StarLicker was an unsuccessful game in almost every way imaginable. We made a lot of mistakes on this project, but through this process, our skill, knowledge, and wisdom as game developers improved dramatically. This article is meant to record our experiences so that we improve going forward and to share what we learned with others who walk in similar shoes. In this business, we hear a lot about the success stories, but not as much about the failures. So here we go…

The Good

Original Concept

Hayden: I began the SkySwitch project, as it was originally named, wanting to build the game around high level design goals. The first goal was to build a strategy game with the aesthetic of a bullet hell shmup. Early into prototyping, the concept of the opposing players “feeding” each others’ economies through aggression emerged, and I fell in love with that as a design goal as well.

To this day, I still think at a high level StarLicker represents an interesting, original game concept with a lot of potential. This is one of the few areas where the released game is very strong, and a lot of feedback we’ve had from players confirms this. However, this was also the first strategy game I designed and the actual game fails to capture the full potential of the concept.

Rudd: Some time after Hayden started Heartonomy and StarLicker but before I joined the project, we were participating in a small hackathon together, and I got a chance to see the prototype. At that point, even though it was extremely rough looking, I could tell that the main mechanic had a lot of promise, and I was seriously impressed. With my naive attitude towards the game industry, I believed that a concept this original and innovative was sure to do well if it could be executed on. The concept is what really sold me on joining the company and risking my livelihood. While there are a ton of things I’d do differently now, I agree with Hayden: I believe that the concept was one of the better aspects of the project.

Shipping

Hayden: Personally, I find it a bit trifling to celebrate the mere release of a game. Having said that, I recognize that shipping does represent a real accomplishment. It requires crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s and there is a lot to learn just from this process alone. If we had not released anything, then writing this article would hardly even make sense.

Additionally, it was always a secondary goal of the project from the very beginning to create a game that could serve as a portfolio piece to showcase to potential work-for-hire clients. We had no illusions that our first release would magically become a huge hit game that could fund the company for the rest of time. We knew it was likely that we’d have to resort to contract work at some point to stay afloat, and that is exactly what happened. And StarLicker has already successfully demonstrated to clients on more than one occasion that we know how to build and release a game.

Rudd: I disagree with Hayden that shipping is “trifling”. To me, shipping the game was a major accomplishment. The difference between an indie studio that has released no games and an indie studio that has released one game is infinitely large. I’m extremely happy that things like Game A Week are becoming popular, because that mentality would have helped immensely at the start of this project. The months leading up to the first release of StarLicker were extremely stressful for me because I could feel that something was wrong. Even with so many months of work put into the game, I could tell that we hadn’t really done anything. We needed to ship. When we finally did, even though the reception was poor, I felt much better, like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

The Bad

Game Design Is Hard

Hayden: I had heard this phrase countless times before but I never truly understood it until recently. In fact, I had heard all of these lessons before, but alas, I am the type of person that learns best by doing (it wrong). At the outset of the project, I had just quit my job and started My Own Company and I was higher on naive optimism than I’d ever been before. For game design, I thought it was enough to establish specific, clear high level design goals (described above) and the rest of the design process would follow naturally and easily from that. This was extremely incorrect.

Nothing about the process of game creation is particularly natural or easy. Every bit of it requires special skills and talents and tons of practice, and design is no exception. I could probably write an entire book about everything I learned about game design from this project, but we’ll keep this to the big ones.

Playtesting

Hayden: Playtest early and often. The value of fresh eyes on a game can not be overstated. It’s fine to start with coworkers, friends, and family, but they will grow accustomed to the game quickly and thus cease to be effective playtesters. As soon as the smallest nugget of the game is playable, start having people play it, and then never stop finding new people to play it at every step of the way.

The Truth About Feedback

Hayden: Really, actually listen to playtest feedback. Playtesters say lots of different things after they try a game. The designer will disagree with all or even most of their suggestions. But do not dismiss any feedback, as I did, with the attitude of “this game is not for you”. It is the responsibility of the game designer to listen to and analyze every single bit of the feedback, and discover precisely what truths it contains. Often, this truth will be far from obvious and often not even directly related to the actual feedback itself. But everything a playtester says, whether its something they like or don’t like, or a new idea they have, comes directly from their experience playing the game, which means there’s something to learn about the game from it.

Rudd: To me, this is the most tragic failure of StarLicker. When we submitted to IndieCade for 2013’s festival, they were nice enough to provide feedback to all entrants. This feedback should have been invaluable, coming from people who understand indie games and what makes them worth playing. But with this feedback, we almost entirely rejected it out of hand, believing we knew what was best for the game.

If I try to rationalize why we thought it was reasonable to ignore, it might be that one of the judges said that they’d love to be able to try the game via multi-device asynchronous play, which was already in the game and in fact the main intended way to play. How deeply can they be looking at this, we thought, if they didn’t even see that? But other feedback cut to the core of what we now know to actually be the issues with the game. “You nailed everything but the core gameplay elements”, wrote one judge, with words that still sting to read.

