I started at Glowing Eye Games six years ago, starting as a greenhorn intern and climbing the ranks to producer. It’s been an absolute pleasure discovering the wonderful world of producing with Glowing Eye Games. My career and experience have very much been shaped by my lovely colleagues, a variety of interesting projects, and trial with the inevitable error.

Producing

I’m often asked by family and friends what exactly it is I do. They’re aware of my job title and that I work with mobile games, but what does that entail? It’s difficult to sum producing up in a single sentence, but I also don’t want to bore them to death by delving into the niggling avenues of game development. I’ll try to keep it brief here as well, lest your eyes roll back as you fall into a blissful, boredom induced coma.

I quite often think of producing as keeping hold of the big picture. While everyone else on the team is busying themselves creating beautiful art, perfecting that gameplay, and finding those pesky bugs, you must make sure that everything created is helping form the envisioned final game. This means lots of meetings, reviews, and a lot of playtesting. There’s a great satisfaction watching all these individual departments come together to create a fantastic end product that’s the culmination of everyone’s hard work.

Lessons Learned

I have very much learned on the job. I came into Glowing Eye Games as a bookseller, with absolutely no knowledge of game development except a great interest in video games. My gateway was marketing, managing social media, writing copy for the games and website, and helping create the marketing material. This is still very much part of my job, but I now have the luxury of delegation. Glowing Eye Games really encouraged my career growth, letting me find my path by giving me both marketing and production tasks, and supporting me when I ultimately decided production was my preferred track. Thinking back through the years I have tried to boil down six years of experience into three important points.

Be Flexible

Being flexible is incredibly important in a small company as you often step in and fill in gaps in moments of slack. While I’m first and foremost a producer, I also find myself doing many of the marketing tasks from my intern days or if there’s a QA backlog and someone needs to do some LQAs then I’m happy to pick that up. This can make work quite fractured at times but becoming a jack of all trades is never a bad thing. My organisational skills are now top notch and being able to use the full Adobe Creative Suite is a huge bonus. Pick up those extra tasks you may not feel comfortable with; you don’t have to be an expert for all jobs, and it never hurts to add more skills to your arsenal, especially as a producer which has you working with all different departments.

Being flexible also helps when working with your team. It quickly became apparent that different people prefer different management styles. Some prefer to be given a task list with check ins when needed and others prefer to brainstorm and discuss before the ultimate review. All are valid and as a producer it’s your job to make everyone else’s job easier, so adapting to their work style is invaluable.

Communication

Good communication is always in job descriptions as one of the core soft skills desired, but it rings especially true for producing. I said earlier that being a producer is all about keeping the big picture in mind, and to do that you need great communication. I would be lying if I said I was on the ball all the time, but I always have the best intentions. This means meetings, emails, instant messages, and screen shares that make sure you’re all on the same page and that things are heading in the right direction. This can be off putting, but it’s all about balance. For example, you don’t have to have an hour meeting every time. A ten minute text meeting might be all you need, or sometimes an email will suffice. This goes back to the be flexible point; you don’t need to do things by the book if there’s another solution that better suits the situation. Just always make sure to take notes. They will be invaluable when you need to follow things up and figure out the status of a project.

Good communication also means accepting responsibilities when things don’t go to plan. As soon as you realise things aren’t going right, talk to your teammates and get it fixed as soon as possible. Things will inevitably go wrong, and the sooner you get on top of things, the sooner you can right the course. It always feels horrible to be the bearer of bad news, but it also shows that you’re able to work under pressure and own up to mistakes.

You are a team

The wonderful thing about game creation is that the game wouldn’t exist without everyone in the team pulling their weight, and that’s very important to remember. Everyone is playing their part so it’s vital that no one charges ahead to take credit but make sure to acknowledge individuals’ hard work as well. Credit where credit is due always.

Listen to your teammates and they will listen to you in turn. Their expertise is extremely important, and you are the point of control herding everyone in the right direction. Work together and not against each other, and always be ready to step in to help or boost your teammates up. Everyone needs support sometimes.

