Hello World

[DonMeadows]

Hi guys.

Was taking a break from work tonight and found this website, and the reference is fantastic. Have signed up and will no doubt lose a few more hours this week trawling through the stuff here. The level of communication and helping each other out at this forum, given that this is the interwebs and is usually pretty poor, here seems pretty amazing.

I thought I would start off by having at least one post. My name is Don, I used to work making console games, and am now working on my own projects. At the moment most of the work is registering business, setting up the budget and cashflow projections, and a lot of paperwork stuff while also preparing project pitches. The plan is to shop a few concepts about, try secure further funding and get back to making games, but targeting small arcade games for iOS instead of console, basically make the kind of games I grew up playing in the 80s, instead of the kind of games I've been making for the last 6-7 years. The hard part is doing that on a limited budget and having a positive cash-flow return, though the hardest part right now for me to adjust to is having to actually 'do' everything instead of working out when someone else should do it, but I'm really enjoying it.

My pixel-art skills are okay, but not fantastic. Will try get some images up soon - but by no means am going to be able to jump in and do edits of work, moreso learning again a skill I never finished learning a long time ago. I'm from a level-design & production background, so while I have some pixel-art in games, it's more from being the guy in the office at 2am the morning before a build that could use Photoshop than any real flair. Pointing stuff out would seem a bit dull too, would be stuff like, 'see this awesome screenshot? -see that crate in the background? - I fixed the tile issue on that'

I like the Eboy stuff a lot, but the Irem/Nazca style has to be my favourite. If there is one game I wish I had been able to work on more than any other, it's a Metal Slug game. Hopefully in the next few weeks I can get some basic stuff from my own projects up and get them into the feedback loop here too.

May be off-topic, but if you guys are further along with some projects and running into pre-production or general production issues, may be able to help you out a lot more than I could ever help out fixing a tile issue on a crate. Also waiting to see how many guys on this list end up being people I've met or friends-of-friends from the industry.

[blumunkee]

Hello and welcome. Always glad to see new blood here, especially guys from the industry.

You aren't the same Don Meadows who produced the newer Spyro games are you?

I think its good to scale back a bit and make small games, especially now that anything successful on console seems to need the equivalent funding of a Hollywood blockbuster.

I'm wondering, you said you are targeting iOS, but do you plan to develop games for more platforms? PC is still lucrative, especially now that we have Steam. Mac too. Android is more difficult to develop for because of the fragmentation, but it's an increasingly big chunk of the market.

I'm just curious. It seems like the console has developed a very high risk/reward ratio, even for small time developers on PSN/XBLA.

[DonMeadows]

Yes, that is me. I worked on ANB  and TEN. I didn't work closely with Amaze on the pixel-art stuff though. They did an awesome job of TEN on GBA.

I really like iOS as a platform in that it's a very controlled hardware. I think what I really liked about developing for X360 over PC on cross-platform titles was that you knew every X360 would have the same hardware inside, and was going to be playing with pretty much the same controller. Working out why the enter key doesn't work with your game on some laptops is a sort of bug-phase I don't think is something you can approach on a limited budget.

I wouldn't rule out other platforms if I could get a decent IP running, or land a work-for-hire model project, but at the moment - in trying to reduce exposure to risk, running through iOS and developing in Unity seems to make the most sense. I am also trying to be very realistic about development spend and cash-flow, so targeting a market I feel more comfortable in is iOS. I'm mid 30s, and most of my arcade friends have stopped going to an arcade, don't play their console but have an iPhone.

I also think the flooded-market viewpoint of iOS is something worth getting in there and punching through. There's some fantastic stuff in there, but a load of sub-standard stuff too. I think getting a decent small, but console-quality title out and going with a Freemium payment model still has a better chance of at least breaking even than starting aiming at Steam. With iOS you can do a patch-update pretty regularly to grow userbase and tweak your product in a way that I think should make development a little easier to see what is working, what's creating an attach, and what's not working than getting a product to Steam-ready release at first launch.