Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Unstable income: indie development woes

Posted on May 8, 2019

There is a disparity between the information people outside a creative industry have, and the truth about working in that industry. This is because the views of people who are very successful in an industry get more coverage, both through conventional media (because reporting on what multi millionaires like Adele or Tom Cruise or Gabe Newell does gets more clicks) and organically through media like twitter, where we naturally follow ‘celebrities’ who are inevitable wealth and famous.

(I am as guilty as anyone. I follow Elon Musk and Brad Wardell and Mike Bithel on twitter. If you are a struggling indie who hasn’t had a hit game ever, I’m unlikely to follow you unless I know you personally…partly because I just *do not know who you are*.)

To compound the problem, there is the whole issue of ‘fake it till you make it’, where indies and other creative types project a false narrative of success in the hope that success will breed success. This is just playing to human nature, and is understandable as a marketing strategy, but its damaging in terms of giving the false impression to people who want the real facts.

And to add to all these factors (as if they were not enough), we have a natural human tendency to want to place emphasis on our successes and minimize our failures. I am much more likely to tell you about all those times I did a share deal and made money than admit just how many times it went badly, badly wrong… This is just how humans operate.

The reality is that there are a number of big downsides to the freelance/self-employed/start-your-own company life that probabl;y need re-emphasizing from time to time. Here are the big ones

Low income

You probably, on average, will not make much money as a game developer, writer, artists, actor or any other creative pursuit. Its just harsh economics. Lots of people want the jobs and few are available. by jobs I also mean sales, so lots of people want a hit indie game and there are only so many buyers. Simple market forces mean most people do badly. In this article in 2018, Mike Rose found that 82% of indie games didn’t make their creators the minimum wage. What makes you so sure you are in the top 18%?

Unstable Income

People often equate unstable income with ‘you earn $5k one month and $3k the next month. sheesh!’ but the reality can be way worse. Think more like this: You earn $32k one month, and then absolutely zero for a year. Or maybe two years. Can you be *that* disciplined with money to live like that? I’ve seen my own income double in one year, then halve the next year, and I’m a stable indie with 20 years experience and many shipped games.

A typical indie games far-from-stable earnings

Isolation

You may well work from home. Whole days may pass without you talking to anyone. You have no work ‘colleagues’ and no workplace chat or gossip. There are no social groups in the evening of people grabbing a quick drink or food after work. There are no workplace parties or works events or trips. You may do 95% of your socializing through a web browser. Not normal or healthy

Financial Planning

You will not have an employers pension, so should set one up. How do you do that? Can you get a mortgage? how do you prove earnings? Who gives you a loan when your income is so unreliable. How can you set up things like subscriptions, or direct debits for bills, or book holidays when you have no idea what you will earn. Even if you get a mortgage, how can you know if you can afford it?

Nobody understands your job

Meeting with friends in normal jobs will start to feel weird. Most of their work-chat is about how they hate their job, or colleagues, or boss. You cannot relate to this at all. They claim to be envious of your lifestyle, but have no idea what it is like. They do not understand why on earth you would work at the weekend, you do not understand why they have to rush back because they have a pre-set lunch *hour*. They don’t know what its like to pitch for work, or a publishing deal, you cant remember what performance reviews are like, or why flexi-time is so valued. They think you have made the wrong decision. You think they have no ambition.

The business facade

You are conscious of always having to represent your business side. You cant get drunk and tell people your job is pointless and the work boring. You are always thinking about your public image, and not wanting to upset potential customers, or investors. Every dumb or sensitive comment you make on twitter could lose you business, even wreck your career. Your views on social media are inseparable from the public face of your employer, which is you.

Nobody to blame

When everything goes wrong and nobody hires you or the game flops, or nobody buys your art, it is your fault. You cannot tell yourself, even subconsciously, that this is the fault of X in marketing or Y in sales, and how you did a good job. Ultimately there is nobody to pass the blame onto. You can come up with excuses and rationalizations but ultimately the whole company is you and there is nobody else to blame. Failure feels much more personal, and harder to shake off. Even when you are successful you worry about failing in the future.

Ultimately, its a choice that depends very much on your personality. Working for yourself in a creative field can be very rewarding, financially as well as personally, and i would DREAD to go be an employee again, but it really depends so much on your personality. I am very self-motivated, I don’t mind (within reason) the isolation, and I’m very risk tolerant, so it works for me.

Also do not forget that the reverse applies. I have personality characteristics that mean I don’t like working as a normal employee at all. I can be argumentative, arrogant, short-tempered, I hate being told what to do, I hate working in noisy places and hate commuting. I can be very moody, and not good at working with extroverted people… there are so many reasons for me to choose the lifestyle I have, despite its many shortcomings.

It is very easy for people who are successful in a field to forget the many downsides for those who are more typical. I probably vastly understate the effect that low income and unstable income has on people. If money worries can lead to stress and health problems, which leaks into relationship problems (which can lead to more stress)… then this can be all consuming. Sometimes these things compound. Trying to be extroverted and upbeat and SELL SELL SELL when inside you are worried about paying for food and that your partner is disappointed in your career choice…. cannot be easy.

My top tip: TALK to other people in similar fields, whether you are in the industry already and struggling, or considering leaving your job for this business. It can be very enlightening. No reading of blogs or twitter is as good as real world ‘pub-chat’ with people in the same position. Even just hearing other people agree with you about the negatives of the industry can be strangely re-assuring. Somehow us humans like to know that we are not suffering alone, even if we are still suffering.

