brianhandy

[brianhandy]

Web Mobile and Steam

This begins a new, and hopefully final chapter, in the launch of Wild Honesty. A prototype has been made that is video chat friendly, similar to the Jackbox format of a television or monitor for the main game, and mobile web browser support for all players’ secret information and controllers. The prototype appears to not only work, but touch on a new feeling of hanging out and talking while not focusing on anything in particular (especially each others’ faces) that has been rare since the pandemic began. And it leaves a lot of hope for both online games and Wild Honesty’s upcoming release. Though our platform appears to be about to radically change.

You know what’s great? Heroku’s near instant setup time is great. Under 2hr!

Web Mobile Stack

Our prototype runs on a Node.js server with SocketIO, which only had one Unity asset store library that actually worked with it. That then also sends an HTML page for mobile web browsers to control gameplay, and all of this  runs on Heroku currently. Though it’s been a month since our last blogpost, the entire thing took less than two weeks to setup. I had experience with LAN networking before, but never server code like this and especially not cross support between Unity and mobile browsers. It’s impressive how quick it was to set up.

Evan Jackover gives an amazing history of Jackbox here.

UX / UI Redesign

If we are to launch not on mobile but in a quarantine friendly format, our platform will have to change drastically. The prototype proves experience goals still mostly work on video chat, but it means a drastic overhaul to what actions are needed by users and when. We have reached out to the old UI / UX redesign studio to make one more pass.

Who knew their ToS were so user friendly? They defend fan art even.

Steam Release

This also means app stores are no longer the best place to launch. A video chat first platform needs a desktop screen share friendly release, and Steam has the widest audience for that. Jackbox numbers are through the roof in quarantine, and we expect by the time Wild Honesty releases, there is a chance we will still be somewhere between Phase 1 and 3 of California’s lockdowns (and generally that most of the world will have similar varying states of restrictions).

This blogpost is surprisingly full of professional logos. All done in sweatpants.

Marketing

Meanwhile, marketing is finally in a full push. The person I have hired is doing a great job here, and we are starting by deep diving on identity of the product, audience, and market. A pivot to Steam doesn’t leave all the normal time to hype a launch for a strong release, but this still gives a great deal of opportunity.

Conclusion

Today I spent an unexpected chunk of time reading about Elon Musk’s background given that next Wednesday will be the first attempt at commercial human space flight in human history - all thanks to the last ten to fifteen years of SpaceX’s efforts. Zuckerberg, Gates, and others have all had similar success in their lives by identifying needs or demands with practical cutting edge solutions, and because it was the right place and the right time, they jumped on their opportunities in full force with a little business sense to match.

This humble niche emotional vulnerability game is not PayPal, not Microsoft, and not Facebook - but there is something incredible about the need arising for deeper technologically facilitated connections, and having the window of opportunity to jump on it. I’m not sure what will happen with the launch of this game, but for the first time in a while I’m very excited to find out. And I hope it does some real good.

5/22/20

[brianhandy]

Party Games & Social Distancing

Hey folks! Some bad news: it looks like it is currently illegal to play my game. Due to possibly the worst tragedy of the United States in our lifetimes, for the next month, friends cannot meet face to face. We’re all sheltering in place until May 15th in Los Angeles at least, and it’s Day 36 of working from home already for me. So, I’m sorry I missed my last bi-weekly blogpost! Priority has been surviving a pandemic. What does that mean for the game, though? Huge pivots to launch - no more April/May launch window. But a month in we now have a much more real business plan, a remonetization plan, marketing personas, likely a final marketing person, and are looking into new finances for the bigger development time created by a delayed launch. So, while different, the revised launch might still work out.

Who doesn’t love free samples? Anti-marketing folks that’s who.

Marketing Knowledge Revised

Just a refinement on last post - provide value to your audience. “Market” by giving out free samplers of how good your content is - ie. how much value it provides. That’s it! That’s all there is to it! Everybody loves visiting Trader Joe’s just for the quality samples they have in every store. Nintendo Directs are fun to watch. Apple talks are cool. Do you know how good the demo was for the first BioShock?

That’s it! That’s all there is to it! You just have to understand who your audience is, what they like, and provide samples of that while showing that there’s so much more of this behind that purchase.

Lots of excel time in hopes of lots of these graphs later.

Estimating Sales

A big part of the pivot was refining the business model, and that was based largely on more accurate assessments of potential sales (like, what you could actually make back financially when you release). 

To estimate sales: find a game like yours, a lot of games if you can. Figure out what degree of quality your game will likely be in general (eg. fast/cheap vs slow/fancy) - and who is a competitor at that level. How much did they make? Now do your burn down chart, calculate hours, calculate costs of contractors and materials, revise based on your last estimated-to-actual ratio, and bam! What would it cost to make the game you’re planning? Would the reasonably estimated sales match that number? How comfortably? Publishers like a 3 to 1 profit ratio, but that can be lower if they trust you more.

And then it’s a gamble, basically every time if anything changes in the development plan. The bigger the changes, the more of a gamble. So, I’ve not deal with numbers at this size and this kind of risk taking before - it’s scary! But it’s worth it, and our numbers line up right now to justify a full marketing plan with revised monetization to match our marketing personas.

GenZ is said to want authentic, instant, and valuable experiences - esp in video.

Marketing Personas

GenZ needs authenticity, and craves connection. Friends here say they’ve already done their own mental health work - they just want an easier way to know if they can share that vulnerability safely with others. That’s it! That’s all you need for a persona is to quantify a demographic, and what their needs are. These are friends of mine, so I want to keep in mind both sides of that - but the demographic concept, as impersonal as it is, can help get this to more people even if I don’t know them. And it might be able to help them too.

So GenZ is our primary persona now - esp folks who love indie games. But others include Millenial gamer bros who crave vulnerability but don’t have the words for it, and church folks (mostly GenZ) who already know how to be vulnerable but love it and will embrace a good excuse for it - as long as they aren’t paying for a mobile game. And with that comes the need for a more free-friendly monetization redesign.

Above: a photo of me all this month, basically. Metaphorically. Conceptually.

WiFi Support

This will be the hardest call of the pandemic. WiFi is possible but laborious - it’s extensive in the structure and support needed to run the game remotely over video chat platforms. But it is possible, and could greatly expand sales if done right. So why not do it? Right now it’s not in the budget - but Jackbox sessions are up, Bunch is being used more, and HouseParty is basically getting into lawsuits from how popular it is now. Online gaming is the lifeblood of pandemic socializing, so this might be worth investing in after all. But it’s complex since that’s like adding a new foundation to the project.

With banks it’s been like this - except with social distancing.

Loans to Expand Development

Everybody needs loans right now and the economy is really rough - which is both bad for sales and good for low interest loans, but bad for the clogged phone lines to get them. Since April and May were the original launch window, this makes everything complicated for talking about whether there was economic disruption of Wild Honesty. The game had not launched, so it’s technically not provable that sales were lost, but it’s basically impossible to launch right now either way - and that was the original plan. 

So, I am figuring it out. The original launch window is now delayed, but it might lead to a stronger launch long term too. Meaning, it’s complicated. I hope we can still reach a wide audience at whatever budget and timeline this ends up in at the end of the day. For now - we will just use this time to launch even higher quality to a wider audience, and hope for the best.

I did learn though that these loans can cover a payment to oneself to sustain development as long as that is eventually repaid, whether through profits or my responsibility to repay it myself. All of that sounds fine. It’s a bigger gamble, but even more of an opportunity to learn and grow too. And that’s deeply valuable in itself too.

Passing the phone back and forth in lockdown is not recommended!

In Short

This pandemic is likely the worst thing to happen in the United States since WWII. Irresponsibility from federal government figures was reckless and has led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent Americans already. That can never be undone - so my hardships are nothing compared to that. I am lucky to have a roof over my head and work, credit, and savings that let me stay at home. Isolation may be draining and demoralizing (I’ve been working at about 60% capacity most of this month) but it teaches a lot about oneself and good habits. I have a lot less social media in my life from all this too.

But, after great grief, life for most of us will go on, and I want this game to come out and help people someday too. This year will be somber, start to finish. Even out of quarantine, fear will still be in the air and large public gatherings won’t be back for many months. But most of us will survive and get through this together. But it will be hard.

For now: Thank you for reading these posts. I look forward to sharing more good news soon on releasing an emotionally difficult game in a year that itself is already quite hard. And I hope we get to all play it together in person later this year.

-Brian

4/14/2020

[brianhandy]

Time to Search for Marketing

My plan was for things to let up this month to leave a little more time for job hunting, and do marketing research half the time. Instead I’ve found that even finding a marketing person is a full time job, cold emailing and searches are always tough, and onboarding new folks will always be tricky (so consider instead investing in more long term contracts since onboarding is a real time cost). These two weeks’ news: marketing knowledge, searching for the right person once more, and onboarding! 

Nintendo Power praises by Chris Zukowski.

