AMANDA: Hey folks - today
we're thrilled to introduce MetaPets--the next-generation
of digital best friends from Unreal Engine. Prepared for cuddles
and ready to play in a wide range of
virtual parks and yards, MetaPets will be created by you,
using the new easy-to-use
MetaPet Creator. This is just a sneak peak,
stay tuned for future updates! Have you heard? We're celebrating our
first-ever Unreal Indies Week! All week we've been highlighting
the stories of incredible teams from all around the world
and sharing their achievements, struggles, and victories in
video game development. On the feed,
discover their inspirational tales, how they've overcome
technical challenges, unearthed funds to carry on
with their development, and more. Every year--twice, in fact--we
put out Student Showcase reels that reflect some of the
amazing projects we've been sent or shown during
that time period. If you're looking to stand
out from the rest of the class, then act fast and submit
your Unreal project for our Spring Student
Showcase by Friday, April 2! Get the details below. Want to know how Weta Digital
created the realistic creature grooms in the
Meerkat short film? Then you'll fur sure
want to check out our latest webinar, where
you'll learn how to create hair, fur, and feathers from the experts. Watch the full webinar on the
Unreal Engine YouTube channel. Twinmotion 2021
released earlier this week, bringing with it a bridge
to Unreal Engine, the ability to share your
projects with anyone, anywhere using Presenter Cloud,
direct access to thousands of Quixel MegaScans
right in Twinmotion, and more. Find a complete list of
updates and then take Twinmotion for a spin. Cesium for Unreal is
available on the Marketplace! The free,
open source plugin unlocks decades of 3D geospatial
technology for Unreal Engine, empowering you to
create applications using full-scale, real world content. Fly over to the Marketplace
and download it today. And now to highlight this
week's top weekly karma earners. Many thanks to: GrumbleBunny ,Everynone,
ClockworkOcean, BamaGame, Shadowriver, LunaNelis,
RocknRolla, KuroPhoenix7, ozbitme, and Nachomonkey2 Put your hands up for the
Haven Virtual Concert experience. Presented by The Game
Bakers and G4F Records, the concert was designed
by artist and musician Danger, featuring tracks from Haven
and Furi's soundtracks, and others. Jump into the groove via
your favorite console or PC platform! Need help scripting your story,
quests, dialogues, or other event-based systems? Well MothDoctor is in,
and they've released version one of
their Flow Graph plugin for Unreal Engine. You can download the
plugin for free on GitHub, and watch their tutorial
presentation on YouTube. And last up,
explore The Fabled Woods in the dark and
mysterious narrative adventure from
CyberPunch Studios. Despite the picturesque
beauty on the surface, terrible secrets lurk
among the shifting boughs. Take the first step into
the woods on Steam. Thanks for watching this week's
News and Community Spotlight. VICTOR: Hi, everyone,
and welcome to Inside Unreal, a weekly show where we learn,
explore, and celebrate everything Unreal. I'm your host Victor Brodin,
and today we've invited four of our
Evangelists to talk a little bit about
their experiences launching their first games. Let me introduce Alex Stevens. ALEX: Hey. VICTOR: Andreas Suika. ANDREAS: Hey. VICTOR: Martina Santoro. MARTINA: Hola. VICTOR: And Samuel Bass. SAMUEL: Hi. VICTOR: Welcome to the stream. Like I said,
we are going to talk a little bit about your experiences
launching your first game since all of you come from various forms
of game development backgrounds and have some form of
experience inside the indie universe. Now, we have prepared
questions for discussion but feel free to submit
your own in chat today and we will either take
them throughout the stream or at the end when we're
doing a little bit of a Q&A. First question coming right up. I would like you to
introduce yourself and why don't you let
the audience a little bit how you got into
game development. Let's start with Alex. ALEX: Hey, I'm Alex Stevens, I'm one of the Evangelists here
for Australia and New Zealand. And I cover-- mostly
I'm a programmer. So I started in
the games industry probably officially 2012 ish. However,
I'd always been tinkering with a bit of programming,
and Flash, and stuff like that. So first games
were built in Flash with action script and
just a little side scrollers and little shoot them up games,
kind of stuff like that. Played around with a
little bit of CryEngine back in like I think it was 2010,
something like that. But this was while I
was studying at uni. And then out of uni one
of my mates was like, hey, do you want start playing with games,
and UDK. And we started on a horror
project called [INAUDIBLE], and so I started
developing that, and we can probably
go on a little bit more about that later on the stream. But I must say it
was interesting. But traditionally I come from
an engineering background not so much a computer science
or game design background. So I get a little bit of
a different lens there. VICTOR: Awesome. Let's move over to Andreas. ANDREAS: Yeah. I started like 20 years ago. I'm in that kind of-- I'm this generation where there
were no schools or no anything even-- I come from Germany. I'm Evangelist
for central Europe. And here 20 years ago,
nobody knew that there's even game development. So when I first started it,
it was hard to convince
everybody around me that this is a real job. But I started actually studying
engineering, and I got married. We had two kids so I was
always looking for the opportunity of side jobs. And Blue Byte back in the
day were looking for testers. So I applied there,
and I started as a tester. And after two weeks someone
came into the room and asked, is there someone who
can script or do something. And I was like, here, here. Which was not completely true,
but you have to try. So they were sitting me in front
of a PC giving me a Lua book. So Lua scripting is where
I actually came from. And then I had to
script for Settlers, which is this
strategy building up game tutorial which was awful. That was the worst
thing I ever did. And then the company grew. I was thinking it
was not too bad what I did there so they kept me. And then Ubisoft
bought the company. And then it wasn't-- back in
the days they were no real game designers so they
were looking around-- Ubisoft-- and saying, OK,
we bought this company. Who is a game designer here
and suddenly they named me. So suddenly I was a game designer. Suddenly I was responsible
for a big brand in Germany at least for a game and then-- yeah. I went from there. I stuck with Ubisoft
for a long time. And then I left and found a
publisher, a small mobile games publisher and grew
that with venture capital. So that was kind of special
then I left there and did some freelancing
and 2017 I released a small indie game
called Long Journey Home with Unreal Engine. So I was on the other side. And I also managed-- I did a lot of different stuff. I managed the in
the Indie Arena Booth, which is the biggest independent
booth on Gamescom that days. But I was always in touch
with some people from Epic, and I joined,
and I don't regret any minute of it. So now I'm in the mix
of making cool stuff and talking with developers. I'm trying to help them. So I'm looking also
forward for this stream. This is nice. VICTOR: Thank you, Andreas. Martina, please go ahead. MARTINA: Well,
so I'm Martina Santoro. I'm Evangelist
for Latin America. I'm based in Buenos
Aires in Argentina, so it's kind of like
almost Antarctica. That's how far away I am. I've been working in the
games industry for over the last, I guess, like 10 or 15 years. I actually started working
in the animation world. And with my partner,
with Lucas we used to go to
all these festivals and present our projects
to production companies, and they were like
super ambitious. Like every time have like this comic book that like expanded
the universe of the characters in a movie, or a TV series,
or a video game. And people would say
like whoa this is amazing, let's do this. There is no way I'm going to
give you money for your game but can you do this with my IP. So that's kind of how we
got into the gaming world. As kind of like
Andreas mentioned, just to be there to do that. There weren't many
game studios in Argentina even though the industry it's
around also like 20 years old. Again no places to go and study. And especially it
wasn't that easy either to convince
your parents that you were going into this industry. They had no idea what
you were doing-- what they were supposed to expect. And it's like-- I think it's harder
to tell your parents you're going into
the games industry than coming out of
the closet sometime in this part of the world. So we were super
lucky we started to work with all these
companies that were mainly from the animation industry,
from films and developing games for them. Until one day we decided
to work on our own thing. We weren't working with a brand. We weren't working
with somebody else's IP. With a brand guide
or anything like that. And we created our first
point and click adventure. Andreas knows
what I'm talking about. And that kind of like
presented us to the world as an actual
independent game studio. We actually show this
game in festivals and markets around the world. And we kind of like
got this opportunity to stop making kind
of like advert games. Like games that were thought
for advertising something else but they were actual games. We were working on games that we
were completely free to design. Yes. But their destiny, I don't know. So we again went to
markets and festivals, and we pitched this idea,
and everybody told us this looks great. There is no way we are going
to give you money for this. So the same thing
happened all over again. But the cool thing
was that it was kind of like our presentation
portfolio to have a game that was beautiful,
that was fun, that was actually entertaining, and playable. We actually could send
something to someone and somebody can
test it and enjoy it. So it opened us a lot of doors. We started working
with companies from all over the
world and just like we're like committed full time
to develop original content and that was an
amazing opportunity. I've been always also
very active in the community working in the Argentinian
games development industry, working regionally,
helping other countries to get resources,
and funding, and help from different
resources that we have. So I worked for 10 years as a
member of the local IGDA that it's called ADVA. I even got to be the first
female president of ADVA a couple of years ago and
together with the other 11 countries we started
the Latin American Federation to-- kind of like
Star Trek-- work together to help developers in the Latin region. So yes that's mainly it. I've been knowing
Paulo and Chris and they've been in all the
evangelizing team in Latin America for a really long time. And when in 2019 they
asked me if I wanted to join it was actually
a weird question. They told me like do you
know someone that can join us. And I was like, yes,
of course, I can introduce you to so many people. I'm like a living-- like an agenda or
something like that. And they told me like,
you idiot, we wanted you to work with us. So it was a very romantic
way of popping the question. And that's how I
joined the team. I'm sorry I made it so long. VICTOR: It's a great story. Why don't we hear from you as well,
Samuel, before we start digging in. SAMUEL: Hi, I'm Sam. I'm Evangelist for the Americas,
and I am the new kid. But I am not the new
kid in game development. I have been a game
developer for 26 years now. More than a quarter century,
which is terrifying in
that I think I've forgotten more than
I know at this point. I started out-- I'm from England. I started out as a kid
with an Atari computer, which had no games in the UK. So I started making
my own games as a kid and had the big dream
of moving to California, and making video games
when I was a teenager. So I did and got a
job at a little developer in the Bay Area making DOS
games back when that was a thing. And from there I went to EA,
and was with EA for 12 years doing AAA things and
niche strategy game things. I made Command and
Conquer games for a while. Worked in some
Medal of Honor games. Learned a ridiculous
amount about shipping a game. Every year on the dot. No delays. Like to say eight games
eight years I learned a lot. I will never do that again. And then after my time
at EA came to an end I got into indie
VR development. Joined up with some
friends to start a company called Three One Zero. We made a game
called Adrift for the Oculus Rift and the Vive in Unreal 4,
we were an Oculus Rift launch title. So we are right up there on
sort of the cutting edge of VR but we were a
team of five people plus contractors and support
from a publisher obviously. But we are a small team
making a very ambitious game on Unreal Engine with new tech and trying to get it out the door,
which was very relevant to today's discussion. And I learned that everything
I learned before was not necessarily applicable
to you have five people, and the question is
there someone to do that? Yes, it's you. You should go do it. And so after working indie
VR for the last couple of years, spending some
time in story based gaming, which was pretty fun. Working in a more
narrative space. Joined up with Epic to
promote indie game development because my real passion is
democratizing game development. I want everyone to
be able to make games and this seems like a
good way to help them do it. And so here I am, hi. VICTOR: Welcome, Sam,
and relatively new to the team as well. Exciting to have you here. Awesome. So hopefully the audience
a little bit about who you are but now I wanted
us to dig into some of your experiences of
going through the roller coaster of starting a team,
developing a game, and then hopefully launching it. And so leading to that,
let's start off with was there any
project that you launched or you would consider a success? And what does success mean
to you sort of back then and then today where you are? And do a little retrospective on
any of these possible successes that you've had. I'm just going to open
up the floor to anyone who likes to take the lead here. ANDREAS: Well, I can start. Sam already implied it. It is highly depending
where you are and what you do
defines a lot what your-- what is a success story. So if you ask me I
would have really to think about what's a success story. So I launched
games with Ubisoft. They were pretty successful. So that's a success story. I launched my small indie
game which was financially not extremely successful. But that's a
success story for me because we built
something up from scratch, and we did something unusual,
and that was holding up. So it might not have been
from a financial perspective like the big thing
