Online Research Methods Presentation

This is my presentation showing the research I have done thus far on the MA. I'm going to run through this as I did on Thursday and then will go through the critique I got afterwards.

Hello and welcome to my online research methods presentation.

To start off this is a diagram of my research thus far. As you can see I started off from my original project proposal presentation and researching since then I have made my way though a variety of paths. Today I’m going to be talking to you about how I got from my starting position to my current position and what I have learnt so far.

After the project proposal I was lost and unsure what I wanted to do, so I spoke to Mike Powell again and he suggested that I forget about my original idea and move into what I actually want to do. So I have moved my focus from mobile development to indie development.

Next on my agenda was to look at my FMP from last year.

I started looking at how this was successful and how it wasn’t successful. Overall the project was a success because our outcome was what we had planned. However there was a few things that I have outlined that could have been better. Such as naming conventions, setting up source control and planning the roles of the team better. After looking into this I know what I need to improve on or set up before we start our next FMP.

I then decided that I should look more into indie games.

To start looking at Indie games I had to define what and indie development was. In short it’s a game created by an individual or small team and also without the financial support of a publisher.

I then started to look at indie companies or games that inspire me. I looked into Thatgamecompany and how they made Flower and Journey, they were contracted by Sony to create three games for them two of which being flower and journey. I also looked at how Toby Fox created Undertale by himself with the help of crowdfunding. I researched how the team at Campo Santo created Firewatch the first game by the company and finally how Markus Persson created a game by himself that he then sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion.

From this small bit of research I learnt that there isn’t a set number of people that work in indie companies it varies in company to company.

The development times vary.

You can make a successful company straight out of uni.

You can have a publisher but still be called an indie company.

People have different job roles in smaller companies.

One person can produce a successful game by themselves.

Buy mainly there is no set type of indie company.

So after looking at some game I felt were successful I needed to figure out how they were and how a game is considered unsuccessful.

To first understand how a game is successful we must understand what success it. From this definition we can piece together that a game is successful when it makes money, gets awards and good reviews.

All of the games I previously looked at all did these things.

So I decided to test my theory and look at some games which are considered unsuccessful. Dinner Date is a small PC game on steam with extremely bad reviews people say that it can’t even be classed as a game because its basically just a monologue. Sonic Boom only sold a total of 620,000 units along with another game which lost a major amount of money. Who could forget E.T. it is seen as one of the worst video games of all time and has been cited at contributing to the video game crash in 1983 and bankrupting Atari.

From this research I can see that there is a correlation between the two types of games I looked at. The successful games all made money, got rewards and had good reviews; whereas the other games did the opposite meaning that they were unsuccessful.

Going down the indie game route I decided to look at what jobs there were in the industry.

I started looking at jobs on LinkedIn and listed everyone's job roles down to see what companies hired. After exhausting LinkedIn I had a look online to see if I could find another indie companies; I found Iconic games, Antagonist and Ghost ship which all stated their teams on their websites.

I then took this data and separated the job roles into three categories: Art, Tech and Other.

The pie charts show how each company splits up their teams. So For example Antagonist is completely 50/50 with Art and Tech which is what myself and James was aiming for in our company.

However when it comes to Hello Games there is only a small percentage of Art and large amount of tech and other.

After correlating the data I proved again that there is no set type of indie company and that they all have a varying amount of people. There also wasn’t any correlation between how companies split up their teams; whereas I had predicted that Art and Tech would be equal and there would be a smaller percentage of other.

However this data was inaccurate due to not everyone having LinkedIn or people could have lied about their profession, so I needed to find a better way to gather this information.

From the research before I started to gather job roles that I enjoy and define them. The problem is depending on how many people are in the company or if they outsource you will be doing either a very specific job or a very board job. Seeing as it is just myself and James I will more likely be called an Art Director and himself a Technical Director.

After finding out how some companies split themselves up I needed to look at how myself and James would.

