Covid-19 Relief Sale Documentation

Hi all, we recently did a covid-19 relief sale by selling Academia : School Simulator. The amount raised was about $250 (thanks to everyone who bought the game during the sale!). There’s a lot of people in need and a lot of work to be done. So we decided to supplement it by adding $750.  We’re sharing this so folks know where their money is going. This crisis is only beginning, and as it progresses the team will discuss how much more we can do to contribute. Thanks again, and stay safe, stay at home, and wash your hands every hour or so.

Recipients:

Lockdown Cinema ($100/5000PHP)

Your contribution will help provide provisionary cash allowances to our fellow Filipino film workers during the Community Quarantine put into place by our government. Feel free to buy up to 10 "tickets" depending on how much you wish to contribute.

Open House ($100/5000PHP)

During difficult times like these, we rely a lot on artists to help us get through. From shows to stories, music to dance, art helps us get by. But these difficult times also mean that artists need us to help them get through, too. It’s time for us to give back to the community that gave us so much joy, memories and inspiration.

The COVID-19 lockdown caused thousands of Filipino freelancers, performers, designers, technicians, and production staff to lose their jobs, projects, and income. They are a special type of worker that escapes the protection of the public sector and are very much vulnerable. They face an uncertain future in the coming months, due to shows being cancelled or postponed indefinitely. 

Emergency Quarantine Facilities for COVID-19 Patients and PUIs ($200/10000PHP)

WTA Architecture and Design Studio has been called on by the Philippines Marine Corps to provide services of constructing quarantine facilities for their frontliners who have been stationed in several checkpoint locations since 15 March 2020.

With this, the teams behind WTA and the Anthology Festival collaboratively designed an emergency quarantine facility to help house patients and reduce the load on the hospital. To fully implement the design, WTA tapped different industry experts and lead innovators to create the EQF Team.

To know the design and infrastructure details of the Emergency Quarantine Facility (EQF), click https://www.wtadesignstudio.com/eqf

Life Cycles ($200/10000PHP)

Public transport is suspended, but doctors, nurses, and grocery and drugstore employees need to get to work. Many of them don’t have cars, and their only alternative is to walk.

Our plan is to pair up with hospitals, groceries, drugstores, and LGUs and help their frontliners get to work.

If you have an extra bike you can spare or lend, or cash (one bike is approximately Php 5,000.00)—we promise you that we’ll get it to a frontliner in need. Helmets and locks are also welcome!

Kaya Natin! Movement for Good Governance and Ethical Leadership presentsA Donation and Fundraising Campaign for Health Workers Fighting COVID-19 ($200/10000PHP)

The Kaya Natin! Movement, in coordination with the Office of the Vice President, is organizing a donation and fundraising campaign for personal protective equipment (PPE) and care/food packs for health workers and frontliners fighting COVID-19.

Each PPE Daily Set Ticket consists of one N95 mask, one gown, two sets of gloves, two pieces of head covers, two sets of shoe covers and one pair of goggles. This is only good for one (1) health worker. Each Food and Care Pack Ticket will help one health worker/frontliner per day.

A Donation and Fundraising Campaign for Health Workers Fighting COVID-19 in Iloilo ($50/2500)

Global Shapers Community Iloilo, in coordination with the Kaya Natin! Movement for Governance and Ethical Leadership and the Office of the Vice President, is organizing a donation and fundraising campaign for Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) Daily Sets and Personal Protection sets for health workers and frontliners fighting COVID-19 in Iloilo.

Project Compassion (Cebu PPE) ($50/2500)

In partnership with V-Day Cebu and Fight Like a Girl PH, 2TinCans Philippines has organized a fundraising campaign for healthcare workers and frontliners fighting COVID-19. Donations received will go towards buying and shipping essential supplies such as masks, gloves, and protective wear for frontline workers in Metro Cebu. Your donation is greatly appreciated in our effort to support our community, and those that support us.

Care For Children Bidlisiw Foundation ($100/5000PHP)

A FOOD SUBSIDY donation drive for the families of children in need of special protection, who are greatly affected by the COVID-19 crisis. Beneficiaries are from the urban poor communities of Cebu City, Mandaue City, Lapu-Lapu City, and Camotes Island.

Bidlisiw Foundation, Inc. takes care of marginalized families with children in need of special protection. These families, who belong to the informal sector of society, are currently undergoing healing, recovery, and reintegration programs.

At this time when enhanced community quarantine is imposed, our family beneficiaries suffer. The daily wage earners’ livelihood is directly hit by closure of businesses, while the self-employed have limited opportunities to continue with their economic activities.

Squeaky Wheel's 2019 Year in Review

Squeaky Wheel started off 2019 on very shaky ground. The Steam algorithm change of 2018 had severely impacted our sales, leading to sales figures of less than 65% compared to earlier in 2018. This predicament lasted into early 2019. We had little choice but to soldier on, updating the game on our regular monthly schedule and hoping that things would turn around eventually.

Another Algorithm Change, Steam Labs, Deep Dive

On September 2019, Steam released another algorithm update that seemed to be more beneficial to us, (though it must be noted that it negatively impacted other devs). They also started reminding players to leave a review for games they'd played, and our review scores are now comfortably at 75%.

On top of that, Steam also added the Steam Labs and Deep Dive discoverability tools in order to help players find games that they may not have known before. All of these things helped to bring our monthly sales figures closer to what they were in early 2018.

Climbing Out of the Dreaded Mixed Reviews Valley

Steam clings to the party line that Reviews don’t matter to sales, but anecdotally every developer is terrified of falling into the dreaded “Mixed Reviews” category, when your game reaches 69% in average reviews or lower. Our consistent updates improved the game and we slowly clawed our way back up to 70% and beyond.