but from the content or from how we develop game it
was extremely cool because that was one of the games where
we had like sound, and music, and art from the beginning. So we first did the
motion we want to achieve and then we did the mechanics. And I come from a game
mechanic background. So to do that in that
way with only eight people that was awesome,
and so an awesome success story. So the first question
you have to ask yourself and that's also true for
your indie studio if you start. Even if you're a solo developer,
or if you have two, or three people. Or if you're like, OK,
we are aiming for a prototype, and then trying to get more
money so we may grow very fast. The question you
have to ask yourself is what are the KPIs so to say. What is a success for you? Is it maybe a success to get
your company on the map? Like having survived the first
game and then grow from there? Or is it like I want
to make money with the first game then
you would maybe approach it differently. Which could mean like
let's do like small games and churn them
out like one month. Each month one
game until one fits. That would be different than saying,
OK, we have five people and we spend half
a year on a prototype or we spend like 10 people
on two years for a full game. And it depends where
you are in your life. So when I started Long
Journey Home I turned 40. And the reason I
wanted to make this so as the game called the
Long Journey Home, so it's about finding your way home. So I turned 40. So I questioned myself. OK, I'm 40. I have two old grown kids. They will leave the house soon. So where am I. Did I come home
in a more metaphorical sense. So for me to be able to
work on that for two years was a success despite even
if it were to have absolutely failed here it would have
been a success for me because I could
spend my time on that. Yeah. SAMUEL: 100%. I mean,
that's very much my metric is-- yes,
if I'm working at a big studio and I'm making a big
studio game then there are clear metrics for
success that we trying to hit. Where you want to
sell that many copies. But when we went and
made Adrift that was again we made from the heart. And it was about an
emotion and the awe of VR, and the feeling of isolation,
and really building a mood and the story. And yes,
we wanted to be successful. Who doesn't want
to be successful. But on a personal level
the fact that the game achieved our goals of
creating that emotion, and that experience. And managed to
ship relatively clean with the Oculus Rift,
which is a pretty nifty thing to do. That was my one sort of
more techie measure of success is can you ship it clean
because one of the hardest things about getting
a game out the door is knowing which
bugs you have to fix. So I was like,
I would like Adrift to ship in a way that it doesn't crash
on people and if there are bugs they're not crazy bugs,
and we can go fix them. And it became very much a thing
if someone would post something on Twitter, Oh, hey,
this weird thing happens and we'd
be right there going, OK, cool we're going
to go take a look at that. And it meant-- it was a very
clean launch in that respect, and it was like
emotionally meaningful, and also as a
technical designer it made my brain happy
because it wasn't built jankily. ALEX: And for me
we go completely on the other side
of the spectrum where like Sam is
kind of in the middle. Where it's like the feel good,
and the tech design side of things-- where
I'm going for tech designer because being a
programmer I'm just like I just want to do
cool stuff in the engine. Break it apart,
make it bend to my will. And so like for me
measure of success is just like did I get this
game running optimally. There's still a little bit
like of an art side of things but it's definitely-- did I get this running on frame
because like I'm a VR developer as well,
and so back to the game for me is my satisfaction. But also the putting in
the grease like lifting your-- what's the idiom? Terrible [INAUDIBLE] guy. Elbow grease, that's the one. Thank you. Yeah. Kind of like that stuff. Just getting in the hard yards,
pushing something out that people can enjoy. It's probably a little bit
more of a simplistic approach but I definitely enjoy
the process and working with the team as well. So for success
for me it's definitely more about the result
of the community and working with
some great people. VICTOR: And in retrospect-- oh, sorry go ahead, Martina. MARTINA: Oh. well, I think it has maybe
like a different meaning for us. In Latin America we
don't have many resources. There wasn't an Epic MegaGrant or anything like that back then. So just surviving for us
I think it meant success. Just the experience
of keeping a game, and launching it,
and actually going through the process of
learning all these steps. I mean, when we started
working we got for example, to work with Square Enix in a very
small game for Latin America. The name was [INAUDIBLE]. It was mobile game. So it wasn't anything like
Tomb Raider or I don't know, Final Fantasy. But the thing
was that just for us going through
all this process it meant working with publishers. Working with people
from around the world. Learning more about ourselves
or how to organize a team. It was kind of like I
survived Square Enix. What's the name of this
generals things in the Army that you get. So each of those steps
kind of like taught us a lot. So for the next project I think
we were in a better position to keep growing. We got to work with Cartoon Network,
or Disney, or Kongregate.
Even if some of those projects weren't publish or weren't
successful releases. Like I think our most
successful game it's an endless runner with Mr. Bean,
you know this guy. So it's either you love
him or you hate him but you know who Mr. Bean is. ANDREAS: Nobody hates him. MARTINA: And at the same time it wasn't the
game that reflected our interests in details. So it's kind of
crazy that just for us to actually keep making gains. Keep engaging
with the community. Getting all these opportunities,
or working in new platforms, or getting featured,
like those kind of things when you are working on your own. I think that looking back
now I think that those were our biggest successes. ANDREAS: I think what
you can already hear a bit is-- I mean what I
personally like with games and that's all
reflected a little bit is like everybody has his own
kind of view and taste to it. I mean, I love games. I love making games
more than playing actually. I love making it because
I learn a lot about myself and I see a lot of cool
questions coming in, and I want a little bit
to go in that direction as well because
there's a lot of questions about marketing and stuff. So I think one goal you have
and especially the smaller you are. So if you are only one
person making a game or if you're three that's
already a big difference. So the people who
do the game first have to figure out
what does it tell it, and what do they want to do,
and what don't they want to do, and where they maybe need help. So a friend of mine is a
solo developer right now-- was a pretty successful one-- and he hates marketing. But he has he has
found good people who help him with marketing. So he is saying, OK,
my thing is making the game. I can make the game great. I'm not so great in
doing the marketing thing. And he realized early
enough not to try it by himself. So finding out first
what you want to do, and what's your passion,
and where do you think your
talent is most useful for is already one
part of the journey. SAMUEL: Marketing
assets are hard too. I mean, that is one of
the key lessons you learn. Making a game-- is that
making a good screenshot is not just a matter of
taking a bunch of screenshots and picking one. And making a video asset,
or a trailer it's ours or if not weeks of work to
get it to the level of quality to promote your game. So do you have the
time to do that if not who does who can
help you and this is-- ANDREAS: And do you--
and do you have the eye for it. I think especially
you see that a lot. So take a look at-- I mean, even if you are a
gamer and not a game developer take a look on Steam. Take a look on any platform--
take a look at the screenshots they have there. So if it's like, oh,
yeah, the QA can make a screenshot
when they play. That's not how you will sell
your game in the best way. So maybe you are lucky
and have someone in QA who has a really good eye for it. But I mean, if you look--
you cannot copy what the big companies are doing. They are building
systems for that in the game so someone can make
really proper screenshots, try to recreate a
special move moment, and then even go over it
and do custom things to it. But first you have
to ask yourself when you do the marketing
stuff what does your-- what message do
you want to transport and then you have to find a
good way to make this visually. So this is so many
different talent and it's extremely hard to make
a game completely by your own. It is extremely hard. And people don't get it. So players-- and I don't want
to say something wrong here but players don't get it. It's still a kind of a
black box for them. So for them it's still like,
yeah, you click some buttons here
and then the game is done but actually it's
extremely hard. And then comes all
the other stuff on top. MARTINA: And then one
tiny comment about something you were saying, Andi,
it's kind of like nobody knows how many kinds of
people we have behind one game. So we have this
myth going around where we have I don't
know people in dark caves coding and seeing the matrix. And it's kind of like, well,
we do need people from marketing. We need graphic designers. Of course,
we need accountants and lawyers. It's just not only people
that know how to code, how to program. We also need so many different
kinds of profiles in the team. So if you actually
don't have that interest-- something I'm in love
with in this industry is that it opened me,
not only my team, but me myself so many doors,
and actually allowed me to try and do so
many different things. Because I don't know
inside of my team I was developing relationships
with potential partners, or investors, or working
with I don't know the consoles. The people from the hardware
or the different platforms for distribution. But then at the same
time I had to learn how to talk to the
press and that's like a different language. You have to organize
information in a different way. And I think I could do that
because my partners completely believed in me. They trusted me
and I trusted them while they were staying in the
studio working the actual game. So it's crazy to see how
many people you need. Of course,
you can do everything on your own. It will maybe take you longer. But if you can
find people that are passionate about
this different verticals I think it's only better. ANDREAS: And it also
depends what costs your energy and what gives you energy. So I always try to
judge a little bit what I can do depending on
if I do it and the day is over do I still have
like some energy left or if I'm completely
drained out. And all the stuff I
learned in the last years-- especially all the stuff
that's draining me out I try to give someone
else because I obviously not in the mood for that. So and it's a learning
process and it's not just a game development learning process. I think that's a life
learning process to figure out what you want
to do and what you can do. SAMUEL: Well, I think-- ALEX: And identifying
on your team as well. Like I know that
my co-developer he was great at the marketing
side but I was way better at the business side. So we just had like an
unspoken kind of agreement that, OK,
he does all of the marketing stuff, and then I'll go out to the
platform partners, publishers, and stuff like that,
and I was good at that. And just rolling
with it and accepting that OK,
we're not all superheroes and can do everything. And allowing trust
in someone else. Like big thing for
indie dev is trust. ANDREAS: Yeah. That but also identifying-- I mean,
that's the thing if you are not an expert in one
category it's hard to judge if someone else is. So very often you
might meet someone who is really passionate
about something and you say, yeah,
that's a great guy. Let's work together. But it might not work
out and it's hard to judge. ALEX: Yes. They might just be the
loudest person in the room. SAMUEL: Especially
when you're in a small team is a problem because there's
only four people in the room. ANDREAS: That's one thing. Yeah. SAMUEL: So one
thing I wanted to bring up is with partnerships. Part of a lot of what
you've been talking about is reaching out to people-- is a lot of times that's where
you find the support you need-- is whether it's through a publisher,
or a hardware partner,
or one of the console manufacturers. Or even someone in a big
publisher in another country might be interested
in your project and go, yeah, we can also give you some
funding, or some tech support, or whatever. Not everything has to be on you,
you can reach out but to do that,
you need to be willing to do the work to reach out to people. And yeah, not all of us
are super socially skilled and it requires a
certain amount of that. So if there's someone on
your team who is comfortable doing that you have to-- MARTINA: Yes. Especially now that we
have this opportunity of-- I don't know how
this is going to sound. But we are kind of like at home. Like maybe a year ago we had
to go to GDC in San Francisco or Gamescom in Germany. You have to move
somewhere and it was something you needed
to get ready physically. I remember like getting like
all my water, and my vitamins, and things for my
throat because I knew I was going to be
talking from 8:00 in the morning until late night in an after
party or something like that. And I had to be in
a really good mood to interact with so many people. But now you don't
have to travel anywhere and we are all stuck at home. You can actually use
this as an opportunity to participate and engage in as
many events as you can to try, and talk with people. And everybody
understands you are at home but you are going to
be more comfortable. You don't have to put
on any kind of makeup. I don't in my case,
it's like I'm wearing a t-shirt and I'm so happy. ALEX: Well, like nobody
knows I'm wearing pants, right? ANDREAS: You do? ALEX: --whatever. [LAUGHING] ANDREAS: You do? ALEX: Just trust that I am. ANDREAS: Victor, didn't put that on the list of to-dos
for the stream. SAMUEL: That's
the end of the episode it'll be the big reveal. MARTINA: Dudes,
I put a bra on only for you today. I haven't put a
bra in 12 months. So yes, this is for you, Victor. But yes, I don't know. It's kind of like
different kind of profiles, different kind of people,
and I think that's something beautiful
in the games industry. If you can find someone
that can do that job. And then, of course,
if you're planning to release your game in China,
of course, you want China to be the perfect match for
you that can actually make your game more successful
