Join Saul, Paul, David, Thomas and new artist Eloise as we discuss what we do on an ‘average’ day.

This week, Saul, Thomas and I (Paul) discuss pipelines, and a new development cycle that we’re devising to ensure that we can produce 6 high-quality Flatland episodes in 6-8 months.

While we’ve gotten a very basic list of deliverables (see the first image below), there’s still a lot that haven’t been worked out, particularly in the art and audio department. What deliverables would you advise we have at different points of this process?

The pipeline and deliverables we’re looking to use for Flatland episodes, with variable lengths for some of the stages.
In constructing the final 11 week pipeline, we opted for a 2 week concepting phase, a 4 week concept development phase, a 2 week content creation phase and a 2 week polish phase.

A look at how the pipelines might overlap, with both 3 week (below) and 4 week (above) intervals. We opted for 4 week intervals.

So we’ve got a booth at Supanova tomorrow, and it’s shaping up pretty damn well! We’ll have the first alpha release of our newest addition to the Flatland universe: Shapes of Grey, super-awesome Flatland t-shirts and more!

In this episode, we chat about the lead-up to Supanova and what it’s entailed, some of the things we’ve encountered in the development of Shapes of Grey and more!

I want to put more pics up, but have to get everything else in a pile… for now, have some shots of Anurag and I in our spiffy new shirts!

In this episode of Seeing It Through I make my first appearance to talk about lighting and how we are thinking of implementing it in Unity3D and the Flatland universe.

Unfortunately Unity3D is a 3D engine and as such does not support nice, optimised 2D lighting out of the box. Unity3D does have its own point lights which can cast shadows but only using deferred rendering, and only using a perspective view, not the orthographic view used in 2D games. Also the technique used to calculate the shadows (shadow mapping), is much too complex to be used for just 2D.

Snapshot of the guards dynamic view mesh

We also mention how we quickly got a nice view cone effect that would collide with objects in the scene using existing shape building tools.

Our Shape Tools

The Question

Do you know of any games that have done two dimensional lighting well or used it in an interesting way?

What is a company? Who is a company? How is a company? Am I a company?

Sometimes, like in a very good tv shows, companies are actual people, but most of the time they are groups of people striving towards one goal together. Companies are interesting things, and making companies, and importantly making the esprit de corps of companies is a particuarly interesting thing. Today, I’m going to discuss the various milestones that make our company feel like a company. This morning, Paul and I were able to get down to 3 types of goals that you’re always chasing towards when making a company. They are: symbolic; practical; and perpetuating. I’m going to do a bit of a discussion on each one and talk about how we’re trying to make ourselves transition from been a garage indie start-up to being a fully fledged company.

The Symbolic and the Practical

The symbolic is oftentimes the easiest and the most visible of the steps in creating a company. For us, the first practical step to creating a company was our incorporation into a registered company. That was a big step, but much like any significant symbolic gesture, until it is backed up significant action and practical results, there is not much use to it. What the symbolic is particularly useful for is that it forces you to shift your paradigm. The incorporation into a company for us did exactly that. It allowed us to have a singular drive towards a goal. It detached the work we were doing from any one individual and gave us a shared ownership of the work. I strongly believe it was that we were a company, with basic contracts et al that inspired us to push ourselves just that extra bit to produce our first Flatland game.

The symbolic and the practical go hand in hand; the symbolic needs to act as an impetus for the practical, and the practical needs to back up the vision that the symbolic represents. For us, since the creation of the first game we’ve made several important, symbolic steps. Our move into an actual office, away from a bedroom has facilitated anther paradigm change. We’re still not exactly sure how to be as effective as possible in an office, and we often worry “are we scrappy enough?”. And a practical thing that has to come out of our move to a more professional setting is a more professional pipeline for our organisation.

The Perpetuating

From these practical achievements our next stage is perpetuating ones. These perpetuating ones are ones which create a legacy which are lasting and are the basis on which a company can be formed. The most easily quantifiable of these is a steady income stream. For us, one of the major reasons I feel as though we still question whether or not we are a real company is the fact that we all still have divided attention. Saul and I both work seperate jobs to allow us to spend time on the SeeThrough projects, and Paul is considering getting one himself. A steady income stream would allow us to devote all our time and energies into this project, however the income stream is merely a manifestation of the more important perpetuating goal ahead of us; that is of a steady production pipeline. In our previous posts we have discussed our desire to produce an Alphasodic model of games. Once a month produce a new level, or levels, with rich and compelling gameplay. As the original Flatland has taught us, if we are able to produce something, then we are able to make money. Our products are good, and people are willing to spend money on them. Now the question is, are we good enough to keep producing that, month after month, year after year?