Perhaps if we had listened better to feedback, we might not have such shocking stats on retention: only 6.8% of matches end quote-unquote “normally”, and almost 65% end in an automatic forfeit due to one player failing to play their turn.

Hayden: While I agree with Rudd about the value of the feedback we got from the IndieCade judges, I remember things differently about why we didn’t take it to heart. It actually began with a playtest session organized by the NYU Game Center specifically for IndieCade submissions. We came out of that playtest with lots of great feedback and some crazy ideas that would have been major changes to the game design.

However, this playtest took place in June 2013, which was already after when we originally wanted to release the game. I’ll get into this in more detail below, but at this point we were panicking over money, and no one was feeling brave enough to make major design changes at that point. This is why such valuable feedback was ignored.

Indie Scope

Hayden: Start as small as possible. A multiplayer strategy game, even a small one, tends to be a very complex game design. To put it bluntly, I was simply in over my head as a game designer. Despite having a lot of experience playing these types of games and the clear design goals mentioned above, I did not have the experience or skillset as a game designer to execute well on those goals in the time we had to develop it.

Rudd: What we shipped was a much larger and complex design than we should have taken on for a first game, unconditionally. But what we originally planned to build before release was significantly more work than we actually managed to do. We originally planned a single player story mode, leagues with Elo/MMR systems for multiplayer, player messaging, and even, perhaps after launch, an innovative system for players to mentor other players. But even by cutting all that, it was too late. The original design necessitated at least some of those things to keep players engaged, but we had run out of time to deliver on them.

Release When It’s Ready

Hayden: In business, time is money and money is time, and we didn’t have enough of either for StarLicker. I originally intended for it to be a 3 month project, but then I decided to make it multiplayer. And then I decided to add 5 variants of each of the 8 units, four unique power-up abilities, etc. In other words, we let the scope grow wildly beyond what we could actually deliver on at the quality bar we wanted. To make matters worse, we were living off of our savings, and it’s frightening to watch your bank account balance dwindle, and this fear clouds good judgement.

We crunched for months toward the end, but while that allowed us to release the game (mostly) as designed, it forced us to rush on many aspects of the production that should not have been rushed. For example, we never created an automated system for integrating art assets. Every time an asset was modified, I had to spend time manually putting it into the game. We never felt like it was okay to slow down and really spend the time on “unnecessary” things like automation. At first this seemed acceptable, but by the end of the project we had thousands of art assets (all the animations are frame-based sprites) and this manual process ended up wasting so much time in the long run. The same was true for a lot of coding tasks that would have resulted in a more polished game. In the middle of a rushed, panicked crunch, it’s basically impossible to slow down to really get the code right.

So, just like in the AAA industry, the best games tend to come from the companies that can afford to say the release is “when it’s ready”, and the bad games always show signs of sloppy, rushed work. Game production is game production, and there is no exception for indie games.

Rudd: The caveat from this lesson learned that I feel we should emphasize is that this comes second to having a correctly-sized scope for your team. Yes, releasing a product that we weren’t happy with was a mistake, but I still feel that we made the right decision in essentially cutting our losses. We had spent as much time as I was comfortable spending on the project, so we basically had to release it before it was ready, because we had failed to scope the project correctly for our resources.

Free 2 Fail

Hayden: This is a big one – the decision to make StarLicker a free to play game. The reasoning behind this decision went something like this: the best way to maximize the number of people that play the game is to make it free. And it would be no problem to design a free to play system that people will like because, well, League of Legends does it! This might be the best example of the overzealous idealism that pervaded the project, a theme you may have already noticed. The problem is that we knew what LoL did to monetize but we didn’t have a good understanding of why it worked, and completely failed to communicate a compelling “why” in our design.

Rudd: One of the biggest problems here is that StarLicker was a niche game. It is not easy to learn or get into. For some games, that is okay. But StarLicker being free meant those that downloaded it had no incentive to give the game a further chance, unless they had a friend bugging them to play it. If they had paid an upfront cost, at least some of them would feel obligated to “get their money’s worth” out of it and learn how to play.

Even for the players who did invest themselves into the game – time-wise, that is – the incentives to pay were extremely low. For the first 6 months of the game being available, we did not offer any cosmetics for purchase; the only IAPs available were XP multipliers and items that were also unlockable via normal play. Some player reviews actually expressed guilt over not paying since they were enjoying the game so much, but not enough guilt to actually purchase anything.

Hayden: Not only was StarLicker a niche game but it also had some design flaws that resulted in a severe player retention problem. This is a death sentence to any free to play game, let alone one that limits the maximum amount of stuff for sale so as to not “abuse” the model. So in the end, we made an extremely small amount of money. With around 11K downloads, the game has earned less than $300 to date (no I didn’t forget a zero there).

