I am the cheapest bastard in indie games (2019) | Hacker News Reader

I am the cheapest bastard in indie games (2019)

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

122 pointsTomte71 comments

> Whenever I ship I game, I immediately begin the race against time to write another game before our bank account runs out.

To be honest I don’t think I paid much attention to the “successful enough to justify continuing but not enough to be sitting on a pile of money that trivializes basic expenses” case.

I’ve got nothing but respect. I would be severely hamstrung by that looming anxiety.

> I would be severely hamstrung by that looming anxiety.

I'm in this position and severely underestimated this. We do $15-20k MRR but $1k of that is profit, and it took 3 years to get here. I'm now an alcoholic and considering closing up shop to take care of myself, but feel bad about blindsiding the 20 or so contractors we work with.

You don't have to blindside, them, though. Say "we're going to close in six months, please find other work" and you can wind down as they leave?

That's the plan. I said "blindside" because for the majority of the 20 contractors, this is their only work and they live normal lives in LatAm. But the actual business doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately.

If you can't find a buyer (per the other comment), perhaps give them the opportunity to discuss if they collectively, or a subset of them, might be able to take over.

If you're willing, you could try to look for a buyer, in case someone else (thinks they) can make the business work. There are marketplaces for small businesses online.

Also, hope you can find help with the alcoholism!

Thanks, I'll look into that.

Do take care of yourself. Give the contractors as much heads up as you can, no need to blindside them. Maybe one of them would like to take over or buy you out?

I f you don't take care of yourself, you have a high chance you will eventually lose the ability to take care of others, and in a much more tragic way.

I like the Ultima V graphics (1988) better than his Queen's Wish (2019). Looks like he is using detailed hi-res textures, sampling them down, then using antialiasing to get rid of the edges. Everything looks muddled and blurry. I just don't like it. I realize this is a minority opinion, and most buyers require higher res graphics.

I would love an Avernum remake in the style of Exile :P.

I had no idea who Jeff was, but I looked at the screenshot at the top and immediately recognized the art style from having played some of his games in the distant past (later confirmed by checking wikipedia). He may say it looks like crap, but it's definitely consistent and recognizable, and that's a big plus.

One key thing missing from this analysis is whether the investment in art would in turn drive more sales revenue (be it from more copies sold or from being able to justify a higher price per copy, or both). If hiring a full-time artist means needing to sell 40,000 copies instead of 25,000 to break even, but doing so results in selling 50,000 copies, then that seems like it'd be a worthwhile investment.

That's of course the issue, though: it's hard to estimate whether professionally-done art would result in sufficiently-higher sales. Only strategy I know of that'd be able to assess that would be to outright poll the customerbase on whether they'd pay more for something with better art.

The big-box studios all seem to invest heavily in art and asset design relative to everything else, and they make money by the bucketload even for games that play considerably worse than your average indie game. Then again, AAAs and indie devs tend to target very different niches.

> Queen's Wish is a big game! Five nations and biomes! A surface and underworld! Multiple sets of furniture, all kinds of environments. The game currently has, to make the different regions look distinct and give enough visual variety, well over 1000 terrain icons. (An icon here is defined to be a 48x48 tile. Some terrains require multiple icons. Each wall type, for example, is assembled from 60 icons.)

Is this a high number for terrain graphics compared to similar games?

I really enjoyed Jeff’s talk at GDC a few years ago.

https://youtu.be/stxVBJem3Rs?si=UdgguNK9X8NQ3Zty

It inspired me to go check out his games and now I have bought all of them on Steam.

This is very good. Usually you get these stories about the crazy successes, this guy just stays in the business long term. He's got a good somewhat cynical sense of humor.

I played the Avernum games and Geneforge as a kid. They are decent games.

Graphics etc. aren't everything.

I want to like these games, but I can't sustain interest in them. Just like I never finished Ultima IV or V, or Excelsior, I've never finished any of Jeff's games.

I got into Spidweb through the Blades of Exile demo. The Exile games (and their Avernum remakes) are pretty great, but I have a massive soft spot for Nethergate.

Nethergate was great(!) I think it hit an interesting story and setting, better than many of his other games that were available at that time, for me.

