Someone in marketing obviously worked out the RRP.  They based it on other games of the same genre, the hype surrounding it, how much of it is new and how much was borrowed from another game.  They must have chosen between £45 and £50 for the Xbox 360 version, setting a higher price for the special-edition version with exclusive DLC and a life-sized replica of a dead frog.

So how much is the game worth?  The answer may seem controversial, but I think it is simple…

Any game is worth only what the buyer / player is willing to pay for it, even if they happen to be a pirate.

Not everyone buys on release day

For some people, the latest PC blockbuster is worth the £40 price tag to get it on release day.  For others, it is worth the £5 they pay for it when Steam put it on a mid-week madness special offer.  For an estimated up to 90%^[1][2] of players, a game is worth ten minutes surfing The Pirate Bay and maybe an hour or two of downloading.

Only…  I think we misjudge the latter batch of ‘customers’ when we say that.

Some pirates are just under-served customers

If a person sees a game they would happily spend £10 on, but it never drops below £20, we never gave them the option to pay what they actually think it is worth.  Oh, we might tell them to ‘vote with their wallets’, but isn’t that precisely what a pirate claims to do?

If any of you have ever bought a Humble Indie Bundle, you were given a chance to undervalue the games.  If you ever bought ‘In Rainbows’ from Radiohead when it was released, you had a chance to get a Radiohead album for free without legal fears.  With the Humble Indie Bundles, you even have a choice in who gets your money; you can give it all to charity if you want and with the blessings of the developers!

The point is that you could decide that the handful of games there were worth a punt for £1, but would never have paid £10 each for them.  Later on, maybe you even went back and bought them a second time or made a big donation for a more ‘reasonable’ amount of money.

Clawing back the bottom line

So what can you do?

Pirates exist, but I have seen ‘pirate amnesty sales’^[1] and even pirates contacting the developers to apologise^[3] after realising what awesome people they were cheating.  Most of us can probably agree that pirates buy games; I would lay good odds that almost every pirate has bought games with real cash and probably recently.

The trick may be to make the pirates give you something instead of nothing.  Yes, it may mean getting £5 for a £20 game, but if the 90% figure is true, every pirate giving you £5 for your £20 game will earn you 225% more revenue.  Heck, get even one in five of them to buy it at that price and you are still looking at a 45% increase.

Alternatively, the trick may be to think of them as unpaid evangelists; they didn’t pay, but maybe they will tell their straight-laced friend (who hasn’t ever even seen a warez site) how great a game is and you get a legitimate sale that way.  Even if the pirate doesn’t buy the game, they might drive the sales based on their unintended ‘complimentary’ copy.  They could even convince a fence-sitter to stop waiting for a Steam sale and buy the game at full price, a smaller increase, but still useful.

At the end of the day, perhaps there is no easy way to stop piracy or to make a person pay £20 for a game they are certain is only worth £10, so maybe we should just find a way to win our small victories and stop fighting the tide. If the only price they pay is to recommend it to their friends, to get your game’s reputation out there, at least it was worth that much to them.

References:

[1] http://amanita-design.net/blog/2010/08/05/machinarium-pirate-amnesty/
[2] http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
[3] https://twitter.com/#!/Surells/status/103748952343584769

Yes, they serve a purpose.  Unfortunately, most PC games are released in a beta state, so they need to get patched.  Selling a half-finished game isn’t part of this discussion, but maybe later.

I am not sure if any of you are like me, but I have ended up with a lot of patching programs over the years.  Every time I start Windows, the system chugs as every one of them tries to connect to the update server; Adobe wants to check for new updates to Flash and Acrobat, Java needs to check for an update, Quicktime is terrified it might be out of date, Google wants to check its suite of tools (half of which are not installed) are up to date, Windows itself often wants to connect, my anti-virus program starts downloading new definitions, my firewall checks for new versions of itself…

Half of these things are not even running, just updating themselves (whether you want them to or not) on the off-chance that you will use them this time.  Even if you remove them from start-up, they re-load themselves the next time to open a file they are configured to handle.  Gamers end up with Punkbuster running at this point, together with the anti-cheat app that came with the Korean MMO you are trying out this week and at least one heavily-obfuscated DRM ‘helper’ that is making sure Nero and Daemon Tools aren’t running.