Steam also quietly added a feature where they ask players to review/change their review after having played the game for a certain amount of time. I don’t know exactly how it works, but ever since they made the change, the number of reviews for Academia has increased appreciably, and luckily for us most people have left good reviews. As of this writing, we’re sitting at a comfortable 75% positive reviews.

Publishing Ruinarch

Our cashflow had stabilized enough that during the third quarter of the year we made the announcement that we were publishing am evil overlord simulator game called Ruinarch (Wishlist NOW!). I wrote more about why we made that decision here, and even shared our contract details in this blog post.

The Maccima team is working on Ruinarch full steam (here’s their latest update) and we’re hoping to launch by mid 2020.

New Team Member and Collaborator

Early in the year, we hired Marica Uchida to help me handle the nitty gritty stuff related to running a business. This allowed me a lot of freedom to focus both on improving processes in the team as well as exploring business opportunities, like the Ruinarch Publishing deal. Without Marica I would probably have lost my mind many times this year, so her additional was very well timed.

While we were at our favorite local game conference, ESGS, we met a lot of cool people, but most notable Jin, who is working on a game called Lawmage Academy. When I noticed that the Lawmage Academy Twitter account had twice the number of Academia, I know that A) we needed help with social media and B) I had found the right person for the job. So we contracted him to help us manage our social media on a freelance basis, and we’re excited to see how that turns out!

Slowly Working Our Way to The Finish Line

Most of 2019 was kind of a boring grind to be honest. We spent the time with our shoulders to the grindstone, slowly working on and improving Academia : School Simulator in the game that we all know it be. All of this work will hopefully come into fruition in 2020, as we’re actively working towards a version 1 release of the game.

Thanks to the team for continuously pouring their heart and soul into the game, the players for playing, giving feedback and bug reports, and everyone else that has supported us this year. 2020 is shaping up to be an exciting year!

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this interesting! If you want to support us, you can buy Academia: School Simulator or Political Animals, or wishlist Ruinarch.

What Does A Healthy Publisher/Developer Relationship Looks Like (With Real Contract Details!)

Squeaky Wheel and Maccima Games teams celebrating the contract signing. Will the happy times last?

Publisher and developer relations have always been fraught with peril.  There is a natural imbalance that occurs when a much more experienced entity with capital deals with a financially naive developer that wants to put their art out into the wider world. Recent news has borne this out, as I have heard of another publisher mistreating or wilfully misleading a developer.  The point of this article is not to name and shame (and honestly, depending on when you actually read this, I could be referring to an issue from 2019 or from 2022), but rather to show what a healthy publisher/developer relationship can look like. I will also be providing actual contract details for Ruinarch (wishlist now!) to serve as a datapoint, as I believe information asymmetry is one of the key issues that leads to developers being taken advantage of.

First off, let’s define our terms.

Publishing

A publishing deal is one that first and foremost provides funding.  For absolute clarity, I will refer to any deal that offers no money as “distribution” which I will describe later. I am aware that others may disagree with my definition, but I believe it is important for developers to hold that distinction in mind. 

Aside from capital, a publishing deal typically also offers knowledge sharing and advice.  This means advice regarding all aspects of game development, from programming to marketing.  This is most useful for a first time developer, but even accomplished developers derive value from having a new set of eyes on their game.

In exchange for capital and information, a publisher will typically ask for profit sharing based on revenue generated after they recoup their costs. Basically, since they fronted the money, they want to be assured that at the very least, they will be able to recoup the risk that they took spending that money in the first place.

This profit sharing agreement can take many forms.  For example, the publisher could ask for a 75/25 split on revenue until they have recouped their costs, and thereafter the split is 50/50.  For our own deal with Maccima (as I’ll discuss later) we get a 100% recoup first before splitting the deal 70/30 in favor of the developers.

Distribution

A distribution deal is one that provides no funding, but basically provides marketing and distribution support in exchange for revenue.

I am personally quite wary of distribution deals.  The up front money from a publishing deal establishes “skin in the game” for the publisher.  As a developer, I am also more appreciative of the up front money because it immediately takes a lot of the risk off the table and lets me make the game without fear.  A distribution deal feels to me like I have taken most of the risk by making the game on my own, then someone is going to come in at the tail end of the process and take some of my hard earned revenue.

However, to paraphrase Shark Tank , “70% of a hundred thousand dollars is better than 100% of 0 dollars”.  There are many reasons why you would want to take a distribution deal:  

1. You are a developer that just hates everything to do with marketing and money and you want to hide in your room and code all day. 

2. You trust the people behind the distribution deal, and they are up front with exactly how much money they are planning to spend on marketing (this shows skin in the game).

3. You already have an established game and want to expand to a market that you are not familiar with, like China or the console market.

These are all valid reasons to accept a distribution deal.  As a developer you will have to make the hard decisions about whether or not a deal is suitable to you.

First Contact

Publishing deals can take a long time to negotiate, and there is a lot of wooing that happens even before the first draft of the publishing deal is presented to you.  Before we secured a deal for Political Animals, I had written on and off to Positech Games about the possibility of a publishing deal. Cliff brushed me off the first few times, but I eventually wore him down (politely, mind you), and in a meeting at EGX in 2015 where I presented him the current prototype of the game sealed the deal.

I first noticed and reached out to Maccima Games on February 9, 2019.  Soon after, I visited them to try to get a better idea of the team and how serious they were with the game.   I broached the idea of possibly publishing the game, but also told them that if they wanted to try for a bigger publisher (eg Paradox Interactive), I would use my digital rolodex on their behalf and try to secure interviews for them.  Early on I already established that no matter what happened I wanted to help them succeed, which helped to build trust between us.

