Katawa Shoujo, Sex Stuff in Games, and Choosing What You Are Allowed To See

What I expected: Weirdo smut. What I got: A little box full of therapy.

This is one of those blog posts it's really hard to hit the Publish button. Basically, what I’m going to do is publicly throw my support behind a sexually explicit dating sim that takes place in a school for the disabled. (Yes. You read that right.) It's kind of hard to do without coming off as a perv or a weirdo.

But I'm old and cranky enough to think that good, sincere work should get its due. If nothing else, the amazingly off the wall circumstances of its creation make it worth a look. So here we go.

I've been spending the last few weeks playing through my backlog of dozens and dozens of indie games, enough to help me realize I have played enough 2-D platformers for my next ten lifetimes. And, while I was poking around online, a very odd title came on my radar.

Pictured: The Feels.

Katawa Shoujo

I love looking at new trends and apps and memes online. I've been on the Interwebs since 1988. (Yes, they existed then, and yes, I am comically old.) The weird electronic culture that sprung to life in front of me provides ceaseless fascination.

And that's why I started to hear about an odd little indie game called Katawa Shoujo. (Literal translation: "Cripple Girls." Katawa is generally considered a slur in Japanese.) It came out in early 2012. While it got some press, it didn't get as much as its quality and the fascinating story of its creation deserved. You can download it for free for Windows or Mac here.

Yes, I know I'm late to this party, and that Katawa Shoujo is a huge underground hit, but mainstream coverage of the game has been really lacking (with some exceptions), for reasons I want to dig into. So bear with me.

This game is the indiest thing that ever indied. It was made by a group of a few dozen volunteers recruited from the hugely popular anonymous image board 4chan (a source of so much reprehensible behavior and remarkable creativity). It took over five years to write. It is a dating sim set in a high school for the disabled. There is already no way this thing should exist, let alone have any chance of being good.

Katawa Shoujo is a Visual Novel, basically a romantic choose your own adventure, a genre of game I know almost nothing about. And, apparently, young people were playing it in droves and losing their minds with, as they say, The Feels.

(Some people actually argue whether Visual Novels are games or not. I could not care less about this argument. If calling Katawa Shoujo a game makes you angry, shout your rage at your love pillow.)

The amount of fan art for this game is mind-boggling. Not quite at My Little Pony levels, but ...

In An Infinite Universe, Anything Is Possible

This game is kind of marvelous.

The gameplay is pretty simple. You play a boy with life-threatening arrhythmia, who enrolls at a school for the disabled and meets five female students there. As the story unfolds (via text over graphics), you are occasionally given choices. If you choose correctly, you might end up dating one of them. Then, depending on later decisions, this relationship can end very well or very badly.

It takes about eight hours to play, with around 10-20 choices based on the path you follow. And it sounds, from any casual description, like a playground for pervs and fetishests.

It's not. It's a quiet, deliberately paced story about young love, growing up, and discovering sexuality, one of the best I've seen since Judy Blume. And yeah, there's sex, of the endlessly awkward young person variety. If it was a movie, it'd be an easy NC-17. (By the way, it is made explicit everyone having sex is over 18. The developers wisely decided to avoid that minefield.)

Yet it's not porn. It's basically a story about figuring out the things about yourself and those you love that can't be changed, accepting them, and how really difficult that is. It's heady stuff, and yes, I sound like a crazy person. But I've learned to accept that.

(By the way, no matter what you do, it takes several hours of play before anyone will even kiss you. If you are looking for smut, you may wish to keep shopping.)

I played through two of the five paths and am slowly going through a third. I'm approaching it like ... I feel like a magician who is picking over someone else's trick to figure out how they did it.

While the art and writing can be uneven, this game is beautifully made and keenly observed. (And it has a storyline around a character named Rin which, if it came in the form of a book or movie instead of an obscure indie game, would receive massive acclaim.)

Happiness not guaranteed.

"But Will I Like It?"

Beats me. Maybe? It's certainly not for everyone, but that's how art works. If you picked a book at random in a bookstore or wandered into a random theater in the local multiplex, you probably wouldn't like what you got.

It has a fanatical following among the young and socially awkward (God, I would have loved it when I was 16), but I have no idea how much Regular People (tm) would like it. I'm sure some would. I asked my wife to play it, just to make sure I'm not insane, and she really liked it, so that gives me hope.

It's hard to tell how big this game's audience is, because a casual inspection of the forums on the game's official site reveals that most people who like it keep it a secret. In a Reddit AMA, one of the game's writers said that nobody who worked on it can use it on a resume.

For people like me who want gaming options for grownups that don't involve shooting fifty people in the face, this is really, REALLY depressing. We've created a system where games that deal with relationships in a daring way like books and movies just can't exist.

An actual YouTube video, that actually exists.

Murder Is Good and Sex Is Bad.

Look. Sexuality is one of the fundamental facts of human existence, and thus is has a place in art. If video games are ever to be taken seriously in art, sex has a place in them. And yet.

It's the old conundrum in our society. Make a game like Grand Theft Auto V where you murder policemen by the hundreds and engage in excruciatingly detailed torture? Walmart welcomes you with open arms and you make billions. Make a game which depicts adults being intimate in a consensual, loving way? Welcome to business oblivion!

Sure, there's plenty of sex in video games. Grand Theft Auto V had a minigame where you grope strippers, and, if you do this efficiently enough, they will prostitute themselves to you. The Witcher invites you to sleep with as many women as possible to earn "romance cards." So basically, you can have sex in video games, as long as it is adolescent, fake, and gross.

Meanwhile, Bioware, which has at least tried to put real, emotional relationships in its games, earns a public freakout whenever they try to depict actual sex. At this point, even the extravagantly mild scenes of Dragon Age and Mass Effect are gone, replaced by Mass Effect 3's clothed hugging.

I don't want porn. I just want it possible for love to be depicted with as much care and attention as murder. The Grand Theft Auto thing can exist, fine, I just don't want it to be the only thing. Is this not reasonable?

Katawa Shoujo is an underground sensation, but I've spent the last few weeks polling my nerd-savvy friends, many of them fans of Manga and visual novels, trying to find a single one who had heard of it. No luck, because we've built a system where mainstream awareness of a title like this is impossible.

Happy endings not guaranteed. (But where is that wind coming from?)

If It's Not For Children, It Can't Be For You

I am not exaggerating. If you tried to make a game like Katawa Shoujo for money, the odds are so against you. Placement on XBox or Playstation? Forget it. This game would be perfect for the iPhone, but Apple categorically refuses to accept any program with non-murder-related adult content. (A movie? Of course. A video game? Absolutely not.)

