Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about when the rubber hits the road: taking all your planning and assets and starting to put everything together.

While the industry divides the year into quarters, we realize that there are really three parts to the year: the barren early months, the gimmicky, convention-filled summer and the action-packed holiday season. This time, we look at May through August. 

Biggest Surprise

Chris Ingersoll: How absolutely tiny the screens on standard-issue DS systems are. I picked up a midnight blue XL along with Dragon Quest 9 and now it’s almost impossible for me to even look at my old Phat (kept to serve as a glorified GBA SP should the need arise) or a friend’s Lite. I’m actually (half-heartedly) considering not picking up a 3DS at launch so I don’t have to go back to a non-XL screen. Honorable mention goes to the fact that Nintendo published DQ9 themselves, thus allowing me to pick it up at launch without having to pay the $5 “Square-Enix tax”.

Justin Last: Monday Night Combat (XBLA). 
I wasn’t expecting to like this one and only really decided to buy it because it was essentially free after deciding ahead of time that I was buying the other four titles in this year’s Summer of Arcade. Boy am I glad that I did, because it has turned out to be my favorite of the bunch. It’s equal parts TF2 and Defense of the Ancients, and I can’t stop playing it. Classes that are well-balanced, a great mish-mash of shooting, game show commentary, and upgrading, and a great co-op mode make Monday Night Combat a standout that I didn’t expect.

Andrew Passafiume: Nothing was more surprising these past three months than what Nintendo had to show at their E3 press conference. The 3DS is probably the biggest surprise for a lot of people, but I was a bigger fan of the new games they had to show off. A new, incredibly original Kirby game, a new Donkey Kong Country from Retro Studios, and the return of Kid Icarus. Nintendo has clearly learned from their mistakes and delivered one of the most surprising and entertaining press conferences I’ve seen from them in a long time.

Graham Russell: Protect Me Knight (XBLIG). When I first heard about this $3 Indie Games title, I obviously didn’t have high expectations. But this is the best 45-minute-long party game out there. Ancient’s turn to downloadables after Big Bang Mini looks promising, though it’s unfortunate that this wasn’t a full XBLA release. With the retro homages, RPG elements and a solid base mechanic of princess protection, it’s worth a purchase for everyone.

Shawn Vermette: Civilization V coming out this year. This or the 3DS topped my list of surprises this quarter, but given the fact that I have yet to get a chance to actually see the 3DS for myself, Civilization V wins out. Civilization is by far the game series I’ve spent the most time playing in my life, and while I was hoping for Civilization V to be announced at E3, I harbored no hopes or illusions about it coming out before the holidays of 2011. So I was very surprised, and ecstatic, to hear that it was not only in development, but scheduled to be released this September!

Biggest Disappointment

Chris Ingersoll: Can I say the entire Wii line-up for this portion of the year? I’ve never liked Mario platformers, so I didn’t even have Galaxy 2 to carry me through the absolute dreck that was foisted upon the system these past months. I gave Fragile Dreams and Monster Hunter Tri a shot, but they both fell incredibly flat for me and nothing else has really grabbed my attention.

Justin Last: Don’t get me wrong – Mafia II is a fine game. I just wish that it was actually an open-world game instead of a game that happens to take place in a large world. As someone who has played through GTA IV and both expansions, Just Cause 2, Crackdown, and Infamous where are the optional objectives? Where are the side missions? Where is anything to do that isn’t the main storyline? The narrative is great, and the characters are fleshed-out, but Empire Bay exists only to tell Vito’s story instead of becoming a living, breathing entity.

Andrew Passafiume: Microsoft usually gives us a pretty entertaining press conference, but this year it was a huge misfire. Despite showing off some cool looking games, making Kinect the focus of the majority of the event was a huge mistake. None of the games appealed to the people they were showing them off to, and the technology, while impressive, never really grabbed anyone the way the Wii did when it was unveiled. Most gamers will look past the Kinect (and its large price point) and instead spend their money on the games they’ve been buying for years. 

Graham Russell: Arc Rise Fantasia (Wii). Wow, how voice acting can torpedo a game. What could have been a pleasant JRPG in the vein of Baten Kaitos and Tales of Symphonia ends up just being grating due to the horrible voice track. Of course, you can turn it off, but then you have awkward silent pauses while on-screen characters move their mouths. It’s still a decent experience, but just not the great one I was hoping for.