The Pitch Deck

A few months later I invited Maccima to an invite-only PC dev session with some other local devs, where we would get to show each other our games and give each other advice.  I chatted with Marvin, the head of Maccima, to get a sense of where they were in development. I explained to him how much money in the bank we had, and how I’d approach a publishing deal.  He told me that they were still interested, and were now preparing a pitch deck for publishers in general. 

I have written about what should be in a good pitch deck before, and Maccima’s pitch deck nailed the most important parts.  It was solid, and their expectations were reasonable. Most importantly, the amount they were asking for was something that we could afford.  After reviewing our finances with our COO (wherein we definitely answered the question of whether we could afford this risk), we decided to offer them a contract.

Here is a link to Ruinarch’s (formerly World’s Bane) Pitch Deck, with financial data removed as requested by the developer.

The Contract

Finally, here’s the main event, a copy of the contract in place between Squeaky Wheel and Maccima Games. One of the nice things about being a small indie dev/publisher is it allows us to share things like this without dealing with a large bureaucracy. I made sure to ask permission from my cofounders as well as Maccima games, and would not be sharing this otherwise.

It’s important to note a few things. This is not meant to be an example of the “best” contract, merely an example of an actual contract.  What works best for us may not work for you. The point is to negotiate until you are comfortable with the contract.

This document is a copy of the original, with personal details, dates and actual dollar amounts removed. I have left the comments in to show that this contract was crafted after negotiation between the two parties.

In the following paragraphs, I will discuss some of the key parts of the contract that you should pay attention to when negotiating your own.

Sales and Rights

Sections 3 to 7 cover what the rights of the publisher are with regards to the game. For example, we wanted exclusive and worldwide rights to sell and publish the game on PC/Mac and Linux, extending to DLC. We have right of first refusal for any ports or sequel, but if we’re not interested, then the developer is free to shop the game around. It’s made clear that all business transactions must go through the publisher.  So for example, on the off chance that Epic Games (ahem) wants to throw a bunch of money our way, they would be dealing with us, not the developer. As a courtesy to the developer they would be included in any discussions, but its important that there is only one point of contact in these kinds of decisions. There are also numerous protections for the developer, such as stipulations that we cannot create sequels, ports, or DLCs without the agreement of the developer.

Royalties and Recoup Rates

Sections 8 and 9 deal with the numbers.  These sections get very detailed, and explain how much of the royalty goes to the publisher, how exactly those number are derived, and how the money will be transferred to the developer. There was a lot of clarifications involved in this section, as you can see from the comments. To protect the Developer, they will be given direct access to financial data (which we can do with Steam).  In absence of that, we promise to share documentation of funds received.

Termination

This is maybe one of the most fraught parts of a contract, but also one of the most important.  A publishing agreement is a relationship, and like all relationships, it can go sour. This section stipulates what should happen in that rare case, and it can be the key to an amicable separation or a messy divorce. There was also a lot of discussion here, but the basic agreement is that we can terminate the agreement if the developer continuously misses milestones.  The developer can terminate the agreement if we continuously miss payments. 

The most interesting part of this is subsection e, which states:

e) The Publisher agrees that Developer cannot be held liable for delays due to acts of god, sickness of key staff, and other events beyond Developer’s control.

This is something that the developer asked for specifically, and which I agreed to immediately.  While we’re all in this business to make money, we must also remember that sometimes life happens, and we have to make room for that possibility.  

Negotiate, Negotiate, Negotiate

If you leave this article with only one lesson, it is that you should negotiate. Contracts can be changed. There is no such thing as a one size fits all contract.  It is the publisher’s best interests to not have changes made, because each change requires lawyers, which cost money. Any change in the contract may also affect their contracts with other developers, and so the costs cascade and increase.

But as a developer you must be comfortable going into this relationship, so if there is anything that really jumps out at you that you feel is unreasonable, ask for it to be explained and if necessary, changed.

Conclusion

We are not presenting this contract as the perfect contract by any means.  In fact I suspect that the contract will be picked apart by developers, publishers, and especially lawyers for various reasons. Ruinarch is also still in the middle of development, so things can still go sour.  We have already agreed with Maccima to extend development because the initial time estimates were a little too tight. Here’s hoping that we will still be friends come next year.

Our goal is that having this out there can help prepare other devs and prospective first time publishers manage their expectations and offer at least one data point for what an actual contract looks like. We also hope that both developers and publishers understand that at the end of the day, this is a relationship, and both sides need to make sure that even as they look out for their best interests, they must take the time to make sure they are on the same page.  The best contract in the world cannot fix a bad relationship, but a contract dispute can be fixed by two people sitting across from each other and negotiating in good faith.

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! If you want to support us, please wishlist Ruinarch.

Why We Decided to Publish Ruinarch

If you follow Squeaky Wheels’ Facebook, Twitter, and Steam developer pages (and if you haven’t hint, hint please do so!) you’ll by know by now that we have just announced that we are publishing another studio’s game.  As with many of Squeaky Wheel’s milestones, I wanted to take the time to dig into our thought process on why and how this happened.

But first, we’d like to introduce you guys to Maccima Games and their debut title Ruinarch (Wishlist PLEASE!). 

Ruinarch is a wickedly fun evil overlord simulator where you cause havoc on people’s lives before taking their lands. Inspired by story generators like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress, create an infernal narrative for your victims as you poison food, raise the dead, and inflict endless misery upon them.

If any of that spoke out to you, wishlist it now! Ruinarch is coming out in Early Access sometime in 2020.

How Did This Happen?

