Developing games Down Under
IT HAS BEEN A GREAT COUPLE OF YEARS FOR AUSSIE GAMES, BUT WHAT’S IT LIKE TO ACTUALLY CREATE ONE? FOR HIS LAST-EVER TECHLIFE COLUMN, BAJO SPOKE TO FIVE LOCAL DEVS TO FIND OUT.
IN 2006, AAA developers in Australia were thriving. It was a great time to make big blockbuster games. The GFC in 2007–2008 was devastating to Australian development, seeing many big studios shut their doors. Right now, there are half finished AAA Aussie games literally gathering dust on hard drives, which will never see the light of day.
But you can’t kill passion, and Aussie devs have that in spades. The rise of crowdfunding and the continuing evolution of distribution platforms has made way for old studios to pivot, and new startups to grow with emerging technologies like VR and portable gaming. I reached out to a variety of Aussie devs to discuss what it’s like making games in 2017.
Matt Kelly grew up breaking games with cheats, to discover how they work and how they were put together. Now he’s running a new studio called Mokomoto. He started his career after the Global Financial Crisis and reflected on the vibe back then. “I remember a lot of cautious optimism at the time, every win was a BIG win. Everything got celebrated. And that perseverance and loudness has really snowballed into the current state of things.”
Mokomoto’s first game Molemen Must Die was released this year. They started small with their first game to reduce risk, but wanted it to be “small, tight, insane and loud!”
Still, it wasn’t easy to get things moving. Video game funding is hard to come by in Australia, with little sign of things improving.
“Things have gotten progressively worse on that front, with the Australian Government pulling funding and a greater feeling of not being able to rely on support being there in the future.”
Neil Rennison, the Creative Director of Tin Man Games, founded the studio in 2008 after moving to Australia from the UK. TMG games focus on narrative and choice, and when I heard they were working on an unannounced PSVR game with Sony, I got a more than a little excited. Neil arrived in Australia just as the GFC was taking its toll on the Aussie scene.
“By the time I arrived in Oz in 2008 and started TMG, the cracks were already showing and over the course of the next couple of years, a lot of the big studios went under. TMG started at the same time as a few other indie developers (many of whom lost jobs from the closures) and we were part of the new wave Australian indies.”
Neil was able to attain funding through Creative Victoria, Film Victoria and support from Screen Australia before government funding was pulled. He loves the Aussie scene, and intends to stay.
“Australia has probably the most cohesive game dev community in the world and I want to be part of that and help it grow.”
Kamina Vincent is a producer who has worked on over 30 games in her career, and is currently a part of a team of four at Mountains. On the state of funding, she says it can depend on which state you’re in.
“Victoria has been really lucky in that the government has been very supportive of the games industry and Film Victoria has a program that invests in both companies and projects.
I’ve been part of teams that have used grants to hire new talent, to travel to conferences overseas, and I’m a recipient of the inaugural Women In Games Fellowship that is designed to up-skill women and retain them in the industry. There are also tax incentives that aren’t necessarily just for developers, and new starter programs such as NEIS, that has funded a few starter teams.”
But grants and funding aren’t the only ways to get a studio off the ground: there’s the solo artists such as Matt Trobbiani from Adelaide. He’s the developer of the super immersive, realistic hacking simulation game Hacknet. Matt works mostly solo, and made Hacknet in his spare time while working a full time job, as well as using his savings. The game has been critically acclaimed, and a major expansion, Labyrinths, was released this year.
‘Honestly, when I was about to release Hacknet, I didn’t expect it to sell at all. I was making it because I loved it. There was absolutely the feeling that I wanted to take a swing at being one of those runaway indie superstars, but I didn’t ever really think that what I was doing was the best money-making move — it seemed like a bad gamble, really.’
Elissa Harris is the co-founder and lead programmer at Flat Earth Games, known for TownCraft, Metrocide, Super Death Fortress and Super Undead Fortress. Their latest game, Objects in Space, is their largest project to date and allows players to “construct their own control consoles for the game to enhance the ‘commanding your own space freighter’ feeling”. She speaks with confidence and excitement about our indie scene here in Oz.
“One thing that has remained the same is an impressively solid support network of professionals and up-and-coming indie developers here. It’s become our international calling-card in a way — when overseas journalists come here to write about our dev scene, they usually end up writing about the vibrant indie community.”
Elissa would love AAA studios to return, to co-exist with the indie scene. She believes it’ll only happen when the market and political support is right.
“Several politicians at a federal level have done their best to support the industry ... but despite the size of the games industry globally and how cheap and easy it is to support us, most politicians don’t seem to even want to have an understanding of our industry.”
From a media standpoint, this rings very true with me, too. I’ve seen so many uninformed politicians over the years dismiss video games as ‘kidsy’, and attempt to talk about the industry with virtually no understanding of it, or what games mean as an art form. It is frustrating. Especially as it’s such a booming industry, pushing so many emotional and conceptual boundaries. We get to live in art with games, but so many still think game are running over prostitutes in GTA 5 and craving the gore and violence of COD or Manhunt. Mainstream media pushes this narrative, too. Multiple times this year, video games have been vilified and demonised with one-sided television segments.
Crowdfunding is a crowded place in 2017, and there are lots of pros and cons when going down that path. Raising funds this way has to be carefully calculated. From media attention, costs of running a PR campaign (which often eat hugely into the money your raise), and the seldom talked about emotional toll of running a campaign.
Elissa says, “The biggest success (and lackof-success) stories seem to have been several years ago now, but while the era of runaway successes on kickstarter may be over, it does seem to be more common to see niche and personal projects having small but useful funding drives.”
It’s possible we’ll never get back to making AAA games in Oz. If it ever happens, awesome! But if it doesn’t, it sounds like things will still be all right. Games are much more than AAA blockbusters in 2017. They come in all shapes and sizes, and so does our demand.