I Gave a Big Talk On Indie Games and It's Pretty Good.

Please enjoy this reasonably-priced hour of grumpy ranting.

For a long time now, I've wanted to give a talk about the history of Spiderweb Software. It would be a combination of funny stories about the ancient history of the internet and a summary of everything I've learned about the True Meaning of Indie Games.

At the 2018 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, I finally had the chance to give the talk. I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's about an hour, and you can see it here:

Failing to Fail: The Spiderweb Software Way!

It was really hard to whittle the talk down to 50 minutes. I had to leave a lot of quality material on the cutting room floor. I did manage to keep the best of it around. Hope you like it!

Avernum 3, Remasters, and the Joy of Owning Your Work.

It's weird to see over four years of my life just sitting there in a lump.

I've been making my little indie games for a living for 23 years. Being a greybeard in such a weird and young industry comes with special privileges.

For example, while some of my peers are getting around to remastering their old games, I am remastering our most popular game, Avernum 3: Ruined World, for the SECOND time. It is only when you rewrite the same material twice that you really test your discipline and integrity.

Writing indie games has become miserably competitive lately. Most new games, even promising ones with a lot of work in them, are sinking without a trace. Yet, thanks to the grinding tedium of rewriting the same game again and again, I have a fighting chance of my business surviving enough to write cool new stuff.

So I'll tell the story or Exile 3: Ruined World/Avernum 3/Avernum 3: Ruined World. (Also on Steam.) There are things to learn here for any young person who thinks, "I wanna' make cool things (not just video games), and make a living doing it."

Don't laugh. It sold like crazy.

In A Previous Millenium, I Wrote A Hit

In 1997, I'd been making games full-time for a couple years. I wrote (and still write) retro, turn-based, low-budget indie RPGs with fun systems, interesting stories, and mediocre graphics.

Happily, I got started at a time when there were very few good RPGs out in the market. I got a nice computer, wanted to play a good RPG, and couldn't find one. So I wrote one. It sold, because no competition. This is a key example of my most important business strategy: Get Very Lucky.

My first games, Exile: Escape From the Pit and Exile 2: Crystal Souls, were designed on a simple principle: I would go back to all the RPGs I loved as a kid and steal the best idea from each one. I then carefully combined all my quality stolen ideas into a coherent whole. This is called being a game designer.

For our third game, I had a better idea. I spent months playing all the new RPGs that had come out over the previous 2-3 years. Then I stole the best idea from each one of those. Thus, I transitioned from stealing ideas from old games to stealing ideas from new games. This is how you evolve as a game designer.

I ended up with Exile 3: Ruined World, which has been our biggest success. It features a gigantic world, that is easy to get lost in. As time passed, the game world evolved. If you didn't fight the monsters off, they would ruin towns and kill the townsfolk. (Though, no matter how slow you play, you can always still win the game.) If you didn't want to follow the story, you could be a bounty hunter or merchant. You could buy a house.

(If you want to try it out, it's available as freeware here. Warning: It probably won't run on your computer. That's one of the reasons we had to remaster it.)

Exile 3 came out so long ago that most new computers then looked exactly like this.

It Was The Right Title At The Right Time

In 1997, it was what people wanted. It was a legit shareware hit. Now, having a hit indie game in 1997 (when the world wide web was basically nothing and most of my sales came from AOL) was different from having one in 2017.

These days, the sales of a hit indie game will buy you a mansion made of yachts. Back then, it bought me a modest house and made my parents slightly less ashamed to say what I did for a living.

I won awards, to the extent there were game awards back then. I got attention from the traditional games media, which was really worth something then. And it established me in the business for good.

But even then, I knew that the real prize was not the praise (which I don't care about) or the money (which is nice, but then you spend it and it's gone). What was really valuable was that I owned the game. It was mine. I could do with it whatever I wanted. Forever.

BEHOLD MY MIGHTY 800x600 PIXELS!

Five Years Later, I Rewrote It For the First Time

We rewrote Exile 3 as Avernum 3 in 2002. Five years is a really short time to wait before rewriting a game, but I have a good excuse. When I started Exile 3, I'd only been making games for money for two years, and I wasn't very good. There were a ton of ways in which the story, interface and graphics should have been improved, and I didn't know to do it.

I spent well over a year writing Exile 3, and my wife and I spent another year turning it into Avernum 3. We went over every single location, line of dialogue, and bit of code, improving and expanding it to the best of our improved abilities. The revised version didn't sell as well as the original, but it still made a lot of money. (Again, by early indie game standards. It was a lot of money for lone artists, but not big-shot money.)

