TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

2006

Mine ended with a series of four quite different parties:

The Future Christmas Party, in the same vacant museum as last year, added dodgems and face-painting to the de-facto chocolate fountain for entertainment. The theme was apres ski, which most people quite reasonably refused to acknowledge. What I usually love about Future parties is just walking across the room and talking to everyone I know on the way, which typically takes around an hour. Socialising progressively shuts down the rational parts of my brain, so after about ten minutes of talking to any one person, my mind is completely empty and I a) say nothing at all if sober, or b) say something absolutely terrible if drunk. So drive-by conversations with lots of different people in a short space of time give me the pleasure of being friendly with people without becoming too much of an idiot.

I suffer chronic schizophrenia, pathological mendacity and anterior-grade memory loss when drunk, which almost cancel one another other out: I don’t recall what a blithering prick I was, and I don’t want to. Only tee-totallers, elephant-drunks and digital cameras put a spanner in the works.

Despite the lavish accoutrements, it was my least favourite Future party so far. If I’m not in the mood for these things I almost always am once I get there, but this time I just felt like curling up in a dark place with something that made sense. Parties, people and dodgems do not, to my mind, make any kind of sense.

Large fluffy penguins do, to be sure. This is Peng, given to my by Clare – ahem, a mystery Secret Santa benefactor – and he is an entirely logical creature. This was at a Christmas dinner party with The Other Circle Of Friends For Whom I Have No Convenient Name. Most people there were drunker than I have ever seen them, which in some cases is a very good thing and in others is not. In my case it isn’t, but luckily I didn’t pass my Threshold Beyond Which I Am Insufferable. I was residually drunk the next morning, though, and carrying my penguin home through town in that state was dreamlike and rather wonderful. One in every two people I passed commented, pointed, laughed or performed some combination of the three. My route home actually involved a leisurely stop at Caffe Nero for breakfast, leisurely enough to then stop at the Jazz Café for lunch with Craig and Graham, both on their way to a flight back to Mother Scotland.

Interesting coincidence: the other day I’d just emptied everything superfluous out of my wallet except my Caffe Nero loyalty card, which I hadn’t used in seven years but which has been modified to read, simply, NERD. Something to bear in mind the next time you empty everything superfluous out of your wallet including your Caffe Nero loyalty card, then the next day find yourself in Caffe Nero for the first time in seven years, and are tempted to say “Isn’t it always the way?” Sometimes it is the other way.

The family Christmas, involving easily as many silly hats per person as the Future party. In fact my parents now have a stock of them to distribute to anyone who wasn’t specifically given one. I was surprised and moderately saddened to find quite a few people were dreading their own family Christmasses – I’m lucky enough to have a family who spend more time laughing than arguing at any given gathering.

We played the 3D equivalent of the drawing game in plastecine, table football, an Indian puck-flicking game, and kazoos. I gave people mostly edible or non-corporeal presents: home-made bread, special foods from Bath’s many special-food shops, a mango orchard for Indian farmers. I got a huge number of diverse things, from smart clothes from the pictured grandmothers, juggling balls with a klutz’s guide, a DVD writer, a tabletop pool table, a power-drill and a present I’m easily geeky enough to need but not nearly geeky enough to buy: day-of-the-week-specific socks. I’ve always felt there must be a more civilised manner of determining which of the countless identical black socks have been worn since they were last washed than the crude olfactory method.

New Year’s, last night, here at my house. It was a dark and stormy night. That is a mini-fogger – a Christmas present – inside an extremely sensibly proportioned mug – also a Christmas present – adding ambience to my already pretty freaking ambient kitchen. Interesting coincidence: two days after I reflected that one of the few things not to go wrong with my house for some time was the bulbs, three bulbs broke in one afternoon. The consensus of party attendees is that the storm, or a surge in power usage on that night of the year, was causing this to happen a lot.

