just isn’t enough to get people involved. Personally, I’m still learning a lot about how to advertise and make a game popular in the pre-release stage, so this section is a combination of what I’ve learned and what I’m still trying.

The most important lesson that I’ve learned about promoting a game is that you can’t do it all yourself. You only have so much reach, and if you’re a cloistered independent game developer like myself, then there’s even less you can do to reach out to the people around you, but hopefully you have friends, colleagues, and just some random associated parties that you can call on for help. This is the best chance to actually spread the word about a project or idea. Hopefully some of your friends will think it’s cool enough to tell others about, and some of their friends will think that it’s cool enough to repeat, and so forth.

My strategy this time is leveraging more social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter and my own site. I’ve also created a teaser site, which has some downloads and additional information about the game. I drop the address to this site just about everywhere I can. I’m also running contests, giving free copies of the app to a few lucky followers once the game debuts.

Games bank on different things for success. Even if you have the exposure to show off your game to everyone, without a hook of some kind, you’re just wasting time. There needs to be some catch that draws people into your game. With some games, like Chibi Fighters (and my older Internet Defense), part of the allure of the game is quirky humor, and I try to bring this out in the marketing. On the promotional site, I’ve tried to make the character personalities the centerpiece of the site, and show the players how much fun they will have by displaying how much fun the characters themselves are having with the game. 

This kind of character-based interest building is especially good for fighting games, like SPCF3, where the players will tend to pick a favorite character and master that specific one. Letting the players get to know the characters deepens their interest in the game, which helps them to have more fun as well as making them more excited about the game’s eventual release. When I work on my RPG, Mystic Empyrean, in the coming months, I’ll use a different strategy—one that appeals to player creativity and the allure of building a world and a persona from scratch.

Giving people a reason to get interested in your game is just another piece of the puzzle. Once they are interested, they need a means to get involved in spreading the word. This usually means something interactive—not just a cool gameplay video or some neat graphics (though these certainly help). Memes, interactive videos, comics, and minigames are just a few of the ways that a developer can get people telling their friends about a game. I’m still investigating a lot of these myself with Chibi Fighters, but there are as many ways to get people involved as there are incentives. 

Ultimately, the developer has to think about what he can give back to the people that are interested in your game. Some common things are status within a forum or web community, actual hard goods, in-game bonuses and rewards, involvement with the game’s creative process, or inclusion in the credits. 

If the game provides an outlet for people to talk about it and socialize, they will. OpenFeint is a free achievement system that provides this very function, and which I’ve included in SPCF3. Including a system like OpenFeint gives me an instant, free community module to plug into my game, and comes with its own range of costs and benefits. For one, I have to host the advertisements of other games on the OpenFeint screen in my app. However, an app can just as easily be advertised within the apps of others using this system.

There is plenty of opportunity for contests and community promotions that are outside of the game. Hidden bonus content or especially tough challenges that will have players asking around for the solutions to unlock or beat can be a great strategy, as can the ability to play competitively online, or competitively at all. Competitive gamers love discussing strategy with anyone they can.

A free or ‘lite’ version of the game can never hurt your cause, and gives unbelievers who are willing to try your game a chance to play it before spending their hard earned money on it. To some people, a demo version says “if you play this once, I think you’ll want it even more,” and shows that the developer has enough confidence in the quality of his work to let people try before they buy.

Of course, not all successful games have free demo versions, either. Ultimately, the question is whether the game is interesting enough that people will want to play it again after playing it once (or playing a portion of it).

There’s very little in the world of gaming that’s tougher than taking your product and showing it to the world. Some people will hate it, some will love it. It’s important not to get discouraged by negative reviews, and to take suggestions and lessons to incorporate in the next venture. If you’re confident in your game, and enjoy it, then someone else will too. Maybe you’ll even make some friends and fans along the way.

Character art by Victoria Parker for Level 99 Games.

Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about building out a game from the base concept.

With the skeleton of the game built, my next step is to identify which parts of the game require fleshing out. This is a problem that can usually be attacked on several fronts. The player characters need to have all of their attacks programmed, the stories need to be written, and some of the minigames have stages that need to be programmed. These different aspects can be approached as they become relevant, or according to whim. Once the shape of the skeleton is established, the actual content insertion can be done at leisure.

All the while that this is happening, there will be new ideas that come along, and need to be accommodated or thrown out. I had originally intended to put a kind of Pong variant into the game as a two player minigame, for example, but that idea was dropped out for various reasons. On the flipside, while writing the story, I discovered that writing the characters in a sort of “fourth wall” style was very interesting, and decided to include unlockable comic mini-stories as part of the gallery mode, as rewards for some minigame achievements.

