LET'S GET SERIOUS HERE. Making video games always seems like the dream job: be creative, get the world addicted and get paid for it. But is it really that easy?
Turns out, it actually might be, as the INQUIRER found out when we went to a showcase of Microsoft's upcoming ID@Xbox indie games content and asked the developers on the scene lots of difficult questions.
Our two interviewees had sufficiently different stories. Joe Brammer is straight out of Derby University with an animation degree and is executive producer at Bulkhead Interactive, developer of the soon to be released Portal-alike The Turing Test and Kickstarter-born Call of Duty-botherer Battalion 1944.
Phil Duncan, meanwhile, is one half of two-man outfit Ghost Town Games along with Oli De-Vine, and spent seven years at David 'Elite' Braben's Frontier Developments. He is working on a cutesy co-op cooking game called Overcooked.
Here are Brammer and Duncan's top six pieces of advice on going it alone and making the games you want to make.
"It definitely helps if you have something to show them," said Duncan, speaking of how he managed to wangle a development Xbox One console out of Microsoft's ID@Xbox team.
"You can't just turn up out of the blue and say: 'I've got an idea for a game.' We took an early prototype of Overcooked. It was about wanting to make a co-op-based game.
"You see games take different approaches, and how the disciplines break down. Sometimes you'll see a small studio that's had a lot of experience with, say, art and the game's beautiful, and it doesn't so much matter if the core ideas aren't particularly unique because it'll still stand apart.
"If you boil down Ico it's a game about pushing blocks, but the world is such a wonderful place to be."
Slightly further along the line as a fledging developer, a good idea makes it possible to launch a successful Kickstarter, even with only one small game under your belt.
Moving from first-person puzzler Pneuma, which "cost nothing to make" and picked up mediocre reviews at best, Bulkhead Interactive raised over £300,000 to take on Call of Duty's multiplayer shooter crown.
"We basically said we wanted to take what they did in those classic shooters, but it's not about doing World War II, it's about making a balanced game, about simplifying a shooter and remembering why it's fun, because you can just shoot the shit out of each other," said Brammer.
"People love sniping, right? So it's just about taking the scope off and adding an iron sight.
"If you've seen the Infinite Warfare trailer and read the comments, there's a massive core of people saying: 'Ah, it's all about Battlefield and Battalion for me. Call of Duty's dead.'
"But the irony is that we were inspired by Call of Duty II and Call of Duty I, so we'd be nowhere without them."
Be brave and lie if you have to
Ideas are all well and good, but taking a flying leap into the unknown, and not always being totally honest, can also reap rewards.
Microsoft's devkit-donating ID@Xbox scheme was announced in the Bulkhead team's last couple of months at Derby University.
"I just applied, all like 'What could go wrong?' I filled out the application form. I'm pretty sure I lied on the form and said someone from Lionhead worked at our studio when this studio wasn't even a registered company," said Brammer.
"I didn't have anyone. I just lied. So you can imagine my surprise when two devkits showed up at this student house and we just said: 'Well, what do we do with them now? You don't know how to deploy, but you know how to play FIFA, so you play FIFA.'
"But I found four artists and two programmers and I said: 'We can't pay, but there are no chances in the games industry right now for artists or programmers, or junior roles, so let's just tale a shot. We've really got nothing to lose except a load of sleep.'
"It was obviously a risk to start with just going out there, and we weren't 100 per cent sure we could it, but you don't know until you try. And it was only really three or four months into the project that we realised our heads were above the water, and that we could do it.
"I'm sure there's lots of stories of people doing the same and realising they can't, and that they need to outsource more of it, but there we go."
Forget sleep - there's no time
The nascent Bulkhead worked from a "tiny little closet in Derby in the industrial north" and set about their task with monitors they "found on Gumtree for £5". One of them had a 4:3 ratio and Brammer said that it was "the first time I'd seen games played in 4:3 for 10 years".
The team worked all day just to pay the bills. "That was the only way we could survive, as well as fund the game," explained Brammer.
Use Kickstarter - it's still an immensely powerful resource
As mentioned earlier, Kickstarter, despite its numerous high-profile failures, is still a hugely empowering way to quickly expand a stupid idea into a real game.
"The Kickstarter for Battalion was only finished in March 2016, but the reason it was important was because we went from no money and made something [Pneuma]. And that game made a bit of money, so that meant we could use that money to make the next one [The Turing Test]," said Brammer.
"But then the interesting thing was, we said that, rather than making a bit more money this time on the next one, if we make a slightly better game we make moneyand we get a £320,000 investment out of thin air.
"So you've got that plus the other game. All of a sudden you can make a much bigger game by being business smart, rather than stupidly passionate and like, 'Oh, I'll make a game all about emotion.'
"So you've got that plus the other game. All of a sudden you can make a much bigger game by being business smart, rather than stupidly passionate and like, 'Oh, I'll make a game all about emotion.'
"No. You need to be very smart about this and ask: ‘How do we spend our money, how do we manage, how do we employ and what do we need? Is our team functioning as a well-oiled machine?"
Brammer described Kickstarter as "like an investor with no ties". What else would allow Bulkhead to make a World War II shooter? No big games publisher on Earth, that's for sure.
Be business smart - not stupidly passionate
Bulkhead now has 13 people, and Brammer also offered advice on how to keep spending money when starting a gaming empire.
"When you go from nothing to something it seems like a massive raise. So we bide our money, we bide our time, and we get this slightly bigger office in a nicer part of Derby (believe it or not there is one) refusing a bigger one thinking we wouldn't need it," he said.
"But then six months later we moved into an even bigger one, finishing The Turing Test, and that's when we came up with Battalion and decided to make the Kickstarter."
Bulkhead contracted out as many aspects of Battalion as possible, launching a trailer video that got over two million YouTube views.
Brammer has since paid for a wedding and had a baby with the money his studio has earned so far.
"I just wanted a job, which apparently in the games industry was impossible," he said.
Duncan, meanwhile, outsourced the audio, but he and De-Vine did everything else themselves, finding that their previous work "with teams of 200, or teams of 30, depending on the project", allowed them to "see all the different disciplines and wear multiple hats", but now in a more condensed way.
Don't be afraid to turn benefactors into business partners
The Turing Test will be exclusive to Xbox One and PC, while Battalion will appear on these formats plus Microsoft rival PS4.
Was there any kind of debate with Microsoft about this? "Everybody has their own agreements with Microsoft. I let them know what we need to make a better game, and they help us," explained Brammer.
"In the case of Pneuma, they took us to Gamescom and EGX and that kind of thing. So when we were young and nobody, they gave us a shot at making a sustainable studio, and now we're a bit bigger and things have value.
"We're still self-funded, but now deals go on where we might say: 'Give us a bit of money and we'll add this in.'
"I've heard things from mentors like Debbie [Bestwick, CEO] from Team 17 who's said: 'Back in the day it was horrible.' But these days I think the best deal I've seen is simply where both partners are happy."
Duncan agreed that it's a lot more open now for developers. "The dev kits are free now. Literally, we emailed Agostino Simonetta [ID@XBox regional lead] and he gave us a devkit and a lot of great advice, and I don't think that sort of thing was available in the past. You couldn't just speak to someone at Microsoft and request a machine," he said.
Like Brammer's first game, Duncan insisted that Overcooked is funded entirely by Ghost Town Games, and not Microsoft, and that Microsoft is "completely fine" about the game's simultaneous PS4, PC and Xbox One launch.
"They never said if you release it there, you can't release it on our console. They've both been really good in that respect, which is great because they're huge rivals," he said.
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