in China than if you trying to [INAUDIBLE] localization. ANDREAS: When it comes
to this we work together. I mean if you are in
a 300 person team and one person isn't
like top notch that's OK, nobody will maybe
notice for a long time. If you're in a two person
team and one is not top notch or is like not in line with the
rest then 50% of your company is going in the wrong direction. So that already says a lot. That's one thing. And what I can
only advise to is try to find someone who
is complimentary to you. So for me,
I founded my last company with Dirk. Dirk was the engine programmer
at Ubisoft there on Settlers. We had our own engine there and then we
started this company. And he is completely in many,
many ways an opposite of me and that was really good. And we didn't agree. And oh, we were not the
best friends or something. But we were really-- he was
the one who was completing me and when we for example,
made the evaluation saying what technology do we want to use. So we were-- I come from a
time where there were no Unreal, no Unity, no Godot,
no-- name them all. There were not so
many stuff out there you could get without
spending money. So I came from an age
where each time you start a new project
you are evaluating again completely from scratch. What is there now. OK, there is a C4 engine. How much does it cost. So you do your
evaluation et cetera. So when we started the company,
we did actually the same. So we were looking
at different options from making our own kind
of stitching together thing. Looking at Unity,
looking at Unreal. And we went with Unreal
because they already where our collaboration
starts very, very well. So he's C++ programmer,
hard core. He knows his shit. So he's really, really good. Oh, sorry, Victor. Now I got to-- How many coins do I
have in the swear jar already in the stream? I don't know. VICTOR: I think
that makes it two. ANDREAS: OK. [LAUGHING] So he was looking
from that perspective. I was looking more for the
content production perspective. And then we figured out for
him the most important part for Unreal Engine was it's C++,
it's open. I can tinker with
everything I want. I can change the
engine the way I want. No other engine has
that on the market and it's a complete suit so
we can release on that for sure. And if we run in any
trouble we will fix it. We can brute force it if
needed because we have access to everything we need. So that was his point of view. My point of view was like,
oh, cool everybody we hire can work in the engine
instead of like doing paper work, Excel tables, whatever. No we don't have extra tables
he does data tables directly in the engine. So we could even get new
people into the development who might not have like the full
understanding of everything but they could all work. So we shipped the
game with nine people in 2 and 1/2 years,
and everybody even-- later we had some interns. They could work inside
the engine all the time. So this both views
reflect a little bit-- I think we made already a
good decision from the start with us both complimentary in many,
many ways and then grow as a
company from there. SAMUEL: All right. To pick up on
something you said. You were co-workers and
you respected each other but you weren't
necessarily best friends. I started a company with friends
and that can be a rocky road. I mean, I'm still friends
with all of those people but when you're making a
game together it's intense. It's hard. And you're going
to disagree on stuff. And if you have an
emotional relationship on top of your
business relationship it can get complicated. So it's just a thing to be
clear eyed about when you go in that everybody
has to know their role. And if a person has specific
roles making a decision within that role you
can say I disagree but you also have to put
your friendship aside and go we are a team making a thing. We are not a bunch of friends
having a massive adventure, we are making a thing,
and we need to take it seriously. ALEX: Yeah there's definitely a maturity component there. It's just kind of going in and
knowing that whenever you step in that door or like that-- In this case, the virtual
door that this is the office and whatever you
say is not personal. Because teams get
broken up so easily just by little small things that
are inconsequential to the rest of the team. The business, the game,
because it's not just two people it's potentially everyone around you. It's not just the developers,
yourself, it's their partners, their family,
children, stuff like that. So putting aside differences
and working together for the benefit of the whole
community around you is a big thing and it
sets a good precedent for your local game
dev community too. VICTOR: Something to
feel good about if you're looking at some of
these indie darlings that we've seen come out
and it seems like it's only one person who's produced them. There's always one person
in the spotlight pretty much-- yes, while the game might have
been originated by one person the final product was
definitely or most certainly, I should say, touched by
more fingers than just theirs. And so-- ANDREAS: Yeah, that's the thing. And you have to know there
are very rare people out there where one folk,
one person can do it all. There is really, I could name
some which I appreciate a lot but that's really, really rare. And very often if you
see an indie darling and you think, oh, my god,
this is the first games they did. This is great. When you look at the
buyers of them very often there's a lot of
experience combined. So that's one thing. And when I said we started
with two and grew to nine that was something
for us that we knew that. We knew the budget
we were having. We knew how long
we can work on that. We knew how many people
we can have and we a little bit like we need at least half of
the company being experienced and the other half life like
let's get new people in also to have fresh blood,
have different views, and help that grow. So you should know that a little
bit upfront what you want to do and what you can do because
it makes the decision-- that drives the decision how much
you can do or what kind of game you do. So if you start alone and
saying let's do the classic one. Let's do an
MMO, and I'll do it alone. And everybody will laugh
now because this is all what we have heard so many times. And that's because of the
perception like making games can't to be too hard. MARTINA: Or have you heard like 1,000 times this
thing that it's like, oh, I have this idea that-- ANDREAS: But I can't tell you, you have to sign an NDA
because it's the best idea ever and we will all get rich. MARTINA: It's like dudes
around the world and dudets also. Every idea has
already been done. The Simpsons have
done it so it's really difficult to come up with something
completely original, and the only way
you have to show it is to actually make
something and show it just like loose,
don't be afraid just go and do it. The originality is going to come
out of the way you do things. How do you turn
them into a reality. Anybody can have an idea. ANDREAS: That's the thing. In the past I was always
thinking like, oh, we have to have great ideas. And then you are breeding over ideas,
and you're breeding, and you're discussing
before you touch anything. Nowadays,
the last game jam I did I think we thought
five minutes about the ideas and we started making it. At the end it was
completely different but the real cool stuff came in
when you were working on it. SAMUEL: It's the execution. ANDREAS: Yeah. SAMUEL: I mean,
a game whatever you-- having written a million
design documents that no one reads because
that's the-- MARTINA: Nobody reads anything. Don't take it personally. SAMUEL: Sorry indie devs,
no one reads your docs. [LAUGHING] It's true that
the game mutates immensely. Whatever you release is not
going to be the original idea. Even if you're very
close to the original idea it's changed so
much along the way and that's the real journey. That's the adventure. And it's also a great place
to go back to a prior point to train up your new people
and give them a little place to go. Here go explore
this feature a little bit. Because I like to say I can
turn anyone into an Unreal developer, you don't have to
be a coder, or a game designer, or whatever. Give me a couple hours I'll
get you making something. And it really is that. You can do this. Here is a place
to try and do this. It's a safe place. If you mess it up it
doesn't ruin the game. And turn your junior
staff into people who can then be a senior staffer. MARTINA: It
doesn't ruin your life. Sorry to add that. But it's kind of like
now it's safe here, It's like are not betting
everything you have, or all your money,
or all your resources into one thing. Right you can
just go and try it. Try it out. Go and do it. Nobody is going to
be broke out of this. ANDREAS: I mean that's
the coolest thing nowadays. SAMUEL: --scrap
it and start it again. ANDREAS: And you can do that. It's really funny. We are living in hard
times and in easy times. So it shifted. So 10 years ago it was extremely
hard to get anything done. Now it's super easy
to get anything done. Later days it was easy if
you have a finished game to get it on the shelf
and get money for it. Now it's flooded,
and it is an art by itself to get recognized. So that's what changed. MARTINA: It's kind of like I'm making games from Argentina. Like this is like
around the corner from the end of the
world and it's never been more easy for
teams to make games, and never been more competitive
at the same time like what you were saying, Andi. Now anybody can make
something amazing. ANDREAS: But that is great. I love that. So I mean,
my daughter comes from school and she used
Scratch to do some-- I don't know if you know that. That's a little kind of also node based so to say
programming thing they use in school just to
teach a little bit of algorithm. She comes home and
I can show her Blueprint and she was like-- she's now 20 something. But when she was younger
she could sit beside me and see it and say like,
oh, this is cool since she could
basically grasp what that is. And that's what
I like with games. Or another example
is my daughter. So I'm really into
learning from games. So my daughter learned
basically coordinate systems not in school that
was Minecraft, because she wanted
to cheat and wanted to see where she spawns,
and she had to understand how the 3D coordinate system works. So this is great. Or vector. In school they teach you like
vector math and you are like, oh, this is super boring. And then you sit here and
try to move a spaceship and you do vector maths. So there's so much
great stuff and that's so cool that game
engines are now on the brink of like being so
accessible that like everybody can do something. SAMUEL: It does get to the point though where we know
that we can all do things. And I personally believe
that the Roblox kids are going to revolutionize
the game industry. I think the kids coming
in Roblox, people doing Creative Mode in Fortnite,
all that kind of stuff. Like there's just so
much opportunities to learn how this works
and then go make your idea. But the hard part now is OK,
you've made a game how
do you get it out. How do you
actually get it in front of people in a way that is
more than just your mom. And because my mom
will look at everything I made and go that's nice
but I want people to play it. So what it is-- and what you
have to do to get it out there to get eyes on it and also
put it in a condition where it can be played I think-- VICTOR: That leads us
to one of the next questions that we had planned here,
which is what did you do to prepare for your launch? And when did you start
relative to the timeline of your projects from
beginning to end? Were there any
important key strategies that you think
that helped or was there any specific practices
in the marketing that also helped with the
visibility for the games launch? And I do want to
mention that we've had a couple of
questions in chat in regards to how do you stand
out in today's market. ANDREAS: So first of all,
it's not like making the game and then making
marketing for it. I think you nowadays
try to identify early what's cool on your game
and what can be communicated. I can make an example,
even with a lot of experience. I missed a lot of
opportunities for the last game. So we used NASA
pictures to create nebulas because we were lazy. So we basically
took the pictures, and took the color coding,
and then created a particle effect
that's recreating those pictures. And that was it
kind of a nice thingy but we didn't tell anybody. And then one
evening I was sitting with a friend who is a
journalist on a bigger German news magazine
on a beer and we were talking about stuff. So it was not really
interview or something. It was just like people
talking and I told him that and he said, oh, my god,
why didn't you tell us. I would have made an
extra article about that because it's so cool. So to have someone
from external in your team identifying what cool
stuff and messages do you have is something
I would advise to get early on because
we are too close sometimes. SAMUEL: And build
a calendar from it. I think that is
one of the things. Know when your release date is. Know when you have
to start selling the game or marketing the game,
and really think about what dates do I need stuff. And you don't even need
to know what the stuff is yet. It's like I'm going
to need screenshots and a video of this date because
we want to get some attention. We're going to focus on
this feature here, whatever. And just even if you
don't stick to it, 100% you have it in your
schedule so you don't have to stop
doing what you're already doing 12 hours a day to
then make marketing assets. You've gone, OK, I know I
have to make marketing assets and I know this store
requires them in this format, in this shape,
and all of that side of things to. MARTINA: I
remember the first time-- ALEX: I'll say this is well-- sorry, go on, Martina. MARTINA: I
remember the first time I spoke to a friend
of mine that works in press especially
for the gaming world. And I created this
crazy long press kits, and it was insane the amount
of information, and stories, and kind of like,
he was like, you need to make this easier for me. Like how many games
are being pitched to me. How many press kits I'm
getting from all over the world or they must ask,
how can you help me with my job? Which was kind of crazy to
actually face that moment where you need to-- well,
as you guys were saying, I need to stay a little
bit away from this, step back, and try to
look it with different eyes. The way you write things,
it's not just that you need someone
in the actual language you are writing to
proofread the text. It's also how it's
going to be used. So we understood that
journalists kind of needed to copy,
paste very specific parts of the text to make it easier for
them to have quotes from the development team,