I'm not surprised about him, his job, how he thinks and works.

I'm very very surprised that he is able to find that niche and he makes enough money tbh. How does someone find his game before really really good games like baldur gates etc.?

I probably know more people playing old games over and over (lets say baldur gates1 or 2) but i don't know anyone who is aware of those type of indie games.

For me personal though: I decided to push for carier first, and i really hope i will have enough time in my 40 to switch over to something i'm passioned for. He is probably quite lucky but i could imagine its stressful

So I've played a couple of his games, and they are great (for me!) because they feel like old-school RPG games like the 'gold box' series (Pools of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds ...) but with a more modern interface and much more content.

I would say Spiderweb Software games are very different - necessarily - to something huge like BG3 or other AAA games because there is only so much a one-man developer or small team can do.

Focusing on telling interesting stories and allowing the player to really explore the game world while letting them feel their choices are meaningful is key, I think. However, I'm sure Jeff has blog posts on the philosophy behind this, so probably read him instead :)

For me personally many of those high fantasy polished D&D based games have become quite boring. I mean they objectively are of high quality! But I couldn't e.g. manage to finish both Pillars of Eternity games because they somehow just became a chore to play further. The writing was great, the visuals were great, but something was still lacking. Achievements and collectables and similar 4th-wall-breaking elements were a turn-off for me, and the D&D ruleset again and again...

By contrast Jeff's Avernum series was such a breath of fresh air. Really interesting world, great writing, no D&D. Those were really great. I wouldn't mind better graphics, but that's a minor point for me.

Even if said polished D&D games are great, how many of them do they make per year? 1/8? 1/5?

Even if you add the non design-by-commitee immersive games that are not quite rpgs, you end with maybe 2 titles per year.

That's not always enough, and then you go and snatch the Avernum series and whatever promises to be similar.

Btw there was another indie company that promised to go the same way: https://basiliskgames.com/

They seem to have got snagged into an ambitious engine change though. And nothing's come out of there in many years.

> How does someone find his game before really really good games like baldur gates etc.?

They don't. There have been really good AAA games before Jeff started making games. His business model does not revolve around getting people to play his games before they discover better ones. His business model is to make games that can't be compared like that.

He was there at the right times: back when the internet became generally available and there weren't many easily downloadable games; Back when Steam got started but didn't have so much content - indie titles could soar.

Yeah, I had the shareware version on the old Apple Mac back in like 2002. I then bought the full version as it was fun.

But like back then I think the computer had shareware version of Avernum and of Unreal Tournament (1999), It wasn't like you had a huge amount of choice.

They are good games though nonetheless.

If you actually read the article, he answers your question multiple times over and even goes through all the numbers involved and the reasons why people buy his games.

Have we read the same article?

Because you know, i read it and i have been followng the game industry for ages as well.

And there was no clear answer to my question: How do people keep finding and buying his games so he makes the mone he does for ages.

But thanks for your comment...

I don't understand, he is using stock art and few artists but still spending $40,000? That doesn't seem cheap to me.

Game art outsourcing is still pretty expensive, even if it's cheaper than hiring people full time. Asset packs are cheap but not that cheap. 40k is pretty modest for art on a modern game.

He did the right thing where 90% indie developers really ignored and failed because of it, that is the cost reduction as much as possible, you need to survive first, then others. But if you have enough cash to live on, then you can do whatever you can.

Funny enough, I wasn't aware of the Queen's Wish games (I do have a bunch of other Spiderweb title). But instead of buying them, I added them to my wish list to get them on sale.

Sorry, I have more games than I'm likely to play during my remaining lifetime already.

Can't edit any more... they're on sale on GoG right now.

Neil breen of game dev.

One wonders what happens now that Stable Diffusion (etc.) is available.

It seems SD's advantage is more in newness/originality, I'm unsure it's actually cheaper right now - one needs to factor in the time/compute taken to get the good enough result. I presume Vogel is currently much more skilled in searching PD images than in running SD.

There are also legal uncertainties around that. Someone would likely figure it out it Jeff himself wouldn't just blog about it. My impression is that some companies don't want AI made content on their platform. Which could mean an abrupt stop to one of the revenue streams, Jeff sounds like he depends on a lot.

