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vitaliadev · 20 days ago

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gd.tv 2025 postmortem

https://itch.io/jam/gamedevtv-jam-2025

So, I already participated in this jam last year. In both times, it was because I wanted a course, tohugh today I see it probably won't be my goal next year because I have enough courses that cover every other course I do not have. It is likely I won't participate in next jam, or at least not for the course (but for flex....lol)

My game:

https://vitaliadev.itch.io/so-about-chrystal

The bad:

Due to perfectly foreseen circumstances, I messed up my project I of course broke my project and didn't have the recent working copy because I wanted to play around with plugins I didn't play before.

I have been in quite bad health recently, so I spent 2 days sleeping and resting, after what I half-forgot what I was doing, so I lost my concentration and didn't follow the plan (which led to issue above ^)

Because I had a broken file, I ended up doing a text version of my game in last 2 days, but I forgot music (in 3d project i had it hanks to using template that allowed me to quickly replace stuff).

I may have wasted a lot of time interacting with the jam community, as well as other jams I planned to be a part of later. It can be fun and all, but it also got an anon hater & wasted time by random chit-chat as a procrastination form voting on games and dealing with my personal stuff irl. So, this point is kinda about me procrastinating in general and using seemingly productive means for it like chatting with the community.

The good:

had HTML5 version compared to last year (if i had a truly good game it would be irrelevant tho)

kinda unrelated, but this game helped me to understand what i want on my itch.io and why i need custom css that now i got granted

Used my original project, so I didn't make a fully new idea that would grow like new type of mold as it always happens

I wrote a good script very quickly because I planned well, and i got massive update on my main idea for the project's universe.

The game is relatively simple by design, so I can actually finish it right now, If i commit to this project.

Doing a jam again made me spend recent few weeks very productively and I helped me to get back into creative flow, and gamedev in general.

I got a course as a prize that fits to my cat game idea.

revamped my youtube and added some videos on the game

got my game advertisement tagline (God, I'm funny):

Results of the jam :

page 23/52; place 457/1023

versus old entry 51/54; 1030/1082 This jam was a year apart, 573places & 2scores up.

Comparison to the previous year:

And for further progress analysis, here's results form another jam i did twice (48hours, not 10 days):

There the time was roughly half a year in between, raised myself 1 point and 4 places position 49/53 in 2024, 45/55 in 2025.

To sum up: half a year I upgrade my rating in 1 point and climb up the ladder. Though, i recalled it wrong, i only participated irl in 1 jam, first one with Out of Control game. So perhaps I could finish because I wasn't on location and had more smooth process this way (again, time was wasted on chit chat irl).

---

Things to do in jams:

Always check if I have music and sounds

consider how to deal with HTML5 (either i don't work in UE5 at all or I work in UE4.23, which needs new templates and learning)

prep meals etc beforehand

Things to do in general:

do postmortem for year of jams (8 total) + video

play some jam games i had no time for

test UE 5.6

clean up the file mess after broken projects

organize my desktop, i have a lot of jams' related stuff dumped all over folders

update all my Twine games with pics and music

check out UE templates

UE new course - for cat game

get screen etc for home

ue template - combat for Jack's game likely

sort my tag system tumlbr posts

Some other thing to do in general:

deal asap with my docs

figure out wth is my health situation now because it hasn't been normal

There were many things more in my head but whatevers

#gamedev.tv #gdtv jam 2025 #gdtvjam #postmortem #gamedev #indiedev #unreal engine #unreal engine 5 #game jam #solodev #devlog #youtube #game development #brainstorm #twine

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layingeggs · 2 years ago

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Playing some of that Magenta Horizon, a game that bills itself as a character action. Really enjoying it.

However, unfortunately, I have pressed every button on my controller and I have not yet taunted. I played through the tutorial level and there wasn't a single taunt tutorial. Did I just miss it?

Devil May Cry 2 died for our sins you know. That was the DMC game where you couldn't taunt.

What are these young gamedevs doing these days that they're making games inspired by DMC and not including a taunt?

Just a little bit less facetiously, (because I was only being just a little bit facetious anyway, the comment about gamedevs as the youths of the day, that was facetious, everything else was sincere,) this does limit the options for S Rank play.

Like, expose me as a filthy casual if you like, but one of the things that appeals to me about Devil May Cry in the first place, say it with me now it's that old chestnut, it's hard but fair. Because yes the enemies swarm you, and yes some of the enemies can parry you, and yes the bosses are tough as nails, and it used to have the same reputation that Dark Souls itself does now,

but it was possible to raise your score through taunting. This had a wide range of subtle yet honestly profound effects on how you played the game.

In a number of DMCs, there are special passive changes to your moves and toolkit based on the Style Meter. Without taunts, you just have to play optimally in order to unlock those. But with taunts, you just need some basic critical thinking about timing your taunts with your combos and against the enemy attacks.

As well the end of level rank. Without taunts, if you want that S Rank, then you just have to play optimally. But again, with taunts, it leads you to intelligently thinking about when you should or shouldn't taunt.

These subtle little incentives for players to approach the game from a new perspective lead to greater insights into the rest of the game. It's a way to experience a tough as nails game and its meta without necessarily having to just sharpen your reaction times to perfection. But it does also train your reflexes with the game to try these alternate approaches!

Again, perhaps it belies the casual streak in me that I want a game with a tough as nails reputation that noneless allows me to get good scores without perfect play. However, and this is crucial, this is charactert action that we are talking about. Also known as stylish action.

The taunts give it that little flourish that makes it feel more like a scene from your favourite film or anime, and less like you're just following through the motions of whatever the game meta demands. Impressing the idea of the video game that is not only hard to play, but very pretty to look at when you actually master it. But emphatically with the control in the player's hands. None of that soft scripted gameplay sequence that we've seen in games since the PS3.

And you look at the cutscenes of these sorts of games also. You look at, for example, once again always coming back to the example, you look at the cutscenes in Devil May Cry.

Dante is always taking hits. There isn't a game where he doesn't. There's hardly a cutscene where he doesn't. Indeed, the fan favourite iconic series trope is of Dante getting impaled with a sword and then shrugging it off like it was nothing.

But then you have this stark contrast in the gameplay, don't you? Where you can't play well without just avoiding damage and never getting hit. That's not how Dante fights at all.

Except you can, can't you? You can take a hit, and then recover from them with taunts! Of course you're not recovering your health, so there's only so many times you can do that before you just lose, but it's doing exactly what Dante is doing in the cutscenes. Shrugging off a heavy attack like it was nothing. Daring on the enemy to do it again with a big dumb grin on your face like you haven't just shed your weight in blood all over the floor.

It's that harmonising between the gameplay and the cutscenes. Inviting the player to participate in the theatre of the action, of action storytelling tropes and conventions. That you can, in a way, use taunting as a way to 'no sell' or 'hard sell' your enemy's attacks!

So of course in a character action you need those attacks, you need abilities that let you damage and fight and defeat enemies. But you also need those non-combat moves! Those non-combat non-movement moves! Those abilities that disarm enemies in a different way. Those abilities that all the hyperviolence into a thing of play or dance or art. That's the real crux of it. That's the style in the stylish action.

Coming back to Magenta Horizon. I did the first two levels. I got pretty poor ranks since I'm only just starting. And then I tried them again and got better ranks.

A helpful thing that Magenta Horizon does when it ranks your performance on the level is actually tell you what you're being ranked on. Apparently, the level of your style meter during the KO of an enemy is important. (It was important in Devil May Cry as well, it's just that the game never said so!)

But how can I score more KOs against enemies during the time in which my Style Meter is filled to a high level? Sure I can do combos, and sure I'm avoiding repeats of stale moves, (though I sincerely don't know yet if this game has a stale mechanic LOL), but up to a certain point, you just have to avoid getting hit.

Can't raise my style with taunts. Just have to keep comboing and suffer as few interrutpions to my combos as possible. That's it.

That's why your taunts are important. They expand your toolkit. (Taunts are also a way of scoring a high style KO against a weaker enemy who would otherwise run out of health before any perfect combo could possibly raise the Style Meter high enough.)

