Texas Game Developers Conference
Secrets of Independent Game Design
As Told at the Texas Independent Game Developers Conference
I just got back from Texas and boy is my chest tired. I thumped it and thumped it and still couldn’t brag anything up as big as the good ole boys in the native population. Okay, I went to a game conference in Austin and didn’t see one cowboy hat, big belt buckle or pair of cowboy boots. I met some great people who really care about games and learned a little bit about why Austin is such a fertile locale for game development. And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with what you might find in the nearby pastures.
This was an independent game developers conference and it hosted everyone from raw talent in or just graduated from college to folks that have been involved with games for most of three decades (we wouldn’t want to mention the names of people like Gordon Walton, Warren Spector, Greg Costikyan, Don Gilman and myself—but we were there).
The hot buzz words spoken around me were: “blue ocean,” “lack of innovation,” “procedural,” and “alternate funding.” Amazingly enough, most of the presentations had quadraphonic resonance with the call to arms you’ve been reading here on the Manifesto Games site where our fearsome leader and provisional dictator (heh, heh—Greg knows how to “rant” like a demagogue but he’s nothing like one in his management style) tells you (sans propaganda) about the high barriers to entry in this business and why companies are afraid to innovate. Since you can read a lot of the hard data on Greg’s blog, I won’t recap his speech here, but I will point out where the other speakers at last weekend’s conference agreed with him.
Blue Ocean
Western civilization used to say that “the sky’s the limit” when speaking about innovation and entrepreneurship. Today, thanks to Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chain Kim and Renee Mauborgne, we talk about “blue ocean” as being open to possibility because the book encourages us to look at today’s market and chart a course that is not what other people are doing. This would, presumably, be the opposite of the “red ocean.” The “red ocean” would be the bloody seas where the big, hungry sharks swim.
It was interesting that both Gordon Walton (now of BioWare, formerly of EA and Kesmai) and Don Gilman (the father of Harpoon on the PC and such an independent developer that he still has a day job) both recommended this book and the strategy of looking for territory where the big sharks aren’t. It was also another way of echoing Greg Costikyan’s keynote address that urged would-be independents to create games no one else is doing. Greg’s observation was something of the inverse of the “blue ocean” idea. He compared innovation in game design to skirting the coast of a vast, virgin continent. Yet, all of these speakers were in harmony with the idea of going where “they” aren’t.
Walton was specific about why “indie” developers need to seek those places where the “big guys aren’t.” He noted that “indie” developers tend to have a full range of disadvantages that the “big guys” don’t. He listed these as:
1) lack of development experience within teams compared to the custom teams assembled by large publishers;
2) lack of skilled team members relative to those specialists recruited by the publishing monolith;
3) lack of capital compared to public companies;
4) lack of a developed market in terms of editorial and distribution contacts;
5) lack of marketing expertise to get the most public relations and advertising/distribution bang for the buck; and
6) lack of business experience in order to guide the fledgling developer through the inevitable tough times and slow cash flow.
Such disadvantages should sketch the harsh reality of the “red ocean” products where large publishers are likely to swallow and digest developers before they can reap any lasting benefit from their efforts or “steal” the idea and be both the first to market and the most trumpeted product in a competitive marketplace.
On the other hand, Walton quoted Voltaire to suggest the major advantages of an “indie” developer. “God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best,” espoused the philosopher. And in the game business, those who know their gaming styles and customers best are most likely to shoot straight. This is seen in “indie” developers who have:
1) a passion for making games such that the work isn’t so much a job as a labor of love (since statistically, the majority of games fail, it better be “love”);
2) less bad habits to unlearn than folks in the machine who may have discovered short cuts in interface design, game models, sound and art;
3) a dissatisfaction with the status quo that will push them to change it; and
4) no stake in the market as it exists today so that they can move beyond it and take incredible risks.
To illustrate how acceptance of the “status quo” and having a stake in the market work together to create a set of “filters,” Walton cited his own experience at a large company in vetting 400 game proposals and only funding 12. He confessed that several games with great play were not funded because the marketing departments could not have successfully marketed the styles and concepts of play.
This portion of the speech dovetailed with one of the main thrusts of Warren Spector’s keynote. “Indie (whether in film, music, comics or games) exists contrary to something else.”