We have a good team, and we are trying to create processes and systems which will be able to exist without anyone in the office becoming irreplacable. As a company we did alot of soul searching a few months back and we know that the kind of company that we want to be needs to be one which allows us the creative freedom to pursue our goals without the company needing us there constantly. As a video gaming company, we can do that, however we now need to work hard to ensure that the procedures are in place. In some cases, like at Valve, that can mean producing a handbook for new employees or it can be like McDonalds (there is much to be learnt from turnkey solutions) where everything is incrementally proceduralised.

The X-Factor and the Sink or Swim

In the end however, the achievement of x number of goals is not going to produce the feeling of a company. It’s much more than it. It is that definitive “sink or swim” moment which you have no way of predicting when or what it is. A break in any industry, and in any field of life is the culmination of opportunity with preparation, and whilst we cannot control the opportunity, or when and how it will arise, all we can do is keep preparing and ensure that when the time comes, we will have mastered our stroke.

The Question

What are some watershed moments in your development histories? When did things become ‘real’? And were these moments symbolic, practical or perpetuating?

Sometimes, when starting a company, cofounders will find their views falling completely in line with each other. They’ll find that they were, sometimes surprisingly, thinking in exactly the same way about a problem that has a number of possible solutions. This is when things move the quickest.

Sometimes, the other thing happens. And that’s where some of the greatest learning can happen.

Alphasodic has been the latter, and it’s not quite done.

While writing this, I’ve realised that Saul and I have now come to agree on many of these points. It’s interesting how we’ve found common ground within points of contention to create a somewhat coherent strategy, and how many of the original problems have become less relevant.

The Problem

The problem can be summed up as follows: we’re going to be using some type of alpha funding model for Flatland. Alpha funding is great: it lets us grow our customer base over time, gives us contact with those who are actually paying for our game and gives us an all important revenue stream.

And yet a part of it seemed wrong for us. We’ve got a vision for Flatland, and that vision requires a fair bit of tech. Our vision involves using varied mechanics to demonstrate how different inhabitants of the world see and understand it, and a lot of those mechanics still need to be made, tested and proven. Now, it’s tempting to just start making bits of the game that address those mechanics, but the simple fact is that by the time we’ve done these, the first bit we make will surely feel sloppy and invalid next to the last bit.

Which brings us (after three months or so) back to the idea of episodic games, but with an alpha twist. Hence Alphasodic.

Alphasodic

The idea is that we simply make new, standalone episodes in the Flatland universe, as part of the process of building our tech. This allows us to skill-up our design without worrying about whether everything will fit into a final product, and gives us an amazing ability to take baby steps to greatness by simply ensuring that each episode is better than the last.

I’m looking to take this a step further and to split our development cycles into two independently moving ‘teams’: Tech and Content. Tech deals with build mechanics and tools and polishing those mechanics to be smooth and exciting, while Content builds new episodes using existing tech. This frees the tech guys to take a little more time (though they’d still have deadlines) to really hone a mechanic and make it as good as possible, while the content team builds new episodes using existing systems.

This brings us to the first issue we’re currently tackling: polish. When we talk about Alphasodic, we talk about being able to build and polish a game within 3-4 weeks (and to be honest, I’d really like to bring that cycle down to 1-2 weeks as we move forward). Saul’s main worry with this is that the quality of the games we make won’t be high if we go down this path, and he has a point: there’s a lot of issues with Fallen Angle that spending more time on it might have fixed. My thought here is we need to get to the stage where we can polish a game in this short amount of time, and that we’re simply not going to get enough practice at those stages of polish to get really good at them if we make things slowly.

I don’t think either of us knows for sure which of these stances is correct, which is why the issue is problematic. We simply can’t know without trying one, and either way it’ll take a while to test.

The Alpha of it all

The other big issue is one of release. A traditional alpha program involves paying a certain amount for a product before it gets made, with the understanding that there will be a “final game” at the end. Since we’re going to be releasing on Desura’s alpha-funding channel, we need to (at least for now) follow this model. But in an episodic program without a specific end-point in sight, what does the alpha program mean?

