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Darwinia+ : was it worth it?
Posted by Chris
on Mon Feb 08, 2010 10:15 am |
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So, we did it.
Darwinia+ is finished, approved, certified, cocked, locked and ready to rock. It's coming out THIS Wednesday, the 10th of February 2010, for 1200 Microsoft Points, and you probably can't imagine what it feels like to be able to write that. Joy, happiness, relief, pride, and hope, all at once. If you haven't seen our launch trailer, check it out now - it's the best trailer we've ever made.
"Success in 2009 is survival" - Mark wrote that way back in July last year, when it became clear just how difficult a task it was going to be. On the scale of bad years, 2009 doesn't hold a candle to 2008 - in which Introversion not only tripped over itself and landed face first in the mud, but decided to stay there for a few months as well. 2009 was the year we worked our way out of it - with long months spent finishing Darwinia+ against a looming cashflow deadline that would end our company for good.
And we made it. Success in 2009 is survival, and I call success on that. And I kid you not, we received the Certification PASS message from Microsoft on Christmas Eve, 2009 - what a way to end the year. I haven't felt that kind of clear victory for a long while.
On Friday 19th February myself and Mark will be giving a talk at Bafta titled "Darwinia on Xbox - was it worth it?". After our talk Kieron Gillen will be asking us some tough questions (we'd hope), and then we'll be starting on what will almost certainly be our third major launch celebration. Writing this blog just two days before launch, the answer to our question is still largely unknown - we genuinely wouldn't want to try and call it, and if it goes strongly either way our talk will be radically different. So attendees might expect us to arrive by helicopter rapid descent through the roof, dressed in silk suits and gold medallions - or they may arrive to see us on the stage nursing hangovers and hipflasks, asking for donations into an empty coffee cup at the end. Could go either way. Of course, neither extreme is that likely, and so long as Darwinia+ does ok we will be ok. We've come to think of this as the life of a small games developer - fraught with risk and hard work, never "safe", in many ways a lifestyle choice, but with the single biggest benefit of all - we get to make our own games.
I do sometimes wonder though - if I could go back to 2006, bump into Introversion as they came off the stage at the IGF, and give them one single bit of vital information - what would I say? Would I say "Don't go near Microsoft, they will consume three years of your life on a game you've already finished"? I just don't think so, because Darwinia+ is an incredibly well made game that i'm very proud to see finished, and our aim was always to get the company on the xbox, not just Darwinia. Would I say "Stick to PC games?" Absolutely no way, the economics just don't make sense, Introversion has to play on the consoles as well as the PC. Having given it some thought, I might say "Don't spend so damn long on the Multiplayer bit", but I don't think the 2006 me would listen anyway.
We've spent much of January 2010 getting ready for launch, promoting the game through all means available to us. Those of you following our Twitter feed will know that Mark and myself spent about four days driving around San Francisco in a Mini Cooper, talking to every journalist we could get time with. In that time we demo'd to Official Xbox Magazine, IGN, Team Xbox, Game Revolution, Giant Bomb, Destructoid, Gamespot, Joystiq, 1Up, and NBC local news.
(Continuing the long standing tradition of excellent hire car rental while in the USA)
Amazingly, all those places are within the San Francisco Bay area - it's the equivelent of Bath in the UK. The content these journalists are looking for has changed in the last year or two - almost everyone wanted to record some sort of live media like a podcast or video, rather than just produce a written article. Some places recorded the video from the xbox while I was demoing the game, they mic'd us both up and one of their staff writers simultaniously and recorded us chatting during the demo, and a camera man recorded digital video of the event, all simultaneously, all streaming to Hard Disk. This is a great way to demo any game for a website, because the resulting video has the developers themselves explaining and showing off the concepts, while being guided and directed by the interviewer.
Here's a great example of the work we did in San Francisco, courtesy of Giant Bomb. This is gonna be of interest to existing Introversion/Darwinia fans as well as total Darwinia newbies, because for the first time there's 20 minutes or so uninterupted Darwinia+ playing, showing all the new menus, controls, head up display, and tutorials. And you can see the game running at a solid 60fps, which Johnny spent a lot of time making possible.
http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-ex-darwinia-plus/17-1954/
We also produced a fantastic promotional booklet and had it printed at high quality and mailed out to all the journalists on our list. Darwinia+ is only available online over Xbox LIVE, so there's nothing tangible - nothing physical for journalists to get their hands on. We wanted to make sure we fixed that, and these books have gone down very well. You can take a look at the PDF here.