Until recently valve was banning ai from their game store, so you're not wrong.

SD lacks humanity. Jeff’s art looks “bad” but bad looks human. His games are immediately recognizable, and that familiarity is friendly, comforting, and inviting. All tile art SD games are going to look the same and have a slight uncanny valley feel to them which will be off putting.

Not sure I’d bet on it. With the right prompts (describing interesting combinations of styles and themes verbally) you can get SD to create some pretty interesting art. Haven’t tried models that are specific to tile art and pixel art though it would be interesting. But, you’re right in that of course there has to be a human involved when everything comes together in a game — that, I don’t think can or should be replaced.

I'm not be able to tell pixellabs ai art apart from professional painted art.

Of course the best result is when the tool is combined with a good artist.

I'm 100% sure the price for game art will drop significantly, if it already hasn't.

> It seems SD's advantage is more in newness/originality

What? Originality? Where? Every time someone enthusiastic shows me a SD "creation" there are at least a few elements I've seen before. Sometimes I can point exactly where.

It's not that SD is so original (one could get creative with the prompts), it's that PD art/stock tends to the same bland look - perhaps if someone is looking at the right places it isn't? But I wouldn't know where.

PD art is less likely to pull from well known sources like GoT or the cover for Yellow Submarine, though.

SD is the same way, though. Things look superficially interesting and technically competent (from a distance, fine and intricate details are always a problem) but because the result is always an amalgamation, everything tends to look the same, poses are generic, faces inexpressive, the more you look the more you notice the broad similarities.

Arguably (and IMHO) the most interesting part of SD is when the models break down and you get surreal horrors beyond comprehension. And that isn't even creative, it's just fun to look at.

And of course none of that is even touching on the ethical problems of SD and other models being trained on copyrighted material, and primarily being used by corporations to push working artists out of jobs, which is not a problem with stock photos (until all stock photos, themselves, are AI generated which seems inevitable.)

Oh, stock photos will soon be "AI" generated ... by "AI"s trained on "AI" generated images. Infinite loop, baby!

If you figure out the right prompts and the right model it feels like you could get a pipeline going with SD. You still might want to hire someone to turn those into actual assets, but now someone can create maybe 5 assets in an hour instead of one in two hours. If you get fancy you might be able to use things like inpainting to create tiles that blend nicely.

If you're going to care about metrics like "asset creation per hour," there already exist countless ready-made assets online, many even free to use. If you care about quality over quantity, then the value of an artist spending two hours on a single asset is obvious.

There is no aspect of asset creation where using AI to generate assets results in a better quality game versus human artists. Using artists to "improve" AI generated content is counteproductive because of the lack of direct control over what the model generates, something you don't need to deal with if a human is creating the art to begin with.

There are already tools available that let you create tiles that blend nicely. You don't need AI for any of this.

AI would be useful automating tedious and time consuming tasks. I've seen many artists say they could use an AI tool for automatically unwrapping UVs, generating spritesheets, JSON files, etc.. but the only thing AI ever seems to be used for is automating the creative process itself, and the results are at best technically competent (which is a result of simulating the work of human artists in the dataset) but never innovative or creatively compelling.

This is what irritates me about the current generation of AI. It is designed to give the appearance of "making humans unnecessary", when people mostly need help with drudgery and busywork.

I’d rather buy Jeff’s games than ones made with AI art.

I think possibly living in a cheaper country makes a lot of difference to the economics. Especially if you live in a cheaper country and make something that people in the first world will pay first world rates.

If that was truly something that made a lot of difference to the economics and the market as a whole, you'd expect to see most indie games coming from such countries. Do you? I don't think I do.

Costs obviously make a big impact on profit, but the truth is indie games likely have pretty fixed costs wherever in the World you choose to make them.

A decent games artist is going to cost the same wherever you're based, because they can sell their services from anywhere to anywhere. The market rate is not local. Your $140k is what you're paying if you, or they, live in Jacksonville, Johannesburg or Juba.

And it's not like those clipart libraries give you a huge discount if they noticed you're in a country with a terrible GDP/capita compared to the US. If their rate is $20, it's $20 for the guy in Seattle and $20 for the guy in South Sudan. The only difference is for the guy in Seattle its a couple of Starbucks trips, but for the guy in South Sudan it's 2 weeks median income.