When developing different game modes, the big question is “what can be salvaged from the existing game modes to make new game modes.” Training mode and story mode can be derived easily from versus—just include some extra controls or an AI engine. 

The deconstruction of the game’s premise to make minigames isn’t just in terms of coding, however. One of the minigames, Corridor Runner, focuses on using your character to dodge a series of hazardous  traps and reach a target—the dodging aspect of SPCF3‘s versus mode. Another, Trick Shots, allows you to use a set of limited shots to eliminate targets that have been placed in hard to reach spots. This minigame is a deconstruction of the variety of attacks available to the different characters and how they can interact. If the minigames aren’t derived from the same premise and mechanics as the base game, they will feel out of place when bundled with the main game.

Minigames and derived modes need to not only be culled from the premise of the main game, but they need to be rewarding in their own right. Playing the story unlocks new characters, so players are motivated to play the story. There needs to be some incentive associated with the minigames as well. 

For achievement driven players, a series of medals and leaderboards are enough. Unlockable gallery content can be a big motivator for others—especially if the unlockables drive the story or characters forward more. 

By creating a wide range of achievements and unlockables—ranging from the simple to the near-impossible, it is possible to get a great deal of mileage and playability out of game modes which would otherwise be discarded quickly. Most gamers are goal-driven, and will play a game mode relentlessly to achieve their goals. The same game, equally as well-built and fun, would be forgotten by these players if it did not present some concrete goal.

There are a lot of reasons to include cheats and secrets in your games. Some of these are obvious—it’s nice to include fun bonuses that don’t quite fit on the options menu. It’s fun to leave in a few easter eggs for people to find. When you’re developing independently, you can and should include things just because you think they’re fun—it’s part of the charm of doing it yourself. 

However, cheat codes and secrets have other uses, too. Including cheat codes that can only be found online or via leaks will entice players to go online and talk about the game, to scour your forums, and start up dialogue about how to get a particular unlockable or cheat code. You can even sponsor community-based “treasure hunts” for your cheat codes, or save them as additional press releases and hooks to continue generating news about your game even after release. If you release a fun easter egg or cheat code in your site’s posts or newsletter every third week, you can bet your bottom dollar that subscriptions to your RSS will go up and traffic will increase. Effectively used, secret content can give your players a more enjoyable game, and boost awareness of your future projects.

In the next installment, Brad will talk about generating buzz and interest for your project before release.

Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about when the rubber hits the road: taking all your planning and assets and starting to put everything together.

Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about getting what you need for your project: creating what you can and acquiring what you can’t.

Two weeks ago, I talked about the process of concepting and prototyping a video game. Now I’m going to ramble a bit about the brass tacks of game building: getting the actual work done.

First off, it’s ridiculous to go into a video game attempting to do it all yourself. Even if you are a Leonardo da Vinci-style Renaissance man/woman, it’s not worth your personal time to hand-craft every single iota of your game. Drawing on the talents of people you know (and getting to know people upon whose talents you can draw) is a major and oft-overlooked element of building a game.

As soon as I moved from “pursuing” to “developing” my game, it was time to think about budget. I don’t expect a huge, evergreen return from SPCF3–iPhone and iPad games are a hard sell in the App Store, and my previous game, Internet Defense, barely made enough to cover the artist’s commission, and nowhere near enough to cover my own time costs. Since those days, I have learned a lot, and also acquired more of a Web presence, so I decided that SPCF3 would likely do better than Internet Defense. The proposition is one that comes with a high risk. Games are a labor of love, but when you’re building games for a living (even just partially), the living has to come into consideration.

I decided that $500 would be a reasonable expense to pour into this game (as in (1) I could get it done for that price, and (2) my fiancée won’t kill me when I present the numbers to her). A $500 allocation for development seems low, but remember that I’m also my own programmer. Hiring myself to do the programming to make SPCF3 would cost roughly 200~300 hours of my time. This is time that I wouldn’t be doing commission projects, so I really have about $8,000 tied up in the development. Unless I sell $8,000 of SPCF3, I’m not going to break even on the cost of the project, and I should just go back to doing websites for furniture companies (a thankless and tiring job that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone). For reference, that’s around 2,300 copies at $5 a pop in the app store, making $3.50 per sale. Really though, your only hope to make money on a game in the App Store is to get featured by Apple.