Next come the programs that you know you really don’t need to constantly update and which ask you for permission before adding themselves to the boot-up sequence, but you tell them to run at start-up anyway.  Steam is the obvious one, but there’s also Desura, EA’s ‘Origin’ alternative to Steam, the Turbine updater for any Lord of the Rings Online or D&D Online players and dozens of similar apps.  You also end up running Xfire, Raptr, maybe even an IM client or two (Trillian if you use too many and want to keep them together) which load at start-up.

Here’s the point where we enter as a videogame developer.  You just waited five minutes for Windows to load and unfortunately, you are running an older version of our game.  What is the least-intrusive way of making sure you have the right version?

Right now, adding a new updater to the start-up sequence doesn’t make sense.  Steam, Desura and IndieCity (we like IndieCity) will all update the game by default, while Linux repositories (oh, for a Windows equivalent) can keep that format up to date.  Bioware and Blizzard’s games just check for updates when you start the game, so that provides a fall-back for those who bought direct or even on a physical medium.  We’ll need to talk to the techy people, but the patch files should not be as epic as anything from WoW, so putting the updater in the launcher app should be more of a speed-bump than a road-block when you go to start playing.

Essentially, half the gamers will see their chosen service updating the game silently.  Those who don’t will get asked to update if there is a new version, but I can’t imagine penalising anyone for not updating.  The only other time an update could be triggered is when trying to join a server with a higher version number, but anyone playing over the ‘net should have an internet connection ready to update the game and those on a LAN can just copy the files across.

Of course, all this could change if the techies tell me I am running my mouth off without getting their input, but there’s my vision, for what it’s worth.

• Four new spells.

With the new runic magic system, we have added four new spells and renamed one of the two existing spells.

• Firebolt – The same spell Ifrit have been slinging at players for a little while, this is a single-target fire spell which hits harder than a fireball.
• Frostbolt – The icy equivalent to the firebolt, this is designed to be a little more effective against fire-based monsters.
• Frostball – Like a very cold fireball, this is an area-effect spell designed to freeze large numbers of opponents.
• Flame weapon / Frost weapon – these two spells take the place of the old ‘magic weapon’ spell, imbuing a weapon with elemental magic.  Right now, they both add the spell-effect from the old spell, but will gain different magical effects later.

• Spellbook updates

The spellbook now has more information when choosing your initial runes, in hopes of better explaining the runic magic system.  Only time will tell if they make enough sense.

Friday is typically patch day, so I would be discussing the patch-notes, but there are a few updated being rolled into one big one for later.  The main issue is a number of databases will need to be reset after each one, requiring all the characters to be reset, so we’ll delay the patch until they are all ready to minimise disruption for the alpha testers.

So, let’s go over the new entries in the change-log. (not on the live server yet)

• Avatars now wear the correct armour and weapons.

This is one of the big changes.  Previous avatars were static, single-layer images which vaguely resembled a fantasy character; the new avatars actually wear the armour and wield the weapons that you select.  Some armour types now include a shield, such as the Albion Plate and Maille including a kite shield, some weapons include a left-hand weapon like the Venetus rapier which comes paired with a main-gauche.  Left-hand weapons have priority in these cases, which adds to the variety of appearances you will see.

Here is a wizard avatar, using the old system on the left and the new system on the right.

old vs. new

• No more dwarves or elves. There are lots of heroic human cultures, so who needs dandelion-munchers?

This was a decision not made lightly, but we realised that we had a range of heroic human cultures.  We have Picts and Cimmerians, Albion pirates and mighty Teutons, so non-humans were vaguely unnecessary.  I think we were overly influenced by Tolkien / Dungeons and Dragons, where I had been pushing Robert E. Howard and George R.R. Martin in many of the other aspects of the game.
It’s okay though; high magic survived, with all of its flappy robes and exploding fireballs.

• Spellbooks for mages.

The current system of class powers is a hack, a quick way to get the spells and abilities into the game.  The mage spellbook represents the first of the updates to this system, letting mages choose the runes they want to use for building their spells.  Essentially, players choose a single elemental rune and a formation rune to make the spell; a ‘fire’ rune and a ‘ball’ rune makes a ‘fireball’ spell, while ‘fire’ and ‘enchant weapon’ makes a ‘flame weapon’ spell.