If anything, starting an indie game setup in a poor country is going to require you to be significantly richer compared to your neighbours than if you live in a suburb of Seattle, Marseille or Glasgow.

You're therefore more likely to have the cash reserves to invest in indie game development if you are living in a richer country.

Yes, it's true that once you get the thing built you're going to be able to sell at first world rates, but getting the thing built is not an equal playing field for everyone.

> If that was truly something that made a lot of difference to the economics and the market as a whole, you'd expect to see most indie games coming from such countries. Do you? I don't think I do.

I have no idea about "most", but quite a few successful indie games did get their start from such countries. Kerbal Space Program is one example with which I'm particularly familiar; its early development happened in Mexico.

Flappybird was made in Vietnam.

The problem is that moving takes money, and time (which is money). In my case, I am stuck developing a fledgling business in London and I'm too broke and busy to move out.

I've managed to survive like this for a while, so it's probably best for me to make my business profitable from London, than waste time and money I don't have to move to Romania or something.

Honestly my #1 reason to move is not even the expensive rent. It's that I miss the countryside, birdsong and smell of grass so damn much.

plenty of countryside, birds and grass in Romania and Bulgaria. Write me a mail, I'll sort you out.

Haha thanks, Romania is an example, the language barrier would be a big issue actually — especially given that I am fluent in 2 other European languages. Anywhere would be cheaper than London.

I'd like to visit Romania one day though, looks gorgeous.

Can I ask what your business does?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39102398 + consulting here and there, but the job market isn't great

Thanks.

The “can’t be bothered” passion Jeff exudes reminds me of many open source authors.

Sure, he makes money and many open source devs do not (directly), but the energy is very similar.

> So the competition is intense, and you can never ever match your superiors on price, ie free. That makes for tough business, friend.

> [...] Consider me. I'm an OK programmer. I'm not good at art and visual stuff, and I haven't been since I was a kid.

> But I can write well. I make good settings and stories, my spelling and grammar are ok, I make addicting game systems, and my systems and stories blend really well. THAT is the product I sell.

So, basically, that's the secret to making it in the indie gamedev business?: Finding the small, $10,000 a year of income slot that you were meant to be in?

And carefully doing nothing but that, like a robotic drone, destined to do one thing and that one thing really well (as far as your internal programming is concerned and well made)?

You're describing an artisan/craftsperson. They are professions of slight artistic variation inside a manual product frame, supported by customers who want/need to buy from small producers.

My mom is a ceramist, and she would much rather make 100 identical (to me) teacups than one ambitious sculpture. The sculpture might even eventually pay more. I don't get it either, but some people enjoy this path.

Your mother enjoys stability. That's what this path is. It's stable and predictable. After all, trying to reach for a million dollars is much more unstable than the one thousand dollars you know you can more easily obtain.

So, this means that indie game devs and other craftsmen are the opposite of research and development types. Craftsmen are exactly like technicians or nurses who have two year Associate's degrees.

The people who do research and development are the real entrepreneurs and four year Bachelor's degree holders equivalents. They're more expensive to start up and maintain too. So, they could use bigger funding for their research labs which enable them to conduct risky and unproven experiments. A traditional startup is nothing more than an open world scientific lab with which to test and validate some macro-economic and business hypotheses.

It all boils down to steady and simple paycheck versus risky yet potentially very rewarding research, development, experimentation, and study that has an analogue in decade long secondary and post-secondary education.

To a point. The thing about craftspeople in modern times is that they are mostly fungible/replaceable by other goods. I buy artisan bread most weeks, but if I don't feel like it I can get decent bread from any supermarket these days. It seems stable, but compared to salaried career? You're always hustling for very little money.

My mom is independently wealthy, which helps support the teacup-making.

In comparison to the diverse, fulfilling job of being underpaid developer #5003 at a given position at Ubisoft?

What you reductively see as robotic and repetitive can be a source of meaning, depth and passion to someone else.

Calling someone a "robotic drone" for working in a specific genre and having a budget is such a bizarre notion.

Following a simple instruction set to reach an objective function isn't robotic and drone-like?

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