Lack of Innovation
If you are a regular to this site, you’ve probably read our own observation that, with the exception of Will Wright’s work, there has been virtually NO innovation since 1996. You probably also know the reason for this. Walton cited the blinders on the marketing departments. Costikyan cited the inflationary budgets requiring sales of more than a million units to justify their development and how those kinds of numbers encourage big publishers to stay with big franchises and sequels rather than experimenting with the new. Warren Spector quoted an unnamed EA executive in 1992 as stating “The future is in big-budget blockbusters.” Spector’s analysis? “I thought he was nuts. I was wrong.”
In the past, innovative games could survive because they lasted long enough on the shelf to catch the wave of “word of mouth.” Today, retail only allows circa 200 titles on the shelf and they have a two-week window of opportunity in which to prove themselves. Worse, unless they can cite an eight figure budget, they are unlikely to get consideration for the shelf. Advertising can’t explain a truly innovative concept in time to make this two-week window work. Further, innovative games (including SimCity) typically start off with a trickle of sales that keep the product going until the “hockey stick” uptrend takes off. Today’s retail policies do not allow for this.
Don Gilman of the electronic versions of Harpoon understands the risks of innovation. This detailed command simulation of modern naval warfare was the first commercial game officially used at the Air Force Command College (as Harpoon II), but there was one airman doing a mainframe-based war college simulation who, unbeknownst to his superiors, used Harpoon Classic to set-up various scenarios on the mainframe. Ironically, he was later accused of having “classified” data on his personal laptop and nearly arrested before he proved that he was using a commercial program. Today, the Australian Department of Defense has paid six figures for the Harpoon crew to do a special version of Harpoon 3 with their own classified features.
Yet, in spite of the number of versions in the series and the commercial success of the first Harpoon (of which there was no game like it—unless one counts the limited experience of PHM Pegasus and Strike Fleet on the Apple II and C-64), the game has had a strange history. One critic said, “Harpoon has killed more companies than the missile has sunk ships.” It may be true. The game’s history has circumnavigated Sphere (parent company of Spectrum Holobyte), Three-Sixty Pacific, Intracorp (successor to Capstone), SSI, The Learning Company, Mattel, Gore Technologies, and Ubisoft. Gilman even sold the rights to the PC game back to creator (of the miniatures/board game rules) and best-selling author Larry Bond from 1997-2001. Yet, Gilman has the rights back and continues to work toward new versions (some of the features he offered off the record are potentially amazing).
His secret to “staying alive” is a corollary to the fact that games need time to find their niche. “The unhappy customer tells 12. Happy customers tell two.” As a result, the Harpoon group has made community and collaboration a keystone of their efforts as a team. We’ll talk about some other secrets in a future installment of this report.
Warren Spector had the same appraisal. He lamented that what usually passes for innovation in the mainstream is actually conventional. He certainly is right about that as Steve Jackson pointed out counter-examples of “break-out” games that were NOT “innovative.” Jackson suggested that the Final Fantasy series was “just another RPG” but done phenomenally well. Starcraft could have been “just another RTS” if it weren’t for perfect game balance. Neverwinter Nights was Dungeons & Dragons brought to the PC better than ever before. Halo is “just a shooter,” but the ability to jump in a vehicle and keep shooting was the key. As a result, Jackson provided a counterpoint to other speakers at the conference—suggesting that “innovation is overrated.”
Non-Journalistic Opinion Point: I am very much aware of Spector’s and Jackson’s point that it doesn’t take MUCH innovation in the mainstream world to get a break-out product. HOWEVER, I think it is very dangerous for any industry, craft, or medium to become so inbred that it ceases to have a robust creative gene pool. I believe the gene pool in electronic entertainment has become more sterile than an Appalachian stereotype or a royal lineage in a cul de sac of succession. Where there is no innovation, there is no life.
Procedural Development
The most interesting events at any game conference occur when a designer or developer opens his/her toolbox and shares the methodologies and techniques contained in said “bag of tricks.” Thom Robertson did this in his talk about “Techniques of Procedurally-Generated Content.” A quick summary of the content would indicate that the technique uses mathematically-generated art. The process reduces both the data footprint required for a game and the number of artists required to produce objects, actors, or terrain for each product. A bonus feature of using this process is that it may allow for user-created objects and often creates futuristic or alien objects different from ordinary human-created objects.
STAR CORPS Thom Robertson demonstrated his program for creating spaceship designs procedurally. We intend to use his program to create our ships for the unique Manifesto Games’ race for Space Empires IV.
