Time flies. The gaming and internet institution known as the Grumpy Gamer Blog has been around for just over ten years.

My first story was posted in May of 2004. Two thousand and four. I’ll let that date sink in. Ten years.

The old Grumpy Gamer website was feeling “long in the tooth” and it was starting to bug me that Grumpy Gamer was still using a CRT monitor. He should have been using a flat screen, or more likely, just a mobile phone, or maybe those Google smart contact lens. He would not have been using an Oculus Rift. Don’t get me started.

I coded the original Grumpy Gamer from scratch and it was old and fragile and I dreaded every time I had to make a small change or wanted to add a feature.

A week ago I had an the odd idea of doing a Commodore 64 theme for the entire site, so I began anew. I could have used some off-the-shelf blogging tool or code base, but where’s the fun in that. Born to program.

I’m slowly moving all the old articles over. I started with the ones with the most traffic and am working my way down. I fundamentally changed the markup format, so I can’t just import everything. Plus, there is a lot of crap that doesn’t want to be imported. I still need to decide if I’m going to import all the comments. There are a crap-ton of them.

I’d also like to find a different C64 font. This one has kerning, but it lacks unicode characters, neither of which are truly “authentic”, but, yeah, who cares.

But the honest truth is…

I’ve been in this creative funk since Scurvy Scallywags Android shipped and I find myself meandering from quick prototype to quick prototype. I’ll work on something for a few days and then abandon it because it’s pointless crap. I think I’m up to eight so far.

The most interesting prototype is about being lost in a cavern/cave/dungeon. The environment programmatically builds itself as you explore. There is no entrance and no exit. It is an exercise in the frustration of being lost. You can never find your way out. You just wander and the swearing gets worse and worse as you slowly give up all hope.

I have no sense of direction, so in some ways, maybe it was a little personal in the way I suppose art should be.

I worked on the game for about a week then gave up. Maybe the game was more about being lost than I thought.

Rebuilding Grumpy Gamer was a way to get my brain going again. It was a project with focus and an end. As the saying goes: Just ship something. So I did.

The other saying is: “The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before.”

Create and all will follow. Something to always keep in mind.

This has always bugged me. Now that I’ve pointed it out, it’s going to bug you too.

What makes a developer “indie”?

I’m not going to answer that question, instead, I’m just going to ask a lot more questions, mostly because I’m irritated and asking questions rather than answering them irritates people and as the saying goes: irritation makes great bedfellows.

What irritates me is this almost “snobbery” that seems to exist in some dev circles about what an “indie” is. I hear devs who call themselves “indie” roll their eyes at other devs who call themselves “indie” because they “clearly they aren’t indie”.

So what makes an indie developer “indie”? Let’s look at the word.

The word “indie” comes from (I assume) the word “independent”. I guess the first question we have to ask is: independent from what? I think most people would say “publishers”.

Yet, I know of several devs who proudly call themselves “indie” when they are taking money from publishers (and big publishers at that) and other devs that would sneer at a dev taking publisher money and calling themselves “indie”.

What about taking money from investors? If you take money are you not “indie”? What about money from friends or family? Or does it have to be VCs for you to lose “indie” status?

What about Kickstarter? I guess it’s OK for indies to take money from Kickstarter. But are you really “independent”? 3,000 backers who now feel a sense of entitlement might disagree. Devs who feel an intense sense of pressure from backers might also disagree.

Does being “indie” mean your idea is independent from mainstream thinking? Is being an “indie developer” just the new Punk Rock.

Does the type of game you’re making define you as “indie”? If a dev is making a metrics driven F2P game, but they are doing it independent of a publisher, does that mean they are not “indie”?

This is one of the biggest areas I see “indie” snobbery kick in. Snobby “indie” devs will look at an idea and proclaim it “not indie”.

Do “indie” games have to be quirky and weird? Do “indie” games have to be about the “art”.

What about the dev? Does that matter? Someone once told me I was not “indie” because I have an established name, despite the fact that the games I’m currently working on have taken no money from investors or publishers and are made by three people.

What if the game is hugely successful and makes a ton of money? Does that make it not “indie” anymore? Is being “indie” about being scrappy and clawing your way from nothing? Once you have success, are you no longer “indie”? Is it like being an “indie band” where once they gain success, they are looked down on by the fans? Does success mean selling-out? Does selling-out revoke your “indie dev” card?

What if the “indie” developer already has lots of money? Does having millions of dollars make them not “indie”? What if they made the money before they went “indie” or even before they started making games or if they have a rich (dead) aunt? Does “indie” mean you have to starve?

Is it OK for an “indie” to hire top notch marketing and PR people? Or do “indies” have to scrape everything together themselves and use the grassroot network?

