Indeviews Episode 4: Sam & Seth Coster
Welcome to the fourth episode of Indeviews! This time we are joined by the brothers Sam and Seth Coster of the indie game studio Butterscotch Shenanigans!
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For those who don't know you, who are you and what do you do?
Sam & Seth: We’re brothers Seth and Sam Coster. We make ridiculous games about ridiculous things, like enraged 4 legged quadropi or monocles that fire blood-hungry animals. We founded Butterscotch Shenanigans, our indie studio, in St. Louis so we can devote our lives full-time to building absurd things and giving people great gaming experiences on their mobile devices.
Which game engines/game making tools do you use for your games? Did you build your own? If you have used different engines/game making tools, which one is your favorite and why?
Sam & Seth: We have used Game Maker: Studio and Unity3D primarily, though we’re sticking with GM:Studio for the time being. It’s extremely fast, doesn’t require us to use expensive plugins, and has built-in support for all kinds of monetization options like ads and in-app purchases, which will be crucial to our sustainability in the months and years to come. As far as we are concerned, it is the best tool for the job when it comes to 2D game development.
We have built a 2D game in Unity, but it took several hundred dollars worth of plug-ins to get Unity to be almost as capable as Game Maker with things like sprite management, and there was virtually nothing that we did in Unity that couldn’t have been done in Game Maker in one-fourth the time. Unity is great for 3D, but awkward for 2D.
Still, we don’t like to promote the fact that we use Game Maker. We have noticed an industry perception that Game Maker is an ineffective development platform, primarily for amateurs or people who can’t program. This couldn’t be further from the truth. But we realize that if we went out actively announcing that we use Game Maker, people would start to see how amazing of a tool it is, and we would have a lot more competition. So hey...let’s keep this between US.
Do you use the same development process for all of your games?
Sam & Seth: Yes.
We got our game development chops doing 48 hour game jams. Our development process is basically a long-form jam model. Since there are only two of us and we lived together for 20+ years as brothers, we know how to communicate and quarrel constructively. The feedback loop on our games from idea to implementation is both tiny and nearly frictionless.
We start with a core idea/theme and build out the first piece of the game, which is the basis of all the interaction the player will be doing within the gaming world. For example, in our upcoming game Quadropus Rampage, the primary mechanic involves nimbly maneuvering the character and stabbing enemies. Once we have the basic mechanic in place we spiral out from it, only including new mechanics that serve to enhance the original experience in interesting and fun ways. We iterate and iterate until the game is distilled down to only those things which serve the core mechanic, and then deepen the content from there.
Usually a few days/weeks into a game we discover a sort of core mantra for each game we’re working on. For Towelfight 2, this mantra was “One More Room.” Anything we added to the game had to increase that feeling, that need of discovery and challenge and curiosity.
Once all the systems are in and the mantra is thoroughly bolstered we spend a good deal of time juicing the game to make it really feel great to play, and look great, too. That means spending time tweaking menus, moving interface elements about for better thumb-love, or making the explosions more glorious.
Basically all of our design/juicing discussions end with the thought that we should probably add more explosions.
Oh, and then we contact Joe (Joe Fraioli), and he makes amazing music within 12 minutes. Everybody needs a Joe.
What programming language do you prefer developing your games on? Why do you choose it over others?
Sam & Seth: Since we use Game Maker: Studio, we do all of our work in GML (Game Maker Language). The language itself is very easy to use, although the Game Maker IDE isn’t very user-friendly. Still, the team at YoYoGames puts out patches virtually every other week, and it’s getting better all the time.
Do you use third party tools (map editors, sprite managers, animation suites etc) or you build your own?
Sam & Seth: Sam uses Inkscape to do all of the artwork for our games. It’s the open-source equivalent of Adobe Illustrator, and it gives us pretty fantastic results when used in conjunction with Game Maker. The one big downside is that we have to use frame-by-frame animation, since we’re in the 2D world, so it can get tedious when things get more complex.
If we get some downtime between games in the near future, Seth will be putting together a flexible skeleton rigging engine within Game Maker that should be a lot of fun to play around with, but that’s still on the drawing board.
Which tools and applications you usually use when developing a game (favorite IDE, text editor, do you use static analysis tools, revision control system etc)?
Sam & Seth: GameMaker Studio is our dev environment, and Inkscape is our arting tool. Aside from those that form the core of our content creation, we use BFXR for sound effects, as we don’t currently have the space for a sound guy, and git for our revision control system.
All you need is a free Dropbox account, a free Git account, free Inkscape, and a copy of Gamemaker Studio (plus the modules to port to iOS and Android) to be where we are from a tech perspective. Making games is cheaper than going out for a night if you take some time digging for the best value out there.
As far as video production goes, we use Cyberlink PowerDirector 11. It’s one of the cheapest full feature video editors around and has allowed us to make some pretty stellar trailers (Towelfight, Quadropus).
Is there any specific library, framework that you always use on your games?
Sam & Seth: We have a suite of Game Maker scripts that Seth has written over the past year and a half, many of which are generally applicable to most game development. So those scripts tend to drift from project to project as a package, which we guess you could call a library.
What is your computer setup? Do you use Mac or PC? What specs? Do you have a dual monitor setup?
