5. Maybe The World Isn't Ready For A Co-Op Only Game Yet

It's conventional wisdom in the industry that games that only have multiplayer don't sell. MMO designers try to make sure that a player can solo the entire game; shooters and RTSes have single-player campaigns; Valve includes Half-Life, their single-player game, and Team Fortress 2, their multiplayer, in a single package; and so on. 

Although we gave a nod to the single-player with our bot and uber modes, for the most part, we willfully ignored that conventional wisdom, hoping the sacred cow would make good steaks -- surely, we thought, Xbox Live Arcade, where most of its users are already hardcore and wired, is a place where the no-multiplayer-only rule can be broken. 

Well, we can tell from the leaderboards that this isn't the case -- far more people are playing single-player than online.

It's surprising, since online co-op is often the number one feature hardcore gamers ask for. In our own belated, informal polling we've discovered that most people don't play co-op Xbox games over the internet.

Of potential players, some don't play online at all; some don't have headsets; some are perfectly willing to deathmatch with strangers but playing co-op with a stranger "feels weird"; with XBLA online populations being what they are, it can take several minutes for someone to show up for a match, and people don't want to wait that long.

Some can't talk their friends into playing; some have friends they would play with, but finding time in their busy schedules is tough.  It's as if most gamers are a little... schizoid. 

What Went Right

1. Creative Team Building

Schizoid was entirely self-funded; Bill and I were the only people who put money into the game. So how did we hire the rest of the team? An advantage that we had, that most young game developers starting independent studios don't, was that because we'd been in the industry so long, at various companies, we knew people who could help us.

Thus Bill's friends, Richard Garfield and Skaff Elias of Magic: The Gathering fame, were willing to come on as designers, and really help develop my embryonic idea into something good. Thus James Chao and Greg Taylor, old associates from Treyarch and my Spider-Man days, were able to come on and do art and programming.

It made me glad that we'd spent so long in the industry, paying our dues, before we struck off to do our own thing. For the most part, the guys on the team agreed to be paid entirely from the back-end, in royalties... which sounds a lot like paying everyone in lottery tickets, but they'd seen the prototype and were excited about its potential. 

One problem was these friends were from all over: we were in Washington; Brian Luizetti, our musician, and James Chao, were in California; Greg Taylor was in Tokyo! So we did the "distributed development" thing, using a cheap subversion and bugzilla hosting service to centralize, so we wouldn't have to deal with maintaining our own servers.

Interns and friends would also pitch in a week here, a week there, to hammer in a few nails or touch-up some paint. As a result we were able to create the game very, very cheaply: our only expenses were equipment, localization, insurance, and the much-lower-than-standard wages for a part-time coder... and time. Lots and lots of time.

2. XNA Game Studio (The Good)

If it wasn't for XNA Game Studio making it so easy to get a prototype up-and-running and in front of people, Schizoid would never have happened. XNA Game Studio wasn't the first prototyping environment I tried -- I was playing with different programming languages, partly for fun, partly to see if I could find a good prototyping language. 

I had spent a day working on Schizoid with PyGame and was confounded by a strange timing bug I never did understand when I decided to give XNA Game Studio a whirl. And I was hooked. The XNA Game Studio API is profoundly well-designed: the simplicity of PyGame with the power of DirectX.

The underlying philosophy seems to be: make what most users want to do easy, and if there's the rare user who needs something special, different, or under-the-hood, make that available as well. Their gamepad API is a great example -- getting it up and running with a nice dead zone only takes a couple of lines of code. 

Much later in the project, when we decided we wanted to do our own, custom thing with the deadzone, that option was available to us. Schizoid was up-and-running in a day. A few days later, I had something I was ready to show to Bill Dugan, my business partner.

XNA Game Studio was so easy to use that we didn't have to write a single tool to make the game: Richard and Skaff typed the level designs straight into C# files as structure data; our musician, Brian Luizetti, worked in XACT; James Chao described the way his creatures would chain and animate using delegates and functions; and Bill, ostensibly the producer, did most of our audio programming! Finally, C# integrates with NUnit, so we were easily able to do test driven development as well. Oh, and did I mention the short build times? The short, short build times meant I didn't have time to read blogs anymore.