This time, Pig-Min did an e-mail interview with Sean O'Connor, who made [Slay] & many other small but intersting games.
His
games & history are far different from than other Indie game
industry. So it could be interesting to read his interview here. Take a
big breath & ready to read a long & important answers.
Very simple, but most addictive game all over the game scene.
1. You are very 'Unique' even in
Indie Game scenes all over the world. But even if I see 'History of the
Games' & 'About Sean O'Connor', it's hard to get idea who you are
exactly, all we could know is very limited. Please introduce yourself
& your work briefly.
I've always been very passionate about inventing
board games and personal computers happened at just the right time for me, when I
was still at junior school. I found computer programming came naturally to me
(first in Basic and then in Assembly code) and it was a great way to make games
that I invented come alive rather than just being a passive set of rules.
I
wrote games all through my time at school on the computers I owned: a Video
Genie (a TRS80 compatible machine), an Acorn Electron and then an Atari ST. I
had a couple of games published on magazines, but I kept finding that just as I
had mastered one computer, the next generation of home computers would come out,
and I would be back to square one.
Looking back I'm not sure why I never got a
regular job as a computer games programmer, but hearing about the stress of
meeting deadlines, and the hours those guys have to put in makes me thing that
maybe I had a lucky escape!
2. [Slay] is released in 1995 for the
first time, and you had more money with that game than you can earn
with Network Managaer Job, so became Self-Employ condition until 1999.
You live in UK, and living fair might be much higher than other
countries, so we could assume you got real high fortune with [Slay] in
1995! It might be real big fortune at then, as I assume. Could you
please let us know brief information about that?
I never made a
fortune from [Slay], but it was making just a bit more than my regular job, so I
thought it was worth the risk of quitting full time employment and having a go
at writing similar games full time. Maybe if I lived somewhere where the cost of
living wasn't quite so high as the UK, it would have been a really good sum of
money though. At that time I didn't have a house, wife or kids, so as long as I
had enough money to pay the rent and buy food I was happy. I think my friends
were very jealous, though when they had to go their 9 to 5 jobs and I stayed at
home working on my own projects.
3. After 2001, we remember some
'Indie Success' story, as Popcap of [Bejeweled] & Introversion of
[Darwinia]. But your Indie success [Slay] is far earlier than them. Of
course, there were some 'Indie Success' stories even in 1990's, however
they became 'Much Bigger' company, as ID soft of [Doom]. You were 1 man
army from the first time, and even until now. There are some other 1
man army (or few men army) in Indie scenes recently, but can't remember
any of them in 1990's. Could you please let us know some Episodes about
that, especially for 1990's?
To be honest I hardly ever play any
computer games!
I played [Wolfenstein] and then [Doom] a lot though, but John
Carmack who wrote the 3D engine for them must have been a technical genius, and
way beyond anything I'd attempt to do, so he absolutely deserved all the success
he got.
I liked the simplicity of Richard Carr's DOS game [Capture The Flag], and
that's why I wanted to do my own version of it on Windows. Maybe other people's
games frustrate me as I keep finding myself thinking that's not the way I would
do it if I had written it.
4. You had made many games. Not only for
[Slay], but also for [Conquest] - [Firefight] - ... etc., total 10
games. But as I think, you'd rather 'Update Older Games' than 'Make New
Games'. Your latest game was [End of Atlantis], and it's done at 2005.
Any reason about that, to update older games again & again, not
make new games? ([Capture the Flag] is the latest in 2007. Sep., but
it's still on Beta, so I didn't write about it.)
A problem is
that each game you write gets its own group of fans, who come up with new ideas
(or find bugs!) that as the author you want to deal with. So, as you get a
bigger collection of games, it becomes harder and harder to find free time to
work on something brand new.
The other problem is that each new game that you
want to do gets more and more ambitious than the last ones, so the number of
hours needed to complete the next project can grow.
Having said that
though, since [End Of Atlantis] I have written [Niggle] which I really wrote for my
father in law, as it's his favourite card game. And we had just bought him a
computer, so it was something for him to help learn about computers on.
I've also
just finished [Capture The Flag] which I wrote to get some experience with
isometric graphics and create a fast enough graphics engine for that so I could
write some real-time isometric games.
5. You are making games not
only for Windows PC, but also for Pocket PCs / Palms / Symbian UIQ.
These handheld machines might be very different from Laptop PC market,
as I assume. Could you please let us know about that, as Selling Scores
/ Buyer's Feedback / Interface / ... etc? And did you get any contract,
to make [Slay] for NDS / PSP (or even XBLA)?
I converted a few
of my games ([Slay], [Conquest] and [The General]) onto Pocket PCs, because I found
that programming Pocket PCs was almost identical to programming Windows, so there
was very little work involved in porting them.
I've no experience myself in
programming on Palms or for Symbian, and those two ports were done by friends of
mine who really liked playing [Slay] and wanted a version on their own favourite
handheld device.
I think the market for games on these devices is so much
smaller than Windows PCs though, and I make nearly 90% of my sales on the Windows
versions.
[Slay] might be a perfect game for Nintendo DSes though, but the
overhead in learning to program on a new device would be so high that it would
be a big risk to do conversion to them.
6. Your games are 20$ for 1
copy, but you do 'Bundle' a lot, as 10 Window games as 40$. It's real
big 'Bundle', so your customers might be very interested in them. Does
'Bundle' really works well in sales, or both of 20$ selling / 40$
selling works well? If you don't mind, please let us know brief idea
about that.
Naturally I try and persuade as many people as possible to
buy the $40 bundle! But, most people just want the individual game that they've
seen and want to buy.
I'm always happy for people to "upgrade" at a later date
if they have bought one game and they now want to buy the whole set
though.
7. Do you have any future plan for New games? If so, please
let us know about that. (Maybe [Capture the Flag]? And more?)
I
really want to use the isometric graphics routines I've worked out to make some
real-time games.
I
thought that [Odyssey Winds Of Athena]http://www.liquiddragon.com/odyssey.php
was technically amazing but again the gameplay got a bit repetitive. Maybe if
the game had been more of a strategy game where you intercede as a god to help
your fleet to defeat the Persian fleet it would have been more my sort of
game.
9. Did you try some Korean games, or even heard or experienced
about them? If so, please share your thoughts about
that.
Unfortunately no. As I play so few other games that's not
surprising I guess though!
10. Please leave some message for Pig-Min
readers
Thanks very much for reading this and I really hope that my games
are your sort of thing.