How to make a video game with your spouse.

Ash and Rachel Blue, met in and dropped out of collage together . They started their own web design company, but soon had to move into the soul sucking corporate world. As he did when he was a kid, Ash spent his days, dreaming about making video games. Ash and Rachel used their free time scribbling pictures and filling up notebooks with vast new worlds, until they finally just decided to do it. Ash and Rachel left their jobs, and steady income, to start their own game company. They have been living their dream for a year now, collaborating on a game together with the people they care most about in the world: each other.

I just want to learn a little bit about you guys first. How did the two of you meet?

Ash: Long story short, I guess we technically met through collage. And then both dropped out of collage.

Rachel: My idea first. He copied me.

Laughter

R: And then we started a web design company.

A: Then we started a web design company, for a while, that was interesting.

So you have been working together for a while now.

A: Yeah. We started working together back when we were…. about 22?

R: That’s when we got married, when we were 22. We were working a little bit together, well yeah, we started working more together after we got married.

A: Its been just about 6 years that we've been together on stuff.

And when did you move from web design to games?

R: Its been a bit of a transition. I know when we were running a web design company, we were working on some little games that, were for the browser, but never got quite finished.

A: Well, yeah I mean, originally I have always had interest in games. I was always a gamer, ever since I can remember as a kid. But I think we really started delving into games almost by accident, because HTML 5 started getting really, really big, and it was like; We can actually build games in the web browser. Back then the only languages I really knew were HTML, Markup, CSS and Java Script. And I thought: “Oh! I can build games in Java Script!”. So I started going down the path with that. That was kind of a gateway drug into more advanced artificial intelligence programming and a lot of other subjects which there was suddenly quite a bit of information on about now. When I was younger I tried to get into game programming. But didn't really have any programming experience in the past and it was really, really difficult. Now it’s just become so much more accessible.

Were you not as much of a gamer Rachel?

R: I always liked the story side of games, but I’m definitely much more of a gamer now than I was 7 years ago. That is definitely a lot of Ash’s influence and think I can contribute a lot of it to Dragon Age.

A: Yeah, Dragon Age was definitely your gate way drug into games.

R: Yeah, when you gave me a copy of Dragon Age. And I was like, up till 3 am, eyes were red and almost fingers bleeding from clicking. “Must play. More Dragon Age! Must.”

So was it difficult to take the step form working at a web development company to going to be an independent game developer?

A: Yeah I would say the biggest difficulty was going from a pretty steady amount of money to absolutely nothing. It was quite a challenge, and that is still a challenge today, because we are not up on Steam Green Light and not up on Kickstarter yet. We are slowly getting there. We have a philosophy that if we are going to put something up online on one of these venues, we should have a demo. Especially going to Kickstarter. We feel very strongly about that. There is really no proof to people backing our game, that we can actually provide them with something. I kind of wish a lot of people who invested in games on Kickstarter would realize that unless there is a some sort of proof of concept, or an extreme amount of pre-production work, that is really producive of a game of idealistic magnitude and a small team. People should probably make sure that the team can produce it.

And that is what contributed to a lot of problems on Kickstarter recently. You know like the: “Oh, this game didn't get funded.” or “This didn't happen.” But that is just an IMO or my opinion.

Yeah that is a good philosophy. People seem to be realizing that they can’t trust everything they see on Kicksterter.

A: Yeah, which is sad. I wish it could be that way.

R: There is implicit trust in everything.

A: But the fact that people are investing in smaller video games, even if they don’t get off the ground or happen, is a really big deal because that changes how investors invest their money too. So even if there are negative things coming out of Kickstarter. There are a lot of positives.

R: Right, that, and not to mention that the funding through Kickstarter is as much about the awareness and marketing of it.

A: Yeah, the majority of people I've talked to use Kickstarter not necessarily for the money, usually more for the marketing they get.

Definitely. So how close are you to a Kickstarter and how is the development going.

