Why We Decided to Publish Ruinarch

If you follow Squeaky Wheels’ Facebook, Twitter, and Steam developer pages (and if you haven’t hint, hint please do so!) you’ll by know by now that we have just announced that we are publishing another studio’s game.  As with many of Squeaky Wheel’s milestones, I wanted to take the time to dig into our thought process on why and how this happened.

But first, we’d like to introduce you guys to Maccima Games and their debut title Ruinarch (Wishlist PLEASE!). 

Ruinarch is a wickedly fun evil overlord simulator where you cause havoc on people’s lives before taking their lands. Inspired by story generators like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, create an infernal narrative for your victims as you poison food, raise the dead, and inflict endless misery upon them.

If any of that spoke out to you, wishlist it now! Ruinarch is coming out in Early Access sometime in 2020.

How Did This Happen?

It’s really kind of crazy how Squeaky Wheel and Maccima Games hooked up.  About half a year ago I randomly saw one of maccima’s tweets of a screenshot and thought “Hey, that looks cool!  I clicked on the Twitter profile and saw that their website used the .ph (as in Philippines) domain. I checked out their website and we even more impressed with what I saw, and immediately chatted them up, asking about their game, and how I’d like to meet up some time to talk some more. 

I came away from that meeting even more impressed, but we weren’t really in a position to make an offer at the time.  It just felt good that there were other people making PC strategy games in Manila! I offered to help introduce them to people when they were ready to think about publishing, and only asked that they send us their pitch document as well to give us first dibs on a possible publishing deal

A few months pass, and Maccima came to us with a pitch.  The pitch was professional, and most importantly realistic in terms of schedule and numbers. Maccima was a well run team that could operate independently of Squeaky Wheel, meaning we wouldn’t be wasting any time at all and effectively doubling our game development output.  

After taking a hard look at what they needed and our financial state at the time, we decided that this was a financial risk that we could take. Even if the Ruinarch flops, Squeaky Wheel would still be able to stay afloat. So after about a month of negotations, we signed Maccima to a publishing deal in August, and we’re so excited to be finally able to share that now.

But why bother with publishing? Squeaky Wheel is still a tiny studio that doesn’t really have deep pockets. While we wouldn’t go under if Ruinarch flopped, that was still money that might otherwise have gone into our profit sharing pool.  Tl:dr publishing Ruinarch is about more than just money to us. If you want to know more, just keep reading.

Nurturing an Industry

While I cannot speak for my other cofounders, part of what drove me to start a studio was a personal desire to help grow the Philippine game development industry. This fascination with building an industry all started with the time I read Richard Florida’s Flight of the Creative Class.  In it, popular economist Richard Florida espoused a vision of the world where cities would compete for creative class workers (defined as people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment whose). Inspired by the book, I set about to do my own small part by helping to nurture the local game development industry.

At the time (about 10 years ago) I saw my role as community building. I helped to revitalize the local IGDA chapter, holding monthly meetings (against the wishes of some local studio managers) and creating a space where devs could meet and learn from each other.  We started the first Manila Game Jam in 2010 to coincide with the global game jam, and I led the community for 3 years. It was often a struggle, but I firmly believed that if we had a strong community, the clustering effect would help propel individuals and companies to be at par with the world, and create a game industry that would funnel investment and money into the Philippine economy.

I’m proud of what we did, but I’m a little less naive now.  I don’t think that the game industry on its own can lift up any country’s economy out of the mire. I don’t think there is any way to leapfrog our way into being an industrialized country, which I strongly believe is a prerequisite for any country or city to have a strong and growing creative class. 

Squeaky Wheel 

As fulfilling as IGDA was, three years had taken its toll on me, so I took a break to focus on myself and my freelance career first. This culminated in my work on Prison Architect.  While it was immensely gratifying to be a part of a game that truly shaped the industry (so much so that Paradox Interactive bought the IP!), I felt that PA was as far as I could go as an individual. That, combined with the ever nagging impulse to nurture the local industry, was one of the things that led to the formation of Squeaky Wheel (if you are interested, read about the long road to the creation of Squeaky Wheel and how we landed our first publishing deal this three part blog series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).  

Running Squeaky wheel has been quite the experience (read restrospectives from 2016, 2017, 2018).  We launched a game that flopped. We launched a game that succeeded.  We’re nowhere near as successful as many other companies, but we are in the extremely fortunate position of being able to survive and support ourselves.  Now that we are in that position where we’re no longer on the verge of collapsing every month, why choose to spend that money on other people rather than ourselves?

Why is Publishing Important To Us?

Publishing a game means so much more to the local industry than simply handing over a bunch of money to another developer.  All of the funding that Squeaky Wheel has had so far came from outside the Philippines. That may not seem like a big deal to developers from other countries stacked with publishers but let me tell you : it feels fucking good not to have to rely on outside funding. What makes this more special for me is that game development is one of the few industries in the Philippines where you can create almost literally create something out of nothing. A decade ago, most local funding came from foreigners, oligarchs, and deeply entrenched business interests. I am immensely proud that bunch of weirdo gamedevs from varying lower to upper middle class backgrounds came together to create a studio that can now support other studios. It is a sign of the maturity of our industry.  It says “we can do this on our own now”. Being able to say that, and being able to support another studio’s creative endeavor, is worth so much more than the money we put into their studio.

Where Do We Send our Pitch?

So are we really a “publisher” now?  Well, not really. There was a huge confluence of circumstances that led to this point.  We’re not actively looking to publish any more games than this (especially since we don’t really have the budget!) but who knows what the future might bring?

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this interesting! If you want to support us, you can buy Academia: School Simulator or Political Animals, or wishlist Ruinarch.

Four Years of Squeaky Wheel

Four years ago on this month, Tristan, Marnel and I became officially registered as Squeaky Wheel Studio Inc.We’ll be taking a break today and having dinner with some of our gamedev friends to celebrate, but in the meantime let me take a walk down memory lane.

September 2015

I am at EGX 2015 for the launch of Prison Architect.  The IVSoftware team have kindly flown me and my wife over to celebrate the launch, so I use this as a way to pitch our game Political Animals to publishers.  I meet Cliffski for the first time and pitch the game to him.  

Within a couple of days he offers me a publishing deal.  Anyone who has done a publishing deal before will know that this is an extraordinarily short amount of time to get a deal done.  It helps that we got along and Cliffski is a one-man show studio that answers to no one, but still.

October 2015

After landing back in Manila I immediately set about establishing a company, which is not a trivial process in the Philippines.  I end up paying more than I probably needed to in order to have another company help me set up my company, such is life here. We are officially registered with the SEC by October 28, 2015

Funny aside, I had thought that we had incorporated on October the 15, which is why we are celebrating our anniversary today. :P

November 2016

After almost a year of working nonstop on Political Animals and taking it to conventions like BICfest, TGS, and PAX, we release the game.  Even with all the advantages that we had, it is a flop. 

