They Took Ma Job!
I'm writing to you today a freed man. I am no longer working in a videogame studio. Now I can start making videogames!
I'll also resume bi-weekly postings to this excellent blog.
I'm skeptical of the corporate entity as a form of organization, I don't think true capitalism involves the majority of people being employees. Its becoming increasingly clear to me that professionalism is not sufficient in this business. I'd rather be talented than professional as a matter of preference, but its apparent that this is also a survival strategy. Notice the trend of the most talented people in game organizations fleeing them as soon as fiscally possible, this is a matter of the soul suriving and its also rational. In a company the tendency is to produce something that has a concave risk/reward profile, the median outcome is losing 20%, the mean outcome is making 20%, and the probability that you'll recoup none of the costs is as small as the probability that you'll have a hit. Demographics are profiled, genres are tweaked, egos are stroked, no secret is revealed.
Indie games, on the other hand, offers the possibility of a convex risk/reward profile. You take all your risk upfront, odds are extremely good that your work will wallow in obscurity and low sales, or sometimes one but not the other. Your upside potential is rather unlimited, what you are making is more likely to be a hit, by design, than everything produced by large organizations, but "more likely" means 1 out of 100 instead of 1 out of 1000. Personally, I like those odds.
How to get money in the meantime? I'm going to be following a sort of unusual approach, financial speculation.
The makers of World of Goo managed to get a hit, making them millions, and they did it on 100k in debt. I was having lunch with the CEO and marketing dude a few weeks back and we got to talking about that game, the marketing guy was like "yeah, but that's World of Goo, do you think we can do that?" and I was just stunned by the irony that a 60+ person organization with a couple million behind it (in a country where that translates into about seven million in local currency) would be scratching its head trying to emulate the performance of two guys with 100k in debt behind them.
Ok?
Considering the game industry offers problems so obvious and solutions so simple that, like considering fractional reserve banking, the mind is repelled.
In my time there I learned how to swim in the corporate fish tank, I improved my design documentation skills, my leadership skills, and I got experience working as lead designer on a major retail project for the Wii, a licensed IP!
I also got to fight the current in pushing an original project with a political subtext, even after adulterating the political thing with cartoony animals, it was still controversial. I hope that design gets put into production, if it does I'll let you know, it'll be gnarly. What's funny about that is I designed the game using a board game prototype, we took a map of Cuba, got heavy with some beer, weed and pizza, and designed a strategy game about guerilla warfare. We were reprimanded for not seeking official approval, but then a funny thing happened, they played the prototype. Instead of a stale document there was, for once, actual gameplay that could be judged more objectively. This was an exceptional instance and highly telling.
Another cool instance was being able to bring one of my indie amigos to the table and do a porting deal. Well, more than a port. I'll let you know when that's announced. I was managing that and its gone pretty dern well so I feel satisfied in completion.
Just because its so punk rock I'll tell you what happened. I came pretty close to quitting and had a sit-down with the jefes, we came to see eye to eye and I resolved that despite my misgivings about the environment, I would suck it up and try to achieve things that I couldn't on my own. My clothes had been stolen by some hookers the week before, so I only own one pair of shorts at the moment. I had some shake in the bottom of my cargo pocket and went to the bathroom to go clean it out, take stock, I wanted to have enough for a full J so I could smoke out a 30 year old mother who had never been high before. So I'm reaching my fingers to the corner, trying to separate lint and leaf, and someone comes in and sees me. I say, "trying to make sure I'm good to toast a mujer tonight" but apparently that didn't go over so well.
Getting let go for that stupid reason is, in retrospect, exactly the note that I want to close that chapter of my life with.
When I was brought in I didn't apologize, I didn't say "hey, I've got one pair of shorts motherfuckers, give me a break," or "you're going to fire me for this but you pay that asshole twice as much as the rest of us to show up at 2 everyday and pretend to do project management!" I don't believe in vengence or petty emotions, I have my dignity and I always try to project a good onda with everyone, even those who have wronged me. I'm kind of like Jesus that way. I instead offered to interview Ian Bogost and Chris Hecker who will be speaking at the EVA conference in December, and I said I look forward to working with them on a developer-publisher basis. I wasn't about to throw the baby out with the bath water, big companies might not be good at developing games, but they sure can do ports and provide a path to a console-donwloadable market.
My first project as an indie will be a social entreprenuer game, like Altruistic Tycoon if you will, though that's not my working title. You'll see it here first. As I learn GML better I'll hatch some other stuff, and I hope to hire Paul Eres to collaborate with me in Q2 2010. Then, I'd like to do a sort of mini-VC fund for indie games, a lot of them freeware, this is what I intended to do with True Vacuum when I first got out of college. To make my bread I'm going to be doing some part-time work designing strategies for the Hedge Fund industry and also speculating on my own account, I managed to make 500% in the last two weeks and I'm just getting warmed up. Its a good thing my talent for nailing entries in fast-moving financial markets was refined in time for my shake-out.
And you never know, maybe now that I'm unemployed Dan Benmergui will start hanging out with me again.