Marketing Knowledge

I watched a GDC talk most mornings the last two weeks, including:

Erik Johnson's “Making Indie Games That Sell”

Chris Dwyer's "(Opportunity) Cost Effective Marketing & PR for Indies"

David Wehle’s “No Time, No Budget, No Problem: Finishing The First Tree”

Casey Yano's "Slay the Spire: Success through Marketability"

“Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage"

Nick Popovich's "Making Games That Stand Out and Survive"

Mike Rose’s “Making the World Give a Damn About Your Game in 2018″

Chris Zukowski’s “Build Your Own Fan Club: How to Use Your Email List”

Mike Rose’s and Chris Zukowski’s I’ve linked since I found them especially formative to how I will approach marketing now. All the talks are good for different reasons, all reinforce the same ideas of developing a relationship with your audience and all suggest, like a good friend, investing in that relationship by routinely sending them cool stuff you think they’d enjoy. Nintendo Power is cited in Chris’s talk as the best example of this yet. But having an audience that loves consuming your work, whether it’s love letters as an email newsletter for Date Everything, or a Discord server that gets secret news and updates early, investing in the community and connection that is your audience will help grow and maintain that so that when your game does launch, the strongest fans can immediately invest and help push it up the charts. It’s a great core idea, and it depends on respecting and mutually investing in your audience in a really healthy way.

Also: did some preliminary video tests with friends so we can start making more marketable content soon. Hopefully more on that soon!

Do you like filling out webforms? Yes? Great, cold emailing is perfect for you!

Searching for Marketing Folks

Cold emailing folks is still hard! I think this will be rough forever. Making a template helps so you don’t rewrite the same core every time. Tweaking it to respect someone’s individuality and showing what you care about helps too. We all have to communicate with a lot of people, and I think as long as there is respect both ways in mind and in action, using your own templates for certain emails is fine. If you’re going to say the same three sentences every time, stop wasting time rewriting them. They do their job - customize the message elsewhere.

The search has been just as rewarding as when looking for an artist though. It broke down into a few steps like last time:

Searching for portfolios I trusted. This was on Google, leading to individuals’ sites for “indie games marketing” or “mobile game marketing” keywords, then cold emailing, getting rejected, and then asking for their recommendations for more folks which had a 1 in 5 chance of getting another 2-5 names. Repeat. (this process took about 3 rounds to find/email some 10-20 people, with rounds costing probably 4hrs of time each on separate days since email replies average 24-48hrs)

Sending back and forth emails with a smaller pool of the top 5-8 individuals. Different backgrounds gave some leads for trailers and PR folks that were not marketing directly as well. This email back and forth averaged about 5 emails, taking 2-3hrs each day for about 3 days. 

Phonecalls and Skype chats with just over half of those individuals, a half hour each with buffer times for setup and notes/emails after, have narrowed us down to probably the final two candidates once again. That meant another 3-5hrs combined to talk with everyone and read some longer emails that needed 30min+ each to read and reply to.

One last round of phonecalls, another 2hrs, and we should have the final marketing candidate. That means in total, finding a candidate for this position probably took between 23 and 28 hours, or a little over half workweek but divided over two weeks. That’s not a small amount of time! I would expect any major new hire, from a zero reference starting point, to just cost a week of work over 2-3 weeks in the future. Due to the back and forth there’s not a great way to accelerate this either. It’s part of the process I didn’t really know how to make time for, but both hiring for design and hiring for marketing have worked this way so I want to make that a clear expectation in the future.

SBA’s website is fancier than I’m used to for government sites!

Business Plans & Executive Summaries

A friend introduced me to SBA - Small Business Administration, a government support agency for entrepreneurs and small businesses. It is surprisingly excellent and has given me some really good wakeup moments for facing the upcoming financial challenges and expectations. They want people who walk through their doors to be well equipped to make a sustainable business, or acquire funding to grow, and in return they want to see your business numbers so they have a sense of what markets are shrinking or growing. From the perspective of a small business, it’s a very useful tool - and they’re not only holding me accountable but teaching me where I need to focus my efforts to financially survive. I am excited to keep working with an advisor I have here now and turn an executive summary I wrote this week into more of a real business plan - useful both for managing expectations of returns, and for marketing to the best audience possible. 

Better “onboarding” (like a boat) involves “iterating” (like the photo)! Ahh? Ahh??

Onboarding

Don’t be fooled by the silly photo - this part was hard and important!

Searching for new contractors took more time than expected, but onboarding known contractors also took a larger than expected amount of time. My biggest regret on this is not taking a more iterative approach to onboarding. I passed on instructions for a new artist I worked with recently (a cool person at that!) and later learned I had not been clear in communicating my needs, the style, or the goals in the way I believed I had. My value is that it is on the communicator to deliver a message on average, and I wish I had done more checking early to ensure I had delivered the right message.

For a contracted game designer I am bringing on to do a pass on adding animal videos, I’ve asked that they show first drafts early and often at the start so we are on the same page before too much work risks being done down the wrong path. I value the concept of hiring good people, clearly communicating, and getting out of the way - but at times those last two points can be in conflict with one another. I hope to share more details soon on finding a better approach here too.

Ahh! What’s this? Secret developer options ingame? 👀 

Design & Tech

Just some fun final details! I added a debug mode to show all animals, questions, and silhouettes! This increases onboarding and test results times in a way I’ve always wanted to do, but couldn’t justify until it was slowing down the work of others. Now that’s in and has gotten me to also do a quick pass at optimizing the videos, so they’ve all been trimmed to 11sec and cropped to the size of the frame, saving us 400/600MB of video space. Awesome!

Rapid video bulk editing was done with ffmpeg for trimming and MPEG Streamclip for cropping and video quality level control. I’ve also added dynamic quality adjustors (whoops forgot that before) so low ram devices run lowres videos compared to high ram devices. Accidentally, I had set everything to low ram before. But that’s fixed!

Toggl report so far for 2020! March is work from home + halfway into the month.

Time Keeping

Toggl is my timekeeping app, and it’s been very useful lately as I bulk categorized all work that had been done on both this and my last project. When working for others, I seem to successfully track 7.5hrs/day of work (there’s a little wiggle room here as I don’t always start tracking exactly when I start - but it’s a solid approximation) and when I work for myself, I successfully track about 6hrs/day (and even though personal tracking is significantly less accurate, this is still is a concerning number). In short: I’m slacking! I really want those numbers to go up, even if I think a big part of it is also how many of those hours are focused vs unfocused work. But it’s good to see my work numbers aren’t ridiculously off the mark. It’s definitely possible for me to hit full workdays in self employment, I’m just not there yet.

Pomodoro Timer techniques on my smart watch have actually been incredibly effective lately for that focus. I’ll set a timer for 25min, then a break timer for 5min, and the wrist accessibility keeps me really focused and moving forwards to getting those hours in. With startup work especially, it’s hard to tell where breaks give the creativity needed to keep up with how the goals change, and where focus gives you the work needed to pump out a product on the current path. Lightfield capture technology was a big distraction this week among all the virus news (if we have to stay indoors, I want to develop a better and more 3d Skype!) and while that might be more profitable as a field longterm, short term it’s better to focus on just finishing the job you started. So what’s best? I think that’s something to continuously be reassessed by context, per project, and a healthy dose of gut feeling.

Was it most efficient to reuse UI for testing? Or just done to look pretty?

Conclusion

Time is short! How do we make the most of it? One of the marketing talks said 30% of your time as an indie dev should go towards marketing, starting before the project starts. And that makes sense. But how do we fill in all the other balancing pieces? Should optimizing get as much priority as finding a good marketing person? Should we spend more time onboarding someone we find, or finding someone who doesn’t need onboarding? And depending on what kinds of profits you can expect and how confidently, you can take all the time in the world. Marketing, business, and development time have this entanglement that I’m only just starting to feel directly - and beyond creating art to change the world, I am experiencing now everything about the marketing and business side of game development, and the stresses of it, directly.

Next time: I hope I decide on a business and marketing plan and a target demographic before I commit to a game’s development, rather than the end of it. It will make sustainable game development significantly easier. 

3/13/20

[brianhandy]

Branding and Accessibility

What a couple weeks! Final logo, icon, and branding package are in! Deaf and HOH support is added! Release Candidate builds are submitted to both iOS and Android! So... now what? The game can release at the click of a button. All that’s left is investing in a marketing plan to actually launch the thing to more than just a handful of people.

Final app icon!

Brand Guide

This part was cool. There’s a whole PDF now dedicated to how to correctly use the new logo, icon, colors, backgrounds, etc. It’s great for maintaining a consistent and professional image. I’ve seen these for other companies products before but never for my own, so it’s great being able to present professionally at this level. It was both an investment of time and funds, but the results are impressive and convey a very strong outwards appearance. I’m excited with these results.

Silhouette mode! Guess the animal by shape, animation, and onomatopoeia. 

