As a professional indie developer our choices are limited when it comes to the game that we choose to create. We have the important criteria that the game must at least cover its own costs. We are not hobbyists that can create games for fun and then hope that they are successful. We must choose the game that we make with care, with the intention of earning money from it built in to our decisions from the beginning.

The first major limitation is scope. The game that we choose to create needs to be achievable with the resources we have available. I would strongly suggest that you aim to create game in less than a year. Not only does working on a game for more than a year become quite draining, you are also putting all your eggs in one basket. No developer can guarantee that their games will be a success so we need to create as many games as possible so that our successes can offset our failures. Keep your scope tight, in a future journal entry I will talk more about effectively scoping your game ideas.

Start small and expand the scope of your ideas as you get more experience of the whole process. Ideally, make your first game in three months or less, go through the whole process of market analysis, prototyping, asset acquisition, development, monetisation, debugging, launch and marketing. Each time you go through that process you will learn new lessons that will inform your approach the next time you do it. Get as much experience as possible of the whole process, especially launch and marketing.

Making small games is a good idea, at least until you have a large team and a secure revenue stream. That still leaves the question of what game to write. You may hear advice to make a clone of some classic game such as pong or space invaders in order to learn the ropes. That may be a good idea for a hobbyist developer, but it is not a good choice for a professional. There is usually no money to be made from cloning old games unless you have an original spin, a license for original IP or a big marketing budget. We need to look for small games that fill a specific gap in the market.

As indie developers we do not have large marketing budgets so our best form of discovery is search. The games that we make must be targeted at search terms that we can dominate. As a case study, Exobyte's most recent game "Pish Posh Push" is a coin pusher game. As is often the case there is a regional search term specific to the UK market for these types of game which is "penny pusher". By naming our game "Pish Posh Penny Pusher" on the application store we were able to quickly dominate this search term and rank first in the search results. That initial group of regional players gave the game a jump start and now the game comes fifth in UK results for the much more widespread search term "coin pusher". A remarkable success considering that some of the competing games in this space have multi-million dollar budgets.

As independent game developers we have great freedom over the type of games that we create. That freedom can be limited dramatically once we make an important decision.

That decision is whether we are going to be professional or hobbyist developers.

If we choose to be hobbyist developers then we have no limitations on the games that we make. We never even have to finish our games if we don't want to.

On the other hand if we choose that we want to be professional developers our choices become much more limited. Firstly we need to make sure the games that we plan to create are achievable with the resources we have at our disposal. Secondly we have to earn money from the games that we create. That second factor is the biggest limitation on our creative freedom once we turn pro.

For the hobbyist developer, making money is a nice bonus, but not an essential outcome from writing games. For the professional, the goal of making money has to be baked into every decision from the beginning. The games that we choose to create are not the ones that we most want to make, but the ones with the highest potential for being profitable.

Most professional indie developers will start out as hobbyist developers and turn pro once that have acquired the expertise and experience they need to make the right choices. Another path is to begin as a professional employed developer and then turn indie, retaining that professional mindset. Each route has its advantages and disadvantages although it's almost always better to have professional experience in employment as a software developer before attempting to become a professional indie developer.

I'm making really good progress on Pish Posh Push at the moment and my enthusiasm has given me improved lucidity when solving problems I encounter whilst coding.  One problem I had recently was the random selection of prizes based on their value.  It's fairly easy to choose a prize randomly that chooses higher valued items more frequently.  You simply total all the values then generate a number within that range and select the item that matches your randomly generated number.

It becomes trickier when you need to make the higher valued items proportionally less common than your lower valued items.  That means that a plastic toy valued at "1" should appear ten times more frequently than a metal toy valued at "10".  The trick is to add up the values of the items as fractions of one.  So the toy valued at "1" becomes "1/1" and the toy valued at 10 becomes "1/10".  Add these together and generate a number in that range and you can easily select the cheap toy proportionally more often than the expensive one.

The algorithm in java looks like this:

private int getPrize() {
    int i_prize = 0;
    float f_max = 0;
    // loop through prizes and total up values as a fraction of 1
    for (int i=0;i<MAX_PRIZES;i++) {
        f_max += 1 / (float) m_prizevalues[i];
    }
    // generate a random floating point number in the range of the total value of all prizes
    float f_select = MathUtils.random(f_max);
    // loop through prizes and select the one that matches the randomly generated value
    for (int i=0;i<MAX_PRIZES;i++) {
        if (f_select < (1 / (float) m_prizevalues[i])) {
            // This prizes matches the selected value, stop searching
            i_prize = i;
            break;
        } else {
           // Does not match, deduct value of this prize and check against next
           f_select -= (1 / (float) m_prizevalues[i]);
       }
    }
    return i_prize;
}

Let me know in the comments below if you can see improvements that could be made, or can spot any problems and especially if you know of a better way that this can be done.  One problem I can see is that at very high values the algorithm could start hitting the bounds of floating point accuracy.  That could in principle cause a very high valued item to never get selected.  For my own needs I'm not going to be in that magnitude so I've not gone to the trouble of calculating at what point that might start to be an issue.

