Note: This story is being reposted from Examiner.com. GPB’s editor, Norman Tran currently interns at Gendai Games but played no part in creating this interview.
Michael Agustin is the owner of Gendai Games in Austin which he started in 2007 along with Dan Treiman and Tommy Tran. Together they’ve created GameSalad, a drag and drop tool for creating video games. Agustin will be presenting the panel Anyone Can Make a Video Game at SXSW ScreenBurn on Monday March, 15th at 9:30am. Agustin has worked with Apple and Three Rings Design. He is also the founder of EGaDS — the University of Texas’ gaming development student group.
Question: So how’d you get here?
Michael Agustin: I started in the console-game industry working working on AI for Pitfall The Lost Expedition. We created creatures using a flowcharts that mapped out everything they could do which was very time consuming. It took about 30 days to create one AI, so I developed a tool that shortened the task to 30 minutes. Basically we created a tool that allowed developers to implement an AI figure in the game in less time than it took to discuss how it would function in a meeting.
Q: I know you worked with Randy Pausch at Carnegie Melon, what type of projects were you working on?
MA: I was really attracted to ALICE and what that was allowing developers to do. I attended Randy’s last Building Virtual Worlds class, and learned many valuable lessons in teamwork and designing experiences.
When I was there we were using PANDA which was used for rapid prototyping. I was part of a team that researched a process called game sketching, which allowed designers to explore complex gameplay and user interaction by having puppeteers over a network improve dialog and control visual elements on the screen.
Q: So how did you guys come up with the idea for GameSalad?
MA: We decided that rather than developing tools for triple-A studios we wanted to go after the mass market and help them create games. The system we developed is a general way of describing logic and behavior in a way that non-programmers can understand. We went this route because one, it’s an area we were interested and two, it’s a very consumer driven industry so if we had developed for studios no one would have heard of it.
GameSalad allows users to publish web games to their website for free. Publishing to the iTunes App Store requires a fee.
Q: How many people were at Gendai when you started?
MA: We have 3 founders, all of us were in different cities. I had just finished my internship at Three Rings and was in San Francisco, Dan was in Madison working, and Tan was in Dallas working for Hotels.com.
Q: How long did it take to develop GameSalad once you game together?
MA: It took about 18 months, we started in August of 2007 and Tommy came on board almost a year later then started working on the website. We had our open beta at the end of March of 09 so it was right around SXSW last year.
Q: So you’re a panelist and your topic is Anyone Can Create a Video Game, tell me about that.
MA: The idea is that there has been a lot of tools that allow people to create podcasts, manage their photos, but games have been relatively hard to make because you need to know how to program. Games are one of the harder areas in programming and are limited to people who are usually self taught or hackers, and it’s sort of cut out the most creative folks. 99% of people aren’t coders and now there’s been a sort of explosion in tools that make game creation accessible to these non-programmers.
My panel is generally going to cover the fact – if you ask kids today, many will say I want to make games while back in the Eighties many said I want to make movies – that game creation is definitely something a lot of folks want to do. It’s a $42 billion industry so there’s a need not just in the consumer side but as they grow up [GameSalad] is a way for them to learn how to make games. There are movies about how to make movies, now we’re starting to make games that help teach you how to make games.
In the panel we’re covering different types of solutions. Our panelists Shanna Tellerman from Wild Pockets, Adam Salsman from Flixel, the last person is Dave Werner who does Atmosphir. Each one of us presents a different take on game creation tools.
GameSalad interface involves draging and dropping Behaviors into various Actors.
Q: How’s the feedback you guys have gotten from GameSalad been so far?
MA: Pretty great, we did a partnership with MacWorld where we did a contest and the finalists won passes to MacWorld and the Grand Prize winner was announced on the show floor. So we had space on the show floor and we were swarmed by lots of content creators and kids. We had folks that were game fans and they were totally surprised saying, “I can make my own games? You just made my day.” They’d ask if we could do something and we’d make those game elements right in front of them. We also had folks that were looking to create comic books or adapt comic books to the web and they saw it as a quick way to get media applications and get some interactivity. Then the last components were all the kids, soon as we mentioned you could make your own games we had kids staying there almost like a kindergarten. Cult of Mac blog told parents to leave their kids [with us].
Q: And how has traffic for GameSalad been?
MA: We launced our iPhone publishing software in September and in the last 5 months we’ve had 50,000 downloads. We had 24,000 people register in 87 countries so it was interesting to see how many websites have popped up. There’s a game design class taught in Indonesia using GameSalad, there’s a blog in Italy, we were featured in The Guardian in England, so we’re definitely following the halo of people that are interested in mobile games.
Q: What are some ways you’ve seen GameSalad used in institutions?
MA: When I entered the game industry, you could just come in through the front door as a Computer Science (CS) undergrad. Now they’re looking for more sophisticated developers and entire schools are popping up teaching people how to make games. We’ve had a lot of schools interested in using GameSalad for game design and CS because you can show concrete examples of programming concepts.