HOH / Deaf Playtesting

This was by far the largest and hardest addition this week. Some last minute checks on logos with friends led to my unveiling that I had not done the accessibility options I wanted to for the game yet, and subsequently some healthy peer pressure from friends to go after an important factor I had thought was not in scope. These revisions are still ongoing (and even involve someone doing real art for them now) but has shown me that even a little work towards accessibility has ridiculous community response. We have had in 24hrs about as strong a playtesting volunteer signup for accessibility work as we had for any gameplay work up until now - and significant positive community responses too. I would highly recommend engaging and taking seriously any community towards accessibility after this. Though it does not reduce the hours of work needed to add functionality, the support is overwhelming.

A silhouette alternative that was quickly discarded.

HOH / Deaf Prototyping

Preceding the playtests were a few quick prototypes. The first, a charades mode, was quickly discarded with a major discovery - that an animal playing a funny sound takes no effort or performance on the player’s part, which in many ways is the antithesis of charades (our first mute gameplay prototype). This also highlighted the vulnerability of performing, especially following a hard question. To be vulnerable and then be asked to go onstage of sorts is the opposite of the positive “gift” that an animal sound effect gives. The silhouettes ended up being a better alternative, as they used visuals to give a similar “gift” (now a delightful animation) as opposed to the audio.

Final logo (white edition) and background! Can you tell I like our brand pack?

Submitting to iOS / Android

Between age ratings, promotional banner needs, updating business accounts, 64bit updates, aab filetype tests and reversions back to obbs, etc - submitting to the app stores always seems to take more time than expected. Fleshing out the credits screen was the biggest step, but now everything is fixed up, committed, and in. The game finally has its first potentially releasable software form, and is all uploaded and ready to go. The trickiest part here was just age ratings on Google having very different expectations than the type of app this is - but that’s experimental work as a whole, isn’t it?

Final colors, final logo, all ingame.

Final Deets

Marketing videos, updating my email singups, talking to composers for music and audio passes, and sending a lot of emails to even more marketing folks were the only other elements of the last two weeks. It’s been a big attempt to get to a launchable state, and to somehow pull in Deaf/HOH support too (only at the cost of a couple extra animals being included due to time). For better or worse, we’ve got a game on iOS and Android that if needed could be pushed out the door tomorrow. Now the next step is to decide exactly when to launch it, and how to best connect with that audience.

2/28/20

[brianhandy]

Marketing Needs, Logo Progress

Wow did you know Marketing was a whole thing? It’s a lot - and right now we’re somewhere between finding someone to do it and me just figuring it out myself - but I am starting to establish what the core requirements of marketing are if I need to DIY for everything. In the meantime! A life could be made of learning marketing - content still needs to get made and this game still needs to be finished to launch. So the game development continues, and the marketing side is still being learned.

Crypt of the Necrodancer’s success led me to Ryan’s excellent talk!

Hooks, Audience, and Promotion!

Ryan Clark’s talk about game marketing is excellent. I highly recommend this 48min investment for anyone starting down this path. He breaks it into three parts: what sticks with people most from your idea/plan/game conceptually or aesthetically or... what has pull? Then pt 2 is identifying that you even have a group to sell to, big enough to make that money back. And pt 3 is how to condense those hooks and get them through to the audience via whatever tools you’ve got. Descriptor text, trailers, banner ads - that first exposure has to hook, that second exposure has to convince, then it’s a business thing of how bad the customer wants it vs the friction of paying to get there. It’s fascinating stuff. Also: the Zach Gage video for the Three Reads is great on communicating what matters in your game too.

Spoiler: I do want all these ridiculous and cute animals in the game.

101 Animal Videos

More animals are now planned - on a spreadsheet even! The content isn’t in yet but the selections and their difficulties are all setup. Hoping to get that all in by launch but it’s a good next step for gameplay either way. It went from 29 to more than 70, where our goal was to get up to 100. At a certain point, well known animals with identifiable sounds is a list that starts to run out. It’s hard to balance which bird, insect, and elk sounds are too obscure with how much content we need. But I think there’s a happy medium in this new list so far. The real issue is, for “abstract” animals - why don’t more cryptids have iconic sounds?

Tada! Pixel 1 with working transparent videos! (Necessary for confetti screen)

Gameplay Tweaks & Android

The “next” button is now disabled on sound effect screens until the sound is pressed. Music lowers in volume for questions and serious playthroughs. Confetti is now fully functional (ok ok less gameplay but still). It’s great seeing the game get more refined - we keep getting to tweak the UI bits and pieces at a time, but it’s a bunch of invisible labor! Major features are all in, so why does polish take so long? What’s the right amount of time for it? I think Beta being content complete and leaving 25% of the schedule for polish is a good idea, but I might suggest something more like 40% if it includes a platform launch. That sounds wild but anything less than 30% of the schedule to polish, launch, and marketing is just not going to see a clean release.

We also now have a fully functional APK! Always a risk as a project goes on to not check other platforms. Video had transparency issues and loading time concerns, but transcoding in Unity fixed all that.

Work in progress logo and ideas for non-”fun world window” game icons.

Logo and Icon

This could be a whole blogpost all its own. Logo design is as tough as UI design, but tied into marketing much more too. How do you tell those hooks to the player through typography and color? The name does a lot already, but too “Wild” a wild honesty looks playful only, and what is an icon for deep conversations? Next blogpost will have the final answers here at this rate! So far it’s looking to use the name to say convos, and the icon to say card game and animals. We will see! My biggest takeaway: icons for games feel like windows into a world of friends, fun, and fantasy. You see the world you want to click on and zoom in to join. That’s what a game icon is - an invitation to some place fun. So how do we do that for a good conversation? Or is that best for single player games when clicking is the relationship between just one player and what to do on their phone? Word of mouth might be more important than an icon on this front.

I have also been fascinated by this wikipedia page all week. 

Conclusion

Marketing! It’s literally every step between the game/product and never having heard of it. How do you convince someone, at every step, that your thing (if it is a good fit for them) is worth clicking the next step for? Your space is more limited than a tweet, so what do you do with it? Like elevator pitches, it’s all about compressing things to the most catchy, valuable, intriguing concept. You want that audience member to be so curious that they click to see more. And again. And again - until a purchase is required and they are convinced they are either deeply interested, or that it brings them great value. Then just deliver a quality product as advertised, or you’ll disrespect and lose their trust! And that’s important long term - but especially when trying to do good for the audience.

Next week, hopefully a final icon and logo!

2/15/20

[brianhandy]

Final Name & Marketing

Wild Honesty: A game for deeper conversations. That is the final name of the game! It is a balance of informational and styling for our primary market of mental health more than indie game, and we even got the web domain for it. Our first build is approved for the app store, marketing research is underway, and Testflight builds are out in the wild and generating more attention than expected. It’s been a good two weeks!

I am reading so many articles like this now. This Disney+ analysis was excellent!

Investing in Marketing (and financing that!)

There was a big pivot here these past two weeks! The planned release is end of this month but a financial assessment from tax rebates tomorrow will set this up more too. Where publishers want more ownership and larger investments, the new plan is instead a line of credit for the LLC and a justified (low risk to my best judgement from lots of WIP numbers!) investment on marketing as long as it could make back its own cost. That’s a lot! This is a big change for me, and I’d still love to have a market specialist to run those numbers, which might be a call with an advisor soon, but in the meantime is about researching marketing techniques and taking a chance on one - hopefully with a marketing company. 

The goal is to connect the game with people who would pay to have it, and I think that could not only be done, but up to a certain point even be worth the financial investment to get the word out. The numbers look like other high quality titles make about $10-20k back if they are in the top 10% of the market, and we have enough strong and positive feedback consistently to lead me to believe that is a real possibility here. The question instead is, how much financially do we want to risk in attempting that?

Names are a key element of concisely & verbally sharing the value of a product.

The Words & Tones of Naming

The last minute name change comes out of the ongoing debate, which almost finalized on Cute Animals & Tough Questions, but was highlighted to me in a final meeting with an old advisor/friend as “that sounds like an indie game” when that has recently become our secondary market. Friends outside of games talk about this title just as a deep conversation starter, and while still a game, they are not focused on it for distraction. That makes the market lifestyle and mental health, and Wild Honesty is a stronger name for invoking that as the primary use. The subtitle, “a game for deeper conversations” establishes both that it is definitely a game, and that it is definitely about opening up and involves talking. The promise is in getting to that closeness, and I feel pretty confident with this final decision moving forwards. Expect a logo (or rough draft at least) next blogpost!

Apple has extensive and clean documentation to help with all this.

Submitting Builds: Content!

Submitting to Apple for an early build approval was important. It, as always, involved a lot more content than expected. iPhones have amazing export features for screencapture now from a connected MacBook directly - including audio capture - and trimming video in the Preview app is ridiculously easy in the latest version of Mac. It’s great to see Apple support how proliferative video is in users’ lives now, both in creating and sharing content, with simple but important tools easily accessible. Even so - App Store submissions, to have video, have very strict resolution and time length requirements. I upgraded my Adobe suite to add Premiere and After Effects just to more easily deal with all this. Content is still the hardest part of submitting, but now there are Privacy Policy and HTTPS government form requirements too (that one will still have to be done soon). Submissions are hard! Always leave extra time for the unexpected here.