(If you want to try it out, you can buy it super-cheap here. Warning: It probably won't run well on your computer. That's one of the reasons we had to remaster it.)

The new game. I am constantly accused by cranks of never improving my games. Look. I'm not saying this is super-fancy. But I don't think you can say there's been no improvement.

Now, Fifteen Years Later, We're Doing It Again

Fifteen years is a long time in the tech industry. Our most popular game is now woefully out of date in every way, largely forgotten, and doesn't even run on new Macs anymore. Now I can rewrite it so it actually works, and an iPad port will fall out of the process in the bargain.

Interfaces and game design have evolved in a million ways. I'm spending 18 months going over every tiny bit of the game again, redoing every single thing from scratch. I'll release it in January or so, and it will hopefully sell. I think it will. I've spent over 20 years building up a loyal fan base.

The Pros and Cons of a Remaster

The good side of remasters is that they can be less work that writing a game from scratch. You can, with luck, get a full new title for 2/3 of the work, and it's easy to market it because people already like it. (I'm assuming you're not remastering a game everyone hated.)

The bad side of remasters is that you become the curator for your own work. It can be grinding to go over old material day in and day out. The reason a remaster is successful is because your fans like the original game. You don't want to crap it up with too many new ideas, no matter how clever. People tend to not like change.

A Lesson For Young Creators

Never underestimate the value of owning your work. There hasn't been a day since 1997 that I haven't made money off of Exile 3. The reason is that I own it. It's mine, to alter, remaster, and distribute. All according to my whims, with all the earnings going to me.

It's a tough market out there. But suppose you release a new game and nobody ever even hears of it. Wait five years, remaster it and it really will be, as far an anyone is concerned, a new game. You can try selling it again!

And ten years from now, people will be using new consoles, new devices, new sorts of computers. Port your game to them! Each new port is an all new release. A new chance for your game to get noticed and catch on and become a hit!

Nature provides us with a perfect metaphor for any internet discussion.

"But Your Games Are All The Same And Look Like Crap"

I have a follow-up post about the reactions when I announced Avernum 3: Ruined World. It's pretty funny, but this is already long so I broke it out into its own post.

When Avernum 3: Ruined World comes out (hopefully in January for Windows/Mac and March for iPad), I'll have spent over four years of my life on it. It's not a game for everyone. It's mostly the product of one person, and it'll show.

Even if you don't like my work, I hope you take some satisfaction in this: Vidya games are still a place where one weirdo can make weird things for other weirdos and make a living at it. As long as this is possible, there's hope. Maybe the next weird thing for weirdos will be YOUR perfect game, the Best Game Ever, and it never would have existed in a purely big-budget world.

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If you're intrigued by the retro-RPG goodness of Avernum 3, you can wishlist it on Steam. News about our work and random musings can be found on our Twitter.

Edit: Added the Pros and Cons section.

To Be a Pro is to Be Abused.

Trigger warning: Bears.

I want to say a few words to young developers on the value of resilience and the growing of a thick skin.

Slow down there. Hands off the keyboard. I an NOT talking about abuse, harassment, and threats. I've already written on this topic. Certain behaviors online are clearly unacceptable, and you should not be subjected to them.

What I AM talking about is learning to endure criticism and occasional hostility that is an inevitable part of being a creator in a public way.

Because you will be criticized. You will be insulted. People will be mean to you. Also, because you are only human and will occasionally make mistakes, sometimes that criticism will be justified. So you should be ready.

I'm going to tell two instructive stories. One about me, one about an ambitious young developer. (Well, as of this writing, ex-developer.) Know enough to be afraid. 

You WILL receive feedback like this at some point. Prepare in advance an appropriate reaction.

A Time That PC Gamer Was Mean To Me

In November, 2000, PC Gamer. reviewed my game Avernum. This was a huge deal for me, as PC Gamer was the biggest press outlet around. The game was already selling very well, but we were eager for a hit. Also, press attention for a small developer has always been really hard to get.

Imagine my surprise when the review, written by a Gentleman I Will Not Name (GIWNN for short), came out and my score was 17/100. Yes, 17%. I'm sure a lot of thought went into it. I imagine GIWNN up late at night, agonizing. "I mean, this game isn't quite good enough for a lofty 18%, but it's also not the sort of hackery that merits a mere 16%."