I came to the conclusion this morning that I should just stop talking altogether. I don’t think I said anything of worth in 2006, and if people really need to communicate with me there’s always e-mail. Everything I say aloud I regret, and quite often my brain just loses interest mid-sentence and I find entirely the wrong words inserted towards the end. I think last night I announced to the room that always have trouble keeping everyone “fed with water” when I host parties. I seemed to be trying not to say “drunk”, when in fact that was precisely what I was trying to say.

I’m told I should talk slower – someone who doesn’t know me very well apparently said that I appear to be trying and failing to keep up with my thought-speed, but to me it feels like I’m thinking too slowly. Whatever the temporal disconnect, it’s circumvented entirely in text, and I really like writing and even reading what I’ve written. Particularly after an evening of almost entirely failing to talk coherently. Interesting aside: in case you missed the link in my sidebar a while back, the creator of Dilbert has a fascinating speech disorder that means he can still speak in front of huge crowds, which is part of what he does these days, but is incapable of talking in normal conversation. More interesting still, he may have found a way to cure himself – something no-one with it has done before.

And So

The year! A great one, though much more erratic than previous ones. It had a long series of incredible highlights, each of which will I’ll recount in its own post this week, but an unwelcome temporary change in my job description meant I spent quite a lot of time with an unpleasant drowning sensation. It was to manage something I don’t like even when it’s done well, and doing it well calls for precisely the skills I don’t have. I’m told I did a good job, but it never felt like it. But yes, more than made up for by many completely wonderful events and happenstances. MORE ON THOSE PLEASE TOM.

My major achievement for the year was to finally settle a matter I’ve been dithering about for at least six years: lots of stubble and crazy hair, or short stubble and short hair? The first probably sounds better on paper, but after extensively studying documentary evidence from parties and photo-shoots, the latter is the clear winner. It will never be long again. I’ve also lost weight and girth and gained muscle and stamina, and since that accounts for thirty-two percent of all New Year’s Resolutions I will impart the secret: exercise more and eat less bad stuff. It’s the secret fitness plan they didn’t want you to know. Seriously, instead of not doing it, do it.

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions specifically – I make around three resolutions every day, so technically I did make some on New Year’s Eve, but they weren’t special ones. Shutting up was a big one, I guess. Another is to find an application that will pop up an innocuous reminder every forty minutes or so to tell me to get up and walk around a bit. The experts who say you should do this if you use a computer a lot probably know more about RSI than I do, and I don’t have it yet, so I should do what they say I should do to prevent it. And instead of saying this and not doing it, I’m going to actually do it. I’m also going to buy a lot of clothes that I like. I now know for sure which of my clothes I like a lot, and discover that it’s not enough. I loathe clothes shopping, but I’m going to bite the bullet… this month, I’ve just decided.

Stuff Of The Year!

This is so easy.

Best Film Of 2006: The Prestige. A period drama about two rival magicians, Hugh Jackman a masterful showman, and Christian Bale a gruff but ingenious trickster. It has a series of major twists, each of which you’ll see coming to varying degrees. But it’s not a film that needs to rely on the element of surprise to captivate you: one twist in particular is so chilling, so hauntingly macabre that working it out ahead of time is as enthralling as the grand reveal itself. Aside from that much of the fun, and screentime, comes from the vicious sabotage they commit on each other’s acts, starting with humiliating pranks and scaling steadily up to mutiliation and attempted murder. Link is to the trailer, and down the sidebar of that page you’ll find a three-part interview with Jackman and Bale, of particular interest to the ladies and gays since they are both freakishly, freakishly pretty men.

Best Song Of 2006: Cat Power – Willie. By a country mile. The entire album is a bassy, brassy, bluesy joy, so completely unexpected from the meek, stage-terrified front-woman Chan. It’s also album of the year, perhaps only by an urban mile, but this song is just… I don’t need to tell you anything about the song because I’ve uploaded it and you can download it and listen to it immediately, so I’ll stick to my New Year’s Resolution and shut up.