Online tools, mailed forms, and face to face time all helped make this happen.

Applying for Business Credit?

A marketing plan needs a marketing budget, so since our last blogpost, I both applied for and was given a company line of credit and a company credit card with a low interest rate and no interest for 9mo respectively. This is a perfect tool to try taking a chance at investing in marketing, and with enough funds to cover any budget up to our target returns. Still on the table is research on bankruptcy and what happens if things go wrong, aside from being in debt, as my understanding is that legal entities have a lot more protection and opportunities for forgiveness here - but I still need to do my research on those topics. For now, it creates a powerful safety buffer, and an opportunity to experiment short term with a launch budget even if later it means paying down a failed attempt at an investment. 

Our 100% unrelated Global Game Jam game this weekend: Turkey’s Revenge!

Conclusion

Wow launching a game is hard. It seems that taking on more ambitious indie projects, targeting wider audiences, and doing more experimental things in more experimental conditions leads to even harder game launches than we previously had. And launching a normal game is hard enough on its own! Time, money, and quality are always the resources at stake here. I’m taking as much time as I can to make up for the other two, but time seems to be at the expense (living expenses, specifically!) of money, so that may run out soon too. More info in a coming blogpost - but the core game with 300+ questions has been getting really solid feedback and, almost every time I show it, gets brought up again sooner than I expect and catches me off guard! That’s great! People keep asking when they can buy the game and if it will be on their platform. That seems... really good? I don’t know what will happen at the end of February, but I am very excited to find out!

2/3/2020

[brianhandy]

Soon to Release, & Publish...?

Wow! What a wild couple of weeks! The new UI is just, like, in. The core of it is all done. It’s a little intense, and needs some memory management, but it looks just gorgeous. I’m so thankful for the Tubik team and their hard work on it. They’ve been great to work with the whole time. Now we have one big question to solve: get funding to keep improving, or finish this up and push it out the door. And we might even be able to do one, and then the other.

Ok... a couple spacing/placement bugs left. But still!

New UI

I’m so happy with the work of this studio. It’s hard to see often how good something looks when the pieces aren’t all together, but it’s really come together wonderfully and my only regret is that I wish I had given the team more credit during the points when I had trouble communicating. Even if I am glad about the issues I got stuck on, I wish I had been more forgiving here. When all the pieces come together, the whole is so much stronger, and any flaws with individual parts are barely noticeable. The issues now are more with UX and my control over what buttons are active and when, instead of any art concerns.  

Testflight builds are going out! Feedback is coming in!

Releasing

I still can’t believe we are this on track to the finish line. Apple approval could delay this, but that’s about it. There is still memory management to do for low end devices (the assets are only JUST in last week, unoptimized yet) and that name, logo, and app icon need revising. There are a couple UX tweaks, and it would be great to get categories dynamically revised so we could add categories like “race” and “politics” later if we wanted remotely - but we could release the game at its core right now, and that’s a blast. 

The search is... lots of lists, lots of spreadsheets, lots of emails and research.

Publishing

Now I am suddenly looking at long term options, what comes after this release, and the future of this game. After doing, and redoing, and tripple redoing the numbers - it looks like we could stretch this out another month or two depending on tax returns, and that actually gives time to try and find a publisher to pay for a spiritual successor to this game. The conversation starter genre has barely been touched, and I know that there is a wide market for this stuff now given that the more time I spend on this game, the more people talk about it and react more positively towards it (polish and art really do help). Most of all, folks keep saying more and more “I want to play this with X group of friends” or “I know exactly who I want to play this with” which is wild. It has the chance to spread by word of mouth. Then the question is either how to market this one so it can self fund a sequel, or to get a publisher to go even bigger and release a sequel sooner with less investment in this title. We’ll see which direction we go with that.

Either way, it looks like a great opportunity to make more games in this genre and direction, and I’m really excited that this might not be the last game I work on that face to face tries to bring people closer together.

(Can you tell I’m running out of ideas for blogpost graphics on this one...?)

Names

The final name is the biggest sticking point now. I have plans to run it by at least one old contact with expertise on this, have run it by another, and am hoping  for a third opinion too. But Cute Animals & Tough Questions might be the final name after all. It conveys a lot of the core concepts, and there’s a reason it’s not disappeared yet (even if “Wild Honesty” has done well in friend polls).

This terrifies me! It’s an 11k word long document about taxes!!

Tax Forms

Gee willikers! Did you know filing out your W-9 is what later leads to your 1099-MISC/NEC and 1096? I wish I had known that! I’ve got a meeting scheduled with my accountant for the former, but didn’t realize that included the filing of the latter, and tried to fill them out on my own. Needing to order those forms 10 biz days in advance, get them to contractors by the end of the month, etc are all terrifying with deadlines and how busy accountants are this time of year.

My advice? Be very, very clear with your accountant before tax season starts on what is and is not your responsibility. And better yet: if you do have to contact your accountant, make the email as efficient as possible. I asked one confirmation ‘y/n’ question via email, with the question in the headline, and was able to get a quick and useful response (”You’re handling my 1099s in our upcoming call, right?”) and that less-than-15sec-investment is one someone that busy can handle. I’m thankful for my accountant, but it will always be hard  to balance communicating someone in crunch with trying to handle a problem on your own. So be efficient about it and respect their time!

“Placeholder confetti. Revised confetti pending.”

Conclusion

This week has been wild productive and wild feeling in the project’s redirection! We weren’t planning any kind of publisher ten days ago, and now that’s my second goal after release (previously it was “find work”). I’m not sure what happens next, but that’s game development for you! Hopefully the next update will be “game is submitted to Apple” with maybe some publishers or a marketing opportunity reached out to. But first I will probably find some numbers on potential audience to invest in. I want people to think real money could come back out of this  investment, and I want the proof to back up my aspirations on this.

1/17/20

[brianhandy]

New Year’s New Functionality!

The holiday break is over! It was used to fundamentally redefine some major aspects of gameplay. That includes: 1) new vulnerability settings, 2) new questions-per-session settings, 3) automatic online updates for those new questions and card orders, and 4) almost 200% more questions to draw from for gameplay! Requests for more customization ultimately led to a ton of new functionality, and even cloud downloads on the backend. So a lot happened for a workweek that was technically only two days in the office! And it was largely a pretty productive holiday week!

Color coding for vulnerability in our new questions spreadsheets!

New Vulnerability Settings

Close and Intimate settings, or regular friend settings in longer sessions, can now get the occasional “Very Hard” question or two. These are pretty intense! They are for an audience that kept asking for more or deeper questions when playing with closer friends though, and that asked for far fewer or less intense questions when playing with strangers. “Easy” is also reimplemented as a category for that reason. Offline CSV file loading was added so we could more easily do detailed passes, spreadsheet formatting, and more to deal with how many categories we now had and the increasing the number of questions. What was recently 67 questions has now been expanded to more than 200 - now allowing for a much wider range of playthroughs that facilitate longer, shorter, harder, and easier sessions - and even ones where no categories are marked off by players at all! (We have a few generic, safe questions in there just in case)

Grid arrangements to keep track of exact counts for every category/difficulty!

New Difficulty Escalations

Adding more questions meant redefining the card order too - now we have templates for “what difficulty of card should go when” depending on multiple factors. The grid’s two axis were “how many questions were requested (between 3 and 7)” and “what level of vulnerability was chosen” and then each of those cells has a template list for what difficulty of question to use when. Now for example: an especially vulnerable and long session can ramp into very hard questions and stay there, or by contrast, a long session among strangers can stay pretty light the whole time (and maybe get a little deep eventually). Close friends in a quick session might also get deep, but strangers can try the game briefly without getting deep at all. Being online lets us fine tune these over time too. Giving the player those options for vulnerability (stranger/acquaintance/friend/close friend/intimate friend) and session length (3 questions, 4 questions... up through 7) gives us a lot more room for making the game even stronger for any audience.

Each bar is a category (faith, love, loss), color is vulnerability, height is quantity.

New Question Spreadsheets

These new spreadsheets are powerhouses. They keep track of every category of question, their vulnerability level, and how many of each we have in every one of those settings too. The goal was to quickly iterate on the data, but the data visualization allows us to instantly assess what categories are lacking even in complex overlaps with multi category data too. That means if each question has three labels (eg. family friends and loss) we can measure it as contributing to each of those categories having a question at that vulnerability level. The graph above is an example of looking at all the data at once, and seeing the colors represent which categories need fleshing out in which vulnerability levels. So even though the goal was just to make fast text changes, the visualization power is letting us make a much more well balanced and refined game. What we weren’t expecting though was the near seamless online integration, and how easy it was to get hooked into Unity.

Pulling tiny amounts of data to avoid heavier app updates!