But it gets better. The review also says my game is worse that choking to death on your vomit. (I swear I am not making this up.) The review included a helpful sidebar that listed rock stars who choked to death on their own vomit. (Again, I SWEAR I am not making this up.)

If you are upset by the current level of journalistic standards in the games industry, I assure you there have been issues for some time.

Some developers would be given pause by a review like this. Some might even be slightly upset. I was not. I was still being given a full, free page of coverage in PC GODDAMN GAMER. I know that review brought me a bunch of new customers. I heard from them. I'm sure I got more extra cash from the review than the GIWNN got for writing it. (And, when you get a few drinks in me, I still get the review out sometimes to show to friends.)

Are you an aspiring game developer? Picture the largest games press outlet publicly treating you in such a manner. If you have any response besides, "Hey, any PR is good PR," you might want to reconsider your career path.

I got that review, and I went on to have a highly lucrative and satisfying career. PC Gamer went on to give very kind coverage to quite a few of my other games. And the GIWNN went on to achieve his True Destiny: being a negligible non-entity.

Since I was taking pictures in my office, I thought my more devoted fans would like some sweet backstage info. For example, I work surrounded by my classic vidya gaem collection. Here is a tiny portion of my Atari 2600 games.

The Tale of Bear Simulator

What brought this article on was the sad story of recent indie title Bear Simulator, written by an ambitious fellow named John Farjay. Full disclosure: I have not played it, as bears are Godless Killing Machines. 

Bear Simulator was funded on Kickstarter with an impressive haul of over $100K. Farjay then broke from Kickstarter tradition by actually finishing the game in a reasonable period of time. He delivered it to backers and released it on Steam. (As of this writing, user reviews for the game: Very Positive.)

At this point, and I'll admit I'm a little fuzzy on the exact particulars, the game received some negative press. There was a particularly brutal takedown by renowned INTERNET TOUGH GUY Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg (sometimes referred to as PewDiePie). This review ended with him getting a refund on Steam, which is now the traditional way for a vicious hack job to spike the ball in the endzone.

John Farjay quit, announcing this in a poignant little post on Kickstarter. Since it might not still be up when you read this, I'll include an excerpt:

Well the game didn't have a great reception, has a stigma against it's name and there's plenty of other problems so making any updates or going further is basically a lost cause now. Plus not skilled enough to make the game better than it currently is or write better updates than previously.
 Was really hoping the Steam release would go well but why would it, should have just gave the game to backers and not bother with Steam.
 Also don't want to deal with the drama anymore. Can't ignore it because that causes more drama and can't do anything about it because that causes more drama.
 It was really fun making the game, trailers, updates, websites, tutorials, blog posts and stuff, hopefully you all liked those things.
 Am glad most of you guys are happy with the game though, unless you were just being nice

I mean, seriously, if you don't find this at least a tiny bit sad, you have an even harder heart than I do.

The Thing That Makes Other Indie Devs Raise Their Eyebrows

There are so many of us who would give a lesser body part to be savaged in a video by PewDiePie. Man, I would love for him to tear apart my work in one of his videos. I'd salve my hurt feelings by using the extra sales to buy a Tesla.

But that's the difference between a hardened veteran and a new recruit, isn't it?

Some of the piles of junk that form my nest. Yes, those are two functional Vectrexes. I am amazing. 

THIS IS NOT A HIT PIECE AGAINST JOHN FARJAY

If you know anything about me, you know that I would never savage a young, earnest developer. Others enjoy lashing out when there's blood in the water (especially when there's tasty, tasty clicks to bait), but I don't.

I have no problem with John Farjay. He offered a game on Kickstarter, delivered a game, became unhappy, and tried to extricate himself from the situation in as ethical a way as possible. The only real criticism I've heard leveled against him is that he didn't provide Kickstarter updates that often, but that isn't a crime as long as the game eventually arrives.

Here's what this situation sounds like to me: This guy wanted the job, applied for the job, got the job, decided he didn't like the job, and quit. This happens 10000000 times a day. It's not a big deal. It's only the public element that made it newsworthy.

And here's the cool thing: There's still hope. Suppose John Farjay changed his mind. Suppose he caught up on sleep, went for a few restorative walks, and went, "Wait! I do want to write games!"

He could write a Kickstarter update, say, "Sorry. I went nuts for a few days. I'm better now, and I'm back to work!" If he did this, I promise that he'd be welcomed back with open arms. It's a great story, and people love indie devs because we're quirky and human.

