Intellivision Publishing

[freewheel]

Hey gang,

 

I've been meaning to start a thread on this for a while now. I've had bits and pieces fed to me over the past few weeks but I'd love it if the experts here could chime in. I'm curious about the ins and outs of publishing a homebrew title for the INTV:

 

1. Obviously there's the bare-bones, "lone wolf" method. Release a ROM. Or if you want to try to make some money, get some programmable carts and sell them yourself. Complete with plastic bags like the INTV Corp releases This seems pretty straightforward, if a bit boring.

 

2. Publishers - who are the big players here? Pros/cons of each? I assume this usually works in a royalty type situation - hand over your binary and they take care of marketing/packaging/sales/distribution, and you get a small cut of the retail price (I'm guessing in the $5-10 range?). I've seen people discussing (usually via disagreements) advance royalties and whatnot - I assume that typically happens for established developers who create some pretty whiz-bang special stuff.

 

3. Box art, manuals, etc - there seems to be a community out there to help with this? Part of the publisher's deal?

 

4. Extra "help" with the game itself - say I can write wicked code but cannot write music or create graphics to save my life. Are there musicians and artists out there who contribute? Maybe in a sub-royalty type scheme? Anyone have experience with this?

 

Anyway, I'm a bit scatter-brained but I'd like to start a thread where people could put in their 2 cents. From anyone - developers, publishers, artists, fans, you name it. And if a similar thread already exists, then slap me and point me in the right direction.

[intvnut]

I imagine nearly every single cartridge release of a newly authored title has a slightly different story behind it, in terms of how the game was produced, if/how the author was compensated, etc. I don't personally have a grand formula as to how it should work; it seems to be evolving organically. I can, however, talk about the two major titles that have come out of LTO.

 

 

For Space Patrol, I worked with David Harley, Arnauld Chevallier, Oliver Puschatzki and my sister to make the original LTO release.

 

I wrote the game and laid out the Moon levels. However, I'm not great with level design and needed help taking it to the next level. David is much, much better at this. He did an excellent job, especially incorporating elements I asked him to, such as the tit-for-tat interplay between the "reverse follower" and the player on Pluto. Pluto Champion is still my favorite course in Space Patrol as a result.

 

Arnauld helped me greatly with music. While I can noodle on a keyboard, and I think I could manage to compose some game melodies eventually, time was short with Space Patrol and I still didn't have reasonable music. Arnauld tracked out the music for Space Patrol in record time (or at least it seemed that way), and was very helpful with integrating his tracker into Space Patrol.

 

Oliver handled the laying out the boxes and overlays, and handled printing the boxes. (I handled the overlay printing, which is probably why they weren't the best overlays...) Oliver also helped me quite a lot with shipping packages within Europe.

 

My sister did the artwork for the cover and the overlays. I commissioned both of these pieces, and Oliver integrated it into the box and overlay layout.

 

It was a team effort, and I am thankful for all the help I received in making SP as awesome of a release as possible. As for how funds were distributed... I shared profits for the initial run with David and Oliver directly. For the cover art, I paid my sister a base commission fee, plus a small delta per copy sold.

 

 

For Christmas Carol, I worked with James Pujals (dz-Jay), William Moeller and company to make it happen.

 

James did the primary game and level development. I contributed one level to game (the second level), as well as sound effects, programming feedback, some concise code snippets and other technical assistance. James also worked with multiple artists to get the game box and overlay art commissioned. In the end, he went with artwork he commissioned from Jason Hotle.

 

I naturally provided the hardware and arranged for the cartridge label printing. William handled printing the boxes and overlays, including working closely with the print shop to ensure everything was in line.

 

As far as money goes: James paid for the artwork and for the manuals himself. I did not handle the printing of the manuals. I paid James an up-front licensing fee for the game, and then negotiated a per-unit margin for each unit up to 300. Our agreement ended at 300 unit sold. The up-front sum shifts some of the risk from the author (James, in this case) to the publisher (me, in this case). It certainly pushes out my "break-even" point.

 

During this whole process, we eventually went ahead with posting a completely free ROM release. While we're glad we could bring Christmas Carol to more people, from a business standpoint I can say it definitely seemed to slow down sales. I think in the future I will tie free ROM releases to hitting certain sales benchmarks, such as a minimum quantity sold, or a minimum time period without selling a copy. As it stands, I was down to selling ~1-2/mo until the uptick before/after CGE.

 

 

Both games went through a rigorous beta testing phase, and we're indebted to our testers. We did end up with a couple issues with Christmas Carol that we handled with recalls. While those were embarrassing, I certainly hope we handled those to the satisfaction of the community.

 

 

In the process of all of this, I've developed my own set of PCBs, the current production versions of which are called JLP03 and JLP04. I've also developed my own cartridge shell, and have had produced a fairly large quantity that sit in my garage, awaiting games. :-) Molding plastic is similar to printing boxes: It's quite a lot of $ to get to the first unit. After that, the marginal cost of an additional unit is low. The total market for Intellivision titles isn't very big, though, so there's always a tension between building more vs. building less based on fixed costs vs. the marginal costs.

 

For example, for something like cartridge shells, they don't care what game they contain, so it's easier to produce a larger quantity of them. But for something like boxes, unless you design a generic box that could work for many titles, you have to assume whatever box you print can only be used for one title. That factors into the economics. (FWIW, some of the Aquarius folks did exactly that—the generic box for multiple titles. It's a beautiful box, and I think it makes perfect sense given the relative size of their market.)

 

 

In all this, for me the motivation isn't money. But, it takes money to make this all happen. Most of this stuff really needs economy of scale to be economically feasible. But, whenever you buy 1000 of anything, the cost adds up quick, even if each item is cheap. That said, I'd be lying if I said LTO didn't show a modest profit. But, all that money goes back into new development. Ship a game, make a modest profit, pour it into the next development. That's what I try to do. And, keep in mind, that's a profit assuming the labor's free. :-)

Edited October 12, 2014 by intvnut

[freewheel]

Appreciate the comments. I'm with you, this isn't about profit for me - but I would like to figure out how to eventually bring a game to commercial release, box, overlays, the works, and break even. Maybe I'm just on a kick since CGE, but hot damn that was cool to see just how much homebrew is out there, and just how professional it looks these days. I won't lie, having my name on something like that, hanging on my wall... I can't think of anything more unique at this stage in life.

 

Any extra monies I'm more than happy to spread amongst artists and other contributors, and to be honest the tool developers that have made this so much easier. Seriously, I was able to whip together a playable game in a single evening on my first try - obviously nothing commercial-ready, but still. After less than a week of a few hours a night, it had gameplay variants, graphics, music, the works. What this community has created is astonishing considering how few people actually use these tools. And considering that it's been at least a decade, probably closer to two, since I've written any serious code that talks to hardware. I wasn't exactly walking into this as a seasoned ASM coder.

 

I have a few ideas on the ROM release concept - I need a better sense of market size and longevity with these games but I've got some rough thoughts on how to make everyone happy.