Do I like this? No, I do not. But we decided, as a culture, that these three corporations can have near-total veto power over this whole chunk of our culture. Now we get to enjoy the consequences of this decision.

This depresses me. After weeks of slogging through insanely gruesome AAA games, it was such a relief to play a title that was, basically, about decent people trying to be nice to each other.

A Final Bit Of Crass Consumerism

One last little thing, since I know a lot of young, aspiring indie developers read this. I think one of the biggest, most unexploited markets now is for short, sincere storytelling games. Think Gone Home. Stanley Parable. This is a great, growing genre for good writers.

In the money arena, you still kind of have to avoid sex, which is stupid, but you can't fight City Hall. There's still so much room to explore. Consider this.

Katawa Shoujo was made by volunteers, covers some really edgy ground, got near-zero publicity, and still has a large and passionate following.

If you're looking for a way to make money writing indie games, your nose might be itching now. The thing you're smelling? Money, waiting to be earned.

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Edit: The "Romance Cards" were from The Witcher, not The Witcher 2.

And, as always, we're still on Facebook and Twitter.

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The Joy and Despair of Writing These Stupid Games.

Please, Charlie Bucket, save me from this hell of my own devising! I've been in 80-hour-week crunch for 15 months!

"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams." - Willy Wonka

"Forget it. Music makers and dreamers of dreams make no money." - Every Sensible Human

Last week, I wrote what is probably the most viewed blog post I've ever written, about the rough road of writing indie games for a living. I decided not to post it like ten times before I finally hit the Publish button. Now I'm really glad I did. The response I received was far more positive than I ever expected.

Also, I made a lot of young, talented, ambitious people sad. Which is its own reward.

As is my style, I want to follow up with a few points raised, questions I wanted to answer, the occasional rebuttal, and a few words about making a living in this marvelous, gruesome industry.

The Good and Bad News

I wish I could remember where I first heard this, but it's true wisdom:

Video game development is not a software industry. It's an entertainment industry.

If you want security and stability in your life (and believe me, if you are sane, this is what you want), write web infrastructure or banking software. Trying to make a living writing games is like trying to be an actor, or a musician, or a cinematographer. Not as bad as wanting to be a poet, but close.

This is a business for misfit toys, people who are in it because we love it, because we live and breathe it.

This doesn't describe everyone who makes games, of course. Doesn't describe the executives. (But what can you do?) Doesn't describe the people who moved into the casual space  and iOS to chase the easy money. (They will be winnowed soon enough.) But the people who design the stuff? Who test and build it? We're the freaks. The true believers.

You want to write indie games, and you're scared? You should be scared. I'm scared every damn day. I've been writing games for my whole life. I HATE writing games. I'm sick to death of it. I do it because I have to. It's all I'm good for.

(But sometimes, every great once in a while, I do something right. Some tweak of dialogue, some clever design decision, some encounter that just comes off right. And ... It's just joy. Wouldn't trade it for anything.)

Games workers are treated like garbage. If only there was something that could be done. If only someone had faced these same problems before. Hmmm. It is a puzzle.

But Also, Game Writers Are Victimized. They Don't Have To Be.

This is a truly fantastic article about how gruesome life in the games industry is, and what needs to be done about it. Everyone who cares about games should read it. It explains why almost nobody can spend a full career writing games and perfecting their craft. And, thus, why most games are so derivative and terrible.

Where Baby Indies Come From

In Chekhov's awesome play The Seagull, Nina, a young actress, says, "You have no idea how awful it is when you know you're acting badly." This is true across all art forms.

Sometimes, you play Dudegunshooter XXXL 1 and say, "Wow, that was awesome!". Then play Dudegunshooter XXXL 4 and say, "This is sort of getting tired." Then you play Dudegunshooter XXXL 7 and says, "Boy, they're really phoning it in now." Then you stop buying them and last you heard they're on Dudegunshooter XXXL 10 and everyone is just sort of sighing and shaking their heads.

You ever play a game and think, "This is so tired and phoned in and joyless."? Well, imagine how painful it is to write that game. To burn your life and youthful energy away in a cloud of 100-hour-week crunchtime to create a big pile of creativity-free meh.

I've done it. I've written games where my heart wasn't in it. It shows in the final product, and it's excruciating. (You might not like Avadon 2: The Corruption, my new game. That's fine. But there's a lot of neat stuff and attention to detail in that game. Like it or not, I think it's clear I'm at least trying.)

It's hard to be young and creative and ambitious and burn those super-productive years away on something you don't believe in. That is why developers turn indie. Not for money (though that helps a lot), but for the joy of creation.

I don't want to discourage anyone. I don't want anyone to give up. I want them to make awesome games for me to play. I just want them to be prepared. I want every word I write to help make more successes.

Never forget. If you are willing to pay any price to work in a field, someone will eventually try to make you give up everything.

Let Someone Tell You a Story

In my previous article, I came down way too hard on Alexander Bruce, creator of Antichamber. He's the real damn deal, putting in his years in the trenches to make good work. If you want to write indie games (or start any small business), treat yourself to this talk.

It's all there. The passion. The good luck and good connections. The quest for perfection and the toll it can take on you. The recognition of and correction of mistakes. It's a perfect example of that old, true aphorism: It takes ten years to make an overnight success.

But this was also the path taken by a relatively unencumbered young person with the serious chops necessary to win design competitions (and the precious funding that comes along with that). If you lack this sort of superhuman energy or have the obligations that can come with getting older (such as, Heaven forbid, having kids), you will have to do less. This has a direct cost, paid in lower odds of success.

Luck, and the Making Of Same

Antichamber is the story of what it takes to make a HIT: Write a first-rate title, and market it until you're on the ragged edge of a nervous breakdown.

My previous article was trying to say, among other things, that this isn't the route you have to take. Some games don't lend themselves well to this sort of press. Some developers aren't capable of it. Heck, I'm close to freaking out all the time doing a fraction of what Alexander Bruce did.

I mean, I'm not a hermit or anything, but I'm really introverted. I hate meeting strangers, and I like my house a lot. If I had to go to a million conventions doing heavy PR to sell my games, my games would not exist. Like my work or not, I don't think gaming would be better off without them.

However, this bit is key: The less you do, the smaller the rewards and the more you need a lucky break. The more you do, the less you rely on luck. If you listen to the talk, don't let it destroy your will. Only understand that it is showing you one point of the yardstick that will be used to measure you.

These children will not be successful game developers. Must be because they are lazy.

And One More Thing About Luck

I knew that the thing about the previous post that would get up peoples' noses the most was the luck part. That luck makes a difference in whether a business succeeds. It's the most controversial obviously true statement I can think of.