It’s really kind of crazy how Squeaky Wheel and Maccima Games hooked up.  About half a year ago I randomly saw one of maccima’s tweets of a screenshot and thought “Hey, that looks cool!  I clicked on the Twitter profile and saw that their website used the .ph (as in Philippines) domain. I checked out their website and we even more impressed with what I saw, and immediately chatted them up, asking about their game, and how I’d like to meet up some time to talk some more. 

I came away from that meeting even more impressed, but we weren’t really in a position to make an offer at the time.  It just felt good that there were other people making PC strategy games in Manila! I offered to help introduce them to people when they were ready to think about publishing, and only asked that they send us their pitch document as well to give us first dibs on a possible publishing deal

A few months pass, and Maccima came to us with a pitch.  The pitch was professional, and most importantly realistic in terms of schedule and numbers. Maccima was a well run team that could operate independently of Squeaky Wheel, meaning we wouldn’t be wasting any time at all and effectively doubling our game development output.  

After taking a hard look at what they needed and our financial state at the time, we decided that this was a financial risk that we could take. Even if the Ruinarch flops, Squeaky Wheel would still be able to stay afloat. So after about a month of negotations, we signed Maccima to a publishing deal in August, and we’re so excited to be finally able to share that now.

But why bother with publishing? Squeaky Wheel is still a tiny studio that doesn’t really have deep pockets. While we wouldn’t go under if Ruinarch flopped, that was still money that might otherwise have gone into our profit sharing pool.  Tl:dr publishing Ruinarch is about more than just money to us. If you want to know more, just keep reading.

Nurturing an Industry

While I cannot speak for my other cofounders, part of what drove me to start a studio was a personal desire to help grow the Philippine game development industry. This fascination with building an industry all started with the time I read Richard Florida’s Flight of the Creative Class.  In it, popular economist Richard Florida espoused a vision of the world where cities would compete for creative class workers (defined as people in science and engineering, architecture and design, education, arts, music and entertainment whose). Inspired by the book, I set about to do my own small part by helping to nurture the local game development industry.

At the time (about 10 years ago) I saw my role as community building. I helped to revitalize the local IGDA chapter, holding monthly meetings (against the wishes of some local studio managers) and creating a space where devs could meet and learn from each other.  We started the first Manila Game Jam in 2010 to coincide with the global game jam, and I led the community for 3 years. It was often a struggle, but I firmly believed that if we had a strong community, the clustering effect would help propel individuals and companies to be at par with the world, and create a game industry that would funnel investment and money into the Philippine economy.

I’m proud of what we did, but I’m a little less naive now.  I don’t think that the game industry on its own can lift up any country’s economy out of the mire. I don’t think there is any way to leapfrog our way into being an industrialized country, which I strongly believe is a prerequisite for any country or city to have a strong and growing creative class. 

Squeaky Wheel 

As fulfilling as IGDA was, three years had taken its toll on me, so I took a break to focus on myself and my freelance career first. This culminated in my work on Prison Architect.  While it was immensely gratifying to be a part of a game that truly shaped the industry (so much so that Paradox Interactive bought the IP!), I felt that PA was as far as I could go as an individual. That, combined with the ever nagging impulse to nurture the local industry, was one of the things that led to the formation of Squeaky Wheel (if you are interested, read about the long road to the creation of Squeaky Wheel and how we landed our first publishing deal this three part blog series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).  

Running Squeaky wheel has been quite the experience (read restrospectives from 2016, 2017, 2018).  We launched a game that flopped. We launched a game that succeeded.  We’re nowhere near as successful as many other companies, but we are in the extremely fortunate position of being able to survive and support ourselves.  Now that we are in that position where we’re no longer on the verge of collapsing every month, why choose to spend that money on other people rather than ourselves?

Why is Publishing Important To Us?

Publishing a game means so much more to the local industry than simply handing over a bunch of money to another developer.  All of the funding that Squeaky Wheel has had so far came from outside the Philippines. That may not seem like a big deal to developers from other countries stacked with publishers but let me tell you : it feels fucking good not to have to rely on outside funding. What makes this more special for me is that game development is one of the few industries in the Philippines where you can create almost literally create something out of nothing. A decade ago, most local funding came from foreigners, oligarchs, and deeply entrenched business interests. I am immensely proud that bunch of weirdo gamedevs from varying lower to upper middle class backgrounds came together to create a studio that can now support other studios. It is a sign of the maturity of our industry.  It says “we can do this on our own now”. Being able to say that, and being able to support another studio’s creative endeavor, is worth so much more than the money we put into their studio.

Where Do We Send our Pitch?

So are we really a “publisher” now?  Well, not really. There was a huge confluence of circumstances that led to this point.  We’re not actively looking to publish any more games than this (especially since we don’t really have the budget!) but who knows what the future might bring?

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this interesting! If you want to support us, you can buy Academia: School Simulator or Political Animals, or wishlist Ruinarch.

Four Years of Squeaky Wheel

Four years ago on this month, Tristan, Marnel and I became officially registered as Squeaky Wheel Studio Inc.We’ll be taking a break today and having dinner with some of our gamedev friends to celebrate, but in the meantime let me take a walk down memory lane.

September 2015

I am at EGX 2015 for the launch of Prison Architect.  The IVSoftware team have kindly flown me and my wife over to celebrate the launch, so I use this as a way to pitch our game Political Animals to publishers.  I meet Cliffski for the first time and pitch the game to him.  

Within a couple of days he offers me a publishing deal.  Anyone who has done a publishing deal before will know that this is an extraordinarily short amount of time to get a deal done.  It helps that we got along and Cliffski is a one-man show studio that answers to no one, but still.

