Why I Make Games
The following is written by Robert Nurse, an indie developer that creates his own no-budget titles at Netherscene Games. In addition to his indie development, Nurse is also a professional performer, and has danced with many Pop groups and in Musical Theater. He recently finished a performance in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ in Hong Kong and Singapore, and also works as a personal trainer and dance teacher.
Nurse writes about what inspired him to become an indie developer and the long road he took to get there. You can follow Netherscene Games on Facebook and Twitter, and also check out a full list of their purchasable games on the Amazon Store.
For many years now I’ve had aspirations as a screenwriter. I’ve written the first pages of countless stories, bought all the books, formatting software, planned on index cards and eventually completed two full scripts and a handful of scripts for shorts. I like them. No one else was interested. I decided the best option would be to actually make them myself.
Spurred on by Robert Rodriguez’s “10 minute film school” and the early exploits of Chris Nolan and Bryan Singer, i delved into the literature of “Lo-to-No budget filmmaking”. I concluded that it was definitely doable. I could start with one of my shorts, single location, cast of two, practical lighting. I write and record songs too, so i have a decent microphone and a multitrack digital sound recorder. I could shoot on a borrowed digital camcorder and my own digital camera that shoots passable video. Sorted.
Never got around to it. I could never find the time. If I had time, no one else did. The prospect of it taking months, or longer, to shoot a five/ten minute film killed all motivation for the project.Impatient, i know. Previously, to practice editing, I had filmed myself doing a couple of scenes, and contemplated that as a viable solution to the scheduling issue.
However, my songwriting, singing and screenwriting may be o.k., but my acting is dreadful. So for anything other than editing practice, that’s a no-go. I had what I’d consider to be a viable product, but no medium into which I can distribute it.
On the back of a BBC Writersroom competition I wrote a radio script. A short horror story with lots of nice sound description and a nice twist. No joy for the competition, but again, here was one i could do myself. Never got round to it. It just takes too long.
When I am on a roll, I can write and record a song in a couple of hours. It’s not polished, but i can have drum, bass, keyboard, guitar and vocals down. I can listen to a complete version and build from there. The gap between idea and rough product with film was just too great for my liking. I have lots of ideas. I have notebooks and cassettes and mini-discs full of songs, lyrics,chord progressions,and bits and pieces. Have an idea, get it out.
Although i wasn’t familiar with the term at the time, I was looking for a visual medium/platform with a development process amenable to fast “iteration”. Try it, like it, keep it, don’t like it, change it, try it, repeat. I can identify an idea that will result in a finished product if I can cycle through that process a couple of times, and I can drop things I am not going to finish. If that process takes anymore than a day, then I am wasting the little free time i have available.
I was checking the the BBC Writersroom site again one day, and I saw a posting from a production company seeking scripts with the scope to become multimedia productions. Expanding into graphic novels, games and t.v. as well as film. My first feature script fit the bill perfectly, I thought. I’d already sketched some storyboards for it and had briefly contemplated drawing a graphic novel version myself as a calling card , but I reasoned that it would take far too long. But that got me thinking about an ad i’d seen on Youtube for a game development program called Unity3d. It said it was quick, relatively easy and best of all they’d just made it free ! I decided I had best check it out. So I clicked a link and downloaded it.
At this point i was thinking it would be useful as a kind of pre-visualisation tool. Upon further inspection, i found it was just what i was after. I had a controllable camera, I could throw some blocks into a scene, and have a character move around and see what was going on. This was perfect.
I studied Unity, studied some javascript, got carried away and forgot all about pre-viz. If someone wants a script to make into a game, why don’t I just make the game itself? After all I’ve already got the script. About a month later I had a playable first level of a game based on my own script/story. The script itself is a kind of race against time, an open world adventure, which lends itself to level based gaming. Best of all, Unity was fast. Exactly the quick iteration I was used to when it came to writing or thrashing out some chords on a guitar.