New Online Updates

Those Google Sheets files work surprisingly well being pulled straight into Unity. We publish them as CSVs online, so while not totally invisible to the user, they are instantly and easily accessible from the code. With HTTPS security too, we’re not too worried about code injection or security risks on this front either. Both question information and difficulty escalation information are now updated on every new session, and the latest files are stored on device. Any new copy of the game from this point forwards will always have the latest data for not a lot of download. It’s only 23kb total right now, which is one thousandth of a percentage of the average 3GB monthly data plan. That’s pretty cool for instant, free, and trivially easy online updates forever!

This website is old, but the people behind it are young and full of life!

Old City Tax

There was one thing that wasn’t a productive code spreadsheet this past week. Bureaucracy can be tricky, and it’s sure not fun being the 830th caller in line (I wish that was an exaggeration) or waiting days for a return call to make sure you didn’t miss a major deadline. But once Los Angeles is on the phone with you, they are actually pretty good at the business and government stuff, even for folks who aren’t familiar with it! New businesses open all the time in this city, and if you do a little of your own research too, you might luck out with as pleasant an interaction with the department as I did. I recommend reaching out to them and taking advantage of their opportunities to help new businesses get their paperwork in order - even if it takes a few days and multiple hundreds of callers to get called back. I just wish I had called a little sooner!

Thanks, LA City Finance!

Conclusion

I spent the first half of this week making a totally unrelated “Matrix inspired” robo caller game, working with a voice actor, writing a script, sending lots of messages, and creating something in a tech I’d never used before just for an experiment for a cyber punk themed new years party. It was tons of fun (a silly idea gone out of control), and I didn’t get to use any of my normal programming skillsets. That’s what most of working on this conversation starter guessing game has felt like over the last four months. Totally new, thrilling, and no ties to anything I know or am comfortable in. But every now and then there’s a week like this where I just get to sink into code and libraries and web and gameplay. And it’s still always wonderful. I feel incredibly productive after all that, and I’m looking forward next week to getting back into things like funding, marketing, and publishing where I have again it’s all new work to me. It’s exciting stuff, and I feel lucky to be doing every side of this job.

1/3/20

[brianhandy]

Talking Names and Fighting Numbers

Last week we totally forgot to do a blogpost. That’s ok! There were a lot of hard problems going on and the takeaway as a whole (for likely the last blogpost in 2019) is that many moving parts require lots of time, communication, and effort. The indie lifestyle, with such an interdisciplinary art, means everything is complicated all the time. It’s a blast, but it’s definitely going to be hard unless you are careful to leave the time, and you are an expert at both diligence and communication.

Ft. “Make it squiggly, but not that squiggly. Like, a different squiggly!”

Communicating Abstract Art

How in the world do you communicate abstract concepts to an artist? Reference material is the best solution I’ve found. Use your words to highlight what does and doesn’t work. Take responsibility to communicate successfully. You are the messenger - it is your job to deliver the concept successfully. They might have enough experience (and you might be a predictable enough client) to skip half of that and just get something you want. But for abstract things like our work in an animated background this week, that gets much trickier. The more high quality reference materials you have, along with strong lines for communication (phone calls, skype, or being in the same room together is best - especially if you both share a common degree fluency in the language) the faster you will see the results you want. 

This “button pressed down” effect almost works, right?

Lottie, After Effects, and Vector in Unity

Unity has vector support! It’s hidden under preview packages in package manager, and doesn’t support nearly everything yet, but it’s a fantastic start. This with plugin u.movin from github allows lottie files and other JSON After Effects exports to have some functionality. We’re still working to see if we can get it 1:1, but something is showing up and it looks like the only restrictions are that masks, text, and layer blending don’t work. Generally there’s a lot of power here.

My only regret is confusing a British swear word for a playful animal one.

Naming Woes

Naming things is hard! Very similar to difficult choice making, identifying your needs (a common thread in life?) leads to a stronger result. What emotions does it need to invoke? How easy does it need to be to say? How important is it to match a style? Is it more to be seen, written, typed, spoken, read, or heard? What do you want people to think of when they see it? What promises should it deliver? What is the style of its competitors?

Then run it by friends. Try a word spreadsheet to mash up relevant keywords, along with suffixes, prefixes, etc. It can be technical and direct, allusive, inversely allusive, or flat out go against your themes to draw up controversy (sometimes a bold and good mood). Don’t forget web domain needs. Then run your ideas by friends or test audiences, be aware of how much weight to put on feedback from which sources, and you should at this point have one or two things in the lead. Then make a choice and move forwards with it! Although that last one, unless you’re out of time, always seems to be the hardest part.

Dramatization of doing taxes with a real accountant.

Accounting

Write offs are great when you work in a mixed media form of entertainment. All kinds of things contribute to my career, so it’s not hard to justify most media consumption as being for work. Consider also how many meals out with friends are friends in industry and how frequently you talk about work. I love doing this stuff for a living, so I regularly talk about work with others in the industry that I hope to work with someday. Apparently that counts for tax write offs? I’d love confirmation on this but apparently a career centered life, while maybe not the healthiest thing, leads to pretty good tax write offs. Fair warning though: getting that money back can take months. We don’t expect to see fixes to last year’s taxes until about months from now.

(Secret tip: hire a formal user researcher to get formal research documents!) 

Playtesting Review

Our playtesting phase is ramping down with the holidays, and the results are really cool. Sydney Rubin’s work in formalizing the process provided the project with a significant amount of new resources, including interviews, analysis of them, and next steps to move forwards from for improving gameplay. In review: playtesting was a lot harder to find blank candidates for than anticipated, and we would invest more in the acquisition phase next time (maybe hiring a studio like PlaytestCloud to acquire testers) but the data from playtesting was just as valuable as we had hoped. This is definitely a side of development that I will personally be leaving even more time and resources for in the future.

Yes. Holidays. Let’s take a break!!

Conclusion

Playtesting is hard! Communicating is hard! Accounting is time consuming. Naming things is hard! Technological things are hard!

Game development is hard??

Keep at it. It’s all worth it.

12/20/19

[brianhandy]

Experience vs Discovery

Working with veteran professionals compared to new collaborators in a field provide value in two entirely different ways. With someone experienced, it can feel like risking going backwards to change anything, or wasting a great deal of money disagreeing with the knowledge of someone who already knows their stuff. With a new team by comparison, every problem encountered is fresh, and though there is infinite flexibility and growth, and all the major hurdles seem to emerge unseen. The former gives impressive looking results, but the latter often teaches significant lessons about what problems are hard and what new opportunities exist in ever changing fields. As easy as it is to see experience as the most valuable, I find a balance of both to be the most valuable.

*No 200 year old Polish statue men worked on this project.

Experience

This week saw countless page long emails with our art studio, who in their extensive experience, have strong opinions on most matters and present great arguments in favor of a simpler, more traditional design route. “Why should we keep this screen?” or “Who really needs that extra button?” come up as questions that lead to a stronger, healthier understanding of every choice in the product. This means long, wordy emails justifying choices and elaborating on why to add certain features, but leads to a combination of elegant design and needs based robustness. It can be slow to work with such a powerful collaborator, but the product is much stronger because of it.

*No laptop wielding astronauts worked on this project.

Discovery

Our user research, by contrast, continues to be a slow path with lots of lessons learned. These past two weeks, we finally launched a series of reddit posts that targeted three communities we believed would give traction to our clean  playtester search. The results were minimal, even though community engagement was not insignificant. There was interest, but not much for actual playtest signups. (Perhaps we should research finding playtesters next?) Now it appears that recruiting costs will need to be even greater to be effective to find the level of unbiased playtester we want, and discussions turn instead to deciding at what point the work is not worth the production time and budget. But the weight of the lessons, and knowing first hand how low conversion rates are: that even a well liked and upvoted post doesn’t turn into any signups necessarily, makes something like playtesting feel like almost a business skillset. That’s valuable to have first hand for knowing how to approach any field that involves asking people for their time or attention in the future, and a lesson that would have kept away from us if we hired someone else to do the job who had already learned that. As difficult as the discoveries might be, they are incredibly valuable things to learn as a long term career investment, and especially with the weight behind the discovery of a real world experience.

Quickbooks is the secret sauce of deductibles.

Accounting

This was the only other big development this week, as most of the time was spent reviewing user research and writing notes about visual design choices. We finally have been making progress with a new accountant to review past tax years with the LLC and expenses, and the biggest takeaway there is how valuable a paperless office can be. Whether at home or traveling, I can sift through password protected documents online, and the biggest time sink was just scanning anything that was not digital yet. As much as possible, I recommend digital records and switching to paperless when possible. And finding a good accountant, in our case found by talking openly about our search until a friend suggested someone they knew, and then taking the months to setup calls and get the ball rolling, really looks like it could pay off in more deductible expenses and possibly more development time (if we find extra savings this way). It would be great to expand the project past our estimated delivery date, and continue to improve things for an early summer release instead of a late winter one. Or we could be in debt, we will see!

Old to the world, and new to us!