Multiplayer Only

Hayden: Since day one, I wanted Heartonomy to focus on developing multiplayer games. So very early in the project, I decided to tackle asynchronous multiplayer as the focus for StarLicker. I enjoyed playing several async games on my iPhone, so it seemed like an obvious good idea. But the problem is we focused on multiplayer features so much that we entirely neglected all the value contained in playing solo.

I eventually came to realize that the value of single player is that most people simply prefer to learn a new video game on their own at their own pace. For most people, trying to learn an entirely new and unfamiliar game in the context of a competitive 1 versus 1 matchup is difficult and stressful. Add on top of that the fact that asynchronous means there is a lot of waiting between turns, and the result is a game that is almost impossible for new players to really get into.

Another side effect of ignoring single player is that we ended up rushing the creation of a tutorial that was little more than an afterthought. I feel like we missed a huge opportunity to make a compelling single player mode for StarLicker that could have introduced people to the game’s unique mechanics at a reasonable pace such that they would enjoy that learning process. And then, hopefully, most players would have eventually decided they were ready for the added challenge of competing against other players.

The Ugly

What’s in a Name

Hayden: Let’s talk for a moment about how we came to name the game “StarLicker”. I originally started calling it this as a new codename that I thought was hilarious and described the core mechanic of the game (tracing along the paths of star-shaped bullets) better than what we were calling it at the time – “Sky Switch”. As we asked more and more people what they thought of the name, we realized it was an extremely polarizing issue. Some people loved the name while others hated it. Those that loved it felt like it was unique, bold and intriguing. Those that hated it thought it sounded gross or perverted and said they would be embarrassed to tell it to other people. Ultimately, we decided to go with it, but I honestly still don’t know if that was the right decision. I’m still getting the same polarized reactions when I tell new people the name.

Rudd: Honestly, I never even liked the name. It always made me a little bit uncomfortable, like it was semi-NSFW. Of course, at the time of its naming, the main player character Lenny wasn’t flying around in a ship, but was flying on his own, with a giant tongue licking up the energy bullets. It wasn’t until later that I finally convinced the rest of the team that that concept was a little too out there. But the name stuck because of the polarized reactions. Our biggest piece of mainstream press coverage seemed like it came entirely from the audacity of the name, and the (NSFW) comments bear that out. At that point, it seemed like it could be one of our “angles” so the name was pretty much set in stone.

Malaise Marketing

Hayden: Marketing an indie game is a ton of work and there is no clear formula to follow to find success. We knew how important marketing was, but we didn’t really know what to do about it. I feel like our marketing effort was halfhearted, and this was a direct result of the fact that we all knew, deep down, that we rushed the game out and it wasn’t good enough. The big advantage indies have when it comes to marketing is their unbridled passion, and by the time we finally released the game, we just didn’t have enough passion left in us to properly promote the game.

Rudd: The biggest marketing push for the game wasn’t even made by us. In fact at the time of this biggest push, I was packing up my apartment to move the next day, unaware that it was happening until it had already begun. Our friend Brian made a post on Reddit’s /r/gaming that made it to the top for a short period of time, even making it to the standard front page of Reddit. By Imgur’s estimation, Brian’s infographic was viewed over 413,000 times. That’s some serious exposure, for sure. By far that was our biggest spike in attention, accounting for almost 10K downloads, about 90% of all of our downloads ever. And we didn’t even have anything to do with it. Ouch.

No One Got Paid

Hayden: StarLicker was entirely self-funded by the development team. This meant basically no one got paid and the plan was that we would each get a slice of the profits after the game was released and the dough started rolling in. For the entire duration of the project, when it came to paying rent and bills and buying food, we each had to fend for ourselves. Rudd and I were full time on the project, so for us that meant living entirely off our savings. For William, it meant periodically taking time off from freelance gigs to focus on StarLicker art in focused bursts. Kurt was wise enough to force me to pay him a little something upfront, but it was a pitifully small amount and definitely less than what his contribution was worth. Zane, having just graduated from college, was an unpaid intern working for IOU.

But then we released the game and money did not start rolling in. It barely even trickled in. And this created a very strange and unexpected set of feelings beyond the obvious disappointment and frustration. I felt really strongly that I just completely let everyone on the team down. It was like I assembled a team of some of my most talented friends whom I had the utmost respect for, only to have them waste a huge chunk of their creative lives. This feeling still hasn’t worn off, and I don’t know if it ever will. This is a huge force fueling my desire to revisit the core concept of this game and the universe we created for it, so that maybe one day I can rest assured that it was all worth it.

In Conclusion

Since long before I (Hayden) started Heartonomy, I’ve felt that making games was my purpose in life, that I had something important to contribute to the world through gaming. StarLicker was not the first time I’ve tried and failed to create a successful game, and it probably won’t be the last. But with each subsequent failure, it hurts a little less, and I learn a lot more. Eventually, hopefully, I’ll have learned enough to make and release a game well enough to succeed.