or if you are going to have
people from the industry making recommendations
or something like that-- I don't know. We got, I remember, Tim
Schaefer in our adventure game. So it was a big thing to
have someone like that supporting this project. So it was kind of an
interesting process to learn that there are
all the different jobs that need to be fed with
different kinds of information. There is this
dopresskit.com website created by Vlambeer
and Rami Ismail that was super helpful to understand what where
the most important key features that we needed to have,
not only the screenshots, but even your profile picture. I remember, if you are
not sending your own profile picture,
people will find it online, and they will always
pick the most horrible one there is available of you. So this is kind of
important even if you don't-- ANDREAS: But it's
really sometimes-- it's sometimes the basics. So before you begin to think
about strategy, unique selling points, who you approach,
I can also tell from evangelism perspective, sometimes we
see something cool on Twitter and then it's extremely
hard to find something out, which I don't get,
because there's no, OK, this our team name, this is the project we
are doing, we are located here. For us, interesting,
do we use Unreal Engine or not? So get the basics,
some screenshots. So even that on one, that's a
reason why web pages are still helpful. So if someone is just on Facebook,
or just on Twitter, or just on Instagram,
that is not the right place, in my opinion, for having that. You want to be able to set--
if someone shows interest, you want to have no friction
giving him all the information he wants at once in the
moment because sometimes you maybe meet someone
who is in the position to help you, and if you then begin to
gather your information, then maybe the
opportunity is gone. Or if it's like-- the most
horrible thing I ever had was someone wanting to pitch-- I was working for a publisher
for some time as a scout, so I got a lot
of those stuff in. And then there was one
guy who was like, yeah, I cannot tell you
much about the game. You have first to sign an NDA. That's already bad. Then you have
the next guy saying, yeah, here's my information,
then you go to website. And then he sends
you the password, and then you
download a zip file. And that is also
protected by a password. And then you have
one screenshot in. You can assure that
a lot of people don't-- if you are pitching your game,
there's a lot out there. So you might have
the best game ever, but if your information and
what you're doing is not available, then you might not get
recognized on that level. And we are not talking about,
hey, let's do cool shit-- Oh shit. Four times. SAMUEL: Can't take you anywhere. MARTINA: [INAUDIBLE] Out. VICTOR: Going to have to
see if we [INAUDIBLE] in there. SAMUEL: It is true, though. It's like, as an evangelist,
we spend a lot of time just being out there in
the world looking for stuff. And also,
on the other side, when we were making Adrift, for example, we got a lot of
support from Epic because we reached
out to Epic and said, hey, we're using UE4 to do
cool stuff, are you interested? And they gave us-- it was like kind
of what I do now. We go, we're stuck,
we can't get the engine to do this,
so we're having this issue, or how does subtitling work,
whatever. And suddenly we
had a whole bunch of people who could be like,
it works like this, or we're going to
send a team out to work with you to help you optimize,
all that kind of stuff. And it really helped us make
a stronger game because we had support and
we were willing to go, hi, we're doing a cool thing,
here all the details, we have a website,
we have a demo, we have everything you need. But I think the other
thing to remember is 5, 10 minutes is a
lot of people's time. And it's like one of
those things whenever I see a trailer for a game,
if your first minute is logos for things,
then you've lost 70% of the people watching
your trailer by the time you get to your awesome game footage. Show me your
awesome game footage. That's what I want to see. VICTOR: Two seconds. Two seconds. Yeah, you have two seconds. ANDREAS: I think with
TikTok it's even less, right? VICTOR: Yeah,
it might be on some platforms. But I think if you're a game
publisher, two seconds. Twitter,
that's how much you have. And if we're sort
of-- all we're seeing is a slow fading logo,
gonna keep moving. Yeah, two seconds. If you can immediately--
the first millisecond, you're showing
footage of the game, and that is,
put the most interesting thing you have right then and there. You want to catch folks
attention immediately because our attention
spans in today's social media environment and what
we do and the amount of games that are
out there is shorter than it's ever been before. ANDREAS: But that doesn't mean you have to shoot thousands
of information the first seconds. VICTOR: No. ANDREAS: So that's the thing. So we all get the feeling like,
bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, we have to be super fast,
but that's not it. There are beautiful trailers out
there where you begin to scroll and then you see
an opening scene that is calm and nice
and beautiful and then you stick to it already. So we are not talking about try
to squeeze all your information in the first seconds,
then you are doomed. SAMUEL: Yeah, don't bore us with a PowerPoint
presentation, but yeah, get my attention with your cool
idea and beautiful presentation that makes me go,
I want to know what that is. I don't even care what it is,
but I want to know. ANDREAS: And that's the same when you approach publishers. So there were some
questions I saw running through. So how do I approach
a publisher in pitching? That's exactly the same. So instead of
sending a presentation with 20 slides about something,
first, what you want to do is get their attention. So maybe a nice GIF and
just two or three sentences about that and then saying,
here's a link to more information. That's much wiser
because then he's-- it's the same. So he's scrolling
through and then seeing, this GIF looks nice. So something-- I mean,
that's the thing. Text is the worst way to
communicate anything. So the question is,
how can you get as close as possible to the real experience? And that's moving pictures. So what is the one
that's taking less friction? And it's maybe a GIF, or GIF,
or whatever country you are from and calling it, strangely. So that's a good
vehicle to do something. Maybe it's a small video,
but that's much better than
written long text about the opening of
your impressive story lore you have there. SAMUEL: No one
cares about your lore. I say this as a
former lore master. I ran the fiction in the
Command and Conquer universe. No one cares. The fans cares,
they do care a lot, but that is not the people
who are funding your game. VICTOR: It's a visual medium. And so ultimately what the player,
or the viewer will be consuming is,
in most cases, visuals. I know that Bose did a really
cool audio only game jam, and then they have
those AR audio only, but 99.9% of the
time it's a visual medium. And so that's the way
we ultimately consume it. And so catch our eyes. Two seconds, we want to see
something pretty, or at least, not necessarily pretty,
but interesting. SAMUEL: The dream. MARTINA: And
adjust that information to who you are talking to. It's not the same if you
are pitching to a publisher, or if you are pitching to a partner,
like you are-- I don't know-- going
to work with someone as a co-producer
for your project to help you achieve something. Or if you are talking
with the press, we already discussed that,
or if you are even talking with your community,
your players. I remember there
was a lot of people that can actually,
two days before they launch, they can go to Twitter and
announce something like, well, I'm going to be releasing
my new game in two days, and because they have this
trajectory and they're famous indie devs or
something like that, they can manage to be
successful with a strategy like that. But in many other cases,
and especially in my experience, building a community in time,
learning to engage with people
that are people that love a genre, that they just
would kill to play your beta, that they would just want
to engage on the game level. It's a different discourse. You need to learn how
to manage that community and how to make it grow. I remember when we wanted
to make that point and click adventure that everybody
told us that adventure games were dead and nobody
wanted to finance. Four years after that,
we said, well, let's wrap it up,
and let's make a Kickstarter campaign and just launch it
and at least try to close this project in a nice way. And the community went crazy. It was a group of people
that actually moved others to come to us to help us. It was really a
moving experience to see the commitment of
people that is so far away and we've never
met in our lives. So I think it was one
of our best strategies that wasn't planned. We thought, yes,
let's make a Kickstarter. And then it turned
out to actually build us a community that later helped
us work with [INAUDIBLE] Media, with Deep Silver,
actually making all that noise in social network and getting
these people from the adventure community supporting it,
kind of open us another opportunity we could
have never had before that. ALEX: Yeah,
building your community and having champions in
that community to help drive. Because I see so many
developers these days are starting up little Discord servers
for their own games and getting moderators on
there to just keep people active, just keep them coming
back and having that game in the forefront of
their mind at all times, because an indie developer
can't do it all themselves. And half the time,
we're not marketers, we're not community managers,
and having those people who know how
to do that and just cultivate that community and keep
them around and engaged, a dime a dozen. And when you find them,
hold on for dear life. MARTINA: One tiny comment. Indie Week,
it's the first time we are doing. This is really so exciting. A lot of people in
the evangelism team, we are all around the world. You can find us in every continent,
actually. So I'm actually very proud
of being a part of this team. And for the first time,
we created this event where each day we are
featuring indie developers around the world that they're
sharing their experience. And actually,
tomorrow, on Friday, we will be sharing the point
of view of several indie devs that are actually going to be
talking about to self-publish or not,
if you are publishing with someone, how are you going to pitch this? On Tuesday, we have a
special day for looking for funding. So it was also pitching,
but for other kinds of people. We were talking on how to
organize your Discords when we are talking with
different people. So I think it's interesting if
you go back to the Unreal website and check
those out because it's a lot of hard work
from a lot of people and a lot of amazing
teams that everybody have the weirdest experiences,
and one more different than the other. So I think you can expand
more about pitching and that on those blog posts. ANDREAS: Antarctica evangelist,
by the way, is the one who swearing the
most on stream has to do it. So I'm afraid that's where
I move to next week. VICTOR: I'll join you.
Always wanted to go. On the topic, I was hoping
we could hear, potentially, if you're able to talk
about a specific anecdote from when you did
pitch a game to anyone, whether that was a publisher,
a partner, trying to get
someone to work with. Just a little bit curious
about a specific instance of when you might have
gone through that process and what that entailed. ALEX: I could probably start on that because mine one
was more of immaturity one because I was young
and I was dumb. And one thing is that I
got word from a friend that one of the Sony
reps-- it wasn't exactly a pitch to a publisher,
but it was a pitch to a platform. And so there was a
Sony rep on the floor of PAX Australia in about 2014. And I heard about him,
and I only got word of it. And I kept my eyes
out and stuff like that, and eventually found him
and kind of cornered him. And it was the
end of the long day, and I didn't think about what
he may have been thinking at that point,
because usually these reps have been walking around a
conference hall for all day. They're just tired. They just want to go home. They've probably jumped off
a flight where they're jet lagged and they're just sick
of talking to people. So just cornering him
was not the best approach. And sometimes-- I've
found that it's actually, the best way is to just go,
hey, I'm Alex, if you want to have a chat,
here's my card, and just let them be,
or let it naturally come. Because what happened eventually
was the next day he came around to the booth,
and he was like, hey, Alex, I saw you yesterday
because I realized halfway through the pitch that I was like,
just leave me be, and he appreciated it. So having a bit of
humanity actually went a super far way
because he came by the pitch, and he went, actually,
this is quite cool, because we had the Oculus,
and this was before the PS VR, or what was it called,
Victor, before PS VR? VICTOR: Morpheus. ALEX: Morpheus. That's the one. And he was like, well,
we might have an opportunity here. So sometimes if you just
show a little bit of humanity and approach a pitch that way,
it might turn out, but not always. So sometimes you have to go
in with your best foot forward, show off your game. As we've already said,
have a pitch ready and for the
appropriate party, because platform
holders want to hear why it's good
for their platform. Publishers,
they want to hear how they're going to make their money back. The people on the floor,
the consumers, are going to hear, what's cool about my game? And tell me in five
seconds before I go to the next
folk down the hall. So definitely, when you
start doing your pitches, just practice on friends and family,
go to game dev events and pitch there. VICTOR: Meet-ups. ALEX: Test different avenues. Meet-ups, yeah. Because you will-- sorry,
go, Victor. VICTOR: Just wanted to go ahead since the fact that there are no conventions
happening right now, I would just want to
say that this applies to virtual meetups as well
and virtual meetings with folks. And I know all of you on
the call here can definitely vouch for it that you've
just taken the job that used to be a lot more
in-person and it is now done online in a virtual
space just like this. And so this applies if
you're feeling a little sad about not being able to go to GDC,
which I know all of us are. Please go ahead and continue. MARTINA: And something else that you can consider that is,
I think, it comes from what Alex was saying,
it's these are people. You are engaging-- I mean,
if you want to talk to us,
for example, we can help you put together
a presentation for applying to a to a MegaGrant.