We experienced one pretty major technical hitch - despite bringing TWO Xbox test kits over to the States for demoing purposes, neither worked initially because they require 220 volts. This is the first time i've ever seen hardware that didn't just work between UK and USA - most gear just converts the voltage if it needs to. So our first day of demos had us frantically navigating to a massive "Fry's Electronics" store where we found just what we needed : a 110v - 220v Voltage Converter, rated at 300W - sufficient to drive the test kit on American power.
We've also continued our campaign to place a 6 inch foam Darwinian into every single journalist office in the world - they're seriously getting around now.
Over the course of the three years it's taken us to finish this epic project, we've had many discussions about what on earth we're supposed to be doing. What is our company aim, what exactly is Introversion, that sort of thing. I think we may have lost sight of the bigger picture for a little while, during Multiwinia's run up and launch, but our aim has never changed - we want to make original video games, and everything else is secondary. In order to achieve that aim, we have to have enough cash to pay all our salaries and office expenses for the long gaps between game launches, and there are various methods of achieving this. Our 2006 aim wasn't just to port Darwinia onto the Xbox - that's much too short sighted. Our 2006 aim was to expand Introversion as a company onto the Xbox, establishing the contacts and relationships and working methods that would enable us to ship all our future games on platforms other than just PC. It's taken us a lot longer than we expected - and we've learnt the hard way that professional console game development is a very different beast to the PC. But we've done it now, and our next Xbox game will be easier, as well as our next PS3 game, our next Wii game, whatever. We're already redesigning our SystemIV support library to make it easier next time around. Our first Mac port of Uplink was a total nightmare project, fraught with all kinds of technical problems, and now many years later Subversion already compiles and runs beautifully on my Macbook Pro, with hardly any effort on my part. The only way to get good at these hard problems is to do them, learn from the mistakes, and get better at doing them.
So in answer to the title question "Was it worth it?", the answer is a most definite YES, even though we don't know sales figures yet - because the prize wasn't Darwinia on Xbox, the prize was always Introversion on Xbox. And even though it's not even out yet, work is already well underway on the next projects. I'm now running the Subversion project with Gary and Leander all fulltime, and Johnny is working on Playstation 3 stuff. I've actually been working on Subversion pretty much fulltime for many months, but i've been so busy working on D+ as well that I haven't had any time to blog about it. Much has changed, I can't wait to resume those blogs once D+ is out the door.
Thanks for reading, and please check out the trial of Darwinia+ on Xbox this Wednesday. Darwinia and Multiwinia were meant to go together, and they complement each other very well. This is the best version of Darwinia we have ever made - the Directors cut, and we're hugely proud of it.
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PAX 2009
Posted by Chris
on Fri Sep 18, 2009 3:18 pm |
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Myself and Mark were at PAX this year, and it was incredible. We’ve been to shows before of course – between myself, Mark, Tom and Johnny we’ve been to just about all of them, but never before have we seen such an amazing gamer fest as PAX. Every single person visiting PAX is at the absolute pinnacle of their geekery, and that unashamed love for Games in all their forms shines through everywhere you look. I actually felt a great deal more connection to this crowd than at any other show we’ve ever been to – because at the core, I’m a geeky Gamer too. I love games and I’ve played games all my life, ever since my parents gave me a Spectrum 128k for Christmas when I was a kid. And I love the fact that PAX exists, and that it hasn’t devolved into the cynical big corporate nonsense of E3, or the sombre and professional atmosphere of GDC. We were exhibitors this year, and it was quite an experience.
We spent much of our time attached to the Microsoft booth, running Darwinia+ on a show dev kit for anyone who came near us. And we had no shortage of gamers – our immediate neighbours on the floor were Bungie, Valve, and Blizzard, and we were right by the main show entrance, so the area was pretty rammed all day long. Gamers queued all around us to play the new Halo game or Left4Dead2, and we also had a long queue of gamers waiting to play Forza on a massive triple-screened set up right next to us. So whenever our stand got a little quiet we’d ambush whichever gamer was nearest in one of those queues, who basically had nowhere to go because he’s queuing to play something, and we’d sell Darwinia+ to them.
For the most part, we had people playing the game all day. A few people knew of Darwinia but most didn’t – some had a dim memory of playing the demo on PC years ago. Darwinia is an old game now, and PAX has a slight console bias in its gamers, and this is excellent news for us, because it means most of the pax crowd haven’t already played/bought the game, so it will be new and fresh and just as exciting for them as it was for you when you first played the game.
