

Ask HN: Gaming Startups - happylancer

So I'm watching the video games awards on TV and I realize there seems to be a gap between the internet entrepreneurs and the pc/video games entrepreneurs. However, both companies start with programmers and designers.<p>There are tons of independent gaming companies, started by just a few guys. For example, the winner of this year's independent game award goes to World of Goo. Do any of you entrepreneurs develop games and would like to share your experiences?<p>Also, the biggest difference I see between websites and games are the animations. Are there any guides out there to get people who are interested in developing games a quick boost?
======
DarkShikari
If you want to look at an interesting example of a successful independent game
designer, look at ZUN, the developer of the wildly popular Touhou Project
shmup series. You'll notice a few things:

1\. He's stuck to a genre that, while still quite popular, _does not require
an enormous development team_. The place for gaming startups is not in the
business of the "big players", but working on games whose main attraction is
creative content and enjoyable gameplay, not high-end graphics and enormous
amounts of hand-crafted content. Because of this, ZUN can develop roughly one
game a year for the most popular amateur ( _doujin_ ) game series in Japan _in
his spare time_... and still have time to work full-time at Taito corporation!
See Braid for another example of a relatively low-budget game that made it
big.

2\. The primary attraction of his games is probably the incredibly well-made
musical scores: each game has a full soundtrack, with tracks for every level
and boss fight. This serves as a "grab": the easiest way to get someone's
attention is a case of "that looks cool" or "that sounds cool." His games
certainly do the latter. If you can get a talented artist, music is not
something that inherently takes a great deal of time to produce, unlike
enormous amounts of 3D modeling or other forms of content. Most importantly,
people simply like listening to good music while playing a game: if you find
people are turning off the music to play their own during a game, _you have
done it wrong_.

3\. In the end, remember that enormous resources and marketing are not
necessary to create a game. ZUN has certainly proven this true: he has gone
from making hobby games in college to being the sole developer of a game
series so popular that the fanbase has its own concert, its own convention so
large it rents out the Tokyo Big Sight convention center, and makes up almost
5% of Comiket. Yet he never did any significant marketing--his fans marketed
the game for him. And he still outright refuses to sign any rights over to a
major corporation for any sort of higher-budget game or non-game adaptation.

Now, perhaps ZUN was lucky. Or perhaps in one of his drunken moments (he's
notorious for his love of beer), he struck a goldmine of brilliance that
allowed him to become so successful. But he's certainly not unique: the way to
success for a small games developer is to make niche games and acquire a
dedicated fanbase, not to aim at the _Halo_ market.

------
rtf
I work in console game development, I've made Flash games, and I spent a week
trying with a startup. (Subsequently I returned to console games.) Long post
ahead.

When speaking of console gaming there is a considerably larger amount of
formality and regulation than most web startups because of the influence
manufacturers and publishers have. You work on their hardware, you are funded
by hitting their milestone definitions, you are beholden to their marketing
plans, and you cannot get distribution without their approvals. Studios that
do big AAA titles are perpetually one project away from bankruptcy because big
games ramp up to a huge staff for full production(which ideally occurs once
the major unknowns of the gameplay, prototypes, engine, tools, pipeline etc.
have been worked out) and unless they have a new project waiting once the
first one ships, they're burning through massive overhead and face firing half
or more of their employees or shutting down. The place I work for specifically
avoids taking on big projects because of crushing past experiences.

Independents face a problem more similar to the early-stage startup of getting
traction in the marketplace. They typically succeed via radical product
differentiation, since the other angle(high quality) is covered by console
developers already. This market has diverged into many subsets - to name the
major ones: downloadable games, browser-based multiplayer, Flash games... each
one has different production requirements and monetization strategies. While
you can find plenty of success stories....there are also plenty of starving
indies out there. As well, indies (as a rule) are less likely to make their
games available as an ongoing, continuously improved service in the way a web
company does. But the ones that go the service route, in my eyes, are more
likely to succeed long-term than those following a "shipped product" model. To
succeed as an indie you really need a rabid fanbase that follows your brand;
the alternative is to jump onto the bandwagon of the week(casual games, girl
games, etc.) and peddle your clone against 10000 other clones, which
ultimately leads to a quality war and the console market situation.

Finally.....the biggest difference between websites and games is collision
detection. To put it the way my boss does, "collision is gameplay." Not all
games need collision, but those which involve simulated physical interactions
do, and that requirement comes up astoundingly often, so it's a cornerstone
game programming task. Plus, the particular implementation of collision
radically influences the game so it's not a matter of dropping in library
code.

That's not to say that the programming's the only problem - art is a problem
because it always takes a long time, and game design is an unbounded-size
problem. Solid game design happens after prototyping many different gameplay
mechanics in isolation, keeping the ones that work, and then iterating over
their integration until a satisfactory combination is achieved. This means: do
a lot of work. Throw most of the work out. The leftover crumbs ship.

An ambitious project I am taking on now in my spare time is the angle of
simplifying the game development process itself, with a website that promotes
sharing and reuse of game-related content under Creative Commons. Long-term I
want to add editing tools to create specific game types, but that is an easy
task to underestimate and the web entrepreneurs that I've seen take it on so
far have either grossly cut back on the features to get something done in a
few weeks(making the service mostly useless) or allowed the scope to grow too
large, finally failing after a depressingly massive effort. (see Gameclay)