There’s more to it

The art of producing is ever changing and growing, especially with new styles of project management coming through all the time. It’s hard to sum up the job in a single blog post but I feel like these three points are important aspects. I think it all comes down to respecting and listening to your colleagues. All people are different and it’s important to remember that. As a producer you are captain of the ship while every specialist on the team is doing their part. Keep an eye on the end product and keep pushing forward, but always be respectful and kind.

If a developer isn’t learning how to make better games, then they’ll always end up in trouble! While you’re not progressing others are, and the competition for the hearts, minds and wallets of players is intense. Games made by big teams get quite a few post-mortems, but I wanted to focus on a few games made by small teams with five or less people. Here are five great game dev post-mortems that every indie developer can benefit from.

Drunk Shotgun by Alexey Strelkov

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/how-i-wasted-4k-and-half-a-year-of-my-life-to-develop-a-game-that-earned-only-30

With Drunk Shotgun the developer created a fun casual overhead shooter for mobile. Having played it, it feels like it’s almost there as a regular five-minute timewaster, but in Alexey Strelkov’s own assessment, there were several mistakes that he spotted. The perennial indie problem of marketing was of course there. Personally, I swear that marketing is the hardest job for an indie! However other identified issues included monetization, the difficulty curve and play testing. A useful read and a worthy example of showing how easy it is to lose money as an indie gamedev. It’s also a fun, free game that I still haven’t beaten!

Starcom Nexus by Kevin Lin

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/disciplines/starcom-nexus-postmortem-an-indie-dev-journey 

The story of Starcom Nexus has a much better outcome than Drunk Shotgun. Kevin showed us, that a Steam game starting out as an Early Access game (that was pretty good on first release) and then graduating to a full release is likely to receive a sales bounce on that second release! That’s incredibly helpful to know!

What’s fantastic is although the post-mortem is around two years old, it’s pretty obvious looking at this action RPG that he continued to build upon his earlier, smaller success and grew the game. It looks like a solid win for him.

Bass Money by Jacob Weersing

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/bass-monkey-postmortem-from-zero-experience-to-solo-game-dev-in-18-months-without-quitting-your-day-job-

This is one man’s journey about making their very first (totally free) Steam game, and all credit to him, it offers so many thoughts for anyone who might want to try and live the indie dream. It covers so much ground and if you’ve never made a game then it is a definitive must read.

Game Development Tips and Tricks from the Creator of Civilization, Sid Meier

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/blogs/just-one-more-turn—game-development-tips-and-tricks-from-the-creator-of-civilization-sid-meier-

Well strictly speaking this isn’t a post-mortem, but it is advice from one of the best, most consistent game creators with experience garnered over several decades. Many of his games released in the nineties are still phenomenally playable today. If you’re looking for what creates enjoyment for your players, then this is the blog for you. Bonus points if you buy his memoir!

Core Defense by Mario Kaiser

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/case-study-making-core-defense-a-solo-dev-success-2

This post-mortem talks through the success that Core Defense became. In its first week it made over $20k and in its first year just over $70k. Those are solid numbers for a one-man team, and no doubt the long tail effect of having a well-regarded game will keep revenue trickling in for a long a time. The detail from the initial post and its follow up, will give a great understanding of what it takes to find this kind of success.

Summary

These are a good set of examples of indie gamedev post-mortems. They’re all worth reading individually, but there are common problems that we should consider before making a game.

Game Development

From the game development side, there are always challenges. Here are a few of the more common ones.

• Finding The Fun – Creating a fun game that retains the player’s interest. We’ve released a few here that maybe we shouldn’t have if we’d spent more iterating and getting feedback.
• Schedules – making a realistic schedule seems to be virtually impossible! Plans change (and hopefully improve), and too often unrealistic hope is used in the schedule diary.
• Testing – Testing for fun and bugs are two different things. It’s far too easy to make large changes towards the end of development that lead to unexpected bugs. Too many bugs and the players will hate the game!
• Game Balancing – After playing your own game during development it just gets too easy, so you make the game harder. Until it’s so hard a new player will drop it in frustration.
• Unrealistic game size – You can spend forever on a game if you don’t go for a design you can actually finish.
• The Artwork Pipeline – Making sure your artwork fits into your game properly and easily needs serious preparation.