So we’d talk about the game with people for a bit, then send them into the introduction levels to get them started. Darwinia+ has had substantial usability work done on its opening 15 minutes, with an entirely new introduction level that’s never been seen before and a heavily revamped intro to the Mine level, designed specifically to ease xbox gamers slowly into the confusing world of Darwinia. And it worked brilliantly. It’s very satisfying to see the initial confusion of Darwinia slowly fade from a gamer, and for him to start enjoying himself, then to start loving it, then to be asking for more when it’s over. We had quite a few gamers who must have played for half an hour or more before moving on, and some of them even came back for more later.
We’ve been working on Darwinia+ for so long now that we’ve almost forgotten what a great game sits under all the snazzy new menus and presentation. When we look back on the intial Darwinia PC demos we released, we just can’t believe how stupid we were. No help, no tutorial, just dump the players into the 3rd level in the game and expect them to figure out they have to hold the alt key and draw a triangle? WHAT THE FUCK? We’re our own worst enemies sometimes. The new Introduction is just what Darwinia needs, showing off some of the love in the game and gently drawing the player into the world, and the controls and HUD work we’ve done is the best it’s ever been. We found that Gamers often explored the multiplayer content after they’d had their fill of Darwinia’s campaign, and were amazed to find effectively another entire game bundled in the package – Darwinia and Multiwinia together for the first time, two sides of the Darwinia+ coin. They complement each other very well. The second demo we released on PC – the Launchpad – now sits as an extra bonus level between Darwinia and Multiwinia, bridging the two games together.
When bundled together, Multiwinia finally becomes how we always imagined it : an extension to the Darwinia story – taking place many years after the end of the Virus outbreak, when the now sentient Darwinians have fractured into different tribes, and Civil war has torn the world apart as they fight each other over the limited resources of the planet. Each of the game modes explores a point in this Darwinian civil war – from the early skirmishes and territory conquest of Domination and King Of The Hill, to the spiritual battles over religious iconography and technology in Capture the Statue, through the mechanised and high tech warfare of Blitzkrieg, and ending in the Exodus of the tribes from the broken world of Darwinia in Rocket Race. Darwinia+ on the Xbox is the best version of Darwinia we’ve ever made – the Directors Cut, the game as it would have been the first time around if only we’d had another two years to spend on it and were able to realise every single ambition we had for the project. It all fits together for the first time – a hundred thousand generations of the Darwinians, from their birth in the cave, through their nomadic simple beginnings, through spiritual awakening and sentience in their extinction level battle against the virus, through strife and civil war, and on through the Exodus to their future outside of Darwinia.
In fact, I drew a picture of what I now call The Darwinian Genome, for those who are interested.
PAX is massive, with so many things going on at once that you can’t possibly take it all in during a day. There were little sprinklings of magic everywhere though. From the “World Maps” printed in retro lettering to guide you around, through the standing rules of the show including such gems as “Rule 3 : Don’t punch or kick people” (no mention of grapple, push, stab, shoot, tazer etc), through panels with names like “How can we make online gaming communities suck less?”, through Will Wheaton hosting unashamed geek-outs onboard something called the USS AWESOME. And the costumes! I’ve never seen so many ridiculous costumes. When you’re trying to have a serious meeting with guys from Microsoft, and in the background you can see a fully equipped Team Fortress Engineer and Scout running down an isle, with a Medic behind them using his Healing gun to keep them going, it makes it hard to concentrate. After a while you realise the Microsoft guys are actually just loving it as much as everyone else. Most of all it makes me feel good about Games.
There was a ton of Indie content on display at PAX, with one entire section called the Pax Ten devoted to Indie games and their creators. It was outside the main exhibition hall and enjoyed a much more chilled out vibe. The organisers had filled the area with bean bags for people to laze around on, and each Indie game was on display on massive plasma screens high up above peoples heads. Crowds of people would gather around watching these fascinating games being played, some gamers would just crash on the floor and chill, sometimes a film crew would march through and interview a young indie developer in front of their game. We spoke to quite a few of the developers in this area and it’s clear to me there’s a ton of upcoming Indie talent out there. Indie is its own established genre now, with its own styles and quirks, and it’s become accepted as a viable and often wildly creative corner of gaming that everyone is interested in – publishers, press, gamers and (crucially) game developers. In this new indie world Retail is a distant memory, creativity and charm win out over technology and brand every time, and it’s Steam, XBLA, PSN and WiiWare that are the places to be now.