October 2015

After landing back in Manila I immediately set about establishing a company, which is not a trivial process in the Philippines.  I end up paying more than I probably needed to in order to have another company help me set up my company, such is life here. We are officially registered with the SEC by October 28, 2015

Funny aside, I had thought that we had incorporated on October the 15, which is why we are celebrating our anniversary today. :P

November 2016

After almost a year of working nonstop on Political Animals and taking it to conventions like BICfest, TGS, and PAX, we release the game.  Even with all the advantages that we had, it is a flop. 

September 2017

A mere 10 months later, we launch Academia : School Simulator in Early Access.  It succeeds well enough to save the company and we continue development of the game.

October 2019

It has been a little over 2 years since Early Access launch, and 3 years since initial development of Academia.  We have hit many highs and lows, but the game continues to make enough income to support our team.

<October 2020

This brings me to an announcement from the future.  At some point before October 2020, we want to launch version 1 of Academia : School Simulator.  The game has made major strides since it first came out. While there is still more work to be done, we can finally see the finish line.  

Games like Academia : School Simulator are tricky things.  While there is the potential to build on it infinitely, we believe we’re coming close to a point that we are personally satisfied with it. Version 1 doesn’t necessarily mean the end of development, but it does mean a change of focus for the team.. It’s been a long road, and we’re excited to slowly inch our way to something new, whatever that may be.

Spoiler Alert, we have some exciting news coming up soon, so stay tuned!

Thanks to Everyone

We want to thank everyone that has supported us throughout this journey.  Thanks to everyone who has played the game (if you enjoyed your experience please write us a review because it really matters!).  Thanks to our partners, our parents and families for supporting us. Thanks to our fellow devs, streamers, and publishers for supporting us, spreading the word, and putting your faith in us.  

We hope that you’ll stick around for the years to come!

Squeaky Wheel's 2018 Year in Review

Squeaky Wheel started life as a company in 2015, and with each year that passes, we seem to alternate between having a good year and a bad year. We started out 2016 with a publishing deal and the energy of a new company. 2017 was a tough year at the start since Political Animals had flopped, and we were on the verge of shutting down. The successful launch of Academia : School Simulator in late 2017 meant that we were riding high at the start of 2018. We were all set to continue that trend into 2019 until Steam decided to play with it's algorithm and wreak havoc on our financial projections. But before we do a deep dive into that whole situation, let's go over what happened in 2018!

Maintaining Motivation in Early Access is Hard!

When we successfully launched Academia : School Simulator in 2017 the exhilaration was soon followed by a sobering realization. We had basically committed ourselves to working on this game for the next couple of years. Launching a game usually comes with the catharsis of no longer having to be consumed by that same game afterwards. But with Early Access you don't get that catharsis, you just kind of keep grinding on. If you don't have a set deadline, the idea of the finish line being endlessly out of reach can certainly be daunting.

One solution to this is to break up development into Alpha Milestones, with each milestone having a set number of specific mechanics that must be finished before you can move on to the next milestone. This way you can a bit the “completion high” that a full game gives you, and you can organize some marketing around the launch of each milestone. We sort of half-assed our Alpha 2 because I pushed the team into doing it just a month or two before the actual launch, but we have a much better planned Alpha 3 being prepared for early 2019.

We Return to Conventions

I was pretty down on conventions in 2016, seeing as how we saw very little success with them while promoting Political Animals, despite the keen interest we saw during the actual events. There's a gamasutra article detailing this issue with much more clarity, but the tl:dr is that people at game conventions are conditioned to be pretty hyped already by virtue of being at the convention, so all of the good vibes you're getting from their playthrough of the game may be legitimate, but is no way an indication of how good the game is or how well it will sell. This isn't to say all of the pre-launch marketing and convention hopping every developer does is pointless, it's just not worked out for us.

That said, conventions are good for other things, including : team building, morale boosting, developer networking (shoutout to all the cool developers we met and hung out with in 2018!), and exploring different markets. We achieved all of those things by going to conventions in Taiwan (Summer Game Show), Japan (Bitsummit and TGS), Korea (BICFest), and our “home” convention of ESGS in the Philippines. One of the cool things about being in Early Access is that you can combine marketing with key sales. We were able to subsidize a lot of our travel costs by selling Steam keys!

Random Thoughts about Different Conventions

TGS (Tokyo Game Show) is a terrible show for indies. The way the booths are arranged is super cramped, and the developers next to us ended up unintentionally crowding into our booth space. Most of the people and press going there are going for the big AAA games. Even with a free booth, I would not go back to TGS. Bitsummit in Kyoto is a much better show that is more focused towards indies. Even if the foot traffic is much smaller, it is also self selecting, and we got way more in terms of Steam key sales there. Kyoto is a much smaller city, and the atmosphere is such that the developers much more freely mingled with each other, whereas with TGS there was more obvious segmentation between different devs.

The Taipei (Summer) Game Show was a bit of a revelation. We mostly went because the booth was free (or so cheap it almost didn't matter). Taipei is less than two hours away from Manila and can cost less than $100 to fly to. We sold even more Steam keys than we did at Bitsummit, which was a bit of a shock to us. One of the organizers said that the attendees probably don't get a lot of PC games coming into town, so the novelty of having a game that was available on Steam showing its wares helped boost interest in us. Many of the people that bought a steam key had mentioned that they'd heard of the game before, and the fact that the venue was tiny (and packed) certainly helped get a lot of people in front of our booth. Interestingly, despite the success at selling keys, Taiwan doesn't rank very high in in terms of our Steam store earnings.

ESGS has become our go-to conference at home (the Philippines), and we always went into it with the lowest expectations based on our biases and understanding of local gamer culture (ie gaming driven by esports, mobile, console, and rampant piracy). We were pleasantly surprised at how many people bought Steam keys from us though, with at least one buyer refusing our discount and offering to pay full price. This leads me to be a little bit more hopeful about our local market, although as with Taiwan, the success at the convention didn't lead to any more revenue on the steam store itself.

