Jeff Vogel Soapbox Thread

[baud]

An interview that confirm what some had said in the thread:

http://doubtful.games/how-jeff-vogel-makes-games/

Choice bit:

One fact that we probably don’t know about you:
I don’t enjoy writing games very much. It’s a compulsion and a profitable job, but I don’t have fun. After doing it this long, it’s just a grind. But I’m not good for anything else, so I keep doing it.

Whole stuff:

Spoiler

How Jeff Vogel Makes Games
AUGUST 30, 2019

Tell us about yourself – Who are you? What do you do?
Hi! I’m Jeff Vogel! In 1994 (not a typo), I founded Spiderweb Software. For the last 25 years, we’ve been writing low-budget, indie, retro, deep, epic, turn-based, huge, story-heavy fantasy role-playing games for Windows, Mac, and iOS.

If I’ve never played your games before, what’s the first one I should try?
Avernum 3: Ruined World, probably. It’s our biggest game, both in size and sales.

One fact that we probably don’t know about you:
I don’t enjoy writing games very much. It’s a compulsion and a profitable job, but I don’t have fun. After doing it this long, it’s just a grind. But I’m not good for anything else, so I keep doing it.

What games are you playing most right now?
I’m going through a ton of indie games. I’m doing a lot of Subnautica and Beat Hazard 2. I’ll also try Celeste when Epic gives it to me for free.

What are your all-time favorite games?
I’ve been playing video games for as long as they existed, so it’s such a long list. I loved Rock Band. Ultima IV. Dragon Age: Origins. Space Invaders. Adventure for the Atari 2600. The Witcher 3. Did I say Rock Band?

What draws you to make games?
Compulsion. From when I was 5 years old and spent all my time in my room drawing mazes, I have always been compelled by puzzles and games. No matter what I do, I will also be making games. It’s an obsession.

How did you get started making games? Describe your process (or lack thereof) when making games. How do you reach your final product?
When I played my first video game in 1978 or so, I immediately knew that this was my thing. This was just before personal computers in the home became a thing. As soon as I could take local classes to learn how to program, I learned BASIC and wrote little games in it.

Now that I’ve been doing it for a long time, I have a process. I spend months just letting an idea marinate in my head. Then I spend a few months writing the story and designing the system on paper. Then I spend 3-6 months working on the engine for Mac/Windows. Then I spend 5-7 months writing the game world, writing dialogue, making dungeons, etc. Then I spend 2 months in final testing, PR, and setting up online store. Then I press the big red ship button. Then I do the iOS port. Then I’m done.

How do you market your games?
Word of mouth, mostly. We’re too small to do a real marketing push. We write games that are addictive and compelling to a small, niche audience, and then we hope they tell other people about our games. We want a small number of people to be super-passionate about our work.

What game-related or game business-related media do you consume on a regular basis?
Not much. I read Gamasutra sometimes. I read r/games. That provides me all the knowledge about the industry I need. I’m not really involved in the industry. I’m just a weirdo off to the side doin’ my own thing.

What are some tool/programs/supplies that you wouldn’t work without?
Even since I’ve started, I’ve worked on the Mac, and I use a 4 button mouse. I program 3 of the buttons for Cut, Copy, and Paste. It has been an amazing, amazing time-saver for me.

What’s your playtesting philosophy? How often/early do you playtest? How do you find playtesters?
We’re too small to pay for playtesters. We don’t have money. We get volunteer testers (like most indies), and our testers are the most awesome, hard-working people you could imagine. We start testing as early as we can, at least 6 months before release. I want lots of time to get feedback and balance tips. I don’t have time to play my games as much as I should.

What are some of the biggest obstacles you’ve faced in your work, and how have you overcome them?
Nothing really jumps out at me, honestly. There were times when our sales went down, and we worked harder on the next game to get fresh ideas. We’ve had an easy time of it, compared to many. We keep our costs low and our expectations low, and get a decent middle-class living.

