INSIDE DEVELOPMENT Is it worth making games for new tech?
How devs decide to make games for new ecosystems. By Xalavier Nelson Jr.
Cash payments. Exclusive development support. Marketing features with increased visibility. These are just a few of the incentives that may be offered to a developer in return for committing to a new platform early. An ecosystem needs projects supporting it, and devs need to ensure that they have a substantial audience to sell their games to. However, when a platform is actual hardware that takes up space, the costs and considerations developers face can vary wildly. “I first got to try the Magic Leap 1 as part of a contract early in 2018, and I immediately knew that I wanted to find a way to work with the device,” says veteran independent developer and consultant Ryan Evans. “[Magic Leap] lets you imbue everyday objects and spaces around you with new meaning and lets you interact with familiar spaces in an all new way.” However, the cost of innovation was not cheap. The headset alone cost him $2,295 dollars—not including tax—and the company couldn’t ship it to his home so Evans had to drive to San Francisco. “The expenses so far have mostly just been money,” Evans says. “To their credit, Magic Leap just had a grant application process to give money and hardware to indie developers with ideas. Getting funding from a platform holder goes a long way into making early development viable. In the meantime I’ll keep looking for consulting work in the space to continue to self-fund, and hopefully as a consumer market comes into existence I can keep making more games for them.” While Evans will have to buy necessary future iterations of the hardware as well, he believes continued consulting jobs that use his growing knowledge of the technology will put him in a prime position to recoup costs and take advantage of the Leap’s potential growth in the consumer market in the future. On the other side of the cost scale, you’ll find developers like Alistair Aitcheson, a creator who uses custom hardware he builds himself for playful art installations (such as a piece at the National Videogame Museum) and interactive stage shows. “A lot of my work is made using Arduinos,” says Aitcheson. “There’s certainly cheaper alternatives, but I’m happy to pay the extra to avoid having to faff around with setup. Other props are found on eBay: Rubber chickens, Duplo and Morphsuits, for example. There’s a joy in creating something surprising out of really cheap parts. People can see how it was made and be inspired by that.”
The developers of System Shock- inspired minimal first-person adventure Spirits of Xanadu found their project gaining Tobii Eye Tracker compatibility with no extra cost or effort, as the company needed more titles under their banner. “In our case, they used a software wrapper rather than native support so it didn’t require any effort on our part to implement,” says Spirits of Xanadu writer Lee Williams. “With nothing to lose, and intrigued by the new tech, we agreed to let them add the support in return for placement on their website.”
Sweet spot
While even low-cost development for new or custom hardware can seem daunting, one element that drives developers to tackle these challenges is fear. What happens if a platform is the opportunity their game needs, and they miss its golden launch period? That’s the question the developers of subversive indie platformer The Messenger faced with the Nintendo Switch in early 2018. “We never doubted that launching on Switch was a great idea,” studio cofounder Martin Brouard said. “However as more and more games started to come out on Switch in the second half of 2018, it became harder to be some kind of no-brainer purchase for players. Nintendo did give us a lot of visibility, though, so our sales on that platform are very good. But had we launched three to four months earlier we probably would have struck gold in a major way. We are still happy with the results, though.” In the end, polishing the game, and receiving major marketing showcases from Nintendo as well as publisher Devolver Digital helped The Messenger surmount an increasingly crowded market to some degree.
A new platform—particularly one with a physical component—is a risk for everyone involved. However, the more this risk is assuaged for the creative people who make the content these platforms need, the more likely success is for everyone in our industry’s constant pursuit of a new horizon.
“There’s a joy in creating something surprising out of really cheap parts”