Finally releasing : The Doors that go like this expansion for Production Line

Posted on May 1, 2019

Today is the day! At last someone has taken the time to think of the billionaires… We release an expansion for ‘Production Line’ today, which adds the following features…

Support for Gull wing doors like these:

And for Scissor-wing doors like these:

And also Butterfly-wing doors like these…

And not least a brand new body type called ‘supercar’. It looks like this:

This is the first DLC for Production Line, and it will be available direct from us at www.positech.co.uk/productionline/dlc.html as well as the humble store, GoG and Steam. its $4.99. I did get in touch with a bunch of youtubers and streamers and sent out some keys, but if you want to see exactly how it all works with my smiling face involved, you can check out this blog video I made about the expansion here:

I honestly have no idea if this DLC will be of interest to just a few super-car geeks or to everyone playing the game, so its a bit of a gamble, but I do like having a stupidly expensive car to build myself, and I definitely think it adds to the late game, and adds to the experience for people who want to build super-sprawling factories with some incredibly high-end options.

The DLC actually launches at 9.00AM PDT which is apparently 5.00PM where I am in the UK. here is the link to grab it or wishlist it:

School #2 construction finished!

Posted on April 25, 2019

They need to clear away building materials by the looks of it, and do some painting and other bits, but the structure of our second school is now complete. Image quality not great because rainy season in Cameroon is not ideal for high end HD photos :D.

More details on the school here:

Positech Games is…building another school in Cameroon

Here are the photos!

A reminder that the charity we use is called ‘Building Schools For Africa’. Link below:

http://www.schoolsforafrica.co.uk/

Making the Production Line supercar expansion

Posted on April 23, 2019

So unless you have not heard, i’m making an expansion pack for my car factory game ‘Production Line‘ which adds a new car type (supercar) and also some new door options as features for various car models, and those door types are Scissor-wing doors, Gull-wing doors and butterfly doors. I’ve done a video that shows these off (below) and also we have a web page for the dlc that you can find here.

I thought I’d put down in writing how this came about and why this was the DLC I decided to do. Personally I’m a fan of DLC, but only if its actually ‘adding’ to the game, or giving the player options, rather than just tweaking some numbers and selling a few text files for $5.99. That seems a bit exploitative, so I always focus on doing DLC where we have new art content at the very least. There is a LOT of art that goes into a single car body design in Production Line, because every car is completely different in terms of where the wheels are, what the headlights look like, even what the axles and drive shaft looks like and where they go. Nothing currently gets simply re-used between body styles.

Adding a super-high end car to the game makes sense from a design and balance point of view, because it means we can leave the balance of the existing game in place, and effectively just add a new style option for the luxury cars, and add a tiny section of the public who only want to buy a super-car shaped vehicle. In the real world, most sales at that price point already are accounted for by people buying sedan and sports style bodies, but there are some people who would want to spend the same budget on a car with a crazy shape.

Plus crazy designed cars are cool right?

Once I knew we wanted a supercar, having crazy doors is pretty much a no-brainer. people love cars with mad doors, and some research showed that butterfly, gull and scissor were the most common options on modern real world supercars. In theory putting all this in the game was going to be mostly artwork, and then some balancing by me. pretty easy huh?

It turns out..NO! This was extremely tricky because of the way the design of those doors overlaps other parts of the car when they are open (which involved a lot of re-ordering of existing components), and the nightmarish fact that gull wing doors actually require a different ‘roof’, to allow for the cutouts n the side for the door hinges. This means I had to redefine these door ‘styles’ as roof types, which also ensures you cant have gull-wing doors and a panoramic sunroof…

As a result, door styles have to be like drive-trains: set in stone when the car chassis is first created and unchanged for the lifetime of that existing chunk of metal. In game-terms, this means that switching your luxury sedan to use gull wing doors will not have any visible effect for a while, as the cars right at the start of the line are then set to be gull-wing, but they have to get all the way to the door panel slot for you to notice.

This also involved a huge amount of special case code-spaghetti, because if you have gull wing doors, then certain other things change. You cannot stick normal windows or wing mirrors on a gull-wing door, and so-on. There was quite a bit of complexity involved in swapping some components for others to accommodate the new system.

I like to give my artists total freedom to create cool stuff and tell them I will worry about making it work. I get better art that way, but more work for me… It turns out that yes…its very cool that the supercar’s engine is behind the driver, but that caused me some hassle to ensure that when the engine gets fitted, its the back part of the car (trunk) that opens up to have it fitted, and not the front… (99% of players wont notice, but I like to surprise the 1% who do). As we were doing this anyway, it made sense to support the same capability for the sports cars, which also look like they have the engine in the back.

So all of that stuff is now DONE and tested and working in the game. The installer is done, and I’m working on the steam build, and mod-panel integration. All I need to do before release is keep testing the balance of this stuff to ensure that the doors are expensive and awkward to fit (but not unprofitable or too annoying) and that demand for these features and for the supercar makes sense.

Right now, the game is being tested with supercar sales only taking place in the luxury price band (well yeah…) and with a market size of 4.76%. I think thats maybe a bit high, and obviously in the real world its <1% but this is a game and needs to be fun :D

In terms of balancing the doors, they are currently just ordinary door panels..BUT the slot-upgrades are pretty expensive ($195,000 for a slot upgrade for scissor doors compared with just $3,480 for central locking) and they require sensors and servos, which lead to a bit of a bottleneck (intentionally). Plus the actual fitting time to add those doors is considerable, more than doubling the max-optimized time to fit ordinary door panels.

The final piece in the puzzle is the design cost. All door types need to be researched separately and also you need to research the new supercar body style. These are quite lengthy research items, but there is nothing stopping you skipping all the other car bodies and making supercars or gull wing doors your early game priority!

If you like the sound of all this stuff you can wishlist the DLC using the widget below.

If you are a youtuber looking to cover the game and want to make a key request you can get in touch through keymailer (below) or email me your steam curator name.