The slightly more annoying brother to the Laid back Friday Night Cinemas, this brother occasionally pops in his head to see how things are going. In this case, hope this brightens up your evening.

Share on Facebook

Up, up, and AWAY!

Y’know, it’s tough to keep momentum while trying to feed and clothe yourself.

And it’s not even like our jobs are soul-sucking or anything.  They’re quite nice, and the company is really swell.  But it is a high-performance organization, and as can be expected, it takes a significant mental and temporal investment, even at times outside of working hours.

Every indie project has its share of troubles.  We struggle on with the distinct impression that there is actually very little keeping us from exploding with progress.  And, as always, we’re holding to The Vision:  build something awesome and don’t sell out to EA.

Our Achilles heel continues to be the production of in-game art assets.  Thankfully, we’re not alone with this trouble — our brainy partners at Flaming Pigeon Studios may have found a solution, in the form of an artistically-endowed friend.  If all goes well going forward, we may just see that rocket-propelled growth that we crave.

(And if we had a nickel for every time we’ve said that… )

Share on Facebook

To be clear: we’re referring to the website, not the game. The game has been chugging along merrily despite the lack of updates, thank you very much

We’re happy to welcome back our resident Poop Midas, plus our level-designer-and-Überina-understudy, Matt! They’ve taken the dubious honor of fixing our website upon themselves. My understanding is that Matt in particular wants to resurrect the “ever-popular” (hey, I can dream, right?) Friday Cinemas, once our website can actually display flash on the main page!

Welcome back, guys. We’re counting on you to compensate for our suck!

Share on Facebook

What’s spookier than a horde of spambots taking over the forums we created and then forgot about for 18 months?

Real life ghost footage!  OoooooOOOoooo!

Share on Facebook

I don’t know what it is about August 2011, but it’s been a bummer at UGS HQ.  In the interest of personal privacy, I won’t go into any great detail, but it seems like every single team member has suffered or witnessed some kind of calamity last month.  Our velocity took a bit of a hit, but it’s hard to be concerned about something like that when people we <3 are suffering.

So, uh, I don’t know if we mentioned this a month back when we knew about it, but we’re not meeting our BHAG for the summer (commence booing).  But wait!  We’ve been dutifully working away at our backlog and tracking our progress, and we now have the data to determine with confidence when our demo will be released.  I’m going to bug Lewis a little bit and see if he’ll let me release a comprehensive view of our backlog, which might be useful for anyone else who wanders down the indie development path.  Tune in soon for more on that!

In unrelated news, I hear that our good friend Will from Exalt Studios, another indie studio in Edmonton, is gearing up for a release of his kart racer, Silas.  I hope you’re all going to buy a copy!  Heck, I don’t really even play games anymore, and I’m still going to pick one up!

Share on Facebook

Those of you in the fine city of Edmonton may have been aware of a certain convention this weekend known as Animethon.  Some of you may have even attended!  But the real question is whether or not you were one of the lucky ones to pick up our Tainted Sword flyer.  Yes, that right, the first real promotional piece directly related to our flagship title!  Technically these shiny flyers were printed for distribution at GDC this year, but due to Kevin’s ‘flyer fail‘ and enforced rules on self-promotion, we never got the opportunity to hand any of them out – unless you count the one that blew away in the wind.  Somewhere out there, some hobo is probably in love with Verna, whose picture came mysteriously out of the sky.

Er… anyway…  We had the opportunity to take a seat in Artists Alley at Animethon, alongside Flaming Pigeon Studios and the fine artists that it comprises.  A big shout-out of thanks to them for the space… and free convention passes!  We also wandered the floors gawking at the many strange cosplayers and generally annoying people by forcing our flyers on them.  With the special help of Überina of course!

It should be noted that Kevin missed out on all the fun due to a unfortunate illness.  However our map designer and generally helpful member of our team, Matt, was more than willing to fill Kevin’s shoes as the bearer of Überina!  And he did a fine job; he might just have to be at the forefront of our promotional activities.

You may recall that last year Über Game Studios sponsored the Console Gaming Room at the conference.  This time, we were lazy and declined the offer in favor of the activities described above.  As it turned out, it was a good idea; the entire conference proved to be quite valuable – a lot of interesting people to talk to and hang out with.  People ranging from a professional game developer (from a little Edmonton company… what was it called… Bio-something?) to a very nice individual who joined us on our flyer rounds who provided some interesting ideas for future promotions.

With any luck, the people who took our flyers kept them rather than throwing them away.  In fact, it might be possible that you reached our site because of our flyer and/or brief chat during Animethon!  If this is the case, thanks so much for coming by our site!  Feel free to comment below and ‘Like’ our Facebook page!  We’d love to hear from you!

(By the way, the ‘Bio-something’ bit above was a joke.  I know perfectly well that’s called Bioware!  How could I live in Edmonton and not know the company that made that famous game… what was it called… Sonic Chronicles!)

Share on Facebook

One of the advantages of being busy to the point of dropping off the radar for the last few months is that we haven’t had to worry about people pestering us about joining our project.  Don’t get me wrong, we loooooove the attention, but since starting to work on Tainted Sword we’ve become pretty jaded about the scores of would-be game developers that we’ve met along the way.

Our core team of game developers rarely changes.  Over the past year-or-so of development, and the year-or-so of concepting before then, we’ve had a couple of people join our team, and couple of people move on for legitimate reasons (note: when you can’t pay anybody, practically anything counts as a legitimate reason).  The best thing that ever happened to us was signing Flaming Pigeon to do our art, filling a gaping hole in our expertise.  But we’ve also had nearly a dozen talented people express interest in joining our team only to flounder on the threshold of actually accomplishing anything useful and ultimately buzz off.