Still, I'm only two levels in. Maybe this game does have taunting and I can still find the taunt ability later on! Maybe I'm just being a noob about.

On the other hand, this isn't the only game I've seen "inspired by Devil May Cry" that simply lacked taunts. I reiterate, only a little facetiously, what are our young gamedevs doing these days? Did they learn nothing from Devil May Cry 2? Alas.

#Magenta Horizons #Indie games #Video games #Character Action

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entergamingxp · 5 years ago

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All the Announcements (June 6, 2020)

June 6, 2020 8:08 PM EST

All the announcements at Indie Live Expo 2020, a huge stream celebrating doujin games, featuring messages from Swery, ZUN, Toby Fox and more.

The Indie Live Expo 2020 live stream event was held on June 6, revealing a plethora of info on Doujin games and Japanese indie games. Here’s a list of all the announcements made during the stream.

Azure Striker Gunvolt 2 Launches June 22, 2020, on Steam

From mountains high to valleys low…

From cities big and small…

From beyond the clouds and across the seas…

We have heard your cries.

“GV2 Steam when?”

At last, we have an answer for you! Azure Striker Gunvolt 2 is coming to Steam on June 22!https://t.co/VqbUH2ghdE pic.twitter.com/pNLYCoueKO

— Inti Creates (@IntiCreatesEN) June 6, 2020

Azure Striker Gunvolt 2 was originally a Nintendo 3DS game launched in 2016. Inti Creates launched the game on PS4 in April 2020. It’s now coming to Steam on June 22, only two weeks from now. Read our review here.

2D Action Game Cogen: Sword of Rewind Announced for 2020 Release on Steam, Switch, PS4

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Japanese indie studio Gemdrops announced Cogen: Ootori Kohaku to Toki no Ken. Also known as Cogen: Sword of Rewind, it’s coming in 2020 on PC, PS4, and Switch. Sakuraba is composing the OST. Read our dedicated article for more details.

Record of Lodoss War – Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth- Early Access Stage 2 Coming Late June

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Team Ladybug announced on Indie Live Expo 2020 that the second stage of Record of Lodoss War – Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth- will launch in late June. A trailer showing the stage was published as well. Record of Lodoss War – Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth- launched in early access on March 12, 2020. As of now it only has a single stage, so it really is an early access. Stage 2 will include Efreet and Ylk as mid-bosses. The developers promises more content to come soon. You can read much more on this Metroidvania featuring Deedlit from Ryo Mizuno’s Lodoss novels with our past coverage here and here.

Online Multiplayer, Open-world, Survival Action game Craftopia Announced on Steam, with Early Access This July

[How to Join Closed Alpha Test of Craftopia]

1. Add Craftopia to wishlist in https://t.co/4jHzMqKuqV

2. Follow @PocketpairGames and RT this tweet

50 players will be chosen by lottery and receive the invitation code via DM. The application period is by 6/12 23:59 pic.twitter.com/yx3rHQkaKo

— Pocketpair – Craftopia (@PocketpairGames) June 6, 2020

Japanese indie devs Pocket Pair revealed its online multiplayer game Craftopia, and announced a Steam Early Access in July. Recruitment for a Closed Alpha Test also began.

Craftopia might look like Story of Seasons in 3D at a first glance, but it actually mixes Survival, Open-World, Crafting, Pokemon, and Online Multiplayer. Craftopia is also an hack ‘n’ slash, as you’ll craft your own equipment and learn skills to fight. You can make buildings and vehicles as well. The game promises a high degree of freedom, allowing you to do a lot of things that would lend you in jail in real life, such as building a giant machine to automatically boil livestock for food, or hunting elephants.

Craftopia looks like tons of fun and is definitely a game I’ll keep an eye on. The official site promises “endless possibilities”. If you can create a whole automated society complete with state racism and cops characters who assassinate innocents with impunity, I’ll buy this in a heartbeat.

Nimbus Infinity Announced on PC via Steam and Consoles (Release Date TBA)

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GameTomo and GameCrafterTeam announced Nimbus Infinity, the sequel to high-speed mecha action game Project Nimbus. Nimbus Infinity will feature skill-based combat, diverse battlefields from asteroid belts to deserts, and customizable mecha & weapons. You can read more on the game on its official site. It’s interesting to note Nimbus Infinity was announced for PC via Steam and “consoles”, so perhaps it could come to Xbox Series X and PS5.

Sumire Announced for PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch (Release Date TBA)

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GameTomo revealed a brand new narrative-driven game, Sumire no Sora. it’s definitely one of the game that piqued my interest the most during the Indie Live Expo 2020 stream, so I detailed what we know about the game via a dedicated article.

Picontier, Coming to PC and Switch, Gets New Gameplay (Release Date TBA)

『ピコンティア』の最新映像が公開されました！でもこれは、まだほんの一部です！完成までもう少しお時間をください…！#ピコンティア #Picontier #gamedev pic.twitter.com/bGDtTuCnGm

— ユウラボ@Skipmore (@skipmore) June 6, 2020

Developed by Skipmore (Fairune, Kamiko) Picontier is a slow-paced garden raising game with cute pixel art. You can also fish and fight monsters. It’s similar to Bokujou Monogatari (Story of Seasons) and its spinoff Rune Factory. They showed around 5 minutes of gameplay on the Indie Live Expo stream. Watch it at the 54:03 timestamp. The game’s developer asked us on Twitter to please wait a bit more till release. They’re also working on another game called Transiruby.

Touhou Fan Game Gensokyo Night Festival on Steam Gets Major Content Update Coming Soon

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Tea_Basira announced during Indie Live Expo 2020 that its 2D scrolling action Touhou game, Gensokyo Night Festival, will get a new update soon. Similarly to Deedlit in Wonderland, the game is in early access. The update will add the game’s second stage, which has Utsuho Reiuji aka Okuu as boss, one of my favorite 2hues.

Chinese Parents, Already Available in English, Will Now Launch in Japanese

Chinese Parents is a pretty interesting sounding game. It’s a raising simulation where you live as a Chinese kid born in an average family, from their very early days of life up to the end of high school when they turn 18 years old. You decide how to spend your time, having fun, studying, learning skills, etc. It’s pretty much Princess Maker but with Chinese Parents. I’d definitely like to try it one day.

Children of Morta, Already Available in the West, was Finally Announced for our Japanese Peers on PS4, Switch

Children of Morta is an indie-action RPG available in the West on PS4 and Switch. Developed by Dead Mage, Children of Morta‘s story driven experience will hopefully become a hit in Japan. No release estimate for the Japanese version was announced yet, but hopefully the wait won’t be much longer. You can read our review of Children of Morta here.

The Indie Live Expo 2020 stream is embedded below. You have the English version and the Japanese version. Smaller announcements were also made, like new ports of existing games. Multiple already revealed or released games were featured for exposure too, such as Gnosia and Alter Ego S. If you’re interested,watch the Indie Waves Part 1,2,3 at the 1:15:56, 2:05:45, and 3:24:27 marks. The event also featured messages from popular Japanese developers:

ZUN (Touhou Project)

Toby Fox (“UNDERTALE”, “DELTARUNE”)

SWERY (CEO for White Owls Inc. ) (1:30:58)

Kazuya Nino (TYPE-MOON studio BB) (3:58:18)

Shuhei Yoshida(Head of Indies Initiative Sony Interactive Entertainment)

Jenova Chen(Co-Founder and Creative Director of thatgamecompany)

ZUN appears on stream at the 4:00:24 mark. He waited in the next room for like 6 hours, watching the stream unfold. Toby Fox’s heartwarming message follows soon after. You can watch Toby Fox’ message by itself here, but it isn’t as poignant without the comments from ZUN.

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Source: Indie Live Expo 2020

June 6, 2020 8:08 PM EST

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/06/all-the-announcements-june-6-2020/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=all-the-announcements-june-6-2020

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rpgmgames · 7 years ago

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August’s Featured Game: Shroom Soup

DEVELOPER(S): Shroomy ENGINE: RPGMaker 2000 GENRE: Adventure, RPG, Psychological Horror WARNINGS: listed here (may contain spoilers) SUMMARY: You play as Arnika, a gloomy teenage girl. Perpetually tired, you live off excessive sleep, lime juice, and instant soup. You look into the vortex forming in your cup of said soup, this time mushroom flavour. Next thing you know, you are in an entirely different world where everything, from buildings to people, is being devoured by fungi. It seems like you have no choice but to walk on... Your journey involves exploration, puzzle-solving and battles.