You can also get through game design without having to program your own “game loop”. It’s been used in high schools and colleges and we’ve had kids pickup GameSalad and be able to start creating games in less than a week. We collaborated with the Austin ISD in a program called ‘Game On’ and it took local kids and introduced to game design. It got to the point they were actually using elements we really didn’t plan to be features. It was really interesting to see what type of solutions they came up with and there was a lot of emergence in the games they created that we didn’t think they could create. One kid created a SimCity clone and we didn’t even know you could create simulations at that level.
GameSalad's development tool allows users to quickly preview their work.
Q: I know some of the interns you’ve had, how’s that program working out?
MA: We had an internship program last summer and then another one this spring. So last summer we had five interns, three of them were the core game designers, one music composer, and one artist for all the games. They developed a game per week for three weeks for 15 games total, then we boiled it down to six, then three, then two using a concept called Stage Gate. The idea is similar to the Hollywood models where tons of people submit scripts and you option then, then turn them into different pilots then some will graduate into full projects. It’s almost how people created Dragon Ball Z and Naruto when they were turned from manga into entire cartoon franchises or how Harry Potter was a very good book before it was a movie. We did that internally except with games, so we had to pick the games that were best suited for the iPhone interface.
Q: Were you happy with the outcome?
MA: I thought that it went really well, they were able to create these very original games that were not only original in their play but in their aesthetics. It was really hard to choose the finalists because they were all very different, yet equally as good.
Q: How do the internships help the developers of GameSalad?
MA: A lot of the students and entry level developers in that community help them get their careers started, it’s sort of a dating phase. You get to try out how they do and at the end they’ll be able to use these experiences and the positions they had to build their careers.
Q: But rather what do you guys get from having the interns around? Does it help you with tweaking and developing GameSalad?
MA: Through the internships, we’ve learned a lot. We’ve found that we’ve been able to get a lot of feedback regarding workflow. Most of our company is focused on developing the tools and the platform, so it’s a way to have folks on site telling us “oh the tool should work this way” or “have you thought about fixing this behavior or changing it? Or maybe it shouldn’t work at all.” So in a sense, they’re our lab guinea pigs! I think overall it helps enhance the experience of using the tool. We did a lot of customization to get last year’s intern games running so it was a great way to stress test the system while they get to see their games come to life at the same time. It’s almost like a reverse studio: instead of working on the games the studio wants you to do, for the interns they came in and did the games they wanted to do while we helped them with the project management so it’s almost like the exact opposite of a regular games internship.
Q: Ok, off the Gendai subject what are you excited to see at ScreenBurn?
MA: Normally there’s a game design contest and there’s a lot of folks that entered their ideas and it’s always interesting to see the ideas they come up with. The contest is centered around design so there isn’t a game to play, but there are a lot of blue sky projects that get pitched but some of them seem like games that would take too much resources to do. It will be interesting if they used GameSalad because they could create the game in the same amount of time it took them to create the pitch.
Q: Can we expect a GameSalad competition at SXSW in the future?
MA: SXSW is more community driven and it doesn’t fit to latch on to one publisher or company. The MacWorld challenge made sense because we’re the only game development software like this for a Mac.
Q: Is GameSalad is due for PC?
MA: We’ll make an announcement when it’s ready. It’s definitely in our roadmap, but we don’t like to make any promises until it’s available.
Q: Ok, what else should people know about Gendai and GameSalad?
MA: You can make games for the iPhone, for the Mac Desktop and browser based games. The tool is free to download, so people can start playing with it and creating games right away! Because GameSalad doesn’t require any programming, games can be made very quickly. There’s a guy who runs a one man studio in Pennsylvania and he was able to make a game in 30 minutes then 60 levels in over 11 days and now he makes over $500 per day with his game after it was featured on the App Store. So it shows something going from shipping on the App Store to making money in less than two weeks. It shows the significance of what we’re doing. We’re allowing regular people to develop games that are actually selling on the App Store so in a sense we’re leveling the playing field while reducing the cost.
Q: The free stuff is great, but how do you guys make money?
MA: It’s similar to the Apple iPhone develop program. We provide free access to the tool. If people want to use GameSalad for commercial purposes for the App Store or desktop executable, then we charge for the services. The starting subscription is $99 which allows you to publish iPhone and desktop games.
Q: Does that get you access to limitless uploads?
MA: You can publish an unlimited number of games per year which is patterned after Apple’s iPhone developer program. The tools are free but if you want to publish you can pay for a subscription. I think it’s a much better system for creators because they’re always getting the latest tool. We can do updates every four to six weeks and the tool is always improving where as the traditional retail box model you have to pay up front and wait two to three years for a new version to come out and then you pay the full price again. So it’s definitely unique and more affordable and gets versions in the hands of users much sooner.
You can learn more about GameSalad by visiting their webpage or download the free tool to begin creating your very own iPhone games.