Best TV Show Of 2006: Heroes. Studio 60 is better written by a factor of seventy-one, Dexter is cleverer and 24 is more fun, but I’m all about the peaks. There have been moments in Heroes – many – at which I’ve wanted to know what happens next more than I’ve ever wanted to know anything about a TV show. When it comes together it’s in a league of its own, and it fills me with a warm substance I can only assume is glee.

Best Game Of 2006: Oblivion! Oh, you think? You think the thing I named as the best game of all time in the PC Gamer Top 100 might also have been the best one this year? You think maybe the game I’ve written forty pages about in print magazines, and a few thousand words more online, might be my kind of thing? Did the 93% give it away? I’d love to be a little bit different to the dozens of lists agreeing with me right now and name Hitman or DEFCON, but no. By a country – and I may have used this term already in this post, but it’s warranted – by a country freaking mile, it is the majestic, sumptuous, liberating joy of Oblivion.

15 Years of Indie Dev In 4 Bits of Advice

It’s rough in the games industry at the moment, and a lot of folks are spinning up their own thing. So I thought now might be a good time to boil down what feel like the key things I’ve learned in 15 years of running an indie games studio.

If you’re just arriving, we are Suspicious Developments. We did:

• Gunpoint (2013) – 10k reviews, 98% positive
• Heat Signature (2017) – 6k reviews, 94% positive
• Tactical Breach Wizards (2024) – 10k reviews, 98% positive

I’m the game designer and writer, I do some code, and until recently I ran the company (I now have help).

As you might be able to tell from the list, our games are all over the place in development time and genre. But they all sold great and reviewed great, and to the extent that we controlled that at all, I credit it to prioritising sustainability.

That means definining success not in total sales or accolades, but in how sure you can be of making another game at a happy, comfortable pace. All our games made more than twice their money back, and we’ve never been closer than 2 years to running out of funds.

The biggest factor in getting to that position, of course, was sheer luck: we made our first game in our spare time, with no budget, and it came out at the perfect time: 2013. Indie games had started to make real money on Steam, but the scene wasn’t flooded yet, so a small-scope thing from first timers had much easier time selling. That kickstart from zero to game-budget-money is ultimately why we’ve never needed a publisher.

So I’m not the right person to ask about startup funding. But we weren’t that rare in our first success, and we are increasingly rare in our still-being-here, still-making-stuff, still-independent. So I can at least advise on how to make what you have go as far as possible.

Looking back, this is what feels like the highest-impact, most-copyable aspects of that. I hope it can be of help.

Why four?
Look, I’ve only been at it 15 years. It’s gonna take me til 2030 to learn a fifth thing.

Contents

1. Stay as small as you can
2. Pick something prototypable
3. Testing is the magic bullet
4. Price is a solved problem
5. A timeline, to illustrate

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1. Stay as small as you can

I hate to say this at a time when it would sure be nice if there were more jobs, but I say it to encourage more stable jobs. Staffing up doesn’t really create jobs if it leads to layoffs or closure, and it fucks with a lot of lives along the way.

I think we only get to a healthier industry for workers when more studios are sustainable, and more jobs are stable. And things get unstable very fast as you grow.

The maths of how team size affects your chance of success is brutal:

• Success is making more money than you spent
• Doubling your team size doubles the amount of money you need to make
• But as the numbers go up, vanishingly fewer games make that much money. So it’s not just half the chance of success, it might be a tenth

For reference, Suspicious Developments’ average burn rate is about 3 full time salaries. I think if we had scaled up to 8 after Gunpoint, we would have made a bad game next, then no games at all.

Heat Signature was a tough game to figure out, and if we’d had less than 3.5 years of runway to test and iterate, we would have just had to release it in a bad state. If we’d had only 3.5 years of runway, I’d have been stressed as hell and the company would have collapsed if it wasn’t a hit.

We haven’t been consistent because all our ideas are golden, we’ve done it by staying small enough to keep testing and working until they’re good. And that’s a more sustainable kind of success, because rolling with punches is built in.

A lower burn rate is a superpower. There’s nothing else that’s fully within your control that can so dramatically increase your chances of success.