Download the demo here!

Our Interview With The Dev Team Below The Cut!

Introduce yourself! Hello! I am Shroomy, and I still haven't figured out which one of my nicknames I should go by, but I use "uboaappears" for art and "toxic shroom swamp" for games. I have a bachelor's degree in biology since two weeks ago and like everything surreal, gory and gay. Nice to meet you. I have been in the community since about 2012, and that might be also when I first wanted to make a game - a Yume Nikki fangame, because YN brought me here. I messed around with the engine for a long time, and certain characters and ideas gradually mutated to whatever this is now.

What is your project about? What inspired you to create your game initially? *Shroomy: It's about making a cup of instant soup and accidentally going on a very weird adventure. ...Okay, actually, it's a coming-of-age story with an emphasis on mental health, relationships, and toxic flesh-eating mushrooms. The idea came to me when I made myself an instant soup once. For some reason, I thought it would be cool if there was a portal into another world in the cup. That's how it started. (I was also into drawing mushrooms growing on people at the time, so that naturally made its way into my Awesome Game Idea.)

How long have you been working on your project? *Shroomy: ...A while. It's enough to say that I graduated from both high school and university with it. But to be honest, I didn't really do much with it until about two years ago. Right now I tend to think of the time before that as trial and error, playing around with ideas and learning to use the engine. I feel a little self-conscious about how long it took me to come up with a coherent story, but that might be a good thing. Since this is quite a personal game, it helped to grow as a person. I think it made for a more interesting and mature work than it would be otherwise.

Did any other games or media influence aspects of your project? *Shroomy: I feel like I take little bits of inspirations from everything. But I'd say Yume Nikki and Re:Kinder were the biggest game influences. Maybe Hello Charlotte, too - the minimalistic world gave me some food for thought :> Design-wise, I think my current (character) style is a lovechild of Danganronpa, Killing Stalking and something else I am not sure about. Maybe just me.

Have you come across any challenges during development? How have you overcome or worked around them? *Shroomy: I think the biggest challenges for me have always been centered around the lack of free time, the lack of energy or the lack of motivation. Some people manage to juggle life and gamedev, but I get exhausted really easily, so it's hard. This is an ongoing issue. I tend to try and free up a day just for relaxing and creative stuff. I've also started using the Forest app for focusing on things, and sometimes use it for gamedev as well. At the beginning I found it frustrating that my skills (in pixel art, for example) didn't match what I wanted to create. That one was improved by - you guessed it - making a lot of pixel art. Making and scrapping a bunch of tilesets for the game. It's as simple as practice and learning how to get the most out of your art program. (It also helps me to make a detailed sketch of a map before I start working, or at least brainstorm the main elements of it.) Another challenge was the incoherence of the story. Originally I wanted to make something really vague and open to interpretation, but... that actually didn't give me enough material to work with. In the end, I played around with the characters, tried to write them some backstories that no one was going to see, and somehow ended up with an actual plot..? Shocking, I know! And the final thing is putting gameplay into the game. To be honest, the puzzles in the demo were pretty random on my side, I just thought them up on the spot. In subsequent locations I tried to make them relevant to the game's themes and/or hint towards the story.

Have any aspects of your project changed over time? How does your current project differ from your initial concept? *Shroomy: For one thing, the current project has a story and a plan, even if the story is presented in quite an obfuscated way. The original concept was not much more than an idea of a shroomy world. The characters also have a lot more depth and pain to them than they used to. The locations have changed a lot as well, to the point where most of the original ones don't exist anymore.

What was your team like at the beginning? How did people join the team? If you don’t have a team, do you wish you had one or do you prefer working alone? *Shroomy: My team is mostly just me. At the beginning it was a young and naive me, and now we have a slightly older and better-at-art me. After I started my dev blog, I was contacted by Tommuel, who now helps me with sound design and music. And my old friend Robin has made a few NPC sprites for me, and might give a hand with more pixel art in the future. They're not really involved with other aspects of development, but I really appreciate their help anyway! I prefer to keep most of this game to myself - it feels too personal to share, plus I'm a bit of a perfectionist.

What is the best part of developing the game? *Shroomy: I would say it's putting my work out there and sharing it with the world. I'm also really proud of how much I've grown as an artist and writer through developing this. I got attached to this story and this world, with all of its fun, weird and sad details. It's also been really fun, amazing even, to get to know other devs and make friends through being part of this interesting and creative community. I owe some wonderful friendships to it.

Do you find yourself playing other RPG Maker games to see what you can do with the engine, or do you prefer to do your own thing? *Shroomy: I definitely play other games for inspiration, it helps me a lot. Though I try not to make things "just like" other games, but make it a transformative learning experience instead.

Which character in your game do you relate to the most and why? (Alternatively: Who is your favorite character and why?) *Shroomy: I feel like I have been through stages. At first I was Arnika, then Lina, now I feel like I'm turning into Arthur. I guess I put my traits into all of them. (Does that mean that Bernard is the next stage? I'm /so/ ready to transcend humanity, finally learn how to do maths and become everyone's favourite character.)

Looking back now, is there anything that regret/wish you had done differently? *Shroomy: I think the biggest mistake I made was jumping straight into making a game without thinking it through or considering the scope. In the end, the lack of planning set me back a lot. Admittedly, I was young and excitable, so I guess it was a learning experience? I didn't really know how to write stories or plan long-term projects, but over time, I somehow built up those skills. I think it's good to have a clear-ish idea of what you want to make before you start, and maybe start with something small. (So basically, do the opposite of what I did.)

Once you finish your project, do you plan to explore the game’s universe and characters further in subsequent projects, or leave it as-is? *Shroomy: Aha. Actually, yes. I have accidentally started writing two sequels already. They will be small games focusing on other characters' perspectives (as opposed to Arnika). I'm not actually touching them yet though, only making some notes and writing scripts. Perhaps by the time the first game is released I'll have enough material to comfortably work on them.

What do you look most forward to upon/after release? *Shroomy: Fan reaction, I think? To be honest, I'm not really sure. I think I'll just be enjoying the incredible dopamine rush after finally setting this child of mine free to explore the world and infect people's brains with all the shroomy memes it contains. (Also will probably get off the internet for about a week from the anxiety.) Then maybe being free to work on other things, indeed. And posting spoilery concept art >:D

Is there something you’re afraid of concerning the development or the release of your game? *Shroomy: I am a little worried about the reception of the game's subject matter. If you looked at the list of warnings, you might have an idea what I mean. Sometimes it feels dangerous to explore certain themes in your stories, because people misinterpret depicting something bad as promoting it, for example. But that's why that list exists. I'm just going to let people know straight away that I explore dark themes in this project and I'm not going to hold back on how I do it. Creativity should flow freely, I think. (I am also a little worried about the ratio of my free time vs. gamedev time and /when/ I will finally be able to release it, but... Thankfully, I'm the one in charge of that.)

Do you have any advice for upcoming devs? *Shroomy: Take some time to make a plan for your project, start small, fail faster, and aim for something finished before you aim for perfect. Make a system for organising your files. Back up often, and on a different drive/cloud than your game is on, preferably several. Most of all, make something you would love to play! And don't be too hard on yourself.

Question from last month's featured dev @blackcrystalsrpg: What are your game dev pet peeves?? *Shroomy: I dislike the fact that sometimes I want to have made a game more than I want to make a game, but to have made a game you need to go and make the game. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But there's no escape from fate, so... go, go and make that game happen!

We mods would like to thank Shroomy for agreeing to our interview! We believe that featuring the developer and their creative process is just as important as featuring the final product. Hopefully this Q&A segment has been an entertaining and insightful experience for everyone involved!

Remember to check out Shroom Soup if you haven’t already! See you next month!