How do you handle life/family/work balance?
Over the years, I’ve become a hugely efficient worker. People in the game industry underestimate the value of practice and experience. It takes me far less time to do more work than it did twenty years ago. I’m super-efficient, which gives me plenty of time to live a decent life.

One of the tragedies of the industry is how it drives its workers out before they turn 40. We are wasting so SO much knowledge and experience, and it’s costing more in the long run.

What one piece of advice would you give aspiring game designers?
Get a chair with good back support. You’ll miss your back when it’s gone.

Who would you like to see answer these questions?
Anyone who can actually make a living as an indie. It getting rare these days. Sales are down, competition is murder. Everyone has to follow a wildly different path, and I bet the coolest story will come from someone I’ve never heard of.

What’s the best advice about life that you’ve ever received?
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

(Meta question: What question did I miss that I should have asked?)
What am I working on now? Our next game is Queen’s Wish: The Conqueror, coming for Windows & Mac, Sept. 11, and iOS out later this year. It’s an all-new, really innovative RPG with a fun story, huge world, and a wild variety of different adventures.
When you write indie games, you always have to hustle for attention.

 

[Julyan Morley]

One fact that we probably don’t know about you:
I don’t enjoy writing games very much. It’s a compulsion and a profitable job, but I don’t have fun. After doing it this long, it’s just a grind. But I’m not good for anything else, so I keep doing it.

I think Jeff needs a marketing director more than he needs an art director.

Jeff, before your next interview, I want you to close your eyes and picture Hugh Jackman sitting on Conan O'Brien's couch trying to sell the new X Man movie.

 

[thesecret1]

It's like he's trying to anti-hype his game with these blogs

 

[baud]

It's like he's trying to anti-hype his game with these blogs

At least his last two blog spot made a lot of noise, so in a marketing sense it was very effective. He's even saying it at the end of his posts:

I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our newest game, Queen's Wish: The Conqueror.

I think the idea here is more to get some attention, in order to get some coverage and more sales on release.

 

[Mustawd]

The guy kind of lives off his Old cranky beat down old dev persona. This isn’t really all that different.

 

[Alienman]

"Buy my game! I hated every minute creating it"

 

[fantadomat]

"Buy my game! I hated every minute creating it"

This is a codexian level of sale pitch,it is clear that the codex had an effect on the guy. Why did he stop posting?

 

[Nifft Batuff]

I like the honesty of Jeff. Usually when some dev declares they had a great time and lot of fun developing a game, the game is shit. See for example underworld ascendant.

 

[conan_edw]

Hosting an AMA.

 

[Terra]

Where did all the money go Jeff?

 

[Alienman]

Going through some answers, and mostly excuses for not doing anything new. But new remasters are coming guys!

 

[Lyre Mors]

Going through some answers, and mostly excuses for not doing anything new. But new remasters are coming guys!

At this rate, I'm kind of worried what he'll do to the actual gameplay of the Geneforge games if they get a remaster...

 

[baud]

Going through some answers, and mostly excuses for not doing anything new. But new remasters are coming guys!

At this rate, I'm kind of worried what he'll do to the actual gameplay of the Geneforge games if they get a remaster...

From Queen's Wish system, I'd say stats are out, replaced by three skill trees (combat, shaping, magic), which can respec in town. And less simultaneous creatures

 

[Beastro]

The guy kind of lives off his Old cranky beat down old dev persona. This isn’t really all that different.

Naw, he could do better channeling the crankiness to make it amusing.

Brought to mind:

 

[Excommunicator]

One fact that we probably don’t know about you:
I don’t enjoy writing games very much. It’s a compulsion and a profitable job, but I don’t have fun. After doing it this long, it’s just a grind. But I’m not good for anything else, so I keep doing it.

He may have said this partially tongue in cheek but it really shows in his work as time goes on.

There are so many capable, passionate people out there who are desperate for a little money and just to be given a chance to create some really good games. Those are the people who deserve the support. Not the people who have lost the passion for what they do.