Look, you have to work hard. The more you scramble, the more often good breaks will come your way, and the better you will be able to take advantage of them when they do.

And I know why people hate talking about luck. People who haven't made it want to believe they are entirely in control of their own destiny. People who have made it want to believe it was entirely because they were awesome. Neither are ever true, but facing it is too scary, so we don't.

Luck matters at every single point along the journey. Look at me. I'm lucky. How was I lucky? Well, I was born in a wealthy, safe country where I wasn't at risk of dying from dysentery or civil war. (Not a lot of hot indie talent coming out of Syria these days.) I had supportive, reasonably affluent parents who were able to get me a computer and programming lessons and didn't freak out when I spent 80 hours one summer beating Bard's Tale II. (And they worried. I know they did.) I'm lucky that the brain tumor I had removed when I was 18 didn't take me out of the game entirely.

Obviously, this isn't about games anymore. It's a whole way of looking at life. In the end, we'll all believe what we need to to get where we want to go. Sometimes, however, someone needs to point out the reality of the thing.

Thanks To Everyone Who Said Nice Things

I really appreciate it. Thanks to everyone who follows me on Twitter now. I'll try to be cute and clever and not murder my career. And that's all I have to say about the business end of things for a while.

I want to do some game criticism for our bit. Our art form is flourishing in a lot of ways, and people trying to say intelligent things about how to make it better are really needed.

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Edit: A Quick Addenda About Luck

The frustrating thing about this topic is that everyone hears a different thing when I say the word "luck." Here is a quote from my previous article in which I make explicit the mechanism in which luck works (and helps or doesn't help niche developers like me):

"Some gamers will love you, and some won’t. You have to hang on until one of those gamers becomes an editor somewhere. The more niche your product is, the longer you will have to wait."

It's not about magic. It's about how you can search in the wilderness for a while until you find that person who can appreciate that weird thing you do and has the power and willingness to help you. You have to do the searching, and luck tells you how long you have to endure until you find what you need.

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Marketing, Dumb Luck, and the Popping of the Indie Bubble.

This article is kind of depressing, so here is a puppy hugging a kitten.

Sigh. I hate writing articles like this. Even if I’m right (and I really think I am), nobody thanks the bringer of bad news. If what I predict does come to pass, people will resent me more, not less. But I really think what I have to say should be considered by the jillions of ambitious game devs who are quitting their day jobs to go indie. So here goes.

Interesting game article in the news recently. This guy named Alexander Bruce wrote a puzzle game called Antichamber. It did very well. He just did an interview (written by Brendan Sinclair) about how it’s very important to do marketing and develop a good relationship with the press and your players.

The article contains a lot of questionable statements (by the writer, not Bruce) like …

"Just a few years ago, developers didn't need to worry so much about their relationship with the end users."

Does this match the experience of anyone trying to keep a small software company alive in the last few decades? The ability to keep a good relationship with end users was our best tool for staying alive. But I digress.

(Edit: Just to be clear, a lot of stuff Bruce says is very sharp and worth heeding, especially about how dealing with limited resources forces you to be clever.)

Despite the weird stuff, Bruce gets a bit of good advice in too. To a point.

Now, first, it's evidence how amazingly sweet things have been for indie devs for the last few years that anyone would even think "You should do marketing." is news. When I started out writing shareware in 1994, the first piece of advice anyone ever gave anyone about anything was, "Yeah. Marketing. Do that."

Not the right way to market your game.

But, Um, Duh, Right?

Isn't it kind of an obvious bit of advice? When you finish your game, you'll tell people, won't you? Is anyone trying to succeed at business by finishing their game, putting it in a lead box, and burying it in the backyard?

But here is where the article sort of falls apart. There are many paths to success in the indie biz, and each needs its own marketing plan. Each developer has their own set of strengths and weaknesses, both mental and in cash and time resources.

Just because one path (Hint: Steam) has been popular of late doesn't mean it's the right one for that particular game (since the genre you are working in will require its own strategy, depending on how niche you are), or that it will be a plausible path forever. If you are trying to make it writing high-cost, boutique games in a serious niche field like, say, turn-based wargaming, following the strategy Alexander Bruce used for his puzzle game will lead to ruin.

You see, the conventional wisdom now is that, to make it in indie games, you need to blow it all on one big, flashy title. Spend all your time at GDC giving the gaming press hot oil massages. Then release it on Steam, get fifty articles written about you, and make meelions of dollars. Buy a Tesla, give interviews, have your next game be a 2-D platformer, and die happy.

But buried in the article is the real news. The little tidbit that really says where things are going ...

"Even being featured in a coveted place like the Steam Daily Deals doesn't mean as much as it used to."

Yes. This is true. A Steam Daily Deal used to mean doing a happy dance and putting on your Super Money Pants. What? That's fading? Uh oh. And this is the beginning of the real story.

By The Way …

I’m not happy about any of this. A few years ago, there was a huge demand for indie content, and I had a bunch of quality games ready to go. I profited from this temporary state of affairs far more than I deserved. I am not gloating about sweet times coming to an end. My modest games will be the first on the chopping block.

I can't get rich selling THIS anymore? NO FAIR!

When Can We Start Using the Term "Indie Bubble"?

On October 29, Steam accepted 100 titles for publishing from their Greenlight system. A HUNDRED. IN ONE DAY. JUST ON STEAM.

This is the problem with so many indie devs cozying up to the Escapist and Kotaku and the PA Report. There is a flood of new titles, so many that Humble Bundle sells them in Costco-sized bundles of a dozen for a dollar. A lot of good titles won't ever get that press. They just can't. There's not room.

And that's just for the flashy titles (the "AAA Indies"). My turn-based, low-budget, word-heavy RPGs are a lot of fun and have a real audience, but nobody at Kotaku gives a crap about them, nor should they. Why would a Let's Play channel on YouTube want to do one of my games? It'd be like putting up a movie of someone reading a book. Alexander Bruce's marketing path is useless to me, but my business is still valid. Has been for 20 years.

Also, the gaming community doesn't care about indies as much as we like to think they do. (Minecraft is an ultra-mega-uber hit, right? Well, Grand Theft Auto V made more than it in like 18 seconds.) The gaming press knows that gamers only want to hear about so many indies. Soon, they'll start picking who lives and who dies.

The point? Any article about marketing indies that doesn't mention the word "luck" is lying to you.

Even if she was alive, she still wouldn't want to play your 2-D platformer.

By the Way, Luck Exists

I know all you young developers are brash libertarians who believe in a just, deterministic universe. So feel free to get angry at me for this part: Unless times are really good, you need luck for your business to succeed. You need the rare sort of good times where there's a ton of demand and very little product. A time like the period that is now ending.