This handy bit of code can be used in any situation where you need to select an item where higher valued items need to be more rare.  A good example would be spawning loot in a rogue-like dungeon crawler.  In that case you want your 10,000 gold value magic sword to be generated as loot a hundred times less frequently than your 100 gold value regular sword.

It is well known that being comfortable is often an impediment to success.  If necessity is the mother of all invention, then comfort is the mother of procrastination.  To accomplish things that you can be proud of you will almost always have to push yourself (or be pushed) outside of your comfort zone.

This principle also applies when it comes to designing successful games.  Most games developers will have grown up with a high exposure to gaming culture and we will be familiar and comfortable with all the classic gaming genres.  The problem comes when we write games inspired by the ones we love and feel comfortable with.  When it comes to releasing our game we find that the app store is full of similar games.  As game developers, we all want to write our own interpretation of our favourite game genre, be it a first person shooter, a platform game or a rogue-like dungeon crawler.

I've recently experienced this when releasing Plasma Duel.  I believe it is a very original game, but despite being an original hybrid game, the ideas upon which it is based are very comfortable to all gamers.  It is not surprising that it is buried in the masses of air hockey games on the Google Play store.  I have no regrets about developing Plasma Duel, it still gets 20-30 downloads a day (I have no idea how people find it) and could get better exposure in the future.  My point is that I didn't set myself up for success when I chose that genre.

Contrast that with the slot machine games that I have developed.  They are well outside of the interest of your average "gamer".  The only reason I am familiar enough with fruit machines to write my own is that I used to live in a seaside holiday resort when as a child and I was teaching myself to program.  Cherry Chaser slot machine and Super Snake slot machine have now a combined total of nearly two million downloads between them.  The reason they were so successful is that nobody else was writing European style fruit machine games and I was lucky enough to feel comfortable writing one of my own.

The crux of this post is that if you are comfortable writing something that very few other people are willing to develop, you have a head start to success.  Your idea for a dungeon crawler or platform game is unlikely to get noticed unless you get lucky or have some really clever hook.  The best route to success may be to move out of your comfort zone and develop a game that isn't for yourself, but for a very specific target demographic outside of the conventional gaming market.

Exobyte have been featured as a case study of success with mobile advertising on the Google Admob web site.

Admob sent out a request to companies last year asking them to submit their success stories with Admob.  I told my story about how successful Cherry Chaser had been and was selected to be a featured study.  This involved a phone call to the Admob team at Google's campus in Mountain View, California last year where we chatted about how I'd used AdMob to monetise my games.

The result is the case study featured on the AdMob web site:
http://www.google.com/ads/admob/success.html

The PDF file of the case study can also be viewed directly with the link below.

Over the past few years the public awareness of independently developed games has increased significantly.  This is largely due to a number of high profile games that have come from lone developers or small teams.  Games like Minecraft, DayZ and Plants vs Zombies have all been developed with an "indie" style game development process.  Even Angry Birds, one of the biggest game franchises of all, is considered by some to be a an indie game due to it being self-published by Rovio,

That raises the question of what exactly an indie game is and where do you draw the line between indie games and mainstream industry titles.  There doesn't seem to be a clear definition of what makes an indie games developer.

A purely technical definition of independently developed games is that they have been made independently of a publisher.  With this definition every game that is created and published by the same company is an indie game.  This definition feels slightly too strict to capture the essence of what most consider to be indie games.  There are examples of large "Triple A" titles that have been published by the developers that created them, especially in the mobile phone market where self publishing has become normal.  There are also examples of games that have been released through a publisher but still have a very indie feel.

So if the technical definition doesn't feel like it quite fits the subject area that the term has come to cover, what can we use as a defining attribute?

The primary factor is that independent games are developed independently of any external pressures on the design of the game.  The reason externally published titles often lose their indie feel is that the publisher puts pressure on the developer to alter their game design due to perceived market forces.  This also applies to self published games that have their game design changed under pressure from factors other than what makes a good game.  Even if a game is made by a lone developer, if the primary motivation is to "work an angle" or "cash in on a trend" then that isn't in the spirit of indie game development.

A second factor is that all of the team are engaged in creating a game that they themselves want to play. Games that are made by companies that are working a tried and tested process to earn a pay packet have a different feel to them.  This is from an advert for a game designer for a large commercial game developer: 

"use a variety of research techniques (e.g. surveys, observational studies) to better understand the needs, requirements and expectations of the target audience and the relative influence of industry trends/best practice".

In contrast, the designer of an indie game will usually just have a great idea that they want to turn into reality and know in their heart that it will be a great game without concern for market research or best practice.

...and by Denmark I mean Google Play, obviously.