September 2017

A mere 10 months later, we launch Academia : School Simulator in Early Access.  It succeeds well enough to save the company and we continue development of the game.

October 2019

It has been a little over 2 years since Early Access launch, and 3 years since initial development of Academia.  We have hit many highs and lows, but the game continues to make enough income to support our team.

<October 2020

This brings me to an announcement from the future.  At some point before October 2020, we want to launch version 1 of Academia : School Simulator.  The game has made major strides since it first came out. While there is still more work to be done, we can finally see the finish line.  

Games like Academia : School Simulator are tricky things.  While there is the potential to build on it infinitely, we believe we’re coming close to a point that we are personally satisfied with it. Version 1 doesn’t necessarily mean the end of development, but it does mean a change of focus for the team.. It’s been a long road, and we’re excited to slowly inch our way to something new, whatever that may be.

Spoiler Alert, we have some exciting news coming up soon, so stay tuned!

Thanks to Everyone

We want to thank everyone that has supported us throughout this journey.  Thanks to everyone who has played the game (if you enjoyed your experience please write us a review because it really matters!).  Thanks to our partners, our parents and families for supporting us. Thanks to our fellow devs, streamers, and publishers for supporting us, spreading the word, and putting your faith in us.  

We hope that you’ll stick around for the years to come!

A Response to Cliffski's 10 Tips to 10X Your Indie Game Development Process

Recently the noted indie curmudgeon Cliffski wrote a lengthy blogpost about how to improve your indie game development process, for which he received a lot of unfair criticism from the internets. A lot of this abuse was unwarranted, and I want to take this opportunity to respond to show people that you can disagree with someone without necessarily hurling abuse at them.

NOTE: It is rather cheeky to do this, but Cliffski published our first game, and by now we’ve known each other well enough that would call him a friend (although this may put that to the test!)

Tip #1 Stop fucking around with ‘fun’ disguised as work

Reading reddit is not work, unless its 100% actual new, informative, well-reasoned and argued and productivity or sales-boosting information directly applicable to indie game development on the platform/genre combo you work in

Cliffski takes aim at “useless” activities disguised as work, like reading reddit, playing indie games, and watching youtube let’s plays. While I agree that hunkering down and actually working is the key component in any endeavor, not just gamedev, there is a lot of value to wasting time. I can say this as someone who tried to devote himself to making sure every single day of his life was planned perfectly so as not to waste a minute of time.

There is a supermarket near my home that charges me 30 Pesos (about 75 cents) if I park there for more than 15 minutes. I have planned my grocery shopping such that as soon as I enter the parking lot I have already pre-mapped my route through the grocery story to pcik up everything I need in order so that I am out by 15 minutes. When I miss this arbitrary deadline I get pissed off. I tried to spend the rest of my life this way and it drove me (and my wife) crazy.

There is huge value in making an efficient use of your time. But there is also value in giving yourself a little bit of slack to enjoy stuff, play some games, and read through things. It’s impossible to know ahead of time what will be “100% actual new, informative, well-reasoned and argued and productivity or sales-boosting information” so you need to give yourself time to explore. Sometimes this means time will be wasted, and we need to be okay with that.

Tip #2 Work somewhere quiet

cliffski’s hyperbaric chamber

a coffee shop is not quiet. Nor is any room in your house/apartment where other people walk through regularly. You need to be an end-zone where people only enter your room if they need YOU.

I mostly agree with Cliff here, although to a certain extent this is dependent on your personality. There is some value to be gained from having white noise around you. When I was still exclusively a freelance artist and would often spend hours painting or creating art, I would have a podcast in the background as it genuinely helped me concentrate. This is hard to do if you are writing either code or just plain old text, as the same brain functions are triggered by hearing people speak and actually writing things down. This is because we generally “talk” to ourselves in our head as we are writing, so hearing someone speak at the same time can be jarring.

Ultimately its the being interrupted part that is jarring. So what I’ve done is to try to have the best of both worlds. I work from home in a personal office (really it’s our second bedroom where I have been graced with the use of a corner). To simulate white noise I use a couple of websites:

1. http://rainycafe.com/ : does what it says on the tin. two toggles and a volume control for rain and cafe sounds.

2. Air traffic control + Ambient vangelis-like sounds : This is my personal super weird combo. It makes me feel like I’m in a sci-fi movie.

3. Any “lo-fi hip hop” playlist on Spotify

I have gone over the deep end before and wasted too much time trying to find the “right” white noise, so just pick a sound that you enjoy but can easily ignore, and start working.

Tip#3 Get a big monitor, get 2 big monitors. Don’t feel bad if you have 3.

Three is a bit excessive, but sure, why not. More screen real estate means more information. Too much information can lead to distraction though. For folks with laptops who want a portable solution, this AOC 16-inch usb powered monitor has been an absolute godsend for me.

Tip#4 Shortcut keys and batch files etc

Zero arguments here. I have made shortcut keys for Photoshop for this very same reason. Any time spent learning shortcut keys is repaid 100 fold in the long run.

Tip#5 Comfort

When it comes to my office, no expense is spared. If you are an indie developer, your desk and office chair are probably more important to you than your car, TV, cooker and sofa combined. You will (hopefully) spend a lot of time in that chair at that desk. Get a really good one. try many, the really good ones will last a while. Mine is an aeron, 9 years old, still perfect. I actually had a desk made for me (surprisingly cheap actually), It will last forever. Do not make false economies here. Mine was about £800. Thats under £100 a year so far for the place I park my ass most of my life.

YES, YES, ONE HUNDRED TIMES YES! This makes more sense for older devs who have to deal with more joint and back pain as they age. But no matter what age you are, buy the most comfortable equipment you can afford.

This includes beds btw. I’d been dealing with some back pain for a very long time and going through a bunch of chairs to find the perfect one. Turns out my main problem was our old bed mattress that I had inherited from my parents. We bought a stiffer mattress and my back pain improved tremendously.

Tip#6 Mindset

Do not surround yourself with well meaning people who tell you what you want to hear. Thats a route that spirals down and down into insular failure and disappointment.

It’s almost impossible to respond to this because it’s so rambling and I have an image of Cliffski in his bathrobe yelling at the gamedev kids to get the fuck off his lawn. But I’ll tackle the point about surrounding yourself with people that tell you want you want to hear with a story.

Someone who used to be a friend of mine asked me to take a look at his 3d animation because he really wanted to get into gamedev. I took a look, and the animation, such as it was, was an object moving from one end of the screen to the other. I told him good job, but tried to explain that animation was a lot more complex than that, and gave him tips and links to improve. He left in a digital huff (this was over chat) and never asked me about animation again. He never became an animator.

People need different things to be able to thrive in their careers. Some need more support than others, and that’s ok! We can’t all be workaholic maniacs like Cliffski. But a certain amount of grit and persistence is needed to see any endeavor through, and if you give up after one well meaning criticism? I don’t have much hope for you.

side note: I have been trying to learn Japanese on and off for about 7 years. I am still pretty fucking terrible at it. But I am committed to learning it.

