XALAVIER
NELSON JR.
I’mafull-time
game writer and
narrative designer,
with credits inside
and out of gaming.
C
ash payments. Exclusive development
support. Marketing features with
increased visibility. These are just a few of
the incentives that may be offered to a
developer in return for committing to a
new platform early. An ecosystem needs projects
supporting it, and devs need to ensure that they have a
substantial audience to sell
their games to.However,
when a platform is actual
hardware that takes up
space, the costs and
considerations developers
face can vary wildly.“I first got to try the Magic
Leap1 as part of a contract early in 2018, and I
immediately knew that I wanted to find a way to work
with the device,” says veteran independent developer and
consultant Ryan Evans. “[Magic Leap] lets you imbue
everyday objects and spaces around you with new
meaning and lets you interact with familiar spaces in an
all new way.” However, the cost of innovation was not
cheap. The headset alone cost him $2,295 dollars – not
including tax – and the company couldn’t ship it to his
home so Evans had to drive to San Francisco. “The
expenses so far have mostly just been money,” Evans says.
“To their credit, Magic Leap just had a grant application
process to give money and hardware
to indie developers with ideas.
Getting funding from a platform
holder goes a long way into making
early development viable. In the
meantime I’ll keep looking for
consulting work in the space to
continue to self-fund, and hopefully
as a consumer market comes into
existence I can keep making more
games for them.” While Evans will
have to buy necessary future
iterations of the hardware as well, he
believes continued consulting jobs
that use his growing knowledge of
the technology will put him in a
prime position to recoup costs and
take advantage of the Leap’s potential
growth in the consumer market in
the future.
On the other side of the cost scale, you’ll find
developers like Alistair Aitcheson, a creator who uses
custom hardware he builds himself for playful art
installations (such as a piece at the National VideogameMuseum) and interactive stage shows. “A lot of my work
is made using Arduinos, which are about £20-£30 each,”
says Aitcheson. “There’s certainly cheaper alternatives but
I’m happy to pay the extra to avoid having to faff around
with setup. Other props are found on eBay: rubber
chickens, Duplo and Morphsuits for example. There’s a
joy in creating something surprising out of really cheap
parts. People can see how it
was made and be inspired
by that.”
The developers of
System Shock-inspired
minimal first-person
adventureSpirits of Xanadu
found their project gaining
Tobii Eye Tracker
compatibility with no extra cost or effort, as the company
needed more titles under their banner. “In our case, they
used a software wrapper rather than native support so it
didn’t require any effort on our part to implement,” says
Spirits of Xanaduwriter Lee Williams. “With nothing to
lose, and intrigued by the new tech, we agreed to let them
add the support in return for placement on their website.”SWEET SPOT
While even low-cost development for new or custom
hardware can seem daunting, one element that drives
developers to tackle these challenges is fear. What
happens if a platform is the opportunity their game needs,
and they miss its golden launch period? That’s the
question the developers of subversive indie platformer
The Messengerfaced with the Nintendo Switch in early- “We never doubted that launching on Switch was a
great idea,” studio cofounder Martin Brouard said.
“However as more and more games started to come out
on Switch in the second half of 2018, it became harder to
be some kind of no-brainer purchase for players. Nintendo
did give us a lot of visibility, though, so our sales on that
platform are very good. But had we launched three to four
months earlier we probably would have struck gold in a
major way. We are still happy with the results, though.” In
the end, polishing the game, and receiving major
marketing showcases from Nintendo as well as publisher
Devolver Digital helpedThe Messengersurmount an
increasingly crowded market to some degree.
A new platform – particularly one with a physical
component – is a risk for everyone involved. However, the
more this risk is assuaged for the creative people who
make the content these platforms need, the more likely
success is for everyone in our industry’s constant pursuit
of a new horizon.
“THERE’S A JOY IN CREATING
SOMETHING SURPRISING OUT OF
REALLY CHEAP PARTS”TOO-EARLY ADOPTION
How devs decide to make games for new ecosystems. By Xalavier Nelson Jr.
Inside Dev
MAKING GAMES IS HARD