Something I’ve pushed pretty hard for is the idea that we’re going to end up with a subscription model. The fact is that making individual games and hoping people buy them isn’t a sustainable business model for most indie games teams (with very few exceptions, most will also do contract work or sell development tools). A subscription model with regular enough content releases can be. We’re not ready for that yet: we have no track record and there’s a bunch of infrastructure to build. At some point, however, we’ll most likely be looking to transform our alpha funding program into a subscription program of some kind.

Saul and I have tentatively agreed to the idea that when people pay for our alpha program, they will get the first six episodes of our alphasodic Flatland game, regardless of how long those takes to build (ideally less than six months). So the “final game” would consist of these six episodes. Obviously, because we will be improving as we go, there will also be quality inconsistencies from episode to episode. We kind of feel like this is okay – players will be able to look back and track the ongoing evolution of our games and stories, like you can with Mickey Mouse or The Simpsons, but on a much shorter time scale. In essence, our games will be a document recording the history of their own development. This is in line with our “see through” philosophy, as well as being where the “alpha” meshes with the “episodic”.

Our main issue right now is in specifying exactly what it is that we are going to end up delivering to our alpha customers. Because I’m wanting us to push our content pipeline to make better things faster, six episodes might be over quickly. In terms of playtime, the collection end up rather large, or quite small (our upcoming episode, by the way, is looking to be half the size of Fallen Angle (in terms of overall level size), since we’re looking to produce higher quality content, while simultaneously building our tech to be more sustainable).

As the guy who’s designing the value proposition to our customers, I’m worried that I might not be able to make a really juicy promise that we can definitely keep. It feels like we’re really close to a cohesive business/development model that suits our needs, and yet there’s this snag that we haven’t quite figured out.

This, in short, is worrying.

Help, please?

As a part of this new series, we’re starting a new podcast called ‘Seeing it Through’.

Subscribe to it here - iTunes is coming…

Over the coming weeks, we’re looking to transform this blog into one with a somewhat different focus: investigation. An Investigation is, essentially, a question or problem that we’re currently tackling. Some can be answered easily, some will need time and experimentation. All will ask for your input. And what investigation is better to start with than the one that spawned this very idea?

Saul and I sat down at the table, and stared at the words that I had just scrawled on our whiteboard-table:

 ”More insight into a games startup than ever before”.

I turned to Saul, paused dramatically, and asked the question: “What the hell does that mean?”

The facts

1.  We names our company is SeeThrough Studios.
2. Our purpose when we chose that name was to create transparency in the game and studio development processes on an unprecedented scale.
3. It turns out that this is really hard. In essence: there is too much data. Every day of development brings with it a bunch of new problems and learning experiences.
4. We’re now at a stage where catching up to give a full history of what we’ve done in the past would stop us from actually making games.
5. We’d like to keep making games. Actually, it’s our core business.
6. At the same time, the “SeeThrough” idea is at the core of our marketing strategy (and therefore rather vital to our business). It hasn’t been working all that well thus far, because we haven’t found a way to implement it consistently.

Progress thus far

During that meeting, we came to a few conclusions:

The plethora of things we discussed regarding SeeThrough.

• Our focus in being SeeThrough should be on making our own story compelling, and interacting with our audience, rather than trying to create guidelines for other developers to follow. There are plenty of other people who have the time to do that better than us (for example, our friend Epona Schweer runs indiebits as a full-time business).
• Compelling stories need interesting characters. We have find ways to better bring across our personalities to our audience.
• The SeeThrough process should give unprecedented insight into the current state of SeeThrough Studios. That is to say, we’re not going to be filling in our history all that much.
• In general, we’re going to aim to talk about the things that most make us think ‘should we really be talking about that to the public?’. If it’s something we’re worried about revealing, chances are it’s something that will be interesting to read.

How you can help

The question ‘What is SeeThrough’ is unlikely to be answered in any final way for a while yet. We’ll be looking to add new forms of content to our SeeThrough arsenal over time, though we’re definitely going to start small, and on a consistent schedule.

You can help us refine our approach by answering the following questions:

1. How do you feel about this “investigation” approach to “SeeThrough-ness”? Is there anything you you would change off the bat?
2. What form of update (investigations like this, conversation pieces, dev diaries, microblogs, podcasts, videos, etc.) would be most interesting to you?
3. What’s the best way for you to get to know us, as humans?

Supplementary Materials

An email from Saul to Paul regarding the conversations had about the SeeThrough process

The original (much longer) version of this post

An email from Saul to Paul about that post