Tip#7 Focus on one thing well

If you are good at making 2D RPGs, make 2D RPGs. Unless you have three years salary in the bank, and a lot of confidence, and are absolutely MISERABLE making those games, do not change. Every 2D RPG you make improves your skills, your experience, your audience, your engine, your productivity and your tool-chain.

There is a lot of truth to this. Mastering your craft takes a long time. If you keep making the same kind of game you can reuse some code and learn to discard things that are unnecessary. But it’s also good to be good at other things. Cliffski is a good guitarist as well as businessman. I am primarily known as an artist, but recently my work has tended to be a little bit of design, business and marketing as well, and I’m a mentee at Weather Factory learning how to be a producer. I can never say that I am a master of any one thing, but I’m happy being a jack of (many) trades.

Tip#8 Seek out harsh but real criticism

Do not insulate yourself from the negative. negativity can lead to change, improvement and accomplishment. Data about what you are doing badly is absolutely essential in improving. If nobody ever tells you your games art direction is shit, or your game title is stupid, you will never improve it. If you *absolutely* cannot cope with harsh, hurtful criticism, then you probably should not try to make a living from indie game development.

I 100% agree. This goes back to the idea of having the proper mindset. You cannot get better if you do not seek criticism. Eventually you will learn to filter useful criticism from trolls, and how to extract value from criticism without taking things personally.

Tip#9 avoid chances for distraction

I used to use rescuetime. I also used to use an hourglass to focus myself on work. I now find I need neither. I’ve worked so hard, so long, I’ve internalized what they used to do for me. Most people aren’t at that stage, and they get distracted. if your phone distracts you from work, switch it off. Nothing will explode. We survived thousands of years without mobile phones, you will be fine for entire eight hour stretches. You don’t need twitter during work hours, you don’t need to check the news sites or reddit during work hours

This tip also rambles off into other stuff, but I’ll tackle distraction. I 100% agree with this. Remember that social media throws billions of dollars at engineers in order to trap you in their site, and MAKE YOU LIKE IT. I have taken the following steps to try to reduce distractions:

1. Added a website blocker to keep me from accessing social media during work hours

2. Also use rescuetime to preiodically track my usage

3. Turned off almost ALL notifications on my phone, with the exception of messenger (coz sometimes friends and fam contact me there).

This has improved my productivity and well being immensely, and I highly recommend it.

Tip#10 Avoid bullshit productivity planning admin

Some peoples reaction to stuff like this is to immediately start planning to be more productive. they will start a productivity planning spreadsheet, with nice formatting, some color-coding and even a company logo

This is where I will take the most issue with Cliff. Essentially it’s an argument for just getting to work and not worrying about the planning. This is fine if you are a single developer and answer to and only coordinate with yourself and a freelancer. This is absolute suicide if you are a team of 3 or more people (unless you’re synced, Pacific Ri style). The Squeaky Wheel team is composed of hard working individuals. But often times we are not working efficiently and in sync because we’re each doing our own little thing very well. This creates a lot of wasted time and stress for me personally, because I always felt that something was wrong and we were not being efficient. It also creates stress for the individual worker because when work isn’t properly planned, you have the eternal feeling of “if I’m not working, I’m slacking off”. As I mentioned in the first tip, this can be absolutely terrible for your mental health (if you’re not a workaholic robot like Cliffski).

Endless planning and bad meetings can be a waste of time. But taking a team and just assuming that everyone working hard will be “good enough” is a recipe for disaster. I have spent the past few weeks working with Weather Factory’s Lottie Bevan to improve my producer skills, and I’m already feeling a lot better and experiencing a lot less stress. In fact, I just spent most of today planning out the next couple of months for the team, and I feel great!

Conclusion

There are a lot of good points in Cliffski’s blog, and a lot that I disagree with. It’s good to have a conversation about it, and at the very least it makes a good starting point for figuring out what works for you!

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! IIf you want to support us, you can by checking out Academia : School Simulator, buy the game now! If you're not ready to buy, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel and help us spread the word!

Why Isn’t Academia: School Simulator Selling as Well as Other Games?

Sorry for the rather clickbaity title! This will actually be a rather dry and boring dissection of why our game hasn’t done as well as similar games, and ideas for doing better.  Academia : School Simulator (henceforth known as Academia) has been out since September 2017 and has done pretty well for Squeaky Wheel. It recently went past the 50000 unit mark and was making a decent profit, at least until the dreaded Steam Algocalypse of October 2018, from which it never truly recovered.  We do have some savings built up and we’re more or less breaking even every month. Being on that knife’s edge of profitability does keep me up though, and I’ve recently started wondering, why hasn’t Academia been quite as successful as other, very similar games? I decided to do a deep dive and compare notes with some other trusted indie developers.  These are the results.

PS: I want to make it clear that we realize how lucky we are to be one of the few devs that are even surviving relatively comfortably. I’m just thinking of this an experiment, ie all things being equal why would one game do worse?

The games to be compared are:

• Academia : School Simulator

• Sim Airport

• Airport CEO

• Another Brick In the Mall ( henceforth know as ABITM)

We are comparing these games because they are the most directly comparable to Academia in these ways:

• Graphics: All of them have a graphical lineage from Prison Architect (for which I was the artist), with some variation.

• Team Size: Relatively similar team sizes

• Marketing : Similar marketing output, which is to say that aside from doing their own marketing, none of these games have really gotten big marketing pushes.

• Originality : These games are building off a relatively established framework. Obviously they are unique in their own ways, but they are different mostly in theme, not gameplay.

• Launch Timing : These games came out within one year of each other, so for the most part the timing argument can be said to be neutral (ie one game does not have a huge advantage over the other due to being first).

• Early Access : All these games are currently in Early Access.

• Quality : I am coming in with the assumption that all these games are of relatively equal quality. That is to say one of these games is not clearly superior to the others at first glance.

We are excluding the following games from this comparison :

• Prison Architect

• Rimworld

Prison Architect can be said to have reintroduced the business sim genre to the world when it came out, and was wildly successful for a variety of reasons.  We cannot compare to that. Rimworld, while having similar graphics, is essentially a storytelling game similar to Dwarf Fortress, making it a massively different game.  Both games also came out much earlier, which means they have the benefit of not dealing with any “sim fatigue” that may be creeping in. In short, these super successful game are not a good comparison to Academia.

Assumed Units Sold

The goal of this exercise is to figure out why Academia hasn’t quite sold the same amount of units as these other very similar games.  We will not be measuring actual units sold, but merely comparing the number of reviews and using that as a proxy for units sold.

As of June 29, 2019, these are the numbers of reviews per game:

• Academia : 522

• Sim Airport : 1740

• Airport CEO : 1772

• ABITM : 982

Based on the above numbers we can say that very roughly, ABITM has sold twice as many units as Academia, and Airport CEO and Sim Airport have sold 3 times as many units as Academia. 