- Mods Gold & Platinum

#rpgmaker #indie games #pixel games #rpg maker #rpg maker 2000 #shroom soup #gotm #game of the month #gotm august #august 2018 #august #2018 #interview #game making #game dev

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sheeping-around · 6 years ago

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Sheeping Around Retrospective: By The Numbers

tl;dr: Scroll all the way down for the numbers.

Sheeping Around has been live on the App Store for a little over ten days now. I think it is about time I look back at the development cycle, the good parts, the bad parts and also share some sales figures while I’m at it. I’m following the trend of transparency to help other indie game developers know and understand the market of premium games, for which I gained inspiration from Eric @ Slothwerks and Arnold @ Tiny Touch Tales. I’m also inspired by the way they work: solo devs working with talented people across the world on a contract basis, and I follow the same pattern.

While I’ve worked on games in the past, this is my first official release on the App Store, and I’m really glad to have been able to reach that goal. My previous games got stuck in infinite iteration loops and never got to see the light of the day.

Inception

I have written in one of my previous posts how the idea of Sheeping Around was born. The idea began as a turn based (asymmetric) strategy game, and eventually turned into a card game that it is today. You can read more about it in the below two posts:

Sheeping Around Inception

Inspired by Card Thief and More

Inspirations of Sheeping Around and its inception as a physical card game

Development

I have around 8 years of experience as a Javascript developer. While I am familiar with other languages like Java and Objective-C/C++, my core expertise and speed of development is still in Javascript. Also, I had begun using TypeScript at work since mid 2017 and had loved it. Reminded me of the good ol’ Flash and Actionscript days.

When the physical version of Sheeping Around card game was proven to be fun enough, I began working on a web-based prototype version of it using Angular.js on the front-end and Node.js on the backend in the first week of November 2017. I deployed the system on Heroku on its free plan, and used Heroku Postgres as database of choice. (It was free upto 9000 rows, more than sufficient for a prototype.)

Initial prototype version of Sheeping Around

For the native mobile version of the game, I used cocos2d-x JS with TypeScript.

I pushed the code to GitHub as private repositories. I maintained separate repos for client and the server.

Multiplayer

Initially I had planned on Sheeping Around to be a solitaire card game, but it ended up being too similar to Card Thief. It wasn’t much fun anyway either. I decided to prototype a two player dueling game on paper, and it proved to be a lot of fun. I figured it would be much more challenging to handle a multiplayer game, but given my full-stack experience, I was confident I’d be able to do it anyway.

Architecture of Sheeping Around

Sketch, GraphicRiver and GUI

Around March 2018, I began working on the GUI of the game. I had recently switched my role to Product Design at my company Sumo Logic and had begun learning Sketch and loved it. I bought some assets off GraphicRiver and heavily modified a lot of them and put them together in Sketch.

All screen designs in Sketch

I wasn’t very happy with the initial designs, but towards the end of April things had started looking much better and professional.

Initial designs

Final designs

Google Indie Games Accelerator

The progress in the initial few months was somewhat slow. I spent time refining the balance of the game and tweaking the progression. Meanwhile I was also designing some UI for the native mobile version of the game.

By the end of June 2018, Google announced the first ever Indie Games Accelerator for games made in South East Asia. The submission deadline was July, so I started rapidly working on the mobile version for Android and iterating it really fast. By mid of July, I had the gameplay fully functional. By the end of it, I had the entire progression system and marketplace fully set up.

Some charts from the progression and reward system of the game inspired mainly by Pokemon

While I was not selected for the accelerator program, it did help me accelerate the game development process anyway and I am thankful to the accelerator program for that.

Art and Animation

I discuss a lot about art style with Rashi, and we had finalized that the characters would be anthro. Check out some concept art and final artwork for some of the characters below:

I really loved the idea of in-card animations in Card Thief, and wanted to have something similar in my game as well. I was fortunate enough to run into Robinson Millaguin in the Indie Game Developers Facebook group. He began his work on animating some of the initial cards in Spine and my mind was blown already. Check out the video below:

vimeo

You can see more of the animation GIFs on the official website for Sheeping Around.

Tragicomic Theme and Music

I had contracted someone for music, but it did not sound so fitting. It was very difficult to decide what kind of music would fit this game because it was such a unique premise. I started scouting out for tracks on AudioJungle. Farms are usually associated with country music, but I had ruled it out completely. Western style music with gut guitars and ukuleles are a close second choice associated with farm themes. Somehow that style didn’t fit either, and sounded rather cowboy-ish.

I explored all kinds of genres of music and tried to see if they fit in the game. Finally, I found that the music in Comedy genre seemed to be the most fitting. I stumbled upon the profile of AudioAgent, who had an amazing portfolio of comedy tracks. His tracks are tragicomic themed, and coincidentally, he kept adding more tracks in the genre as the game progressed.

The game now features a total of 9 comedy audio tracks by AudioAgent. (The tracks change every 10 levels.)

You can check out the tracks in the below Youtube playlists:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1Ajh9Cn23k&list=PLnTakDx63B8L0pBpjPD10VB3NJEcXj2l4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXeq713R444&list=PLnTakDx63B8IS3hr4Sd-tnZXgu5vCIoi6

Sound

I had already made a list of suitable sounds from AudioJungle, but it was from a variety of artists and didn’t seem to fit together. I was not sure if I should hire a sound designer for the project. I figured it would be a good idea to ask around anyway.

I am active on Twitter in the gamedev community, and I found Elise Kates’ profile there. She had done some amazing work in the past for games like Moss, and I thought she’d be a good candidate to help me out with the sound. And it was a great decision afterall. The sound effects added the finishing touches to the polish in the game and really brought the characters to life!

Putting It All Together

I’m glad I’ve been able to put all of this together in a single package. The pun in the name, gameplay mechanics, art, animation, sound and music all come together really well. It would be perhaps be one of my proudest achievement since it is an important skillset to have.

Translation, Screenshots, Trailer and Preview Videos

In December, I took help from the Indie Game Localization community to get the game translated in 12 languages. It was an overwhelming amount of work, about 5000 words. I maintained separate Google Sheets for each language.

But what was harder was designing screenshots and preview videos and localizing them into all languages. But it did pay off eventually because it got the game featured in most of the regions that I had localized for.

Check out the preview video below:

youtube

Robinson helped in creating a landscape trailer for the game as well, since Android needs a landscape video regardless of whether the game is landscape or not. it was more of a theatrical trailer that served as an introduction to the premise of Sheeping Around and dab a little bit into its gameplay:

youtube

Freemium, Premium or Paymium?

The hardest decision for me to take was whether to go premium or freemium (or paymium), and if premium, what would be the price point of the game. Early on I had decided that the game would be premium on iOS and free-to-play on Android, given how easy piracy is on Android (more on piracy in the Piracy section below). I had thought of keeping the game’s price to $4.99, as I had read that Card Crawl had recently upped its price to $4.99 from $2.99 and it increased their month-on-month sales by more than 2x. Turns out, it won’t work very well during release when both developer and the game are new to the market and there are no ratings and reviews. This is also why my day 2 sales were more than day 1 sales, when I dropped the price to $2.99.

My game also has in-app purchases, and most people object to the idea of IAPs in a premium game. But if you look at the top paid charts in the card game category (or even any other category for that matter), you will find that more than 70% of the games have IAPs. This model is called paymium on mobile platforms, and has only recently entered the debate alongside freemium and premium. In the PC world, most games are paid, and the concept of DLCs is fairly normal and accepted, so I don’t understand what the issue with IAPs in premium mobile games is about.

Besides, the IAPs in Sheeping Around aren’t your typical in-your-face popups that appear at the end of every game to give you a reward or to increase your life. They are subtle, just two coin packs that you can buy if need be. You probably won’t need to though.

Pre-orders and the Coming Soon Feature

I set the game to be available for preorder on 31st December 2018. That would make my first new years’ resolution to be to release this game. I set Thursday, 17th Jan as the release date. That is because App Store refreshes every Thursday and it would get greater number of days in visibility if it gets featured then. (Most features last at least a week.)

That is also when I also submitted my game and my story to Apple via App Store’s promote link, hoping to get featured.