Yes, Luck: Getting a good break. Meeting the right editor who will champion you or making the right publisher connection. My company, Spiderweb Software, has been lucky. Many times. I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Worthy titles sometimes fall by the wayside now. There is no inherent universal justice that decides that the "best" games succeed, whatever you mean by "best". Some gamers will love you, and some won’t. You have to hang on until one of those gamers becomes an editor somewhere. The more niche your product is, the longer you will have to wait.

Disagree? Think that everyone who fails only fails because they were lazy or stupid or just suck? Fine with me. It's your call if you need to believe in a universe based on justice and fairness. I hope someday to join you there.

This article is kind of depressing, so here is a puppy.

Can There Only Ever Be One Path?

Here's how it works now. Everyone makes a team, puts something together with flash, pushes the heck out of it at GDC/PAX/whatever, and waits for Steam to wave its magic fairy dust wand and make them rich.

Which is great. If it works. But there's a problem. There's still a lot of fairy dust in that wand, but it's getting spread awful thin.

Is there another route to success in this business?

You could try what I did to make a long career. You could pick a neglected genre, write the best games you can for it on a limited budget in your spare time, release one game after another, and push your work where you can to build a loyal audience with word-of-mouth and good customer support. Then, maybe, years later, thanks to your persistence and hard work, you might go full time. A loyal audience can keep you in business through good times and lean.

All you need to make a game is a $299 computer, a chair, time, and some software which we'll pretend for the moment you didn't get on BitTorrent. It will probably look cruddy, but a lot of people don't care (and many people get off on the rough DIY thing). You won't be on Steam, but there are plenty of ways to sell it like on your own site. It'll be tough, but starting a new business is never easy.

When I did it (shut up, grandpa), there wasn't even the web. Now there are forums and communities galore. There are a million places to start assembling that customer base, and you don't even need to say the word Steam.

Is this possible? It should be. It happens. I'm not the only small dev who has made a living this way. But, sadly, there aren't many. I don't know how feasible the slow and steady building of a clientele is in indie gaming. I am, however, confident that we're going to need to start finding out.

Dear God, please let Polygon notice meeeeeee!

But What About the Future?

I think we're in for an interesting few years in the computer game industry. I have my own opinion about the future of small game development, and it's this:

If your game can't succeed based on word-of-mouth marketing, unless you get real lucky, you need to adjust your budget, your quality, or both.

I know, I know. "Jeff Vogel is just being a crazy old coot again." Sure. Nobody wants to hear a whole business model being called into question.

But I've lived through rich times and lean times, several of each. Small-scale software development is a rough business, and you need to operate lean and mean to live in the long term.

Some indie devs will use their bubble money to get big and survive. Anyone who can't grow huge and doesn't have the patience and persistence to go the small company path will have to seek opportunities elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see anyone lose their jobs. I've actively enjoyed seeing people who do what I do getting rich.

However, Microeconomics 101 is still true. When people start making a ton of money, they will attract competitors until nobody makes easy money anymore. It’s an iron law of capitalism.

Alexander Bruce deserves his success, but it is important to remember that the path he described in his interview is only sometimes the best way, even if the press often treats it as the One True Route. Not everyone can market their way to success.

(Edit - The final sentence was perhaps a bit too hostile, so I changed it.)

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My incoherent mumblings are now available in condensed form on Twitter.

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We Finally Released Avadon 2.

Keeping the single-player, turn-based, story-heavy flame alive.

After two years of development, we have finally released our first all-new game in three years. Avadon 2: The Corruption, the second game in the Avadon trilogy, for Mac and Windows, is now out on our site, Steam, and GOG.com.

It's another hardcore, story-heavy RPG. Cool tactical combat. In-depth story with a ton of tough choices and many different endings. (Far more than in Avadon: The Black Fortress.)

It's very much in the spirit of the older Interplay/Black Isle/Bioware games, back when Interplay and Black Isle were still going great guns and Bioware still wrote Bioware games. If you liked Avadon, you should like this one. If you didn't like Avadon, Avadon 2 is bigger, has more tough choices that make a difference, and doesn't start as slow. Maybe you'll like this one.

Don't like our business model? Allow me to phrase a retort.

I'll Take a Good Start

We've sold about 2000 copies in the first 24 hours, after pretty much zero attention in the gaming press (not that we deserve attention, I guess). Now that most indie projects are made by big teams, these numbers seem super low. For a small lean-and-mean company like ours, it's really promising.

We'll still be in business.

"But This Looks Like It Was Made In 1995!"

And that's an insult? Um, kid, haven't you heard? That's the hip style now.

Pictured: My development process.

Time Will Take Its Toll

It's been a long road. I'm in my forties and have been doing this for about 20 years, and questionable health and creeping burnout are taking their toll. I'm proud of this game, I truly am, and I think it's a lot of fun. But I can't rely on my body and brain to support my usual machine-like pace.

It'll be a while until reviews come out, but I'll spoil the surprise. 7/10, or 8/10 if the reviewer had a good day. That's how the prevailing standard of reviews go. Avadon 2 has low production values, but it's basically competently made and a lot of fun for people who like that sort of thing.

There will also be the standard cheap shots about how I should be doing different things. Even though spending my life trying to perfect my skills writing games in a beloved genre almost nobody else works in already makes me so edgy that I live out on an edge made of edges.

Anyway, there's a big demo. Hope you like it. I'm going back to bed.

Finally, I'm on twitter now. Follow me. I'm cranky and I don't want to be employable in the computer game industry, so it should end up pretty amusing.

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A Little Bit of Genius at PAX

There were things I saw at Penny Arcade Expothat I wanted to go on about. Something besides Microsoft trying to push us into our exciting Windows 8/Internet Explorer 9 future by providing the world middling adaptions of ancient Atari games for some reason.

There was one game at the Indie Megabooth that deserves special attention from all humans. Not only was it funny, but it has perhaps the best elevator pitch in the history of the human race:

OK. You're a guy living in the suburbs. You have a wife, two kids, and a secret: You're actually an octopus in disguise.

Obvious jokes aside, how can you not want to try that game? Especially when you know it's called Octodad: The Dadliest Catch.

Octodad!

This game is the purest epitome of the Indie spirit. (How's that for a pull quote?) It's unique, intriguing, utterly bananas, and no major publisher will ever do anything like it.

Sadly, the gameplay is focused on maneuvering the octopus, which means struggling to do normally simple tasks with an odd control scheme. I am a little skeptical about how much this particular style of gameplay can catch on. On the bright side, if it's priced cheaply enough, it can make a ton of sales based on the "Oh God. I have to try this out." factor.