To understand the process, think of how terrain is generated in many different games. Landscapes are easily created from seed values and do not require as much memory as pre-created and rendered pieces of art. The good news is that it allows for an exponential increase in game assets. The bad news is that few objects have the aesthetic appeal of artist-rendered characters or objects. The best news is that procedurally generated objects do not have to be created without the input of a human artist. The traditional techniques and procedural process are not mutually exclusive.
UNCANNY VALLEY Robertson used this chart from Masahiro Mori’s robotic research to warn against trying to be too life-like, the “uncanny valley” of eerie zombie-ism that some see in modern sports games like EA’s NBA Live ’06 where the faces look real, but somewhat rubbery.
Procedurally-generated avatars or characters are not high in realism. This is not bad when you want alien characters or alien/futuristic vehicles. It is bad when you want credible characters with which to interact on the screen. As a result, vehicles and spaceships are considerably easier to create than detailed faces.
No matter what you plan to build, bilateral symmetry is one of the first things to be programmed. Our eyes are trained to observe both sides of faces or objects. If both halves are symmetrical, we tend to fill in the details mentally and actually forgive many flaws and oddities. Asymmetrical objects tend to make us feel uncomfortable.
Robertson’s explanation of the process sounds simple. First, decide what you want generate via algorithms. Next, decide whether: you are merely allowing artists to use the algorithms to leverage their created art assets; requiring the game program to generate art assets on the fly; or allowing the users to generate the content to their own satisfaction. Determine whether this is a tool to pre-generate something or whether it will be generated in run-time. Finally, no matter what you do, understand that the process won’t work exactly as you expect.
Amazingly enough, few game designers or teams seem to use procedurally generated objects, even though the pay-off greatly expands the number of art objects that can be used in the games or allow users to add “custom” assets.
Alternate Financing
Most of the presentation by Chris Oltyan centered on SBIR funding. The initialism stands for Small Business Innovation Research, a federal government program which funds research and development out of more than 15 different government agencies (as well as the armed services which are subordinate to the Department of Defense). Although the funding is provided for doing research as opposed to developing games, one can easily imagine how helpful it can be to have the government pay for the research behind your game’s model.
Does your game deal with space colonization? It is easy to see how there might be an open NASA SBIR to research an aspect of terra-forming or spaceflight. Would the Air Force have an open SBIR on experimental aircraft? That could certainly jumpstart a unique new flight simulation. Building an entrepreneurial game? How about a United States Department of Agriculture project dealing with new techniques in creating bio-based products for industrial use?
Ah, but most game developers would say, “We don’t have the expertise to provide all of this research?” Oltyan quickly explained that very few companies do so. Most partner with an academic researcher to lead the project. Naturally, this means that the full funding wouldn’t end up in the hands of the game developers creating the computer model to demonstrate the research (and apply the research to their games), but it also means that the game company wouldn’t have to perform and manage all of the research.
Further, one can always call on a company like Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. to complete the initial proposal and manage the process for a 15-25% management fee. So, the answer sounds easy. A developer with a vision for creating a new Transportation Tycoon game might be able to win a grant from a Department of Transportation study in order to create the basic model for the transportation infrastructure in the game. The first milestone is paid for, right?
Wrong! The government is always slow to pay, even though the research work has to be completed under an accelerated schedule. As a result, a developer might be incurring the bulk of the costs prior to receiving payment. This would require some type of gap funding (usually bonds of up to $100K to tide the developer over until the funding comes through), but once again, costs a percentage of the grant.
The session was quite enlightening and though the research opportunities may be relatively rare, it is always nice to hear more about alternate funding. Of course, no matter what funding a developer might choose, Don Gilman’s reiteration of age-old wisdom in a different session still rings true: “Get it [the business parameters and details of the deal] in writing because people and businesses change.” Gilman’s session also presented an important corollary to this age-old truth as he concluded his presentation with, “Contracts are worthless if you are poor or weak.”
Parting Shots
Shortly upon returning from the conference, I had a phone call from the head of a small developer who had once been part of one of the large corporate publishers. He was so excited and energized by the conference that he had conceived of an alternate funding proposal to bring his dream game back to life. I’ll write about it when it happens. Until then, rest assured that the Texas Game Developers Conference was significantly more than talk. It was talk that led to action…a MANIFESTO, if you will.