On January 5, the game got featured in the Coming Soon section, and it started getting a little spike in pre-orders. From 1-2 per day to around 25-30 per day. On January 20, the game got featured in a lot more territories, including US, UK, South Africa, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand. I netted about 250 pre-orders from this feature. But it turns out that in some places, since Apple lets you preorder without having a linked credit card, they would fail to be billed on release of the game. Because of this, only about 200 pre-orders went through successfully. App store still shows -1/-2 net preorders days after the game’s release.

New Games We Love & Top Charts

Upon release, the game was featured in “New Games We Love” in US, China and the Greater China Area (HK, Macau, Taiwan), South-East Asia, India, UK, Europe, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand. It also went on to become #3 card game in US (iPhone) during launch and stayed between #3-#5 during the first week. In China, which is the second biggest market for me, the highest it went was #9 in card games. (Competition is quite high in that category there, with most paid games priced at ¥1 ($0.15).)

I especially love the words UK editorial team used to describe the game in Games We Love.

Reception

The reviews so far have been positive, with occasional negative reviews talking about some bugs, most of which I have fixed in the week after release. Here are the current reviews and ratings stats for the game so far:

US: 4.6 / 5 (56 ratings, 32 reviews) China: 4.3 / 5 (41 ratings, 23 reviews) Thailand: 4.7 / 5 (15 ratings, 11 reviews) Germany: 4.0 / 5 (11 ratings, 6 reviews) Russia: 4.6 / 5 (8 ratings, 7 reviews) UK: 3.7 / 5 (6 ratings, 4 reviews)

Some encouraging reviews:

“I’ve only played this game for 20 minutes, and I love it already. The creativity, the idea, everything about this game is just beyond my expectations, and I can only assume how addicting this game will be.”

“It a really good game. You should make a physical card game for this game. I really like it and it’s definitely worth buying it.”

“Don’t really review apps, let alone end up playing one a day or two after I started. But this one... this one got me hooked! It’s fairly simple gameplay but sometimes it gets pretty exciting.”

“Pre-ordered it, I've played Card Monsters since release & Hearthstone for 4 years & this game is very solid & entertaining.”

“I think this game is another new twist to a card game, I can definitely see potential for this game. I can’t wait for the next update, hopefully with some new cards to use.”

“This game is family oriented and so easy to play. It has the simplicity of UNO yet with enough strategy to keep you engage but not overwhelmed. This is highly addictive and fun to play. The element of luck is always a factor but how to use the cards given is the key. The games are short but competitive. Those who love card/card battle games should download this without hesitation! Kudos! Look forward to updates to see what you guys come up with next!”

DAUs, Screen Time and Retention Rate

I use Tableau for my data visualization needs, and have custom graphs and dashboards created for all kinds of metrics. 27% of the players have played the game for at least one hour, which is quite encouraging. 4.5% of the players have been addicted and have played for more than 5 hours. I’ve been seeing an average DAU of around 750 and average total session time of over 450 hours. Not that it matters much for a premium game, but I’m tracking it anyway. In terms of retention, my day 7 retention is about 10%, which isn’t so bad. I will give it more time to see what my day 30 retention is.

Press Coverage and Critic Reviews

I had mailed a lot of media sites and YouTubers to review the game. A lot of them covered the game. Thanks to the localization effort, the game was featured in a lot of foreign language blogs.

Specifically Pocket Gamer and Pocket Tactics wrote about the game. The review from Pocket Tactics was negative with a 2.0 / 5 rating, and from Pocket Gamer was somewhat above average at 3.5 / 5 rating. Pocket Tactics review, though negative, gave me a chuckle because of their words of choice.

You can check them out here:

Pocket Gamer: A surprisingly tense, exciting and fun card battler that doesn’t quite have the tactical depth for the long haul.

Pocket Tactics: Sheeping Around looks the part, but sadly the game turns out to be as dull as you would expect for a game based on an animal that stands around in a field all day chewing grass.

The criticism though has been pretty good in these reviews, and I will add more content and depth in the future updates to address the weaknesses they have mentioned.

Piracy

One thing I wanted to point out was that about 25% of the users of Sheeping Around are using a pirated version. I was under the impression that it would be very hard to pirate an iOS game, because it would need jailbreaking and it isn’t very easy to jailbreak your iOS device. Turns out I was very wrong. There are pirated App Stores like AppEven that you can install on your device, and you can install premium iOS games for free using those stores. You don’t need to jailbreak your phone and the whole process is dead simple. Turns out these folks are abusing Enterprise App certificates for ad-hoc app distribution, and Apple hasn’t been paying much attention to them.

Within about two minutes, I was able to download a pirated version of my own game from AppEven. It even added its own ads that pop up once every few minutes that bring revenue to the owners of the pirated app store. It made me a little sad, but that’s the way it is. No matter how many attempts you make to prevent piracy in your app, the hackers will have a workaround to bypass it. They can remove the code in your app that prevents piracy, replace your ads with their own. It is their daily business.

Promotional Artwork

For games that Apple finds worthy of promotion using a banner feature or on the Today page, Apple requests developers for promotional artwork. I got this request last Monday and I submitted the artwork by Wednesday. The game hasn’t gotten a banner feature or Game of the Day yet, so I can only hope it will happen one day in the future.

By The Numbers

And finally, the moment you’d been waiting for. Sales. Sheeping Around was able to break even about 50% of its outsourcing costs (art, animation and sfx) in 10 days since launch.

The top 2 territories where the game made some decent revenue are US and China, followed by Germany and UK.

What’s next?

I’m already working on some new cards that add more variety to the gameplay. These include:

Bonus cards

Peek - Look at the opponent’s hand.

Undo - Undo the opponent’s last move. It can also potentially undo a stolen or whistled sheep.

Lucky Pendant - Draw half the number of cards in your hand (rounded off).

Shepherd cards

Fence N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Build a fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being stolen for N turns.

Electric Fence N (N = 2, 3) - Build an electric fence around all sheep preventing any of them from being lured or stolen for N turns.

Quarantine N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Cure all sheep of Infestation or Intoxication by N turns.

Vaccinate N (N = 3, 4) - Prevent Infestation or Intoxication on all sheep for the next N turns.

Thief cards

Infest N (N = 2, 3, 4) - Infest all sheep with pests to prevent them from being whistled for N turns.

Intoxicate N (N = 2, 3) - Intoxicate sheep to prevent them from being grazed or whistled for N turns.

Thrash N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Damage a Fence or an Electric Fence and reduce its value by N turns.

Termites (N = 3, 4) - Spread termites to prevent building a Fence or an Electric Fence for the next N turns.

Changes to existing cards

Rescue N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Trap, Infestation or Intoxication by N turns on one sheep.

Distract N (N = 1, 2, 3) - Reduce the effect of Guard, Fence or Electric Fence by N turns on one sheep.

You can already add an ally that unlocks at Lv. 20 to the game. Future updates may include upto 5 allies in total:

Shepherd’s side

Beaver - Jack Kim (Lv. 10)

Llama - Fuzzy Wumpkins (Lv. 20)

Sheepdog - Casper Cloud (Lv. 30)

Emu - Emily McCoy (Lv. 40)

Donkey - Muriel Miller (Lv. 50)

Thief’s side

Raven - Merlin Kook (Lv. 10)

Eagle - Cradoc McClaw (Lv. 20)

Coyote - Roxy Fang (Lv. 30)

Badger - Agent Chaos (Lv. 40)

Bear - Boris Rockpaw (Lv. 50)

Additional Features I’ll also be working on some features like: - Expressions and dialogs - Offline mode vs AI - Pass and play multiplayer - Quests

Conclusion

Sheeping Around was a fun project, and unlike my other shelved projects, it saw the light of the day, and it is a proud achievement for me in that regard. For the past 14 months, I’ve worked part-time at a consistent pace on this project (and full time for a few months). Especially as a solo developer being able to develop a PvP multiplayer game where people in US can battle people in China with servers located in London, I think it is a great feat.

Look forward to more updates in the future on this blog. Follow the blog on Tumblr or me on Twitter to keep yourself up to date on the progress of the game.

