Scott Andrew

Posted September 24, 2012

Yup, we have another one.

It's been fun but I'm itching to move to something with finer-grained control over jump cuts. iMovie's 0.1s minimum clip size is actually way short. Who'd have thought I'd be considering an upgrade to Final Cut before Logic Express?

Posted September 24, 2012

The Amanda Palmer thing: she managed to Kickstarter over a $1M to finance an album and tour. Now she's getting pushback for looking for volunteers to play horns and strings in each city. Professional horn and string players are pissed. Steve Albini is pissed.

It illustrates another takeaway from PAX Dev I forgot to list: people have no idea what it costs to make things.

Kickstarter was the elephant in the room at PAX Dev. It was common folk knowledge: if you set a high fundraising goal, people complained that you couldn't possibly need that much. If you met that goal, people complained that you were now rich. If you had any sort of previous market success, people complained that you were doing a Kickstarter at all.

It was not widely understood how much of the $250K needed to build a video game was going to be eaten up by taxes, payroll, development costs, etc. All the complainers saw was a  company trying to rake in cash for themselves.

A million dollars is a lot of money for someone like Amanda Palmer, but a million dollars is chump change compared to what is spent promoting a Lady Gaga single. And it's not like Palmer is doing what every other band on Kickstarter seems to do, earning enough to put out another CD. There's a tour. There are costumes. There's an art book. There's a hand-painted-by-Amanda-herself turntable, for crying out loud. There is also the cost of making and shipping all of these things. And there's taxes.

I'm not sure that people should know, or care about, where each dollar goes. But the rise of high profile projects on Kickstarter has illuminated how little is known about what it costs to make things. Good things, thing that are worth your time and attention.

It's a shame that AP is being branded as a "Kickstarter millionaire" in the press, because she is undoubtedly no millionaire. She's an artist who so happens to have momentary possession of a million dollars. To paraphrase a PAX Dev attendee, the criteria for being a "rich" artist is being able to draw any kind of salary from your art. A low bar for such a lofty designation.

Posted September 20, 2012

Posted September 19, 2012

I managed to squeeze in two very awesome, very different conferences in the past month: PAX Dev and XOXO. Below are some brief thoughts on each. As I'm packing for a trip out of town I haven't taken the time to link to everything, so use your Google powers and follow your bliss.

PAX Dev

This was a smallish game developer conference put on by the Penny Arcade guys, two days prior to PAX Prime, the gaming expo. Mostly comprised of seminars and panel discussions about the challenges of making indie games, with the occasional workshop. PAX Dev intentionally shuts out the press -- no reportage is allowed, to the point where even tweeting was expressly forbidden under threat of expulsion. I'm not sure if this was to encourage more people to attend next year, or to avoid the chaos-fest of PAX, It felt oddly out-of-step with the way tech-minded people communicate today. By all means, prohibit reporters and cameras, but forbid attendees from tweeting? Hmph.

That's not to say that PAX Dev wasn't a great experience. It was. So tiptoeing around that weird NDA, here are some of my personal impressions from being immersed in the indie game crowd:

There are a ton of very bright, very hardworking, underemployed people working in indie games.

To succeed, you have to really want to live that lifestyle.

Doing a Kickstarter for your game is awesome, but also asking for a world of hurt and suffering, even if you score big.

Kickstarter, Kickstarter, Kickstarter.

You're either developing for one platform, or all of them.

"Social" remains a cipher we're busy unpacking (and still trying to shake off the bad taste of Farmville).

No one really knows how to make money and be happy with it.

In my opinion, successful games are all about building a world the player wants to escape to.

Take good notes, because no one will post their slides, even if they say they will.

XOXO

This is a festival of "disruptive creativity" that took place in Portland. The idea was to gather a bunch of people who make indie stuff on their own terms -- games, movies, music, physical products -- and have them talk about why and how they did it. The result, in my opinion, was a tiny conference that was the spiritual successor to SXSWi.

Speakers included writer/showrunner Dan Harmon, creator of NBC's Community; the guys from Studio Neat; ukelele songstress and YouTube star Julia Nunes; Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson; R. Stevens, the creator of webcomic Diesel Sweeties and a bunch more. Basically, an eclectic lineup of folks who managed to create successful stuff without sacrificing the vision (and most of the profits) to the conventional publishing/distribution industries. The result was pure inspiration, the kind that makes you want to start something immediately.

I can't possibly summarize the content of every speaker, but here are my general takeaways:

Despite advances in technology and services like Kickstarter, Etsy, Bandcamp, VHX and so on, the most important ingredient is still doing the work.

Not everything can make money. Not everything has to make money. The things that don't make money are still your work. (Matt of Metafilter had the soundbite: "Money is the least interesting problem." Agreed x 1000.)

Kickstarter, Kickstarter, Kickstarter. We'd do well to avoid the weird technocrat-ishness of thinking we can and should bootstrap everything, lest "just do a Kickstarter" becomes the new "just borrow money from your parents."

Embrace naïvety. A quote from Dan Harmon: "Once you know how the system works, you lose the ability to change it."

You don't have to know everything before you start.

The way the speaker sessions were handled was perfect. No workshops, no product pitches, no fifteen minutes of Q & A. If you had a question, you tracked down the speaker at the food carts outside during the break. Heaven.

There were also lots of social events during XOXO, including screenings of Indie Game: The Movie and an arcade featuring playable demos of Proteus, Nidhogg and other games. There was a non-stop, hours-long session of Johann Sebastian Joust. And an indie arts and crafts market that featured a working MakerBot and the Cards Against Humanity guys. And one guy brought an alligator.

Posted September 18, 2012

Posted September 15, 2012

At the XOXO Festival in PDX.

You know, I have never played this game.

Posted September 15, 2012

Yup, I'm calling these things "video flyers" for lack of a better term:

The spot above was cut from footage I'm using to assemble a music video for "Trapdoor," a Explone track from the same EP. That video won't be ready until October and I plan to do a "making of" post after I get the final cut assembled, but here are some stills I'm pretty happy with:

Posted September 10, 2012

It's here! At iTunes and Amazon and the usual suspects. And we have an awesome animated video to go along with our first single, "He's A Bat." We like Queen, and we like bats, so there you go. Check it out.

(View this video at YouTube.)

You can read what Patrick says about the new release over at the Explone website.

Posted September 4, 2012

Posted September 2, 2012