 

[Infinitron]

He's baaaaaaaaaaack: https://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2020/02/getting-sweet-patron-money-on-modern.html

Getting Sweet Patron Money On the Modern Internet


Once, to survive in the arts, you needed someone like this: The profoundly rich product of centuries of inbreeding.

This is a blog post about making a living writing art. Like, say, indie games. So expect a certain amount of despair.

In ye olden days, many talented people wanted to be artists. However, very few of them sold their art for enough money to make a decent living. So they would get a patron. A patron is a very rich person who is amused by you. They provide you with a tiny chunk of their wealth, and you continue to exist as an artist in order to please them.

(This system came into being many centuries ago, long before modern capitalism existed, so save your Capitalism Iz Bad hot takes for a sunnier day.)

Many very talented people are writing indie games, but the competition is soul-crushing and most gamers don't even bother to play the games they buy. Those of us who have the design chops but don't have a hit have to find patrons.

There are currently a number of routes to patronage. Suppose you want to write your indie 2-D roguelike platformer about an old dying man who wants to learn to smile. Yet, at the same time, you don't want to live in poverty. Here are three big paths to hope.


This entire blog post is an advertisement. A very good-intentioned one, but still.

1. Crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter, Fig)

Kickstarter achieved a true miracle: They figured out how to monetize goodwill.

I am a big fan of Kickstarter. I currently am Kickstarting a remaster of our cult classic Geneforge. It's going well. I am writing this blog post to get more attention for this effort.

Kickstarter is simultaneously a way for people to pre-order your game and a way to find patrons who will pay more substantial amount of money for a single copy. Once, my fans gave me $20-30 per game. Thanks to Kickstarter, richer people who have been my fans for a long time now have a way to pay more and get more in return. They are enabling us to keep writing games.

In ye olden days, if you were a patron for a playwright, you could actually sit on the stage during performances and make fun of the play as it was going on. If you are a serious patron for me, I let you give me ideas to put in the game. You can pay more on our Kickstarter to name a character or design elements of the game.

(By the way, I actually enjoy this a lot. The ideas we've gotten from our backers have been of a VERY high quality and fun to write. But I don't let you do it unless you help me buy food for my kids.)

I expect that we will kickstart every game we write from now on. It really is making that much of a difference for our business. If something about this makes you mad, remember it's basically just taking pre-orders, and people don't have a problem with that when Activision or EA do it.

A Side Thought: One reason video game kickstarters do so well is because Steam gives out free keys to backers of the game when it lands on Steam. This really helps sales and is very generous of Steam. People really like Steam keys. If Valve stops allowing this, kickstarters for video games will instantly become far less valuable.

Another Side Thought: Kickstarters can fail or turn into frauds. Look, if you kickstart a game and it doesn't work out, hey, it happens. But you need to be honest about it to your backers and, if at all possible, refund some of their money. If you don't do this, you make Kickstarter look like a scam, and you are stabbing all your fellow indie devs in the back.


The Internet lets you be like these guys, if they worked indoors and had your credit card number.

Spoiler

Donations (e.g. Patreon)

Of course, not all artists look for wealthy patrons. Others are buskers, warriors of the road, playing their music on a streetcorner for donations of passers by.

Patreon achieved a true miracle: They let you busk from the privacy of your home, and you get your money as a subscription instead of a one-time thing. The second part is REALLY important.

Kickstarter tends to be for creators who have a long-time fan base and who have built up a bit of trust. Patreon tends to depend on someone finding you and having a surge of goodwill for you, enough that they fork over a credit card. Then, every month, you can tap a few drops of precious sap from the mighty maple of their credit rating. Get enough of those temporary surges of goodwill and you have a job!

To keep your Patreon profitable, it really helps to come out with constant drips of content only for backers. For this reason, I believe that Patreon is better for people who make content in many small chunks, like writers, artists, and podcasters. However, some game developers are making really good money out of Patreon, so it must be considered.