My unsolicited advice for the developers: If the game turns out to not be that fun, sell it for five bucks. You'll move a lot of copies based on morbid curiosity alone.

Edit: Oh, yeah. You can support Octodad at Steam Greenlight here. I voted for it. KEEP INDIE GAMES WEIRD!

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How Indie Games Can Be Cheap and Awesome

I got to go to PAX over the weekend and be on a panel and see cool gaming stuff and meet lots of cool people and fans of my games. One of the things I learned is that a lot of people actually read my blog. This is very gratifying. Although it terrifies me that anyone thinks my opinion is in any way significant.

PAX is great, of course. Though it is in the unenviable position of being permanently unable to satisfy the massive demand for tickets.

(Sure, its success will probably invite others to copy it with their own gaming cons, but those dopplegangers won't be the same without the presence of all the big companies showing off their stuff. And big companies won't go to a lot of cons, as they need to set aside at least a little time to make games. So, from now on, if you manage to score a PAX badge, just cherish it, knowing that your attendance the following year is unlikely. Just think of PAX as a hot but extremely unstable boy/girlfriend.)

I had a lot of little epiphanies while looking at the many, many highly promising indie games on display at PAX. (The PAX 10 looked cool as always, but the much flashier Indie Megabooth next door seemed to be sucking up its oxygen.) And here is the biggest one:

16-bit graphics are an awesome thing, and more indies should use them.

If you don't know what 16-bit graphics are, think early Nintendo/Super Nintendo. If that still doesn't ring a bell, look here. Or here. Or here. Or especially here.

If you are a small game developer, you have a big problem. You want your game to look great. But graphics can be expensive. Or very expensive. 16-bit graphics solve the great mystery of writing a game with a small team and no budget: making decent production values cheaply in a short amount of time.

Here is what 16-bit Nintendo-style graphics have going for them:

1. They work. Heck, people wrote awesome games using them for years.

2. They look good. It's amazing how evocative an icon you can make with a few well-chosen pixels.

3. They're cheap and quick to make. One talented artist can produce a game's worth in an entirely reasonable amount of time.

4. You have the power of nostalgia working for you. To a whole generation of gamers, those icons are as warm and comforting as a Snuggie.

5. Because of #4, anyone who takes cheap shots at your graphics looks like a jerk.

6. Versatility. With care, they can blend with much more detailed and 3-D effects. Fez is a fantastic example of this. You don't have to be pure when you use this style.

Right now, this style of graphics is seen as a pure nostalgia play, a way of saying, "Look! We look like a Nintendo game! We're silly! Tee hee!" But I think 16-bit graphics are better than that. They've been used in a million great games, and they can be used in a million more. The more people use them, the more they will be seen as an entirely legitimate art style, which in turn will make them available to more generations of poor, promising designers.

Indie devs, don't be afraid to be cheap! It is your sacred right and responsibility as an Indie!

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Quick Thoughts On Android

One of our games, Avadon: The Black Fortress, came out on Android recently. (It's also on the Amazon App Store.) The experience was very tiring and time-consuming, and it will great outside support (such as the Humble Bundle wanting to help with the port, as they did with Avadon) for us to go through it again. If you are a small development house without a hit big enough to get the attention of the big boys at Google and Amazon, it's really hard to summon up the resources to deal with the things that make Android so tough to develop for.

And what are those "things"? If people are interested in a developer's view of the Android situation, the Penny Arcade Report had a really good article on why one dev is avoiding the platform. It's only describes the beginning of the problems, but it's a very good start.

(If anything, the article sells short how many devices there are out there, each with their own weird quirks and bugs, and how much extra testing and debugging time you have to spend dealing with the mess. It's even harder when you write games for tablets, like we do.)

The comments on the post are very worth reading, as they provide a classic example of how evangelists for a platform can be capable of erecting a Reality-Dispersal-Field, through which not even the hardest facts can penetrate.

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We're In the New Humble Bundle!

Today, the newest Humble Bundle went live, and my game was in it. The Humble Bundle For Android 2 is now up, enabling you to get Avadon: The Black Fortress and four other fine indie games for whatever you decide to donate, and a portion of your contribution goes to charity.

Note that, though it's called the Android bundle, all games in it are also available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux. Pay once, get it DRM-free for all four platforms.

We are hugely excited to be part of the Humble Bundle, a project that has managed a unique combination of ethics, business sense, and just general excitement. It was a great idea when it came out, and it's still a great idea.

Also, this is the first time that we've had a game out for Android and the first time in well over a decade that we had a game out for Linux. Ports of these games were done by other developers, and they did a great job. After the Humble Bundle concludes, we will make sure that the ports will continue to be for sale.

Any hypothetical questions, imagined reader?

Q: So the Linux and Android version won't disappear from the Earth after the bundle is gone?

A: Nope. Deals to distribute these versions are already in place.

Q: You didn't do the ports yourself?

A: No, they were ported by skilled third-party developers in close consultation with us. My increasingly old brain doesn't have the space to learn to develop for any new platforms. It doesn't even have space to hold everything I need to know now. The number of things I need to do for my job that I need to relearn from scratch every time I do them is already really high.

Q: Will future Spiderweb titles come out for Linux and Android?

A: Good question! I don't know!

Being able to sell something for Android and Linux is extra-exciting to me, because, after years of reading e-mails about how awesome it'll be for me when I develop for those platforms, I will get to actually see how good it is. So if you are one of the multitude that promised me up and down that you would buy anything I release on Linux/Android, I have a great opportunity for you ...

Q: What charities does this support?

A: The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child's Play, both highly worthy endeavors.

(Added 3/19/2012.)

Q: Avadon for Android is for tablets. What does this mean?

A: That the device's screen needs to be at least 1024x600.

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Four Things To End the Week.

One.

I have a big article about the indie games biz up on Gamasutra. I'm quite happy with how it turned out. Enjoy!

Two.

Everyone all justifiably atwitter about how Tim Schafer raised upwards of one million dollars on Kickstarter to make a new adventure game. It's a great proof-of-concept for the whole publicly funded game thing. If Tim Schafer couldn't pull in some coin to make an adventure game, nothing else has a chance.

I think it's brilliant, and it ties well into what I said in my Gamasutra article. The secret power of indie devs is to exploit underserved niches. Expect other Kickstarter-funded games in future. I only hope the results match the expectations.

Three.

Heaven forbid that I should be thought to criticize Notch or Minecraft. (I won't even point out that the whole end boss/enchantment/potion/combat system is taking the game in entirely the wrong direction to please exactly the wrong group of people.)

But, about this.