Players start with one elemental rune, one formation rune and a choice of one more element or one more form.  This allows them to choose two spells of the same element (say, ‘fireball’ and ‘firebolt’ for instance) or two spells of the same type and different elements (e.g. ‘flame weapon’ and ‘frost weapon’) if they want.

This system is the basis for all spell-casting, so cleric spells will also use this and (once implemented) bards and paladins will use this system for their own spellcasting.  Fighter and rogue powers will work slightly differently, but that will be the topic of a future update.

One of the first things I decided for the Facebook version was that it needed to change the original (PC) design if it were ever to work in the slowed-down asynchronous world of Facebook apps.  I needed to focus on letting the player actively create their little city like some cut-down version of Settlers, I needed to simplify the dungeon-delving.

You know what?  I was wrong.  Seriously, it just works as it is for some reason.

The city is nice to mess with, but there is already a Settlers game for Facebook which does everything I was thinking of doing with cities and more, but five minutes of playing it showed me that it wouldn’t work for Legacy of Heroes.  The dungeon delving is actually fun, one case of Mountain Dew and a pizza away from the kind of adventures I used to have around a coffee-table with my D&D group.  The players talk, they laugh, they joke.  It works because they are playing together…

Legacy of Heroes started because I missed my old D&D group.  It works because it has actually started to fill the void.  Expect a more social game (no, not in the Zynga ‘invite ten friends to get a free cow’ way) with a few more laughs, something to play with friends instead of against them.

Also, expect to watch things explode.  We are still tweaking the fireball, so it can be a little temperamental…

As expected, we seem to be doing both better and worse than the hypothetical ‘average studio’ – I got talking to a lot of people who had some ideas about the directions the industry is moving in and saw a lot of the mistakes we were making as a developer – but the perspective was useful for working out how to keep doing what we are doing right and stop doing what might not be working so well.

Interestingly, there were one or two points raised by players about Facebook games; these might need to be addressed at some point.  There was also a lot of talk about iPhone and iPad, but I think we’ll be letting another company handle the porting of any games which might end up on iOS formats.

Now, if you will excuse me, I think I will track down a cup of coffee and begin the difficult road back to full productivity…

Used well, they tend to give a sense of…  well…  achievement.  Early on in the game, you might get one for completing the tutorial, then another for your first successful battle.  By the end of the game, they are rare and special, awarded for completing the main story or collecting every coin or action figure in the game.

Once a novelty, these have become de rigueur for modern games, something you would be mad to leave out.  Console users rely on them to build up their credibility as a gamer, comparing scores to work out who is the most ‘hardcore’ in a certain group.

When I realised that I had actually spent half an hour of my life trying to ride a pig off a cliff, not to mention trawling a game website for hidden puzzles just to gain a ‘seal’ later the same day, I knew an achievement system was probably inevitable.  The achievements themselves actually work as an extension of the upcoming tutorial system, so it is not a great technical challenge, but I did wonder if they were necessary.

Given the low ‘cost’ here, I can’t see any reason not to.  I am not sure anyone would be offended by their presence…

While I may be the lead designer of Freya’s Aett, I was not always an indie; much of what I learned, I learned as a salaried employee in a bigger studio.  I want to talk about one of my pre-Freya’s Aett games in this post; it’s called Dragons’ Den and came out for the iPhone and iPad today. [App-Store Link]

This was actually not the last game I worked on, there are two more awaiting their moment in the sun, but it was one of the most important to me.  Dragons’ Den was my first experience of lead-design, running a whole team of developers and scheduling.  Thankfully, I had a very good mentor to call on when I needed a nudge in the right direction, in the form of industry-veteran Mete Djemal.  I could name all the brilliant individuals who taught me what I needed to know, but suffice to say that my design-style is a product of many men’s wisdom and many women’s too.

The first thing I discovered was that putting the words ‘Design Lead’ in your email signature does not make it so.  You have to earn the respect you might have hoped to get right off the bat, then you have to justify it by your actions.  I will not say that there were any real power struggles, but my lead programmer was the lead programmer, the Head of Technology at DR Studios.  I was a jumped-up narrative designer who had been a given a little project to lead.  There are 101 ways to approach this sudden shift in the power balance and most of them are bad ideas.  I had to learn humility, flattery and the subtle art of inspiring camaraderie.  Oh, that and blaming the deadlines on the COO…  Technically, since I was acting as the producer, it was that or blame Sony and I am not sure it would be very cathartic to moan about a monolithic entity like that.