We set ourselves up to make a lot of the mistakes described above because we shut ourselves off from the world during development. The game dev community, especially indies, can help each other so much. I read once that we are not competing against one another, but we are all competing with obscurity. I believe this is true. So if you read this article and have any sort of reaction at all, we’d love to hear it. Whether it’s a question, something you can relate to, words of encouragement or even discouragement, please share it with us by email, twitter, etc. Thanks for reading.

We are calling it a soft launch. Traditionally speaking, this means that the product or service, in this case the game, is only made available to a limited audience as a sort of test run. Our soft launch is a little different. StarLicker is now available to anyone with an iOS device, worldwide. The limited audience in this case is everyone who knows about the game. Strictly speaking, a game isn’t really available to you until you know it exists.

Not many people know about StarLicker yet. So far players have mostly been our friends, family, beta testers and their friends, and a handful of people who have discovered the game on their own. We haven’t yet made any concerted effort to get noticed by gaming websites or anyone else influential in spreading the word about the game. The one exception to this are two nice pieces written by our friends over at Str N Gaming – check them out here and here. These pieces exist only because the writers were in the beta and they have been super supportive of us ever since they first learned about the game.

At this point, you may be thinking we are crazy. How could we just sit back and let the game fail? We may be crazy, but we are doing this deliberately. The thing about StarLicker is that we designed and built it for the long haul. It is an asynchronous multiplayer, free to play, bullet-hell strategy game. You’ve never heard of such a game before? Exactly. People have never seen anything quite like StarLicker. It draws on several disparate influences and blends them together into something new. On top of that, StarLicker is not a game to be consumed like a piece of media, nor is it an addictive time-waster for the subway. It is designed with a high skill ceiling to be a rewarding hobby, played competitively by a community of long-term, dedicated players. We have been around gaming long enough to know that a game like this will require more to take off than a big expensive marketing push and a bunch of internet headlines.

For StarLicker to realize its potential it’s going to need lots of passionate players and a connection between the player community and the developers. This will facilitate an open dialog about what is working, what should be changed and what the metagame looks like at the highest skill levels. This sort of community can not just be created quickly out of thin air. It is something that must grow, organically, at its own pace. As the creators of StarLicker, all we can do is plant the seeds and water them. We know this game is unique, innovative, rewarding and downright fun to play. Over time, as we continue to play the game, refine the balance, add new features, support more platforms and reach new players, both over the internet and in person, it will grow. And as it grows, more and more people will be connected to us and one another through the game. Then one day, StarLicker will be the epic, perennial game it is meant to be.

Are you excited?

It surprised me because for most of my life I have identified myself as a gamer and it never occurred to me that this was the slightest bit strange, let alone perverse.  I love to play games, so naturally I am a gamer, right? Nevertheless, these statements made me think deeply about why is it that we don’t call people who read a lot “readers” or people who listen to music “music-listeners”.

It then occurred to me that this is the wrong question to ask. It’s clear from every example I can think of that it is silly and somewhat perverse to label someone by what they consume. Consumption is not a meaningful or identifying quality of a person. We are all consumers of different things to varying degrees. The question I then asked myself is what does it actually mean to be a gamer?

The answer is simple. Like the game developer, the writer, the musician and the filmmaker, the gamer himself is a type of creator. Gamers develop skills and techniques, and they create strategies and tactics. They invent stories to give meaning to the decisions they make as they play. Together, gamers form communities to share these discoveries and inventions, and out of these communities, gamers create unique culture around the games they love.  Games are interactive, and therefore they can not be treated simply as media to be consumed.

To resign games to just another form of consumable media is far more perverse than any label we could place on people. As the creators of the games, we need to embrace this truly unique and special quality of our media.  We should champion the gamers who spend their time exploring the worlds and stories and mechanics and systems we create that empower them to be creators themselves.

In his fantastic talk at GDC about the relationship between game theory and game design, Frank Lantz asked us to consider that “rational thought is not incompatible with the sublime”, and that just maybe it’s possible that the game of poker saved the world during the Cold War. It should be clear to us developers that we have something very unique and powerful in this medium of games and its participants we call gamers.  Let’s move forward by making this abundantly clear to everyone else who has not yet realized it.

However, I thought that the original version of the essay turned out to be a very heartfelt reflection on myself and my career, so rather than let it go to waste, I figured I’d share it here, in its entirety, unedited. And if you happen to be a fellow game developer reading this, whether we’ve met before or not, I miss you and I can’t wait to see you in March.

***

Never before in my life have I been so excited for any single game-related event as I am now for the Game Developers Conference in 2013. I’m sure this sounds trite, but coming from me, it truly means something. In order for you to understand why, I have to tell the story of my turbulent history as a game developer.