Pricing

• Academia : $20

• Sim Airport : $20

• Airport CEO : $16

• ABITM : $15

In terms of pricing the games are pretty close to each other.  ABITM’s lower price point may have helped give it an edge over Academia, but it has sold less than both Sim Airport and Airport CEO, so lower pricing doesn’t seem to necessarily lead to more units sold.

Launch Date

• Academia : 8 Sep, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 24

• Sim Airport : 7 Mar, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 62

• Airport CEO : 29 Sep, 2017 avg. reviews/month to date = 81

• ABITM : 4 Nov, 2016 avg. reviews/month to date = 30

The most striking thing here is that Academia and Airport CEO launched at basically the same time, but given that amount of time Airport CEO averages 81 reviews a month and Academia averaged 24 views a month.  

Trailer Comparison

There has been a lot of talk about how important trailers are to a game’s launch. Mike Rose in particular has mentioned in one of rhe GDC talks (I can’t remember which one in particular) that a good launch trailer is key to success. So let’s compare the numbers between the launch trailers of each game on Youtube:

• Academia : 29,576

• Sim Airport : 20,893

• Airport CEO : 58,214

• ABITM : 38,041

These are current numbers, as I’m not aware of any way to access historical data.  There are some interesting comparisons to be made here.

1. Airport CEO had the most views at almost 3x the number of views of Sim Airport, however this did not translate to 3x more sales.

2. Academia had about 1.3x more views and ABITM had about 2x more views versus Sim Airport, but Sim Airport has outsold both Academia and ABITM

My conclusion is that while it is very important for your trailers to hit a certain mass (say above 20k views), after that a lot of other different things come into play when it comes to unit sales.

Sum of Top 5 Video Views on Youtube

While the launch trailer aims to measure initial impact and interest, this aims to measure long term interest in the game.  I am aware that there is a better way to do this via Steamspy, but I currently do not have an account set up with them so this is a proxy. I will add the top 5 videos for each game based on viewer count and compare them.

• Academia : 9584000

• Sim Airport: 2240000

• Airport CEO: 1104000

• ABITM: 1577000

Academia is clearly the winner here, with an almost 5x lead over Sim Airport. Our sales data also shows that we unit sales peaked during the times when these major streamers (jacksepticeye, DanTFM etc.) played our games. It seems clear that despite having a good lead in terms of views, it hasn’t guaranteed that Academia would do better over the other games.

Theme Comparison

When we made the decision to do a school-themed game, the thought process was that it would be relatable since everyone has (in the economic class that can afford to play games for leisure) has been to school. 

Clearly this was not a winning strategy, as it seems running a mall and running an airport (despite the fact that two games are duking it out) are still making more sales than a game about running a school.

Some developers did mention that the theme of the game did not particularly draw them. While the power fantasy of running an airport or mall may stoke entrepreneurial dreams, running a school may not quite hit those same notes.  It could be that there is a mismatch in theme and genre here, and that a school game might have worked best as an adventure game or even a visual novel, since this is where the story elements of running a school might shine.

Marketing Comparison

I am not aware of the actual marketing spends of any of these companies.  However I am on friendly terms with all of them, and as far as I can tell, none of them have made any real investments in marketing, whether it be purchasing ads or even showing up at conventions.

I know for a fact that the Sim Airport guy is very averse to going to conventions, he wasn’t particularly keen on going to GDC.  He’s also mentioned he hasn’t done a lot marketing, adhering to the belief that people buy the game “because it’s good”

ABITM is a dev based somewhere in France who also doesn’t really do the convention circuit, although I’m not aware of any marketing or ad spends in his part.

The only time I heard of Airport CEO in media or conventions was when Jason Rohrer mentioned it in his talk at GDC.

As far as I know none of us are doing any major efforts in terms of marketing, ad spends, or conventions, and yet Academia  has sold the least of the four games.

Youtube subscribers on company account

Another form of marketing is having your own Youtube account and pushing out videos.  This is something that Prison Architect and Production Line have used to very good effect.  Academia did this very well early on but we have lapsed.

• Academia : 667

• Sim Airport: 1900

• Airport CEO: 5800

• ABITM: 235

Airport CEO has a very clear lead here, with Sim Airport coming a distant second. You could make the argument that community engagement through having a Youtube channel is a key thing we could be improving on.

As a counterpoint however ABITM has a meager 235 subscribers but has twice as many sales as Academia.

Another interesting point is that Airport CEO and Sim Airport have chosen to make channels out of their games, while Academia and ABITM are using their studio channels.  There is a case to be made that a game having its own channel increases the chances that people will find it, and also helps with brand building for the game.

Game/Company Website

These are links to company or game websites with little analysis except to say that Sim Airport recently updated their website, while ABITM seems to be the simplest website of them all. None of the websites seem to convey any advantage to any of the games.

• Academia

• Sim Airport

• Airport CEO

• ABITM

Review Score Percentage

Review score are a touchy subject when it comes to games on Steam.  Steam reps will insist to their death that review scores have zero effect on their algorithm while indie developers like Cliffski will yell at you to get your total review scores percentage back up to 70% because it’s THAT IMPORTANT. 

When I first wrote this, the review scores were:

• Academia : 68%

• Sim Airport: 77%

• Airport CEO: 78%

• ABITM: 82%

Overall ABITM is in the lead here, but not by much.  And despite this, both Airport games have easily outsold ABITM. So while Review Score must have some psychological effect on a player’s decision to buy a game or not, in this case there is no clear correlation.

Recently Academia’s total review score percentage hit 70% again, so it will be interesting to see if this has any effect on future sales.

Deepest Discount

One could argue that one of the games might be doing deeper discounts to pick up more units.  During the 2019 Steam summer sale these were the discounts of each game:

• Academia : 25%

• Sim Airport: 40%

• Airport CEO: 30%

• ABITM: 40%

We assume that the Steam Summer Sale is the most recent and therefore the deepest discount for each of these games, since it would be very hard to try to discount to 75% to try to boost units but they go back up to 40% off.  Once players know that it was discounted so deeply, it creates an anchoring effect, and they will simply wait for the game to go back down to 75% off.

Regardless, the differences in deepest discounts seem close enough that it seems safe to shrug this off as having any meaningful effect on sales.

Conclusion 

Based on the varied feedback, it seems that Academias’ biggest issues when it comes to sales are a poor fit between theme and genre, An average trailer, and possibly less depth and retention than the other games.

There is very little we can do about the theme, although we could work that into the game more so that anyone who *wants* to feel like they are running a school really gets into the game.  More depth will be added as time goes on, and once that’s done, a new trailer will hopefully entice people to try the game out.

This kind of comparison is really difficult unless there are vastly similar games to yours out there, however it has been useful for our team in clarifying what kind of mechanics we should focus on adding to the game in the near future.  We hope it’s been helpful for you as well.

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! If you're interested in Academia, you can buy the game now! If you're not ready to buy, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel and help us spread the word!

