An interview with James Brown of Ancient Workshop

This week we have an interview with an ex-AAA industry programmer who did what many of us dream of doing and left Britain for New Zealand. James Brown has since gone on to form Ancient workshop games and has recently released Ancient Frog on the iPhone.

Ancient Frog touch

Phil:

You moved to New Zealand after being in the mainstream games industry in the UK. Was there any particular reason why you didnt become an indie developer in Britain first?

James:

I did try creating stuff in my spare time while holding down a job, but it was clear that for many reasons I just wasn’t going to finish anything that way. I was working at Lionhead at the time, and desperate to get out. For my whole working life, every year had seen a higher salary and more responsibilities, so I’d always sort of assumed that whatever I did next would have to be another step in that direction. And I just couldn’t face it – I was completely burned out. I knew I was at a low point, although it wasn’t until I left Lionhead that I could really see just how bad things had been.

So I basically hit the reset button. I needed a new job, it wasn’t going to be in Guildford so I also needed a new town and a new home, and it wasn’t necessarily going to be well paid and having reached that conclusion, I realised I could throw everything up in the air and do whatever I pleased.

The fact that the living is cheaper in New Zealand and the income from selling stuff online is the same wherever you are was a factor in the decision. But it was more to do with what was going on in my life at the time.

Phil:

You are choosing a route that I know a lot of indies are looking at right now, by producing iPhone games. I get the feeling that there has been a bit of a gold-rush as people have made silly profits for a short time. That appears to be less the case now. How have you found making games for iPhone? Do you think long-term the iPhone will be a viable platform for indies, what with the prices falling and quality of games improving?

James:

There’s a handful of games that have made a lot of money very quickly, but that’s not the norm. People say the gold rush is over, as though that’s a reason not to bother with the platform at all. But you can move to San Francisco today and make a good living, and that gold rush ended 150 years ago. If you’re looking for an easy way to make an instant fortune, you’re out of luck. If you want to put in a bit of work and earn a bit of money, no problem.

The iPhone was a very good choice for Ancient Frog. I had been developing it on and off in my spare time for over a year as a PC game, and it was progressing very slowly. Then in 2008 two things happened that forced me to re-evaluate what I was doing; my wife became pregnant, and I got laid off from the company I was working at. This gave me the opportunity to work full-time on the game, but also gave me a very firm deadline to finish it (and indeed anything else I wanted to do before fatherhood hit).

Constructing the levels for Ancient Frog was extremely time-consuming. Because I wanted it to look good at all resolutions up to 1920×1200 and any aspect ratio, the levels were intricately assembled from layers of imagery which cropped or stretched to fit the screen. The playing area covered the minimum achievable screen portion, so to keep the rest of it interesting there were incidental effects and animations – interactive water, birds, specks of dust dancing in rays of light – and all of it sourced from 2048×2048 textures which I was creating from high quality photographs taken with a good camera under carefully controlled lighting. The few levels I had made looked great, but to build enough of them at the quality I wanted was simply not going to be achievable in time.

The iPhone, however, had a low (320×480) resolution screen, one size, one aspect ratio, one (and a half) processor speeds – I could do each level as a single image with a little shadow effect on top to keep it all alive, and I could use snapshots from my little compact camera to create the textures. For me, this is the biggest appeal of the platform.

It still took another 6 months to finish (I reckon it represents about a year’s full-time work, overall), but I got it out and on sale before my son was born. (He very kindly gave me a couple of weeks extension for which I was grateful, although my wife, perhaps, less so.)

As for competition on the app store – prices are falling and quality is improving, but luckily not in the same applications. There’s a lot of 99 cent crap (“I’ll take a tired old genre, whack it out with stick-men on graph-paper graphics, and make a fortune!”), but there are good games selling for a good price. It’s not as high as you’d charge on the PC, but then the app store makes payment so easy for gamers that the volume can easily make up for it.

I’m not going to play in the 99 cent market, but I have no fear about competing on quality.

I think it’s a great platform for indies – the barrier to entry is low, the platform is still pretty unified, and there’s millions of paying customers out there. And they’re not worried about whether your game will work on their machine, they’re not worried it’ll be full of spyware or viruses or trojans, they’re not worried that you’re some sort of cyber-hoodie who’s going to steal their credit card info. They don’t even have to type in their credit card – just point at the icon they like and say “I want that one”.

