Kongregate Now the Best Opportunity for Bootstrapping a Game Company

Gamasutra recently interviewed Jim Greer about the news of Kongregate getting $5 million in funding. Kongregate plans to spend most of that on Funding the Flash Renaissance, as Gamasutra put it. The games Kongregate will be funding will be "premium games" - those that are a step above most of the current games on the Kongregate website. Staying true to the heart of Kongregate, part of the game will still be free, but part will also be purchasable through microtransactions. This could include paying for levels as stated, purchasing items for characters, or any number of different things.

This just adds more to the cake that is independent game development right now. In fact, based on the numbers Kongregate has released, we think they are now offering the best deal for bootstrapping a game company.

When we decided we wanted to start Intuition, we looked at all of the options out there for bootstrapping a game company with no games in its portfolio. One of the easiest ways to look at game development is to break it down into platforms, which I see as a "horizontal slice":

TV Console
Pros: High sales, high exposure/glory
Cons: High barrier to entry, sparse up-front funding, lose IP with funding?, royalties only likely in download space, harder development

Handheld Console
Pros: High sales(DS especially), medium exposure/glory, low-medium cost
Cons: Medium barrier to entry, sparse up-front funding, lose IP with funding?, no download space yet

PC
Pros: Low barrier to entry, low cost, cult indie glory, some up-front funding, easier development
Cons: Lower sales

If platforms are horizontal, then distribution channel is vertical:

Retail
Pros: High sales, high exposure/glory, well-established
Cons: High barrier to entry, sparse up-front funding, (probably) lose IP with funding, royalties extremely unlikely

Download
Pros: Low-medium barrier to entry, low-medium cost, some up-front funding, royalties likely
Cons: Variable sales, no handhelds yet

Web Browser
Pros: Low barrier to entry, low cost, some up-front funding, easier development, royalties probable
Cons: Variable sales, not well-established, only Wii for consoles

When you put these two together, you form a Game Development Bootstrapping Opportunity Matrix.



Based on these, we thought that the cell at PC and Web Browser was the best option for bootstrapping, because it's relatively easy to develop for, the cost is low, and the barrier to entry is low. The only downside is that it's risky; who knows what the sales will be, and it's not a well-established way to make a living. Aside from the couple grand you can get by being sponsored, there's not much living in it at all...until we stumbled upon two options a few months ago that looked promising: Adult Swim and Kongregate.

As we've mentioned before, Adult Swim has been commissioning games for their website. Someday I'd love to devote a post to why I think that is, but for now let's just say they are. Here's their deal:

Funding roughly $15k - 120k
No royalties
Single player game (for now)
Adult Swim owns IP

At the time we found out, all we knew was that Kongregate was sponsoring games. Now, everyone can be sure that funding is available. Check out these recently-announced stats:

Funding roughly $20-100k
70% royalties
Game must support a community
Period of exclusivity (1 year?)
Developer owns IP

So if you agree with the matrix above, getting funding from Kongregate for a premium game is a no-brainer. We've decided to give that avenue a shot; we'll give an update soon on how that's going; suffice to say for now, it's going well. However, Adult Swim is still a good option for getting started. You're getting paid to make a game, after all!

7 strikes - The "Unwritten Vision" & Finding a Systematic Methodology for Pitching Game Ideas

If this were baseball, the team may still be hopeful, but this is a video game, which includes baseball video games, so maybe hope is alive. Our last three ideas sent to Adult Swim were rejected and may not have been our best yet, although I probably shouldn't speak specifically about any of them, we all felt like the writing of the pitches themselves was very strong. Somehow we're always optimistic sending off these little guys, even though we've been rejected and tell each other that our chances are slim, our hopes always end up high in the sky where they shouldn't be.

"IDEAS! You are grounded!"

It's true, we need to ground ourselves and our lofty ideas of having hope for the future, especially when you offer up the fate of that future to another party for approval or disapproval. Chances are that our notions of which ideas are good and bad have a lot more to do with the "unwritten vision" inside our heads than what the actual written idea turns out to be on paper. For me, our ideas that we pitch turn into a fantasy of sorts, and part of the fuel that feeds that fantasy is the idea of the pitch's acceptance.