BICfest in Busan gets a special mention because like Bitsummit, the indie spirit and camaraderie is strong, and if your game gets approved they sponsor accomodation for 2 people!

Political Animals Gets Some More Recognition

In May of this year I was invited to a great conference in Budapest called Brain Bar to talk about “Do games have (a) moral conscience”? While I hardly think anyone attending the conference was gonna go out and buy Political Animals after seeing this panel, it was still some nice validation for our first game.

We Had a Good First Three Quarters

Before I start talking about the bad news, I do want to take a moment to recognize how fortunate we were that for most of this year we were a profitable small indie studio. Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games took a poll in November asking if “the last game you shipped cover its costs, including a nominal salary...” The results, while not surprising, showed the stark reality of how difficult it is to make money in this business.

62% of people who put out a game lost money on that enterprise. Of those, I would be terrified to know just how many of them had quit their jobs, sacrificed their savings, or took out a loan on their property just to finance their dream. 18% of people just broke even, which means they got to tell their wife, partner, or family that they still had a roof over their heads, but that they might be looking for a regular paycheck from now on. Only 20% made a profit. Do you remember how your parents worried that you were getting into game development, and asked why you don't consider getting a “safer” job? To put it mildy, game development is a risky business (although to put it in context, probably no more risky than starting any other business).

For the first three quarters of 2018, we were making a tidy profit, and putting some of that profit into donating funds to schools as well as community building with local game developers. All of that changed in October.

Steam's Discovery Algorithm Killed Our Sales

The title above is a reference to a Jake Birkett blog (you should really follow his blog, as he does a very good job of taking the pulse of the indie game community at large) that he released earlier this month. If you're not familiar with what happened, here's a quick rundown. Steam's abrupt algorithm changes in October had a huge impact on Birkett's sales. After sharing the blog on Twitter, numerous developers across the Twitterverse (including ourselves) retweeted and shared Jake's sentiments, and press outlets like Kotaku picked up on the news. The coup de grace was Epic Games' announcement that it was opening the Epic Store with a much more generous revenue share.

I want to echo Jake by saying that without Steam and the access to the market it provides, we wouldn't be where we are now, part of the 20% of game developers that is (was?) earning a tidy profit. But that dependency reveals a major flaw in our business. We ultimately have no idea what goes on in Steam's algorithm. This is done to keep devs from gaming the system, but also means we have no idea what to do to improve our chances of the algorithm sharing our game with Steam's userbase. And these changes can have a huge impact.

For us specifically, the first month of changes saw our revenue drop to around 40% lower compared to our weakest month so far, and the second month saw our sales revenue drop to around 65% lower than our weakest sales month. To put that in other terms, after Steam takes its revenue and after taxes, we are now below the break even point on a month to month basis. As mentioned before we were fortunate enough that we were making a profit before and have been putting away money for just such an occasion, so we're not in any real trouble yet. But it is rather sobering to know that your expected revenues can be so drastically altered with a few keystrokes.

Moving to Different Marketplaces

Steam's access to their market has meant that there has been less of a focus for us on being in different marketplaces. Indeed, if we could make enough to profit by simply being on Steam, it simplified a lot of things for us. We could focus on a single marketplace to reply to our players, and focus our efforts into integrating further with Steam, by adding achievements, and in the future, leaderboards. Our past experience with Political Animals shows that at best, even Steam's larget competitor GOG only ever made up 10% of our revenue. So focusing on where most of the revenue game made a lot of sense. It's become clear that we can no longer keep doing that, and we need to adapt to the changing times (hopefully Steam does as well).

We already have a buy page on our website, with a humble widget included (hey indie devs, the humble widget takes only 5% of your revenue!). The Epic Store is intriguing and we'll send in an application for sure, but as far as I've heard, they're processing thousands of applications and won't be considering anything new until late 2019 (For anyone complaining about Steam opening the floodgates, this was the alternative all those years ago). Kartridge is interesting, but I've heard confidentially from a successful indie dev that their game, which has sold tens of thousands of units on Steam, only sold 4 on Kartridge in a year. Discord is definitely intriguing, especially with its streamer integration, but I worry about our capacity to regularly interact with players on a regular basis. We're naturally introverts and have our hands full just responding to forum posts, so I worry about how taxing that will be for us. Plus we have no idea how difficult deployment will be to their site.

So finally that leaves us with itch. Itch.io has long been the go-to place for weird, niche indie games, and never had pretensions to be a site for the mass market. It's still growing though, and most importantly for us it seems relatively pain-free to add it to our deployment process. So we'll be looking to add Academia : School Simulator to itch sometime next year. I don't expect we'll make a lot of revenue, my initial estimate is maybe 5% or less than total Steam revenue, but I'll report back with real numbers in the future.

What's Happening in 2019?

2018 was a pretty good year for us. I think it would be fair to say we perhaps got a little complacent, or if I'm being more generous, we allowed ourselves to enjoy the fruits of our hard work a little bit. I expect that 2019 will look a little bit more like our 2017, where we put our noses to the grindstone and try to work on getting as much of Academia : School Simulator done as we can, while simultaneously thinking about what we're gonna be doing next.

As usual, I want to thank the team for putting their all into the game, everyone who has supported us thus far, and all the players for buying the game and giving us great feedback over the past year. See you all in 2019!

Squeaky Wheel's Productivity Tools

As game developers, we can get so focused on the craft of game making that we can sometimes forget that the tools we use outside of actual game development can be just as important to the process. Having the right tools can make the team much more productive, so knowing which tools work best for your team is key. Here I will go over some of the tools we’ve used previously, and what we have replaced them with to better suit our needs.