I don't do Patreon because of my old-fashioned "Ok, Boomer" attitude towards my business: I make a living by selling stuff. You give me money, and I give you a game. Though, the moment my business feels threatened, that principle will go right out the window.

A Side Thought: This is a great (and long overdue) way for makers of mods and other user-made content to be paid for their efforts.

A Side Thought: A friend of mine who is trying to make a living as an artist online is considering making a Patreon. However, to really make money, she will need to draw lots of smutty versions of cartoon characters. I have no real lesson or purpose in relating this. I just think it's funny.


This is what I look like when contemplating the Internet. It is also what you get when you Google "Baby Boomer public domain image".

Corporate Patrons (e.g. Humble Bundle, Epic Game Store)

Of course, you can get patronage in the old-fashioned way: get a rich entity to fork over a wad of cash. These days, the cash wads come from corporations.

If you have an old game that has some appeal, Humble will sell a million copies of it for pennies each. They get chum to throw in the waters, and you get visibility and a nice check.

If you have a new indie game that looks fancy, the Epic Game Store will pay you a huge advance to have an exclusive. Then they get the prestige of selling it, and you get patron bucks. Whether the game actually sells enough to make it profitable for Epic doesn't actually enter into the equation. (Thus, this is more like the patronage of antiquity than it at first appears.)

We have sold many games on Humble, and it really carried our business during some lean times. We want to sell games on Epic, but our tawdry wares have not yet appealed to them. (Hey Epic, we got some really funky old indie games full of prestige, available for a giveaway for but a tiny taste of the Fortnite billions!)

This route to patronage is available to those developers who have skill. You need either a very promising title or a library of quality goods. It won't get you into business, but it can keep you there.

A Side Thought: Apple is also giving out patronage checks to those who put their games into their subscription model Apple Arcade. This is great for participants, but the subscription model for video games will bring developers to the same Hollywood Accounting doom faced by other creators. If you get offered a big check to be in a subscription service, congratulations, but don't pretend you aren't scorching the earth behind you.


Your end goal, of course, is to become this guy.

It's a Glorious World

I say this without irony: The opportunities above are amazing and awesome and without them we wouldn't have a business anymore. Every time the indie games biz gets tighter, the Internet figures out a way to help us survive in it. We feel very, very lucky.

And this isn't even all the possibilities for patronage. I understand in some countries the government will give you tax breaks and actual checks to help write your game. This effort to cure the world's tragic shortage of video games should be applauded.

Of course, none of this will help you if you don't have skill. If you can't write something that has appeal to some audience, nothing will save you.

If you're a skilled indie developer (or musician or artist or creator) and your work is good, kind humans will want to support you. Make something that speaks to a bunch of fans, and they will open their hearts to you. And then, with luck, their wallets. And internet entrepreneurs are figuring out ways to help those fans become patrons.

It's not often I write something in this blog with a smile on my face, but this is one of those times.

Oh, and did I mention I have a Kickstarter? My kids gotta' eat!

###

I am writing these blog posts to get attention to our upcoming game, Geneforge 1 - Mutagen. You can also follow me on Twitter.

 

[SausageInYourFace]

One reason video game kickstarters do so well is because Steam gives out free keys to backers of the game when it lands on Steam. This really helps sales and is very generous of Steam. People really like Steam keys. If Valve stops allowing this, kickstarters for video games will instantly become far less valuable.

wat?

I thought Steam generates the keys for the devs, its not like they are free keys either as the backers gave their money, its essentially just preordering. And afaik Steam generates whatever amount of keys the devs ask for.

 

[Bad Sector]

I thought Steam generates the keys for the devs, its not like they are free keys either as the backers gave their money, its essentially just preordering. And afaik Steam generates whatever amount of keys the devs ask for.

He means that Valve doesn't ask for their 30% cut for these keys. Valve are in no obligation to do that, they could start asking for a 30% cut of the Steam listed price or stop issuing keys altogether. But they have figured out it makes more sense for them to provide these keys for now since thanks to these keys there is a whole industry that relies on Steam without Valve lifting a finger.