For some time at Introversion we’ve debated our continued use of “The Last of the Bedroom Programmers” as our company slogan. We’ve all been generally in agreement that it doesn’t represent us anymore, but nobody has come up with anything to replace it (Apart from “Videogames from our souls”, but that’s just too funny) and so it’s stayed through inaction more than any desire to hold on to it. That slogan was the PERFECT message to represent us in 2002, when the Indie genre just didn’t exist in any meaningful way, when big Retail was still the dominant way to make money from games, when digital downloads from websites weren’t well established and long before Steam, XBLA or PSN even existed. It was a totally different market, dominated by big corporations and franchises, and we felt very much like it was Us Versus Them. Our launching of Uplink into Retail in 2002 was a guerrilla battle against insurmountable odds. Fast forward to 2009, and all of that has changed, we no longer program in our bedrooms, and more importantly there are now lots of super talented Indie companies doing what we do. Those guys at the Pax Ten are the new bedroom programmers – we’re working on our fifth and sixth games now, and that time is behind us. If I was an Indie starting up now, I’d be offended by that slogan. I’d think Introversion were a bunch of arrogant assholes to keep using it. And most likely many Indies do in fact think just that. It’s a relic from a time in the Games Industry that no longer exists.
So with that in mind, we’ve decided it’s time to rid ourselves of that slogan. It’s coming off the website, it’s coming off everything we do from now onwards. We will never use it again. That time has passed, for us and for the wider Games Industry, and it’s time for us to accept we’re working in a different world now. Still, that slogan has been with us for a while, and there was a time when it was a rallying cry for us. We will miss it, but this has to be done.
And with that, it’s gone.
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Keeping IV from the Wolves
Posted by Mark
on Fri Jul 03, 2009 11:24 am |
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“Success in 2009 is survival.” I can’t remember who told me that, but it is a quote that I have found myself repeating a number of times this year. I would normally consider it weak leadership to set a goal so menial as simple survival, however it’s been a very rocky few months for Introversion and there are times when one needs to accept the reality of the situation and I think it would be foolish to continue to try to grow the business when we are clinging on to the cliff edge with our fingernails.
I’m going to come on to the steps we have taken to ensure that we can keep the lights on, but I also think it’s important to understand how we have ended up cash strapped and months from our next release. Introversion is founded on a very strong belief that maintaining creative integrity is the most important aspect of the business and that belief has informed our strategy and shaped our growth. We have avoided work for hire projects and have used the sales revenue from each previous game in order to fund the next. Rather than being paid by a publisher during the development process we have to wait until the game has shipped and whilst this puts a strain on the cashflow during dev, the upside is that we receive a much larger chunk of the sales post launch.
This method works as long as each previous game generates enough cash to complete the next title, but the whole thing goes wrong when a game doesn’t sell as many copies as expected. This happened to us in September last year when we launched Multiwinia. From our point of view we considered this to be Introversion’s fourth major PC title and we expected to continue our upward trend of game sales – each of our other three games had sold more than the previous and we really expected Multiwinia to do the same. Sadly that wasn’t the case and we found ourselves in September last year staring at day one sales data and realising that we were going to struggle to make it to the launch of Darwinia+ on Xbox Live arcade.
Now this is quite a scary situation to find yourself in and the temptation is to panic and whilst I’m going to present a rationale view of what we did it’s important to note that we suffered an enormous loss of morale and the team very nearly fell apart. When faced with this situation it’s critical that the top team are positive and support each other – if the board members are weeping with their head in their hands talking about the end, then the employees soon pick up on this and things just spiral down. Probably the hardest thing I had to do, but also probably the most important was to stay positive and get the other directors to do the same. In hindsight I think we handled it well, but my advice to anyone in this situation would be to surround themselves with impartial outsiders who can provide the perspective on the situation. It’s very easy to feel swamped and overwhelmed, but strangely things don’t seem so bad when your massive problem is dismissed as a “short term cash-flow issue” by your business advisers.
Keeping morale high is critical, but I also want to describe some of the practical steps that we took to stay afloat. So firstly it is important to obtain an accurate view of the problem. We run a monthly cash-flow projection that forecasts our income (from our back catalog of games and the other revenue generating projects that we run) and our outgoings (wages, rent, tax, project payments etc) at the end of each month is a number, if it is red (negative) we have an issue and if it is black we are fine. The size of the problem is indicated by the size of the number and if it’s big and black then everyone gets a bonus. The problem in September was that it wasn’t big and black instead it was small and black and it wasn’t long before it turned red. The important point to note was that we knew immediately how long we had before we couldn’t afford the wage bill. We also knew how long it would take before the next big cash injection (the launch of Darwinia+ on the Xbox 360), so the challenge was to make the cash last long enough.
