A wild podcast appears!
As a part of this new series, we’re starting a new podcast called ‘Seeing it Through’.
Subscribe to it here - iTunes is coming…
Over 
the coming weeks, we’re looking to transform this blog into one with a somewhat different focus: investigation. An Investigation is, essentially, a question or problem that we’re currently tackling. Some can be answered easily, some will need time and experimentation. All will ask for your input. And what investigation is better to start with than the one that spawned this very idea?
Saul and I sat down at the table, and stared at the words that I had just scrawled on our whiteboard-table:
”More insight into a games startup than ever before”.
I turned to Saul, paused dramatically, and asked the question: “What the hell does that mean?”
The facts
- We names our company is SeeThrough Studios.
- Our purpose when we chose that name was to create transparency in the game and studio development processes on an unprecedented scale.
- It turns out that this is really hard. In essence: there is too much data. Every day of development brings with it a bunch of new problems and learning experiences.
- We’re now at a stage where catching up to give a full history of what we’ve done in the past would stop us from actually making games.
- We’d like to keep making games. Actually, it’s our core business.
- At the same time, the “SeeThrough” idea is at the core of our marketing strategy (and therefore rather vital to our business). It hasn’t been working all that well thus far, because we haven’t found a way to implement it consistently.
Progress thus far
During that meeting, we came to a few conclusions:
The plethora of things we discussed regarding SeeThrough.
- Our focus in being SeeThrough should be on making our own story compelling, and interacting with our audience, rather than trying to create guidelines for other developers to follow. There are plenty of other people who have the time to do that better than us (for example, our friend Epona Schweer runs indiebits as a full-time business).
- Compelling stories need interesting characters. We have find ways to better bring across our personalities to our audience.
- The SeeThrough process should give unprecedented insight into the current state of SeeThrough Studios. That is to say, we’re not going to be filling in our history all that much.
- In general, we’re going to aim to talk about the things that most make us think ‘should we really be talking about that to the public?’. If it’s something we’re worried about revealing, chances are it’s something that will be interesting to read.
How you can help
The question ‘What is SeeThrough’ is unlikely to be answered in any final way for a while yet. We’ll be looking to add new forms of content to our SeeThrough arsenal over time, though we’re definitely going to start small, and on a consistent schedule.
You can help us refine our approach by answering the following questions:
- How do you feel about this “investigation” approach to “SeeThrough-ness”? Is there anything you you would change off the bat?
- What form of update (investigations like this, conversation pieces, dev diaries, microblogs, podcasts, videos, etc.) would be most interesting to you?
- What’s the best way for you to get to know us, as humans?
Supplementary Materials
An email from Saul to Paul regarding the conversations had about the SeeThrough process
The original (much longer) version of this post
An email from Saul to Paul about that post
Well you are off to an amazing start guys.
We at Bifrost Studios set out with a very similar goal, to be approachable to the public, to our public hopefully, and open enough to allow them insight into how a game studio works.
I recently discovered you podcast and started with the episode on Money with the wonderful Epona. My very first thought, even before the podcast was over, was “wow, these guys are completely transparent about their dealings and the state of their company.” It has got us here talking about doing our own podcast. I love your podcast, it’s now my favourite show (even including TV shows) of the week.
I would be a big fan of video dev diaries. This is something I am thinking about introducing at Bifrost. I would probably have them once a month, but luckily for us we have 3 small teams that work on independent projects, so we could have nearly one a week without too much effort.
Blogged Dev Diaries are awesome, but to work well, engage the audience and give a real show of what’s happening you need to remain dedicated to producing them regularly. This might be easiest if you have one a week, but each week is rotated around the dev members.
These are all things I plan to implement into Bifrost very shortly, we have just recruited for our third team and they don’t start till next week, so once they are in and set up I’ll be setting up some rosters and things.
Twitter is great, it’s certainly a good way to let your audience know when you have new content in each of the above areas, but it is also a good way to get to know you, as humans, as you put it. Because it can be a lot less about the “dev” related things, and more about the little things that you deal with as a dev that people from any job can relate to perhaps. Like internet drop outs and things. Though you’d obviously have to do that from your phone if your internet dropped out.
Anyway, I hope these ideas spark something cool and interesting. We are still in our infancy and are also attempting to find ourselves, so I’m by no means an expert on the matter, but I have thought about it a little.
At the very least, keep doing what you’re doing, I love it.
Just listened to this first podcast and a couple of other game devs who seem to be highly transparent came to mind. One is (one person?) developer Wolfire Games who is very public with the development of their new game Overgrowth — each alpha build comes with a publicly available video detailing all changes. As well as being interesting to those in the alpha, it probably entices people to preorder as there’s a lot of footage of play and a strong feeling of knowing the direction.
The other example is Asymmetric Publications who do the browser-based MMO Kingdom of Loathing, and who recently got their next project Wordrealms kickstarted. This company do at least two weekly shows where most of the major dev team answer questions, discuss their two games and talk with utter frankness about how work is going, when things are going well and when things are going wrong. This is obviously different since they’re in constant active development of an MMO, but their openness has made their player base feel very connected to them as development continues. I used to play KoL, though haven’t for several years — but I still listen to the podcast as the insights I gain into the running of a game dev company are so fascinating; as well as the fact that their unreserved demeanour make for great radio. I think their transparency and communication with their audience has been invaluable in the progression of their game.
These are the two who sprang to mind. If you’re still trying to figure out exactly what you want “see through” to mean, I thought hearing more about how others are successfully managing transparent game dev processes might be interesting