"Man, if we get to make this, it'll look like this, this and the player can do this! It'll be so cool!"

But this kind of thinking is counter-productive to pitching a really solid idea to a very critical audience with an even more critical target audience. By doing this we're essentially attaching our own convoluted emotions to the game's worth, that ultimately has nothing to do with the game itself. This ends up being a catch-22 since the hope and excitement of creating our own original game fuels us to work on it really hard, but in the same turn, it also clouds our judgment during that initial process.

"So how the hell do we see with eyes unclouded Ashitaka?"

I'm not exactly sure but I think we'll need a more systematic approach, and I think that's something we're closing in on as we go through this epic journey to save the forest spirit. In my opinion, that systematic approach would be more like a venture into the marketing world as opposed to just "using our gut." The gut is definitely more fun and better suited for our own internally-funded-games, but the marketing approach would probably lend itself to a higher success rate.

Who knows, but I'd say mix in more research, systematic methodology (pop-culture flow charts?), more criticism, emphasize character, and a lot of testing and we may just figure this thing out.

After writing this post and thinking about the nature of our pitches, and Adult Swim's reception of said pitches, I wonder if this is just a case of a generational gap. I think it's safe to say we believe in the web2.0 process of publishing, just getting it out there and seeing what everyone says, then re-iterating until it succeeds, however in contrast with AS's process, they appear to be founded in a quasi-traditional publishing process with just releasing one time, and hashing it out behind closed doors until it's up to snuff.

While that may not have a ton to do with our ideas sucking in the opinion of AS, I think it's part of the frustration we're experiencing.

Josh's response (I hope you don't mind if I add some input here)

The processes being referred to here are agile development for us and waterfall development for Adult Swim, respectively.

It's becoming pretty clear that the waterfall method only works in video games for select cases. That's why you are seeing a pathetic 20% success rate in video games versus the more typical 80% success rate of other media. Most people who analyze such things narrow the causes down to these:

1. The complex nature of video games creates a lot of chaos, which you simply can't plan for. Things go wrong and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

2. The interactive nature of video games creates a huge possibility space for events to occur. When you design a game, it's very difficult to think of all of the possibilities of actions that can occur, all of the problems inherent in those actions, and all of the solutions to those problems.

3. The industry is still in its infancy. We don't have a proven method for designing good games. So far it has been "guess and check."

Agile development tries to solve this by assuming that - whether you blame chaos, limited knowledge of possibility, or lack of established methodology - problems will occur no matter what and that you'll need to rework them to solve them. So get your product out the door as soon as possible to find out what those problems are - "release early." Then, release your product as frequently as you can so that whenever you go to solve your problems, you have as much information as possible about your product to inform your decision - "release often."

The problem with using this process for Adult Swim games is that it doesn't fit well with the website, since it is currently being treated like retail space in a media specialty store like Sam Goody. A small selection of finished, polished products are being presented in a way that assumes those who come across the page will be interested enough to play one or more of the games. The waterfall method will give you a finished, polished product to sell on the "shelf." In order to succeed here with the agile method, though, you need to be late enough in development that you have iterated a few times and came up with a polished product. The question then becomes "Who am I releasing early and often to, then?" And will Adult Swim even allow such a method?

The analogy of the retail space continues. In order to sell units - or in this case, traffic - you need to have an eye-catching cover - or in this case, gameplay video and description. Additionally, the game itself needs to be fun enough that Adult Swim can get more traffic through word-of-mouth advertising from people who have enjoyed it. So these are even two more reasons that it would be more fitting to use the waterfall method.

Another Round of Pitches to Adult Swim

Out goes another 3 pitches to Adult Swim. That comes to a total of 7 now. Although, it seems like we've sent way more than that. Maybe we're just getting used to it now. I don't want to say that we're getting good at it, but I'm not sure how else to say it... I know, we're starting to understand it more now. Yeah, that's it. I don't think any of us have pitched so much in all our lives. It's like we're Clark and Michael now or something.

