The following blog is an opinion piece. It represents only the personal opinions of its writer. It doesn’t represent any businesses or other individuals.

A few articles are circulating at the moment about the state of the Australian games industry. Most of them well written and helping everyone get up to speed with what’s been happening. You can read a short but well written article here on the subject: http://au.xbox360.ign.com/articles/108/1088951p1.html

I want to personally talk about the smallest of the small. The Indies in Australia who are working in teams of 1-5 people to create some fun games. These start-ups are much like my own are working hard to understand the business and nature of this era of downloadable digital gaming.

Since the start of this year I’ve come to form a few opinions on subjects related to small Indies. Here are my thoughts on what small Indies can do right now and how they will fare in the next few years.

Small Indies should seek small business support

I’ve just completed a short small business course with NEIS and I couldn’t stress enough that anyone who’s thinking of or already just started an indie studio should look into this course. I found it well worth the 6 weeks of my time. It does require a number of conditions to apply though:

• Applicant needs to be on newstart allowance through Centrelink prior to applying.
• They must be over 18 years of age.
• The business can’t exist before taking on the course. So no prior ACN or registered business names for the business pitched.

It’s not easy to get into. But having the help to write out a consistent business plan and receive some fortnightly payment assistance can mean all the difference in the first year of your business. I know that if wasn’t going through NEIS had to continue relying on Centrelink payments that I would have to start dividing my efforts between my business and finding an alternative source of income. My NEIS payments allow me to focus 100% of my time to my business.

There is also talk of small business support through some of the local industry associations. Although we’ll have to wait to see that materialised before it can be explored further.

Business and Pleasure – Meet it half-way

By this title I don’t mean that a start-up should go straight to work-for-hire. I do believe that Indies of a small size should focus efforts on their own intellectual property projects. But these projects need to have a number of sensible business questions considered against them, such as:

• SWOT analysis. Is the project viable to produce by the studio to a reasonable time and quality?
• Target Market and marketing plan: Who are your audience? How will you tell them of your game? Why will they buy it?
• Profitability: Given the platform and genre of game your making, how many sales or transactions can be expected to be made? Will it cover the cost of development and advertising?
• Monetisation Plan: In what ways will the game make money? A one-off purchase? In-game cash shop? Subscription?

Speaking from experience over the last year of working on my own projects I admit that I’m guilty of not considering these important business questions before starting on a project. I know that it’s quite easy to get wrapped up in a project you really want to create without considering if it can even be made to sell.

My advice to other small Indies is taking a half-way point in deciding what your project should be. The project should be something the team is excited to develop. But it needs a proven audience and business plan as well.

Government funding just got harder

The government announced a week ago that it’s halving the funding given to Film Victoria for games related funding. This will last for 2 years.

In my opinion, what this will mean for small Indies is that funding will become even more competitive and harder to obtain. The funding committee will more than ever scrutinise every element of an application, from not only the proposed projects business plan but to the experience of the team and the studios prior history. My concern as a starting indie business is that this will effectively cut all applications from studios like my own that have yet to produce a highly commercially successful product.

I know if I was in-charge of funding with only $1,000,000 to distribute over 2 years amongst dozens of applications and tens of millions of dollars in funding requests, I would be investing my money into established studios with a proven level of reliability and not unproven start-ups.

From a start-up business perspective it means that we can’t count on external funding to pitch and develop projects that would otherwise be unviable under our own support. It means that as small Indies we may need to create a few smaller money-maker successes before we can focus on the type of projects that the studio may want to pursue as part of its original goals and ideals. There’s nothing wrong with this outcome but it does tighten the options available to us.

Funding is something we can never truly take for granted. I’m happy that it still exists and Film Victoria as an entity are nothing but supportive.

Overall though this opinion is formed from my pessimism and paranoia. It could well be the case that the dynamics that these funding bodies operate and judge projects will not change in the slightest.

Facebook and iPhone

Facebook and iPhone are huge markets with a small barrier of entry. It also means that these markets are extremely satiated and hit driven.

For small Indies the opportunities arise from the low financial barrier of entry. The threat of course is that everyone else is doing it. The game you create must take in all the most popular qualities of the most popular games of the genre and work with that to create a product that’s both unique enough to get media coverage but simple and familiar enough to be associated with other successful projects.