Invisible Labor

This always comes up too! This week we fixed analytics bugs that were important, and updated Unity to 2018.3 for bugfixes regarding rounded iPad corners and safe areas, even if tablet support isn’t a direct plan yet. This took a good chunk of time and was necessary even though nothing here was a major new accomplishment, so it makes sense that programming time estimates are always recommended to be made and then multiplied by three. Never forget how important it is to leave time for the things you forget.

(cue: “Why Can’t We Be Friends” by the band War 🎵)

Conclusion

Both experienced collaborators and work to discover new issues were helpful this week. I still recommend utilizing both at once, which might be too why companies love new hires and internships even as they have stable setups. That new discovery is key to forming your own memories as individuals and a company as to what problems are hard and where time is valuable, and gives everyone real experience. Old industry veterans, by contrast, can quickly create results exactly the way they know for a worthy price. Our hope then is that such investments will be recouped with the results of that experience too. At the least - both sides are providing a lot of results, and if the main point of game development is to learn more about good game development, this week is a great example of that.

12/9/19

[brianhandy]

Importing Designer Workflows

Web designers and game designers usually use wholly different toolsets. This is a major restriction in the ability to share knowledge and experience between the widest 2d UX medium and the widest 3d UX medium in the world. Now though, moving forwards with a dedicated design team, this project is challenged with bringing that work from web and app design tools into Unity. The tools aren’t quite ready for that yet, but they are all surprisingly close.

Sketch is one of these UI / UX layout software applications, and happens to be the tool of choice for the studio we are working with. Sketch exports .sketch files that include pngs and incredibly detailed json documents all zipped up. Unity has no import method for this, but a user made plugin has been created to handle Sketch files that had been converted a similar PNG and JSON format (Framer files) and to roughly get those into our Unity editor. My job this week involved cleaning that up.

Why Sketch?

Sketch appears to be one of the top ten or twenty UI/UX specialty apps out there right now. As long as tech platforms keep changing, the tools will likely keep changing too. Other alternatives included Zeplin, InVision, Adobe Experience Design, Framer, and more. Mostly, it is not a loss since it is a common platform, and it is also an advantage since our preferred design studio works closely with it.

Look at all these great (advertised) Sketch designs! Wow-ee! (so cool!)

Why not do it by hand?

Speed and accuracy in moving an artist’s creation from one environment to another creates incredible power for game development. Few games have UI and UX for 2d menu navigation that is comparable to the beauty of many top websites or work apps. Creating this tool not only facilitates more accuracy in one direction though, but in making changes to send back too. An ideal tool would not only show the file in Unity but be able to make changes and save to it in its original format. This reduces the need to communicate, and increases how much both the UX designer and the game developer can do to meet their needs together in the same limited time. It’s especially useful for rapid iteration.

Competitor Framer does many of the same things, and has shared exports.

What filetypes do visual designers use?

Our design studio sent over this list to choose from:

UX files - .sketch/figma, .pdf, .png

UI files - .sketch, .png, .zeplin.io

Animation - .aep, .gif, .mp4 (or any video), .png, and .json lottie files

Most of these are static exports, likely flattened, and fairly standard expectations for dealing with an artist of any type. But the more Unity can read the same tools the artist uses, the more dynamic and accurate their uses can be. Since Sketch files can export to figma and zeplin formats, it makes supporting this filetype a strong choice in the future.

Animation files, like the json lottie ones, will be a different powerful effect later. Understanding how those pieces move from one environment to another though will help set expectations for what is useful in the tool we design too.

Code code code. Version control and open repos!

So what’s working?

So far we’ve added 4x resolution importing to fx-lange’s tool, updated the Unity environment to 2018.1, and fixed the readme for latest tools implementation since Framer and Sketch have both changed a bit in the last two years. Our pull request was submitted, negotiated, and approved, so others will be able to work with UX designers in Sketch a little more easily in the future now too.

Look at that 4x importing in Unity! Dang!

Then what’s next?

Next up is probably taking on Sketch files directly. Currently the Sketch files need a Framer conversion, but this loses dynamic text and a few layers. That kind of access might even mean we could save from Unity back into Sketch files directly. It would let us send files back to our designers with our own tweaks instead of relaying that all by email.

But what if your ending is really... the beginning?

Conclusion

The only big downside is time. Programming a tool like this is a huge investment. It means seamless integration later (comparatively, at least) with great iteration power and sending files back and forth more easily, quickly, and accurately - but it’s a big commitment. If Sketch gets discontinued in the next few years then it’s kind of a bummer to start again, but for now this is a powerful addition that, hopefully, will help this game’s UI/UX stand out from the crowd.

12/2/19

[brianhandy]

Difficult Decisions

How do you make a hard choice? Almost half of this week was spent consulting with others, researching online, reprioritizing, and deep diving to understand whether to send the project funding to one company for a visual design pass focused on appearances, or to send the funding to another company with a focus on UX and interaction effectiveness. It was a hard choice but leads to a strong new stance moving forwards, so understanding how to make a difficult decision like that was the core takeaway this week.

Your needs may or may not include money and/or a cat.

What Are Your Needs?

The biggest point learned in making a hard choice was a deeper understanding of one’s needs. This shows up as a concept in conflict management with interpersonal issues too, so it makes sense that it appears in deliberations for difficult work choices. Needs based problem solving (like needs based communication) helps eliminate false choices when one of two choices might be able to fulfill all needs if other, potentially addressable needs, are met. Maybe the choice is between a sports car or a van, but if the needs are actually something to bring joy and something to transport lots of people, there might be other investments that could bring that same joy or distribute that transportation. If a new computer would bring as much joy as the sports car, the van combined with getting a computer might fit within budget - making one of the choices now capable of fulfilling both of the underlying needs.

Who would you turn to with a tough choice in game development?

Trusted Peers and Friends

Consulting with others is an excellent way to both rubber duck (from programming) a situation - talking out your thoughts - and to hear new perspectives you may have overlooked or could not have known. The tradeoff is understanding the perspective each outside voice brings when they share that view, as their needs and what they see might not match yours. When I ran my big decision past four different friends/groups, I got four different answers which did not lead to much progress. Every perspective was valuable and valid though, and I learned a lot from each of them. At the least, the game may now see a new logo and icon because of it, even though that was peripheral to the core issue. But the process of talking it out gave more strength to each of the needs I had already identified.

It’s like gardening, except it’s game development!

Long Term vs Short Term

As with investments, understanding the consequences of your choice and what effect it will have both long and short term give you a better idea of what path is more valuable. It’s easy to follow a path because it is “good” as opposed to understanding what it will accomplish, when, and how high the risk is of that compared to how much of a risk you want to take. Financial investment advice proved particularly powerful as soon as it became clear that the visual design path was a stronger investment for the planned release date, and the UX path was stronger for a longer timeline and wider budget. That helped make it much easier to decide, since the framing of the question became about when to release and how much of a chance to take with that. The conservative, short term, and more stable goal of a visual design path to release sooner seemed clear.

Time to be definitive!

Making A Choice

I gave myself a deadline of 48hrs on this choice very intentionally. It’s easy to get lost in researching an idea forever. “It could be good if only-” or "It would be better if we would just-” and before you know it, a week has gone by with no progress on the game. Leading, I believe Picard said in TNG, is about making a choice and moving forwards with it regardless of that uncertainty. And sometimes you will be wrong, but this way you will always be learning and making progress. Indecision is the only thing that can really kill that momentum.

Functionality! (Designed by the path of least resistance!)

New Features

As far as hard game development goes: the Settings, History, and Credits screens are now in! Work has started on an experimental “per-session” screen for settings that will be added next, since players were caught off guard by the time needed to play a session, and sometimes wanted less or more vulnerability than they got. One useful piece of code made this week was a marquee script for scrolling credits. It’s a good reason to have a Utils class, since this will certainly not be the last time I use this functionality in a Unity project.

Enough decisions and animals to make Monty Hall proud.

Conclusion

Tough choices are hard. Give them some time, focus first on needs and long term vs short term goals. Be sure to consult with others, but understand their perspective too on how well they know the project, how much experience they have, and what their goals are too. And then make a choice, and move forwards with it. I chose a conservative route to release on time and in budget, and the long term path can always be returned to someday. In the meantime, this project gets to keep moving forwards, and continues to be on track for a release soon. That sounds pretty good to me.

11/18/19

[brianhandy]

Cute Videos & Tough Payments

Video backgrounds are a cool idea that sprung up this week! Now to determine if they are too distracting to leave in. So cute though, right? Anyway! The real focus this week was on distributing payments, continuous progress on art / playtesting, and trying out this cool new videos idea. Findings are: it’s, at the least, super duper cute.

Artist Conversations

More communication with various artists happened this week! And we are making progress towards a final selection - one visual design studio is well within budget in their estimates, communication has been good, and their work delivers the professional style we would like to achieve. Calls to Ukraine can be rough! And 7am calls to India are no joke. But as long as you always do your research before the call, have a plan for the meeting, and work to stay on track, face to face time can be incredibly valuable and much faster than email. The only other thing is: make sure you know who you’re talking to. Mistaking a UI / UX designer for a visual illustrator can lead to very confusing expectations or miscommunication on the call.