In the end, I think my team were either humouring me or else had been getting stern looks from management, but at least we had a working relationship.  Sometimes, I even got everyone to turn up to the Scrum meetings, even if they did often happen an hour after the scheduled timeslot.  The game started to form.  I soon learned the next lesson.

If you are in charge, people ask you questions you were not expecting.  Yeah…  Design Documents…  They are never actually finished.  There is always something you forgot to write down.  You might not think some details are relevant, but it matters immensely to the artist  if you suddenly add in a button to the UI or if the game suddenly needs to support more than one currency.  Forward planning is key and here’s the kicker…  Sometimes, you need to delay the start of development until you finish designing, not try to finish it while the game is being built.  For a start, you don’t have much time to design if you are scheduling, writing strings, updating scripts and attending meetings to discuss why you are behind schedule.

Oh schedules…  How I despise thee…  I also kind of rely on thee too…

If you ask for time-scales and someone tells you ‘about a week’, get a solid time from them or they will remind you that it was only an estimate when the deadline passes unmet.  Telling the CEO you schedule was just an estimate will not fly.  Slack time…  Someone once said to add 10% slack.  Try 50% or more…  Never admit to management that you even have any slack time beyond about 10% of the estimate though.

The other thing, the big sin, is adding to the design without adding to the time-scale.  If you have a good idea, pitch it first.  Get an extension approved before adding the ‘essential feature’ and grovel if necessary to get it.

The thing is…  I never saw Mete do these things.  He missed deadlines (though much less than I did) and he must have been adding slack time to his schedules, but he made it look so easy and there is the biggest lesson; a good lead designer is like a swan, gliding effortlessly on the surface and paddling furiously under the waterline.  It reminded me of something I was once told as a young theatre director.

“Everyone is relying on you to be calm and in control.  You don’t have to manage it, but as long as you look like you have it all in hand, nobody else will panic.”

Sadly, I was unable to finish the development cycle due to certain economic factors, bringing it to life and then having to depart before the rough edges were fully rounded out, but I am told that Mete took up where I left off and I can’t say I disagree with the changes I have seen so far.  The game was a learning experience, a baptism of fire without which Freya’s Aett could never have been realised, and so I acknowledge my debt here and now to the team at DR Studios for making me the lead designer I am today.

- AnthonyHJ, a slightly-singed Narrative Designer

The first item of note is the new dungeon-exploration mechanic.  You can walk around the dungeons, keep track of the rooms you have previously explored by checking the mini-map, see where your allies are and more.  You will discover rooms full of monsters, locked doors which require the skills of a specialist (whether a rogue to pick the lock, a fighter to bash the door or a mage to decipher the runes of binding) and stories which explain just what you are doing in a dank and smelly cave miles from civilisation.

The character-adventure section is really starting to feel like a dungeon romp at last instead of a series of unrelated battles against randomly-selected monsters (sorry testers, I needed to get the combat system working before I could add dungeon-delving) and that means that the cities will soon be influenced by the choices you make, the dungeons you empty and the ones you choose not to…

It’s a good day to be a lead designer.

The name of the project is “Past Mistakes, a Jack Flint adventure”, formerly known by the code-name “Mean Streets”.  It’s a pulp detective story which is not really comedy, but doesn’t take itself too seriously either.  Ideally, it will be the start of a series of Jack Flint adventures, but it will also stand alone quite well.

There is currently no artist attached to the project, but recruitment will start before long.  We will initially be looking for a one-off artist or a series artist, due to the slightly different style of art needed, but there is no reason to think they wouldn’t be invited to work on other projects too.  While there is no composer attached, music by Kevin McLeod is currently being used under a Creative Commons attribution licence (CC-BY-3.0) to speed up the process.  Maybe if the Jack Flint series goes well, there may be a special edition with original music later; who knows?

The intention is to share the current ‘taster’ build of the game (sans art) with selected artists just to help establish the current direction and style, then start actively recruiting after the upcoming TIGJam UK event.