My earliest memories of learning about game industry events date back to my teenage years. Back then, when I was still much more simply a gamer than a game developer, GDC was overshadowed by the E3 convention. During our senior year of high school, my best friend and I were so enthralled with the game industry and E3 that we flew to Los Angeles and went to the expo. We got in with press badges by posing as assistants to his mother who had legitimate press credentials. Imagine the excitement of a videogame-obsessed 18 year old flying to California to actually go to E3. Yet that excitement pales in comparison to my feelings toward the upcoming GDC.

Today, memories of my past experiences at GDC conjure a strange mix of emotions. Each time it was accompanied by a different mindset. The first GDC I attended was during college. This was an incredibly optimistic time in my life since at that point, my lifelong dream of becoming a game creator was on track to becoming a reality. I had recently been accepted as a summer intern at a major game publisher, so I knew that in the following summer I would be living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area. Attending that GDC was a little preview of what living there was going to be like.

The following year, I accepted a full time position as an engineer at the same studio that I had interned at. To make a long story short, my naive idealism for what working in the AAA game industry would be like faded rather quickly and was replaced by a cynical disenchantment. This disenchantment was accompanied with the rise of an ego-driven sense of entitlement with regard to my position in the industry. At that point, I decided going it alone was the only way for me, and this was fueled in large part by my perception of the indie culture and community I had observed at GDC each year that I lived there.

It’s important to note that I decided to go it alone, because my perception at that time of what it meant to go indie had been significantly warped by my ego. What followed was an attempt to work on my own game designs and it ended in complete failure. After a year, I had released nothing and had little more than a few very incomplete prototypes to show for it. My cynicism toward game development was at an all time high. This ended with the decision that I no longer wanted to be a professional game developer, that I would be happier just making games as a hobby. Thus, I moved back to my native New York and got a job as a data system engineer in the education industry.

I did, however, stay true to the hobby and eventually released an esoteric puzzle game for iOS that I developed with a musician friend of mine who had an appetite for game design. After that, I continued working on some iOS game designs of my own at a very leisurely, relaxed pace.

Something amazing happened to me during those years being away from professional game development. With the complete lack of pressure in a hobby, I was able to gain a whole new perspective on the experience of game making. My cynicism faded away, as well as my sense of entitlement. In other words, I grew up. And having grown up, I found that I had never lost the passion for game development. Instead, I had just let negative attitudes toward specific aspects of the profession and industry sour the whole experience for me. I recalled the community and culture epitomized by GDC and realized there are many tremendously positive and uplifting aspects of the industry to balance out the negative stuff that had brought me so far down. And with this renewed spirit, I left my data systems job and set out on the greatest adventure of my life. I started an indie game development company with a few friends, and we are now hard at work on our first game.

I stand today reflecting on this history as the anticipation for GDC in March builds. The reason I will make a great volunteer is my supreme excitement and strong desire to thoroughly reconnect with the vast community of game developers that GDC fosters so well. If I am not selected as a volunteer, I will probably still attend the conference, but it will put a serious strain on my already strained indie developer budget. But I don’t think any GDC experience will be as fulfilling as having the opportunity to give something back to the game development community after all these years of being apart from it.

Overall, I was really blown away by the quality and depth of discussion. It was a much smaller group than something like GDC, and I felt the passion for game design as a craft and life-long pursuit really permeated the atmosphere. I arrived toward the end of the panel on Saturday morning, and caught some words of wisdom from Richard Lemarchand which set the tone for my brief time there. He said something to the effect that a game designer should not hold on to a single philosophy of game design, but rather he should see games through the lenses of as many different design philosophies as possible. This was underscored by the juxtaposition of Dan Cook’s presentation on the creation of games as “value engines” (which I will get into more depth below) and Tracy Fullerton’s presentation of her game based on Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. I don’t know if it was intentional by the conference organizers, or by chance, but I can’t imagine two back-to-back talks with a more different approach to game design. Yet both were very thoughtful and fascinating in their own right.

I have been a long time fan of Dan Cook ever since I found his amazing Lost Garden game design blog. I have gotten a great deal of inspiration from what he has written about game design over the years. Dan’s talk did not disappoint in the slightest. You can read a good summary of the talk here so I won’t bother to summarize the talk. Instead, I want to highlight and discuss a couple of his points.

Dan talked about players’ skill improvement in a game as a source of value. He claimed that the value of these game skills were not transferable to other areas of life. I agree with this in a literal sense. Skill in Triple Town will not make the player into a skilled city planner. However there is a great deal of hidden value in skill gaming. The real value in skill gaming is in the practice of training for improvement. Improvement at any task requires a certain mindset of learning from failure, and practice makes perfect. Improving at skill games trains these precise mentalities. I believe this value is transferable to other areas of life. This is the driving force behind my interest in creating StarLicker as a competitive, skill game. We plan to really explore ways of enhancing the value of training for improvement in the design, and hope discuss more details about this in the near future.