I needed some primary sources and I found a small company though James called Humble Grove. I sent them a little message on Facebook asking if they wouldn’t mind explaining to me how they split up their team.

They got back to me and said that they both work on the overall visuals of the game but one does the art and the other does the programming. This was similar to what I had in mind and was glad to hear it was working for another company.

Myself and James would split up in Art and Tech but share jobs like gameplay, level design and writing/narrative.

The next step was to find a way to get primary research so I decided to do a questionnaire.

From the few contacts I had I set up a questionnaire and sent out questions to a couple people I know that are working at indie companies. The questions were chosen as they will help me later down the line; If I need to know if it’s viable to outsource people. It also good to know peoples opinions such as how long is a game in production for these answer give you more information than just a number.

I reached out to a couple people some of which didn’t get back to me or are too busy at the moment but this is a tl;dr version of the answers I got back from the questions I sent out. I spoke to Ben Jane from penny black studios, Jay from Drop dead interactive, Mike Kelly from Automaton, Gary Lloyd from Sigtrap and an anonymous person from a small mobile company.

After reading though everyone's answers I gathered some data from the answers and crated these graphs. There's one for the number of people in the company, how long a game is in production for, Does the company outsource people, Where does the money for production come from, Does everyone work on the same project and where do people work. As you can see all of these graphs vary and no company is the same as the other.

When it comes to Automaton I decided to make another graph, I made one on who they employ; as you can see it is pretty equal in terms of tech and art and then there is a small section of other which is how I predicted it to be for most companies. This is how myself and James will most likely split up the team.

Yet again this confirms that every indie company is different, they all have varying numbers on employees, different working conditions and different views.

There is no set type of indie company.

Finally what I want to do and what I want to become.

From all the research so far I know how to split up the work between me and James.

I know that I want to be the “Ben Jane” of our company.

I want to be the Art Director in a small company that works on concepting though to animating.

I now need to work on becoming that person so working on a small and a medium project whilst honing my skills to be able to then make a game with James for our FMP.

That’s everything,

Thank you for listening is there any questions?

FEEDBACK & REFLECTION:

Overall my theory on indie company's not existing is interesting; indie company's can be any size and even have a publisher now. We feel that the name indie comes from the music industry and games commandeered that but now indie games are independent in terms of not making games the mainstream way and they are also seen as "independent thought" meaning that they are free to do what they want without a producer or publisher turning around and saying to change everything.

I need to start looking more in depth at functional skills and how myself and James with breakdown tasks between us, to make sure that what happened in our FMP last year won't happen again.

Questionnaires are a clever way of gathering information, however they have their flaws;

- Using survey monkey you can only have a certain amount of questions and answers for free

- There is a limitation when it comes to people only answering the questions you have asked

- Designing questions is difficult to make sure you get the answer that you want out of it; do you want it to be a yes or no? a broad answer? etc.

- If you only ask a small amount of people it is biased and can't be seen as completely accurate

Interviews tend to be better (instant messaging has a similar outcome).

From my research so far it's evident that there is no such thing as an indie company or a standard indie company; therefore I can do what I want as there is no 'road map' to follow.

I need to look into more depth of how to efficiently split up tasks between myself and James.

I need to define what 'Ben Jane' is.

What does an art director do?

What does an art director in a small company do?

Look at Escape Studios VFX pipeline and how they split up their pipelines to pre-production, production and post-production.

Take the pipelines from 'Ben Jane' and 'Mike Kelly' and apply this logic to the pipelines to see what is pre production, Art, tech etc.

Job titles are important to look at because I need to understand the processes that 'art directors' use and I also need to know my worth and how where I fit on a job level scale.