And it's kind of like, we are human beings,
we are working for someone. You kind of want
us on your team. If we are going
to help internally, or if I'm a publisher,
or I'm working with the hardware, I'm probably part of a team. I have to talk about with you,
try and make it easier for
me to champion you inside of the company. So I think that the best
projects we ever got, either funding or publishing
or any kind of deal out of it, was when we found someone
that fell in love with our project, but also, at the same time,
really wanted to work with us. Imagine that developing games
is not just a one-month thing. It's a long process. It's people that are going to
spend a lot of time with you. So they really want
to work with you. It's kind of like a
big part of the deal to build that relationship and
that trust between your team and this person that
is going to be putting their reputation on the
line with their partners in their company. This is going to be your
knight in shining armor. So it's kind of crazy to see
how those dynamics work. I think that the best projects
we ever partnered with someone was when we found someone
that actually was pitching to us, they were kind of telling us
how to make the pitch better because he needed this or
that to present this on a meeting, I don't know,
after GDC, or they were asking us to polish
something on the prototype because they wanted to
showcase it in a specific way. I don't know. I think it's crazy that
we kind of clicked with someone that knew better
than we did what we were doing. So they were kind of like-- I don't know, we were making
turn-based strategy RPG. So he launched many of
these games in the past. And he wanted to
work in another one, and he got so excited that
was kind of like, well, you need to do this and
then do this other thing. And don't worry,
I'll help you put this together. Or, I don't know,
when you're talking about a business decision,
your game, if it's a premium game, or it has content,
like DLC installments, or if it's a free to play,
sometimes and most of the times,
we are focusing on the game and we don't
have that part of the game development process in mind. So having someone that actually
has that experience of working in a live game,
or generating content, or kind of maintaining a
community around that, it was amazing to have
someone that could guide us through that process. And I think that the best
partners are the ones that, yes, complement you. SAMUEL: Yeah, that's the thing. MARTINA: They complete you,
actually. ANDREAS: That's the thing. You go looking for a partner. So I think one thing,
when you do your own game and you are desperate
because you maybe need money, or you need help, or whatever,
mainly it's money, you need money,
so you always go into this discussion with this kind of feeling,
you are the small guy, and there's the big guy,
and you have to show something, but that's not true. If you find someone
where it fits, then it fits also for them,
which means they have also benefit of that. And that's not just-- if there's someone who
just wants to give you money to get money back,
then maybe that's not the right one for you. So maybe you want to
find someone like Martina said where it clicks. So you should approach
these kind of discussions like eye on eye, even if it's a super
big conglomerate of they have a lot of money, whatever,
you are entering this and you have something to offer. You have to offer
your unique nice game. So that's one thing. Second thing I would say is
when you make your homework, and that has nothing to
do with the event itself. If you would go to an event,
you should do your homework
before you go to the event and make a list of with
whom do I want to talk, and then you have to
realize a little bit what the companies are. So if you are in Europe,
and you go to Sony, Japan and you talk to the guy,
he might not be even to help
you at all because it's a completely different branch,
they are disconnected
to a certain level. So you need to find
someone that fits you. Then you maybe have to find someone,
do your homework, and find out, OK,
I'm doing this kind of game, who else has knowledge
about this game? So not just firing to everybody,
like shotgun going there and pitch to everyone,
find maybe the one-- MARTINA: Like sniper mode,
not like unabomber. ANDREAS: Yeah. SAMUEL: It's like finding the-- if you're pitching to Epic,
finding the right person to go through,
what region are you in? We're evangelists from
different regions, who should you talk to? Because if you talk to me,
but you're in Australia, that's less useful. But I had a story about this,
which is about confidence in your partner,
which was when we're making a Adrift, we had a meeting with some
very high up people from Oculus. And they were game
developers with a lot of experience who'd made some cool stuff. And so we were all a little,
yeah, are we going to look silly? Are they going to come in
and just tear apart our game? And so we were in the middle
of taking through our work, and the person said, no, I have
100% confidence in your ability to execute the game. I'm just here to help you do it. And it really helped. And it was one of those ones where,
yes, they helped us beyond that, but it gave
us the sense that, yeah, we do know what we're doing. And so if you can
find a partner like that who says that and means it,
hold on to them for dear life. And if you're in
a position where maybe later in your career
you were in the other role, being that person
as opposed to being that powerful intimidating person,
but being a human, and going,
I am a human, I am here to help you versus I'm a
corporate monolith really helps. ANDREAS: Yeah,
I was more on the other side than on really pitching. I was thinking about what other
interesting pitching situations I had, and I have to say,
I was really, really, really lucky on being
in the right moment, in the right position. And a lot of those
easier pitches. So when we did
Long Journey Home, we did it with someone together,
I didn't pitch the game, I pitched the team. So I said, this is the
team that will work on that. This is maybe the kind
of game we want to do, but most of the time, especially
when you look for a little bit more money than just
temp money for a game, it is not the investment
they do for the project, it's the investment
for the people you do. So it comes down to who
you are and what you do. And that actually
takes a bit of time, and you have to
do baby steps to-- you have to establish
the relationships. So when we did the
Long Journey Home pitch, it was more like,
it is really ridiculous, but we were sitting there like,
shouldn't we make a game together? Yeah, that would be cool. So we drank a beer and decided,
yeah, maybe that's a good idea. And then we talked about with
whom and then it just unfolded. And it felt-- it is an
absolutely privileged situation to be there,
but the relationships with all the people that
were on board for that were built up over 15 years. So that's the thing. So it takes sometimes
a little bit of time. So when you do your prototype,
then maybe it's already
an idea to begin to reach out because building
this kind of relationships takes time. And on the other side,
if you have someone where you
have the feeling it's not on the same level
of discussion and it feels like a little
bit intimidating, then maybe don't go there. I really think this is a wrong-- that starts already
pretty wrong. So it should start like, hey-- when people pitch to me
always were extremely honest. So if someone started talking,
after one minute, I got already,
this is not for me. I don't want to
waste their time. I don't want to waste my time. So I'm extremely honest in saying,
this is-- I always try to see
something positive and try to help some people
to get where they want to be, but I'm also very clear saying,
OK, this doesn't really fit. And if you have someone in
front of you who doesn't get it, that's the human part. He's talking and
firing all the information and you try carefully
not to hurt his feelings, but saying to him,
this is the wrong place, this is the wrong approach,
this is the wrong person you're talking to. So you have to
listen and you have to find this kind
of good balance. And sometimes it clicks
and sometimes it doesn't. SAMUEL: Yeah,
hustle culture can be damaging where there's a certain
kind of tech mentality where you go, you hustle,
and you get out there and you work the pavement,
and sometimes that drives people away. It's like,
you got to target your pitches. If you just shoot
it at everybody, then everyone's like,
did you get that pitch? I got that pitch, too. Everybody's heard about it. ANDREAS: Yeah,
and that happens, I can tell you. I was on the pitching side,
and I was in Switzerland at Ludicious, really,
really nice event. Unfortunately,
it doesn't happen anymore. Ludicious,
really, really nice. And I remember we
were sitting in a really nice, cozy restaurant,
suddenly with all the scouts from all different companies there,
and sure you talk. And it was even like I saw
something that's not for us, but maybe for you. So as indie developers
should talk to each-- as I'm finding out what kind
of publishers or investors are nice,
they do to a certain extent as well. So yeah, it is important to
find a good sweet spot for you. VICTOR: Thank you. MARTINA: Something
I also wanted to add. It's kind of crazy sometimes
how cultural things affect also those meetings. I'm Latina. I talk a lot. And it was really hard
for me to learn to listen. I think that's one thing
that actually opened us a lot of opportunities was that,
as Andi was saying, it was kind of like,
well, this is our team, and we were showing
something we really wanted to do, and showing those
games actually showed how we could work if
we were completely free. So it was interesting
that instead of-- if Andi would've said to me,
well, Martina, after a minute, I already know this
is not a project for me, then it was kind
of like a way for me to not just get offended
and leave or something, I had to learn to say,
well, OK, tell me more, what kind of projects
are you looking for? What kind of other
projects you are engaging? So it actually opened
us a lot of opportunities because we were showing
that we have the capabilities, we have the resources,
we have the experience. So maybe it was kind of like,
well, can we pitch something new? So maybe it got a bit-- spread our attention,
but actually opened us a lot of opportunities to,
at least, keep surviving. ANDREAS: Even have this Intel and getting an idea about,
this is what they are looking for, and getting-- you can get a lot of
information out of that. So you can ask why they
are looking for that, et cetera. So this can be, still,
a very fruitful discussion. SAMUEL: And maybe-- MARTINA: Another tiny note, consider the actual culture
from the other person. So I was warned
by a friend of mine when I was going to meet
with someone from Germany. And he told me, well, now,
Martina, you are Latina, but consider, this guy is from
Germany, and from the West, so it's going to be
even more German. So maybe he wants to express
many emotions, right, Andi? ANDREAS: You were
not talking about me. MARTINA: No, no. So I don't know. Or, for example, well,
when we met with the people from Square Enix,
this was a Japanese company, Fukushima-san,
the owner of the company, the founder himself was there. And he had this project
where he wanted to make games for Latinos, by Latinos. [INAUDIBLE] down,
we are all Mexicans, or something like that. I don't know what
he had in mind. But it was kind of crazy
that even though he wanted the Latino way,
he was expecting us to understand the
Japanese way of doing things. So I think that
one of the reasons we got the project was that
we got prepared for that meeting. And not only in the ceremony of
what a Japanese meeting means, but then also on
how to follow up, or how to have these
conversations with people that are kind of expecting
things to be a certain way. ANDREAS: Considering
cultures is kind of something that you should consider. So getting a feeling-- I mean, we are operating
now on a worldwide audience, so to say. So 10 years ago you could
be successful by having the pipeline to produce the CDs,
put them in the shelf with a nice box,
so that was valuable. So that's where some
publishers come from. So they had this kind of chain,
so production chain under their control. And then you could be
successful in one market. Now, we are aiming-- everybody is kind
of aiming globally, some are aiming only for
the local market, et cetera, but you have to find that out. And to find-- I think to think a
little bit about culture with who you talk about,
but also what is your cultural goal of the game. So who's the target audience? What is their culture? And it's super interesting. I mean,
super interesting to find out. And that's why I think
that's something to consider. ALEX: Yeah, I remember when I released my first
game to early access, it was a little horror game. And we were like,
for the most part, we're probably going to get
most of our players from the US and Australia and the UK,
the usual western countries. But we were super surprised
when Poland was our top country, because you wouldn't expect,
Poland being in dark areas and all
that stuff, liking dark, horror style games. And it just never
occurred to us. So we pivoted quite a lot. So we, from marketing,
we started chatting to more Polish journalists
and stuff like that. And it was just like,
it was weird. But you have to roll
with the punches, otherwise you sink or swim. MARTINA: Yes, this industry is not who punches harder,
is who can take more punches. I think that's for
everybody out there. SAMUEL: So my
last studio before here, we were making a
game in a different engine that targeted women and
queer people primarily. We were making story games,
and we wanted to do like a prestige version of a choice or
or style game. And it was really interesting
because certainly your market outreach is
completely different, your cultural sensitivity
is completely different. And it was one of
those things where we were looking at the
content we were making and we didn't necessarily--
while our team was very diverse,
our writing staff was not so much. And we realized that
we were making content targeting people that
was excellent content, but wasn't necessarily
actually hitting the cultural beats we wanted. And it is a really
interesting challenge where you need to have-- we had community people,
we had marketing people who had real knowledge
of those markets, and they were the
ones going hoping to steer the
conversation and steer the creativity of our work. So actually talking to
the people we wanted, because we found the ones
that didn't hit those markets did not do well. Because, yeah,
someone will look at that and go, I don't want that. I want that. And it's as simple
as that often. But yeah. VICTOR: I think it's
time to move over to some of the questions
that we received from chat. Some of them I know we
have covered a little bit already, but there are a
couple there that I think are worth addressing. Let's start off with
a couple where I'm sort of looking for a one
sentence, one word answer, trying to be pretty
straightforward about it because I know that we can
talk a lot about these topics individually. But let's try so that we can
go through them a little bit. Hillel Garcia Austria asked, how can I protect
my game from piracy? ANDREAS: Not at all. SAMUEL: You can't. ANDREAS: The question is
if you want to take that fight. SAMUEL: Yeah,
I would say, if there is a battered, pirated version
of your game up on a torrent, upload a good version of
the game with a good build. I don't know that your
publisher would like that, but that's the reality. You don't want a bad
version of the game out there, even if it's pirated. ALEX: Yeah, actually,
I like one marketing tactic of another team. I can't remember the name,
but they replaced the main character
