Health and Indies

Our lecturer was Janne Niittymäki from Goodlife, that makes health tech games.

I haven't ever imagined myself working with health related games, but I do find the subject fascinating. I myself struggle with depression and anxiety, and video games help with that, but I do wonder if it is possible to make games made with psychotherapists and doctors, that could help with mental illness' struggle. I think at the end of this I will look into this, if there have been attempts and how successful they have been.

Glider (image from Goodlife's website)

Goodlife started with a glider game made for Kinect use, meaning player uses their body to play. It was designed work people recovering from strokes They developed the game with physical therapists (or possibly just one, it wasn't clear). For games that are meant for people with disabilities, it is important to work with experts on the field. This gliding game was made so the player cannot fail at it, only succeed, as motivating health games should not punish the players. People who play these already have to struggle with their everyday life, to motivate people there should only be rewards.

For their games they have systems for calibrating the movement of the person, because people are at different stages of their recovery or just simply aren't that flexible. The Kinect camera detects the movement and if the person has more range, the tasks are according to that.

Health games also need to be designed for people who necessarily don't understand technology, or because of their situation cannot hold equipment. For this Kinect is good as player only uses their own body, but it would be a different story with a mouse and a keyboard. It is very important to think about the client in these games. Relating to this point, it is also important that the player never feels unsafe when they are playing your game.

For game making in general iteration is very important, and for health games there is importance on having the best version that there can be. Clients shouldn't have to be in a situation where they get harmed because the game asked too much of them.

These systems are mainly for hospitals and the like, but this type of physiotherapy can be motivating to people at their homes too. It is common for physiotherapist to recommend daily exercises and these exercises can easily be skipped, but using an application to motivate regular exercise can help. 

Looking at video games being used as a therapy system for clients, it seemed that there are not at least many games for only this purpose. It seemed to be popular subject for board and card games. There are studies of using video games in therapy; "They conducted weekly 1 h videogame-based group therapy once a week for 6 months. They found that videogame integrative videogame-based group therapy are a motivating and effective treatment approach to improving self-awareness, social skills, and behaviors in people with TBI. In addition to using videogame-based treatment on those with TBI, videogames can be used with other diagnoses." (from here)

I looked some more and found a claim that; "Some companies have taken therapeutic gaming to a completely new level by designing games that are intended to help people develop coping strategies for dealing with mental illness." (from here)

And the same site lists some games like Depression Quest, which is a game about living as a depressed person. On their website they say: "This game aims to show other sufferers of depression that they are not alone in their feelings, and to illustrate to people who may not understand the illness the depths of what it can do to people." This is all very interesting to me, but I am possibly starting to be too far away from the original subject too much. I will do my own research project about this. 

Kukouri logo (from their website)

Kim Soares from Kukouri games discussed about indie publications

Kukouri is an indie gaming company in Kotka, founded in 2011. They have 9-11 game developers working there, and they are currently working on Pixel Worlds. They are most known for The Tiny Troopers franchise. 

Their Pixel Worlds is a massively multiplayer social sandbox game. To keep the game fresh it has monthly updates, continuous challenges, quests and events.

Their core audience aged 8-18 years old, which respond well to influencer campaigns as children use social media a lot. (Me too, even as a 27-year old lady). The Pixel Worlds has an official YouTube channel, Pixel Worlds Game, which has 126 t. subscribers, and weekly curated content. From looking at it myself, it seemed well made, and targeted at their core audience. It is a good idea to have social media channels for an indie game, and hiring community people to run them.

After explaining bit about his own company, Kim started telling about the process of indie gaming companies.

It is very rare to be a multitalented person and being capable of doing the whole game by yourself. I know I am not a multitalented person, I am hardly a person. In small projects it is possible, but in indie games it will take a lot of time to produce a whole game. Having a team with varied talents so they can focus on their own things is important. 

It's also good to build your team with people that you have good chemistry with, it is easier to communicate when you like the people around you. Having similar artistic vision helps on this matter too.

Working together on a common goal is easy when everybody is on the same page, someone needs to call the shots so the game will be coherent.

For specially at the beginning of the project it is important to have dedication to it. Whole team should be prepared to work for it, as it is a long process and making games isn't the easiest job. 

From finances I mostly understood that it is important at the start of you project to at least have enough money to survive 12 months. This can be implemented with grants and loans, Starttiraha, ELY-keskus and Business Finland was mentioned.

Then there was mentioned Venture capitals and Angels. I don't think I properly understand either of these, but Venture capital is a from of private equity, these finance startup companies and small businesses that are believed to have long-term growth potential. (from here)

Angel investor is a private investor with a high net-net-worth, invidual who financially backs small startups or entrepreneurs, usually for exchange for ownership equity in the company. (from here) Both of these forms of funding isn't easy to acquire in Finland.

I couldn't find explanation that I understood for Outsourcing paying the bills. I might try to figure this out by asking from people as it is for some reason too complicated for me, and I didn't understand it at all from our lecture.

Publishers aren't that useful for mobile games, but in PC and console games publishers fund the game. The downside is that publishers take a lot of the revenue, around 50% and 70%. 

So I think from all this I learned that finances are difficult, which I knew, but this made it more clear.

Then we went through sale channels, for mobile gaming it's App store, Play store and manufacturer stores (Huawei, Samsung)

For PC it's digital distributions like Steam, Windows store, Epic etc. These distributors usually take a sum for you to publish your game on there, like Steam requires 100 dollars, which can be credited after your game has made 1000 dollars, Steam also has a 30% commission fee. Something like Epic store is more strict for what they take in their catalog but their commission fee is 15%.

Consoles only have their own digital distributors. Then there are physical sales, but it's popularity has been going down for now, and it seems to be slowly dying media form.

User acquisition and marketing is a considerable expense, for mobile games it can be more expensive than development itself, and for this it is important to hire professionals, so your game won't disappear to the masses of mobile games. 

PC user acquisition is different, that press releases and emails to game journalists, and engaging in social media might be enough. If your game is interesting, adding posts to websites like reddit might be able to gather interest. Even so, it is good to be able to make good looking trailers and images that grab peoples attention, so having marketing specialists wouldn't hurt.

I don't think I have anything to add to these points, but at the end of the lecture Kim pointed these out;

• Day to day operations and bureaucracy takes time; budgeting, talking to Venture capitalists, and finances in general.
• Revenues are paid with delay of up 180 days, and there are store cuts (30% is the norm) and taxes.
• Something always goes wrong, prepare for things to go wrong, and things to take more time than you think.
• Networking is very important
• Planning and doing your homework will be a matter of life and death

Of all this personally I am afraid of the networking. I am socially useless creature.

I might add more images for this post, possibly not.