Dan also emphasized the fact that using media arcs in game design results in an endless need to create additional content which is consumed and discarded. I wholeheartedly agree with this and it was so refreshing to hear him verbalize it. I believe the true utility that media arcs bring to game design is to merely lower the barrier of entry into a game world for a new player. Game systems and rule sets are often abstract and complex, and I think it’s unreasonable to expect players to see the beauty in a game design right off the bat. Media arcs can be used to great effect to introduce and immerse players in a game world and the systems and mechanics they contain. Once the player is immersed, good game designs will wean the player off of the media arc as a source of value and replace it with what Dan calls a “value engine”, leading to a rich community and culture surrounding the game.

A perfect example of this from my own experience is the evolution of my love for StarCraft. I was 14 when the original StarCraft was released, and at that age, competitive multiplayer was quite overwhelming and intimidating for me, even against real life friends. Today, StarCraft (and its expansion Brood War) is famous for its incredible multiplayer which largely spawned what is now the professional eSports scene in Korea and which has now spread across the globe with StarCraft II. Despite being an avid fan and follower of this scene today, this is not what I fondly remember the original game for. What I remember most is the moment (a pre-rendered cinematic, no less!) when Tassadar sacrificed himself by channeling his power through his ship and crashing it into the Zerg Overmind to save Aiur, the Protoss homeworld. If it hadn’t been for compelling moments like these in storyline in StarCraft’s single player campaign, I honestly can’t say for sure that I would have the same attachment and interest in the game today.

I became hooked on Defense of the Ancients (DotA) almost immediately and before long it was the only game I was playing. I was playing and thinking about it so much that I began having vivid dreams at night of the gameplay. It was around this time that I had something of an epiphany about my taste in gaming – that the competitive and social aspects of a multiplayer game were equally, if not more, immersive and engaging than the narrative-driven single player experiences I had previously championed as the pinnacle of game design.

At the end of part 1 of this story, I said that I was struggling with how creating immersive, emotional game experiences fit with designing balanced, competitive multiplayer games. It was thanks to this DotA-fueled epiphany that I realized the answer. Both types of games are immersive, emotional game experiences. Both types of games use systems and mechanics of play in a virtual environment to create these emotions. The player can feel emotions from deliberately designed events that are built into the game by the designers, and just as easily the player can feel emotions from events that occur within the gameplay of a multiplayer match. Just as Ico made me feel protective of Yorda, DotA made me feel protective of my lane partner in the early game when they were the carry. It turned out I was completely wrong in my belief that all the artistry of game design was found in crafting single player experiences.

Having removed this thorn from of my side, I felt like a born again gamer. I played a lot more DotA, and then a lot of League of Legends, and then Starcraft II finally came out and it quickly became my favorite game of all time. These multiplayer games immersed me in a depth of strategy and competition, and the accompanying array of emotions, that I had previously only gotten a taste of in my prior gaming experiences (primarily first person shooters and fighting games). Through SC2, I became a follower of what is known as “eSports” which turns what is for most people a recreational, leisure activity into a highly skilled, highly competitive activity requiring 100% dedication from the top players. To this day, I am fascinated by both the play of professional SC2 and the new media content that surrounds it.

I felt compelled to write this because ultimately it is a story about many of my influences and inspirations as a game designer. The events described were some of the most formative moments for me as a gamer and all of these experiences helped me discover precisely the elements of gaming I want Heartonomy to create.

My earliest gaming memory was playing Duck Hunt on my uncle’s NES in the late 80s when I was 4 years old. Shortly after I got my own NES Action Set and quickly discovered the other game that came bundled on the dual cartridge. As a result, my love of gaming began with 2D platformers, and this dominated my gaming tastes for the next several years. As a young child, I was drawn to the thrill of controlling the stylish cartoon characters across their vivid fantasy worlds.

As I grew up in the mid 90s, there were two major forces that would significantly broaden my perspective on gaming. The first was the introduction of RTS games on the PC to my gaming repertoire, beginning with Warcraft II and then solidifying a few years later with Starcraft. These games offered a new type of gameplay from what I was used to with platformers on the consoles. Not only could I build and control armies of stylish characters, but victory required more than just mastery of the controls. In these games, you really had to think and make decisions about the best way to play. To top it off, these games were also my first taste of competing with friends in online multiplayer.

The second major force was the arrival of 3D to console gaming. Playing Mario 64 was my first real exposure to the immersive 3D worlds that have come to be known as the “triple A games” which dominate much of the PC and console gaming we have today. For the next decade and more, I became increasingly intrigued by the emotions these types of games could conjure by combining game mechanics with their worlds, stories and characters. I was so focused on this one aspect of gaming that during college I wrote a paper about Ico which you can read here. Though I’m embarassed by how bad at writing I was back then.