with a character with a pirate hat and sort made it a novelty. And that was a marketing
scheme for them. So you could
potentially lead them to it because piraters are
probably going to pirate the game anyway, right? MARTINA: It's not
money you are losing. It's kind of like
these people maybe can have-- don't have the
money to spend it on your game. So it's better if you get
good advertising out of it. So mouth to mouth,
I think it's still the biggest way to make your game successful. ALEX: Yeah, it could also mean that maybe Steam's
auto pricing measures weren't appropriate for
a certain region, and maybe a certain
region needs it to be just a little bit cheaper. So if you look at your data,
you might find that, I'll just drop
my price in this region and then will likely just
stop pirating your game and just buy it because it's
more about what I can afford, what I can put aside now,
maybe even a discount every now and
then at an appropriate time can help as well. MARTINA: That's really good. Especially in Latin America,
we always have this kind of
strategies to have a better pricing because it's
so expensive for us. And at the same time, you always
have additional taxes and stuff like that. So I think this is the best. SAMUEL: You can always ask, hey, why are you pirating my game? And they'll probably tell you. The thing is, again,
it's humans, like anyone else. ANDREAS: I really think it
is a question how much effort you want to put into it. And I'm pretty
sure you don't want to fight the thousands
of people who are really skilled in
breaking your game anyhow. So especially an
indie developer. I think that's not
where you want to waste your time with this. Make a cool game, and then
be happy if it's pirated a lot. And then the next game
maybe runs better or whatever. But I think to go
on that battlefield, you will die several
times even before you get only one foot forward. SAMUEL: And yeah,
you get a lot of negative press from using anti-piracy stuff
because some people get real mad about that. Yeah. ANDREAS: And
it's really interesting. I play a lot of old games
and try to get them work. And I have a big library
of pretty old games here. And even now I
tend to buy it on GOG because it is so
easy and convenient and I don't have to do anything. So if you make it accessible
enough and easy enough to buy, and if the price
fits for the country, et cetera,
then that lowers your piracy more. And what I really--
this is really interesting because the games
from around 2000, that released around 2000
that had all the [INAUDIBLE] and all the-- they
were a big initiative on a lot of bigger companies who
were putting protections on them, you can't play them nowadays
anymore because Windows 10, for example,
is seeing some of them, like [INAUDIBLE] as a security issue. So you cannot play
those games anymore. And I think it didn't
protect them from pirating. So it's just awful. So I wouldn't go there
and fight that fight. MARTINA: Well, in Latin America we used to have this
problem where every time we had to wait for the
release of a game, the time difference between
the official launch and the launch
in a Latin country was so long, it was ridiculous,
that people would just pirate it and start playing. A lot of Latinos
we speak English because we've been playing
games from other regions that weren't localized in Latin Spanish. So it was kind of crazy
that we have this, not stores, but, I don't know,
people in parks selling these copies,
illegal copies of games, but then when the
digit distribution came, it was so much easier
then instead of taking a bus, going to a park, trying to find
the game you want, bringing it home and see if it works or not,
just downloading a version at home,
I don't know, it made it just easier. And that helped so much
to fight piracy in our region. And the same thing, we got
games localized in our own language with a special price from
our special region launched at the same time
as everybody else. So we don't need to pirate it. We now can access it
as everybody else does. VICTOR: On that topic,
next question comes from blaaa blooo, who's asking,
is getting a lawyer that important, in indie game dev? And I love all the details,
but let's try to keep the answers to
a sentence or two most. SAMUEL: Yes, get a lawyer, get someone who can
read legal contracts and explain them to you. Make sure that--
if nothing else, to make sure that all
the content in your game you actually own and are legally
allowed to release because you can get DMCA'd for music you used,
you could find out they used marketplace assets that weren't necessarily allowed
to be released and modified. And there's all kinds
of things you could get into. Get a lawyer to
review all that stuff. It's incredibly important. And you don't want-- ALEX: And a
lawyer for contracts. SAMUEL: Yes. ALEX: A lawyer
for contracts as well. I know a lot of indie
devs who they jump in and they just do a
handshake agreement, but officially,
a handshake agreement doesn't mean that the rights
of assets get transferred to you. It still is in their hands. [INTERPOSING VOICES] MARTINA: Sorry, Alex. ALEX: Yeah,
so having a contract that seals the deal that says,
hey, the rights of this asset is going to be transferred
into this company's hands of the game is super important. Especially,
I've seen companies have disputes in the middle of a game right
because, you're using my asset, and it's used in a
way I don't like it, and because they had
a handshake agreement, it's had to be removed. So just be aware of that. VICTOR: Next topic-- MARTINA: Sorry. ALEX: Go ahead, Martina,
I'll let you answer this one. MARTINA: That you need someone that is specialized
also in games and understand the game
development process. For me, the best lawyer we
ever got was a Russian guy, and he kind of told us,
well, agreements are meant to be broken. So it's kind of like, well,
you need someone that understands the process. So when something
doesn't go as planned, because it's going to happen. And it's not always bad,
sometimes it's like, you, I don't know,
find a new mechanic that makes your game amazing. And you want to pursue that,
well, how are you going
to put that in writing and reorganize your
working skill or whatever? So that's my only-- ANDREAS: Before you
jump in with the next question, there's one question
I saw just popping up, and I think that's
something I completely get. As an indie dev, you might
not have the money for a lawyer that you're thinking. That's true. But on the other hand, you might
sign something you are bind to, and if you don't understand
what you're signing there, that will cost you much more. And I can tell you,
in my region at least, I know some lawyers
who are really indie friendly, and say like,
I will check with you the contract. And if it comes to a big deal,
et cetera, et cetera, we will find a way
that you get me paid. So there are really
nice people around, not all lawyers are shit. Shit. So now I have to
go Antarctia as well. It's really hot here,
so I'm happy to go to the-- no, seriously, the meetups
and build your network locally because you will find
an indie who's telling you, we worked with this guy,
he's really nice, and helpful even if you don't
have the money. SAMUEL: Lawyer, accountant, key. And also,
if you're hiring people, have a lawyer to review and
set up your employment contracts so when you hire people,
the ownership rights and everything is sorted out. The standards work,
all that, otherwise it can get real messy. VICTOR: On that note, there are also the indie equivalent of
lawyers as well as accountants. It might actually be
worth reaching out in similar
communities with folks that are in the same path,
or part of your career as you are in game development,
they might be in their
respective careers. MARTINA: And you can
always talk to older indies that we've been
fucked up so many times that we can tell you,
well, this is a program. ANDREAS: Ah! Swear jar! MARTINA: Sorry, Victor. Pardon. VICTOR: OK,
I'm just going to bleep, bloop. Next question comes from-- actually, there have been
a few questions in regards to what does an evangelist do,
and then there's a follow-up one that 3Dev asked, which is, do you have to have
a custom license to get help from Epic with an indie game? So if you could please
elaborate a little bit about the evangelist
role and what folks can do to get
in touch with you and what you can do for them. MARTINA: Alex,
would you like to take that one? ALEX: Yeah,
so the main role of evangelism is to, I guess, champion the
community, kind of turn people into basically the
champions of our community, but also show off the
engine and basically build-- we're basically like glorified
community managers, but with support
and conferencing and all that stuff. So we go out,
we do talks at conferences, or we do it now virtually,
and we chat to teams. So we might even do a little
bit of solution architecting. Depending on the
evangelists in your region, you might be doing
something a little bit different. I know for Australia
and New Zealand, we've got a little bit more of
a building region for game dev because, unfortunately,
when the global financial crisis happened, it went all under. So now we've got a lot more indies,
not as many AAA teams. So my role might be a little bit
different to Andreas', however, I still do the whole thing of,
hey, let's talk at talks, let's go to meetups, let's
help out little indie teams. So I regularly have Twitter
DMs and emails come in saying, hey, Alex,
I've got a problem with the engine, do you mind basically
checking this up? And we're happy to do that. Within reason. If you keep on hammering us,
we'll probably just be like,
give us maybe a couple of days and we'll get back to you. But we're here to basically
help people make cool-- and I won't do the swear word. Andreas,
you can fill that one in for me. But yeah, we're basically
here to just help out. SAMUEL: With a friendly
face for developers at Epic. And it's what I said, it's like,
my DMs are open on Twitter. You've got a problem, hit me up. It says it right in my profile,
please do,
because that's why we're here. MARTINA: Well, in my case, I'm more like a social person,
let's say. So I've been like a
professional stocker in my career for the last 15 years. So it's kind of like I
know a lot of people, and my main job
is kind of like being the first point of
contact between you and all of the
teams inside of Epic. So I maybe won't
be able to assist you on a technical issue,
but I know who to point you to. If you need to talk with the
animation, or the architecture team, or someone from games,
or VR, or even, I don't know, I get to talk a lot with
people from education. And even inside of our education
team we have different teams. We have people that are
working with authorized instructors or with training centers
or with universities and academic partners. So my work it's to be a human-- I don't know,
like a networking person. Someone that will help
you surf our big community. I don't know. It's kind of like
something I've been doing as a volunteer in
the community for so long. I can't believe now I'm
getting paid to do this. This is amazing. So it's kind of like I
am not making games, but I am helping others
make their own game. And, of course,
make them within Real, our job is to turn
you to the dark side. We are here to preach-- how was the joke going, Alex? [INTERPOSING VOICES] ALEX: Spreading the world-- the Lord and Savior Tim Sweeney. MARTINA: We sounds like a cult, but it's kind of like
also what we do. ALEX: And one thing is as we come from mostly games backgrounds,
some of us actually come from
virtual production backgrounds, enterprise, stuff like that. So we cover a wide gamut. And, for example,
Sam and I, we do a lot of VR stuff and programming. Andi's done a lot of everything. I know Chris Murphy,
you've probably seen, is my counterpart in Australia,
he does a lot of tech art. We all have complementary roles. ANDREAS: Yes,
so basically we are responsible for the outreach. So we want to get the word
out and show how easy it is to use the engine. And we do that
in two directions. So internally,
we are a little bit like-- for example,
making a very small game right now and reporting back to
the engineers and saying, how is the experience there? Or when we talk
with indie developers, we get a lot of insight
what their stuff is. Sometimes we even
have bigger studios. When we used to travel,
we visited regions and went to meetups,
but also meeting different users of the engine from a game stuff,
but enterprise stuff as well, and then trying to get the
information a little bit back. So it's a two-side thing. And nowadays we have a
lot with the feature videos and making cool
projects and show how stuff is done and trying
to distribute this information and help people getting
into it and making cool stuff. That's a cool thing,
Epic is only succeeding if you
are succeeding. So that's the reason why
I love our business model. So our job is to make
cool stuff coming out. So this is really-- this is the part I
love most in this job. So we are trying to be
helpful because if you release something, then we just don't-- it's not about selling a
license or something like that. It's about-- it's
not like here is-- you pay for the engine
and then you do something and we forget about it. It's about like, hey,
really, really cool stuff needs to come out and
then everybody is happy and the ecosystem is growing. MARTINA: And also it's kind of like making you
meet the others. We have this community that
is so generous and so open. We have the Discord
channels and all these places where people actually meet
up and share their experience and what they're doing. So it's actually amazing
when you tell them, well, have you checked
that guy's game, or what they are trying to
use the engine for, something we've never used it before? So it's kind of amazing
that we are also making these matches with people
that are maybe from completely different industries
and have completely different experiences
in their lives so they can create
something completely new. SAMUEL: It's really fun to
visit the internal evangelist chat in a regular basis
because there's always something cool there,
something popped up on Twitter, or someone did
something internal that we're going to put out. But it's sort of-- yeah,
we're the nexus of interesting stuff within the community trying
to manage it both ways. ALEX: Yeah,
one thing is for sure, we see a lot of cool stuff and
a lot of interesting techniques and solutions to things. So we have a wealth of
knowledge for some things that you may not have
realized are in the engine. For example,
I just showed off before the stream, a little tool menu,
tool bar extension that I'll post up on
Twitter next week. And yeah, stuff like that,
it's really cool to be able to just go, hey,
I'm just jumping in the engine and doing what I
love and showing it off. And most of this potentially
comes from meet-up backgrounds as well. So I used to be the organizer
of the Brisbane meet-up in Australia here. And yeah, I think the same
was with Ari [INAUDIBLE] and a couple of other people. VICTOR: To round that off,
I just wanted to say that your
first message to one of us should not be if you're
allowed to ask a question, you should ask the
question and then we might be able to answer. I think the most frequent
question I receive is can I ask a question. And it can be tiring and
sometimes a little difficult to just respond yes and sort
of initiate the conversation. If we're unable to answer,
we won't, or we will try to, and so just ask
the question right off the bat. That's the best way
to get our attention, and also the
possibility for us to help. ANDREAS: And also,
I apologize if not all questions get always answered. Because I can tell you,
since two and a half years I'm doing this now, it is just not
possible to get back. I sometimes feel
really bad about it because then I forgot that
someone wrote me on Twitter DM, I forgot. That happens. So don't feel bad if it
