Canned Dogs

The International Game Developers Association (IGDA) held a seminar on doujin and indie game development at Bunkyo Gakuin University in Tokyo on the 2nd of May, and they invited Chou Kenta (top-left pic) from ABA Games, Watanabe Kuniaki (top-right) from kuni-soft, Fujisaki Yutaka (bottom-left) from French Bread, Kataoka Tomo (bottom-right) from Stage Nana, and Goo from Blank-note to speak at the seminar.

They talked on topics such as how to maintain motivation while making a game and the obstacles faced in the doujin and indie game scene.

The first part of the seminar was a presentation by a researcher who pointed out that over 90% of game projects do not get completed. And to this Chou Kenta indicated that games don’t get completed because of the three steps of “No good ideas”, “Got tired of it after working on it for too long”, and “The game wasn’t so great after all after actually starting to make it”.

Also the development costs of a doujin game is huge and it’s seldomly worth it. A doujin game can take 6 months to a year to make, but the normal price for selling a doujin game is around the vicinity of 1000 yen. On top of that, everybody’s focused on only a few select popular circles, and they won’t even look at the less popular guys, and the extremely high quality productions from some circles completely overshadow others. And because of the amount of work needed, many developers just leave to find a more casual hobby.

Expectations for games are getting higher

Every speaker agreed that the hurdle for making games is getting higher and higher. And there are two major hurdles in this.

The first hurdle is the skills needed to make a game. Previously, there were simple programming languages on the PC like BASIC which many users have used to make their own programs, and “Maicon BASIC magazine” used to be like a bible to indie game makers. It used to be that BASIC was the norm when it comes to programming languages and assembly is for the more advanced users. It used to be a casual hobby like that.

But right now, OS and hardware are getting more and more complicated, and the skills and techniques to use all this is updating at an amazing speed. High level programming languages that are easier to use are available now, but it has become more difficult for a weekend programmer hobbyist to keep up with all this.

The second hurdle is the game itself. The level of quality in doujin games and freeware games have been going up really fast in recent years, and this is especially true for the games at the top. It also goes without saying that commercial games have been improving at a steady pace too.

Because of this, when somebody is trying to make a game, in most cases his expectations for the game would be incredibly high. Even if that is not true, just wanting to at least meet the minimum standards that other games already have would require high level expertise in most cases.

This is the same even for areas outside of programming, such as the game’s concept design and the actual level designs, it can sometimes require an unimaginably high level of skill to do all this. In these cases, the project will tend to come to a deadlock even before it has really started.

It may look like novel games can easily avoid all these problems, but novel games have the problem of graphics and sound and the cost of producing these.

For example a novel game might get compared to other games and it may have a really low amount of CG, or it may repeat the same free-use bgm tracks again and again, and players would feel disappointed at the experience.

But in order to prevent users from feeling disappointed and increasing the amount of CG, the problem of costs and budget comes into play. Goo from Blank-note who made the novel game Himawari and is writing for narcissu 3 had commented that he didn’t know why he was even doing doujin at all, when referring to the problems involved with costs for CG.

Then next comes the problem with game volume. This is especially prevalent in novel games, as Goo from Blank-note describes when he made Himawari and listed on the package that the game would last about 20 hours, somebody commented at the doujin event where it was being distributed saying that it was too long.

There is no right answer to this problem, but Kataoka Tomo from Stage Nana says that when comparing a 3 hour game that gives a satisfaction of 100 and a 10 hour game that gives a satisfaction of 100, the 3 hour game is better. A short game that satisfies the user would be ideal, and he believes that anything more than 3 hours is too much for enjoying a story.

The problem of being unable to reach the users

One of problems that were raised by all present was that there is nowhere for them to advertise the game that they have made.

There used to be news sites that covered doujin and freeware games, but many of these sites have in recent years either stopped updating or become extremely slow in updating. The guys taking part in the panel who are basically the big guys in the scene don’t really feel the effects from the decline of news sites, but some of the audience who also make doujin games have commented that the amount of traffic to their sites have had a very big drop ever since the decline of doujin news sites.

But these news sites are basically personal sites which are kinda being done as hobbies, and as the number of games being announced increases, the individuals running these sites are no longer able to handle the load. However, one opinion was also that it would be easier to get more traffic by making an R18 game as opposed to getting introduced on a doujin news site.

Another idea that was raised was that a wiki that introduces doujin or freeware games might be the best way to go around this, and the conclusion was met that it would probably be one of the plausible ways to solve the problem.

A wiki would definitely function well, but as the number of users grow, the cost of maintaining the site will also grow exponentially. And when introducing a game, a few screenshots would need to be put up (though many doujin game sites don’t actually put up screenshots). With all this happening the costs for data transfer will probably become really high, and the problem of whether the individual running the site would find all this worth maintaining will come in. Of course, there is also the costs involved with dealing with people messing up the wiki.

The iPhone app store and other currently existing doujin sites that can provide info and also sell or distribute doujin and freeware games was also mentioned. It would probably be hard to last long without a system like those mentioned where both the one that is providing the info and the one that is selling the game can get money out of it. Though there is also the opinion that the entire system might not actually need to last long at all, as it should just use whatever’s convenient at the current age.

Via: 4gamer, Inside-games

This entry was posted on Monday, May 11th, 2009 at 12:37 pm and is filed under Doujin. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.