One Finger Death Punch arguably seems to be of a bit higher quality than some of your other games. I must confess that I wanted to ask about your somewhat more, let’s call them “unconventional” titles, but I wasn’t so sure how to tactfully word my questions. Then I came across the video “I Want It! RAGE” on your own YouTube channel, and I breathed a huge sigh of relief. I also laughed quite a lot.
Shortly after that, I ran across your Who Is Silver Dollar Games? video, and many of the questions that I intended to ask suddenly became a lot less relevant. While I would encourage anyone interested in Silver Dollar Games to watch the video, the short of it is essentially that you don’t really make games, you take little ideas and make them into interactive experiences. You’ve even gone so far as to compare your work to birthday cards that play a tune or have a bit of speech.
Now that you have One Finger Death Punch under your belt–which is easily your most critically acclaimed effort to date–do you think it’s going to be harder to fall back on the “we don’t really make games” line of reasoning? Do you intend to continue focusing on both more complex titles and tiny ideas?
Jonathan Flook: We certainly intend to work on both the complex and tiny titles. We just finished making a game called Eat or Flick, it’s about a kid picking his nose and he either eats it or flicks it. For the past five years we’ve always had some big project in the works. Blazing Birds, Blow, Ranger, Boom Chick Chick, The Jump Hero, Mirror, Fatal Seduction and One Finger Death Punch. If those games were our only games I’m pretty sure we’d look like any other respectable gaming company and we wouldn’t be the controversial and provocative thing we are today. We don’t care about any of that, we just like making small games as well as larger games. Making a game for a year or two can get tiring, it can get boring, it can get tedious. Breaking up the development process with something simple and stupid like The Heckler is how we keep the development process fun.
From time to time a few people on the internet seem to say things like “Make your larger games, but if you make these stupid games like No Luca No or Bed Time Nursery Rhymes I’m going to destroy you.” One critic wrote “People aren’t pissed at you because you’re dumping out games in short order. If the games were fun, nobody would care. These games are boring, and that’s what bothers people.” My response to most of the internet noise/hate is the following.
There’s always a price to be paid for standing out. Silver Dollar Games gladly pays that price. The comments we get for better or worse remind us that we’re free. Free to make the games we want to make. Free to make games that strike a nerve, form a guilty smile, and remind people that video games are entertainment. Love us or hate us, we’ll continue to bring a unique brand of entertainment to the video game industry.
There’s a reason bloggers focus on games like Don’t Be Nervous Talking To Girls and Try Not To Fart, it can be a hot topic, it brings readers. No one cares about our passion projects like Blow, Ranger, The Jump Hero, Fatal Seduction and Mirror. They just don’t have the same effect on readers. But after is all said and done you just stop caring what other people think. It gets easier to ignore the cyber bullies. Sometimes you just got to do what your heart desires and forget there’s a nasty blogger ready and waiting to jump on you. And at this point most (not all) of it blows right over us.
I feel bad for others who are suffering from cyber bullies and internet abuse. You hear stories like Fez II being cancelled and abuse directed at Call of Duty’s David Vonderhaar, or the death threats that Jennifer Hepler received at BioWare, or the harassment that Zoe Quinn received for her Greenlight submission Depression Quest and you wish you could help them.
Strangely enough, our small games are a significant and important source of revenue for some people who hate or “rage” on our games. There’s quite a few content creators on YouTube who use our silly games to make thousands of dollar on their channels by bashing our games. More often than not these YouTube content creators will a lot more money than us by using our game content in their YouTube channels. This kind of thing is to be expected when you make games like Censored and Cassie’s Animal Sounds, but it’s cool to know that we’re a part of the YouTube indie game ecosystem.
It’s not all bad. In fact, in response to our smaller games we get more fan mail than hate mail by 5:1, and I tend to believe the angry are more vocal too. When you make a game like Homeless you know you’re going to get negative reviews. But it’s exciting to see a small game grab the attention of others. Our strangest little games connect with different people from around the world. It’s really awesome to see that there’s a game for everyone, no matter how strange it is.
Do you typically have the idea for a game title first, and then work towards designing game-play to support the idea, or is it often the other way around?
Jonathan Flook: Ideas typically come from real life situations. Like watching our three year old nephew learn to eat. Or reliving the horrors of working at a telemarketing agency. We take a situation and try to build gameplay around it.
