This is part one of a multi-part series on focus in game design, using examples primarily from Knockabout Games.

One of the first things you should ask when designing a game is “what is the game about?”.  This is an old notion, and it’s not original to me.  The purpose is to focus the project and establish criteria against which to measure ideas and features.

This question should really be asked twice, once about gameplay (functionality) and again about context (theme).  Some functional examples might be “territorial acquisition”, “exploration”, or “physical contact”.  Thematic ones could be, say,  “19th century imperialism”, “street football” or “gumdrops”.

In either case, it’s important that there be only one answer.  That doesn’t mean you have to throw out your kitchen sink list of cool features you’d like to implement, but the question you have to ask of each one is simply “how does this feature support the core idea, and if it doesn’t then how can it (or should it be dropped)?”.

I should note that it’s possible during development for all this to change.  Sometimes a supporting feature unexpectedly emerges as the core element that makes everything tick, and by extension, the core focus of the product changes too.  Given the thought put into the relationship between the original core and different game features, that can be ok;  moving the new element into the primary role probably won’t be too hard (but you will have to re-think how, and if, other features still apply).

I could give some interpretations of existing games on the market and what I think they’re “about”, but this is backward looking and not terribly helpful.  Instead, in the next series of posts I’m going to talk about games I’ve actually worked on and how we answered that question at the beginning of the project (and to what extent it held true to the end).   These are all from Knockabout Games, a mobile game development shop I founded and ran from 2002 to 2006.

Next week, the first example:  JAMDAT NFL

This multi-part series examines the history of Knockabout Games, a mobile games startup I co-founded in 2002, near the start of the pre-iPhone “first wave of mobile gaming”.  The start of the series can be found here, and last week’s post on Knockabout’s demise can be found here.

I wouldn’t feel too sorry for Knockabout, by the way.  We shut the company down cleanly, without debt.  Everyone found work quickly.  Our publishing partners still talk fondly of the titles we created for them.  And something odd happened after we closed the doors.

Early in Knockabout’s existence we did a deal with Motorola to OEM our pinball game on some of their handsets.   It was a colossal waste of time and money that we never thought we’d recoup (our max upside projection was about 10k– we did it mostly for the relationship).  We’d only ever seen one royalty report, and it was so small as to be inconsequential.  We had written the whole thing off.

Except that, three months after Knockabout’s end, we started getting checks from Motorola.  Checks that were large enough that we could have saved the business if we still had staff or an office or anything.  But we didn’t.  So we distributed the money to the shareholders.  We had no way to project how much would come in or for how long, but every quarter a new statement and royalty check would arrive in the mail.  For two years, money came in and went right back out.

On top of all that we got inquiries from both Microsoft and Sony about the pinball game, and ultimately licensed it to both of them.

Was all that enough to make up for the cash we sunk into the business?  No.  But it did soften the blow substantially.  Monty and I often joke that we should have made pinball and immediately shut the company down.  The real lesson, perhaps, is that we should have put more faith in our own IP and focused on that with a smaller staff.  We didn’t need to build the shop like our past businesses — a few guys would have been sufficient to achieve sustainability and from there we could have scaled up as appropriate.

The larger observation is that speed isn’t always as critical as it appears.  Any time you enter a new, emerging space, there’s a tendency to view the window of opportunity as small.   You have to move fast, grow quickly, establish a foothold before the value chain ossifies and fills up with established players.  To some extent that’s true.  But I think there may be a case for being patient and growing organically, not worrying about the timeline and just adapting as you go.  If you’re small, really small, you’re actually pretty nimble — large tectonic shifts in the space don’t kill you.

That wraps up the series on Knockabout Games.  The entire sequence is below:

Before The Start

Product Strategy

Business Strategy

Funding, Equity And Staffing

What Actually Happened

Where We Failed

Knockabout’s Demise

An Epilogue

This multi-part series examines the history of Knockabout Games, a mobile games startup I co-founded in 2002, near the start of the pre-iPhone “first wave of mobile gaming”.  The start of the series can be found here, and last week’s post on Knockabout’s equity and staffing plan can be found here.

Sure enough, our method of meeting publishers long before pitching worked well to establish our presence in the space.  By the six month mark, if I was introduced to a new publisher, they had almost always heard of Knockabout in advance.  We hadn’t even shipped a title yet.

Early on we signed up with JAMDAT to build the next version of their solitaire game.  Their first one was a great seller, so despite the lack of a brand, it seemed like good bet (and in the early days of mobile, just having a simple name for a title — e.g. solitaire or racing — was often more effective than long brand names that didn’t fit well on the deck listing).  A few months after that they gave us their NBA title to build.  In both cases, we overspent relative to what they funded.

We eventually signed on with a few other publishers, mostly to build games based on movies or sports.  And we added JAMDAT’s NFL property to our list.

For our own IP, we built three titles:  pinball, breakout, and blackjack.  We received almost a dozen offers to distribute the pinball game, and ultimately signed with JAMDAT.   Not only did they offer the best deal, but it made sense given how much work we were doing for them on their major brands.

We also signed a royalty-based OEM deal with Motorola to put our pinball game on a number of their handsets.

We constantly kept in touch with publishers and handset providers we weren’t working with, always looking for worthwhile deals.  Our steady workflow, particularly with high profile publishers like JAMDAT, gave us walk away power in contract negotiations.  We even dropped a potential deal with THQ in the late stages of negotiations because they refused to discuss a few critical parts of their contract (if anyone ever tells you “that’s just the way it is” in a game development contract, you should tell them “just where it is” they should shove it).

As expected, we overspent on our titles.  We got the results we expected too:   the games were very high quality, consistently rated #1 by reviewers in their respective categories;  and each subsequent deal we did was higher than the previous, often doubling in size.

