So, the industry has been in a massive race to the bottom.
Congratulations… here we are… Free is the new zeitgeist.
Now we’ve ground that to ground and the top titles are ‘pay to not play’, ie buy shortcuts to unlock things that you can normally get to by playing, but game-play is made to be so repetitive and grindy that people would rather pay money than play more. So the lifetime play of those looks something like this:
Now the trick is to space the first few unlocks close enough where the player can get them all in a session or two, probably without paying, then the player is already invested heavily and has had several endorphin rushes of ’winning’. (no really, go research slot machines and emotional feedback mechanics, systems for building compulsive behavior etc… it will creep you out when you play a facebook game again)
Now you can start to increase the grind amount between major unlocks. The goal is to gradually increase the required tedium to the point where the user starts investing real money. And once they start investing money, the difficulty in getting them to spend again decreases dramatically. Once the user is all worn out and spent, you’ll hopefully have their email address / fb profile etc… so you can cross promote your next game with the ‘From the makers of….’ which will hopefully immediately spark the flashback to the original 15 min.
I think that sucks.
Well.. that’s a tough question. Because games are everywhere, in greater supply than any user could possibly ever play. Add in the long tail, and that’s only going to make things harder and harder in the years to come.
For example:
Why play a $15 indie title when it’ll be on a Steam sale for $3.74 soon. (Today, it’s the wonderful Orcs Must Die 2) .. but wait why play that at all.. when you can play last year’s AAA title that you missed for $14.99 (today it’s the Complete Prince of Persia pack (5 AAA titles))
The answer, I think, lies in : investment, involvement, community and marketing.
Go play the first chapter or 2 of Telltale’s awesome and gripping Walking Dead. We need narratives that players can get themselves lost in. Even better than telling gripping narratives are narratives that they make themselves. Ask someone about their favorite Minecraft experience. Everyone has one, Minecraft is NOTHING but a player investing themselves completely in a world that’s receptive to it. We’re lucky that Mojang has been great and not added mini expansions/addons/IAP because you know that it’s got to be tempting and would have been wildly successful… The days of running down a hallway and shooting things with little to no narrative for the user to invest in, well.. you’ll be competing against every game that’s come before you and they can come in at a lower price point than you, because they’ve already made their money back. Make the player feel like they’re in charge of something they care about and they will stick around.
Alpha sale, Kickstarter, Pre-orders with Beta access. Here’s a not-so-secret, Everyone wants to be a game designer. (That’s because they don’t know what it really entails) Involve players in your process, anyone remember alpha release Fridays from Notch? How about hanging out in the Elemental alpha access forums? Everquest beta? Engage your customers.. Now the hard part is getting them in the door in the first place.. but it’s not that bad…because when you empower a user, they feel special and unique and THAT is how things go viral, when a person can show their friends that they have something cool, unique and special you just can’t get them to stop talking about it. It takes time, (ask Notch about how hard it is to keep up with community expectations) and you have to be out there available for critique and since it’s the Internet, it comes with some serious bile.
World War II Online has members who keep their subscription active, entirely because they love the community they have built. Second Life would have sputtered out years ago if it hadn’t been because of the ability of users to create sub-communities in the game. Natural Selection2 would never have been released without their community coming together. League of Legends, Dota2, StarCraft all have strong user<–>user community interactions. However, building a community is usually the RESULT of having a great game, so it’s the best way to sustain a title.
With every game ever made having the exact same priority in the marke place compared to your title what’s the easy way to stand out? That’s right, throw money at it. It works, ask Cliffski at Positech.. The above methods only work if you have eyeballs on your game. Now, marketing isn’t a bad word.. really. And it comes in all shapes and sizes. From Blog posts, to banner ads, to asking for feedback from Gamedev.net it’s ALL marketing.. Every Tweet you ever do .. that’s marketing.. Even if you’re not selling a specific title, you’re generating interest in you. And then, when you have something REALLY important to say, you want to be able to focus as many eyeballs as possible on it as fast as possible. Think of Marketing as being the Shock Paddles and your game is your Frankenstein.. The above elements will let it grow strong and tall, but without an initial shock, chances are you won’t even get a toe to twitch.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]
Woooooosh!!!
That was the sound of March whizzing right by.
A million things came up and the month got used for other things.
So be it.
April is where it’s at anyway.
Ramping up and getting started asap.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]
It’s been one hell of a month. Since starting over in the 18th it’s been non-stop go go go to get this thing up and running.
Overall I’m really pleased with how well it turned out. I have a lot of little secondary features I want to add to it, but I think I need a week to recover.
It will be an interesting thing to see if the game finds any kind of an audience, I’m not aware of there being a whole lot of multi-player games on a single tablet yet. However I think that it will be one of those kinds of genres where people can pop down for 5 – 10 min with a friend while waiting for the bus and play a game.
Time will tell.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]10 days left. Basic features are complete.
War mages is a 2 player game played on an Android tablet (7in or greater) where each player enters orders/commands for monsters they then summon onto the gameboard.
The goal is to have a fire elemental make an explosion on the enemy’s summoning circle.
Lots of little UI things left to do along with victory conditions but I’m in good shape
[read original post at swiftthought.com]Tough decision made. The original planned February game isn’t going to happen.
As I rapidly approached the mid-month mark I realized that I had actually made Anti-progress… I had started out with working off of the base Jan game and broken it to the point where it no longer had sound, and was actually unbeatable as that would crash it. And I hadn’t even finished adding a single new feature (other than preparing to get the Spine actors put into place)
Then to add insult to injury I found out about Impire, which comes out tomorrow. It looks an awful lot like what I want my game to be, except with a helluva larger budget, and that was pretty damn demotivating.