Game Marketing and Business

Arguably the Marketing and Business side of making a game is even harder than the development. It’s easy to see why, because as an indie developer we’re just more likely to be focused on the development side. Marketing looks like an alien concept and frankly having suffered from this myself, it’s a vastly different discipline than development. Good marketing folks are smart, but they are smart in a way that the average game maker isn’t. Remember building and releasing it doesn’t mean that your player will ever find the game.

• Advertising and PR – Most games simply need advertising. Finding the expertise and the budget for this is tricky with indie game development. If you’re lucky you can sidestep this problem by finding a publisher which, you guessed it, is also tough!
• Monetisation – Will you sell the game, use in app purchases or advertising to earn your living? Decide at the beginning of development and tailor your design accordingly!

I want to sign off with one final thought that seems to apply to all the developers. If you aren’t doing post-mortems whether that’s just thinking about what’s happening with your games or making the bigger effort of writing it down then you are missing out. It’s tough to make a financially successful game, for us it’s about 20 to 25 percent, and nudging that number upwards can make the difference between making a living or not being able to do a job that you enjoy.

Square Enix just announced the sale of everything related to Tomb Raider, Thief, Legacy of Kain and Deus Ex along with the studios that made them and a back catalogue of 50 titles. It’s a pretty huge change of direction for them and it got me thinking, when should smaller developers sell games or give up on some of their creations. We can’t all get the $300 million that Square Enix received but any sized developer or publisher that has been around for a while will have the same question.

Using examples from us, Glowing Eye Games – a plucky solitaire, dominoes, and casual game developer that has been around for 14 years – and supersized examples from Square Enix, maybe we can learn something here. While writing this, I was amazed that even on our tiny scale there are real comparisons even with the tenuous and somewhat ridiculous links to famous games. Also, it’s fun being an armchair pundit, and I loved some of these games.

Let’s start with the easier games first. The ones that really lose money. We’ve talked about Mahjong Seasons in a previous blog post, our attempt to break into that kind of game many years ago. It never found the traction that we as a small company needed to make it financially worthwhile. Did I say that it was easy to ditch that game? Well, I was wrong.

As a small company we had an existential crisis, on our development scale we built some useful bits of technology and spent lots of effort and wages on honing the game. We believed we had a great combination of level designs and the artwork. It hurt us, that this game didn’t find an audience despite a large (for us!) advertising budget. Those tens of thousands of dollars are totally a valid comparison to millions that Eidos and Square Enix have spent on marketing. (No need to send us emails about the previous line!). We added new levels, and for a little while doubled down on the advertising, all to no avail. We asked ourselves why it failed, but frankly I don’t think we ever got an answer to that, other than the players didn’t prefer it over other Mahjong games. We had other ideas around Mahjong (mild reinventions and invigorating concepts) and never moved forward with them, maybe rightly so. I still wonder if new iterations with the knowledge we had earned would be something that players could enjoy and want? I’m not sure anyone would want to try updating Mahjong Seasons, and even after all these years we don’t want to either!

Using the collection of IPs from Square Enix, the Legacy of Kain is their supersized version of our Mahjong Seasons. This collection of dark fantasy, action-adventure games was started in 1996 on PlayStation. There were four more games released by Eidos before Square Enix bought them out. The last attempt was the multiplayer game Nosgoth. It entered an open beta in January 2015, but never got officially released with the servers shut down mid 2016. For those players moving from a single player adventure to this multiplayer world, it just didn’t work. Negative reviews kept on coming, and they decided to cut their losses. The developers and Square Enix painfully accepted that what they’d created simply hadn’t captured a broad audience, despite changes and tweaks in a year of the open beta. I have no doubt that the dev team would have been hurt just like us with Mahjong Seasons, but I can only imagine that to them and Square Enix the audience numbers were painfully obvious. It would take a brave new company to resurrect this franchise without a concrete plan about attracting fans old and new. For purposes of this discussion, the Legacy of Kain is the lowest valued part of this sale. It’s not the franchise that encouraged Embracer to buy this collection.

