Disillusionment of the Indie Video Game
Take a look at the credits of the latest Assassin's creed. Each name is written in about 11 point font and stacked as meticulously as the bricks in the towel of Babel. They fly by at almost incomprehensible speeds and continue on longer than the great river in the Amazon. As the wife of an aspiring game developer (and as an avid player of games, myself) I sincerely want to sit here and silently appreciate all the hard work and tedious hours these hundreds of people spent on making these games so great! But after 10 minutes of credits, I get tired. And then after 20 minutes, I've left the computer and gotten a sandwich. At 35 minutes I realize that maybe they'll be over soon and finally, after 40 minutes of simple, black background credits rolling, they're done.
Meanwhile, in the seat next to mine, Justin is asking me to play test the game he's been laboring on for three days. "Look! The hexes catch the dots!" I attempt to look excited, knowing full well how hard he worked on it, and try to find encouraging words, but I fear I fail most of the time to express how proud I really am for his hard work.
This prompts a lot of questions for me! Is my disinterest in my husband's labor to produce something relatively simple a poor reflection of me as a wife? Or is there something intrinsically impatient about the nature of the American Video Game Player? Or is there simply something in the process of creating a IGN critically acclaimed video game that we under estimate? And how must Justin feel when he sees me playing Assassin's creed with delight but then seeing his own creation as rudimentary in comparison?
There in lies the root of the problem. A friend of mine stated it quite simply as "Compare and Despair." Ultimately, many conflicts we have with others or ourselves come from unexpressed or unfulfilled expectations.
As Indie Game Developers, we fall into this trap and here's why:
We are struck with an amazing idea with a driving and compelling story in an amazing fantastical world. Our characters are driven by a twisty but sympathetic plot line and they are all garbed up in the most fantastic yet utilitarian clothes and armor imaginable. The game will be dynamic in its play style. New but simple to understand and easy to pick up quickly. There will be a solid ability for the developer to create new and dynamic levels while still progressing the story line along.
You're super motivated, super excited and so you want to start working right away!
Three days later, you have a hex that catches dots. (albeit, a very beautiful hex that catches dots, but a hex that catches dots all the same).
Let's compare a small game studio, such as Chronobit, to that of Ubisoft's development team for Assassin's Creed Black Flag from a purely time stand point.
Let us assume that 900 people worked on Assassin's Creed Black Flag and were equally distributed in the following five categories: Story line/Directing team, Programming, Art (including but not limited to character art, scenery, atmosphere, and menus), Music/Sound effects/Voices, and Marketing. (There are a lot of holes in these 5 areas. It doesn't include play testing or production teams.)We are also assuming the people at Ubisoft work the average 40 hour week and worked on this for all 52 weeks out of the year for a full year. Let us also function under the knowledge that Chronobit has 1 developer and I help sometimes (so that makes a very hopeful 2 people) and that we only have four hours after work each day to work on it and one full 12 hour day on the weekend to work on games dev (making it 32 potential hours in a week) for a full year. With this, between the two of us, we have 3328 hours in a year to distribute out between these five areas. Let's see how this looks:
| # of people working on this at Ubisoft | Total Man Hours over the year devoted to this one thing | # of people working on this at Chronobit | Total Man hours they can devote to this potentially over a year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Direction/Story | 180 | 374400 | 2 | 832 |
| Programming | 180 | 374,400 | 2 | 832 |
| Art | 180 | 374,400 | 2 | 832 |
| Music | 180 | 374,400 | 2 | 832 |
| Marketing | 180 | 374,400 | 0 | 0 |
| TOTALS | 900 | 1,872,000 | 2 | 3,328 |
So basically, we've got 1,872,000 man hours (which, btw, are full of professionals who have been practicing their craft for years) versus 3,328 man hours between Justin and I. We are working with 99.9% fewer man hours. Seriously! 3,328 of 1,872,000 is 0.1%. You can get a better interest rate on a savings account than 0.1%!
Think of it this way. A professional pianist spends probably 40 - 50 hours a week practicing so that they can perform a sonata on the weekend. What if someone came up to you and said "You have 3 minutes to practice this piece before you go on stage. Also, they are expecting you to be a professional pianist." NO! No way! I can't do that!!
With that in perspective, you begin to understand how any Indie game is an accomplishment. The indie sector does so much more with so much less. It's full of amazing people doing spectacular things with their craft!
So Justin made a hex that catches dots with his spare time in 3 days (about 12 - 16 hours worth of work). My reaction (as should any game player's) should be "That's Freakin' Awesome!!. That doesn't sound like a lot but Good Gracious, you're a beast!!"
If you think about it, having a hex that catches a moving target when you click is a bit like hitting the correct button so that your character in Black Flag, Edward Kenway, grabs a ledge at the right time. That sounds so small. Imagine if you were a game developer at Ubisoft and you encountered this conversation all the time:
"Dude! you worked on Black Flag!! What did you do?"
"I made sure that when you hit a button, you stuck to things as long as the environment offered something for you to stick to."
I must be frank: I know nothing about the work load of your typical programmer for a large scale game like that, but I can only imagine the tasking must be that specific in the hopes that it works 99.9999% of times for their users. Small, detail oriented work like this, however, works fine coupled with a large integrated group of workers all going towards the same goal, but should an indie game developer say he's worked on a button for weeks on end, he would naturally be met with skepticism.
Ultimately, it comes down to resources. It's quite easy to say that Ubisoft naturally has significantly more informational and personnel resources than Chronobit Studios. However so often, the faceless consumers of games tend not to realize the drastic differences between the resources of the gaming studio and only see the resulting differences between the results of the games themselves. One cannot fault the consumer on this. It is difficult to know unless you have experienced it. The struggle is relaying this perspective for the benefit of the Indie Game society.
I think I'll finish on one note. It stuck with me once when Justin said something to the effect of "A movie offers 3 hours of entertainment for consumers at the cost of $10 a person. But mobile games offer 20 - 30 or more hours of entertainment and people expect them to be free." Sadly, consumer culture around entertainment items has become increasingly difficult (not only in the gaming world but also for the movie and music industries as well). With the dawn of the Internet and PC, it's become so much easier to share content that consumers have begun to devalue the amount of work it takes to for the creative sectors of society to do what they love and find a consumable audience for it. For now, Chronobit can only continue to work at what we love and hope that one day we may make someone happy with our work.