Both laugh

A: It’s a fun question. This spring we had built an HTLM 5 demo. And HTML 5 is totally capable of supporting all the needs of the game and everything we wanted to do. But the problem was that in the process of building it, we were using a preexisting game engine and it didn't provide the more complicated AI algorithms and path-finding technology we needed. It was simply not available in HTML 5. Which was really depressing, HTML5 is capable of doing everything that big games are doing. The problem is that the tool sets just aren't available. If you wanted to do behavior trees, which is a little bit difficult to create unless you want to roll it yourself on your own. If you want to do a dialogue system, you are going to have to write up a lot of extra code and probably pull in some third party program to do that. So being primarily a team of us, and some other people that have come on to the project after, it just wasn't capable of supporting what we needed. But we moved over to Unity and have actually been able to get pretty much everything up to speed and then some.

R: We also tuned some of the visual stuff.

A: Oh yeah. We are really happy with Unity. A lot of the stuff we would have had to do from scratch, we have been able to get from the Unity Asset Store. Picking up a behavior-tree plug-in, or a finite state machine system. Those would normally take weeks, or at least a month, to roll each one from scratch.

So back to your question of how far we are away from Kickstarter, our plan is to release a demo, I’m hoping, by the end of this quarter, and to have a closed Alpha out. Everything works. Almost all the game components are in the game, other than the user interface, and that is because we are waiting for Unity 4.6.

R: Really hoping that comes out soon.

A: Yeah, we may just move over to NGUI. We are talking about possibly moving over to that. But we really would love to use Unity’s new built in system so we are trying to hold off as much as we can, and get everything else ready before we do that.

R: We are waiting until the last minute possible until we can’t wait any longer before —

A: — yeah, moving over to a third party plugin.

So, hopefully around Christmas we’ll have a closed Alpha out. Ideally we want to get to Kickstarter either at the time of GDC this year [in the beginning of March] or shortly there after. We have a staggered release for the demo. Because what will happen is that the demo will come out, as a closed Alpha. We’ll get feedback from that which we are then going to implement and then release the new demo publicly. Then we have two other smaller chunks of content that happen before and after, that we want to add to it. Then the goal is to get to Kickstarter.

R: So we have a big key product demo and then the actual demo that we had in mind. We’ll hopefully add the extra content to get to that point.

So is it just the two of you working on the game?

A: Well, my best friend from collage, Christopher Davis, who has had a good chunk of professional writing experiences in the past, has come on to help us. Currently for lore in the game. We have over a hundred entries. With a time span that spans a 100.000 years of history in the game.

Laughs

R: Most of it is: “In the span of these 1000 years, this happened in the story”

A: There is a lot of back story.

R: Back story, history, detailed lore of items. That we’ll have to implement into the game.

A: We are trying to take more of a Dark Souls approach. There is a lot of lore in the game, so what we have been doing is that we have invested a lot of time writing everything down and creating a lot of the back story. Our plan is, so we don’t make the game super text heavy, is to put it in the items themselves. Most of the lore that is, as there will be some audible dialogue. We have voice actor set up for that

R: Yeah, a really awesome, deep rough voice type of thing. I’m very excited.

A: Yeah, for the narrator of the story. For individual characters talking, we actually just have simple text based, choice system. That also brings in some interesting things that we are trying to solve. Users don’t want to read too much text, so how do we present it in a succinct manner where each little bit of text you get is small and easily edible. Writing good dialogue like that for game does just not come naturally.

R: Especially writing in such a small amount of space and you are just: “That sounds really cheesy.”

So how long have you been working on this world, before even starting on developing the game?

A: That’s a good question. We talked about the game last year in August I think.

R: August or September. Yeah, it’s been about a year.

A: It was a couple of months before we started production of the game. Originally we talked about doing it just as a story. After talking a lot we thought it would actually make a better game than it would a story. Rachel came up with the original idea, not me.

R: I drew a little dragon who wanted to become a knight, we thought it would have been a really short story, but this would be a great game. It’s a lot better story now, it’s changed and evolved but the primary characters remain the same.

A: And the primary character progression is pretty similar.

R: Pretty similar.