In fact, we've discussed gathering all of our ideas into an official Rejected Game Ideas list. I bet we could hit 50 at this point. Of course, many of them look like this:

CULTure Shock
You play as an aspiring cult leader and must build up your membership while trying to secure the necessary inventory for the rapture. Run into normal everyday problems along the way; the store is out of kool-aid, run out of gas, rent bills piling up.

Game mechanics?
* Collecting membership and putting them to work building the future
* Devising mass suicides
* Dealing with everyday problems


So it's not like the list would be a novel or anything. This is one of the better rejected ones; some of them are pretty tasteless. I think that's what would make the book so entertaining.

Speaking of that, I think it would be great to compile them into a book and use an on-demand printing company like Blurb to sell the book online. Of course, this is exactly something I would say. I always seem to be looking for some crazy way to get us some money, since, you know, we're dirt poor and all.

Hopefully, we're getting closer to the kind of ideas Adult Swim is interested in. We can keep going, though. If we do, I just hope that we get to the point where we're the pitch-giving equivalent of when you get really, really tired at 4am, and you start to get all delirious. Then it's really going to get interesting.

We're Like a Hot Dog In Search of a Bun

After looking at this image and snickering for a moment, I quickly realized that we are the hot dog. We have a meaty game development substance to us, and are in search of a bun to present our meat in a way that is easy to grab and consume. Not only that, but we're not sure exactly what kind of hot dog we are and therefore what kind of bun should hold us. We just stand there, intrigued by the opportunity we see before us.

So the search continues to find our proverbial bun. With regards to that, a lot has happened in the past couple weeks.

After Dinowaurs was turned down, we sent it over to Jim Greer and the folks at Kongregate. They seemed pretty interested in the idea, but were thinking more about the game being a multiplayer experience. Finding that out was exciting, because our original idea was for the game to be a multiplayer game. So now we're working on editing the pitch to be multiplayer. Hopefully they'll enjoy what we've come up with.

Then, all three of our pitches sent to Adult Swim were shot down. However, there was a glimmer of hope. They seemed to really like one of our ideas in particular - Hitchhikémon. As the name suggests, the game is based on the Pokémon franchise. In Hitchhikémon, you cruise the highway, picking up Hitchhikémon who seem like promising additions to the team and battling other Hitchhikémon masters. You must order your Hitchhikémon to fight from the roof of your speeding truck while avoiding oncoming traffic, road debris, and civilian drivers. Utilize strategic thinking to decide what weapons they'll use in a given fight to develop their skills into a true killer.

So basically, the game is like Pokémon, but instead of walking around, you drive in your truck. Not only that, but you fight with your hitchhikers while you're still driving - and you have to avoid obstacles. It's every hitching stuntman's dream game.

The problem with this game is that the name is a pretty big part of what makes it funny, and considering the ridiculous size of the Pokémon franchise, attempting an obvious parody would be pretty risky for Adult Swim. The good news is that we're quickly closing in on the kinds of things Adult Swim is looking for.

Mike continues to work on Melba Toast. What is Melba Toast? I'll leave the details to Mike, but for now I can say that it's our highly-optimized Flash 9 engine. And it'll rock your socks off. We've been debating on whipping up a really small game with it. Right now we're thinking of trying to clone Tanks from Wii Play. Man, that's such a great game. It has this N-type quality to it, where the mechanics are extremely simple, yet extremely well-tuned. Really, the game would end up a poor man's Tanks because of how hard that quality is to pull off. Stayed tuned to see what happens with that project.

Finding the Right Fit

Well, Dinowaurs was rejected because it was "too cute." While we really liked the idea, it's not the end of the world for us. Thankfully, coming up with ideas isn't too hard. Three new pitches have arrived at Adult Swim this morning. What if they still don't like those ideas? Does that mean we're just not the right fit for each other?