Or does “indie” just mean you’re not owned by a publisher? How big of a publisher? It’s easy to be a publisher these days, most indies who put their games up on Steam are “publishers”. The definition of a publisher is that you’re publishing the game and the goal of a lot of studios is to “self-publish”.

Or does being “indie” just mean you came up with the idea? The Cave was funded and published by SEGA, so was it an “indie” title? SEGA didn’t come up with the idea and exerted no creative control, so does that make it an “indie” title?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions (and maybe there aren’t any), but it irritates me that some devs (or fans) look down on devs because they are not “indie” or not “indie enough”.

Or is being “indie” just another marketing term? Maybe that’s all it means anymore. It’s just part of the PR plan.

More scans from the Monkey Island Design Notebook. I’m glad I kept these notebooks, it’s a good reminder of how ideas don’t come out fully formed. Creation is a messy process with lots of twisty turns and dead ends. It’s a little sad that so much is done digitally these days. Most of my design notes for The Cave were in Google Docs and I edited them as I went, so the process lost. Next game, I’m keeping an old fashion notebook.

Mark Ferrari or Steve Purcell must have done these. I can’t draw this good!

A lot changed here!

Getting the Main Flow right is critical!

I am not going to throw these out! That was a joke! Several years ago they got water damaged, so now they are sealed in water proof wrapping and kept safe and insured for $1,000,000.

Also, this is not the “design document”, they are just notes and ideas I’d jotted down. There wasn’t a formal design document for the game, just the large complete puzzle dependency chart I keep on my wall. I have no idea where that went to.

Many more to come. Posting these is easier then writing actual blob entries. I’m lazy.

Notes and ideas for Ghost ship and on Monkey Island.

The dream sequence had to wait until Monkey Island 2.

Room layout sketches.

Very early brainstorming about ideas and story.

First pass at some puzzles on Monkey Island

Just writing ideas down. I’m surprised “get milk and bread” doesn’t appear on this.

Map when ship sailing was more top-down and direct controlled.

I’m doing some house cleaning and I came across my Monkey Island 1 and 2 design notebooks. It’s interesting to see what changed and what remained the same.

I’ll post more… If I don’t throw them out. They are smelling kind of musty and I’m running out of space.

My first sketch of Monkey Island

Early puzzle diagram for Largo (before he was named Largo LaGrande)

I’ve never written one of these “year in review” posts before. They always seemed silly and the beginning of a new year is just an arbitrary milestone.

Also, it’s hard to believe it is 2014. The 8 year old boy in me is disappointed that we don’t have moon bases and flying cars, but I guess the Internet is pretty cool. Didn’t see that one coming.

The Cave

First up is The Cave. It didn’t burn up any sales records or get amazing reviews and was largely forgotten a month after it came out, but you know what? I don’t care. It’s a game I am incredibly proud of and the team at Double Fine did an amazing job and working on it was a lot of fun. I’ll stand by the game until the end of time.

While snowboarding over Christmas, I rode the chairlift with a complete stranger who played and loved The Cave. Suck on that Metacritic.

Scurvy Scallywags

Next up is a iOS game called Scurvy Scallywags in The Voyage to Discover the Ultimate Sea Shanty: A Musical Match-3 Pirate RPG (actual title) that I built with my good friend Clayton Kauzlaric. Another game that wasn’t wildly successful but I’m extremely proud of.

Scurvy Scallywags is Candy Crush for smart people.

While the game didn’t come close to making enough money to pay for the time and effort that went into it, Clayton and I decided to port it to Android, which should be out in early 2014.

I guess one of the personal triumphs of Scurvy Scallywags is that I’ve been in this wretched (I mean wonderful) industry for close to 30 years and I still make games and love it. Every morning I get up and program and design and write and build something. I’m very thankful for that. Maybe I’ll die poor and in the streets, but at least I get to do what I love. I’ll be the one holding the cardboard sign that says “Will Design Games for Food”.

Got in shape

I lost over 75 pounds in the first half of 2013. I now run almost everyday and workout and am probably in the best shape and health of my adult life. It was a lot of work and I didn’t use any silly gimmicks or diets, just exercise and completely changed the way I eat. Losing weight is really hard and I’ve struggled with it my whole life, but it’s was rewarding and worth it.

Australia

I went to Australia for the first time and gave the keynote at PAX and made some great friends. I am terrified of public speaking, so I always consider it a win when I can stand up in front of thousands of people and not make a complete fool of myself. Or did I? Don’t tell me! I did great, right? Holy crap, now I’m worried.

Snowboarding

I went snowboarding for the first time. I’ve been skiing since I was 6 (although not in the last 10 years), so I’m no stranger to the snow, but strapping both legs onto a board and sliding down a hill was terrifying. After four days it was starting to make sense and I was able to go where I wanted. I’m really looking forward to my next time.

I hope everyone has a great 2014. I might make a game or something.