Going Solo

Yeah, I was laid off in September last year. We did Spore, and I was on that for six years - I was involved with the creature animation, the editor, the skin - everything that helped bring the game to life.

But then after Spore shift, the process that had taken six years had been relatively painful - I'd have done a few things differently on the game design front - so I was going to leave in order to make my own game, SpyParty. That was going to be in January, so I told them I wasn't going to work on another big project with them and as a result I was just doing small stuff, basically patches.

They don't generate any money, however, and EA is a publicly-traded company, so to have expensive staff working on stuff that's not bringing in any money... so I totally understand the reasoning, and it wasn't a surprise when I got laid off, but that then moved up my time frame by about four months.

I got a little bit of severance, so I scrambled to get a website up about my game - for an indie game it's really important to get everyone in the press aware of it, and I knew that when I left there'd be press attention, so we got it going immediately.

So I've just been working on SpyParty for the past few months - it's what I'd call a 'triple-A indie' project, that's what I hope it'll be. In the past couple of years there's been this emergence of this mid-range of games, with Braid, Castle Crashers, World of Goo, Flower... games like that that are indie and small - $15 - but they're completely polished.

These games aren't trying to be uber-games - they're not trying to be GTA IV or Spore, which are huge - these games are really laser-focused on one particular mechanic, or small set of mechanics, and then just polished. I hope to do that with SpyParty - it's a couple of years out, but that's the goal.

Well, there are a bunch of different ways that'll hopefully work. I've cut my expenses massively... so there's that, and I have some savings from working in the mainstream industry for the past 15 years. Then in order to take it to the polish level that I want, that I think it deserves, I'll probably have to get some funding - whether that's friends and family angel stuff, or a publishing deal.

But the problem there is that I need to have total creative control to do the thing I want to do - I have a very clear aesthetic that I'm going for, it's very experimental, but I've already got a prototype that's looking interesting. But I need to not be forced to ship it at any given time.

So it's very unlikely that I'd be able to get a publishing contract that would give me the leverage I needed - but it doesn't actually cost that much to live, even here in California. I could maybe do it on just a few hundred thousand dollars - if I were willing to burn all my savings down I could fund myself, or get some friends and family to loan me some.

We'll see - the good thing about nowadays when it comes to financing is that there are proven good games of this size that have been profitable. Before I joined Maxis I was working on an indie game for a long time and never finished it, but back then there was shareware on the PC, but no real console model - no way to monetise it.

Since Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network, and to some extent WiiWare and Steam, there's now a $15 business model. You can be somewhat confident that if you do a good job, you can earn your money back, whereas before even if you made a great game, it wasn't clear that there were sufficient channels to do it.

I think it's awesome, and it helps a lot of people in the industry, because you get a lot more innovation that way.