This shouldn’t have ever happened, though. Aspiring developers need to hear tales like these, so that they know what they are in for.

A shareware award I got in 1997, next to notes from my new game. My work notes very strongly resemble the opening credits to Se7en. 

But What Does That Mean Exactly?

It’s easy to say “Toughen up.” But what does that mean? How do you modify your behavior and reactions in a way that enables you to withstand being in this business longer. Because that’s the goal: Creating a stable, sustainable business you like to run.

This will, in the end, vary from person to person. I don’t know what your mental fault lines are. I don’t know what freaks you out. I only know that, when you find the thing that freaks you out, you should probably modify your behavior or inputs in a way that leaves you calmer and more able to do your job.

For example, a lot of devs I know worry about weird metrics. They obsess over their Steam wishlist numbers, or their user reviews, or if they can compete with some new game that’s coming out, or whether keys they chose to sell through Humble Bundle are being resold. The world presents us with infinite trivia to worry about.

If a piece of input worries you, and you can’t control it, and you have no crystal clear idea what its impact on your life will be, feel free to ignore it. In fact, you probably should ignore it. If something upsets you, do everything you can to ignore that something.

Being harassed is VERY difficult to ignore, so do what you need to to keep from being harassed. Forums are nice, but you don’t HAVE to have them. Twitter has its points, but you don’t HAVE to be on it. (This is true. I ran a successful business for many a year before Twitter went live.) If a forum or public-facing account is a hive of harassment and nastiness, shut it down for a month. Most of the trolls will move on.

If you say, “I have to be on [web site] no matter what!” you are giving the crazies a weapon they can use to hit you. Don’t do that. “But they can drive me off of a site? That is wrong and not fair!” Yes. It is wrong and not fair. I’m angry about it too. But this isn’t an undergraduate ethics class. It’s business. Who ever told you business was fair?

(Fun aside: What percentage of online abuse against developers is secretly being launched by their competitors to push them out of the business? It might be 0% now, but, as the industry gets even more competitive, it won’t stay 0% forever. Sleep tight.)

This is a TOUGH, competitive business. It’s a blood sport. To have even a small chance of success, you will need to bring your A game, day after day, for years at a time. If something distracts you from that, you must cut it out without mercy.

My latest game's Metacritic. It's entirely fair. When I disagree with something someone wrote, I send them a respectful rebuttal. 

Quick Aside About User Reviews

Most indie developers write games aimed at niche audiences. Therefore, the games they write won’t be liked by most gamers. This is pretty much the definition of ‘niche.’

Alas, indie developers also tend to really freak out about negative user reviews on places like Steam. They worry about this too much. It’s easy to forget that, if you write a game aimed at only 10% of the gaming audience, 90% of players will hate your game. A lot of them will leave bad reviews. This sort of review is not harassment. It’s the system working as intended.

Sometimes, when a dev expresses an unpopular political opinion, those who disagree will organize a brigade and spam your Steam page with negative reviews. This sucks, and they shouldn’t do that. (Although I would gently observe that, when your goal is to run a profitable business, political activism will only very rarely help in this.)

Not all clumps of negative reviews are signs of evil intent, though. Maybe you just wrote a game a lot of people don’t like, and they told you, and that’s the end of the story. Be ready for it.

I suggest making sure that the sliver of users who like your games are paying you enough money to stay in business. Then do what I do and don’t read user reviews. EVER.

But Getting Back To the Main Point

John Farjay was living the dream, and he fell apart. It's far from the first time, and it won't be the last. Life in the public eye, even in so lowly a role as indie game dev, can be tough. It's not for everyone.

It's the job of me and others like me to prepare the neophytes. They need to be ready for these jolts. They can't let one nasty review or article collapse them.

Assholes and hacks exist. So do reasonable people who will call you out when you inevitably make mistakes. You must be ready for all of them.

How do you get to this lofty point? I don't know. I just wish you luck, and I won't hold it against you if you find you aren't cut out for it.

Brace yourself. Good luck.

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(You can read my moment to moment thoughts on Twitter, which I am on for the moment. Finally, I can't resist ending with a link to this.)

Four Things To End the Week.

One.

I have a big article about the indie games biz up on Gamasutra. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Enjoy!

Two.