From Hipchat to Flock

As a mostly virtual studio, having a good way to communicate online is absolutely necessary for us. When we first started developing Political Animals, company chats were still in their infancy, and Hipchat was one of the early companies providing this service. While Slack was around, Marnel preferred Hipchat because it had a much lighter chat client. Turns out the reason for this was that Hipchat was an incredibly primitive chat client compared to today’s updated products. It became very frustrating to use Hipchat during long chats, when it was unclear to whom we were replying to in conversations. We ended up creating our own systems for this, like copying and pasting the message we were replying to, as if we were on a forum.

Our Scheduling, aka “Today’s Bowel Movement” channel on Flock.

So we were kind of amazed when we switched to Flock and all of its functionalities. The ability to reply to specific messages, create reminders and notes, and being able to create custom avatars for people and rooms just blew me away. It felt like the difference between dial-up and broadband internet, or SD vs HD. Once we switched over there was no going back.

Flock over Slack

The leader of company chat clients is Slack. You almost can’t get away from slack advertising when listening to a podcast these days. In some ways this turned me off on Slack (I like rooting for the underdog). However we did try out Slack and some other products for a little bit just to see what it was like, and we still came back to Flock. The reason? Flock offers basically the same service as Slack, with a much more generous free version. They offer double the storage space (10GB) versus Slack (5GB) which means we have a lot more wiggle room when attaching files in chat. I’ll write a more in-depth article in the future, but I highly recommend Flock for small teams.

From Jira to HacknPlan

Jira has long been hailed as the gold standard for agile project management. What they don’t tell you is that for it to actually be useful, you need an actual full time project manager, or someone who is committed to that role. Unfortunately for us, we do not have anyone who is able to fully maximize Jira and all of its integrations. Vanilla Jira is, at least in our experience, painful to use. Basic things like looking up previous sprints consume way more time than necessary. Their strict adherence to the sprint methodology also created some annoying things like not being able to easily delete tasks (something that they added eventually). I was ready to move us off Jira as soon as I found a suitable replacement.

Hacknplan is agile project management created specifically for game development. It’s hard to immediately explain why Hacknplan is better than Jira for our needs. The easiest way to explain it is that while a good project manager could probably create amazing functionality using Jira, HacknPlan lets teams without a dedicated project manager just hit the ground running.

My favorite thing about HacknPlan is its GDM, which is essentially a living game design document. Previously, I would often want to write down some game design ideas for future reference. I would put them in Jira’s backlog, and there they would remain for the rest of their lives. HacknPlan’s GDM lets me create a category or folder containing all of these design ideas, and lets me easily access them in the future when we’ve run out of tasks and need something new to work on. The best thing is that you can assign tasks directly from the GDM, meaning there is a direct connection to your daily work tasks and the higher level design, which is something that is lacking in most agile management tools. HacknPlan has some issues (the pricing tier and some limits on the free version can be a little annoying), but the benefits far outweigh them. I’ve become quite an evangelist, and will push HacknPlan onto any developer within earshot. I’m going to write a much more in-depth post about HacknPlan and how we use it in the future, but if you are a small team making a game, I absolutely recommend you use HacknPlan.

From Google Sheets to (Sometimes) Airtable

Google Sheets is a great all around spreadsheet app that you can access from almost anywhere as long as you have an internet connection. It doesn’t do anything special, but in the hands of an expert like our designer Tristan, you can make magic with it.

Airtable is an app that lets you do some of that magic and much more without a lot of effort. It feels a little like Spreadsheets 3.0 (with Spreadsheet 1.0 being the actual paper spreadsheets), adding functionality to spreadsheets that can make them much more easier to parse at a glance. For example, while designing our research items, we decided that they would be arranged like a tree, with some items being unlocked by research a “parent” item. Noting down the parent of a research item in a spreadsheet is easy enough, but hunting down items with the same parent can be a chore, even if you take the time to color coordinate the cells properly (which can be time consuming in itself). With Airtable, it only takes a couple of clicks to instantly rearrange and group the data by “parent”, which is a godsend when we are doing internal QA to make sure that everything is working properly in the game. Even better, you can parse this data by grouping it according to two different fields. So for example I could organize the data by way of parent and research cost, allowing me to know which research items that have the same parent cost the same amount.

Airtable’s complexity is also what makes it annoying to use sometimes. For example, coloring a cell is something that anyone who has used a spreadsheet does on a regular basis. I often do this when I want to indicate that a specific task is done, by highlighting it in green. Airtable’s free version doesn’t let you do this seemingly simple task, meaning if I want to do the same thing, I would have to create a new column, assign it as a “checkmark” type of field, and us this to check off items as I finish them. So while I highly recommend that studios use Airtable and its immense capabilities (of which I feel like I have only scratched the surface), sometimes good old Google Sheets is more practical to use. Luckily Airtable lets you import CVS files so if you start out using Sheets and deciding to move to Airtable, the process is painless.

Bonus Tools : Bug Reports with Google Forms

We currently use Google Forms as a bug reporting mechanism. While it’s great and importantly, free, I have been wishing we could switch to a different service that was better at parsing the data we receive. It’s great that Forms links seamlessly with Sheets, but all that data can be overwhelming to comprehend.

I’ve done a little research into alternatives like Surveymonkey, but I’ve yet to see anything that would be exactly what we need, which is an affordable bug report website or app that parses out the bug report data in more understandable chunks. If you have any suggestions, please let me know in the comments!

Bonus Tool 2 : Rescuetime

We are a small team and we don’t do the typical time tracking expected in a virtual team. This probably won’t scale to a much larger team, but in general we’ve noticed that we tend to work longer hours than usual anyway, so asking people to time in and out just seems insulting.