#sheepingaround #postmortem #indiegamedev #gamedev #gamedesign #ios #appstore

3 notes · View notes

tcrakman · 7 years ago

Photo

Been trying to define a style for the game, (it´s been months actually, i ended up scrapping more than half of the stuff i did since i didn´t liked how it ended looking).

Learned a few tricks along the way though! (which now saves me a lot of time doing things with some stuff that took me days before to do...)

Im sure a lot of people already knew about these beforehand but, i didnt... so im just putting these here in case someone needs a helping hand with these issues, or just wants to save time, a lot of time...

Here are 3 advices of art for gamedev i can give based on what i´ve learned through this year:

-Dont go TOO BIG for pixel art! try to make your resolution no more than 960*540 (that´s actually the res i use), you´ll save a lot of time, you´ll enjoy the process more and most importantly...you will not burn yourself out :D

-Try to make your assets fit within a grid. What i mean with this is try to have all your characters, floor tiles, trees, houses, boxes, fences, etc.fit in a power of two size. Like this floor tile is 32*32, this tree here is 64*64, this house is 128*128, this character is 16*16 and so on. This way you´ll have a better time placing all your props in the game engine editor you´re using (im using Game Maker), since they will all fit nicely in the grid.

-Speaking of assets.... Make assets to make your levels! dont make yourself burn out by trying to make (draw, model) every level to look different. Hm... how do i explain this one. When i first started with this project i tried to hand draw every level or room to look different from each other, though it would be cool and more “artsy” to have each level have its unique assets, floor, walls etc. Problem is...it took me a long time to get ANYTHING done. Since im making this game solo i really need to find ways to optimize the developing, i already knew that most if not all games use pre-made assets to build the entirity of their levels but i didnt listen :D, perhaps this is the dumber thing i did and it cost me MONTHS to realize i was doing things the “hard dumb” way. Just claryfing some things about this! you can build of course every level to be different with just premade assets! You can mix and match your floor tiles, trees, walls, platforms etc to create interesting looking and playable levels, its all about creativity :) There, of course, can be levels with assets that cant be found in any other part of the game, maybe there is a special boss in this room, maybe this room is different than anything else and it has like a sanctuary, a secret groove, the tree of life, the dreaded chaos ultima machine... Another good thing of building a library of premade assets is that you can make more levels, dungeons, towns, castles for your game since you already have build a lotta bunch of these assets, so you can have more game in a lot less time than trying to make everything to look different, so....

Well, right now these are the 3 biggest tips for game dev i can give for saving time (based on experience), also here are some other small ones that can also save you time:

-Its a good idea to rough the levels before making the assets for them, i´ve found planning and having a clear vision of what i want is the best way to actually accomplish that vision.

-BRUSHES!!! seriously, try these! you can make your own sets of grass, wall textures, debris, floor patterns, flowers, bricks, tree leaves, bushes, rock textures... well ANYTHING really. (If you´re making pixel art in Aseprite, you can select an area you want a brush of and just press ctrl+b).

-Finally, getting your game to work first is more important than getting it to look good, really, you really want to get the mechanics first more than anything else! Getting a playable prototype of your game is very useful, since people will tell you what they like, dont like, they will give you a lot of valuable feedback on how your game plays, it doesnt need to look good, hell, it can even be squares and circles!

Also, of course, there are a lot of free assets in the dev stores you can download and use to help you build that prototype! (just please... try to have all the final art in your game to be your own.)

Well, having said all that, i thought it would be cool to share how the playscreen has evolved in these past few weeks, still work to do with the gui (healthbar, icons, etc) but im liking how the latest is looking! the one in the top.

Well! that was a long text wall. Thank you for listening and viewing :)!

#pixel art #2d #2D Game #aseprite #2d game art

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hypertensiongamedev · 7 years ago

Note

You are a source of inspiration..Any recommendations if someone wanted to make a game of their own? (I.e what programs to use, things to look out for, etc)

I’ll get the expected answers out first. Here’s the programs I use (and the plugins I use for each of those):

Blender, which I use for modeling, rigging, and animating

Rigify plugin for rig creation (this comes bundled with Blender, you just have to enable it)

RetopoFlow for retopologizing high-poly to low-poly (has a free version in Github, the paid version just entitles you to technical support)

Substance Painter for texturing (this sometimes goes on sale on Steam, so watch out for it every time Steam goes on a discount sale)

Photoshop CC for creating GUI art, and image manipulation needs ($10 per month sounds fair for all the things it could do for me)

Unity for the game engine

StrangeIoC, an open-source code framework (I explain what it is exactly here)

TextMesh Pro for the GUI labels (free)

ShaderForge for making my own shaders (used to be paid, but it’s now free)

InControl, for user customization of controls (has an old, free version in github)

Unity’s Post-processing Stack for visual effects (free)

A custom AI plugin that I made, called INTLord

A custom game editing tool I made that I simply call Attack Editor (for now)

Visual Studio Community Edition (the free version) for the IDE

Resharper plugin for VS is immensely helpful for me (this is pretty expensive, but worth it for me as I use C# heavily)

Git for backup and version control

I use Git Extensions as the front-end GUI

Dropbox and Google Drive for backing up other things like raw art assets

Portable Kanban for keeping a todo list (I can recommend HacknPlan for an online alternative)

But I think the number one thing to look out for here is that, while it seems I’m able to do this game with ease, I can assure you that it is not smooth sailing all the time. I’m only sharing the end result of my work each time I post. All the mistakes and errors I encounter, I tend to discard and not share, but only because I think no one cares to really read about them. My point here is that even when I tell you what programs I use, just using those won’t guarantee you success.

If you’re having a hard time making a game, that doesn’t mean you’re not cut out for this, because I have a hard time too. It’s an inescapable part of something as complex as game development. I think what really makes a person not cut out for this, is when they give up easily when encountering difficult problems, like an overwhelmingly confusing bug, or getting a crash and finding out your work got corrupted. The proper response here is to approach problems methodically instead, and take steps so you tend to not encounter those things again in the future.

Don’t expect to get things perfectly the first time, but do take time and effort to improve each time you blunder.

There’s one pattern I see a lot with beginners who never get far: they love to complain. Don’t end up like that. If after all your best effort and research, things still don’t work, then I can finally concede that you have the right to complain.

These beginners would blame the engine, the programming language, or the art tool if something goes haywire, when, majority of the time, the mistake was their misunderstanding what the tool was for, and a way to solve it was in the user manual. So make sure you’ve done your homework before going on a rant.

Second thing: Practice a lot. They build your skill set. If you have no idea where to start, I suggest just making a simple game like tic-tac-toe in the game engine of your choice. The point here isn’t to build something amazing, it’s to get your feet wet with the tools you’re using. You’ll be doing it more to learn how to get graphics drawn on the screen, how to detect and react to user-input, how to code gameplay logic, etc.

The fact that you’re making a simple tic-tac-toe game helps ease the difficulty curve of trying out a new game engine. Then work out how to put a main menu on it, a highscore that gets saved to a text file, etc.

Then try out making a tetris game, then a side-scrolling platformer, etc. The more familiar you get with your tools, the easier it is to create more and more complex things.

There’s a theory out there that the amount of vocabulary you have with your spoken language influences what you tend to say (or even think!). I think it’s the same with you and your gamedev tools. You might have never gotten around to doing some crazy idea you had, simply because, lacking knowledge in your tools, you didn’t think it was possible.

I do game jam games to try out learning something new.

One thing you need to realize is, if you’re not having fun doing the nitty-gritty details of these steps in game-making, maybe you should reconsider your choice of wanting to make games, because this is how it is all of the time. Or probably at least consider specializing in one aspect instead, and get help with the rest.

The third thing to look out for is having no direction. What really helped me out with making this game is having a clear goal of what I want: a 3d action game about the last days of a terminally-ill henshin hero, taking place in a modern day city.

When you have no clear goal, you have no idea if what you’re currently doing is beneficial or detrimental to your game. You would have no yardstick to measure progress.

It’s fine to experiment without having decided yet what the game will look like, or what genre you’re going for, but I think even among experiments, the good ones are those that have at least some general direction of what they’re trying to test or prove.