The main result of these two forces as I continued to grow older was a vast proliferation of the types of games I played. It was around the turn of the millenium that I realized designing games was something I myself could do, and ever since I have considered it my craft. I began to “research” games instead of just play them, and I tried to expose myself to as many games as I could. As I mentioned above, my interest as a designer began firmly rooted in the emotional experience of playing an immersive, single player game. At the time, this just seemed to me where all the artistry of game design was found. However, I never stopped playing multiplayer games with my friends, both online and offline. In hindsight, I enjoyed those experiences just as much if not more than any single player game.

For many years, even after I began working professionally in the game industry, I struggled with reconciling how creating immersive, emotional game experiences fit with designing balanced, competitive multiplayer games. It wasn’t until 2008 when I began playing DotA did I start to understand how these two concepts fit together. This new understanding ushered in my most recent and significant gaming evolution, and this is where the story will continue in part 2.

First, it’s important to recognize that at its core, the freemium concept is not new. It has been around for decades in the form of shareware and free game demos. Allowing players to try before they buy is obviously good for them, and it’s good for business for the same basic reason as freemium – it lowers the barrier to entry. What makes freemium new is the way the game is proposed to a potential player. Instead of offering the player a free trial of a game which can be upgraded later to the full version for a one-time price, a freemium game is offered as a full game which can be enhanced, or even personalized, many times over for many (small) prices. This small difference enables game makers to sell games in a new way, and it can sometimes lead to problems. However, these problems are not very interesting and can generally be avoided by simply respecting and listening to players.

The great thing about this new way to sell games is that it perfectly facilitates the role of the player in the game design process. You should pause reading here for a moment and go watch this excellent episode of Extra Credits which perfectly explains what I mean by the role of the player (and while you’re there, bookmark the page since most episodes of the show are awesome). In this episode, they contrast games with other forms of media by stating, “A game without a player is nothing.” The best moments in gaming are defined by the experiences players have while playing (or watching) and are never contained entirely within the game code. To create these moments, avid players spend many hours, weeks, sometimes even years of their lives devoted to their favorite games, and often powerful communities rise up around them. Sometimes, a player will even become more familiar with a game than the game’s creators. A medium which depends so heavily on the audience to achieve greatness ought not to charge for admission. Rather, fans of great games grow attached to them, and will gladly pay for enhancements to the experience, even ones wich offer no functional value in the game. In this light, the freemium model appears to be the perfect way to sell games, as long as developers are willing to strike a healthy balance between a profitable business and a respect for the players.

Next, I incrementally remove the bits of randomness from the mechanic and replace them with specific behaviors according to the design of the game. The process of modifying code incrementally is the standard process for all iterative software development, and it works exceptionally well for game programming. In the bullet firing example, one iteration might be to change the random firing direction to always fire toward the position of the player’s cursor. Another iteration might be to replace the random bullet colors with three specific colors which represent three different weapon types. Iteration continues until the code matches up with all of the game play ideas, and then usually continues further as changes and refinements are made to the game mechanics. This process lasts until I am satisfied that the game produces the desired player experience.

I am hypothesizing that this trend is not specific to my own process of developing games, but it is indicative of something more general I call “game design entropy”. Entropy is a concept from a few different branches of science, and generally refers to the measure of disorder in a system. When the mechanics and interactions of a game are first created in computer code, the pervasive random variables result in systems containing a lot of entropy. As development continues, some or all of the entropy is deliberately removed by the creators in order to craft the best possible game experience out of those systems. In this way, the process of constructing a game can be viewed as removing entropy from a system. If it was possible for humans to remove entropy from physical systems, we would truly be masters of the universe.

Back in early 2009, I was living in North Hollywood and spending the majority of my time playing DotA and working on a few game prototypes. One of these projects was a very simple game I made for the Wolverine Soft 48-Hour Alumni Development Contest. Each year, the game development club at the University of Michigan holds a weekend long contest to see who can develop the best game in this short timeframe. This sort of event is more commonly known as a game jam. I really enjoyed these events when I was a student, so I jumped at the chance to do it again when the contest was opened to WSoft alumni.

The theme of the contest was “switch”, which made me think of Ikaruga. In this bullet-hell shmup game, players can switch polarity to absorb enemy bullets of matching polarity. I decided for my “switch” game I wanted to focus entirely on an absorb mechanic rather than shooting, and just to make it more interesting, instead of switching polarity of a single ship, players could switch between controlling 4 differently colored ships. The title Season Switch was largely arbitrary, coming from the fact that the 4 “ships” represented the spirits of each of the 4 seasons. I developed it using XNA, so if you have access to a Windows PC, feel free to download the game here and give it a try (I apologize in advance for the Microsoftness). You can read about how to play here.

Here are a couple screenshots which give you a good idea of what the game is like.

To be blunt, Season Switch is a bad game. The difficulty curve is ridiculous and players usually lose all of their lives almost instantly once multiple streams of bullets are on screen. But I really like the absorb mechanic as the central focus of a bullet hell game, and thus, Heartonomy’s first game will pick up on this concept where Season Switch left off.