Hey, I wouldn't presume to give them advice. But, after I make my 30 million dollars, I'm not going to rely on Anonymous to finish my games for me. Just sayin'.

Four.

Every once in a while, I read someone's critique of OK Go as a band, focusing on the fact that they basically fine and only have one decent single. (Don't click that link. You've seen it already.) But that misses the point. They aren't a band. They're much more interesting than that. They're a meme-generation factory, and really good at it.

So here is my legally mandated one link a year to an OK Go video. Yeah, like you have something better to do with three minutes and fifty-four seconds.

Look for my next link to them in roughly fifteen months, when they play some pleasant and non-threatening power pop by shooting kittens out of a cannon into steel drums, or whatever.

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You Gotta Pay Your Dues If You Want To Sing the Blues

"I am the entertainer,
And I've had to pay my price.
The things I did not know at first,
I learned by doin' twice." 
                    - William Joel

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote at length about the 10000 Hour Rule, which can be stated as follow:

To master any non-trivial field requires 10000 hours of dedicated practice and study.

The previous post was about the rule and why I think it's a true thing. I also wanted to write a bit about how this rule applies to the creation of computer games, which, believe me, is an endeavor that takes many years to master.

How the Rule Applies To Professional, AAA Game Development

Big game companies are infamous for eating their young. They scoop up young people that don't know any better, make them work insane hours for crap pay, discard them when they burn out, and harvest a new crop of workers. There are few elder statesmen who stayed around long enough to get really good at what they do. Alas, most of the rank and file get driven off before they put in the years necessary to get really good.

So if you've ever wondered why games tend to be so derivative and make so many of the same mistakes again and again ...

How the Rule Applies To Indies

When an indie developer nobody cared about suddenly breaks out and releases a hit, kickass game, you know what I love to do? Find out how that sudden superstar spent the years learning to make a good game.

Every successful indie developer has a pile of relatively rough old games they cut their teeth on. Notch (Minecraft) does. Jonathan Blow (Braid) does. Petri Purho (Crayon Physics) does. I sure do. John Carmack and John Romero made a pile of games you never heard of before they created Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom.

It's necessary. You can't just make a good game from scratch. You have to spend years working at it, writing stuff that you probably won't be very proud of. I count myself very lucky that, when I was writing my early RPGs, there was pent up demand for them. Enough so that even my rough, subpar goods were able to generate a living.

One More Example That Amuses Me

I only just heard about an upcoming Indie RPG called Driftmoon, being developed by a small company called Instant Kingdom. Hey, why shouldn't they write an Indie RPG? Everyone else is.

I'd never heard of them, but I looked at the gameplay video and the screenshots and thought, "Hey, this looks really nice. I bet this isn't their first game."

Then I looked at their older games. Five of them, each one a little nicer than the one that came before. It's awesome to look at. You can almost see the learning.

(Oh, and you can see the couple who runs Instant Kingdom here. I don't want to sound crass, but these are two seriously attractive game developers. If I was running some Association For the Advancement of Indie Games or something, I would put those two on a poster in a cold second. The caption would be, "Indie Game Developers - WE'RE NOT MONSTERS!")

How the Rule Applies To You. (If You Want To Create Games.)

So if you're one of the many enterprising young folks who ask me about getting into this business, learn from the above. Write games. Lots of them. Don't worry about aiming too high. Don't do your ultra-mega-epic yet. A bunch of varied, small apps is a great way to learn, and you'll get a bunch of your failures out of the way early.

It's a lot of work, but don't despair. Hey, I built a career on a game that looked like this. If that can happen, than you, a person I suspect is at least as intelligent and driven as me, totally has a shot.

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Why All Our Games Are Now Cheaper Forever

Spiderweb Software just started our annual sale. It's ten percent off everything we sell for the whole month of October. That isn't really news. We do this every year, and people seem to like it.

But this year, there is much more. We permanently lowered the prices of everything we sell. At least 20% cheaper (in addition to the 10% for the sale). For some products, much more. The most expensive game we sell is now $20, and that is likely to last pretty much forever.

It's a big mental shift for us, and I thought it was worth blogging about. I write about game pricing on this blog a lot, and I'm not ashamed of it. Right now, most of the huge revolutions in the game biz are in the new crazy pricing models, and there are still a lot of questions out there about the most efficient way to make a game make money.

Why It Took So Long To Lower Our Prices

We released our first game in January, 1995. That is a long time ago, and much has changed. A few helpful comparisons.

Now: Huge distributors like Steam and iTunes sell massive numbers of copies for low prices, and Indie developers make good money on huge volume.
Then: The World Wide Web barely existed and we scraped by on a handful of sales from AOL.

Now: A quality Indie niche game sells on big portals for ten bucks at most. More than that and people think you're crazy and move on.
Then: Most good shareware games sold for $25. It took me a very long time just to realize that that price isn't normal anymore.

Now: Indie developers can make excellent livings selling lots of copies of cheap games.
Then: Indie game developers were called "shareware developers," and everyone thought they were losers and spat on them.

Now: Want to pirate a game? It just takes 3 seconds of searching on Pirate Bay.
Then: Took five minutes of searching instead of three seconds. This actually made a big difference.

Now: Many new games are given away for free and make their money on micro-transactions from a portion of their users.
Then: FREE games? With micro-WHAT? What are you? A SORCEROR?

(The shift to free games is arguably the most stunning development in the games biz in a very long time. My prediction: Within five years, there will be a successful game that pays you a small amount to play it and makes their cash selling better swords or whatever.)

I'm a dumb person in plenty of key ways, so it took me a while to observe the key fact:

A LOT of money is being made by selling games for cheap.

So now , instead of selling our games for $25 or $28 (!!!), we'll sell them for $20 or $15. I know this still seems like a lot, but I haven't backed off on the key thing I've long said ...

People Who Write Niche Games Can't Charge a Dollar

If you're making a pretty, shiny, highly casual game with cartoon squirrels and you think you can find a million fans for it, go ahead. Charge a dollar. You'll have to.

But if you write games like mine? Low budget, old school, hardcore RPGs with lots of content? If I charged a dollar for it, I'd have to sell a copy to pretty much every interested human everywhere to have a chance of making money.

So I still charge an actual price, an amount of money that still feels like money. Maybe I should have taken everything down to $15. Maybe I'm being too timid in the price drop. But, in a sense, that difference doesn't matter.

There are two sorts of prices you can pay for a game: An amount that is so small you don't care, and an amount high enough that you do. Our newest game, Avadon: The Black Fortress, is $20 on our site and $10 on Steam. That's a big difference, but, in a very real sense, they have the same price: an amount of money that actually feels like spending money. We will always charge actual money, as opposed to pocket change. All I have done is slightly tinkered with the level.