As Told at the Texas Independent Game Developers Conference
I just got back from Texas and boy is my chest tired. I thumped it and thumped it and still couldn’t brag anything up as big as the good ole boys in the native population. Okay, I went to a game conference in Austin and didn’t see one cowboy hat, big belt buckle or pair of cowboy boots. I met some great people who really care about games and learned a little bit about why Austin is such a fertile locale for game development. And no, it doesn’t have anything to do with what you might find in the nearby pastures.
This was an independent game developers conference and it hosted everyone from raw talent in or just graduated from college to folks that have been involved with games for most of three decades (we wouldn’t want to mention the names of people like Gordon Walton, Warren Spector, Greg Costikyan, Don Gilman and myself—but we were there).
The hot buzz words spoken around me were: “blue ocean,” “lack of innovation,” “procedural,” and “alternate funding.” Amazingly enough, most of the presentations had quadraphonic resonance with the call to arms you’ve been reading here on the Manifesto Games site where our fearsome leader and provisional dictator (heh, heh—Greg knows how to “rant” like a demagogue but he’s nothing like one in his management style) tells you (sans propaganda) about the high barriers to entry in this business and why companies are afraid to innovate. Since you can read a lot of the hard data on Greg’s blog, I won’t recap his speech here, but I will point out where the other speakers at last weekend’s conference agreed with him.
Blue Ocean
Western civilization used to say that “the sky’s the limit” when speaking about innovation and entrepreneurship. Today, thanks to Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chain Kim and Renee Mauborgne, we talk about “blue ocean” as being open to possibility because the book encourages us to look at today’s market and chart a course that is not what other people are doing. This would, presumably, be the opposite of the “red ocean.” The “red ocean” would be the bloody seas where the big, hungry sharks swim.
It was interesting that both Gordon Walton (now of BioWare, formerly of EA and Kesmai) and Don Gilman (the father of Harpoon on the PC and such an independent developer that he still has a day job) both recommended this book and the strategy of looking for territory where the big sharks aren’t. It was also another way of echoing Greg Costikyan’s keynote address that urged would-be independents to create games no one else is doing. Greg’s observation was something of the inverse of the “blue ocean” idea. He compared innovation in game design to skirting the coast of a vast, virgin continent. Yet, all of these speakers were in harmony with the idea of going where “they” aren’t.
Walton was specific about why “indie” developers need to seek those places where the “big guys aren’t.” He noted that “indie” developers tend to have a full range of disadvantages that the “big guys” don’t. He listed these as:
1) lack of development experience within teams compared to the custom teams assembled by large publishers;
2) lack of skilled team members relative to those specialists recruited by the publishing monolith;
3) lack of capital compared to public companies;
4) lack of a developed market in terms of editorial and distribution contacts;
5) lack of marketing expertise to get the most public relations and advertising/distribution bang for the buck; and
6) lack of business experience in order to guide the fledgling developer through the inevitable tough times and slow cash flow.
Such disadvantages should sketch the harsh reality of the “red ocean” products where large publishers are likely to swallow and digest developers before they can reap any lasting benefit from their efforts or “steal” the idea and be both the first to market and the most trumpeted product in a competitive marketplace.
On the other hand, Walton quoted Voltaire to suggest the major advantages of an “indie” developer. “God is not on the side of the big battalions, but on the side of those who shoot best,” espoused the philosopher. And in the game business, those who know their gaming styles and customers best are most likely to shoot straight. This is seen in “indie” developers who have:
1) a passion for making games such that the work isn’t so much a job as a labor of love (since statistically, the majority of games fail, it better be “love”);
2) less bad habits to unlearn than folks in the machine who may have discovered short cuts in interface design, game models, sound and art;
3) a dissatisfaction with the status quo that will push them to change it; and
4) no stake in the market as it exists today so that they can move beyond it and take incredible risks.
To illustrate how acceptance of the “status quo” and having a stake in the market work together to create a set of “filters,” Walton cited his own experience at a large company in vetting 400 game proposals and only funding 12. He confessed that several games with great play were not funded because the marketing departments could not have successfully marketed the styles and concepts of play.
This portion of the speech dovetailed with one of the main thrusts of Warren Spector’s keynote. “Indie (whether in film, music, comics or games) exists contrary to something else.”