Last week I faced a dilemma over which game engine to use to build Heartonomy’s first iOS game. I have prior experience building iOS games with cocos2d, but I have been hearing great things about the Unity engine so I wanted to see if it was worth the price tag. After downloading the free trial version of Unity and following a basic tutorial, I was quickly impressed at how intuitive and powerful the tool seemed to be. However, I was having some difficulty with stuff that should be easy for a 3D engine to handle. For example, there seemed to be no obvious way of rendering a sprite as a simple textured quad.

Feeling a little frustrated, I decided to see if anyone else had encountered this problem before me. With a little Googling, I came across a fantastic article written by fellow iOS game developer Flyclops, about the exact problem I was facing as well as a lot of other great information about making a 2D game with Unity. While I was there, I found another great article comparing the physics engines in cocos2d and Unity. After playing around with Unity a little more, I decided to stick with cocos2d for now mainly because it is free and open source and it has everything I need to make a 2D game. Although, Unity remains a very attractive option for future Heartonomy games. This decision was much easier with the help of Flyclops’ articles.

The Internet is built on the idea of freely sharing ideas and information. This has blossomed into a culture of creators who are comfortable investing their own time and effort and then giving the results away for free to anyone else who might be interested. The people who do this understand that money in your pocket is not the only thing of value in this world. The esteem and gratitude of others can be just as valuable, and sometimes more. This is the force that has allowed the Internet to become the incredible, unprecedented entity it is today. And this is the force that will continue to push art and media forward as we accelerate toward the future.

I have been a gamer since I was a toddler and a hobbyist game designer since I was a teenager. I have worked professionally as a computer programmer both inside and outside of the game industry. Recently I’ve shed enough self-doubt to decide that it’s time to turn my hobby into a career. This post and the launch of this website is the official announcement to the world of what is truly my dream.

In this introductory post, I want to share a little about what I hope to accomplish with Heartonomy as a game company. You can expect future posts will dive deeper into some of the topics I touch on here. So what type of games is Heartonomy going to create? Before I can answer that, you’ll need to know a bit about what I mean by “game company”.

I consider games to be an extremely broad category, and I use the word “game” loosely. When I say “game” I am referring to any activity that involves the interaction of a person and the world around them. Games can be played with the body and they can be played with the mind. Games can be played outdoors and they can be played on computers. Games can involve large sums of real money or they can be a way to spend some free time. Games can be played alone and they can be played with others. Basically, if one or more individuals are making decisions and/or taking actions, a game is being played.

There have been many attempts by authors, academics, journalists, designers and gamers to formalize a definition of “game”. These are valuable efforts, but there’s no need to get too formal here. If you are interested in the topic, I highly recommend Jesse Schell’s book.

With such an expansive concept of what a game is, it begs the question, what is not a game? The answer is almost nothing. Nearly all of human experience can be viewed as a series of games of greatly varying depth and complexity. Life itself encompasses all of these experiences so living is the ultimate game. From this perspective, it’s not always clear where one game ends and another begins. I will elaborate on this in a future post on one of my favorite topics – the concepts of micro (mini), macro and meta games and how they relate to each other.

At the core of all games are one or more people (players) who are participating in an activity (playing). Each of these players have their own goals and objectives. Common goals often result in cooperation between players. We can see this when a presidential candidate works with his campaign advisors toward the common goal of getting elected just as clearly as when friends playing Halo 3 Team Slayer cooperate to get 50 kills before the other team. Similarly, opposing goals create conflict. Presidential candidates must challenge and debate their opponents in order to gain support of voters just as the members of the opposing teams in the Halo 3 match are trying to kill each other while avoiding being killed.

The major difference between these two examples is what is at stake. In the presidential election, the stakes are high. The winner becomes the president and the loser becomes just another politician. In Halo 3, the stakes are low. The winning team members see a boost in their rank and get to feel good about the win while the losing team members feel bad as they see their rank drop. But despite the huge variance in the stakes of different games, the actual moment to moment experiences of playing any game contains within it some universal truths about what it is to experience life.

So now that you understand what I mean by “game”, you might be scratching your head, trying to figure out how Heartonomy is a company about experiencing life. Well, it is and it isn’t. Heartonomy is a video game company (in “video games” I include all computer platforms – PC, web, console, handheld, tablet, phone, arcade, etc). It’s obviously impossible for a single company to focus on the entirety of life experience. There are two main reasons we will focus on video games. First, they are primarily used for recreation, which means the stakes are low and they are ripe for experimentation. Second, video games and web applications are probably the most rapidly developing and evolving form of games right now, which allows us to start small.

Video game development offers an incredible opportunity to explore and experiment with the very fabric of living. Computers have enabled developers to incorporate all forms of media into the games we play, and the internet has enabled us to play and interact with anyone in the world. The many diverse and viable platforms we have today means games of any complexity on any subject matter can find an audience. This is the best time in history to be a gamer and a game creator and I am excited!