The concept of the "right fit" is an often neglected, yet very important part of game development. Adult Swim would essentially be our publisher. It's very important for a publisher and developer to have like-minded goals in game development. Unfortunately, most of the time the goal of the publisher is to make money by bringing profitable games to market, instead of bringing games to market that create a certain kind of game experience. I don't think this is the goal (at least not the short-term goal) for Adult Swim. The games on the their website are free after all. The short-term goal seems to be simply bringing people to the website by many different means, including original Flash games. What is the long-term goal? That is yet to be determined.

If we focus on the short-term goal, then we need to ask ourselves if the people Adult Swim wants coming to their website are the people we want to make games for. I think an easy way to find that out is whether or not Adult Swim likes our ideas. If we get rejected again, than it's a pretty safe assumption that the people we're focusing on don't match up.

Surely there's more to funded Flash development than just Adult Swim, right? Shouldn't we not put all our eggs in one basket?

Enter Kongregate, an attempted "YouTube of Games" website that aims to bring Flash games to the masses. So far, they seem to be well on their way. In fact, they just recently started sponsoring Flash game development. So off Dinowaurs goes to Kongregate. Maybe it will be appreciated there. If only we could make another Dinowaurior...

What is the right fit for us? We're still not sure. These are just two of many opportunities out there. Part of being a new company is wandering around trying to figure that very thing out. One thing is for sure, though: this is an exciting time to be in game development.

"It's like sending your only child off to college"

Not that I've ever had to do that, but I imagine the experience would be very similar to today's Super Secret Special Shipment. That's right! Today we shipped out something so special and top secret that we can only refer to it by its Christian name: Levi. He's making his way due south to Williams Street, not for a sampling of Georgia's great golf courses, or Atlanta's rich history, but for his future; heck! for our future.

Ted and I spent most of the morning packing little Levi's things, taking pictures desperately trying to capture his final hours in Ames where he was born. Oh heavens, the memories! I remember when Ted (Levi's father) brought him into work to show him off to everyone, we all cooed with delight. Ted looked so proud. I know it's probably hardest on him, letting him go, off to explore the world on his own, but I remember hearing a song once about letting birds free if you truly love them and I take comfort in that, I think I'll record that on tape for Ted.

Little Levi (I keep calling him that, he's big now... he's big) has always been an inspiration to us. His leaving brings up so many moments, laughter, and even sadness. The annual swap-'n'-save we had at work a week or so ago. He brought me a beautiful pink sweatshirt (seen in my bio picture on our site) that was so festive and warm that I don't think I took it off for at least 5 days. It wasn't until just yesterday that I found out Levi had knit me that sweater from the wool of his first lamb in honor of our friendship.

That young Dinamo, he's persevered through a great deal and God bless Ted for all his love and grace in raising such a fine specimen. He won't be in Atlanta until 10:30AM tomorrow, but when he does get there, his driver has promised to email us with confirmation that he's arrived safe at William St. Godspeed to our little guy, and to all you readers down there in Atlanta, keep a lookout for our special one, he's probably a little sun burnt and needs your helping hand.

Website Updates, USPS Bullshit, though not in that order

He kids, thanks for tuning in. I just got done biking around Ames, which is pretty much all I have to do on a Friday night, and decided to update you guys on the current situation. I know you're all as anxious to hear how our pitch is going over with the Adult Swim guys as we are and I just wanna let you know that USPS is totally worthless, consider this my formal declaration of independence from that government run shit-house. We sent the package on 2 day mail Monday and still have not received notification of delivery. Ted is progressing nicely with the sculpey-dino and we are definitely NOT using USPS. Though I don't really believe the $352.88 Sonic-Air option is necessary per-se, I do know we'll be taking our business far, far away from the government lackeys.
In other news, the website is totally, and I may alienate some of our readers by saying this but I must, pimp. If you haven't checked it out in a while I suggest you stop by and see what's up, its more than just growing grass and 'shrooms now as I've gotten around to implementing some neat pop-up stuff and thumbnails with Greg's help on the visual aspect. We still maintain the data-driven model, so if anyone else ever gets the gumption to mess with the layout, as Greg and Josh has already done a bit on the team page, they may do it with a limited amount of XML experience and without needing to stomach the horror of reading any of my "codes". In reality I am disgusted with the actual "codes" controlling the website, as it's just a mash-up of various pieces of functionality, each one tacked onto the previous iteration. To put it simply, it is the embodiment of feature-creep despite its development time being limited to about two and a half weeks.
At the very least I recommend you check out the back page for our new thumbnail implementation, it was fun to create and we are featuring a brand new artist who joined the team despite him already being the main programmer. I drew some concept art of what I considered to be the best day ever and it just so happened to involve dinosaurs fighting with high powered weaponry while villagers streamed about them in some fanciful representation of worship. Almost like some kind of war... Maybe a Dinowaur?