Of course there’s a learning curve, as with anything, and that learning curve finally stalled “Split-City”, as my first game was called. My code was, and probably still is, awful and messy, but I’d learned to use a powerful new tool. I had a forced break of a couple of months, and when i came back to it I decided to build something more manageable. No longer thinking about a film tie-in, just build a game. A simple game to help me learn more about Unity. “Balls and Walls”. Ball drops, hits a drag and drop platform or two, hits or misses the goal. Nice little level. Then two, three, eight. I sort of had a whole game. Sound effects, music, everything. And i liked playing it too. Cool. Then i had a break of nearly a year from Unity.
When i finally got back to it I had to re-learn pretty much everything, but I was now armed with a new Android tablet. So far I’d only played my games in the Unity standalone player on my laptop, now I could progress to the next level and export to an external device. The Android and iOS Unity basic licenses were reduced at this time, so I bought them, downloaded the Android SDK ,latest Java versions and set to work building my first Android game. It took about a week to get it tweaked and onto my tablet playing nicely, but there it was. A game I’d made up, built and shipped to an Android tablet. Brilliant. Now i started thinking about getting it into the marketplace.
If i was going to actually release “Balls and Walls” it’d need a fair bit of polishing. I’d actually built it in 3d which was completely unnecessary,so i swapped the camera to Orthographic, jiggled it around a bit and it was much easier to play touch-screen. It still looked a bit rough though.
I then discovered “GIMP”, the open source, photoshop-type image editor and started playing with that to create some graphics assets and once again got sidetracked.”Balls and Walls” got left behind and I was onto “Mind the Gap”.
“Mind the Gap” was inspired by a plan I had to write a spec script for the Steven Moffat TV show “Sherlock”. The script was inspired by a logic puzzle I’d devised about the London Underground. I got some nice cover-art done in GIMP and built a simple little boardgame type of game. Roll dice, move, race an AI to targets. Undoubtedly my best-looking game so far and very playable, if simple.But the AI scripting was a nightmare. Again, this was mostly due to my coding, I suspect. There were no algorithms or formulas, just nested “if” statements for each AI turn. Mind-numbing to write and frustrating to debug. I’d planned to add a two-player option to the game, but couldn’t figure it out, and needed to extend the layout/board to expand the gameplay, but couldn’t face the AI.
Another game stalled.
As respite from “Mind the Gap”, I started scribbling ideas for another game. “Killer on the Loose”. A kind of “Cluedo” meets “Battleship.” This was the first time I really planned a game. I was at my girlfriend’s and away from my laptop, so I couldn’t just start building. Instead, I wrote notes, talked gameplay with her, fine-tuned scoring, devised bonuses/hazards, and we played pen-and-paper versions. I had it pretty much mapped out in a couple of days and when I got home I had it finished in about a week.
I’d planned to have some in-app payments for extra levels in there, but couldn’t get my head round the Apis. The online leaderboards and achievements went the same way. Ultimately, it’s a single player game with no online functionality. There is a lot of gameplay in there, but no external challenge or means of comparison or bragging. It was hardly going to set the world on fire. But, it was my game and I should at least give people the option of playing it.
The best way to learn to do something is to do it. I didn’t know how to get a game into the Android Marketplace and onto Google Play, so I found out and did it. As i said, I’d planned to do in-app purchase as a monetization strategy, but couldn’t, so I went for ads instead. Unfortunately I couldn’t get them to work in “Killer on the Loose”. So my first game was out. Released. In the marketplace. Ready for download. Unsurprisingly no one noticed. I suppose it’s quite a rarity these days. A mobile game that’s free, with no ads, no in-app purchase and no network requirements. What it’s also got is practically no one playing it.
But that isn’t the point. The point is there’s a handful of people in America, Singapore, India and Europe who are playing a game I created from scratch. That one and the three, so far, that followed it. They’re playing for free, but, I made them for free. Four games finished and released in just over a month. That month has taught me an awful lot. And that will stand me in good stead for the next lot of games.
I’m currently rebuilding “Killer on the Loose” as an online multiplayer. Barring any mishaps i’m aiming to turn that into a mini franchise and finally incorporate some proper monetization. Then it’ll be time to finish “Mind the Gap”, now that I’m getting the hang of networking and can bin the AI.
And that’s why i make games.
It’s fun. It’s free. It’s creative. And it’s great to think someone on the other side of the world, who’s never heard of you, can stumble across your game and enjoy it.