Again, the business viability of the project must be considered. Flukes rarely occur on these marketplaces anymore. Unless they where engineered beforehand to do so. If you make an iPhone or Facebook game without a solid marketing plan then you’re a fool!

Getting on Steam

Steam remains to be the target for a few indie developers including myself. Steam has most definitely opened itself up to Indies and smaller games over the first half of this year. But it’s my belief that you must have a product near completion and playable before you even approach steam for distribution.

It’s most definitely a case of the developer needing the product to reach a level of completeness and market awareness before steam is approached. Otherwise you’re simply wasting their time.

Steam based products are also larger in production values then your typical iPhone game. So some form of funding will be needed to make a typical steam game.

Indie progress for the next 2 years

We are seeing more indie start-ups than ever before due in most part to new low barriers of entry via the downloadable market.

Here’s my prediction on how these start-ups, including my own will probably fare:

Many small indie studios have and will continue to crop up. Out of them many will fail over the first 12-24 months due to lack of funding, lack of profit due to financially unsuccessful projects or a disbanding of the team.

However, a number of these studios will survive the first few years of operation. The games they will produce will be polished and have some business considerations attached to their conception.

Some studios will intentionally stay small while others will slowly grow to take on bigger and more sizable projects. Both will create reputations of being able to deliver original quality products.

If Indies continue to learn and evolve from each product they create and learn from their mistakes then success is a matter of persistence. Our small size and low cost of production allow us to survive the mistakes we make in ways larger companies can’t. If we continue to trade away an immediate stable job for a gamble on a fulfilling business then we just might give Australia a new set of indie studios able to employ staff. Taking on mid-sized projects like steam based multiplayer games and ultimately be a part in re-branding Australia’s reputation as a development house that focuses on small to medium sized quality games.

I think that’s worth working towards.

The escapeFactory leaderboards and website were down from 5:56:07 PM EST until 8:20:50 PM EST tonight, which is pretty crap.

What Happened

At 5:58 EST, I got an email from our webhost telling me we were using too much CPU. As they do on shared hosting, they immediately disabled (what they perceived to be) the offending script, which in our case was the entire API directory. Turns out, doing that kinda breaks the entire site.

Ben got a tip an hour into the downtime and emailed me. I missed both emails cuz I had just headed out to dinner and had my phone tucked away. I got back around 8 and restored the API directory which put the site back online immediately and resumed recording scores.

To be clear, this only affected the web server — all escapeFactory games are designed to work regardless of the reachability of our Leaderboard API. The apps themselves retain scores locally, but unfortunately all attempts to send scores up *to* our server during this time period failed and were not recorded. (More than likely it exposed some dummy code LOLcat usernames, too.)

Why Did It Break?

As of today, Mole is free for the week of GDC. In Lunarpages’ world, that made us a victim of a “Sudden Burst of Popularity“, which in turn exposed my (ahem) “Badly Written Script or Plugin”.

Every API call runs a SQL query that was only a little costly at 1000 records but an utter deal-breaker at 200,000 records. It was a junior mistake on my part, and one hidden deep that would have stayed hidden except for the sudden popularity of “Mole” today. An unnecessary subquery was causing our response time to slowly creep up over time. By the time I got to it, we were averaging over 5 seconds per API call. No wonder our CPU was topping out our limit. I refactored quickly and response time per call is happily back sailing under 0.03 seconds.

Going Forward

At this point, everything appears to be under control. The API as a whole is really efficient, and I think we bought ourselves some time having smoked out that rude subquery.

We’re clearly on the verge of outgrowing our little experimental phase where shared hosting stops making sense, which is frankly a great problem to have.

Things have been quiet on the blog here, but there is plenty going on — and a few announcements are imminent, too. I thought I would get out ahead of those and give an update on the development of our website backend and custom leaderboard API.

History

The idea for this site grew out of the work Ben and I did to give Snowferno online leaderboards. Snowferno.com was both our promotional site for the game and also the online home of users’ leaderboard scores. I wrote a custom API that allowed Ben and I to securely transmit information between Snowferno and our webserver.