With the Thief games, we here don’t have an amazing equivalent that we can shoehorn into this delightfully preposterous comparison of $300 million dollars’ worth of franchise but damn it I’m gonna try! I loved Thief, and Thief 2. I never played the third one or the final one released by Eidos in 2014. That final one seemed to lose some of the essence though, it became linear, and the reviews were mixed at best. Thief never got a Square Enix reboot, and it’s understandable why. Every iteration of Thief, whether it got good reviews or mixed reviews, never seemed to get the sales that Eidos expected. So again, Embracer probably aren’t considering this as a major item as part of their $300 million.

I’m going to go ahead and compare a little puzzle game to the Thief franchise as it’s my blog post and I’ve come too far to give up now. Brilliant Blocks was the name of a simple block dropping puzzle game that we initially made in Flash for online players in the mists of time, when mobile phones still had number keys instead of shiny, flat multi-touch screens. It was a time when Nokia still made phones and good money. It did well but not brilliantly (which is annoying given the game name). We got fan emails, we even sent a semi-official email to someone stating that he was the best Brilliant Blocks player in the world. A superb friend, saw how much his buddy liked the game, and contacted us so that we could tell him he was great. Let me be clear, his scores were good, damn good, so that accolade was well earned. I wish I still had that email and the artwork we created and sent. Must be great to have work mates like that.

Even though that first online version made decent (but remember not brilliant, sad face) money for us, the audience plateaued. We tried making another online sequel, it didn’t work out, but the original was still making money. Well, okay, it was just one of those things we thought, maybe next time. We tried rebooting it for mobile. Thank you Apple for the shiny touch screen and the marketing genius that changed all phones forever and ever and ever. That didn’t work either, so although we definitely had some lovely fans, enough to make a small profit on the franchise overall, we’ve been very reticent to bring it back. We started designing a similar game with a new name, but it didn’t get far before we thought we had better options. I’m not sure what needs to happen for us to try again, but this one hangs around in the background. I hope it get its chance to shine again, but maybe it’s like playing Sega’s Columns puzzle game today, it needs something that will make more people love it. I mean, oh yeah just like the Thief franchise, etc.

The real prizes are the Tomb Raider and Deux Ex characters and worlds. Oddly, despite selling 38 million copies between the three new Tomb Raider games and 12 million units of the two new Deus Ex games, Square Enix regularly complained about these games underperforming. That’s so wild, it’s become a meme. Maybe, and it’s difficult for me to know for sure, these franchises suffered from declining sales. The expectation is either going to be sell the same number or more! Maybe Embracer believe that these two franchises can rise again.

It’s time for a me to make another tenuous link to our games. Pyramid Solitaire (Ancient) Egypt, and Magic Towers Solitaire are my contributions. Naturally, being on mobile it’s a little different. For us it’s about the daily active users (DAU). If players are active, then they see adverts and that’s where we make our revenue. We have made lots of minor improvements to both games, but never really moved the games forward. Our DAU numbers have been declining over the years, less than half of their respective peaks but despite that there are still many loyal players which continue to make these games a massive part of our total revenue.

A few years ago, despite the numbers continuing to trace downwards, I turned down an offer to purchase these games outright from us. I saw a longer-term future for them, but we were working on so many different things we never had the time to turn our attention back to them. Recently, we’ve decided that what these fan favourites need is a proper overhaul and some effort and love poured back into them. When they were first released, they were absolutely some of the best solitaire games out there, with Apple featuring them on the app store. Even now, we know players still like them, but with so much choice out there they don’t stick around as much. More specifically, for an advertising supported game it’s about them coming back after they enjoy something different. That’s where we’ve stalled a little. Starting with Magic Towers Solitaire we’ve begun work to increase the variety and range within the game. For us, this is a major project, and it will be months before we’re able to release this update. The hope is that we’ll entice our fans back to play another round and gain new fans in the process. Once we release it, we’ll see what the players enjoy and try to repeat that for Pyramid Solitaire.

For me it’s been a great deal of fun writing this article, and through the light-hearted lens of these great franchises, there are connections that game creators of all sizes can benefit from in what they do.

Find Pyramid Solitaire – Ancient Egypt here!

Find Magic Towers Solitaire here!