We managed our publisher relationships very well too.  When things did go wrong, they were supportive and worked with us to find a solution.  In one instance, where we knew we were going to miss a movie launch date, the publisher pulled the title and sent the assets off to a chop shop in Russia to get a quick product out the door.  But they also immediately called us to try and lock us down for another title before we went to another publisher, going so far as to send us a milestone check before we’d even determined what the game was or had a contract in place.

Most of our staff were software engineers.  We had one full time artist who was crazy fast, and the platform limitations put a severe limit on how many assets we could provide (max download sizes ranged from 100k – 400k).

It didn’t play out perfectly though, a topic I’ll cover next time.

This multi-part series examines the history of Knockabout Games, a mobile games startup I co-founded in 2002, near the start of the pre-iPhone “first wave of mobile gaming”.  The start of the series can be found here, and last week’s post on Knockabout’s business strategy can be found here.

Funding and Equity

Knockabout was mostly owned by myself and Monty Kerr.  Monty’s role was largely silent — he had an existing game development business to run still — but he had quite a bit of extra office space, desks and computers for Knockabout to borrow.  He also had spare resources (people) for us to use on a part-time basis, to complement the rest of us who weren’t going to draw any salaries for a while.   Since game development is primarily a labor intensive activity — almost all the expense is tied up in payroll and the space to house everyone — this took care of the bulk of our costs and allowed us to bootstrap the business (we later leased our own space and in an unusual reversal, sublet to Monty’s company).

We also gave a small amount of equity to three seasoned game industry veterans we thought would be critical to our company:  a director level manager to oversee the specific titles, a technology director, and the CTO of Monty’s current business (who was to stay there and migrate to Knockabout later).  We wanted these folks to feel and behave like owners, not employees, since they were so important to our success.

And we gave them ownership straight up — no options, no vesting.  We did have an option plan drafted, but never actually used it.  Our take was that options, in 2002, still had a negative connotation left over from the dotcom bubble.  There was no point in handing them out if no one would take them seriously.  So for most of the staff we had a simple, and generous, bonus plan:  any time profit distributions were made, 50% of it had to go to the staff.

Development Staff

For staff, we only wanted to hire coders and artists with prior game development experience.  The platform was going to be a nightmare as it was — I didn’t want people learning how to make games for the first time as well.  I just wanted experienced game developers who were good engineers (or artists who had strong illustration, modeling and animation skills) — that was the harder thing to find;  any good engineer could learn a new platform easily.

On the flip side, we skimped on management.  I wanted producers who were former developers so they could communicate well with the team.  That struck me as particularly important since the teams were so small (often one engineer).   So we would hire guys who knew how to make games, but were trying to transition from a technical role into a management one.  I was to personally train and mentor them in those roles.

That wraps up the planning phase for Knockabout.  Next time I’ll talk about what actually happened.

This multi-part series examines the history of Knockabout Games, a mobile games startup I co-founded in 2002, near the start of the pre-iPhone “first wave of mobile gaming”.  You can find all eight parts of the series below:

Before The Start (this post)

Product Strategy

Business Strategy

Funding, Equity And Staffing

What Actually Happened

Where We Failed

Knockabout’s Demise

An Epilogue

Before The Start:  Why Mobile?

In the fall of 2002 I sat down with longtime friend and business collaborator Monty Kerr to talk about a new venture.  I already had two game startups under my belt, and I’d just come off a one year break (most of which was spent living on a catamaran).  I was recharged and ready to dive into something new.

We didn’t have any idea at that point what kind of games we wanted to make, but we had two requirements:  it had to be in a relatively new space, and it had to be games.  So I got on a plane and made a three city tour of the west coast — Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles — to chat with friends and colleagues about the state of the industry and where things were headed (we also spent some time with folks here in Austin).

There were three sectors we were considering:  casual downloadable, mobile, and boutique MMOs.  All three were fairly new and unexplored at the time, but each looked ready to explode (indeed, in hindsight they all did).  We ultimately chose mobile almost by reduction:

• Boutique MMOs were much more costly than the other two ($500k – $1m a pop) and would require raising capital.
• Casual was exciting, but it felt like we could do this sort of startup any time — shareware games had been around almost 15 years at that point and it didn’t seem like anything was going to make entry into this space more difficult in the future (although that turned out to be wrong).
• Mobile had a small window that had just opened up.  If we wanted to try it, we had to go now.

The clincher was actually a conversation I had with Mitch Lasky, then CEO of JAMDAT (which later became EA Mobile).  Mitch gave me a thorough rundown of the value chain and how money flowed through it, and talked about the various challenges of building games for handsets.  And he shared some data.  What was most interesting, though, was that the first mainstream color handset had just launched (the Motorola T720), and people were suddenly starting to buy games.  Real money was flowing.

Building The Plan

I spent the next two months diving into all manner of research about mobile games:  carriers, publishers, developers, technology providers, handset makers, and so forth.  The way I like to do this is to write an operational plan, of sorts.  The goal is to create a document that covers how the space works and how we’re going to build a business that can thrive in it.  But it’s not as organized as a business plan and isn’t trying to pitch or sell anyone on the concept.  It doesn’t even need to be complete.  The purpose is to identify all the moving parts and look for opportunities on which to build a strategy;  the act of writing it down forces one to see everything and articulate that strategy clearly.

Knockabout’s plan was about 200 pages and unfinished.  And it was never looked at again after we launched.  That wasn’t because parts of it became slowly invalid over time; rather, it was because the process of putting it down on paper had effectively committed it to memory.  We knew it inside and out.

There were four basic parts to our strategy:  product, business, funding and development.  Next time I’ll dig into our product strategy.