CAT | Misc
Happy birthday to The Voxel Agents – now one year old!
This is Agent Simon here. Recently we’ve been reflecting on our first year as an indie game studio, and at the April meetup of the IGDA Melbourne Chapter I presented a retrospective of the business side of running the studio. I’ve posted the slides (link at the bottom), but first I thought I’d give some context to the presentation.
Slides accessible at slideshare and in PDF
Going indie is very rewarding and enjoyable. It is also extremely hard to make a living from it. We wanted to share our experiences to help others who are planning to start an indie studio. The retrospective covers our mistakes, our successes, the things we did that gave the most value and some harsh realities of the indie financial situation. To succeed as an indie, you need to be well organised and have a clear plan. We set out with some pretty outrageously unachievable goals, and although that blind optimism has certainly helped to get through some difficult times, I think we’ve mostly stuck to the goals and we’re now well on our way.
I like to think of running an indie studio as pushing a snow ball along. There isn’t any one single thing that you do that will make you successful, but each successive step forward helps to slowly build the snowball bigger, and hopefully one day it will be big enough to start feeding yourself from it (we’re not there yet).
There’s a very vibrant community of indie developers in Melbourne, and in the hope that we could help, we were really happy to share all the details. The presentation covers how much we invested, our income and expenses and a quick summary of our marketing and production approaches, as well as other tidbits.
The slides are available on slideshare and in PDF. There is a lot more detail I would have liked to add but couldn’t in a 30 minute presentation. I am now developing the retrospective into a full article and if there’s any aspect you’d like covered in particular just leave a comment. You can be notified when the full article is ready by following us on twitter, facebook or via RSS.
Good luck to those who applied for the Film Victoria funding round.
Assistance starting an indie studio in Australia:
- IGDA Melbourne Chapter – a bunch of friendly developers
- GDAA – Game Developer’s Association of Australia
- Multimedia Victoria – ICT industry support body
- Film Victoria – the Victorian funding body for game and film production
- Freeplay – Freeplay is an independent games festival that focuses on the creative and artistic side of making games
- New Enterprise Initiative Scheme – government income support for new enterprises
28
The Voxel Agents donate $1,697 to support the people of Haiti
0 Comments | Posted by AgentMatt in Misc, Train Conductor
Some time last week we stumbled across AppRelief. We thought it was such a great idea we decided to join up. We signed up for the period of our Australia Day Sale (Jan 20-26), donating 100% of our net profit during that time.
We’ve just received the daily figures from apple for the period, and after operating expenses, we will be contributing $1,697! We don’t pay ourselves (yet), so this represents quite a hefty commitment on our part.
Our most sincere thanks go to all the players of Train Conductor, in particular those in Australia, Italy, USA, Japan and Great Britain who represent the largest contributors.
Distribution of sales by country
Extra kudos goes to Japan and Italy, sales of Train Conductor jumped significantly in those regions during the donation period. (And thanks to AppViz for the PieGraph)
We’re still trying to decide between whether to donate to the RedCross or MSF or perhaps another worthy source. We won’t be receiving the cheque from Apple for the sales until the end of Feburary. If anyone can help suggest a worthy charity, please let us know before then by leaving a comment.
Update: We have chosen to give the proceeds to Médecins Sans Frontières Australia. The full amount of $1,697 has been donated and will go to helping MSF’s efforts around the world and in Haiti. Thanks to everyone for helping us to do this!
So this post should be the first of many weekly roundup posts. The week marked week 3 in development of our first game DolphinFantastic (working title) and things are shaping up very nicely. We made some big improvements this week, we’re a lot more comfortable with the device, and user testing provided a lot of valuable direction (more on that later).
Entering the week, we had 2 different play modes prototyped. From some internal testing one version was clearly showing promise, and thats the version we decided to go ahead with. I got busy working on feedback mechanisms for the user, adding scoring and putting more graphics into the game, while Tom was busy working on the all important texture tool, to mash up and compress our textures. Now that we’d picked a play mode, Simon could focus on a final look for the game, and putting together a long to-do list.
When the game was a bit more polished, it was ready for user testing. This was the first chance we’d had to try it out on unsuspecting people, and it turns out that southbank is pretty much the prime location for them. There’s always a wealth of people milling around, and all it takes is a friendly smile to get their attention (Trying not to look too much like sales-people). We realised after the first two people that we had a lot of work to do, and this drove the direction of the game for the rest of the week.
First thing that had to change was the “Missiles” – the bright red triangles flying across the screen. Some people thought they were directional arrows. We slowed them down, and put some proper graphics on them, now we have pufferfish, and the game plays a lot better.
We also needed to work on the pacing of the game, instead of just randomly dropping loads of items on the player. Tom whipped up a nice pacing system for Simon to play with, and we slowed things down a lot, so new players wouldn’t get scared away.
Come weeks end, we had a game that was playing pretty well. We did some user testing on Friday night and things were good if not great, after sleeping on it we’re pretty happy, and with one week until our target release date, we’re pretty excited.
Still plenty of work left.
- Matt
We’ve moved into the HWT Tower in Southbank, Melbourne. Its a beautiful place to work, and here’s the view from our floor. One day, our office will hopefully have this fantastic view…
The Voxel Agents make games. And you can play them!
We’re focused on developing titles for digital download, through services like the iTunes App Store, XBOX Live and eventually many other platforms.
We will be posting updates as we progress towards our first release…