Two years ago I released Cherry Chaser Slot Machine on to Google Play.  Within a few days it climbed near the top of the "New Releases" chart which led to lots of downloads and a good ranking in the overall charts.  When I released Super Snake Slot Machine later that year my target was to get another good ranking on the "New Releases" chart, to help this I cross promoted the game in Cherry Chaser.  The strategy was again successful with Super Snake also achieved a good position in the overall charts.

Just over a week ago, I released my third game on the Google Play store.  Plasma Duel is an air hockey game and so fell into the more congested "Arcade games" category on the site.  Even so I felt that with cross promotion in the other games and by experimenting with buying Admob banner ads in other apps I could at least get some exposure in "New Releases".  Last weekend I showed sixty thousand adverts for Plasma Duel in my other two games and during the past week so far I've purchased over five hundred thousand adverts in other applications that show banner adverts.  The net result from these advertising campaigns so far is about a hundred additional installations of Plasma Duel.  The total number of downloads of Plasma Duel is now just over three hundred.  It's been reviewed thirteen times with an average rating of four and a half stars.

The result of these efforts so far is that Plasma Duel is currently sitting at position three hundred and fourteen in the top new free "Arcade and Action" games on Google Play.  A "New Release" on Google Play is regarded as being any game released in the past thirty days and Plasma Duel is only ten days old, so there is still time for improvement.  What interests me is how the games that feature more highly on the chart have achieved their better ranking.  This is where things start to look a bit... odd.

Let's start right at the top.

The top "New Release" in the "Arcade and Action" category on Google Play right now is a game called "Temple Run Bunny".  It's been downloaded over a million times and is a nearly fifty megabyte download.  Let's be clear, this has no relation to Temple Run apart from being an almost exact clone.  it's basically game using stolen intellectual property,  The top reviews on the game are quite revealing about where all these downloads are coming from:

"Temple run for kids. It seems nice 5 stars for now until I play it may not be what I think it is lolz ;3"
"Good. I said three stars because I did not play it but I am going to I think it is going to be like temple run by the looks of it"
"Temple Bunny Run. Well I give it a star because its the lowest it will go for an app that cant even be allowed to be downloaded to begin with, just like temple run 2. fix that problem and i'll change it to five stars"

Those are just the top featured reviews, there are hundreds more by other players who haven't played or can't play the game.  All down the charts there are similar examples of games that either the reviewer seems to have been forced to download and review or the review is obviously auto-generated junk text.

This problem has been getting attention elsewhere as well.  Just take a look at this mammoth Reddit thread on the topic:  http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/1vmjsl/holy_cow_look_at_all_these_fake_appsgames_on_the/

Google really need to do something about this.  It's the one thing that could push me away from developing for Android first.

Plasma Duel has been released!

I published the free and premium versions of Plasma Duel to production on New Years Eve so the game is now out there for everybody to play.

The next challenge for the game is visibility, there are over 500 games in the "top new arcade" category on Google Play - that's just the games released in the past 30 days.  Getting Plasma Duel anywhere near the top of that list will be a challenge.

My primary tactic to make some sort of impression on the charts is to take advantage of the current installed user base of Cherry Chaser and Super Snake.  I'm running a 100,000 house ads to the players of these games promoting Plasma Duel as a new game from the maker of the game they are playing.  I'm going to try to blitz those ads between now and Sunday to try to make an impression on the charts.

You can help me!

You can help me by giving Plasma Duel a rating on the Play Store.  If you enjoy the game please rate it and maybe give a few comments.  The ratings given to games influence their rankings quite heavily so every good rating I get will help me enormously at this stage.

Thanks to all who helped test the game, you rock!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.exobyte.plasmaduel&hl=en

The first Norwich Game Expo showcasing the work of local games developers was held on October 11th and 12th at Epic Studios in Norwich.  We were lucky enough to be invited to show our games and had a great time talking to people and seeing all the amazing games and talented individuals from the local area.

What is apparent is that there is a huge interest in computer games development, across all age ranges.  More and more people are having a go at turning their game ideas into reality, aided by an explosion in great tools such as Unity.  It feels very similar to the boom in the games industry that happened in the eighties.

My advice for an aspiring developer who wants to write a game is to do something small and do it well.  Don't underestimate the work involved in finishing a game.  A finished game is a lot different to a prototype.  I had the core game of Plasma Duel done in June, but have only just got all the essential features and bug fixes done where I'm happy to do a beta release, and there's still quite a few of features I need to add before I can publish a full release.  

Plasma Duel is about twice the size of my slot machine games in terms of complexity but has taken about four times as much work to finish.  It seems like the time it takes to finish a game is roughly equal to the size of it squared.  It's obvious to me now why very large games by indie teams very rarely get finished, or are released in an unfinished state.

The big advantage we have as indie developers is that we are fans of our own games.  That means we have the enthusiasm to play our own games over and over until we've found most of the the bugs and glitches. Players can tell the difference between a game written by someone working on their own game as opposed to games written by someone being paid to do a job.  That's why indie games have a popularity that is out of proportion with their budgets.