Squeaky Wheel's 2018 Year in Review

Squeaky Wheel started life as a company in 2015, and with each year that passes, we seem to alternate between having a good year and a bad year. We started out 2016 with a publishing deal and the energy of a new company. 2017 was a tough year at the start since Political Animals had flopped, and we were on the verge of shutting down. The successful launch of Academia : School Simulator in late 2017 meant that we were riding high at the start of 2018. We were all set to continue that trend into 2019 until Steam decided to play with it's algorithm and wreak havoc on our financial projections. But before we do a deep dive into that whole situation, let's go over what happened in 2018!

Maintaining Motivation in Early Access is Hard!

When we successfully launched Academia : School Simulator in 2017 the exhilaration was soon followed by a sobering realization. We had basically committed ourselves to working on this game for the next couple of years. Launching a game usually comes with the catharsis of no longer having to be consumed by that same game afterwards. But with Early Access you don't get that catharsis, you just kind of keep grinding on. If you don't have a set deadline, the idea of the finish line being endlessly out of reach can certainly be daunting.

One solution to this is to break up development into Alpha Milestones, with each milestone having a set number of specific mechanics that must be finished before you can move on to the next milestone. This way you can a bit the “completion high” that a full game gives you, and you can organize some marketing around the launch of each milestone. We sort of half-assed our Alpha 2 because I pushed the team into doing it just a month or two before the actual launch, but we have a much better planned Alpha 3 being prepared for early 2019.

We Return to Conventions

I was pretty down on conventions in 2016, seeing as how we saw very little success with them while promoting Political Animals, despite the keen interest we saw during the actual events. There's a gamasutra article detailing this issue with much more clarity, but the tl:dr is that people at game conventions are conditioned to be pretty hyped already by virtue of being at the convention, so all of the good vibes you're getting from their playthrough of the game may be legitimate, but is no way an indication of how good the game is or how well it will sell. This isn't to say all of the pre-launch marketing and convention hopping every developer does is pointless, it's just not worked out for us.

That said, conventions are good for other things, including : team building, morale boosting, developer networking (shoutout to all the cool developers we met and hung out with in 2018!), and exploring different markets. We achieved all of those things by going to conventions in Taiwan (Summer Game Show), Japan (Bitsummit and TGS), Korea (BICFest), and our “home” convention of ESGS in the Philippines. One of the cool things about being in Early Access is that you can combine marketing with key sales. We were able to subsidize a lot of our travel costs by selling Steam keys!

Random Thoughts about Different Conventions

TGS (Tokyo Game Show) is a terrible show for indies. The way the booths are arranged is super cramped, and the developers next to us ended up unintentionally crowding into our booth space. Most of the people and press going there are going for the big AAA games. Even with a free booth, I would not go back to TGS. Bitsummit in Kyoto is a much better show that is more focused towards indies. Even if the foot traffic is much smaller, it is also self selecting, and we got way more in terms of Steam key sales there. Kyoto is a much smaller city, and the atmosphere is such that the developers much more freely mingled with each other, whereas with TGS there was more obvious segmentation between different devs.

The Taipei (Summer) Game Show was a bit of a revelation. We mostly went because the booth was free (or so cheap it almost didn't matter). Taipei is less than two hours away from Manila and can cost less than $100 to fly to. We sold even more Steam keys than we did at Bitsummit, which was a bit of a shock to us. One of the organizers said that the attendees probably don't get a lot of PC games coming into town, so the novelty of having a game that was available on Steam showing its wares helped boost interest in us. Many of the people that bought a steam key had mentioned that they'd heard of the game before, and the fact that the venue was tiny (and packed) certainly helped get a lot of people in front of our booth. Interestingly, despite the success at selling keys, Taiwan doesn't rank very high in in terms of our Steam store earnings.

ESGS has become our go-to conference at home (the Philippines), and we always went into it with the lowest expectations based on our biases and understanding of local gamer culture (ie gaming driven by esports, mobile, console, and rampant piracy). We were pleasantly surprised at how many people bought Steam keys from us though, with at least one buyer refusing our discount and offering to pay full price. This leads me to be a little bit more hopeful about our local market, although as with Taiwan, the success at the convention didn't lead to any more revenue on the steam store itself.

BICfest in Busan gets a special mention because like Bitsummit, the indie spirit and camaraderie is strong, and if your game gets approved they sponsor accomodation for 2 people!

Political Animals Gets Some More Recognition

In May of this year I was invited to a great conference in Budapest called Brain Bar to talk about “Do games have (a) moral conscience”? While I hardly think anyone attending the conference was gonna go out and buy Political Animals after seeing this panel, it was still some nice validation for our first game.

We Had a Good First Three Quarters

Before I start talking about the bad news, I do want to take a moment to recognize how fortunate we were that for most of this year we were a profitable small indie studio. Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games took a poll in November asking if “the last game you shipped cover its costs, including a nominal salary...” The results, while not surprising, showed the stark reality of how difficult it is to make money in this business.

62% of people who put out a game lost money on that enterprise. Of those, I would be terrified to know just how many of them had quit their jobs, sacrificed their savings, or took out a loan on their property just to finance their dream. 18% of people just broke even, which means they got to tell their wife, partner, or family that they still had a roof over their heads, but that they might be looking for a regular paycheck from now on. Only 20% made a profit. Do you remember how your parents worried that you were getting into game development, and asked why you don't consider getting a “safer” job? To put it mildy, game development is a risky business (although to put it in context, probably no more risky than starting any other business).

For the first three quarters of 2018, we were making a tidy profit, and putting some of that profit into donating funds to schools as well as community building with local game developers. All of that changed in October.

Steam's Discovery Algorithm Killed Our Sales

The title above is a reference to a Jake Birkett blog (you should really follow his blog, as he does a very good job of taking the pulse of the indie game community at large) that he released earlier this month. If you're not familiar with what happened, here's a quick rundown. Steam's abrupt algorithm changes in October had a huge impact on Birkett's sales. After sharing the blog on Twitter, numerous developers across the Twitterverse (including ourselves) retweeted and shared Jake's sentiments, and press outlets like Kotaku picked up on the news. The coup de grace was Epic Games' announcement that it was opening the Epic Store with a much more generous revenue share.

I want to echo Jake by saying that without Steam and the access to the market it provides, we wouldn't be where we are now, part of the 20% of game developers that is (was?) earning a tidy profit. But that dependency reveals a major flaw in our business. We ultimately have no idea what goes on in Steam's algorithm. This is done to keep devs from gaming the system, but also means we have no idea what to do to improve our chances of the algorithm sharing our game with Steam's userbase. And these changes can have a huge impact.

For us specifically, the first month of changes saw our revenue drop to around 40% lower compared to our weakest month so far, and the second month saw our sales revenue drop to around 65% lower than our weakest sales month. To put that in other terms, after Steam takes its revenue and after taxes, we are now below the break even point on a month to month basis. As mentioned before we were fortunate enough that we were making a profit before and have been putting away money for just such an occasion, so we're not in any real trouble yet. But it is rather sobering to know that your expected revenues can be so drastically altered with a few keystrokes.