Everyone all justifiably atwitter about how Tim Schafer raised upwards of one million dollars on Kickstarter to make a new adventure game. It's a great proof-of-concept for the whole publicly funded game thing. If Tim Schafer couldn't pull in some coin to make an adventure game, nothing else has a chance.

I think it's brilliant, and it ties well into what I said in my Gamasutra article. The secret power of indie devs is to exploit underserved niches. Expect other Kickstarter-funded games in future. I only hope the results match the expectations.

Three.

Heaven forbid that I should be thought to criticize Notch or Minecraft. (I won't even point out that the whole end boss/enchantment/potion/combat system is taking the game in entirely the wrong direction to please exactly the wrong group of people.)

But, about this.

Hey, I wouldn't presume to give them advice. But, after I make my 30 million dollars, I'm not going to rely on Anonymous to finish my games for me. Just sayin'.

Four.

Every once in a while, I read someone's critique of OK Go as a band, focusing on the fact that they basically fine and only have one decent single. (Don't click that link. You've seen it already.) But that misses the point. They aren't a band. They're much more interesting than that. They're a meme-generation factory, and really good at it.

So here is my legally mandated one link a year to an OK Go video. Yeah, like you have something better to do with three minutes and fifty-four seconds.

Look for my next link to them in roughly fifteen months, when they play some pleasant and non-threatening power pop by shooting kittens out of a cannon into steel drums, or whatever.

Mixed Bag Of Fun

I have been putting the final touches on Avadon: The Black Fortress for Windows in the hope of releasing it next week. I have also been shepherding the game through beta-testing on the iPad. The rest of my time has been spent trying to convince myself that I'm not having a heart attack. Also, wishing they made office desks with hutches with space in the middle for a large iMac.

(Boy. It would be funny if I really did have a heart attack now. People would link to this blog post and go, "Wow! Irony!" in the same way everyone gets totally tickled to find the Facebook page of a recent mass-murderer. And remember, if I do die, and you pirate Avadon, I will then be able to totally haunt you and I'll be floating by the ceiling when you use the bathroom, making spooky noises.)


(I'm just sayin'.)

In the meantime, if you want to satisfy your cravings for hearing me discuss finer points of computer design in my weird voice, you should go here. It's a Podcast Interview for The Veteran Gamers, and it turned out OK. It should be worth your time, as I talk very quickly.

Finally, as I write this, the Playstation Network has been down for eight days. What's up with that? Networks go down. That's what they do. But eight days? Wow. Can you imagine the apocalypse of sleep-deprived horror going on at Sony now? Something crazy much be wrong.

Normally I wouldn't care, because most of my gaming is single-player, but my PS3 is my Netflix device. I can't watch Netflix on my XBox because the fans in that thing sound like a jet engine powering up. And Netflix on the Playstation requires PSN to work. Because everything about PSN has always been designed from a place of deep hate.

Listen to Me Talk.

The Active Time Babble podcast at 1up.com has a new, long interview with me. There's a lot of stuff about Avernum 6 and a few tidbits of information about the new game I'm working on. Just the thing to help you not work.

Welcome To Jeff's Ego Pit!

(Tap. Tap.) Is this thing on?

Hello. I am Jeff Vogel, and this is my blog. I have noticed, over the last few years, that many other successful Indie game writers have their own blogs. They tend to be full of interesting thoughts. I have lots of interesting thoughts too. About game design, about running a games business, about things I feel are funny, and so on. So here they are. I hope some people read them, and that this isn't a gigantic waste of time.

I run a profitable independent game company, and I have done so since 1994. This is a very long time to do this sort of thing. Indie game development, despite the occasional glorious success like Castle Crashers or Braid, is a really tough field to make money in. But I have managed, even though I make RPGs with laughably low budgets and simple graphics. Or, perhaps, BECAUSE I have laughably low budgets and simple graphics.

My blog's title represents what I feel is the highest aspiration of the Indie developer: to be a bottom feeder who has found a reliable food supply. A few Indie developers strike it rich, but most of us who do this for a living survive by finding a small, neglected market (retro single-player RPGs in my case) and workin' it like we mean it.

As time goes on, I will write about running an Indie game business, the process of making the games, and pithy comments on new and successful titles. In addition, I will repost some of the old Grumpy Gamer columns that have been lost forever to time. Most of them are outdated and lame, but some of them are still good and relevant. Along the way, I hope to give some information and tips that fans or aspiring designers might find interesting.

Finally, if you have read this far, I thank you, and my self-esteem thanks you.

On to the show.