Ancient Frog

Phil:

James:

Ancient Frog was the third game I started once I’d decided it was time to make my own games for a living. The first was a hopelessly ambitious persistent multiplayer build-things-then-blow-them-up game, which hardly got anywhere. The next was a slightly too ambitious London Underground simulator, which got as far as looking pretty cool, but left me struggling to find the fun. So when I finally left Lionhead, I sat down and tried to come up with the simplest possible game that I could create alone, to the level of polish I thought would be necessary to sell.

A puzzle game was the obvious way to go for simplicity – you create one mechanic, put all your effort into making that as solid and appealing as you can, and then crank out as many levels as you have time for. But I wanted an animated character to widen the game’s appeal, and since I’m under no illusions about my abilities as an animator, I was looking for a way to limit its movement to the point that procedural animation wouldn’t look crap. The great thing about the animation as it ended up in the final game is that it’s actually the player who provides the motion. The little tics on top – breathing, fidgeting, blinking – are trivial to implement but really bring it to life.

The style of the levels – photorealistic but pushed into a really glowing over-saturated space – worked out better than I’d anticipated. Again, the initial motivation was to create something within my abilities, which meant relying on photographs for the bulk of the levels. I’d assumed that I would be getting an artist in to finish it all up, but I kept creating more stuff to check that it was going to look OK, and people started telling me they thought it looked fine as it was. There’s a few tricks in there to make the levels hold together as cohesive designs rather than collections of disparate photographs – simple things like the ragged border and the shadow pass – and the end result is better than programmer art has any right to be. The frogs themselves I hand-drew, using a technique I refer to as “keep changing bits at random until it finally looks right”.

People online responded very positively to the idea that the entire game was the work of one person, so that worked out well. I think that the benefits of getting a top class artist can be outweighed by the benefits of having a single creative vision. The artwork was created to do what the code could manage, and the code was created to get the most out of the art. And because it was tailored to my specific abilities, there isn’t really anything else that looks quite like it.  It’s very gratifying that it keeps appearing on people’s lists of “most beautiful games on the iPhone”.

Phil:
I have to ask about New Zealand. Why there? I guess its not because of the weather is it?

James:

Heh, not the weather, no. There wasn’t any one single reason. It’s quite cheap here, I could afford a nice house, the people are happier and friendlier, the landscape is breathtakingly beautiful. I don’t want to over-sell it because, frankly, I don’t want everyone else moving here.

I also had this romantic notion of moving to a shack at the end of a dirt track, with a battered old Land Rover and a wind turbine for company. I always knew it was a silly fantasy that would quickly drive me mad – I have no idea which end of the chicken the milk comes out of – but there’s a certain hankering for the good life which I can satisfy here while still living in the capital city of a first world country.

Ancient Frog screen3

Phil:

Indie developers often have a feeling of remoteness. Many of them working at home, alone, with very little contact with the outside world. How do you deal with that side of being an indie? How do you handle your development on a day to day basis?

James:

As you might gather from my previous answer, the remoteness is something I rather like.

To be fair, I haven’t spent any very long period completely solo. Even when I was finishing Ancient Frog, I was interspersing it with the odd week of contract work here and there. And as it was coming up to release, I signed up for four days a week creating some museum exhibits – I didn’t know if it would sell, and there was a baby looming in the immediate future. As it turns out, I’d have been better off spending that time milking the frog and working on the next game, but it is good to go out and interact with talented creative people.

I find the freedom of working for myself incredibly liberating. I’ve got my study set up just how I like it, and if I find myself slumping into an unproductive period – procrastinating, surfing the web – then grabbing the laptop and spending the day in a cafe or at the library does wonders. The art style for Ancient Frog also gave me a perfect excuse to just head off into the bush with my camera, looking for textures.

Phil:
I saw that you did some experiments with sales prices for Ancient Frog. The sales channels would tell developers that lowering prices would increase sales by a significant amount, however I get the feeling that this only works for the already popular titles. How do you think the pricing of your games affects the sales? Do you have a minimum price point that you would never go below?