Moving to Different Marketplaces

Steam's access to their market has meant that there has been less of a focus for us on being in different marketplaces. Indeed, if we could make enough to profit by simply being on Steam, it simplified a lot of things for us. We could focus on a single marketplace to reply to our players, and focus our efforts into integrating further with Steam, by adding achievements, and in the future, leaderboards. Our past experience with Political Animals shows that at best, even Steam's larget competitor GOG only ever made up 10% of our revenue. So focusing on where most of the revenue game made a lot of sense. It's become clear that we can no longer keep doing that, and we need to adapt to the changing times (hopefully Steam does as well).

We already have a buy page on our website, with a humble widget included (hey indie devs, the humble widget takes only 5% of your revenue!). The Epic Store is intriguing and we'll send in an application for sure, but as far as I've heard, they're processing thousands of applications and won't be considering anything new until late 2019 (For anyone complaining about Steam opening the floodgates, this was the alternative all those years ago). Kartridge is interesting, but I've heard confidentially from a successful indie dev that their game, which has sold tens of thousands of units on Steam, only sold 4 on Kartridge in a year. Discord is definitely intriguing, especially with its streamer integration, but I worry about our capacity to regularly interact with players on a regular basis. We're naturally introverts and have our hands full just responding to forum posts, so I worry about how taxing that will be for us. Plus we have no idea how difficult deployment will be to their site.

So finally that leaves us with itch. Itch.io has long been the go-to place for weird, niche indie games, and never had pretensions to be a site for the mass market. It's still growing though, and most importantly for us it seems relatively pain-free to add it to our deployment process. So we'll be looking to add Academia : School Simulator to itch sometime next year. I don't expect we'll make a lot of revenue, my initial estimate is maybe 5% or less than total Steam revenue, but I'll report back with real numbers in the future.

What's Happening in 2019?

2018 was a pretty good year for us. I think it would be fair to say we perhaps got a little complacent, or if I'm being more generous, we allowed ourselves to enjoy the fruits of our hard work a little bit. I expect that 2019 will look a little bit more like our 2017, where we put our noses to the grindstone and try to work on getting as much of Academia : School Simulator done as we can, while simultaneously thinking about what we're gonna be doing next.

As usual, I want to thank the team for putting their all into the game, everyone who has supported us thus far, and all the players for buying the game and giving us great feedback over the past year. See you all in 2019!

Squeaky Wheel's Productivity Tools

As game developers, we can get so focused on the craft of game making that we can sometimes forget that the tools we use outside of actual game development can be just as important to the process. Having the right tools can make the team much more productive, so knowing which tools work best for your team is key. Here I will go over some of the tools we’ve used previously, and what we have replaced them with to better suit our needs.

From Hipchat to Flock

As a mostly virtual studio, having a good way to communicate online is absolutely necessary for us. When we first started developing Political Animals, company chats were still in their infancy, and Hipchat was one of the early companies providing this service. While Slack was around, Marnel preferred Hipchat because it had a much lighter chat client. Turns out the reason for this was that Hipchat was an incredibly primitive chat client compared to today’s updated products. It became very frustrating to use Hipchat during long chats, when it was unclear to whom we were replying to in conversations. We ended up creating our own systems for this, like copying and pasting the message we were replying to, as if we were on a forum.

Our Scheduling, aka “Today’s Bowel Movement” channel on Flock.

So we were kind of amazed when we switched to Flock and all of its functionalities. The ability to reply to specific messages, create reminders and notes, and being able to create custom avatars for people and rooms just blew me away. It felt like the difference between dial-up and broadband internet, or SD vs HD. Once we switched over there was no going back.

Flock over Slack

The leader of company chat clients is Slack. You almost can’t get away from slack advertising when listening to a podcast these days. In some ways this turned me off on Slack (I like rooting for the underdog). However we did try out Slack and some other products for a little bit just to see what it was like, and we still came back to Flock. The reason? Flock offers basically the same service as Slack, with a much more generous free version. They offer double the storage space (10GB) versus Slack (5GB) which means we have a lot more wiggle room when attaching files in chat. I’ll write a more in-depth article in the future, but I highly recommend Flock for small teams.

From Jira to HacknPlan

Jira has long been hailed as the gold standard for agile project management. What they don’t tell you is that for it to actually be useful, you need an actual full time project manager, or someone who is committed to that role. Unfortunately for us, we do not have anyone who is able to fully maximize Jira and all of its integrations. Vanilla Jira is, at least in our experience, painful to use. Basic things like looking up previous sprints consume way more time than necessary. Their strict adherence to the sprint methodology also created some annoying things like not being able to easily delete tasks (something that they added eventually). I was ready to move us off Jira as soon as I found a suitable replacement.

Hacknplan is agile project management created specifically for game development. It’s hard to immediately explain why Hacknplan is better than Jira for our needs. The easiest way to explain it is that while a good project manager could probably create amazing functionality using Jira, HacknPlan lets teams without a dedicated project manager just hit the ground running.

My favorite thing about HacknPlan is its GDM, which is essentially a living game design document. Previously, I would often want to write down some game design ideas for future reference. I would put them in Jira’s backlog, and there they would remain for the rest of their lives. HacknPlan’s GDM lets me create a category or folder containing all of these design ideas, and lets me easily access them in the future when we’ve run out of tasks and need something new to work on. The best thing is that you can assign tasks directly from the GDM, meaning there is a direct connection to your daily work tasks and the higher level design, which is something that is lacking in most agile management tools. HacknPlan has some issues (the pricing tier and some limits on the free version can be a little annoying), but the benefits far outweigh them. I’ve become quite an evangelist, and will push HacknPlan onto any developer within earshot. I’m going to write a much more in-depth post about HacknPlan and how we use it in the future, but if you are a small team making a game, I absolutely recommend you use HacknPlan.

From Google Sheets to (Sometimes) Airtable

Google Sheets is a great all around spreadsheet app that you can access from almost anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. It doesn’t do anything special, but in the hands of an expert like our designer Tristan, you can make magic with it.

Airtable is an app that lets you do some of that magic and much more without a lot of effort. It feels a little like Spreadsheets 3.0 (with Spreadsheet 1.0 being the actual paper spreadsheets), adding functionality to spreadsheets that can make them much more easier to parse at a glance. For example, while designing our research items, we decided that they would be arranged like a tree, with some items being unlocked by research a “parent” item. Noting down the parent of a research item in a spreadsheet is easy enough, but hunting down items with the same parent can be a chore, even if you take the time to color coordinate the cells properly (which can be time consuming in itself). With Airtable, it only takes a couple of clicks to instantly rearrange and group the data by “parent”, which is a godsend when we are doing internal QA to make sure that everything is working properly in the game. Even better, you can parse this data by grouping it according to two different fields. So for example I could organize the data by way of parent and research cost, allowing me to know which research items that have the same parent cost the same amount.