Depending on the type of game you are doing, the varying elements of design (sound, art, programming, interfacing, etc.) will take different lengths of time. Usually programming is the most time-intensive of these, and will give you the greatest control over the final game product. So, it’s best to be a programmer, if you’re going to do any of the grunt work for your game, but it is a long, hard road to get to that point. It’s a good idea to design a game that will make more use of your own strengths.

So my budget plan allocated around $500 of other people’s work. Armed with this information, I immediately contacted an artist. A good relationship with a quality artist (and preferably several) is invaluable. As someone who does commercial projects involving art, I have a veritable roll call of artists to handle whatever project comes up.

Where do you find artists? I’ve had a lot of bad experiences hiring friends to do my artwork in the past, so I have a policy of not hiring anyone I know in person. Instead, I search portfolio sites like deviantArt to find artists whose portfolios match what I’m looking for. Once I have ten or more candidates, I pitch them the project, and have them all bid on it. Lowest bid wins the commission. With a system like that, it’s very easy to stay within your project margins. Amateur artists, musicians, and designers are all looking for a way to get noticed and put some high-quality projects in their portfolios, just like me. Because of this, I try to hire these individuals over professionals whenever I can. It’s an added bonus that they’re interested in work for the exposure rather than the money, and thus will usually be able to complete jobs within an indie-level budget. Also, as your interests increase from successful games or projects, you can come back to these individuals with larger projects, and they’ll trust you to be able to cover higher expenses or even pay them in dividends rather than up-front capital.

For SPCF3, I contacted Victoria Parker, the same artist who drew for my recent card game, Kill the Overlord. (More on that one soon.) Victoria’s style seemed perfect for this project, but most importantly, she could create the 18 characters I wanted to include in the game, all while staying within my set budget. Earlier, I said that I came up with the concept as the very first step, and then thought about resources, but that’s not entirely true. The talents of the artists that I planned to hire were a major factor in choosing ‘Chibi Fighters’, as Chibi characters are Victoria’s specialty. If I had a different artist in mind to do the work, the game might have taken on a very different look and feel.

It’s surprising how much you can get for free. Sound effects and music are all over the Internet, and many people want you to pay quite a bit for them. Luckily, if you dig, there are just as many cheap or free sound effects and even full music tracks to choose from. For Internet Defense, I used free music written by Kevin MacLeod, who also scores music for a price (a price beyond my feeble budget, so I have to stick with the free stuff). There are also plenty of royalty-free music scores that you can acquire for less than $3 at sites like Square Peach. I’ll be using a combination of these in SPCF3.

Deciding on music and sound effects is something that I do as the game development progresses. While these elements are important, they are not as title-specific as art is, and so there is no need to rush and buy a commission or decide up-front what to use throughout the whole game. You can buy as you go.

As for interface and graphical elements, there are plenty of ways to go. With Photoshop and a little practice (or Inkscape and a little practice, or GIMP and a little practice) it’s possible to create decent, stylistic graphics that bring out the feel of your game. It helps to have a background in design, be it making card games or board games or websites. It’s also good to draw all of your menus and interfaces out in advance. Rough sketches with arrows connecting different buttons to their target screens are a good starting point. If you’ve ever put together a website, a game’s menu system goes up much the same way. And don’t forget player feedback when designing your interface. Players are going to spend a lot of time looking at and using this (hopefully), and you don’t want it to be annoying or unintuitive in any way.

If you need to hire someone to put together your user interface, the rule is the same as with all commissions: someone out there will do it for your budget, or close to it, and there’s a free alternative to everything, even if free is practicing in your spare hours until you’re good enough to cover it yourself.

Playtesting is a very different kind of resource, and it is one that becomes more and more important as the game develops. Rather than a piece of the puzzle you can get and then arrange as you wish (like art files or music), playtesting is more like a compass that guides a project continually towards the ultimate goal.

My policy with playtesters is the reverse of with artists: I directly contact people I know to play test my games and products, partly because of trust, partly because people like myself and my friends are the target audience that I’m developing for, and partly because I’ve had bad experiences with anonymous playtesters in the past. Like artists, you should try to develop a relationship with your playtesters. They will understand your vision and be better able to advise you that way.

So how do you know what kind of things to create and allocate? Often times it’s an estimation, like with art. Other times, it’s a “do as you go” process, like music and sound. In the cases of commissions, you can get your hires to estimate for you, then decide how much you can afford of their services (if any at all). Ultimately, a design has to be flexible enough to cover changing budget, playtest feedback, and your own sudden inspirations. When I had the concept for SPCF3, I left enough open so that if I had cash to spare I could do more, rather than pressing the very limits of the budget from the get-go. After all, you can never plan for everything from the start. 