 

[Aemar]

Thanks to Kickstarter, richer people who have been my fans for a long time now have a way to pay more and get more in return.
[...]

(By the way, I actually enjoy this a lot. The ideas we've gotten from our backers have been of a VERY high quality and fun to write. But I don't let you do it unless you help me buy food for my kids.)

I expect that we will kickstart every game we write from now on.

 

[Infinitron]

"I am a big fan of Kickstarter." (begins using Kickstarter five years after it peaked)

Somebody should tell Jeff about board game Kickstarters. He'll start making board games and never go back to CRPGs again.

 

[baud]

I thought Steam generates the keys for the devs, its not like they are free keys either as the backers gave their money, its essentially just preordering. And afaik Steam generates whatever amount of keys the devs ask for.

He means that Valve doesn't ask for their 30% cut for these keys. Valve are in no obligation to do that, they could start asking for a 30% cut of the Steam listed price or stop issuing keys altogether. But they have figured out it makes more sense for them to provide these keys for now since thanks to these keys there is a whole industry that relies on Steam without Valve lifting a finger.

And once you already got games on Steam, it's way easier for Steam to sells more games to the users.

"I am a big fan of Kickstarter." (begins using Kickstarter five years after it peaked)

Somebody should tell Jeff about board game Kickstarters. He'll start making board games and never go back to CRPGs again.

No, you see, he's too old to change and he's tired, but he knows what he's doing, he's been doing this for 25 years. And board games requires being careful about how good a game looks, so that's way out of Vogel's league

 

[V_K]

"I am a big fan of Kickstarter." (begins using Kickstarter five years after it peaked)

Somebody should tell Jeff about board game Kickstarters. He'll start making board games and never go back to CRPGs again.

I doubt it, boardgames aren't very remake-able.

 

[BinaryForest]

One reason video game kickstarters do so well is because Steam gives out free keys to backers of the game when it lands on Steam. This really helps sales and is very generous of Steam. People really like Steam keys. If Valve stops allowing this, kickstarters for video games will instantly become far less valuable.

wat?

I thought Steam generates the keys for the devs, its not like they are free keys either as the backers gave their money, its essentially just preordering. And afaik Steam generates whatever amount of keys the devs ask for.

You're right, but the thing you're missing is that Steam doesn't take a cut on any of those dev keys. If you back a Kickstarter for $10 and get a Steam key then your entire $10 went to the devs. If you wait until the game is out and buy it on Steam for $10 then $3 are going to Valve. So from the perspective of the developer, Steam is giving them free keys by not taking a cut on the potentially tens of thousands of keys they're generating for the backers.

 

[baud]

One reason video game kickstarters do so well is because Steam gives out free keys to backers of the game when it lands on Steam. This really helps sales and is very generous of Steam. People really like Steam keys. If Valve stops allowing this, kickstarters for video games will instantly become far less valuable.

wat?

I thought Steam generates the keys for the devs, its not like they are free keys either as the backers gave their money, its essentially just preordering. And afaik Steam generates whatever amount of keys the devs ask for.

You're right, but the thing you're missing is that Steam doesn't take a cut on any of those dev keys. If you back a Kickstarter for $10 and get a Steam key then your entire $10 went to the devs. If you wait until the game is out and buy it on Steam for $10 then $3 are going to Valve. So from the perspective of the developer, Steam is giving them free keys by not taking a cut on the potentially tens of thousands of keys they're generating for the backers.

Though Kickstarter is taking his cut on the 10$ from the backer.

Also reviews written by people who activated those keys don't count towards the total shown at the top of the store page: so reviews written by your biggest supporters (or at least those that backed the game) don't count toward the most visible user score on Steam.

 

[passerby]

Though Kickstarter is taking his cut on the 10$ from the backer.

30% vs ~9% ( 5% Kickstarer, 3% + 0,2$ payment processor ) and around 30-40k from higher tiers he would never get on Steam.