Bibliography: (ALL REFERENCES FOR ITEMS IN THE PRESENTATION)

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JAMIESON, A. (2016) FMP reflection and deconstruction. [Weblog] Amber Jamieson: Game Artist blog. 21st October. Available from: http://amberjamieson.wixsite.com/gameartblog/single-post/2016/10/21/FMP-reflection-and-deconstruction [Accessed 14/11/16]

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Broderick, J. (2016) Guiding Sprites town. [Online image] Available from: http://idotrigames.wixsite.com/blog/single-post/2016/05/29/Finishing-up [Accessed 14/11/16]

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THATGAMECOMPANY (2009) Flower. [Online] PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita. Tokyo: Sony Computer Entertainment

THATGAMECOMPANY (2012) Journey. [Online] PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4. Tokyo: Sony Computer Entertainment

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JAMIESON, A. (2016) Indie development research pt2. [Weblog] Amber Jamieson: Game Artist blog. 21st October. Available from: http://amberjamieson.wixsite.com/gameartblog/single-post/2016/10/21/FMP-reflection-and-deconstruction [Accessed 14/11/16]

THATGAMECOMPANY (2009) Flower. [Online] PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita. Tokyo: Sony Computer Entertainment

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CAMPO SANTO (2016) Firewatch. [Online] Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS X, PlayStation 4, Xbox One. California/Oregon: Campo Santo/Panic Inc.

WIKIPEDIA (2016) Success Kid. [Online image] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Success_Kid [Accessed 14/11/16]

WIKIPEDIA (2016, para. 2) E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (video game). [Online] Available from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.T._the_Extra-Terrestrial_(video_game) [Accessed 08/11/16]

ZAK, R. (2015, pg. 5) E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. [Online] Available from: http://whatculture.com/gaming/10-disastrous-video-games-that-lost-their-creators-millions?page=5 [Accessed 08/11/16]

STOUT GAMES (2011) Dinner Date. [Online] Microsoft Windows. Portsmouth: Stout Games

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SASS, D. (2014) Sonic boo. [Online image] Available from: www.gamespot.com/reviews/sonic-boom-rise-of-lyric-review/1900-6415956/?comment_page=2 [Accessed 08/11/16]

JAMIESON, A. (2016) Job roles within an indie company pt1. [Weblog] Amber Jamieson: Game Artist blog. 21st October. Available from: http://amberjamieson.wixsite.com/gameartblog/single-post/2016/10/28/Job-roles-within-an-indie-company-pt1 [Accessed 14/11/16]

SHAMSUDDIN, K. (2013) Evaluating Content Based Animation through Concept Art, Vol. 2. (Issue 11), pp. 819 [Online] Available from: www.academia.edu/5239068/Evaluating_Content_Based_Animation_through_Concept_Art [Accessed 09/11/16]

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CREATIVE SKILL SET (2016, para. 3) Lead Artist (Games). [Online] Available from: http://creativeskillset.org/creative_industries/games/job_roles/332_lead_artist_games [Accessed 09/11/16]

JAMIESON, A. (2016) Job roles within an indie company pt2. [Weblog] Amber Jamieson: Game Artist Blog. 28th October. Available from: http://amberjamieson.wixsite.com/gameartblog/single-post/2016/10/28/Job-roles-within-an-indie-company-pt2 [Accessed 15/11/16]

HUMBLE GROVE (2016) 29. [Online image] Available from: https://humblegrove.itch.io/29 [Accessed 09/11/16]

JAMIESON, A. (2016) How to talk to indie people. [Weblog] Amber Jamieson: Game Artist Blog. 26th October. Available from: http://amberjamieson.wixsite.com/gameartblog/single-post/2016/10/26/How-to-talk-to-Indie-people [Accessed 15/11/16]

JAMIESON, A. (2016) Indie company primary research. [Weblog] Amber Jamieson: Game Artist Blog. 9th November. Available from: http://amberjamieson.wixsite.com/gameartblog/single-post/2016/11/08/Indie-company-primary-research [Accessed 15/11/16

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Amber Jamieson

Game Artist blog

Online Research Methods Presentation

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