It seems to be a pretty ambitious game. Can you tell me about all the different systems, and the story and the main idea of the game.

A: I can go into that.

R: Definitely, you know more how the systems weave together.

A: The major core arching mechanics of the game is that there is a companion system. We wanted to make a 2D game where you had kind of a Metroidvania style play through. Similar to Castlevania or Super Metroid but at the same time have a companion system involved in it. As you play the game, you can check out one, two companions at a time. And the companions actually contribute to the Metroidvania mechanic: there are specific doors, that only certain companions can open. We want to do equipping of abilities but I’m probably talking ahead of myself now. We’ll definitely have a core ability set for each companion though. But also at the same time, one of the big things we want to rely on is that the game focuses on a bigger group of people. Coming together as a community to rely on your companions abilities. As you work with the companions they will actually evolve at certain points in the game, as there is a small time skip, of about 10 years that occurs. Once the time skip actually happens, characters will go down one of two different paths, and I think we’re now looking at about 7 different companions and each of them will evolve. All the character you meet before the time skip will change. We have worked out the mechanics for that, so there is a back end system. As things stand right now, each character has a mini quest that you accomplice and that affects that. We might do a point system. We are still experimenting a bit as to what works best for game play with that. But its fun because we have these two different paths. The character we always talk about to explain that, is a little girl called Fran. You meet her and depending on how you treat her, and your actions in front of her, she will actually become a collage professor at a school for gifted children, kind of like professor Xavier, or she will end up becoming a gang lord that takes over the chunk of the city.

R: Either way she’s pretty bad ass.

Laughter

A: There are two different paths but it’s kind of the same character, but two different players. We are trying to experiment with making things not so black and white. We don’t want you to just get a good companion or an evil companion.

R: Their skill sets are different. It’s not so much: ‘Oh I’m BAD!’ It’s more that their world view is a little —

A: — their world view has changed. Or their philosophy of life. And their costume design is different.

R: YEAH!

A: We actually had another artist that came on to work with us for a little bit. Because we have so much artwork.

R: Yeah. She wanted to work on some of our stuff and it all worked out.

A: As for other game mechanics, we originally wanted to do an insane amount of weapon customization on the game. We ended up moving back a little bit on that. We now kind of have gone more of a Dark Souls route, again back to that game. So it’s customization but kind of done by craft. You get a weapon and can upgrade it a couple of tiers. There will be different components for each weapon, but because of limitations we are probably only going to have three or four weapon variations. The only one set in stone right now is the sword that you start with. We are hoping to do some other things. Most of that came out of user requests. We were originally just going to do the sword but we had a lot of people who emailed us, requesting weapon variations.

R I don’t know if we’ll get to the nun-chucks.

Is the division of work between you two mainly through programming and art?

R: Yeah, but there is some overlap in inputting things into Unity. I’m able to go and say: “Oh hey I got that stuff done.” And I’m getting a little better at it.

A: Rachel does a little bit of programming. I do most of the heavy lifting, but mostly my job is to build tools that she and the writer can use. All three of us write. Chris and I are the two primary writers on the project. Rachel does editing.

R: Yeah and more of the overall direction.

A: I do most of the game design documentation and game mechanics. The artwork for this game is an insane amount of stuff and I know that it mostly keeps Rachel —

R: — pretty busy. What starts out as a simple little door turns out to be, not that simple of a door. It’s a really cool door. It was worth it.

A: Yeah we have been spending a lot of time on the doors that the individual companions can open. I think we have three or four door types. We have been trying to make them more rewarding so that when they open up, or crack open, that they can be more fun than just opening up to new areas.

How difficult is it to work with your spouse? I’m not sure I would actually be able to work with my wife.

R: I find it easier to work with you than anyone else.

A: I would rather not work with anyone else in all honesty.

R: He is my first pick.

A: Also in the past we have built a lot together. Working on the game, of course we fight a little here or there.

R: Well we have some difference of opinions.