Pictured above: an example of what a real Skype contractor call is like.

Playtesting Conversations

Also more progress here! Builds are sent out to some of the first playtesters now, and next week hopefully we’ll have the results of an interview or two. Progress is slower than expected here but continues to move forwards, which is good. Next is expanding our recruitment to online communities, and that means deciding which niche audiences are small enough to invest but not too small to give too few of results. Self care groups, local multiplayer, and mobile or indie gaming groups seem like the best investment so far. It all ties into defining our target audience and reaching out to them directly.

In 2019: using digital sites to send physical bills. How cool is that!

Contractor Payment

Paying the people who work for you is good! Wells Fargo Bill Pay provides a great online cheque payment system if you already have an account with them - just a couple forms and they’ll handle the paperwork/mail. International wire transfer payments are harder, but Xoom by Paypal has worked for me in the  past (with a hefty fee) but Transferwise looks like it might provide more affordable options soon.

The design studio we are speaking with requested an upfront deposit for their payment. This caught me off guard, until a little research showed companies sometimes go out of business and lose funding before an artist can send an invite. While sending a large payment does require some real trust, an artist asking for the money first is not unreasonable - just maybe less common.

This site is a great implementation of reducing user friction for legal forms!

DocuSign

A few of our playtesters had trouble printing, signing, and scanning documents - so to reduce friction, we set up a DocuSign account for digital form signatures. It works great! A little cumbersome, but powerful in some very useful ways to ease how quickly users can sign documents. This should allow NDAs to flow smoothly. I’d go with this again.

Look at that bird! Wow! Cool! Just - don’t forget about the other players!

Animal Videos

Inspired by one of our visual designer candidate’s websites, we have now added background videos of animals! It’s really cute. However: stock footage can be expensive. Storyblocks (unlimited videos, $300/yr) looks like an excellent deal given this (aside from elusive Cuckoo footage, where Shutterstock $79/video may become a necessity). Fudging video backgrounds for the abstract “animals” though is... something. There are lots of cute videos of kids ringing doorbells and pouring tea out there, thankfully. We’ve gotta test all this still to see if too distracting - we still want this to complement the conversations, not distract from them. But so far this looks only like a positive addition to the quality of each animal screen. They feel more polished this way.

Another finding: one cute video is worth more than three mediocre ones. The cute one is always cute - quality should sometimes come first. And another finding: the finale screen has to be extra cute for a strong finish. We might do the same for the title screen, but that could set too many false promises (it’s not ONLY animal videos here).

Final takeaways from video, on portrait phones, mostly obscured by UI: footage can be longshots of any animal, or midshots of any mostly-verical animal (giraffes, llamas, standing eagles). The problems arise when closeup footage is used, or midshots of wider animals. Too much of the figure is obscured, and the animal reads terribly on screen. Motion becomes overwhelming too. So avoid these!

This card came up on a retreat playthrough and - they had some opinions!

Question Text

Improving the animal experience (because it looks way more professional now) just makes me want to improve the quality/effectiveness of the questions too. The standards of the game are increasing! That’s awesome! It’s exactly what we want. This may lead to a more intense study of what other questions are out there, what makes a good question, how to categorize them, etc. This is the direction we’ve always wanted to take for making the questions better, but requires a lot more intense research and focus on the questions. It’s more time than we’ve spent there before but it should really improve the game.

Someday even stock footage of cuckoo birds will be free...

Conclusion

Flexibility is important to allow the good ideas to come through. The video idea feels, to me, like a huge bump in quality. Players so far seem to enjoy it, but felt the animals were totally separate from the questions now (so maybe it is too much?) but these are questions to keep figuring out over time. Communication is important! Time is important! Quality, ease of use, and payments are important! What’s new? Video is a far more compressed, flexible format - and phone storage is bigger than ever. Try throwing some videos into your... video game.

(Look they’re just too cute I gotta post ‘em ok)

11/11/19

[brianhandy]

Artists and (More) Emails

Is this really what video games is? Just a bunch of emails? Yes. Welcome to the end of month two. This week was about emailing playtesters, emailing artists, finding out the email system was broken (oh so that’s why we didn’t get any replies...), fixing the email system, and then emailing some more. Google Voice is now setup, so we can professionally call playtesters from a company phone line, the email system for thatsnotagame.com is fully up and running now, and emails and Skype calls with numerous artists are ongoing. It’s good stuff!

Servers matter!

MX Records

This was a new phrase to me! It’s an important one too! These are what ensure your email hosting and your domain are connected for delivery - and allow email replies to go through and not bounce. Don’t forget about these! Especially don’t forget about them so much that the people you tried emailing reach out on social media about how broken it is! (Definitely don’t do that!)

Yes having a wall of clocks actually sounds useful right about now.

Timezones

Artists might have higher quality work for more affordable rates overseas, but communication is more difficult and time is an element of that. Language and time barriers! That’s Not A Game is looking at remote contractors for art right now since it’s easier to find especially relevant portfolios that way, but setting up Skype calls for 8pm at night or 7am in the morning can be rough! Just understand this tradeoff and plan around it if you pursue oversea collaborators.

Signup page copy is open to suggestions. (All copy is open to suggestions...)

Email Newsletters

In case playtesters want to follow the game’s updates, we created a new MailChimp newsletter too. The signup at thatsnotagame.com/newsletter is already live! What to send out exactly is still unknown (maybe some sort of blogposts...?) but likely major news updates only or big exciting developments. It’s a great way to follow up with anyone who was interested in the game before, but we’ll have to be careful to not waste anyone’s time.

“Dear potential collaborators. I think you are very handsome...”

Potential Collaborator Emails

This week saw a very high success rate of reaching out to potential collaborators. Almost every email got a reply, and that came after changing the style of writing to be concise and prioritize the most exciting elements (who would have thought!) for why we should be in touch. Teasing a cool idea seems to consistently get a response! So instead of “telling” how good the project is, like an elevator pitch, a few important phrases were used and an invitation was given to continue dialogue. It was great to see such a consistent response. In addition: making templates for emailing various groups helps speed up the process. This saves a lot of time when sending almost the same email to five different people.

Pictured above: Cute Animals & Tough Questions without an artist.

Understanding Visual Arts

Communicating with those potential collaborators, in this case all visual designers, then leads to learning more of their language. What is a LOTA filetype? Blue prints? Color boards? And now that more discussion is happening, elements of working with a visual artist are becoming more clear. One overseas artist offered to work for $60/hr, which leaves a lot more room for what our budget can do than we previously expected. They also have much higher expectations than I imagined for me specifying the exact work I want done, instead of a general “make it look better” instruction. It’s difficult, but good! And it’s helping challenge the project in a valuable way. Leaving time for onboarding and finding artists is still the hardest part, but we are slowly getting closer to finding someone to improve the game’s art.

Collaboration!

Conclusion

So yeah! This week was good! It was basically all about communication, but led to meaningful progress towards working with an artist - which seems to be more in budget than I expected. Lots of emails and technical corrections to backend things happened this week too. Is video games 85% invisible labor? It would certainly explain why it’s so hard to estimate development time.

The biggest takeaways this week were: 1) Use templates to email many people at once about the same or similar concepts, like when searching for contract workers. 2) Visuals arts has its own language - learn it by listening to artists. 3) Make sure replies to your email system work! And 4) Leave 85% of your planning time for invisible labor in setting up backends, legal paperwork, emailing other potential workers, etc. Video games take time and effort! Be ready for it!

11/3/19

[brianhandy]

Seeking, Searching, & Scouting

This was a week of (rough) playtest recruitment, funding searches, and art hunt decisions. The core takeaway is that finding good people is always hard, and finding money takes time too. A firm direction might be more valuable than a bigger project here, but looking into funding opportunities is something worth understanding better overall, regardless.

New Icon

This part of the week was easy! It really doesn’t have much to do with anything else this week! It even led to the pursuit of a simpler name - and now we are trying out “Animal Questions” to match this new icon in the header image. The animals kind of look like an “A” and a “Q” respectively, so apologies in advance to whatever artist I meet later who has to deal with my ideas about how cool this is.

Financially, this is not a simple search!

Artist Search

The difficulty of deciding how to find an artist became an idea I workshopped with peers this week. Is it better to work with someone you know who has less specifically relevant skills, or someone that’s a gamble but very talented at the exact thing you need? The room was divided in their answers, so I think there is value in each. I may reach out to a local artist I know this week with the disclaimer that I know it is not a perfect match, but I will keep an eye out on Dribbble and Twitter too. I have liked the leads I saw there before.

Look at all these grants! Do you like reading? I sure hope you like reading!