Airtable’s complexity is also what makes it annoying to use sometimes. For example, coloring a cell is something that anyone who has used a spreadsheet does on a regular basis. I often do this when I want to indicate that a specific task is done, by highlighting it in green. Airtable’s free version doesn’t let you do this seemingly simple task, meaning if I want to do the same thing, I would have to create a new column, assign it as a “checkmark” type of field, and us this to check off items as I finish them. So while I highly recommend that studios use Airtable and its immense capabilities (of which I feel like I have only scratched the surface), sometimes good old Google Sheets is more practical to use. Luckily Airtable lets you import CVS files so if you start out using Sheets and deciding to move to Airtable, the process is painless.

Bonus Tools : Bug Reports with Google Forms

We currently use Google Forms as a bug reporting mechanism. While it’s great and importantly, free, I have been wishing we could switch to a different service that was better at parsing the data we receive. It’s great that Forms links seamlessly with Sheets, but all that data can be overwhelming to comprehend.

I’ve done a little research into alternatives like Surveymonkey, but I’ve yet to see anything that would be exactly what we need, which is an affordable bug report website or app that parses out the bug report data in more understandable chunks. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments!

Bonus Tool 2 : Rescuetime

We are a small team and we don’t do the typical time tracking expected in a virtual team. This probably won’t scale to a much larger team, but in general we’ve noticed that we tend to work longer hours than usual anyway, so asking people to time in and out just seems insulting.

Instead, we suggest that people download Rescuetime and track their productivity on their own. It’s a great free tool that helps you keep track of your computer time. We’ve found that most people are usually shocked at how little productive time they actually use during the day, and this helps give them an incentive to do better. The free tool lets you set goals (mine are to have at least 4 productive hours a day and to spend less than 30 minutes on social media during work hours) and is more than enough for the average person.

Conclusion

I hope this will be useful for other devs and studios out there to give them an idea of the tools that they can use to help make the process of making games a little bit easier. It’s important to note that these are the tools that work for Squeaky Wheel specifically. The best thing to do is to always try it out for yourself and see what works best for you and your team!

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! If you're interested in Academia: School Simulator, you can buy the game now! If you're not ready to buy, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel and help us spread the word!

What Keeps the Philippines Game Industry from Being More Successful? Part 1

Recently on the local IGDA Facebook group a question was asked about “What is stopping the Philippine game industry from having more financial success and global cultural influence?” I generally don't like these questions because they're overly broad and usually are just expressions of frustration looking for affirmation. Luckily it did spark a lot of interesting conversation, so that's great. I was tempted to weigh in, but Facebook is a poor way to communicate. While this is only tangentially related to Squeaky Wheel, I guess I can get away with saying that it may be interesting to talk about the environment in which we make games. I'll respond with my thoughts on some of the responses, try to tie it in with our own experiences as a small PC game studio, and offer suggestions for improvement.

Note: My opinion is skewed towards PC games, and indie PC games in particular, since that is what we make. As such I have little interest in the mobile games market.

Is there a Lack of Support from fellow Pinoy (Filipinos)?

This one is a relatively easy one for me to respond to. We never targeted Filipino players in the first place because we don't believe the market is large enough to support us. This is a belief that I've long held, which only now is slowly starting to change.

Note : Just a warning, I'm not a statistician and the numbers I share with you here are taken from websites that may or may not have accurate research. I do believe them to be generally true, which is why I hold this belief about selling to the local market.

First, let's compare GDP at PPP between the US and the Philippines. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is the value of goods and services produced in a country in a year. Divided by the population of a country, this gives you a rough estimate of how much an average individual in that country earns. PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) is a formula used to equalize the cost of goods between different countries. So basically we are comparing an average person's income between countries, which is important because we want to know how many people might be able to buy our games.

Using the numbers from this Wikipedia page, I took the data from the IMF, World Bank, and CIA lists and divided by 3 to get the average GDP at PPP for 4 countries : The Philippines, The USA to act as the “successful model”, and Thailand and Indonesia as comparatively similar economies.

So what this graph tells is that an average person in the USA has almost 6 times the purchasing powe of the average person in the Philippines, which means much more money to spend on things above basic necessities (ie games and other entertainment). So all things being equal, the average game developer in the US has a much larger domestic market than the average Philippine developer.

Things get worse when you factor in socioeconomic classes. According to this site (according to an SWS survey), the percentage of people in the upper and middle classes (A,B and C) are about 10%, while about 90% would be considered working class or poor. Let's assume that the survey is a little skewed and double the number of ABC classes to 20% of the total population.

That still means that of the average population that is earning less in GDP at PPP than even Thailand or Indonesia, only 20% of that population might have the disposable income to be spend on games. This doesn't even take into consideration access to PC/consoles, credit cards, piracy, and other mitigating factors that make depending on the local market a dangerous idea. So to respond to the claim that there isn’t enough support, I would say the more important question is whether there is even statistically enough people that are able to support a healthy industry. My answer would be a flat no.

That said, that doesn't mean that you should ignore the folks them. There are a quite a few players out there that are happy and willing to support local development, and I was pleasantly surprised at how many people came by our booth last year to buy Early Access copies of Academia : School Simulator. To be fair, I had expected not to sell a single copy, so my standards were pretty low. Certain communities can also be quite supportive. When I politely shared that we have Jose Rizal as a trading card on the r/Philippines subreddit, people were quite supportive and surprised that the game had been made in the Philippines. We also get excited youtube users that comment on our videos that they were excited to hear we're from the Philippines.

And of course the local development scene is pretty friendly and usually ready to help out (ourselves included, when we are able).

So yeah, it's a great morale boost to get some support from local fans, and we want to represent as best as we can in local events like ESGS, but our long term strategy is to sell to the world first, then hope that trickles down into interest from local fans. Given that the internet (via Steam and other global distribution platforms) gives you access to the global marketplace, you have a much better chance at survival as a game developer by selling to the world rather than just selling to the domestic marketplace.

It would be great to one day have such a large domestic marketplace that is large enough to accommodate super niche games as well as giant triple A games. But a lot of that is completely beyond us and has to do with the economic health of the nation. For now, the best we can do is to nurture the current communities that are already supporting local game developers, and survive by selling to the world.

This is part 1 of what may be a multi-part series. No promises, as this takes me way too long to write than is probably worth it!

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this interesting! If you want to support us, you can buy Academia: School Simulator now! If you're not ready to buy, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel and help us spread the word!

Drawing Inspiration from a Global Community of Game Developers

I've opined before that I think game conventions are a net negative when it comes promoting or marketing your game. If it's a consumer focused event, then player feedback can be valuable. There is an infinitesimally small chance that press or streamers will find your game and help it blow up. But I think many games have proven the digital age it is very possible for you to succeed without participating in game conventions at all. But that's a topic I'll go deeper into for another day, as I've yet to give it enough thought to write anything coherent.