Shawn Vermette: Honestly? My biggest disappointment is finding out that my computer overheats when I try to play StarCraft II. If I have to go with an industry disappointment though, it would definitely be Risk: Factions. I went into it expecting a lot more than there was. Sure, for the first time ever I can play classic Risk and mission based Risk online. However, the factions part of it and the actual implementation of the online game don’t really work for me. In the few games I’ve played online, I’ve had bugs crop up repeatedly, and the factions offer no gameplay differences whatsoever.

Game of the Year, part 2

Chris Ingersoll: Dragon Quest 9, full stop. I’ve put over 260 hours into this game as of my sending this in, and will probably put in at least another hundred before the new Professor Layton title finally pries open my XL’s deathgrip on the cartridge. I haven’t put this much play time (especially condensed into so little real-world time — unlike, say, Animal Crossing) into a non-Pokemon game in forever.

Justin Last: My relationship with the Wii is a strange one. It sits unused for months at a time until a new Nintendo game comes out and then I can’t peel myself away from it. Metroid: Other M is the most recent game to convince me that getting a Wii wasn’t a poor choice. I love Samus’s adventures, and it’s nice to see the series taking a chance with a new control scheme and an emphasis placed on close-quarters fighting. Other M is absolutely gorgeous, and the Bottle Ship makes for some great level design. I’m falling in love with the series all over again one missile expansion at a time.

Andrew Passafiume: Updating the already excellent formula found in Grand Theft Auto IV and bringing it to the Wild West was the best thing Rockstar has done in quite some time. Red Dead Redemption truly impressed with it’s excellent story, characters, and truly immersive game world that was unlike most settings you would find. With the added bonus of an addictive multiplayer component, RDR is easily one of the best games of the year, and will still be remembered years after its release. 

Graham Russell: Valkyria Chronicles II (PSP). Got in under the wire, didn’t it? Blur was on top for a few months, managing to survive E3 and its aftermath, only to get toppled on the last day. VCII is not quite as cohesive an experience as the original, and it suffers a bit from asset reuse. But it seems Sega knew that it couldn’t beat the original, so it tries to create its own advantages. Customization, branching class paths and co-op missions help it do that.

Shawn Vermette: As much a Final Fantasy fan as I am, I have to tip the hat to Square Enix’s other major RPG franchise- Dragon Quest. Dragon Quest IX has won me over. The classic feel and the polish on the game easily made it my favorite game thus far. Although, looking ahead, that may change in September.

Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about getting what you need for your project: creating what you can and acquiring what you can’t.

Two weeks ago, I talked about the process of concepting and prototyping a video game. Now I’m going to ramble a bit about the brass tacks of game building: getting the actual work done.

First off, it’s ridiculous to go into a video game attempting to do it all yourself. Even if you are a Leonardo da Vinci-style Renaissance man/woman, it’s not worth your personal time to hand-craft every single iota of your game. Drawing on the talents of people you know (and getting to know people upon whose talents you can draw) is a major and oft-overlooked element of building a game.

As soon as I moved from “pursuing” to “developing” my game, it was time to think about budget. I don’t expect a huge, evergreen return from SPCF3–iPhone and iPad games are a hard sell in the App Store, and my previous game, Internet Defense, barely made enough to cover the artist’s commission, and nowhere near enough to cover my own time costs. Since those days, I have learned a lot, and also acquired more of a Web presence, so I decided that SPCF3 would likely do better than Internet Defense. The proposition is one that comes with a high risk. Games are a labor of love, but when you’re building games for a living (even just partially), the living has to come into consideration.

I decided that $500 would be a reasonable expense to pour into this game (as in (1) I could get it done for that price, and (2) my fiancée won’t kill me when I present the numbers to her). A $500 allocation for development seems low, but remember that I’m also my own programmer. Hiring myself to do the programming to make SPCF3 would cost roughly 200~300 hours of my time. This is time that I wouldn’t be doing commission projects, so I really have about $8,000 tied up in the development. Unless I sell $8,000 of SPCF3, I’m not going to break even on the cost of the project, and I should just go back to doing websites for furniture companies (a thankless and tiring job that I wouldn’t recommend to anyone). For reference, that’s around 2,300 copies at $5 a pop in the app store, making $3.50 per sale. Really though, your only hope to make money on a game in the App Store is to get featured by Apple.

Depending on the type of game you are doing, the varying elements of design (sound, art, programming, interfacing, etc.) will take different lengths of time. Usually programming is the most time-intensive of these, and will give you the greatest control over the final game product. So, it’s best to be a programmer, if you’re going to do any of the grunt work for your game, but it is a long, hard road to get to that point. It’s a good idea to design a game that will make more use of your own strengths.

