Content On A Shoestring

Organized by Eleanor Robinson, 7-128 Software

Person's Notes

Johnny Richardson's notes:

Eleanor: There are basically 7 people at 7- 128 Software, and as a result they have to develop content very cheaply

• Reusability of content is absolutely critical
• Saves money
  • e.g. Word games
  • Developed a dictionary used across 8 games
  • Inexpensive graphical technology
• Can’t afford elaborate 3D level design
• Doing 2D graphics
• Making background out of photos, clipart, etc
• Online image services for clipart as opposed to original art
• Reusing same model and same game engine for several games
• Develop a character and re-use it in more than one game
• Recording own audio
• Very important that indies make content cheaply

Can’t afford 3D?

• Because of cost of tools and expertise
• Also, content from some tools like Maya or Flash can’t be accessible to handicapped gamers
• Andrew: Using Google Sketchup for 3D instead of a bigger tool for a current project
  • Jeremy: Google 3D Warehouse is great for getting lots of pre-made models
• Making own sound effects with your mouth!
  • People love it!
• Free sound libraries are starting to charge
• Creative Commons is also great – some of those licenses even let you make a profit
• Scott: wants Heritage players to make content themselves and then pull it back in, release it again
  • Awesome feedback loop
• Art/Music
  • Compositing things
    • Keeping Layers of files you can reuse for different events
    • Mix and match
    • Change tempos/etc of music and you can get a ton of tunes out of 3 or 4 tracks

Getting people to do favors

• Somebody talked about getting bands he knew from Seattle to make tracks for his project for free
  • Putting out $$$ for marketing artists in return for their effort
  • Musicians are really used to this
• Nathaniel Chambers gave Johnny free tunes for his game for a splash screen at the bootup
  • Free PR reciprocates back-and-forth
• Scott: even people who are established will do free stuff

Reusing

• Does quality suffer from this?
• Game design is always set by constraints
  • What areas can I go into? Set limits at beginning of project
    • Content creation is an easy way to slim down project size
    • Trickles down into code, production, etc. workload
• Tom: Good doesn’t always mean good for you
  • People will always sell you music and other assets for lots of money
  • Pays off a lot to look hard for cheaper folks that are just as good
  • Sometimes expensive != awesome

• Localization: 7-128 thought about doing a machine translate
  • Then hire a languages student from college and both parties get something

Is it ever really worth it to spend more money to get better content?

• Oftentimes outsourced designers or tech end up spending your money just trying to communicate with you or one another, let alone create the content
• Doing series of games where the content re-usability makes a lot of sense
  • Becomes an asset
  • Casual games/family-friendly
• If you have a gun sound, using the same over and over across titles isn’t going to be a huge issue to the player
  • Novelty vs. familiarity is an important decision

Traci: Sometimes more cost-effective to start from scratch than upgrade from really old content

• e.g. taking content from a Win 95 game and then just re-starting the code base

Old games can and will always sell, says Jeff Vogel, who re-releases his RPGs by just adding a little content

• Asset reuse in a macro sense
• People who are new to the series don’t care that it’s been re-released over and over

Session Audio

From Johnny Richardson:
.mp3 Audio, 3.8mb (Pretty good quality, may need to crank your volume for some parts)