On my most recent developer stream, I dove into the not-so-simple process of preparing my PC-based game jam entry, Cat Trick, for release as a mobile title. There were lots of technical things discussed, but I think the most interesting and insightful segment of the stream was the last part, where we discussed how a lot of design and format decisions depend on the clarity of my goals for what I want out of this game. I recently went over my decisions with my teammate, Will, and since we were in agreement in all of them, I decided to walk through my entire decision-making process here.

(That stream segment is here, if you are down to watch). Here’s a short recap.

I thought I would follow up to that discussion with the answers to my goal questions and the subsequent decisions made. First up, some of the actual game-related questions I had to answer were:

• Do I need to care about performance on bad phones?
• Do I need to put in leaderboards?
• Should I redo the cat movement?
• What engine should I use?
• How should I approach monetization?

But to answer those, I needed to answer some bigger, more goal-oriented questions first. They were:

• Why am I a making this game?
• For whom am I making this game?
• What does success look like?
• What do I want to get out of this process?
• How quickly do I want to finish?

Even figuring out how to tackle these questions put my mind in a tangle. The answer to one might inform the answer to another, which cascades down into a list of design decisions. For me, I decided to jump on the most practical and tangible one first.

How Quickly do I Want to Finish this Game?

While I could wrestle with my vision of the bigger questions of why I’m even bothering to do this, the reality is that I’m on a fixed timeline here. I only have so much money left to do indie things and I’ve chosen to spend my time doing that rather than jumping into another job. Because of this, time and budget became the leading factors.

I don’t want to be working on this game beyond the end of the year. Taking into account how many *actual* days I have to work on it (I work on Hyperlight Drifter 3 days a week, Sundays are no-work, then 3 days for streaming and my own projects). I’m still working on Imaginal, which even after I release it I’ll still want to be doing the installation version. There are other projects I still want to grapple, like my eyetracker game, and a gamejam or two in that timeframe. November is a wash because I will be traveling. Events pop up. I give it a conservative estimate of 20 working days that I can devote to this project.

Okay, great, I have a timeline that I have to stick to. What other decisions does this one inform?

Engine:
No way I can learn a new engine with this constraint. This locks me into using Construct 2 and removes “use this as an opportunity to learn a new engine” from a potential answer to “What do I want to get out of this process?’

Monetization:
From in-app purchases to buy hats for the cats to devising a currency based economy that you could circumvent by watching ads, that stuff takes a lot of time that I now do not have. Options now include “throw a pricetag on it,” “make it free,” and “sell a license” as a maybe on there, but I need more information before I can make a call on this.

Leaderboards:
Time is of the essence, so I this eliminates the more time-intensive option of “make leaderboards for all platforms.” My options now are, “no leaderboards,” “leaderboards on ios only” (due to ease of game center integration), and the on the fence “tweeting scores” option.

Alright, what does my question list look like now?

Game decisions:

• Do I need to care about performance on bad phones?
• Do I need to put in leaderboards?
  • none, iOS only, score-tweeting
• Should I redo the cat movement?
• What engine should I use?
  • Construct 2
• How should I approach monetization?
  • Premium, free,  or license (no fancy schemes)

Goal Decisions:

• Why am I a making this game?
• For whom am I making this game?
• What does success look like?
• What do I want to get out of this process?
• How quickly do I want to finish?
  • no later than January. ~20 working days.

At this point it would be logical to jump back to my goal decisions, pick another question to answer, and go from there. However, my intuition pushed me to focus on one of the game decisions that I thought might inform several of the goals at once, so I went with that. Let’s talk about…

Monetization

I now have 3 options for how to release this game. The simplest possible would be “throw a pricetag on it.” Releasing it for free is also simple but introduces the question of ads. The licensing thing is not necessarily simple, but intrigued me because it was an option I had not considered before someone suggested it in the stream (the market in which you can license your game out for a bigger company to buy, clean up, and then release).

So if we were *just* leaning on the first goal of being finished in as little time and with as little mental energy as possible, premium would be the obvious choice. But before I pick, there are other goals that might steer this another way.

For Whom am I Making this Game:
When I made Cat Trick for the game jam, it delighted me to see how much my cat-owning friends enjoyed it, but I had even more delight when someone told me how their kid had loved it. I want my little cousins to be able to play this. If I make it premium, I could probably get my friends to buy it, and they could get their friends to buy it, but there’s a barrier for kids to be able to play it. Free might be the best option to reach the audience that I want.

What does success look like:
Always a hard question. Making money for your games is always desirable, and I don’t want to devalue my work, but the market is so brutal for mobile that I feel it would be unrealistic to plan to make any substantial money off of this with the time I am willing to put into it. Success for me, then, is getting through the pipeline and having something on the store that my cat-loving, primarily-mobile-using family could go and get and play. Premium could do that, and free could do that even more easily.

Okay, so free is looking good for my purposes. What about ads? That’s still work, getting that all integrated. Is it worth the effort? Darius Kazemi had a hilarious talk at XOXO last year, where his argument is to put out a lot of things with little effort, and if something catches, be able to leverage it. But not to waste time beating your brains out on a business model for something that isn’t going to catch. One suggestion was to just release it for free and if lightning strikes and it takes off, put an ad in there, but not to waste the time doing up front. Could this be done tactfully?

What do I want to get out of this process:
“Learn a new engine” having been removed here, there are still some other things I want to get out of it. I want to experience the pipeline of releasing a mobile game, partially because that process has seemed so repulsive to me that I feel I must do it to overcome and learn. This would shove out the idea of licensing the game, as the whole point of that path is to not have to do the actual releasing yourself. That whole world is intriguing, though, and one I am not familiar with, and there certainly would be a ripe path of learning opportunity for investigating it. But at the end of the day, it would be avoiding the process which so repulses me and which I feel the need to get over, so the licensing option is out.