Lack of Innovation
If you are a regular to this site, you’ve probably read our own observation that, with the exception of Will Wright’s work, there has been virtually NO innovation since 1996. You probably also know the reason for this. Walton cited the blinders on the marketing departments. Costikyan cited the inflationary budgets requiring sales of more than a million units to justify their development and how those kinds of numbers encourage big publishers to stay with big franchises and sequels rather than experimenting with the new. Warren Spector quoted an unnamed EA executive in 1992 as stating “The future is in big-budget blockbusters.” Spector’s analysis? “I thought he was nuts. I was wrong.”
In the past, innovative games could survive because they lasted long enough on the shelf to catch the wave of “word of mouth.” Today, retail only allows circa 200 titles on the shelf and they have a two-week window of opportunity in which to prove themselves. Worse, unless they can cite an eight figure budget, they are unlikely to get consideration for the shelf. Advertising can’t explain a truly innovative concept in time to make this two-week window work. Further, innovative games (including SimCity) typically start off with a trickle of sales that keep the product going until the “hockey stick” uptrend takes off. Today’s retail policies do not allow for this.
Don Gilman of the electronic versions of Harpoon understands the risks of innovation. This detailed command simulation of modern naval warfare was the first commercial game officially used at the Air Force Command College (as Harpoon II), but there was one airman doing a mainframe-based war college simulation who, unbeknownst to his superiors, used Harpoon Classic to set-up various scenarios on the mainframe. Ironically, he was later accused of having “classified” data on his personal laptop and nearly arrested before he proved that he was using a commercial program. Today, the Australian Department of Defense has paid six figures for the Harpoon crew to do a special version of Harpoon 3 with their own classified features.
Yet, in spite of the number of versions in the series and the commercial success of the first Harpoon (of which there was no game like it—unless one counts the limited experience of PHM Pegasus and Strike Fleet on the Apple II and C-64), the game has had a strange history. One critic said, “Harpoon has killed more companies than the missile has sunk ships.” It may be true. The game’s history has circumnavigated Sphere (parent company of Spectrum Holobyte), Three-Sixty Pacific, Intracorp (successor to Capstone), SSI, The Learning Company, Mattel, Gore Technologies, and Ubisoft. Gilman even sold the rights to the PC game back to creator (of the miniatures/board game rules) and best-selling author Larry Bond from 1997-2001. Yet, Gilman has the rights back and continues to work toward new versions (some of the features he offered off the record are potentially amazing).
His secret to “staying alive” is a corollary to the fact that games need time to find their niche. “The unhappy customer tells 12. Happy customers tell two.” As a result, the Harpoon group has made community and collaboration a keystone of their efforts as a team. We’ll talk about some other secrets in a future installment of this report.
Warren Spector had the same appraisal. He lamented that what usually passes for innovation in the mainstream is actually conventional. He certainly is right about that as Steve Jackson pointed out counter-examples of “break-out” games that were NOT “innovative.” Jackson suggested that the Final Fantasy series was “just another RPG” but done phenomenally well. Starcraft could have been “just another RTS” if it weren’t for perfect game balance. Neverwinter Nights was Dungeons & Dragons brought to the PC better than ever before. Halo is “just a shooter,” but the ability to jump in a vehicle and keep shooting was the key. As a result, Jackson provided a counterpoint to other speakers at the conference—suggesting that “innovation is overrated.”
Non-Journalistic Opinion Point: I am very much aware of Spector’s and Jackson’s point that it doesn’t take MUCH innovation in the mainstream world to get a break-out product. HOWEVER, I think it is very dangerous for any industry, craft, or medium to become so inbred that it ceases to have a robust creative gene pool. I believe the gene pool in electronic entertainment has become more sterile than an Appalachian stereotype or a royal lineage in a cul de sac of succession. Where there is no innovation, there is no life.
Procedural Development
The most interesting events at any game conference occur when a designer or developer opens his/her toolbox and shares the methodologies and techniques contained in said “bag of tricks.” Thom Robertson did this in his talk about “Techniques of Procedurally-Generated Content.” A quick summary of the content would indicate that the technique uses mathematically-generated art. The process reduces both the data footprint required for a game and the number of artists required to produce objects, actors, or terrain for each product. A bonus feature of using this process is that it may allow for user-created objects and often creates futuristic or alien objects different from ordinary human-created objects.
STAR CORPS Thom Robertson demonstrated his program for creating spaceship designs procedurally. We intend to use his program to create our ships for the unique Manifesto Games’ race for Space Empires IV.
