Less Cash Makes More Money

I went on two spending sprees this season - one hosted by Google's Android Marketplace, the other hosted by The Humble Indie Bundle. The two shopping sprees combined cost me less than twenty bucks, but out of them I acquired no less than 48 (yes, forty-eight) commercial applications. Four of them not only included source code, but previously undisclosed version control access to said code and remastered soundtracks. That's a pretty freakin' good deal.

One might think that my mad app grab put these software studios at a loss... but that appears to be far from the case. Introversion Software (a personal favorite of mine) noted that the opposite effect occurred:

As we pass 180,000 sales of the Humble Introversion Bundle, I can’t help but feel astonished. This is the biggest single sale Introversion has ever done on any platform, even beating the epic Steam promotions we run from time to time. It roughly equates to one sale every six seconds. And the best part of all - the part that makes me most happy, is that this promotion has doubled the number of people who have played our games. 180,000 is more copies than our best selling game Darwinia ever sold, and the Humble Bundle includes all four of our games, so that means twice as many people have now played each of our games than before the bundle. That’s pretty cool. As the principle game creator here at Introversion, that’s the biggest thing for me.

And let’s not mess around, the revenue is pretty good too. When it’s all divided up we’ll see about one quarter of the total revenue you see on the Humble site - and I’m sure Humble won’t mind us revealing that, because it’s obvious if you’ve look at the default sliders. That’s one quarter of a pretty big number, and that revenue will keep us going for a long while. And we’ve done it while raising over $200k for some very worthy charities.

As for those publishers who participated in Google's 10 Apps / 10 Cents / 10 Days promotion? I haven't heard of any testimony from that front, however watching the Android Market itself has been very interesting. During the 3 weeks spanning the promotion and the week immediately following I've seen more activity and application updates pushed than I've seen in the past 3 months - including apps that were not part of the promotion. It seems the promo not only featured some titles whose volume might have otherwise tapered off but it also increased interest in adjacent titles as well, enough so that publishers wanted to have updates waiting in the wings for them.

I've noticed that this kind of title distribution is gaining steam, enough so that Rock, Paper Shotgun has almost been driven insane by the sheer number of bundle announcements. This has the leading indications of being a potentially disruptive market force... as much as I might loath the cliche. This method of catering to all price points has somewhat been used by recording artists and game studios years before, but the emphasis was selling at cost and then giving premium content to the upper 10% of the fanbase who would pay for it. For some artists lowering the cost barrier wholesale can pay amazing dividends and grow a loyal user base in short order.

Love for the Indie Developers

It was interesting reading GameSetWatch's interview with Love's Eskil Steenberg. Was very cool to hear Eskil was good friends with the garage developers at Introversion. Interesting also to hear his opinions on procedurally generated content.

Eskil is developing Love entirely on his own, and using procedurally generated content to generate what he needs for something of such a vast scope was a necessity. Introversion is familiar with this same issue - you can see its effects in Darwinia.

Would be a nice thing to get back into.

Introversion's Procedural Art

The huge amount of effort required for content creation was a hot topic a couple of years ago, as many people saw the enormous cadre of artists and animators making AAA titles and realized no garage developers could hope to reach that type of scale. The fear at the time was that this would mean the end of indie development.

Of course after Peggle, Portal and Crayon Physics hit the mainstream it suddenly became apparent bigger doesn't equal better. Or more sales.

I've always loved the approach Introversion has taken with development. They're truly dedicated garage developers, spending more time trying to perfect a fractal tree than they really should. But I can respect spending an inordinate amount of time trying to wrap ones head around a concept like procedurally generated landscapes.

When I heard that Gamasutra was hosting an event with Chris Delay speaking on the topic of procedurally generated content, I definitely wanted to jump on the opportunity. While they had a fairly unrehearsed HP shrill asking the questions, Chris had some great points.

Chris emphasized that the main reason his titles have procedurally generated textures and meshes was because artistic content is just not a space he feels Introversion can compete within, since other companies have mastered that area. He saw it as neither a positive or negative thing, it's just the case for Introversion. Should artists be afraid? Chris doesn't think so. Procedural content cannot replace people, since it ultimately can't produce those unique items that make an environment distinct. While you can generate the landform that the world consists of (mountains, hills, streets, clouds, etc) it cannot add fine-grained details to the world.

You automagically gain several efficiencies with procedural content:

You don't have to re-draw or re-generate a scene if you need to modify level of detail

You end up with a large amount of content and detail that artists can't get (you can delve as deep as you want into a fractal)

If you do procedural animation, you can have adaptive animations that exist as a consequence to a number of actions

While the idea of using fractal algorithms for landscape generation or building trees, I hadn't thought much about procedural animation. Of course Spore uses it for their character builder, but introducing this as a new way of rigging meshes would again immensely help developers. Not needing an entire team of dedicated animators or texture artists would make things much more palatable.

There are tradeoffs of course, and Chris repeatedly mentioned that procedurally generated content requires a different way of thinking about memory management. Rather than loading assets off disk, you load them in memory at runtime - so you don't worry about texture compression, but you do now have to worry about LOD given to your algorithm and how much memory the resulting data structure will reside within. You can't let your procedure go willy-nilly and create too many verts.

Introversion's latest undertaking, Subversion, sounds interesting. Right now Chris describes it as more of a thought experiment, so who knows if we'll actually see it. But what he's pursuing is procedurally generating cities from 10 kilometer view all the way down to pens and desks inside a building. Not only does this employ a landscape generator for hills and mountains, but also will procedurally generate streets and buildings based on markets and traffic demand. Each procedural algorithm feeds its brothers, affecting its ultimate output. For example, more traffic makes more roads which can make bigger buildings.

One difficulty Chris found with this approach was that it was often ard to find out bad results - sometimes you would have cities being built on entirely one side of an area, with another being completely blank. Or sometimes a fire escape would open into nothingness on 30th floor. It's all a matter of finding a way to re-seed or compensate when these failures occur. Or maybe it just makes the whole concept quaint.