Instead, we suggest that people download Rescuetime and track their productivity on their own. It’s a great free tool that helps you keep track of your computer time. We’ve found that most people are usually shocked at how little productive time they actually use during the day, and this helps give them an incentive to do better. The free tool lets you set goals (mine are to have at least 4 productive hours a day and to spend less than 30 minutes on social media during work hours) and is more than enough for the average person.

Conclusion

I hope this will be useful for other devs and studios out there to give them an idea of the tools that they can use to help make the process of making games a little bit easier. It’s important to note that these are the tools that work for Squeaky Wheel specifically. The best thing to do is to always try it out for yourself and see what works best for you and your team!

Thanks for reading, and hope you found this useful! If you're interested in Academia: School Simulator, you can buy the game now! If you're not ready to buy, please sign up for our mailing list, join the Facebook group, follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to our Youtube channel and help us spread the word!

Squeaky Wheel's 2017 Year in Review

This is the second year of Squeaky Wheel's life as a company, and things are certainly looking a lot different from when I wrote a similar blog post 1 year ago. We started 2017 at a low point. Our first game, Political Animals, was (and still is) a financial flop. We had shifted pretty hard to our as yet unannounced game (Academia: School Simulator) in a last ditch attempt to launch an Early Access game that could save the company. We were fully prepared for this to be Squeaky Wheel's last year as a company, but it turns out we still have some life left in us! Still, as with last year, many lessons were learned. Here they are in no particular order.

We Launched our Second Game!

First things first, we launched our second game on September 8, 2017. We had gotten a lot of interest in the months leading up to launch, but being this was a game that was only in development for all of 8 months, anything could go wrong. I wrote a much longer blog post comparing the launch of Political Animals with Academia, but the short version is Academia did much, much better than Political did. In fact it did well enough in the first month of sales to ensure that we could operate for at least one more year. That's a huge deal for us, because it ensure that we can keep the lights on for all of 2018 working exclusively on Academia : School Simulator.

Political Animals is Getting Recognition Despite Lack of Sales

As a small team, knowing where to devote our resources is a very important skill. It quickly became obvious that Political Animals was a sunk cost, and we needed to move on. So after a couple of character and language updates, we moved to work full time on Academia : School Simulator.

Despite it's financial failure, it has reaped recognition in other ways. It was awarded a 5 star review by Common Sense Education, the primary resource for teachers looking to integrate games into their teaching. Political Animals was also included as one of Common Sense Educations' Best of 2017 under the Social Studies category. We also did some local workshops using Political Animals as a way to discuss civics and politics with high school kids. So it's certainly paying a lot of karmic rewards and “good feels”.

Moving forward, we want to explore how to get Political Animals into schools by creating worksheets and workshops with teachers to better enable them to use the game in their classes. We're also going to pitch the talk to the Games For Change Conference in 2018 under the Civics track.

It's become very apparent to us that there is a good game buried underneath some bad presentation choices in Political Animals. I'm holding out hope that maybe next year we'll have the opportunity to dig into the game again and release a deluxe edition with new characters, play modes, and a proper tutorial, so that it can fulfill its destiny as a game.

An Evolving Company Structure

When we hired our programmer Don last year, it was a little unclear what his position was in the team. Was he a cofounder? An employee? Legally he was a contractor, but our small team and egalitarian nature meant that we made very little distinction between him and the core team. While that may generally be seen as a good thing, I do think that confusion partly led to his decision to leave the company to develop his own game, Shots Fired. I want to make it clear that we parted as friends, and we wish him the best with his game (go on and wishlist it!) but it did teach us that we needed to have more clarity when hiring people.

My previous work with Introversion has given me some insight into how they run as a company, and that has given me a model to work with. Essentially they have a core group of directors, and with the exception of one (or two?) employees, they hire out contractors as necessary. In fact, that's how they hired me for Prison Architect.

I like this model because in practical terms it allows us to be more flexible with how we operate. So apart from the core team, we can hire freelancers to help us out for short term tasks like art and social media, or contractors for the duration of the project. Contractors can also be offered bonuses based on their time with the project, and can share in the success (or failure!) of the game.

In a hit-based industry like games where there is little to no stability, having the right kind of structure can be vital to the survival of an indie studio.

What's Early Access Been Like?

Honestly? Not as bad as most developers think it is.  I think we have struck a good balance with Academia : School Simulator.  We have been as honest and forthright about what we can and cannot do, and our capabilities.  We've never overpromised, and the fact that we're constantly on the discussion boards and responding to emails when we have free time has built a sense of trust with our community, one which we are very serious about keeping.

It's been really great to get feedback from people, and for that reason alone Early Access has done tremendously for us.  It's still a bit of a balance managing player expectations for the game and the direction we want to take it in, but that's par for the course. The majority of our players have validated my belief that people who buy into Early Access games are mature and understanding of the process, as long as we are open with them.

What's happening in 2018

2017 started rough, and we ground it out, patiently working on Academia and posting updates and Youtube videos dutifully and crossing our fingers for launch. It turned out better than we could have hoped, and we're happy to say that we'll be working on Academia : School Simulator for the rest of 2018 and beyond. Prison Architect took 5 years to complete, and Rimworld is still chugging along and putting out updates with full release nowhere in sight.

2018 will definitely be very interesting. We're hiring two new contractors to help us speed up development. If all goes well, we have many plans that will make Academia an even better and more complete game within the next few months. We're hoping for a Mac release early in the year, and we're currently working on a language modding tool so that even more people around the world can start playing the game.

I'd like to thank everyone who has helped us make it this far, including everyone that bought into the game so early on and believed that we could make it awesome. We wouldn't be here without you!