So armed with detailed knowledge of the scope of the issue there are only two things that you can do, and you usually need to do both:
1. Increase the cash in
2. Decrease the cash out
We are quite a small organisation and we run pretty efficiently so reducing our spend is pretty tough. We went through the cashflow looking for lines to cut and the biggest related to our old office (a sexy townhouse near tower bridge) this was the first casualty. Sure we didn’t want to move out, but when we rolled up to our new rented office space it turned out to be better – we were now all together in a single room (before we had been spread around the house and never talked to each other) and it meant that we could communicate better and a stronger sense of team emerged.
The second largest outgoing in the cashflow represented the enormous sums that we pay to the British Government each month for the privilege of living and working in this glorious nation. Of course we had taken steps to minimise our tax liability (because we are smart and have a good accountant), but it’s also possible to agree terms to defer the tax to the end of the financial year. So we did exactly that it’s completely legal and the tax office were surprisingly lenient with us – of course we’ll need to pay it back, but we can defer it until after the launch of our next game and that’s what’s important right now.
The third big cash sink is the most important – salaries. We have a small highly motivated efficient team and I’m pleased to say that we didn’t need to lose any of the guys. Making people redundant is an important option that needs to be on the table, but I’m pleased to say that we didn’t need to push anyone out.
So then we looked at increasing the flows of cash into the firm. Firstly we redoubled our efforts with Multiwinia. We phoned up Valve and as always they helped us out. If you can get on a splash screen on steam then you see a massive increase in your sales figures. You usually need to drop the price, but often it can be a sensible move. It certainly was for us and in the run up to Christmas we saw a number of promotions that really helped to bring the money in.
Now Multiwinia is our newest game, but there are three others that we sell from our store in reasonable numbers every day. Our next big push was to try to increase the number of sales we were making of these games. Our web site is made up of separate sites for each game and the company home page – if we could increase flows between those sites or increase the conversions (number of people who bought from us after visiting one of the pages) we would be much better off. We realized that we were way out of date and doing the e-commerce thing really badly. It’s now possible to track traffic though a web site and optimize the site to result in maximum purchases. We launched a project (codenamed “Glengarry”) to metricate our site with Google Analytics and test two new Uplink sites to see which generated the best results. The project is still running and we haven’t seen massive improvements, but we know a lot more about e-commerce then we did a few months ago and I’m confident that as we keep improving the site our back catalog sales will continue to improve.
As well as trying to sell more we wanted to know if we could generate entirely new revenue streams based on our existing project portfolio and with a little networking it soon became apparent that there were a couple of opportunities that we needed to take advantage of. Firstly the same government who collects tax from all us serfs also gives it back to techno-serfs who conduct research and development. Remember what I said about Introversion’s Creative Integrity, well the reason we need that is because we like to push the boundaries and do stuff that has never been seen before. Now stuff that hasn’t been seen before = research and development so a quick call to the boys at Braithwaites and we’re looking at another chunk of cash coming our way.
Now as well as giving back tax on R&D conducted in the past, the government also provides funds to support projects that meet the right criteria and they really dig it when Industry jumps into bed with Academia. Being an ex Imperial College London graduate I had maintained links with that hallowed institution and we crafted a proposal based around our Subversion project. An august body known as the Technology Strategy Boardgranted us funding and away we went.
In September last year I looked at a cash-flow that said that Introversion was out of money by Christmas and a plan for Darwinia+ that said that we wouldn’t be able to launch until June. It’s now ten months later and I’m looking at a project plan forecasting the launch for September / October and a cashflow that runs out around the same time. It is certainly not the case that we are out of the woods and I’m currently trying to craft a proposal for a bank loan, but I think we’ve done a pretty outstanding job over the last few months. In sticky times like these we all need to stick together and I’m aware that the descriptions above are pretty brief – if you are a small developer in the same situation drop me a line and I’ll try to help you out as much as I can.
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Moving on
Posted by Byron
on Mon Jun 29, 2009 9:57 am |
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Some of you already know this but with great sadness I am moving on - leaving Introversion. The good news is that I am starting at Sega Sports Interactive in the middle of July 
Thank you for your messages of support, it's been great interacting with you!
I want to thank Introversion for the opportunity of working for them - it's been interesting and certainly educational and I wish them the best for the future!
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