So what does it take to join an indie game project, or any game project in general?  Extra Credits ran an excellent feature on this topic last year.  From our own experience, I’d like to add the following.

This is a critical element of contribution: having something to contribute.  I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who want to make or play video games for a living.  They’re often avid gamers themselves, but have nothing marketable to offer beyond vague ideas.  But as Extra Credits aptly points out, there’s no room in the game industry for an idea guy.  Everyone from the highest executive role to the lowest QA guy is over-saturated with ideas.  The only thing in short supply is the practical capability to turn those ideas into finished products.

Game development teams hire based on need, but generally try to accomplish as much as possible with the fewest number of people; there are many practical reasons for this.  When the skills align perfectly, it’s possible (and even favourable) to get by with as few as one or two people.  Our own core team of three people has an abundance of technical, design, and writing expertise; we’re forced to rely on contractors for art and music, but we will always be interested in infusing our team with artistic talent directly.

I’ve heard lots of people complain that it’s difficult to get into the game industry.  That’s simply not true, but there’s a catch: there’s lots of room in the industry, but only for the right people.  Valve, the monolithic game creator/publisher/distributor best known for Half-Life and Steam, is relatively small for a triple-A studio, having only around 260 employees.  In a recent interview, their Managing Director Gabe Newell claimed that they would hire as many as 50 new people – so long as those people all meet their skill criteria.

The trick is that you need to be prepared to diversify.  Triple-A studios are known for assembling massive teams of specialists, which allows them to make technologically superb but creatively lacking games.  Valve is in the enviable position of assembling a dream team of people who are jack-of-all-trades, master-of-at-least-two.  Part of the dream of owning a development studio is to be able to encourage and fund the acquiring of new skills among our team.

This should be a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised by how many people who wanted to help us eventually bailed out on account of a bi-weekly meeting.  We’re all busy, what with work, life, and relationships; we get that.  But there is a minimum standard of communication that’s required to be a part of any project.  If you can’t make it to any of the meetings, in person or on Skype (hey, we’re pretty easy that way), do you really think you’ll be able to get up to speed and contribute in a meaningful way?

Believe it or not, this is actually the most important point on the list.  If you really want to help build a game, find something that you can do, then do it.  A lot of people are confused by hierarchical project and company structures, and think that the business world is nothing short of an endless network of managers who tell you what to do.  But as Jim Collins pointed out in Good to Great, if you ever feel the need to manage someone, to tell him/her what to do or how to do it, then you’ve hired the wrong person for the job.

To put it bluntly, there’s enough work to do building a great game and a great company that it doesn’t make any sense for a contributing member of the team to spend any effort trying to motivate other people or keep them productive.  This is particularly true on an independent game project, where there are no monetary constraints forcing a release at a particular date.

You can have all of the expertise in the world, but if you don’t have ownership, you’ll produce something inferior if you manage to produce anything at all.  But if your team is passionate and self-driven, it doesn’t matter what skills you lack, you can still produce something monumental that people will enjoy for years to come.  One look at Dwarf Fortress and you’ll know what I mean

Share on Facebook

• We’re not dead.  Yay!
• We’re both working full-time at other jobs.  Meh, they’re pretty cool.
• We’ve received some assets!  More yay!
• While we’re waiting on assets, we’re working on the toolkit.
• We’ve assigned story point value to blog posts, so we now have an incentive to write them
• The Poop Midas is on “maternity” leave while he works on his own game.  Boo!
• We’re going to be wearing tutus on Saturday.  Don’t ask (but stay tuned for the video)

Share on Facebook

Following another invigorating sprint review and sprint planning session, I was trolling our webpage (yeah, I know, trolling your own website is classy) and I realized that you guys have no idea what’s been going on for the last several weeks since GDC — where the Über Bus is, who’s on it, and where it’s going.  Whoopsie daisy, lemme try and get you guys up to speed.  Don’t worry, it’s all good news

First and foremost, we’ve been busy setting up our art pipelines with Flaming Pigeon as we gear up to leave the Pre-Production phase and head squarely into Production territory (video games follow similar development phases to film making, though the contents of each stage is wildly different from films).  Our FPS art director has returned from Japan safe and sound, and we’re sooooo happy to have her back!

Second, our meetings at GDC have revealed to us how important early feedback and cash flow are to getting the big name distributors, like Steam and XBLA.  With that in mind, we chose our new BHAG:

To release our first public demo and start offering pre-orders at the end of August!

Our first public demo will include the first draft of the entire user interface, the first two areas (constituting the bulk of the first chapter), and working versions of all of the features of the game.  This will give us 1.25 years to build the rest of the game incorporating all of your feedback.  During that time, the demo will be re-released at various stages to demonstrate new value.  How’s that for iterative development!

People who pre-order the game will pay a reduced amount of the launch-day pricetag while still receiving the full game when it’s released.  In the meantime, however, they will get new content to add to their demo copies at regular intervals as we continue developing it.

Well, there you have it, our goal until September.  It’s big, it’s audacious, and I daresay it’s hairy too.  But if we meet it, we’ll be in a very good position to realize our long term goal, which is a holiday 2012 release.

Share on Facebook

We wanted to quench your thirst for epic games using this epic video. But embedding was disabled on youtube

Extra Credits is still pretty epic, though.

Share on Facebook