And the Lisa Frank Genie Says: "Outlook Good"

The pitch has been submitted! Yessss. Working together on everything has been a blast. At one point, we were discussing how to present the pitch materials. We got to talking about how great it would be to put the materials in a cheesy grade school folder with dinosaurs on it. Greg and I agreed that a Lisa Frank dinosaur folder would be the coolest ever. We went through the internets (and the local school supply stores) in search of such a folder. Unfortunately, such things don't seem to exist. However, while browsing the Lisa Frank website, we discovered there was a games section. Naturally, we went to check it out. The first thing we found was a game called Ask Genie. It's essentially a magic 8-ball in the form of the typical obnoxious Lisa Frank colors and graphics that we were familiar with, but with an updated Bratz-inspired girl genie. Greg asked her "will we get monies?" (Now, it's not all about the money, but hey, we gotta pay the bills just like anyone else.) The response was "Outlook Good." Yes! We high fived and concluded that the matter was settled. Something good is going to happen.

Even though we couldn't find any Lisa Frank dinos, Greg's girlfriend Kym made us an image out of her love for dinosaurs (and Greg, presumably). It was so good, we wanted to use it for a folder, but concluded that the craft of a hand-made folder wouldn't hold up to our standards. So instead, all of you can be blessed with its awesomeness above.

What did we end up doing for presenting the pitch materials? Well, Ted found some folders he had saved from the time of Disney's Dinosaur. Thankfully, he recognized the value of them and had them stored away in a safe location. We unanimously concluded that the folder that said "Extinct This" with a picture of a Carnotaur screaming would be the one used for holding the pitch materials. So the pitch materials were added, stickers were put on the folder and packaging, and the package was sent to Adult Swim.

So far, the genie's prediction has been accurate. Nothing has seemed to go wrong with anything, yet. Our pitch isn't perfect, but everything is there and we feel it's of high quality. Hopefully our hard work will pay off.

Looking Back On the Last 2 Weeks

I was talking with Greg and reflecting on what we've been up to lately. Intuition really started about 2 weeks ago when Greg, Mike, Ted and I got together at ISU to talk about the possibility of making a game. I realized that in the next couple days, we'll have done the following in just over 2 weeks:

• Created a Flash-based website with a dynamic XML back end
• Created a slick company identity
  
• Created a preliminary design for a fun dinosaur fighting game with a great style and sense of humor
  
• Created a good pitch document (we think) and sent it to Adult Swim of all places!
• Created good concept art for the dino game
  
• Created a simple game mechanic prototype for the dino game

Wow. That progress just amazes me. I wonder what we could accomplish in the next 8 months...

Creating a Pitch Is Hard

So we're creating a pitch to submit to Adult Swim. Before you get too confused, it's for a video game, not a show. The pitch has to be 2 pages, which seems like plenty. However, for describing something as complicated as a game, it's surpisingly difficult. We've found the trick is to just glaze over everything. It sounds simple I know, but if you're excited about an idea and want to share that with someone else, your first instinct is to describe all the exciting details. Instead, you've got to try to be short and sweet.

Well, there's a fine line between short & concise and short & confusing. Not only that, it's a pitch, which means it needs to sell. How to do you explain a game mechanic in a concise way and make it sound exciting? I don't really think you can. With our pitch, we've settled for starting out with a more humorous tone, then transitioning into a clear explanation of the game. Every once in a while, some witty phrases are sprinkled in. Will it work? We'll find out in about a week.

Does anyone have any pitch experience or advice?