Funding Opportunities

This is a cool idea that ties more into the business prospects of the project than I’m used to - and an element that has never been the primary focus compared to the players’ personal development. If the project could have returns, whether financial, communal, spiritual, or any sort of tangible investment or value to be gained, it can be marketed to someone that way. Maybe a grant foundation wants to help students open up on their first week (USC?) or maybe it’s about contributing to the arts and the world’s spiritual development. So what is it, and where to find it? Artist grant databases (pictured above) help with things like that. It depends on who you market towards, and that leads me to the most important keywords of the week...

Look at that audience! What a target! They care about their thing! We want that!

Target Audience

Demographic, intended audience - it doesn’t matter the exact phrasing so much as the concept. Who, very precisely, is this for? If you can identify the group then you can market to them. You can stylize towards them. For this project I have recently leaned more into “friends who play Mario Kart” as the audience, but I don’t want it to be exclusive to gamers either. Casual Mario Kart? Either way, identifying this will help me find more specific groups to recruit from, which will help find players for...

A flier! In the wild! Could it be? (photo credit Syd Rubin)

Playtesting

Finding good playtesters is rough! It is our first week trying this and results are far from instant. Turning to peers for advice is showing it’s a hard topic in general. More prep in advance, more time, and more money (unsurprisingly) always help. It just depends on what kind of priority this is, how effective each effort in searching or testing is, and how many ways you can cheat at all that. Grabbing friends and family and coworkers is a great cheat, but doesn’t work as well for our need for clean, private playtests. The formality points us towards services like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but that still needs more time and research too. But a little progress still counts! And we are proud of seeing some early initial responses to our fliers. Our first playtester is found, and a first playtest to follow.

Hopefully, if we pursue funding, it will be less suspicious than this...

Conclusion

This week was rough! Who knew game development is mostly time, money, and people problems! Programming feels easy by contrast (or familiar at least) but if we keep at this I know that we will, over time, develop better practices in: finding playtesters, identifying our target audience, deciding if we want to spend time pursuing further funding, deciding on where to get an artist, and celebrating how dang happy I am with that icon. This though, was a week. It didn’t feel very productive, but many emails and plenty of articles about funding later, I do feel better about understanding the needs to determine what comes next with all this. What follows then is making some decisions about it.

10/25/19

[brianhandy]

Preparing for Playtests

Playtest setup formed the bulk of this week’s progress. That was implemented in three ways: 1) direct playtest setup via emails to plan, 2) analytics implementation to give more accurate insight, and 3) external resource setup or iteration like fliers, emails, websites, and forms. This helped for finishing the transfer to an Apple business account too. The only other big news was that, in reaching out to more people, we were hearing more folks positively respond to the game with some exciting reinforcement.

A cropped “community board" and future recruitment flier spot - via Flickr.

Playtest Planning

Emails, calls, and documents were sent back and forth all week to hash out details. Now we have most of the pieces prepared to start recruiting, send out playtest builds, and conduct phone interviews. Due to a lack of physical office space or testing facilities, and with the nature of privacy regarding this game, playtests are setup to involve private play sessions, followed by informational interviews over the phone. We’ll see how recruitment, installs/setup, and interview results all go - as any of these could cause a snag. The biggest concerns right now are the difficulty of finding totally new and unspoiled playtesters, how to get players through the Testflight setup, and then getting good information from the phonecall interviews. Expect updates on at least part of these items next week.

Unity claims this will all be working soon!

Analytics Implementation

Unity offers a limited form of free analytics to all customers, which when the backend is up and running, works great. Within 500 characters, any event can be sent whenever we want - which we have now semi-legibly squeezed an entire playtest into. A few characters had to be sacrificed (ie. “spaces”) but every animal and question for a session and the timestamp of each is now squeezed into a single event, sent when the app closes or a session completes. For privacy reasons, no email addresses are associated, but we use game center IDs so we can associate a playtest with the phone interviewee. This will be removed for release, but for playtesting that identified data is important. The only real issue is that a few hours into implementing this, Unity’s analytics developed a backend bug and stopped sending data. They claim to be working on it currently. And the only other snag was how similar the Analytics and AnalyticsEvents classes were: both feature similar CustomEvent methods, only with entirely different parameters. Not a fun discovery!

A potential flier design by Syd Rubin, our lead user researcher.

External Resources

Fliers, NDAs, screening forms, websites, and additional email addresses were all setup or iterated on this week too. Who knew games had this much invisible labor? (Everyone who has spent any time releasing games - that’s who!) Apple required an email account from a unique domain to register a company account, as well as a formal webpage (meaning this blog is at http://thatsnotagame.com/blog now instead of at the main site) so that all exists now. Checks and double checks were made so all media correctly conveyed the tone of the game and didn’t spoil playtests or expectations, or only did so intentionally. It became a balancing act to keep testers unspoiled but also not mislead anyone regarding the product.

Is this the real target demographic?

External Responses

In the process of reaching out to new artists and consulting with old friends, feedback consistently reinforced that the game brought something unique to the market and made people excited to see it released. That was unexpected! But it’s a great sign and indicates that there might actually be some virality in how people talk about this game after a session. One peer mentioned they thought about it while on a recent camping trip, and a potential contractor expressed stronger interest in working together once learning what the product really was. This seems to be happening more consistently lately, so that can only be a good sign! Sadly the potential contractor artist requested $10k-$30k for a pass at the art direction, so we may need to soon change either our expectations or find a publisher with a budget.

“You make games? What’s that like?” (Photo captured from real gamedev’s life)

Conclusion

Playtests are almost ready to begin recruitment, and things will be moving very swiftly once that begins. The plan is to schedule sessions as soon as we make contact with playtesters, essentially - and to schedule them for sometime soon. This positive reinforcement is good, especially with how slow development is treading through all the invisible labor of setting up emails and more websites. Analytics are looking useful as soon as Unity’s backend is up and running. And boy game development sure has a lot of bureaucratic moving parts. Simply programming a game sounds nice in comparison - but it’s very exciting to see how much we are able to accomplish on all these other fronts too.  

10/18/19

[brianhandy]

Independent Contractors

After a quick week off in Boston, it’s back to work on “more legal forms than I’ve ever seen before” here. Meetings, emails, contracts, tax forms, and a device purchase for dedicated testing. My goal this past week was to bring on a former team member as an independent contractor for more extensive user research and playtesting, and hiring someone is a whole new skillset involving a lot of papers and communication.

Many websites offer contract templates, but this one had flexibility we wanted.

Necessary Papers

A W-9 (tax form) and contract for the terms of the agreement (oh boy) are the two primary papers I got setup this week after a lot of back and forth by email. The important takeaways are that contractors, unlike employees, must be essentially their own business or individual that you pay only for the outcome and give only your needs. How they go about their business must be totally on them - no requirements of uniforms, tools used, or anything else can be made by the client. As for W-9s, since they contain SSNs and EINs, just make sure they’re encrypted and password protected if you email them. Ultimately: I ended up using Rocket Lawyer to setup my contract, but Legal Zoom was seriously considered as well. It’s best to have a template written by a lawyer that knows what is and isn’t important for legal defenses, and all the advice articles online for writing contracts just cover the same things that these companies’ template contracts have in them.

I recommend not using a phone if the other party is within 10ft or fewer.

Use Synchronous Communication!

Setting up that contract however, involved lots of communication. Asynchronous communication like email is great for clarity and particular details or unscheduled times, but hashing out an overall plan has so much back and forth between two new parties that synchronous communication will always be best for final plans before moving forward. On that front: face to face is better than video calls, which are themselves better than phone calls, but anything less than that (email, texting) turns into a slow back and forth sludge and high risk for miscommunication. That’s not recommended for establishing the start of a project or major details, and especially not for conflicts if (or when) they happen. Pick up a phone, get someone on Skype. Synchronous communication is the clearest way we can communicate for anything other than hard data sets like lists and numbers.

Please also use email not snail mail (my apologies for the misleading imagery)

Use Asynchronous Communication!

Ok - now hear out my counter point from this week too! Synchronous is always best, but sometimes any communication is better than no communication at all. That’s where emailing large corporations, busy individuals, and any hard to reach contacts will work best. The communication might not be good, but reducing it to the bare minimum and hoping for it to just get through, along with a little persistence, has paid off a lot this week. Literally! A large group that had previously promised some funding, along with an individual in a powerful marketing position, finally got back to me this week after a long series of follow up emails. Asynchronous communication is never ideal, but it has a strength if used in small doses and carefully over time. Always try sending followup emails as long as they are respectfully paced out and clearly, concisely communicated. It’s definitely worth the investment. 

This post brought to you exclusively by Pixabay (CC0) stock photography.

Conclusion

Paperwork is good but it sure takes a minute. Communication is rough! Try to understand when, and how, to communicate. If you want to bring on a new independent contractor, be sure to leave time and use appropriate communication techniques to setup that connection and work. It may take a while, but the fastest path is to email concise hard details, schedule a call for hashing out the core plan, and then emailing contracts from websites designed for such templates. Before you know it you’ll be starting to actually worry about  cutting cheques.

10/7/19