When you think of gamers, you often think of a bored commuter, tapping away to pass the time, or someone holed up in a room with a plate of snacks and a headset. But actually, gamers come in many guises and from many different places. How to reach all these people? Well, social media is the answer, but don’t expect a one size fits all. Let’s go through the advantages of different social media sites.

Facebook

Facebook is huge! It caters for a wide range of ages, so it’s a great way to communicate with your audience, both young and old. They can comment, review and message, which allows us to maintain friendly customer service in a social space. Whenever we have news on our game, updates or something to share, Facebook is a great way to get that information out there in a quick and accessible way. It’s really lovely to see an array of emojis, comments on reviews and to get personal messages on how our players love the game. We can also take on their feedback and fix glitches if ever they arise.

Twitter

Twitter hosts a different type of follower. Unlike Facebook, where most, if not all, of our followers are actual players, Twitter is more of a gamer centre of independent game developers, sound technicians, artists and animators. Twitter has more of a business like feel, and our posts of our games, which we use on Facebook, just weren’t right for the cliental on Twitter. Instead, we show our awareness and appreciation of the wider game industry by posting linked articles from popular game websites to keep us in the current mindset. It’s also a great way to stay in the know of trends and how our fellow game devs are going.

Instagram

Games are image and video heavy, so Instagram is a perfect place to pitch. A picture tells a thousand words in this case, and when you have a professional feed of consistent artwork and details, it gives your followers great insight into your style, professionalism and popularity. The viewer can choose just to admire the picture or read on in the description. Most of the time we explain how or why we chose such an image to post. Sometimes it’s an update on something we’re proud of or an error to show we’re all human in the game dev world. Most of all, it’s giving advice on how to promote yourself as a business and a games company in the right way. Everyone loves the little details and you don’t need to write an essay to get your point across. Plus, it’s just lovely to look at.

Pinterest

An interesting social site to take advantage of, and this is mostly tailored to our cliental of men and women over 50. Pinterest is a haven for family fun, craft ideas and aesthetic pinboards. It’s also a great place to showcase videos of how our games work, as they automatically play when the viewer is scrolling through their feed. Pinterest users are interested to learn new things or gain new ideas. Tutorial videos or taster videos allow these users to realise there are many forms of solitaire they can play. A useful link and a handy space to explain the video reels in potential players.

Imgur and Reddit

These are two social media sites we have yet to figure out and see if they are worth the time. What steers us from using them, after a few test-runs and trials, is their lack of market. There are definitely people who use it who would be interested in our games, but they are harder to reach. Both are casual and eclectic. In order for find your tribe, there’s a medley of images and trends to wade through and even then, it’s not clear cut enough for our posts to gain much traction at all. It might also be due to the sheer amount of content being posted daily. However, we never say never, we’re just in-tune to their rhythm yet, so maybe we will try again in the future.

Use each social media’s assets to your advantage.

• Facebook has great customer service potential and communication. Send messages, make reviews, like and comment. These are all helpful ways your players can get in touch with you, tell you what’s working within the game and what’s not.
• Twitter relies on hashtags so start to understand where your market is looking. #Screenshotsunday, #fridayfeeling and #mondaymorning all posted on the right days and times allow a little more traction to hit. If there’s a new game out or some games news, check the trending hashtags to find more likeminded followers. Avoid bots!
• Instagram also relies on hashtags, so be as niche or as general as you like, depending on who you’re trying to find. However, be aware that your images must be bright, accessible and understandable. Make sure none are too dark to see what is going on, blurry or jarring. Followers often take a look at the entire account to see if you’re worth following and that you’re not going to clutter their feed with ugly and irrelevant photographs or images.
• Pinterest loves videos. If you have a landscape or portrait orientation video, it doesn’t matter, Pinterest will happily put it out there. Most of the time, we get over 1K views. Make sure your videos are professional, clean and as slick as your game actually runs. Sometimes people won’t watch for more than 10 seconds, so you have your chance and you better run with it.

Using different social media accounts just goes to show the diversity of your players and also the game industry you are a part of. It may seem overwhelming at first, but get into a good rhythm and become consistent with your posts, and over time you’ll start to see followers rack up. There’s also so many handy sites and tricks that can teach you when, what and where to post. Good luck!