So what value is there in attending conventions? Why did we bring Academia : School Simulator to Bitsummit this year? Well for me, the best thing about game conferences is meeting fellow developers from around the world and hearing their stories. In where political and ideological divisions are becoming more and more stark and divided, it's more important than ever to build bridges and get to know each other better. So here are some stories from Bitsummit, with all the specific details brushed out to protect people's identities.

Note: a reminder that I am from the Philippines, which hopefully helps give context to some of what I say.

Indonesia

Three of my formative years were lived in Jakarta, Indonesia's bustling capital. This year at Bitsummit I met a few awesome young game developers who are really making waves both locally and around the world. We compared notes on whether Metro Manila or Jakarta was the worse city ( I decided it was a tie) and how linguistically interesting it was that even our slang words were sometimes similar (The slang for women's breasts is “dede” in Filipino, while it's “tete” in Bahasa Indonesia). We hoped to one day be able to grow the regional industry to the point where we could have our own GDC, aspirations we shared with a Singaporean dev that joined us for lunch.

In between dick jokes (remember how I said they were young?) they mentioned that they had read my article about publishing games in China and how that had shaped their decision to seek publishers there. Hearing these stories really affirms that the time I spend writing these blogs is worth it.

Just a day after the event, the news about a suicide bombing in Surabaya shocked the Indonesian nation. I've always had close ties to Indonesia, but now having made these new friends, I feel their pain even more intensely.

Denmark

Drinking beer by the riverside is one Bitsummit's most time-honored traditions. I had a conversation with a Danish developer about old age in the game industry. He's pushing 40 and a little worried about it, and I was happy to have a conversation with someone older than me about my fears of aging.

I asked how he felt about the influential Danish architect Bjarke Ingels and he said that while he doesn't agree with everything Ingels does, it's kind of nice that he(Bjarke) is a larger than life personality coming out of a country and region that prides itself on the Jante Law (tl:dr living a modest life is A-OK). I agreed that it's good and necessary for certain people to be able to stand out and make their mark in the world and hopefully improve it. But he agreed with me when I said it's also important not to worship these people or require everyone to aspire to be like them.

He talked about how he owns a gun and hunts in the Danish countryside, but that he can't wrap his head around American gun laws. I just shook my head sadly and mentioned how disappointed I was that some people on our forums seem really eager to have school shootings in our game. I have a standing invitation to call on him and his team if we ever visit Copenhagen.

South Africa and Germany

There is something about bi-racial couples that really makes me happy. It's like my view of the world being interconnected and everyone being equal is encapsulated a relationship between two individuals, and it's a beautiful thing. One such couple was staying in the same guesthouse as us, and we had a little conversation over breakfast. There was a disagreement about how we felt about doing game conventions:

South African : I don't know what you're talking about, I get so pumped doing conventions, I'm fucking ready to go! *stretches and flexes
Me and the German : Ugh, get out my face.

Brazil

I met a Brazilian game developer who is living in Japan. I approached him because we were both building simulation games, and we talked about the difficulty of explaining and showing a simulation game in a convention that tends to favor loud, quick to play action oriented games.

We had a couple too many beers at the mixer, and it became clear to me that with each increasing beer he began to progressively bring out his grab bag of spoken languages and accents, which led to two awkward/hilarious moments:

Ukranian : Hey, I'm from the Ukraine.
Brazilian : *something in Russian!
Ukrainian: That is Russian, but I forgive you.

Third Party : These guys are from Australia!
Brazilian : *something in ridiculous Australian accent!
Australians : …

A couple of beers later (perhaps we should have stopped, but they were free) I brought up the current situation in Brazil and he went on a passionate defense of Lula da Silva and how the charges against him were trumped up. The short argument was that yeah, the left was corrupt, but at least they did some good things. The right will just destroy everything!

I should end this by saying I think he's a really lovely person, but when we meet him next time maybe I'll tell him to slow his roll with the alcohol.

Japan

I tried out a Japanese developer's game and I really liked it. We alternated speaking broken Japanese and broken English to each other, and I encouraged him to shop his game to publishers so that he finds a wider audience. I pointed him out to publisher that I knew, and then proceeded to take one of his flyers over to said publisher.

Me: Hey have you checked this game out?
Publisher : No, what is it?
Me: *explains game
Publisher : Oh awesome man, thanks for this, (you're) always looking to help others out.

Canada/USA

I met a lovely couple living in Canada who were both game designers. We discussed the difficulty of calling their spouse their “partners”, especially in the context of a game exhibition where a partner more often means “business partner”.

One of them brightened up when I mentioned we had made Political Animals. Apparently she had really loved how it took certain risks by showing that politicians were just people responding to incentives. I told her that it really warmed my heart to hear that, especially since the game was a financial flop. She said she thinks it's well known in game designer circles because she hears it being discussed a lot. This is the first I've heard of that, but that certainly made my night.

We talked about how we were both so in love with Japan and were trying to figure out a way to settle down there or just live there for a few years, and how it sucked that Japanese immigration and residency policies made it really difficult to attract people here.

I should say I’m actually quite picky when it comes to my friends, but it was one of those wonderful moments where I felt like we instantly connected and would have been best friends had we lived in the same area.

Last Conversation : Iran

We shared a table space with a couple of Iranian developers. I had given them advice on how to get to Kyoto via Tokyo through email, and it turns out we shared the same guesthouse as well. We shared our extension cord with them, and before we packed up and left I had a quick conversation with one of them:

Iranian : Hey, thanks for being good neighbors and sharing your extension cord with us
Me: Oh no problem, its's really nothing. I uh...good luck with those economic sanctions I guess?
Iranian : *Sigh These fucking politicians.
Me : I know right? We just want to make games and get along!
Iranian : Exactly!

Note: I understand that this is a rather naive statement and obviously having made a game about politics we believe in some sort of political process. It does get frustrating sometimes that people on the ground can be friends while their leaders bicker with each other.

These are only some of the many conversations I had in Bitsummit. I left feeling a little more energized and connected to the world than I had been for a while. It's important to hunker down and build your games. But making games in isolation can become lonely and disheartening, and sometimes it's good to reconnect and feel like you're a part of a larger, global family of game creators.  Here's to next year's Bitsummit!

Bonus Conversation : China

While in line at the airport I tapped a guy on the shoulder because his bag was wide open and the contents looked ready to fall out. He was very appreciative and friendly, and we chatted a little bit while in line. Turns out he's a Chinese businessman with “many businesses” in many countries and doing “distribution”.

Chinese : I distribute cleaning implements
Me: *excited Oh! Like vacuum cleaners? (excitement context: I love my Dyson vacuum cleaner)
Chinese : No, like liquid cleansers
Me: *hiding disappointment Ah.

Since he was friendly enough I offered him by business card before we split up, and he offered his in return while his girlfriend nodded approvingly (she was very keen for us to exchange contact info). When I looked at it, his business card was an “invitation” to join Amway. He texted me afterwards thanking me again for reminding him about the bag. Needless to say, I will not be responding to any and all further texts.

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