To understand the process, think of how terrain is generated in many different games. Landscapes are easily created from seed values and do not require as much memory as pre-created and rendered pieces of art. The good news is that it allows for an exponential increase in game assets. The bad news is that few objects have the aesthetic appeal of artist-rendered characters or objects. The best news is that procedurally generated objects do not have to be created without the input of a human artist. The traditional techniques and procedural process are not mutually exclusive.
UNCANNY VALLEY Robertson used this chart from Masahiro Mori’s robotic research to warn against trying to be too life-like, the “uncanny valley” of eerie zombie-ism that some see in modern sports games like EA’s NBA Live ’06 where the faces look real, but somewhat rubbery.
Procedurally-generated avatars or characters are not high in realism. This is not bad when you want alien characters or alien/futuristic vehicles. It is bad when you want credible characters with which to interact on the screen. As a result, vehicles and spaceships are considerably easier to create than detailed faces.
No matter what you plan to build, bilateral symmetry is one of the first things to be programmed. Our eyes are trained to observe both sides of faces or objects. If both halves are symmetrical, we tend to fill in the details mentally and actually forgive many flaws and oddities. Asymmetrical objects tend to make us feel uncomfortable.
Robertson’s explanation of the process sounds simple. First, decide what you want generate via algorithms. Next, decide whether: you are merely allowing artists to use the algorithms to leverage their created art assets; requiring the game program to generate art assets on the fly; or allowing the users to generate the content to their own satisfaction. Determine whether this is a tool to pre-generate something or whether it will be generated in run-time. Finally, no matter what you do, understand that the process won’t work exactly as you expect.
Amazingly enough, few game designers or teams seem to use procedurally generated objects, even though the pay-off greatly expands the number of art objects that can be used in the games or allow users to add “custom” assets.
Alternate Financing
Most of the presentation by Chris Oltyan centered on SBIR funding. The initialism stands for Small Business Innovation Research, a federal government program which funds research and development out of more than 15 different government agencies (as well as the armed services which are subordinate to the Department of Defense). Although the funding is provided for doing research as opposed to developing games, one can easily imagine how helpful it can be to have the government pay for the research behind your game’s model.
Does your game deal with space colonization? It is easy to see how there might be an open NASA SBIR to research an aspect of terra-forming or spaceflight. Would the Air Force have an open SBIR on experimental aircraft? That could certainly jumpstart a unique new flight simulation. Building an entrepreneurial game? How about a United States Department of Agriculture project dealing with new techniques in creating bio-based products for industrial use?
Ah, but most game developers would say, “We don’t have the expertise to provide all of this research?” Oltyan quickly explained that very few companies do so. Most partner with an academic researcher to lead the project. Naturally, this means that the full funding wouldn’t end up in the hands of the game developers creating the computer model to demonstrate the research (and apply the research to their games), but it also means that the game company wouldn’t have to perform and manage all of the research.
Further, one can always call on a company like Stottler Henke Associates, Inc. to complete the initial proposal and manage the process for a 15-25% management fee. So, the answer sounds easy. A developer with a vision for creating a new Transportation Tycoon game might be able to win a grant from a Department of Transportation study in order to create the basic model for the transportation infrastructure in the game. The first milestone is paid for, right?
Wrong! The government is always slow to pay, even though the research work has to be completed under an accelerated schedule. As a result, a developer might be incurring the bulk of the costs prior to receiving payment. This would require some type of gap funding (usually bonds of up to $100K to tide the developer over until the funding comes through), but once again, costs a percentage of the grant.
The session was quite enlightening and though the research opportunities may be relatively rare, it is always nice to hear more about alternate funding. Of course, no matter what funding a developer might choose, Don Gilman’s reiteration of age-old wisdom in a different session still rings true: “Get it [the business parameters and details of the deal] in writing because people and businesses change.” Gilman’s session also presented an important corollary to this age-old truth as he concluded his presentation with, “Contracts are worthless if you are poor or weak.”
Parting Shots
Shortly upon returning from the conference, I had a phone call from the head of a small developer who had once been part of one of the large corporate publishers. He was so excited and energized by the conference that he had conceived of an alternate funding proposal to bring his dream game back to life. I’ll write about it when it happens. Until then, rest assured that the Texas Game Developers Conference was significantly more than talk. It was talk that led to action…a MANIFESTO, if you will.