Why write a custom API when so many leaderboards existed already? Well, being our first iPhone app, we didn’t want to commit to any 3rd-party leaderboard frameworks yet. I’m pretty sure a bunch weren’t even compatible with Unity3D for iPhone at the time. So rather than complicate our development, we designed a system that required only simple Unity3D WWW calls. With that, we were able to register an app launch and transmit scoring data to and from our online database.

After Snowferno launched, Ben and the Lycette Bros. started on a few follow-up ‘Dude companions to Snow Dude. The original didn’t have an online leaderboard, but they wanted something implemented in the sequels. Ben suggested we broaden the scope of our Snowferno API into one that multiple apps could use. At the same time, all of us original escapeFactory devs — Ben, FatLab Music, the Lycette Bros., and 3000 Words — were starting this site, so it made sense that our new multi-app Snowferno API should also become a part of the escapeFactory.

Design Goals

• Cross-platform: The API must integrate into any development platform without the inclusion of external frameworks. The maximum requirement must be that it can call a web URL and receive a HTTP response.
• Backward-compatibile: The API must always receive API calls from and send responses to apps once they are released, translating if needed as the API matures.
• Autonomous: Front-facing pages may piggyback on a CMS/blog framework, but all ties between the API Core must be contained within a single host-compatible “wrapper” plugin. Whenever possible, the API should recognize and behave properly on all app release platforms rather than impose compatibility requirements on any specific platform.
• Secure: Only authorized apps may communicate with the API. All incoming data must be securely signed.
• Modular: The default front-facing pages must be customizable per-app. Scoring metrics must be extensible per-app to allow multiple dimensions.
• Promotional: API and Core should serve to encourage visibility across the whole escapeFactory family of apps.

Features (as of current release v0.6)

• Site-wide app settings:
  • Toggle site-wide visibility of an app with public/private switch
  • Date-sensitive app releases
  • Toggle visibility of leaderboard pages per-app with on/off switch
  • Centralized fields to store current app price, icon image source, screenshot image sources, and iTunes App Store ID
• Statistics:
  • Total app launches and total unique devices by version per day
  • Total user install base
  • Aggregate average & median scoring trends by level
  • Aggregate achievement progress
• Leaderboard template system:
  • MVC-style modular views to allow per-app customization of leaderboard pages
• WordPress-specific shortcodes:
  • Gives site editors access to output custom data within the site-building features of WordPress without having to expose PHP functions
  • Output an app store URL w/optional affiliate encoding
  • Output a uniform product page block of HTML displaying app icon, screenshots, price, and app store links — for use in a WordPress Page
  • Output a Unity Web Player to enable play of an online version of an app
• m.escfactory.com:
  • lightweight, touch-friendly directory of the escapeFactory family of apps. Intended to be displayed in-app as cross-promotional tool
• API calls:
  • App Launch: register an app launch and update the app with current online data relevant to that user
  • Scores: record online scores and other gameplay metrics and provide the app with realtime high-score updates
  • Achievements: record online when pre-defined tasks are achieved
  • Twitter: post tweets to a user’s account, with app hashtags and custom shortened url to user’s leaderboard pages
  • Account Management: associate a user’s device with the WordPress user registration system, manage Twitter OAuth tokens and other account settings

Tools

Web Frameworks & Services
WordPress – VibrantCMS by WooThemes – jQuery – galleria – jQTouch – Random.org HTTP Interface – Twitter-async

Promotion & Marketing
ShareThis – YOURLs URL shortener – Google Analytics

Coding & Project Management
Basecamp – NetBeans/TextMate/Transmit – Beanstalk

Going Forward

The Lycette Bros.’ upcoming ‘Dudes and the soon-to-be-released Mole from Roo Games have been solely responsible for pushing me to get the escapeFactory API and Core this far. Many more new features are already on my todo lists — some you’ll see and some only we’ll notice.

Mole introduced our first online, “Play Now” version of an app, and we have big plans for doing more with Unity Web Player. Also, look for a Snowferno update that will utilize the new escapeFactory API features (ahem, tweets). And when the time is right, we’ll be bringing its leaderboard pages over to this site as well.

And of course, more great new games. Stay tuned.