So I moped, and pondered and had a couple beers.
At this point I started going back through my mental pile of old abandoned games to see if there was something that I can make work and turn into a game in 2 weeks. And by golly I didn’t have to go far. My original blog post, in fact. It’s time to do BombBots over again.. except in a fantasy theme this time, on a tablet, in 2d. Oh and finished, seeing as I never finished the Second Life version (LUA server implementation problems), or the Torque Version (TGB never solidified into what I needed). So the goal, is to turn it into a 2 player on 1 tablet/mobile device game. Who knows.. maybe it’ll work out and be fun.
So the awesome thing is that just being ok with trashing the original idea really got me re-invigorated again. So perhaps the Drakkheim games this year will just be all little experiments and then I’ll see what sticks before committing to some grand master plan and in the meanwhile I’ll have a chance to build up a good re-usable codebase and master all the tools I want to.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]
One of Feburary’s Game 2 big new features, New art, and Animation!
Going to keep this short and sweet, can’t stop and reflect too much.
What went right:
What went wrong:
That’s it for now.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]
Will write a long soulful post mortem soon.. For now just riding the waves of euphoria for getting it ‘done’.
Play it here: http://drakkheim.com/january
[read original post at swiftthought.com]
Another long week. I’m finding as the game gets tighter and tighter I’m spending more and more time re-doing things that don’t work. While they make the game better, it’s not ‘fun’. Mainly it’s actually pretty depressing to throw away hours and hours of work. This is the part of the project where I guess I usually get bored/frustrated and stop. But Not this time.. This time I’m too damn close! New Playable builds available here: http://drakkheim.com/january/play
So what did get accomplished?
Lots and lots of bugs and glitches. Revisions to prevent button click through and proper input handling seem to have been the biggest culprit. The most common rendering bug / crash bugs centered around parts of the rendering loop continuing even if the monsters, enemies or any of the other arrays change size to 0 or trying to access things after starting to switch to the victory / loss screens.
So as of last week.. it wasn’t any fun. Because once you discovered you can stack units and stack 3 or so units they’d instakill anything they encounter. So the player winds up making a stack and then just sitting back and not doing anything. This was because monster combat is resolved first. So I changed that. Even though stacks can still instakill most things, the attacks are calculated simultaneously. This suddenly meant that you have to constantly manage your monsters. Which lead to a HUGE Problem. How do you select a monster in the middle in a stack. That leads us to ……
A major revision to the in-game UI made it much easier to keep track of your monsters. The only downside is that you now are limited to 20 monsters. (I’ve never even come close to that, so this shouldn’t be a problem. I also was able to tack on simple little health indicators beneath then portraits. All of a sudden things were a million times more fun. Then a quick tweak to the map renderer means that I can now reserve the bottom part of the screen to prevent sending creatures to whatever is beneath the UI. This alternate method of selecting units has a second unexpected benefit, It’s playable on Android again!!!! ok so no android build today, due to a some more event click through issues… but that should be fixable.
Tack on some interface sounds and things feel much more crunchy.
The base levels are in place. Still need to tweak the hell out of them
so over at http://www.reddit.com/r/onegameamonth someone started a particle Friday event. The intent being, blow off development and put in place some gratuitous particles. So I did, on the home screen, there’s now Fire.
Ok.. seriously.. with 4 days left.. too much. So the real question What Essential things are you missing?
That list, luckily, is much shorter.
Holy hell, that’s not a lot of time to get the last stuff done.
BUT, the last few days have been pretty productive, I must say.
So that’s not so bad.
3 of 5 levels are pretty much ready. And with the ease of starting and stopping rounds now, balancing is easier.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]
Whoa… so very very very close to being a real game.
This week I got, victory and failure implemented.
Graphics, monsters, particles, a revised UI backend and fun stuff
here’s a video from a couple days ago:
and Since then there’s been particles added, healing aura around the dragon egg and the beginning of playbalancing implemented.
Windows EXE: http://www.swiftthought.com/files/Drakkheim-jan-20-alpha.exe
Mac / Linux Java Jar : http://www.swiftthought.com/files/drakkheim_jan_20.jar
if you want to try em.
Here’s the victory and defeat screens if you don’t want to find em yourself..
Other than that This is my remaining to-do list for the Jan release:
Yeah.. that’s totally doable!
Ok Very very tired now and not very coherent.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]
Time for the weekly update!
Lots of new functionality got put in this week. The biggest of which is clearly the pathfinding which.. in all honestly was a pain in the butt but has been rock steady since I got it working. The map on the other hand.. I must have re-re-rewritten chunks of the rendering for it so many times these last few days. That and tile picking (still a wip) have both turned out to be deceptively huge pains in the ass. The primary cause is that the world coordinate system and visible coordinate system and the map tile grid are all different and finding out what correlates to everything else is a pain.
Luckily I seem to have it mostly sorted out for now. Well except the map renderer… that’s currently working on a sheer brute force approach, so I’ll have to limit the map sizes in the Jan build.
er they say a picture is worth a thousand words so here’s an annotated screenshot.
Oh and here’s a couple of runnable Builds:
Windows Pc EXE > Here
Everyone Runnable Jar > Here
Android…er.. it runs on my devices… however Im having issues getting the deployed APK file to work :-/
{Basic Instructions}
Click on stuff. There’s no real gameplay yet.
Right Click and Drag to pull the map around.
Let me know if it works
The rest of the weekend will probably not be nearly as productive :-/
However next up. Invaders! Collisions! Combat! Death!
But it’s gonna be close to see if I can get a functional game done by the end of the month.
Can’t say how much fun it will be.
[read original post at swiftthought.com]