A: Yeah, we are not a super couple, or anything like that, where everything is perfect. But I've worked a lot in the corporate world personally, and I find it soul sucking. I don’t know if you have ever worked at a big dev company or a place of cubicles and offices, but working there just makes me want to kill myself for the most of it. It is horrible. I guess it depends, I’m sure there are good companies out there, but I've worked with several at this point in my life, and there are only a few that I worked at that are decent. There was one place I worked with that was pretty good, but there were a lot of other internal problems.

We definitely like working together. Everything that we have run into problem wise, we've been able to overcome. And we do work a lot. We work 60 hours a week on the game. We try to keep things around 40 but that rarely happens because of deadlines and trying to keep things on schedule.

Do you work from home or do you have an office.

A: The mess behind us, which we just moved into —

R: — Is our new office!

Laughter

R: Work life balance is a little… interesting. I don’t know. I really like this. I’d rather have my work, when I’m this passionate about it, fully integrated with my home life than try and separate it. The thing is that if you have a crummy job, you don’t care about it. But when you do care about it, you want to bring it home.

A: That’s true.

Are your families supportive of your independent work?

A: My family doesn't really get it. They are like: “What are you doing exactly?” “I’m making a video game!” “Does that make money?”

R: They are always like: “Is it done yet?” Well… it can take 5 years, just wait.

A: I think most people think that game development is that you go out and make some thing for a couple of months. I don’t think most people realize how long it can take depending on what game we are making . It could take us a few months to make a small game and it could be really successful, but when you are making something that is a large scale RPG, with it’s own universe —

R: — and story line —

A: — that is all mechanics and you are trying to do something that is a little bit original… They don’t really understand the kind of scope that something like that can take. 3- 5 years. I know a guy that worked on Dust: Elysium Tales. A game that we talk about a lot and is a big inspiration for our project.

R: Oh yeah.

A: He spent at least 3 years working on the game.

R: To be fair though, my brother who is a gamer, is very, very, supportive. I think he understands, and is always “Come on, you can do it!”. So there is that.

There are a lot of game companies in San Francisco, but how is the indie community?

A: We’re not super duper involved, but we actually run the HTML 5 San Francisco Games/Art meetup.

R: Well it’s not HTML anymore.

A: Yeah. The Game/Arts meet up. We used to run HTML 5 Game Developer meetup, which I started. While people were showing up to that, there were more people showing up to the game artists meetup that Rachel started. So I shut down my meet up and joined her to help growing things.

R: We are co-organizers now.

A: We've found at that, every time about 20 people show up. The interesting thing is that even though there are a lot of game companies out here a lot of them are very close knit community. So it can be hard to get involved with them sometimes. A lot of it is that they work at a specific space, where they all get together. We spend a lot of time with the Game Dev Study Group. It is run by two friends of ours that worked on Lost Toys, which is an award winning mobile game. They've done a really good job of organizing people on the development side of things.

R: They get a lot of cool devs and game designers to talk, and we have found that a lot of people are using Unity like us.

A: While the devs are pretty organized we have found that artists are really fragmented for games in the Bay area. The majority of people that I have met out here have trouble being employed long term, so a lot of them are contract to contract. They move cities a lot. There is definitely a real forest of people who are artists out here. We formed the group to help people get together more.

R: Not just game artist, because there weren't any meetups for any digital art really. It was all about getting your sketchbook and go to this coffee shop where you can’t bring your laptop

It’s an interesting kind of sad dynamic. You can be really talented, but not get any work. I know someone that worked at EA, people on big triple A titles on concept art.

A: Call of Duty

R Yeah, a girl had worked on Call of Duty and I was like “Your stuff is amazing.” But she said “Yeah, I’m looking for work.” I just thought how, how are you looking for work. But, it happens.

A: A lot of the people I've talked to recently have been going to start their own game projects.

R: Which is really exciting.

A: Yeah. Good for them.

I say: good for you Ash and Rachel. Thanks for being an inspiration and starting your own game project. I took this interview, and present it here as a Q and A, as my fifth project for Games Journalism Class. Check out their game at http://playadnc.com/#home