Opening your indie game studio only one day a week may not be the most productive way to run things, but these days it comes with a clear advantage.
“You hear lot of talk about the ‘indie apocalypse.’ Well, we really don’t care about that, because we have a steady income,” says Peter Heil of Crimson Owl Studios. At this, co-worker Pascal van Beek laughs and adds: “I do care about it, because I do want to make a lot of money.”
“Well, we want to make Caromble! as big a success as possible,” Peter clarifies, “But we’re not dependent on any income or money, so we’ll continue living even if it fails.”
Caromble!, Crimson Owl’s first game and an updated take on the classic brick-breaker genre, has been six years in the making. It’s a simple game, but the Utrecht-based group of developers meets only one day a week to work on the game. The team recently made Caromble! available as an early-access game on Steam.
A Slow Burn’s Initial Spark
While not all of the developers have been with the studio for all six of those years, Crimson Owl’s current lineup consists of Peter, Pascal, Raymond Bijl, Thomas Duindam and artist Thomas Schmall. Peter, Pascal, Raymond and Thomas Bijl work on programming and level design. The developers work at least 32 hours a week at their other jobs in the (non-games) software field, but every Friday they get together to work on their indie game.
The one-day approach started early on in their career — or before their careers started, for some. Peter and Pascal studied together under a game and multimedia master’s program at Utrecht University. Peter says the program’s hours were pretty flexible, so they started skipping classes one day a week to start working on their own game engine.
“Pretty soon we realized that a game engine by itself is no fun at all,” Peter says. “You need to build actual games.”
At first, they set out to make complex games like zombie shooters involving motion capture, but they soon realized they needed to start out with something much simpler.
“We decided to make the simplest game we could think of,” Pascal says. “And that was a variation of Pong, or Breakout, in this case.”
Not long after the project started, they brought Schmall on board to provide the look of the game. They thought they’d finish in six months. Six years later, they both have successful careers in non-gaming software, and they’re working with other developers and artists who make a living outside of the games industry.
Working With Friends
The Crimson Owl developers go way back. Pascal says he’s known Duindam since they were both 13, and he met Peter a couple of years after that. They met Raymond while studying for their bachelor’s degrees.
“We thought it would be fun,” Pascal says. “What could be better than working with friends? Well, we came back on that for a while, because it’s very difficult to work as friends. It becomes serious, and all of a sudden because you know each other so well, you don’t keep your mouth shut and say everything you think.”
There’s also the danger of slipping the opposite direction and letting your friends get too distant, the developers say. Pascal feels that there was a period when they saw themselves more as colleagues than friends, and he regrets that. He’s says now he’s made more of an effort to greet his co-workers as friends, as well as spend time with them outside a professional setting.
Despite the potential difficulties, Pascal says, their long friendship is probably the reason they’re still working together on the project even after six years.
Missing Peak Indie
It goes without saying, but a lot in the games industry has changed in the past six years. Peter says people will often tell them the game would be great on iPad, but when they started work on the game (not to mention the engine), the iPad hadn’t been released, and there was fierce debate about whether a market for tablets was even viable.
Game engines have improved and come down in price to the point that if Crimson Owl had started work on Caromble! today, Peter says they probably wouldn’t build their own engine.
And since their incomes are independent from the outcome of the game, they’ve pushed forward with Caromble! for better or worse.
“If we were dependent on the money, we probably would have pulled the plug on it. We wouldn’t have pushed it as much as we have,” Pascal says. “In a way, it helps the game. But ideally, we would have published this game four years ago, when the indie market was still very open — it’s still open, but it wasn’t as guarded as it is now. We missed the peak.”
Advice for Once-a-Week Game Dev
Raymond says one of the rules they’ve made for themselves is to never commit code by yourself. Too often in the past, team members would want to work on the project only to find that the game was broken by something another member had done solo. Now they try to commit code, especially anything that could be game-breaking, on Friday mornings so they all know what changes were made and they can fix it together.
And even though they started out building the simplest game they could think of, more than half a decade of work underscores the lesson: Start small.
“Six years is a very long time to be doing a game,” Pascal says. “Learn to be as small as possible.”
Pascal says now that they have more experience and know what to expect, the development, marketing and other parts of their next game should go much more quickly.
Whether it does take less time or it ends up taking another half-decade, at least the Crimson Owl developers can fall back on their (other) day jobs.
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