Bonus Point: Why Is Our Game Twice the Price On Our Site Than On Steam

I get asked this a lot, and it's a fair question. The answer:

In any place where your game is sold, pick the price that will maximize the profits. This ideal price changes depending on the nature of the place where it is being sold.

Steam is a big, sprawling gaming bazaar where practically all of the games are cheap. People see a game, spend a moderate amount of money on it, and try it out. People experiment there, and you need to charge a price that encourages customers to pick you as their experiment. Also, if you charge $20 for your game there, it will be on a list with ten good games at half the price, so you will get murdered.

Spiderweb Software's web site, on the other hand, only lists our games. It is generally only visited by fans of role-playing games. People on our site are generally really interested in the specific sorts of games we sell, and so the higher price doesn't scare them off.

This sort of logic isn't my weird invention. It's basic business. World of Goo is $20 on the company site, $10 on Steam, and $5 on iTunes. Each marketplace has its own norms, and you price your game to maximize your earnings there.

And that is why games are now at most $20 on our site. Because of the current standards of the game industry as a whole, I think that will most likely increase our earnings overall. It might not always have been that way, but I feel it is now.

(And, yes. I set game prices to maximize my earnings. Of course I do. Astonishingly, some people seem to take offense at this. I don't care. I'm not going to neglect to send my kids to college just so I can satisfy someone's arbitrary standards of Indie cred. I'm too old for that, and children persist in their irritating need to eat food.)

So. Anyway. A Sale.

Our games are cheaper forever, and even cheaper than that this month. We're getting a lot more sales, and I don't feel like the dumb jerk that still charges $28 for three year old games anymore. If you like old school role-playing games, you could certainly do worse.

And it will be a while before I write about pricing again. Believe it or not, I have other things to say (and make fun of). Time to get going on that ...

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Our First Game Is Out For the iPad. Hooray!

Last week, Avadon: The Black Fortress HD for the iPad went live in the iTunes App Store. The reaction to it so far has left us stunned. Literally. Like, jaws dropped, walking around in a daze.

The genesis of the iPad version was a few months ago, when I said, "Hmmm. I have a few weeks free on my schedule. I think I'll port Avadon to the iPad. That'll be good for a laugh!" I've long known that there was a demand on the device for old school gaming, free of ads, in-game purchases, cute animals, zombies, and farming.

But, it turns out, the demand was far greater than I'd ever guessed. My fan mail since the release has been very instructive. Gamers weren't just disappointed by the lack of deeper games on the device. They were downright irked.

But that is the Magic Power of the Indie developer. Find an underserved market and serve it.

Writing and releasing my first device for iOS has been very instructive. In case anyone is interested, here's a few comments on Spiderweb Software's first game for portables.

Learning To Code For a New Platform.

Apple has done an amazing job of making developing for iPhones and iPads accessible. The sets of commands to program the device (i.e. the API, called Cocoa) are very clear and not too trying to learn. The development environment, XCode, is free. There are several good, free game engines for the devices. (I used a heavily modified version of the open source engine iPTK.)

There are also excellent books available on the topic. I leaned most heavily on Beginning iPhone 4 Development. I found iPad Application Development For Dummies to be unusually poor for a Dummies book, but its chapter on Provisioning (a tricky, vital, and neglected topic) is easily worth the cost of the book.

A Decent Port. But Just Decent.

Avadon originally came out for Windows and Mac. I was really determined not to half-ass the port to the iPad. I put a lot of thought into how to best adapt an old school, Western-style RPG to a touch screen. It's not something people have spent a lot of time doing. I think I came up with good answers to a lot of the questions, and the game overall plays really well.

However, there are a number of places where the UI could be better. This isn't because I was lazy or wanted to dump shoddy work on the market, but simply because this was my first iOS application. So have mercy. Our next game for the iPad (out, let's say, next April) will be better. It'll take some doing to modify the engine, but it'll get done.

Avadon HD is also a fairly demanding app. All of those icons eat up RAM, and the first generation iPad doesn't have a lot. It's playable, but it will be pokey from time to time. It runs great on the iPad 2, but I don't take a lot of satisfaction in that. The inconsistent performance on the iPad 1 is, simply, a failing on my part.

The Apple Approval Process.

Took a week to get my app approved. No rejections. No hassles. No complaints.

The Eternal Pain of Pricing.

It hasn't all been love and group hugs. Some of my fans have been seriously furious that we sell Avadon for Mac and Windows for $25 and the iPad version is $10. Like, "I will never be your customer again. Die in a fire." furious. I don't normally explain my decisions about pricing, but this merits a few words.

The same game is almost always priced differently on different devices. If you look at the prices charged for, say, Peggle, Plants vs. Zombies, or Angry Birds on different platforms, you'll find a huge variety. Angry Birds on the iPhone? One dollar. On the Macintosh? Five dollars. That's a five times difference!

There are a variety of reasons, all of them out of my control, for why I feel it is appropriate to charge less for the iPad version:

1. It has fewer features, due to the limitations of the device. Most notably, it is stuck at 1024x768 resolution and there are no keyboard shortcuts.
2. Since it is being sold by Apple, it is subject to the rules of their system. Most notably, there is DRM, and we can't give refunds through iTunes. Games bought directly from Spiderweb have no DRM and a Money Back Guarantee.
3. When you buy Mac/PC Avadon from us, you get a registration key that can be used to unlock an unlimited number of copies, over both Mac and Windows. A registration over iTunes isn't quite so liberal.
4. There is no ability to mod the game. This matters to more people than you might think.

But the main reason Avadon HD is $10 is, to be honest, that is the only possible price. Any more expensive, and it will cost way too much for an app. Any cheaper, and we're charging too little for what is still an old school niche product with a limited audience. If you try to look at it from our perspective, I think you will see that we didn't have a lot of options here.

One More Disappointment.

We are going to release all of our new games on the iPad. No question.

However, we currently have no plans to write games for the iPhone. After long thought, I came to realize that we just can't figure out how to write the sort of in-depth games we like to do on that screen size. Again, this is a failing on our part. I'm sure some intrepid developer will find a way to make it work. (Hear that, young Indies? That is the siren song of a market for you, all wrapped up with a big, red bow.)

Also, since most Android devices don't have a screen big enough to support our games, we are very unsure how soon we'll be supporting that platform. We are in wait-and-see mode.

Thank You.

And finally, many thanks to everyone who reads this who has supported our games. At the end of the day, I'm just a guy in a basement trying to earn a living and feed the kids. I am grateful for every sale. Plus, they make it possible for me to write more games. Lord knows, by this point, I'm too old and cranky to learn how to do real work.