Sam & Seth: We both develop in Windows 7 using dual-monitor setups, though we need to have a Mac handy for making iOS builds and dealing with the iTunes store. As far as specs go, just know that we have more RAM between our two computers than North Korea has within its entire nation.
Sam has the bad habit of making all of the artwork for a game live in the same Inkscape file. This works handily as an anti-theft tool as no other computer on the planet could open his files. Here’s a screencap of Towelfight 2... LITERALLY ALL OF IT.
Do you have any photos from your working environment & a screenshot of your typical development setup?
Sam & Seth: Guess which belongs to the artist and which to the programmer!
Which games inspired you the most? Do you have a favorite developer from the games industry (indie or not)?
Sam & Seth: We take inspiration from a huge number of games, though from a development perspective, just about any successful 2D indie game is inspirational to us. This includes pretty much anything from Team Meat, as well as Braid, Spelunky (which was originally made in Game Maker), and many others.
Any small team that has interesting ideas and can beautifully execute those ideas is a team that we admire.
What’s the single piece of advice that you would always give to someone, and what is something that you will absolutely avoid/never do again?
Sam & Seth: ADVICE: Spend a lot of time talking with other indie developers, potential players, and generally building up your social network. When you release your game, you need to have a large audience of people listening. Because if nobody knows about your game, you would have done just as well if you had never made it. Too many developers focus on the “building” of the game and ignore the “salesmanship” side of things; they hole up in their development cave for a year, crank out something cool, and when they emerge from hibernation, they’re alone in the forest. Whether we like it or not, we have to realize that game development is just as social an undertaking as it is a technical one.
We’ve taken the time to forge relationships with the startling number of devs in St. Louis, helped create a chapter of the IGDA here, and attend every local jam we can manage. In response we’ve gotten help with testing, media coverage, and had a number of insights that never would’ve surfaced if we were truly going it alone. “Independent” is a misnomer. Find and grow your tribe and they’ll do the same for you.
OH CRAP DON’T DO THIS:
Don’t release a paid game until you have a following.
We released Towelfight 2 a few weeks ago. We wanted to avoid IAP, ads, and the lot of it, and saw a lot of shouting about how IAP is evil and roughly the worst thing next to waking up with a horse’s head beside you. So we decided on selling our game as a “premium” title, at with the full game intact and no IAP or anything of the sort.
The thing we didn’t realize was that because we were an unknown developer, no one particularly cared about our paid game. We’ve only made back ¼ of the money TF2 required and have seen our sales figures drop precipitously. This is despite getting featured on Touch Arcade, PocketGamer, Kotaku, IGN, a variety of other news sites and even making the front page of the App Store. The vocal minority, which is the group that prefers to pay-up-front, convinced us to do something that, had we spent more time on our game, would’ve bankrupted our fledgling studio.
It’s important to be aware of your stance in the market before going to market. The latest statistics show that most mobile users simply prefer free-to-play games. As odd as it is, we both recognized after our miscalculated launch that the games we play most are in and of themselves free-to-play titles: Tribes and League of Legends (if you want to play with us give a shout on Twitter!). And we don’t feel violated by them in the slightest.
So we’ve undergone a paradigm shift. We hope that some indie dev about to release their beautiful game at a premium will take a moment to consider this failure of ours and perhaps avoid the same fate.
What is your opinion on the rise of free game development "suites" like Unity, UDK, CryEngine etc? Do you feel interested in using them for your next projects?
Sam & Seth: Without them, we never would have gotten into game development in the first place. They smooth out much of the process and are generally amazing for fledgling developers. Having said that, we are in the midst of a unique age of video game development, where the ease of development has caused supply to begin outstripping demand.
As players, we love that more and more games are being made all the time, because no matter what we enjoy, there’s something for us out there. But as businessmen, it’s a bit more difficult to be excited about the cornucopia of competition we face every day. Considering the hundreds of apps that hit the AppStore daily, having your game stand out amongst them, as well as securing media coverage for your games, becomes a job that very few developers can consistently manage. But at the end of the day, we are up to the challenge and are excited to continue diving face-first into it.
What are your future plans? What games are you working on right now?
Sam & Seth: We’re entering into rapid build mode. When we started Butterscotch Shenanigans we wanted to take our jam methodology and refine it to the point that we were making a quality mobile game every month or two. With Towelfight we got in a little too deep and accidentally picked a mechanic that relied too heavily on content and story in order to work, resulting in a 3-month development cycle.
We’re getting back to the spirit of our company. Our next game, Quadropus Rampage, the product of our 7 Day Roguelike jam, will be done in under a month and released shortly thereafter. We’re experimenting with a free-to-play model with IAP that doesn’t leave players feeling alienated and provides real value, rather than replacing things that should’ve been available in the first place.
Sam & Seth: We’re also looking forward to helping out other St. Louis devs like the Happy Badgers (who are doing a wonderful Kickstarter right now) and Third Party Ninja once we get some financial breathing room under us. Our dream is to provide a scholarship/housing option for new indie devs in the area so they can get the breathing room we’ve managed without having to damn near die of ramen deprivation in the process.
Thanks so much for this interview!
Sam & Seth: NO. Thank you!