You don’t need to finish a game to sell it anymore. But the new era of “Early Access” is presenting new challenges to developers, and some industry veterans are inviting or discovering tools that is making their lives easier.
Developer 22Cans is best known for the strategy game Godus that puts you into the role of an all-knowing deity. You can hop on the Steam digital-distribution service right now to get Godus from the Early Access portal (you can read more about Early Access in our previous report). It isn’t finished, but you can spend money on it. This gives you access to the game as well as any future updates, which means you essentially get to follow along while 22Cans works through creating the final product. While the leadership at the developer all have a ton of experience building triple-A games, they saw Early Access (along with crowdfunding) as an opportunity to do something fresh. This set them free to try new things with Godus, but it has also forced 22Cans into working differently.
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“Most of us here come from the triple-A world,” Godus technical director Tim Rance told GamesBeat. “I was originally at Lionhead Studios, working on big titles like Fable. Obviously, we spotted — some of us, the founders of Lionhead, had seen that the industry was changing. We’d been working on triple-A games for quite some time, and we realized that the world was very much crystallizing down into a handful of triple-A titles. They had become somewhat more routine to develop.”
Like many talented developers working at major studios, Rance along with fellow 22Cans founder Peter Molyneux (who is the famous designer responsible for Fable, Populous, and Black & White), saw an opportunity to get out of that rote existence to do something that they could feel passionate about again.
The freedom of Early Access
“Now, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “Triple-A games are amazing products and all the rest of it. But they were slow to develop, and they had to follow a formula. Being honest, by that time, we were just salaried employees, and we were interested in doing something on our own again, taking advantage of this brave new world that had suddenly appeared out of the shadows quite quickly on mobile and so on.”
Rance says the team got together with the goal of bringing its experience in triple-A games to smaller, indie stuff on PC and mobile. Its first release, Curiosity, was exactly that: a curiosity that the studio developed to help it get attention. It had players working together online to tap away millions blocks on a cube like so much bubble wrap. Hidden underneath the cube was a secret that only the player who chipped away the last block would discover.
“We got a lot of people interested [with Curiosity,” said Rance. “But then of course we realized, well, we have to do a game. That’s our main love and passion, developing games. We thought, let’s try and look at our past and move the knowledge we have about development through to the mobile era. That’s when we came up with Godus, a reinvention of Populous, Peter’s first game.”
22Cans turned first to crowdfunding. The company raised more than $700,000 on Kickstarter in December 2012. In September 2013, the company released it on Steam’s Early Access page before launching a free version for iOS in August.
Doing it different
All of this is very different compared to the way Rance and Molyneux worked at studios like Lionhead. At that company, developers would work on a game for a couple of years, finish a game, and then ship it.
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Releasing a game to the public in an early state and then iterating on that required the developer to do things in new ways.
“There were many things we had to learn,” said Rance. “I suppose — a few of the things that are very different in this world — Peter loves iteration. He loves trying things out and looking at them. You can get something working and play around with it and then try something else. I would call that passive iteration. The world has gone from that to something I would call active iteration, where you don’t have the luxury of time that we have on triple-A games, where the budgets are massive and you have two or three years to get development done. The teams are smaller. You have to get something out into the marketplace much sooner. And so actually, the interesting thing is that rather than doing iteration just among the developers, you bring that iteration to the world of gamers.”
Essentially, players are along for the ride, and they get to see all of the ideas that a developer wants to try. The gamers can then provide feedback, but they can also get attached to things that maybe the developers end up not liking.
“You want them to help you with the iteration,” said Rance. “That is a much harder thing to do, development-wise. Rather than segmenting all the different stages of development, everything has to be much more streamlined. I suppose I would call it a kind of joined-up development, really, which is where you’ve got lots of different features that you’re thinking about and playing around with. You have to have support in your development tool chain, your pipeline for getting ideas and content and gameplay from the designers all the way through to the gamers.”
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The right tools for the job
22Cans has discovered some tools that makes it easier to handle the kind of development it needs to manage an Early Access release.
“The tools that we have to use have been ones that we had to choose very carefully to facilitate that whole process,” said Rance. “Perforce is a big one that helps manage keeping track of all the different versions of a file that you work on.”
Perforce works by helping multiple people keep track of different versions of a file. This means that a dozen or more people can all contribute to the same project, and Perforce will help every know what changes were made and when. Triple-A companies use the tool, but Rance said his team found out that it is invaluable when doing the kind of iteration that Early Access requires.
“The easiest way to think about it is that if you have a library, you can check out a book, work with that book, and then check it back in,” Perforce technical lead Gabe Weiss said. “Now imagine a library where you have a librarian who lets 20 people check out the same book at the same time, all writing in it, and when they check it back in the librarian manages all the different changes to the book. In broad strokes, that’s what our software does.”
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For Rance and 22Cans, having tools that handle tedious but important stuff like version management frees them up to make a great game.
“The key thing, really, is to make sure that all the tools you use join together, work seamlessly, and you get as much functionality as you can from other people, so you don’t have to build it yourself,” said Rance. “You can focus on making the game features and the fun bits, rather than figuring out, oh my God, how do I get this content to somebody?”
As for Early Access itself, Rance has a nuanced view of it, and also a bold prediction for the future of the games business.
“I think Early Access has worked reasonably well for us,” he said. “It has caused us some problems, but I think it’s a great way of getting some early monetization. I imagine games will eventually end up as a sort of service thing, like TV shows — you pay for a service and you get a selection of stuff. But right now, these models are a great way to get developers started, so long as, as I say, they’re set up with the right pipeline of tools to get the content out there and make changes quickly.”