This is the earliest photo I could find of my work on the game, dated 2014, Dec. 31. On my pen tablet display there is my early concept for Desparo.

There’s a lot of things to consider when deciding to make a game. I myself was thinking whether I make this game a turn-based, or a real-time action RPG. I was also wondering if I should do it in 2d or 3d, if I go with anime or realistic art style, etc.

I knew I needed to finalize my decisions if I ever hope to progress. I think the proper way to have done it would have been to make a turn-based RPG prototype alongside an action RPG prototype, and then compare the two. But in the end I just went ahead with the real-time action game, simply because I wanted to try out something new.

Sometimes, you start out making a game prototype with just boxes, and deciding it has potential, flesh it out further by attaching a theme/story/premise behind it. I think that’s also a viable approach. It just so happened Ghost Knight Victis started the other way around, with the story first before the gameplay.

And how do you get that spark of an idea of what your game should be? My game’s premise was a culmination of several ideas that have been brewing in my mind for a long time (years). After going through something pretty significant in my life and one lonely December, with two bottles of Tequila and playing through Transistor, all the incongruent ideas started making sense and fit together.

I’m not saying people need to go beat themselves up just to get something “cool”. In fact, if you have a content and happy life, consider yourself lucky if you couldn’t find inspiration to create something really artistic. Because those things tend to come from some deeply-buried, strong feeling, like anger or resentment. Then again, dealing with such thoughts are a normal challenge of growing up, living in a community, or even something as mundane as struggling with where to get a stable income. You just need to change your perspective on where inspiration comes from.

Fourth is to pace yourself properly. Match your expectations with what you can do at the moment. Aim too far out of your comfort zone, and you’ll likely fail, get discouraged, and stop trying. The trick is to aim only a little bit outside your comfort zone. You still compel yourself to improve, but at the same time, it’s a manageable amount of work for you.

Scrum and Kanban are the usual things to learn about here. I personally use Kanban a lot. The idea is simple:

As a task gets further along to completion, the more it moves to the right. But, you have one restriction: only up to 3 tasks at a time can be in the “Doing” column.

This means if you are already devoted to working on 3 tasks in the “Doing” column, and you want to work on something new, you have to finish at least one of those 3 first. This makes you concentrate on getting things done. It stops you from diluting your focus, trying to work on too many things at a time.

You could also decide to move a task from “Doing” back to the “Ready” column. But I normally do it only when either I realize something else is of more importance and I need to stop what I was doing, or perhaps I’m stumped and really can’t progress on that task, in which case I give up and swap it for a different task instead.

Scrum has a lot of techniques, but one thing I take from it is the idea of sprints. You do your work in a per 2-week period, called a sprint. On the start of each sprint, you decide what you will get done, and commit to finishing those tasks within 2 weeks. After those 2 weeks, you again pick which tasks to do for the next 2 weeks, and so on. This is also a method to help you focus on getting things done, because you only concentrate on a few tasks at a time, but it also forces you to take a look at the bigger picture and re-prioritize after every 2 weeks.

In my case, I don’t have 2 weeks. My sprint is only 2 days: every weekend. So I make sure each task I write in a card is achievable within 2 days. If I think a task can’t be finished in 2 days, I divide it into several subtasks.

For example, “obtaining items from chests” might be too complex, so I could divide that to these subtasks:

being able to define chests as a list of the items inside it, and being able to save that data to file

being able to place chests in the map, each chest being: a 3d model of the chest, and the data file saying what items are inside it

create the GUI art for viewing items inside a chest

put the GUI art in-game and adding code to allow it to react to user-input

implement the code for transferring items from a chest to the player’s inventory and vice-versa

Fifth is to concentrate on having a working, playable work-in-progress.

The thing to aim for here is that at the end of each sprint, whatever progress you make should be something that works in-game. It’s fine if you don’t get that all the time, but I think aiming for it helps pull everything towards that direction.

I think this video of Bayonetta’s prototype says a lot:

youtube

For reference, here’s how the final product looks like:

youtube

You can see from that prototype video that you can already start working on the gameplay even if you don’t have the art finalized yet (because the art can take a long time to get done).

I think that’s the wiser method of doing things, you get a playable work-in-progress without being stalled by the fact that the art is incomplete. It’s even better because it’s easier to adjust animations while they’re still rough: it’s less motions to re-arrange and tweak whenever you need to adjust it.

It’s also not good to base your judgement of how correct an animation is from just looking at it in Blender/Maya/etc. alone, because you aren’t seeing it being used in-game. For all you know, the sword attack you’ve been polishing for so many days doesn’t really work because the arc of the sword swing doesn’t really reach the intended target! Or maybe you didn’t realize that the swing is making the sword pass through the ground mesh unintentionally!

Or maybe there’s certain situations where your animation really just needs to be tweaked (when fighting inside narrow hallways, or when you are standing on a flight of stairs & attacking a target below you, etc.). It’s really better to test it out in-game as soon as you’ve established the key frames of your animation.

Frankly, this is something that I should learn to do myself!

And what about for the story? I think this is a neat trick in designing a prototype for your game’s story:

youtube

(the video’s about half an hour long, but it’s worth it)

The basic gist is that you design a “board game” out of your game’s story. And I think that’s the proper way to do things. There’s really more to it than what I just said, so I encourage you all to watch that video.

Sixth is to handle feedback as objectively as you can. As a solo developer, you will tend to see your game as your “baby”, something that in your eyes is a flawless creation.

Maybe you expect players to always do something, but turns out it never crosses their minds at all. That might be a symptom that you need to fix your game’s design.

Be clear with what you are asking feedback for. Just posting screenshots, and a vague “this is my game, suggestions and feedback are welcome!” will not help, because people will tend to give you suggestions that are not in line with the goal you have set in mind for the game, and you end up sounding defensive trying to explain things.

Explain your intent with what you’re specifically showing, and ask for feedback if people think your work achieved that intent or not. But start with a 2 to 3 sentence blurb that describes the premise of your game, to set the tone. Here’s a good tutorial for that.

Take the time to appreciate when people praise you, but don’t let it get to your head.You shouldn’t keep yourself in a circle full of yes-men, you will just not improve there. On the other hand, don’t think that just because you’re being the target of verbal abuse that you are finally getting the so-called brutally honest feedback.

You really have to ignore the emotional parts of what people post, good or bad. Read between the lines of what’s being said, to find the truly useful feedback you want for improvement (if there is even any in their posts).

But don’t just follow every suggestion that comes along your way. Sift through it and think about why someone said what they said.

In my first playable demo, many were complaining that the player should be allowed to move more responsively, to be able to cancel attacks into movement. But that went against my intention of giving it a Dark Souls type of combat (instead of a Dynasty Warriors style of combat).

I realized, people were having that problem because I placed far too many enemies in the level. No one suggested that I lessen the amount of enemies, but that was really my mistake with that one.

So there really was a problem, but their suggestion was not the best way to fix it.

Another example: When Magicka was still being developed, some beta testers complained that friendly fire ruins the experience, and kept suggesting to remove it, or at least have the option to disable it. But the developers doubled down on their decision to have friendly-fire, because friends hitting each other was part of the humor that they wanted to achieve, so they decided to leave it there, and they were right.

I’ll end all of this by saying, this is only my way of doing things. It’s perfectly reasonable if you discover a different way that works for you!

I always keep a bottle of Tequila handy under my desk.

#tips #gamedev #indiedev

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lazcht · 8 years ago

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Contemplations

...of aging, and the year of 2017

Hey, it’s been such a long time I haven’t write a long (and personal) blog so pardon my (even more) rusty writing skill--phrasings and poor vocabulary.

Well. I’ve been thinking to share some of my thoughts to the internet concerning...age.

26th of September is my birthday. Actually this is the last year I’ll be in 20s, haha. Lately (at least among my friends) it’s so familiar to hear “It feels like I was graduating school yesterday damn it.”

Is birthday really matter?

Nah it’s just a calendar--day, week, month, year, time system made by humans as a system to measure how long we’ve been here, on earth. I don’t feel really connect with the concept to celebrate anniversaries exactly by “time”. It works more as reminders, a trigger to notice myself to contemplate, evaluate, and plan.