James:

I think you’re right about lowering the price. It’s no use going cheap if nobody’s there to see, and meanwhile you’re just sending out the message that your game isn’t worth much.

Ancient Frog launched at $4.99. The time to lower the price would have been when it was featured on the app store front page – that’s when the possibility existed (if it ever did) of hitting the top ten and making the crazy money. But it was selling so well at that point that my main concern was not breaking it. I’ll never know whether I made the right decision. I chose the guaranteed break-even rather than the risky riches, and I’m happy to live with that.

Later, I tried putting it on sale for $2.99 – it had just popped back into view, appearing in one of the app store featured sections and in a good review on MSNBC. There was a little spike in revenue, but within two days it was losing money. I even had emails from people who’d bought it on the back of the review, saying they’d have paid more. Clearly a better class of gamer at MSNBC.

Since lowering the price made less money, I tried the next logical thing – raising it to $5.99. The result there was very clear – everybody in the US simultaneously stopped buying it. I retreated back to $4.99.

So I’m pretty happy that at the moment it’s at the right price.

I flat refuse to take it down to 99 cents. That’s not really a carefully considered business decision, just the fact that I put years of my life into it and I’m damned if I’m going to see it priced like a ring tone. I’d like to think that by not going that low, I send the message that my next game isn’t going to go that low either. The trouble is that I’m just one voice in the crowd, and the app store does give a pretty clear message: all games end up at 99 cents.

I’m encouraged that Doom Resurrection is priced $9.99 and selling well at that – people are obviously still prepared to pay for quality.

Phil:
You worked in the mainstream industry for some time. What was that experience like? How has it prepared you for life as an indie developer? Do you have a different attitude to the way you develop games for yourself?

Frog on rock

James:

I’d been a bedroom coder in the 80s, like many of my generation. There was no internet of course, so publishing was through the noble medium of the type-in listing in a magazine. But I didn’t get into the industry proper until 1997. Then I was lucky enough to be around when small downloadable games were starting to go mainstream, and did some of my most enjoyable work on small teams (me+artist) creating small games.

My big mistake was going back into big games. I was offered the position of Lead Programmer on a new Lionhead game. I knew Peter Molyneux by reputation, but it was billed as a quick 18 month game, and I thought, really, how bad can he be? I can leave if it gets too painful. But the longer the project went on, the more unwilling I was to let all the work go to waste, and in the end I saw it through to the finish.

Lionhead at that time had this ability to attract the most fantastically talented people, and get the worst possible work out of them. The projects were a constant churn of discarded half-implemented ideas and grindingly long hours, culminating in a mad panic when their funding ran out, taking whatever crap was least broken at that point, calling it a game and releasing it. Molyneux’s games have a well-deserved reputation for flashes of the promise of genius, buried in a shitslide of bugs and inconsistencies. And it’s not pretty being involved. I seriously considered changing my name to Alan Smithee in the credits, but really by that point what I wanted most was to build up the funds for my move to New Zealand, and leave without looking back.

It’s not only Lionhead of course. For years, the industry has relied on getting bright enthusiastic young graduates, working them hard for low pay, and discarding them for the next batch when they’re used up. Recently they’ve discovered that people don’t want to work for them any more, and they’re asking the government to bail them out. Excuse my schadenfreude.

As far as affecting my approach to development is concerned, the biggest benefit was that I had a powerful motivation to create something again after years of frustration.

From a coding point of view, I now write everything as though there’s a team of unruly programmers of various levels of skill and impetuousness loose on my code. Everything is incredibly robust, tested, asserted, built to stop with loud warning klaxons the moment anything unforseen happens in the program. It’s a bit over-engineered for a one man project, but as coding styles go it’s preferable to the other extreme.

Phil:
Finally, do you have any advice to other indie developers working in Britain? Or even people in the mainstream industry thinking of becoming an indie developer? Or anyone thinking of moving to New Zealand?

James:

You’re never going to finish that game. Simplify it.
Your puzzle game is way too hard. Simplify it.
Your life is too dependent on an indifferent employer. Simplify it.

Thanks to James for this very insightful interview. You can visit James’ site at: http://www.ancient-workshop.com/

Tags: Interviews

This entry was posted on Friday, August 7th, 2009 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.