So my budget plan allocated around $500 of other people’s work. Armed with this information, I immediately contacted an artist. A good relationship with a quality artist (and preferably several) is invaluable. As someone who does commercial projects involving art, I have a veritable roll call of artists to handle whatever project comes up.

Where do you find artists? I’ve had a lot of bad experiences hiring friends to do my artwork in the past, so I have a policy of not hiring anyone I know in person. Instead, I search portfolio sites like deviantArt to find artists whose portfolios match what I’m looking for. Once I have ten or more candidates, I pitch them the project, and have them all bid on it. Lowest bid wins the commission. With a system like that, it’s very easy to stay within your project margins. Amateur artists, musicians, and designers are all looking for a way to get noticed and put some high-quality projects in their portfolios, just like me. Because of this, I try to hire these individuals over professionals whenever I can. It’s an added bonus that they’re interested in work for the exposure rather than the money, and thus will usually be able to complete jobs within an indie-level budget. Also, as your interests increase from successful games or projects, you can come back to these individuals with larger projects, and they’ll trust you to be able to cover higher expenses or even pay them in dividends rather than up-front capital.

For SPCF3, I contacted Victoria Parker, the same artist who drew for my recent card game, Kill the Overlord. (More on that one soon.) Victoria’s style seemed perfect for this project, but most importantly, she could create the 18 characters I wanted to include in the game, all while staying within my set budget. Earlier, I said that I came up with the concept as the very first step, and then thought about resources, but that’s not entirely true. The talents of the artists that I planned to hire were a major factor in choosing ‘Chibi Fighters’, as Chibi characters are Victoria’s specialty. If I had a different artist in mind to do the work, the game might have taken on a very different look and feel.

It’s surprising how much you can get for free. Sound effects and music are all over the Internet, and many people want you to pay quite a bit for them. Luckily, if you dig, there are just as many cheap or free sound effects and even full music tracks to choose from. For Internet Defense, I used free music written by Kevin MacLeod, who also scores music for a price (a price beyond my feeble budget, so I have to stick with the free stuff). There are also plenty of royalty-free music scores that you can acquire for less than $3 at sites like Square Peach. I’ll be using a combination of these in SPCF3.

Deciding on music and sound effects is something that I do as the game development progresses. While these elements are important, they are not as title-specific as art is, and so there is no need to rush and buy a commission or decide up-front what to use throughout the whole game. You can buy as you go.

As for interface and graphical elements, there are plenty of ways to go. With Photoshop and a little practice (or Inkscape and a little practice, or GIMP and a little practice) it’s possible to create decent, stylistic graphics that bring out the feel of your game. It helps to have a background in design, be it making card games or board games or websites. It’s also good to draw all of your menus and interfaces out in advance. Rough sketches with arrows connecting different buttons to their target screens are a good starting point. If you’ve ever put together a website, a game’s menu system goes up much the same way. And don’t forget player feedback when designing your interface. Players are going to spend a lot of time looking at and using this (hopefully), and you don’t want it to be annoying or unintuitive in any way.

If you need to hire someone to put together your user interface, the rule is the same as with all commissions: someone out there will do it for your budget, or close to it, and there’s a free alternative to everything, even if free is practicing in your spare hours until you’re good enough to cover it yourself.

Playtesting is a very different kind of resource, and it is one that becomes more and more important as the game develops. Rather than a piece of the puzzle you can get and then arrange as you wish (like art files or music), playtesting is more like a compass that guides a project continually towards the ultimate goal.

My policy with playtesters is the reverse of with artists: I directly contact people I know to play test my games and products, partly because of trust, partly because people like myself and my friends are the target audience that I’m developing for, and partly because I’ve had bad experiences with anonymous playtesters in the past. Like artists, you should try to develop a relationship with your playtesters. They will understand your vision and be better able to advise you that way.

So how do you know what kind of things to create and allocate? Often times it’s an estimation, like with art. Other times, it’s a “do as you go” process, like music and sound. In the cases of commissions, you can get your hires to estimate for you, then decide how much you can afford of their services (if any at all). Ultimately, a design has to be flexible enough to cover changing budget, playtest feedback, and your own sudden inspirations. When I had the concept for SPCF3, I left enough open so that if I had cash to spare I could do more, rather than pressing the very limits of the budget from the get-go. After all, you can never plan for everything from the start. 

In the next installment, Brad will look at taking the resources that have been assembled and putting them together to form a playable game.

Character art by Victoria Parker for Level 99 Games.