doesn't come back directly. Try again. Nobody of us is pissed if
you try two or three times. That's fine. VICTOR: I'll say try again,
to a certain extent. Next question. I want to dig into a
little bit more specifics when it comes to marketing
and publishing and uploading your games and such. Kenneth Verhoeven asked, how can you do marketing if
you have literally zero budget? I'm making a game with
my dad in my free time. ANDREAS: I love that already. This is already a pretty cool story,
to be honest. There are not so
many people out there who can say I do a
game with my dad. That is already a good
marketing pitch, to be honest. MARTINA: You're already marketing it,
actually. You're pitching it to us. ANDREAS: That's already
marketing with no budget because now I'm intrigued. Now I would like to know what
kind of game you are doing. So this is already pretty
cool because it's unusual. It's nothing you see often. And that-- so you
want to intrigue-- SAMUEL: As a story,
you get 2,000 words out of it. ALEX: Yeah, I'll say this, locally, there was a team
that had a whole family and that was their
whole selling point, is hey, we're a family of
game developers and we're making this cool game,
support us. [INTERPOSING VOICES] ANDREAS: But
there's some basic stuff I think you can do-- is you can post regularly. Not like one day you post
solid enough things and then one month you don't. You have to understand
a little bit the algorithms of all this social media
stuff that's out there. So you have to understand
a little bit of the platform. So you get better traction,
for example, if you don't make
external links. It's better to post on Twitter,
and you can find this kind of information. So you can sit down
and there are people who have blog posts about that. So you can figure that out
and then you make a plan for it. I do each-- screenshot Saturday,
it's really good to get some visibility. So there's a lot of those stuff
you can make a list of those. You can figure out what
to do and then have a plan, like each Friday evening,
9:00 PM, something like that, we post something
with a little update what we do. And it takes time to grow it,
but have consistency is pretty, pretty important. I always forget it
was my own account. I forget to post and then
I'm really disappointed. By the next posting,
I think, this is a great one, but I forgot to
post for four days. So in the algorithm,
I'm not shown anymore. So you have to learn a
little bit about the platforms, and you don't
need money for that. And then you have
to a little bit of a plan. And then you think
about what kind of content you want to do because
it's also pretty hard to have consistent content
and not throwing everything you have out there. You have to have some
surprises at the end. So it's like with
the movie trailers you watch and you see, all
the fun jokes were on the trailer, so the movie is not fun anymore. So you also want to avoid that. So you need to have
a little bit of a strategy. MARTINA: I have two
examples that I really like. There is this team that
built their community starting to market the
development community. So instead of going to build a
player, user-based community, they started to share their
experience on how they were developing their game. So it was the
community around them, the people from the
actual gaming industry that was kind of intrigued on
how they solved that problem, or how they are
doing this or that. So you can actually start
also sharing your experience with your own game. Make a video of your dad
making the game and then that's around the world could
actually get into gaming because of that. I don't know,
I think it's something sometimes we don't think about. And then the
other thing is there are many other teams,
other industries with different backgrounds
that could actually be interested in
participating as partners, getting something out of this. We have this experience with
the Adventures of [INAUDIBLE] and Pizza Boy. We were making a game
based on a comic book published by Dark Horse Comics,
and this animation studio, they wanted to-- they were starting
out and they wanted to have their own
portfolio project, something to show
to potential clients. So they actually
invested their own time and they didn't charge anything
to make a very short VFX film. So this comic book,
this specific comic book took place in Lisbon, Portugal. And the short film was giant
spiders invading Portugal and crawling through this
bridge that is famous in Lisbon. And the funny thing was that
when we published the video, nobody saw it when we
expected it to be seen. But since one of the people
that participated in this film, in this short film, was the face
of the Portuguese CNN back-- how can I explain this? Something that wasn't supposed
to be a part of our strategy turned out to be amazing
because this guy that was an actual serious journalist
allowed us to use his image to make the fake coverage
of this invasion of spiders. So, I don't know,
the Portuguese Association of the Free Press or something
went to every single media in Portugal to
complain about how we were using his face
for a stupid short film for a comic book in a
video game promotion. And we got 2 million
views in an hour because of all of these
people complaining about this specific-- I don't know if I
made any sense. Victor's face is
kind of worrying me. VICTOR: I was making
a face on 2 million. MARTINA: Yes, in a morning. So it's crazy how
things work out. Maybe they're talking
good things about you, or saying bad things,
it's important if they're talking about you. VICTOR: Preferably good things,
I should say, is better than bad things,
but there is such a thing as bad press. This leads into a little
bit from a question from-- let's see here,
there have been so many now. I want to make sure I get the
right name of who asked them. Shipwreck studios asked--
and let's do a short answer here. Might even answer this
myself-- as a new indie preparing a demo, what's the best way
to grow an audience, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Twitch? And my answer to this
question is as many as you can. There are services that allow
you to post to several sites at once. Some of them might cost
you a little bit of money, but that amount of
money to pay someone, or just your own time of
being enrolled and actually managing all of
that each separately on each platform,
that can be a lot more expensive. But how about--
one of you can fill in a little bit about sort
of suggestions in terms of, how can you grow your audience? SAMUEL: Depends on the game,
too. Not every game lends itself
necessarily to a Twitch stream, or to YouTubing. One of the problems we
had doing VR is obviously VR is experiential,
and even a trailer doesn't really get it across. So a lot of stuff. We were less
leaning into that. We did trailers and
YouTube videos and some stuff with Epic,
but a lot of what we did was boots on the
ground marketing, where we were at places going,
here, play this, and using that to
drive word of mouth. And it was one of
those ones where you have to kind of
pick which battle you need to fight for your game. And then later we
found a lot of people did end up streaming
the game on Twitch, but that was post-launch
and was really useful for long tail, but prelaunch, yeah,
we weren't quite there yet. VICTOR: Thanks, Sam. BobsNotYourUncle asked,
at what point should you set up a store page,
for example, on Steam? ANDREAS: I take that one. Early. Early, early, early,
early, early, early, as early as you can,
even if it's a dummy one, because you don't have to
publish it to learn what you need to do because it's
much more than you expect you have to do. And that's true
for all the stores. And they need a special format,
et cetera, et cetera. And you will need
several iterations to make your artwork
looking nice on all the different views it has. So the recommendation is,
in the moment you have this page, just make something. So it's the same with the game. Just make something, throw it in,
get feedback internally, get feedback from others,
and iterate on it as you do with the game. VICTOR: Alex,
I think you had another good-- ALEX: Yeah,
there is a little bit of a caveat. And the only caveat is if you
already have a store page up, you potentially ruin any
chances of an exclusivity deal. So there is also
that side of things. But if you're already
talking about exclusivity, you probably are already
talking about putting a store up somewhere else,
or you should already be thinking about
these things first up. ANDREAS: Only to clarify, I'm talking about not
that you publish it, I'm just talking about
on the back end, bringing everything in,
because you can review it and show that even to others. But on the other side,
that's true. VICTOR: Yeah, the store page shows a little bit
of professionalism of having that there. It's a lot better than one or two
paragraphs and a locked web page,
or some of the other references that I've heard you
talk about for tonight. It can look really
nice and professional. This is what the game will
look like when you actually publish it. Good tips right there. Stark_avs asked,
how fleshed out should a prototype be for me to start approaching
finance options and marketing for the game? SAMUEL: As a former
professional rapid prototyper, it really-- again, it's a broad question,
but you should be selling the
dream of your game, and you should be selling
the vision of your game. You want to show up your
core feature, the thing that makes you interesting and cool. It doesn't have to
look exactly right. We sold Adrift off a
build in a totally different engine that looked
completely different, but the core concept
was the same. The core principles that
were driving the game were there and carried across. So that's what you need to
focus on for your prototype. In three minutes,
sell me your experience, sell me your vision. And I can accept that you
don't have great animation, or you don't have any
VFX yet or whatever, as long as you sell me
your core burning vision that you want me
to be interested in. VICTOR: Thank you. Let's move on. George Rivara asked,
what percentage of budget should be for marketing? That's if you have a budget. MARTINA: I don't
know if this is true, but there is a myth that
says that Will Smith, or I don't know, Jim Carrey wouldn't
sign on a movie that didn't have half of the budget
only assigned to marketing. So I don't know
for that question. ANDREAS: And that's
probably true for big games as well. So especially the
big ones there you can compare marketing
budget with that. Which means, for an indie dev,
if you have no money to make the game,
you have no money to make marketing,
which is a perfect fit. SAMUEL: It's amazing. You can have $500,000
worth of marketing, just enough to
make a small game, and still no one
knows that you exist. It's how you deploy the
marketing more than anything else. ALEX: And one thing as
well is what a lot of people don't realize is that some
platform holders [INAUDIBLE] exclusivity with
game stores before. I'm not talking just
about exclusivity like you can only
deploy that game store. I'm talking about
marketing exclusivity as well. So some platform
holders actually say, if you only market
your game on our platform, we will give you a bunch
of marketing money. So that's always an
avenue for indie devs. That's something you
might be able to broach to your platform holder
if you're nice enough. ANDREAS: But I mean, there's so many different routes of-- I don't know. I have a friend,
they made a game with two people. There was absolutely no money. They get a little bit of
government funding. We are pretty happy in
Germany that we have states and even National-wide
you can get a little bit of a funding for your games. They made it with that. And then they made a quirky
game with a zombie in Unreal Engine with only two people. They released it. PewDiePie played it,
and that's the story. Now they are six people studio
and they're doing pretty well. They released [AUDIO
OUT] and it was-- they are actually--
it's Sluggerfly, so they are even in the-- they have an inspirational video
for Monday in the Indie Week. This is pretty nice. There's Omno, Jonas Manke,
he's an animator. He learned Unreal
Engine by himself. And then he had
a small prototype. And then he showed it
around and people told him, you have to do
something with that. And then he made a Kickstarter,
which was a little bit
easier when he did it, that was pretty successful. Then he found some marketing
people helping him with that and now he's on his game
in the last [INAUDIBLE]. VICTOR: Crow asked
a good question here, what strategy would
you recommend to any devs for quality
assurance testing? MARTINA: Start early. ANDREAS: That's a good one. MARTINA: I don't
know how address that. But it's kind of like--
sometimes I feel people rather make a huge game
because it has a lot of content and they think that that is what
is going to make it successful, that you have 1,000 characters,
or I don't know, millions of missions
and worlds to discover. And the truth is
that it doesn't matter if you've created all that
content if the game is not polished enough for
people to get there. So maybe if you can scope down,
try to do something that it's better. I don't know how to say it. So if you can spare some
time yourself to do QA, or to work with
somebody else if you don't have the
money or the budget to hire a professional one. But try to do that. So you won't find ugly surprises
when you release the game. ALEX: There's also automation. So a big thing is there's a big
misconception with automation that, I'm going to have to set
it up and keep it maintained. But you're trading the
time off to implement automation and testing,
or automated testing, I should say,
in your game to save time, not having to look for bugs later on. So you catch them early,
you catch them often, you basically spread
out the work of time. So automation testing,
especially in UE at the moment, there's some
good tools in there, like gauntlet and the
automation framework. Definitely check them out
because just spending a day or two just getting them set
up and then each time you implement a new feature
and build a map that just tests that feature, or even if you're
making a multiplayer game, you can record your
multiplayer games, replay them,
and test the replay. So if you know that a
certain way you play a game is going to crash that replay,
you can just play the replay, and if it does not crash, sweet. That's your smoke test done. It's super powerful. Yeah. SAMUEL: I would also lean
into things like early access. I mean, obviously not
as the first step for QA, but especially if you're
doing a game like, a good example is Hades. Hades is winning all these
Game of Year Awards. Hades spent a lot of time in
early access refining its game model. And these are experienced
devs who'd come from AAA and made a bunch of indie games. And they still went, OK,
we need to find out everything-- not only are we doing
a gameplay model that needs a bunch of tuning,
but this means that when you
actually ship and you come out like a Nintendo Switch,
you are very polished, you're very clean
because you will get more QA in one day
of an audience playing your game than you
will in six months of QA team playing your game,
which is, unfortunately, not the ideal order of events,
but it tends to be what happens. ALEX: And setting up
a crash reporting service helps as well in that regard. Because Fortnite
is a good example of that, is millions of people
play that game and the engine is pretty damn stable at
runtime for that reason, it's because you've got millions
of people basically putting it through its paces on
thousands of different devices. And you can't do
that in an indie studio. You can only do that when you
get the masses jumping onto it. So yeah. VICTOR: It's easier to
find a large player base than it is to find the
money to fund a large QA portion for your game. Next question comes from DuderSeb.