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2. Pick something prototypable

By ‘prototype’ I mean a playable build that meaningfully shows what’s good about your game – a proof of concept.

A prototypable project is one where you can build that in an amount of time you can afford to lose. If you can make a prototype but it’s gonna take 3 years, it can’t serve the main purpose of a prototype: to check this game idea works while there’s still time to change tack.

Being able to do this quickly is crucial for two reasons:

1. If the prototype ends up proving your idea doesn’t work, or is beyond your means, you’re gonna want as much time as possible to do something about that.

2. If your prototype proves the idea can work, how much time you have left directly determines how good the game will actually be.

It’s also just incredibly motivating and clarifying for the whole team to be able to play the game they’re working on, and see where it’s headed.

So:

• Choose your project based heavily on which seems the easiest to prototype.
• Pick stuff you can prototype with the people you already have.
• Don’t obsess about anything until you have a prototype: you don’t know what’s important yet.
• Assume everything you do before you have a prototype might need to be scrapped or redone.

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3. Testing is the magic bullet

You are going to take an exam that costs all of your life savings to sit. If you ace this exam, you’ll win 2-10 times your life savings. The games-playing public already knows all the answers to the exam, and will tell you if you ask them.

It is incredible how many devs don’t ask them. Or don’t ask enough of them. Or don’t ask them early enough, or enough times.

Testing can be a fair bit of work and time, but nothing is as expensive as launching without it.

This phase of development is called ‘making the game good’, and if you don’t have time for it, that’s as big of a problem as it sounds.

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4. Price is a solved problem

On a pretty real level, your sales are a function of:

1. How many people arrive at your Steam page
2. How much your Steam page makes them want to buy it
3. How much it costs

The first one is famously hard. The second one heavily depends on making the game good, which you’re gonna spend 90% of your time on.

The third one is just a single number you can change in 30 seconds, and you can find out the correct value for it in one round of testing.

We just ask people how much they think the game should cost, and every time we’ve gone with the price most people chose, and every time they’ve sold great and reviewed great.

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A timeline, to illustrate

I’m a visual thinker, so I laid all this out on a timeline. The positions are arbitrary, of course, but there’s no realistic place to put those five lines that doesn’t make doubling your headcount terrifying for your breathing room on both quality and stability.

Obviously most of this post is broadly aligned with conventional wisdom. But the thing I want to yell about, that people don’t seem to internalise enough, is how dramatically and reliably having more time, with a testable build, converts to your game being better and your studio being safer.

But does making a good game guarantee a hit?

Nope! But at the indie scale, making a bad one sure prevents it. And staying small helps again here: if you need to sell a million copies at launch, quality alone can’t ensure it – marketing and other factors all need to align. If you only need to sell 50k, you can get a lot closer to that with just good word of mouth.

Again, this is not a guide to selling the most copies. It’s a guide to making whatever funds, talent and good fortune you have go as far as possible, and keeping you better insulated from whatever bullshit happens next. And that comes down to giving yourself as much time as possible, and checking in with players to make sure you’re spending it well.

‘Meet The Scout’ Imminent

It was shown at GDC. If you’re as geeky as me, don’t click this link unless you demand proof – it’s mildly spoiling. The Scout’s been my favourite personality ever since the “I broke your stupid crap, moron” incident, so I can’t freakin’ wait.

Update: it’s probably going to be the week of the 10th, or the week after that. Valve Time, naturally.

‘Iv’

Really, really like the look of this. New York City is my favourite place on Earth so far, and this doesn’t just look like it, it feels like it. Of course, my favourite thing about NYC is that the people are a) diverse and b) frequently shockingly nice, and the defining feature of the 3D GTA games has been that the people in them are a) a handful of clones and b) incessently and predictably hateful. So that’s probably not going to work out.