In the next installment, Brad will look at taking the resources that have been assembled and putting them together to form a playable game.

Character art by Victoria Parker for Level 99 Games.

Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about starting his latest project: a 2-player iPad action game.

The game I’m currently developing for the iPad is called Super Psychic Chibi Fighters 3. Yes, it’s really called that.

Let me explain.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to do another video game. After the recent success of some other, more practical products, I had a little money to spare, as well as an idea that I had been mulling over for some time. Gradually, the idea took shape, and seemed like a viable option. 

My first thought was about the delivery medium of the game. I thought it would be fun to do a two player, frantic action game on the iPad. The device is big enough to support two people playing on either side of it while still seeing whatever catastrophic action was happening in the middle. 

As long as the action doesn’t require hands to cross over the middle of the game surface, that is. So I needed a game where the players are interacting with each other at a distance. Maybe blasting bullets or shots at one another? I was reminded of two games–one I had played and one I had made.

In high school, I was a fan of Psychic Force 2012 for the Dreamcast, as well as the anime X1999, and wanted to make something similar. In these, combatants fly through the air, blasting enemies with massive bolts of elemental magic. So, in C++ on Windows 2000 using DirectX as my graphics source, I developed my first game, Super Psychic Chibi Fighters 2. 

Yes, 2.

It was one of those zany, tongue-in-cheek titles. In SPCF2, the players tossed blasts of magic at one another while trying to dodge out of the way of other blasts. It was a simple but feature-filled game, with 4 play modes, as well as 20 characters with unique campaigns. It only had a production run of about 5, but the gameplay and idea were there.

I was also intrigued by the Touhou series–a series of fan-made games most haven’t played. When I was living in Japan, I was introduced by a friend to this series and the danmaku (or “bullet hell”) style of space shooters. In danmaku games, the goal may be to shoot up the enemy ships, but that’s not the challenge. Danmaku enemies and bosses can fill up the screen with thousands of slow-moving bullets that form a deadly, shifting maze for your character to navigate. 

I knew what I should make Super Psychic Chibi Fighters 3: a humorous, frantic, head-to-head game for the iPad that combined the original’s chaotic gameplay with modern special effects and a new battle system that focused more on evasion.

The first thing to do was find out if it was actually any fun. It’s easy to come up with game concepts, but how well do those work in the real world? Unfortunately, I’ve developed enough time-consuming, highly polished games that just weren’t fun that I’ve come to understand the value of prototyping. Determining whether an idea works must be the top concern– until you know it works, a game concept is just a shot in the dark against a faraway moving target.

In order to test, I decided to develop a quick and simple prototype of my idea that gathered together the most basic elements of gameplay. So I fired up XCode and created a Cocos2d game for the iPad using the Chipmunk physics engine. These engines are both open source, so my base prototype didn’t cost a dime to create. (Of course, I already had the iPad and an Apple developer subscription. Those cost $700.) It took about 4 hours to put together the basic game, which looked like this:

I didn’t bother with life bars, fancy graphics or even putting up walls; I just wanted to see if flinging blasts at your opponent was any fun. So the player targets are the two “mage” characters (recycled graphics from a previous project), and the little red pucks took only a minute to create. The interface background is just a suggestion–none of the walls or boundary lines are enforced in the prototype.

You make some surprising discoveries by prototyping. In the first game, you flicked the projectiles at your opponent, sliding them forward and releasing them like air hockey pucks. However, Lynda (my fianceé and playtest guinea pig) and I found that we kept smashing hands together and blocking the screen. So I changed the puck release mechanism. Now, players touch a puck and pull back, releasing to fire it off like a slingshot. This made the game much easier to play. Moving your characters to dodge was a reasonable challenge as well, since without fingers blocking the way, it was easy to see what was coming.

The frantic action was there. Before long, we were both laughing as our characters got blasted by exploding hockey pucks and spiraled out of control off the sides of the screen. The skill factor was there: it was possible to line up combos that would follow the path of a character blasted by an explosion and keep pressure on them. The strategy was there: I could dodge a blast, or block it with my own. We could use trick shots off of the walls or backs of the arena to surprise foes. It was actually a lot of fun, as simple as it was. 

So now that I had a working concept, it was time to move to the next step.

In the next installment, Brad will talk about his experiences contracting artists, gathering resources and developing a budget.

Character art by Victoria Parker for Level 99 Games.