And this one he says,
a question primarily for Martina, when do you think it's
a good time in a project to incorporate? MARTINA: Sorry,
to incorporate what? VICTOR: To incorporate
as a company, to go from I'm just making
a game to now we're an actual company. MARTINA: So this is kind
of tricky because sometimes incorporating means
that you are going to start to work as a company. There are a lot of-- it's not business-related,
but it's kind of like taxing
and all these matters that you have to do to
start working as a company. So sometimes you
need to evaluate, what is it that you are doing? Is it you are planning
to hire a lot of people? Do you need to
incorporate because you want to bring people to
work in an office, for example? So you will have to hire
insurance and stuff like that. Are you planning to develop
something solo and you want to publish it on your own? Do you really need
to start paying taxes as if you were a big company? I think that when we started
with the studio in 2009, I think it was,
we made that mistake. We went corporate too fast. I don't know how to sell it. So it was kind of crazy that we
needed to make presentations every month and we needed to
have meetings with accountants. And we weren't even hiring anyone,
we weren't making any money. So it was kind of
like a lot of money down the drain and a
lot of time because we needed to actually
spend time to maintain that part of the company. So something that
I will also advise is that if you
really think that you need to start
working in this way, as a company, as a corporation,
try to find someone in your team or a partner
that loves to handle that, because it has nothing
to do with games, but at the same time,
without it, it's not going to exist,
the games part without it. So it's kind of like you need
someone that is constantly managing those things. I don't know if-- ANDREAS: I want to
add something important I forgot at the beginning. We have to go one step back
and watch on the whole picture right now. It is easier to make games,
which is cool, so you have to decide
if there's something you want to live on,
because it could be also really, really nice hobby. And saying making
games is always equal to I have to do at least
indie and sell it. It's not true. I know people who
have a full-time job, completely something different. So they do a lot of game gyms,
they participate-- they releasing stuff on itch.io,
and they're pretty happy with that. And they don't-- and maybe I
know one who's now thinking, because he has one prototype
that's nice, thinking of, OK, can I somehow free my time
so I can spend more time on that and not starving? So he's trying to
make a mix and talking with his current employee,
and saying, can I maybe reduce the hours? So I could live with
a little bit less money and then spend time on that. So I think it is important
to understand what I love right now it's an art form. You can express
yourself via games now, which you couldn't 10 years ago,
which is awesome, but at the same time,
you have to find out for yourself is this
something you want to have, all this pressure,
and all this money stuff involved in something you maybe
just enjoy as a expressive art. SAMUEL: Making games is hard. VICTOR: I think we
all can agree to that. Yes, making games is hard. So just a little bit. It's fairly similar to the
music industry as well where, how many people
play music in the world? A good portion of them. Now, it so happens
that picking up a guitar is a little bit more accessible
than trying to build a game. But it's slowly
getting to the point where you can even
build interactive experience on your cell phone. And a cell phone
is a little bit easier to get than a high-end dev
machine capable of ray tracing and all of the other
fancy features. So it is getting a little
bit more democratizing. And what that means
is that everyone won't be able to survive
or have a comfortable life with the income that they
can make from their products, but that doesn't mean
that it's not something that you shouldn't pursue. There's always
compromises in life. And sometimes you might
just want to tinker with the stuff that you're excited about. And like Andreas said,
potentially you might find that little golden
nugget that you didn't even think about,
but that shouldn't stop anyone from trying to
pursue their dreams and go all in if that's
what you want to do. ANDREAS: No, it's exactly what I'm saying, go all in,
but just figure out in which extent you want to do it. Not that you end up with a
lot of pressure and that part you actually didn't like. VICTOR: Yeah,
it's important to still have fun, especially in our industry. Otherwise,
it can get rather difficult. We're about at the end
of time of the stream, but I would like to ask you
one question-- this was actually the first question that came in,
but I wanted to leave it for the end. Kellers in Colorado asked,
if you could change something about your journey,
what would you do differently? SAMUEL: Wow. VICTOR: And that's the stream,
folks. We'll see you all next week. ANDREAS: Thanks,
Joey Prink, for the raid. That's really-- hello
back to Austria from here. That's really nice. Nothing. ALEX: I think-- ANDREAS: I wouldn't
change anything. The good and bad stuff are good. ALEX: Yeah, for the most part, I'm here because of all of
the mistakes and the learnings that I've made so far. However,
in telling myself if I told myself at 20 when I started on
this endeavor, basically, don't burn out. If you feel tired and you're
buggered and you-- sorry, Australian slang slipping in. If you're tired and
you're just exhausted, take a break, because usually
when your body's telling you that, you need to. Otherwise,
the worst thing you can do is burn out and scrap a project. Get it done. MARTINA: And maybe
lose this sense of fear. What I believe
it's sometimes I-- it took me too long
to make a mistake. I keep pushing through
something that was meant to die, or something. So I think I learned
more every time I went through
the full cycle faster. So the faster
kind of philosophy. ANDREAS: Now I have one. I will never, ever write a
500-page game design document ever, ever again. SAMUEL: High five right back. Yeah, I think, honestly,
the only things I regret are the crunch. Over the years I've done
my fair share of crunch. I [INAUDIBLE] the EA Studio
when that was happening, and that left me
with some damage that I had to recover from. And no matter
how cool your job is, it's not worth putting yourself
through the ringer physically because then you're not
doing the quality of work that you wanted to
do in the first place. You're grinding out a thing. And you lose your love
for game development. And it's the only thing
that it's the art form that I love the most. So losing touch with it
for a while because of that was something
I really regretted, and it took a while
to find my way back. But otherwise, yeah,
that's why I'm here. I love doing this thing. ALEX: I'm definitely
feeling like-- what's the word? Not emotional,
the kind of like where you feel-- I had it in my mind. I lost it. It's early in the morning. I'm so sorry. I'll show you the sunrise after. VICTOR: I have a
couple of [INAUDIBLE]. I think Martina touched
on something important. Fail fast, fail quickly,
learn from your mistakes and then continue. Knowing when to stop, knowing-- or, at least,
don't be afraid to try again. It's so much better that you
fail quickly and you decide, you know what? That's not going to work out. Cut it. On that note,
during one of the earlier topics, something I've
heard a lot is that a lot of first-time developers,
or people who are getting into
game development, and they start off
on the A project that they're planning to ship. That project is the whole world. You can't even see
past your first project. And if this is
something that you would like to continue to
do for the rest of your life, you're probably
going to go on to ship quite a couple of things. I know so many people that
shipped 10, 15, 20 games, actually shipped them, published
them, charged money or release it for free, before anyone ever
knew about any of their games. And do that. Don't be afraid to even ship-- I think Andreas also mentioned
that publish it on itch.io, get feedback, see if you have-- find some players,
maybe even a small community that will be excited to help
you test your game, which can be really difficult.
And you can do that with a game [? jam ?] prototype. It's possible as long as you
reach out and talk to folks. This has been a pleasure. I've seen a lot of good
commentary from chat as well. I'm really happy we were
all able to get together to talk about this topic. If anyone out there
is interested and have more questions or even are close
to releasing one of your games and you're not really
sure what that entails, there are some official
steps to take as well when you're using Unreal Engine. There are very few. It mostly involves one form,
but it's important that you do fill out that form. If you have these questions,
you can reach out to the evangelists. There's a web page
where everyone can read a little bit
more about you all and also find the appropriate
one for the region that is in the indies.unrealengine.com. Is that correct? MARTINA: Yes, we shared it also in the Indie Week blog post. So if you go to
the inspiring stories at the bottom of the post,
you will find a link that will show you everybody. You can contact
us through LinkedIn, or Twitter, or Facebook,
Instagram, I don't know. We are there. So just reach out. VICTOR: All the places. Awesome. As a typical,
I will end the stream with a little bit of
information for those of you who have been watching
from the beginning. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to
have you stick around. If you have any
follow up questions, I do want to point
out that we announce all of our live streams on
forum.unrealengine.com in the events channel. You can also see a schedule of
upcoming streams in the Twitch About page,
but there is usually more information and more up-to-date information
on the forums, a good place to go. If you are enjoying some
of our more technical content that we normally
cover on this stream, we do transcribe all
of our live streams. So what that means,
usually within a week of us going offline, you can actually
download the entire transcript or just turn on
captions on YouTube. I should also go
ahead and mention that something that we tried
out last week for the first time and I forgot to add it in the
forum announcement post is that there is now
a add-on for Chrome. Let's see if Skye
can go ahead and get us the link for this. But there's actually
an add-on in Chrome that allow you to
live-subtitle in real-time, which can help a lot. I'm a non-native
English speaker. And I've lived most of
my life with captions on. And I think it has taught me a lot,
especially when it comes to technical terms,
which can be a little bit difficult sometimes
to know what was said. So go ahead and
Control F that transcript if there's a term
you were looking for or when we were talking
about anything in particular. There are no physical
meetups going on in the world right now,
but communities.unrealengine.com is the place to go to
find meet-up groups local to your area. There are some of
them that are actually throwing virtual
events right now, various Discords
around the world, and it's a good
place to find people that are interested
in developing games or other various
experiences with Unreal Engine. Go ahead and check that out. In terms of marketing
and publishing your game, we do have a countdown
video at the beginning of all of our live streams. This is 30 minutes
of development that you speed up to 5 minutes. You send that to us
together separately with your logo and
information about your game, and you might become
one of the countdowns that we air on the
stream every week. Same goes for our
community spotlights. We spotlight three every week
on our news and community spotlight segment as well as
in the Epic Games Launcher. These are projects
that we either find on Twitter,
Facebook, our forums. There are many good
places where you can post, even work in progress,
and we'd love to see this. And so go ahead and do that. Shout out to unrealslackers.org
as well if you're looking for the largest
unofficial Unreal Engine community out there. It's a great place for
real-time communication. If you stream on Twitch-- MARTINA: We have
the unofficial Spanish also Discord. So for people talking in Español, let me tell you. Send me a
message and I can send you the Unreal Engine’s unofficial
Discord link in Spanish. That's it. VICTOR: Gracias. If you stream on Twitch,
make sure that you use the Unreal
Engine tag as well as the game development tag. That's the easiest way for us
to filter and find your content. And make sure you
follow us on social media. That is where we
do all of our updates in regards to news
for the engine, but also other exciting news,
and the streams. We tweet every Thursday
morning East Coast time in regards to what topic we're
going to cover today. If you're not too keen
on following the forums and you prefer Twitter,
we talk about that as well. Next week on Inside Unreal,
we have two of the developers
from Torn Banner. They're coming on to talk about
making massive medieval maps with Chivalry 2. If you don't know the
studio Torn Banner. ANDREAS: Nice. VICTOR: They're developing Chi-- they developed Chivalry,
and they are coming now to talk about Chivalry 2,
which I'm really excited about. I've talked to them,
I think, since E3 2019 was when we first saw a little
bit of a glimpse of the game. So they'll be on the
stream next week. I'm super excited about that. But until then,
I want to thank you all once again for coming on the stream. Thanks, chat,
for hanging out today. If you missed a
part of the stream, you can always
watch them on demand on both YouTube and
Twitch perpetually afterwards. I know we've gone ahead
and posted those links. You can also find an
informed announcement post. And with that,
I've talked a little bit, I want you all to get a
moment to say anything you would like to leave
chat with today before we go offline. ANDREAS: You
give us a word again, which you know that it takes
hours again when everybody-- VICTOR: It's OK. I tried. We're past that now anyway. ANDREAS: You gave up, right? MARTINA: It was fun, guys. Thank you so much for hosting this,
Victor and everybody that is watching. Thank you for coming. ALEX: Thank you very much. And good morning
from Australia as well. VICTOR: Good
morning from Australia. Thanks, Alex. ANDREAS: Good
night from Germany. VICTOR: Yes,
and good afternoon from East Coast. MARTINA: And Buenos Aires. You're fine, yeah. VICTOR: Thank you all so much. We'll see you again next week. Take care, everyone. Stay safe. Bye. SAMUEL: Bye.