But this is the first time since we were last in Liberty City that a GTA game hasn’t been garish. It looks serious, sombre. Try to picture a Vice City or San Andreas trailer with that music. This looks majestic. However amateurish the combat and missions have been in GTA games, the one thing they do with professional aplomb is storytelling. If they’re choosing to tell the story of a slave-trading (bride-selling?) Russian immigrant, they’ll tell it with the appropriate gravity.

They told Vice City’s Scarface tale with appropriate style, and San Andreas’s homecoming with appropriate attitude. But in Vice City I was a mealy-mouthed prick, and in San Andreas I was a sad, stupid little man. If I can’t be the mute blank slate in a leather jacket I was in GTA3, a depressed and amoral Eastern European is still a dramatic step up.

!

Some questions I’m getting asked a lot:

Tom, have you won any large perspex awards lately?

No, I- wait! Yes, there was one! The Games Media Award for best Specialist Games Writer in Print. Would you like to see it?

If I say yes, will you uncuff me?

‘Specialist’ Games Writer?

A writer for a publication solely about games, as opposed to someone who does the games bit in a general mag or paper. Those guys had an award that night too, but we didn’t know any of them and I’ve forgotten who won.

This was an actual awards ceremony?

An actual awards ceremony. I didn’t go last year, so I took the precaution of getting drunk with PC Zone on a barge beforehand to be ready for any eventuality. It was an extremely dense concentration of people I knew and liked in a medium-sized comedy joint, with tables somehow arranged so that more than half the guests had to twist and shuffle to see the stage.

Sponsor Deep Silver barged us down the Thames from Paddington to Camden, via London Zoo. Most agreeable.

Who else won stuff?

I was really happy to see Eurogamer’s Ellie Gibson get the online version of my award – we go way back, but I voted for her because of this. Sadly Rock Paper Shotgun didn’t get the Best Website nod they were up for – Eurogamer did. I consider it impolite of Ellie to win an individual and a group award in the same night. Edge beat us to Best Magazine, and I’m happy for them largely because their own Alex Wiltshire, who was up for my award, seemed so genuinely happy for me.

The single, twitching claret pupil of Edge magazine, nameless and livid. That’s me on the left, but I’m so hideous I had to cut my own face off.

The people there were overwhelmingly nice to me. I was overwhelmed. If I hadn’t recently become an Insufferable Prick, I may have wept. Alex was lovely, Log was lovely, Will and Steve from PC Zone were lovely, my editors Tim and Ross were lovely, my publishers James and Richard were lovely, even when I started shouting at one of them about online strategy (Insufferable Prick), Kieron and Alec from RPS were lovely, Ryan and Jonty from Official Xbox World were lovely, and Matt and Rick from Games TM – with whom I’d hoped to strike up an aggressive rivalry – were too lovely for me to do so. It was a whole evening of people sincerely overestimating my talent and worth.

Rock Paper Shotgun, and a guy I don’t know, tear up the dance floor.

You’re not actually that good. How were you able to win this?

Obviously a lack of shame, integrity and humility helped me a great deal here. This blog is not game-changingly popular, compared to the many higher-profile places the GMAs were mentioned with a nod to a different candidate, but it appears to be frequented by profoundly decent chaps and chapettes. I’ve never seen a site with comment threads this long that’s so entirely free of howling douchesatchels.

On top of that, 1Fort is, I think, game-changingly popular, and without prompting Chris wrote me an amazing endorsement there that convinced even me to vote for myself. I have no facts to back this up, but I suspect a post like this from a guy like Chris does more than an offhanded link from a site with ten times the daily uniques. Thanks, Chris. Please don’t DVORAK my keyboard.

Thanks in particular to Octaeder, John Walker, The_B, ImperialCreed, Chris Livingston, Seniath, J-Man, Mr Brit, Pod, Chris Evans, TooNu, Chijts, LaZodiac, spuzman00, Lack_26, Alex Holland, Alex Holland’s mother, and anyone who voted for me but didn’t specifically say so here.

My acceptance speech on the night was glib, ungrateful, nonsensical, misspoken and possibly inaudible due to nerves, alcohol and shock. But this is what I meant to say.