My dad joked about a fortune cookie game one day at the dinner table. We laughed and thought it would be hilarious to see. So we did it, Fortune Cookies In Bed. The game’s description is “The most advanced fortune cookie game every made”.
My sister and I were camping one night and she said, “Wouldn’t it be funny to have a game that combines sniping and dating?” She then said, “You can call it, Shoot or Date.” So we did. Its tag line is “If only there was a third option.”
Our sister makes strange animals sounds so… you bet, Cassie’s Animal Sounds.
Office Affairs is kind of a true story about how I became a game developer.
Despite the lower budget that you must have for your titles, many of your games feature fairly high quality music and voice work. The music found in One Finger Death Punch, and the music used in Blow is completely different, but both are quite good. The stereotypical Asian announcer in One Finger Death Punch, or the British gentleman that you used for “You Will Buy This Terrible Game,” or even the kid and and his mother that appear in Lazy Gamer, these all use voice talent that seems considerably better than what I could provide using my family and friends. How do you go about finding the voices for your games, and do you typically license music or hire musicians?
Jonathan Flook: I’m so glad you noticed our music and voice overs. We really spend a long time making sure it’s perfect. Most of our music is licensed from typical stock music websites for anywhere from $40 to $120 per track. Nothing too special but we do spend a very long time finding just the right music. We may not be good programmers or artists, but we try to make up for it in other areas. Blow and The Jump Hero had licensed music from musicians. The music ran us about $2000 for each game. Sadly neither game made that back. So we’ve learned that you can’t afford anything too extravagant since XBLIG has such a low pay out. We also worked out music deals for Boom Chick Chick and The Headsman, but they didn’t cost us too much.
The voice work is just myself or my friends. We have no money for a professional voice over so we just practice, try, try and try again until it’s the best we can do. Again, the voice work is something that we have control over, we can work it until it’s just right. Anywhere we can to make up for the lack of visual art or programming techniques we’re going to try to take advantage of. You’ll notice that none of our games are 3D. That’s because we simply can’t do it, we’re not good enough. We don’t know enough. So we try to compensate in other areas. Audio is one of them.
Here’s a little fun fact, all the music in the game Ranger was made by my brother which came from this CD he made a while back. Track 9 is my favorite.
If you weren’t restricted by time, budget, or programmer skill in any way, what kind of game would you want to make most and why? If you didn’t have these restrictions, do you feel that developing a game would be more enjoyable or less enjoyable?
Jonathan Flook: If we had less restrictions game development would be much more enjoyable. Right now we’re living pay check to pay check and I don’t know how we’re going to pay our rent down the road. You can’t do your best creative work under those conditions. We have so many ideas, from the simple to the grand. I can’t name one particular dream project we’d work on, but we know it would focus on gameplay. We’d like to make a game that’s just gameplay, no story, no plot, all about the act of playing. Something simple enough that it excludes no one, but still appeals to the experienced gamer. Something designed from the ground up to be a fun experience.
Up to this point, you’ve spent nearly all of your development career working with the XNA tools that Microsoft has provided, but you’re now in the process of porting One Finger Death Punch to Steam. After that, do you have any desire to work with other development platforms? Are you interested in ever developing a title for a PlayStation system, smart-phones, or the Nintendo Wii U?
Jonathan Flook: We’re currently learning Unity which we’re in love with. We’re able to do so much more with Unity that we could ever do with XNA. It’s opened many doors for us. I’d love to try to make smart-phone games. I love using my iPad and iPhone and it’s practically the only thing my friends play games on anymore. With the power of Unity I think that’s something we can do. We’re also working towards making indie games on Xbox One. Their indie service isn’t live yet, but the day it launches we’ll be more than ready to take advantage of the service and share our games with a new generation of Xbox gamers. And this time we’ll be able to do voxels, Avatars, 3D shooters, online multiplayer and everything else that Xbox gamers loved on XBLIG that we couldn’t do before. Unity is opening that 3D gate for us and we’ve never been more excited for it. With Unity I feel we’ll no longer be held back by our technical skills and that will help level the playing field for us.
PlayStation and Nintendo Wii U don’t impress us at first glance because it’s not an open market. You have an idea but if they don’t like it, tough luck. You can’t be creative when you know there’s some executive who decides what you can or cannot do. We enjoy a tremendous freedom on XBLIG and I feel there’s a similar freedom on the mobile markets. Until that changes at Sony and Nintendo we probably won’t be looking at their platforms.