Let’s see what the list looks like now:

Game decisions:

• Do I need to care about performance on bad phones?
• Do I need to put in leaderboards?
  • none, iOS only, score-tweeting
• Should I redo the cat movement?
• What engine should I use?
  • Construct 2
• How should I approach monetization?
  • Premium
  • Free (potentially with place for an ad)
  • Licensing

Goal Decisions:

• Why am I a making this game?
• For whom am I making this game?
  • I want kids to be able to play it
• What does success look like?
  • Having a game released that lots of people can easily play
• What do I want to get out of this process?
  • To personally go through the pipeline of releasing a mobile game
• How quickly do I want to finish?
  • no later than January. ~20 working days.

Wow, that loop answered a lot of the big questions! There’s only a few remaining big questions to tie up, and fortunately they are all related, so let’s wrap them up.

Wrapping up loose ends

We touched a bit on leaderboards when thinking about time investment, so let’s revisit now that we’ve made some more.

No leaderboards would still be the easiest to implement, or not-implement. It would also be the easiest way to achieve consistency across platforms. Now that I have decided that the game will be free, however, I have a new understanding of the expectations that will be out there for this game. If implementing leaderboards via gamecenter is trivial, but the thing stopping me would be my desire for platform consistency, then at this point I’m more comfortable letting that go. Score tweeting would need research to figure out how it fit in with my time table. So, for the time being, let’s say I’ll look into score tweeting and game center integration.

In line with the differing expectations between free games and premium games, I can now take a look at performance. Making a mobile game can be tricky when you always have to take into account the lowest performance device out there. The easiest approach to performance is the attitude of “alas, the game may just run badly on bad phones.” Expectations-wise, a free game that doesn’t run great on an old crappy phone is no big loss, compared to a premium game that you paid for up front and doesn’t work on your device.

So, without spending loads of time on performance optimization for the last powerful phone, does that affect leaderboards in any way? Well, yes, a little bit. Now that I’ve decided on leaderboards, there is an element of a fair playing field existing that I have to take into account.

Currently the cat’s motion is purely based on physics, impulsing him around through the air for flips and bouncing. This means that the ways the cat moves will be inconsistent across different devices, ESPECIALLY devices with very different performance capabilities. Since I’ve decided not to sink a ton of time into performance, but since I HAVE decided that leaderboards will be a thing, this informs the last decision on my plate: that I WILL have to redo how the cat movement works, so that it will be more intentional and consistent.

This takes a hit to my “how much time to put into this game” goal, but redoing how energy and pouncing and scoring works are all things that I’ll need to do, so it’ll wrap up in the expected workload. Plus, Jakub Koziol said he’d help me with figuring out the best approach to movement (Jakub did the rope in Cat Trick, which does not use any physics at all).

Wait! Is that all of them? Have I addressed all the hard decisions that remain? Let’s check!

Game decisions:

• Do I need to care about performance on bad phones?
  • No. Since it will be free, expectations are a little different
• Do I need to put in leaderboards?
  • iOS only and potentially score tweeting (need research)
• Should I redo the cat movement?
  • Yes, now that there are leaderboards, his movement needs to be more predictable and consistent across devices
• What engine should I use?
  • Construct 2
• How should I approach monetization?
  • Premium
  • Free (potentially with place for an ad)
  • Licensing

Goal Decisions:

• Why am I a making this game?
• For whom am I making this game?
  • I want kids to be able to play it
• What does success look like?
  • Having a game released that lots of people can easily play
• What do I want to get out of this process?
  • To personally go through the pipeline of releasing a mobile game
• How quickly do I want to finish?
  • no later than January. ~20 working days.

YES! I think that’s it, I….oh wait. Wait there’s that one last one. The hardest one.

Why am I Making this Game?

SIGH. You guys, this question can be so hard. Afterall, the easiest, lowest-impact process to my life would be to NOT make this game. It’s already released in game jam form! People can play it there! Why bother? No really, why am I bothering?

Sometimes I am tempted to say “listen, I make games because it’s kiiiind of like a medical condition? It can’t be helped.” This is a cop-out, though.

So, for this question in particular, it is important to always know the answer to the base question: Why do I make games? For me, I make games because I love people. I actually answered an ask.fm question on this topic ages ago which I still occasionally refer to, because I feel that it is so important. I love people, and I love to be able to play with people indirectly through these little artifacts. This game is extremely playful, possibly the most playful thing I’ve ever made, of COURSE I have to get it into more people’s hands.

The point here is that I rolled all over in distress trying to figure out “why am I making this game?” But the moment I fell back on my internalized answer to “why I make games,” the more specific answer was immediately obvious, and there is no more rolling and stressing.

You need to know your answer to that question, and have it ready at all times. It is important.

Conclusion

I now know everything I need to launch into production on getting Cat Trick mobile-ready. I’m making a free game because I want kids to play this, and I want to make it easy for lots of folks to play. I’m making the potential for ads on the off-chance of success without the work up front because I need to finish this this year and am trying to make it as efficiently as possible. I’m using Construct 2 because I know it well and time is of the essence. In making this I hope to push through my aversion to the mobile release process and learn something about the pipeline. I’m putting in the simplest solution for leaderboards that I can and as a result, have to rework the core movement in the game.

I’m making this game on mobile at all, versus just leaving it as a PC game jam entry, because I love people so much, and the game is so playful that I HAVE to get it out on something where more hands can reach it.

I know this was a long, wandering read, and I am grateful if you’ve made it this far. I don’t know if looking into step-by-step decision making will yield any insights, but I do know that these questions – questions about your goals – can be difficult. Maybe seeing me struggle through them will help someone else.