Editor’s note: Brad Talton is an independent game designer and developer. What kind of games? Video games? Board games? Card games? Well, yes. His company, Level 99 Games, creates all kinds of geekiness. In a series of columns here at SBG, Brad shares insights into the game creation process. In this installment, he talks about starting his latest project: a 2-player iPad action game.

The game I’m currently developing for the iPad is called Super Psychic Chibi Fighters 3. Yes, it’s really called that.

Let me explain.

It occurred to me that it might be fun to do another video game. After the recent success of some other, more practical products, I had a little money to spare, as well as an idea that I had been mulling over for some time. Gradually, the idea took shape, and seemed like a viable option. 

My first thought was about the delivery medium of the game. I thought it would be fun to do a two player, frantic action game on the iPad. The device is big enough to support two people playing on either side of it while still seeing whatever catastrophic action was happening in the middle. 

As long as the action doesn’t require hands to cross over the middle of the game surface, that is. So I needed a game where the players are interacting with each other at a distance. Maybe blasting bullets or shots at one another? I was reminded of two games–one I had played and one I had made.

In high school, I was a fan of Psychic Force 2012 for the Dreamcast, as well as the anime X1999, and wanted to make something similar. In these, combatants fly through the air, blasting enemies with massive bolts of elemental magic. So, in C++ on Windows 2000 using DirectX as my graphics source, I developed my first game, Super Psychic Chibi Fighters 2. 

Yes, 2.

It was one of those zany, tongue-in-cheek titles. In SPCF2, the players tossed blasts of magic at one another while trying to dodge out of the way of other blasts. It was a simple but feature-filled game, with 4 play modes, as well as 20 characters with unique campaigns. It only had a production run of about 5, but the gameplay and idea were there.

I was also intrigued by the Touhou series–a series of fan-made games most haven’t played. When I was living in Japan, I was introduced by a friend to this series and the danmaku (or “bullet hell”) style of space shooters. In danmaku games, the goal may be to shoot up the enemy ships, but that’s not the challenge. Danmaku enemies and bosses can fill up the screen with thousands of slow-moving bullets that form a deadly, shifting maze for your character to navigate. 

I knew what I should make Super Psychic Chibi Fighters 3: a humorous, frantic, head-to-head game for the iPad that combined the original’s chaotic gameplay with modern special effects and a new battle system that focused more on evasion.

The first thing to do was find out if it was actually any fun. It’s easy to come up with game concepts, but how well do those work in the real world? Unfortunately, I’ve developed enough time-consuming, highly polished games that just weren’t fun that I’ve come to understand the value of prototyping. Determining whether an idea works must be the top concern– until you know it works, a game concept is just a shot in the dark against a faraway moving target.

In order to test, I decided to develop a quick and simple prototype of my idea that gathered together the most basic elements of gameplay. So I fired up XCode and created a Cocos2d game for the iPad using the Chipmunk physics engine. These engines are both open source, so my base prototype didn’t cost a dime to create. (Of course, I already had the iPad and an Apple developer subscription. Those cost $700.) It took about 4 hours to put together the basic game, which looked like this:

I didn’t bother with life bars, fancy graphics or even putting up walls; I just wanted to see if flinging blasts at your opponent was any fun. So the player targets are the two “mage” characters (recycled graphics from a previous project), and the little red pucks took only a minute to create. The interface background is just a suggestion–none of the walls or boundary lines are enforced in the prototype.

You make some surprising discoveries by prototyping. In the first game, you flicked the projectiles at your opponent, sliding them forward and releasing them like air hockey pucks. However, Lynda (my fianceé and playtest guinea pig) and I found that we kept smashing hands together and blocking the screen. So I changed the puck release mechanism. Now, players touch a puck and pull back, releasing to fire it off like a slingshot. This made the game much easier to play. Moving your characters to dodge was a reasonable challenge as well, since without fingers blocking the way, it was easy to see what was coming.

The frantic action was there. Before long, we were both laughing as our characters got blasted by exploding hockey pucks and spiraled out of control off the sides of the screen. The skill factor was there: it was possible to line up combos that would follow the path of a character blasted by an explosion and keep pressure on them. The strategy was there: I could dodge a blast, or block it with my own. We could use trick shots off of the walls or backs of the arena to surprise foes. It was actually a lot of fun, as simple as it was. 

So now that I had a working concept, it was time to move to the next step.

In the next installment, Brad will talk about his experiences contracting artists, gathering resources and developing a budget.

Character art by Victoria Parker for Level 99 Games.