Soon, we will release the first screenshots and information for Avernum: Escape From the Pit. For Windows and Macintosh. And the iPad!

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The Ultimate Fix Your Broken Game Checklist.

(This is the third of three articles about providing tech support as a small business. The previous chapters are here and here.)

I get two sorts of requests for tech support for my games. First, there's the familiar problems, the things that are my fault or that I know how to fix. I love these. I tell the victims how to get out from under their burden, they get on with their lives (dazed that an actual human read and processed their request for help), and everyone is happy.

And then there are the gremlins. The weird problems. The sorts of issues that are reported by exactly one person out of many thousands. Problems whose cause and fix are a total mystery. These are, alas, most of the problems reported to me. Most of these problems will be caused by incompatible software, hard drive corruptions, wonky graphics cards, or free-floating evil spirit manifestations. Sadly, as the hardware industry seeks out ways to cut corners and make computers ever cheaper, these sorts of afflictions only grow more common.

(Of course, some people say that every problem with a game, ever, is the result of the programmer's sloppiness and error. As if video cards never break and Windows is a flawless piece of software. These people want you to spend limitless time chasing bugs that don't exist. For a sample of this line of thinking, read the comments for my last post. While I acknowledge that some problems end up my fault, wasting energy trying to fix problems you didn't cause and can't fix is a Bad Thing.)

When I get one of these weird problems, I send out a standard list of troubleshooting steps. I have spent years assembling and perfecting it, and it honestly fixes the vast majority of problems. If you are a small developer, I invite you to steal and adapt it. If you are suffering from misbehaving software, I suggest trying these steps. At the risk of sounding slightly arrogant, if everyone would just drop everything, listen to what I have to say, and follow it without question, the world would be a much better place.

Spiderweb Software Tech Support Checklist

1. Restart your machine and try the game again. Run the game when no other applications are running. A lot of glitches and crashes are one-time things and don't happen again.

When someone runs one of my games, it is far from the only moving part in their system. There is the OS. The drivers. The many background processes. The other programs that are running. Any one of these programs might have a bug that messes up sections of memory. (Not to mention the fact that RAM can be corrupted on its own.) The longer a computer runs without a reboot, the more likely that things might get messed up. Then the system goes down and comes back up, and everything is nice and clean again.

Most problems only happen once, due to weird and unreproducible effects, and never happen again. If you get a crash, don't immediately freak out. Take a deep breath, reboot your machine, and try again.

2. Sometimes, game files can become corrupted. Try uninstalling, redownloading and reinstalling the game. This fixes a surprising number of odd problems.

The key step. Any program can become corrupted while being downloaded, installed, or just existing on the hard drive. This step is a surefire way to fix any such flaws. I am constantly amazed by how often I can fix a catastrophic, recurring problem by simply telling the user to uninstall and reinstall. No other mucking about with settings, saved games, or whatever.

This step also has the bonus of making sure the user has the newest version of the software.

One warning note. This step has three parts. Uninstall. Download clean copy. Reinstall. Be sure the user doesn't skip a step, or the beneficial effects are lost. For example, if you install without uninstalling first, the installer might leave the existing (corrupted) files alone instead of copying over them.

3. (Windows Users) Your video card driver files might be out of date or damaged. Get the latest versions of video card drivers and reinstall them. Even if you are currently running the newest version, the files or settings might be corrupted or damaged. Reinstalling might fix the problem.

I always hate telling users to install new drivers, for two reasons. First, they often think that I'm just doing it to blow them off. After all, this is what ALL developers tell them to do. Second, unlike the previous steps, identifying your video card, finding the manufacturer's web site, locating the newest driver, downloading it, and installing it requires a reasonable amount of technical skill. Odds are, your grandmother won't be able to figure out how to reinstall drivers.

And yet, I tell people to do it for one reason. It works. Weird, glitchy graphics? This is probably the answer. If new drivers don't do it, a flaw in the actual video card is probably the answer.

Lately, many of my users running 64-bit Windows 7 have had tons of problems that were solved completely by getting the new drivers. Several of them swore up and down that they were using the newest drivers. They weren't.

I strongly believe that the ugly situation with video cards and drivers is one of the key reasons for the huge shift in gaming from PCs to consoles. It's really not good.

4. (Windows users.) If random crashes happen during gameplay, try turning the sound off. If this helps, reinstall your sound card drivers too.

We're getting to the bottom of the barrel now, and this step isn't near as necessary as it used to be. As sound engines have improved, most of my weird crashes from sound card/engine issues faded away.

However, it does eliminate one more set of drivers to work with, and not using sound reduces the amount of memory the game needs. Every once in a while, this fixes a problem.

5. (Windows users.) Sometimes, reinstalling DirectX solves unexplained crashes.

And it does. Very, very rarely. It happens, but seldom enough that I'm considering removing this step from the list. Also, all of our newest games use OpenGL.

And That's It

If it's a problem or crash nobody has reported before and the user goes through these steps (or claims to have done so) and the issue isn't fixed, I give a refund. I'm out of answers.

I do hang onto the e-mails, though, in case other people pop up with the same problem later on. Sometimes a working program gets bushwhacked by another, poorly-written program. For example, on the Mac side, there was once a version of Quicken Scheduler that caused games to stop being able to see the keyboard. When I got the second report of keyboard failures, I sprung into action. Having the earlier report around helped a lot in figuring out the problem.

Steps I Don't Suggest

There are two steps for fixing mysterious problems that I almost never suggest. I feel that they are very extreme, involving too much work (and perhaps expense) to be worth it just to play my little game.

1. Reinstall the Operating System

This is the nuclear bomb, the way to purge your system of all manner of corrupted files. It's also a huge pain in the neck. I generally only suggest this if the user mentions he or she is seeing a lot of nasty problems while using a number of different applications.

2. Get a New Video Card

Video cards break. Seriously. It's happened to me. Sometimes they fail and you need to get a new one. However, I only recommend looking into this if the user mentions having similar problems over a wide range of games and swears up and down that fresh, up-to-date drivers are installed.

In Summary

Tech support is necessary, time-consuming, and aggravating. It tests my patience more than anything else I do. And yet, doing it well will, in the long run, make your customers love you and earn you money.

Be as patient and kind as you can possibly manage. Only fight battles when you have a chance of winning. Consider, with humility, that a problem might be caused by a bug. Also remember that, very often, it won't be your fault. Respect how shoddy and cheap and poorly maintained computers frequently are. And, always, try to treat your customers they way you would want to be treated.

You will always be amazed at how messed up things can get. Good luck.

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