Should I be happy? Hmm. Celebration, eating fancy, wonderful wishes, surprises, gifts, are bonus. I might be taking them for granted actually, (I feel bad for that) but I kinda feel it’s not a necessary thing to have on a birthday. Though my birthdays have been so great since I was little, so in my mind, a birthday is always been a good and fun association.

Except, when I was reaching 20... my anxiety about stuff arose, maybe this time is the same. I’m about to hit 3rd checkmark of 10 years of milestone. So it’s a lie if I say, that aging doesn’t matters at all.

I feel so grateful that I’m always surrounded with kind people who care about things I love, my well-being, or my future, or simply all people that accept my presence on their lives. So thank you for all wishes and gifts... Though I can’t promise anything in return.

Suddenly I remembered...

My mood was not really good lately. I’m thinking about lot of stuff. Frustrated, anxious, worried(?), and a little bit pessimistic. Why, I wonder?

I’ve been thinking, what’s the difference, and how I’ve been changing from 10 years ago; the teen me, to I am now. So here are my personal conflicts.

1. First of all, the easiest thing to notice, is my physical body.

Back then, recovery was fast, good stamina, and a body that didn’t go sick although I didn’t put so much attention in it. I could ate stuff sloppily, hygiene doesn’t stop me from doing what I want, sleep deprivation didn’t matter as much, pollution didn’t really affect my respiratory system, bad posture didn’t get me strains or sores, lack of exercising also less punishing. Waking up motivated and energized.

Now... well, I’ve been trying to wake up not feeling bad, and go to sleep with a good posture so I don’t feel like shit the next day.

Allergies such as dust, smoke, (my own) sweat, water (on my scalp) are easily triggered these days. I dunno if the environment here getting so much worse (well, it’s a capital city of Indonesia, Jakarta), or just my body can’t cope up with my old lifestyle.

After I get the feeling of living in a weak dying body previous years, being unproductive, unmotivated and low at energy, mood-swing, stressed and getting the feeling of “decaying”, having atrophic and useless muscles; I figured it was because I lack of self-care. I feel that can’t ignore this shit anymore, before it’s getting far too late.

2. Mindset & interests.

The more I think, I noticed maybe the biggest difference between me 10-20 years ago with me right now, is the optimism level LMAO.

In junior high school days, to 20+ ish, I kinda have faith that someday (perhaps in 5-10 years) I might be able to become famous, or having decent money flow. I felt that I was a genius compared to people my age, haha well I had a narrow social circle. As I grow older, things become difficult (actually prolly I was just underestimated lot of stuff back then?). Having more knowledge makes me think that I know nothing about this world, this industry I work in, about what’s work and what’s not, about this life.

I used to have strong feel of justice or moral compass that’s quite firm. I could really simply say that doing A is plainly wrong and doing B is absolutely right. As I grow older, learning so much stuff (from experience, or fiction stories I consume), knowing so much people with their insight from cultural, religion aspect, things are not as simple. I faced lot of turning point couple of years lately.

I used to have interest in drawings, my capability to draw something, but not about reading, or listening about things that inspire. My dream was to become an animator or comic artist, later on I was only interested in the drawing process, the result, but not the story. Maybe that’s why I’m comfortable in joining other’s project rather than doing my own.

I consumed things that only makes me able to create what people told me to, but not “nutrients” for my ability to conceptualize and inspire, to deliver message. In 7++ years of my career, I deliver nothing, just work, ego "masturbating”, fun and money. Not so long ago, I noticed I that I should change my direction. That I had to make impact, or at least, a lasting impression, stuff that people could think about.

I focus less in technique, and think more about purpose, idea, vision. Things that only I, can deliver it (still looking). Things that are more personal and close to my identity.

3. Family condition.

Not only me that gets older. Parents, partner, sibling and other relatives are also getting old. Not to mention the economy and how industry, business trends flows by.

Economically, my family is currently going downwards. Parent’s not as healthy as they were 5~10 years ago. Good thing they’re still lively, active, able-bodied to still go traveling actually. They simply can’t work continuously, hence eventually, incomes are scarcer. Bills getting higher each year, or even months. They don’t demand retirement (thanks to them), but I feel they’re thinking we (their children) are not ready to take full responsibility of paying all of household needs. But luckily enough, our family didn’t have any debt. Yet I could use steady income to cover us, as soon as possible.

Psychologically, parents are more into games now (I’m so glad lol), and they’re still quite sharp to pick out hoaxes though there are lot of random Whatsapp videos or articles they share with the old folks. Overall, still good but long term-wise, I’m quite pessimistic.

4. Spiritual side, ego, myself.

It’s getting harder to reach a clear mind nowadays, just a moment to meditate and let my mind sit calmly, silently. I guess I’m now getting even more drowned into the “Lazcht” ego. I feel the need to work hard, but only to serve the “me”. How about afterlife thoughts, awareness, mindfulness? I know I need more mind exercise, but there we are, too busy being involved into mundane stuff haha.

Love life, it’s hard to describe but now I feel like I can control better of my own possessiveness, to think that love is about giving, having a big heart, and letting go. Breakup? Nope, but as a formerly monogamous person, I’m currently having a polyamorous partner. We had been seeing the differences as our biggest obstacle on continuing the relationship, and I was trying to make myself adapt and change to compromise, but now, we decided to see and experience love with our own “style”. It works for now, tho, we don’t know for how long. :’)

Insecurity changed and taught me a lot of life lesson. Back then I’d never care much about my body image, upgrading wardrobe and so on. Lately I also feeling anxious again about my gender issue. The urge to transition (I’m a trans FYI) is getting stronger, but meh... I’m broke, so not now. :(

What do i do then?

1. Physical aspect: workout, regular outing, drink more water, body-awareness, and keeping good habit.

Latest one is hardest, because of my zero-discipline. For people who has similar issue with mine, easiest way I find is to bathe regularly, at least once a day would make my day better. Maintaining room’s sanitary is also excellent method to wake up feeling great. Recently I bought an air purifier, vacuum regularly, and it worked nicely.

I once find using a scheduler app with fixed wake up time, eating, working, etc makes me feel better and content, then again it’s hard to keep it on long-term.

2. Nutrients for brain: watch or read more interesting and recommended stuff, explore, make new friends or be in a new circle.

I also feel that it’s necessary to learn languages, especially Japanese, I feel like someday I’ll really make use of them.

Probably planting is also a way to refresh mind and soul. I really hope to learn on cultivating vegetables, or just herbs if it’s easier haha.

3. Economy and family matter: can’t do much for this actually, except doing my best on my work and keeping healthy relationships.

I really hope I can make them go travel somewhere else beautiful, since their mindset always like “we wouldn’t afford that much.” or “it’s not worth it.” well, perhaps they’re not into it but I just don’t want they can’t afford to spend money on something they love.

Hopefully I can find a good way to improve my economy without too much sacrificing important things.

4. Myself as me: I... just hope to improve, or perhaps become slightly more famous as an artist or gamedev person lol. Most of all, I just want to love myself more, and be content with my own self. Also hopefully I’ll become more useful to others, on anything. I wish I can optimize myself because... too much burnout (physical or social). If anyone notice that sometimes I don’t appear anywhere or rarely seen, that’s not necessarily that I hate being with you guys, mostly it’s because I need my space and time.

Ideally, I want to go to more convention events, overseas, selling my own stuff (or with circle), get in touch with amazing people. Or simply maintain good relations with people around me (not just physically ofc) right now. You guys are good friends.

Okay that’s enough, I think I can count this as my prayer because I don’t usually “pray”. Forgive me for my wrongdoing (or let me know?) and thanks for being here with me. May universe get along well with everyone and hear our wishes! :)

~Lazcht, 29 Y.O.

#contemplation #life evaluation #personal

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liketherogue · 8 years ago

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LOWREZJAM Post-Mortem

From August 1st to the 16th I spent an inordinate amount of time working on my first game. As someone who has only spent the past couple of months pursuing game development in earnest, I needed a way to stop generating an assortment of half-baked concepts and prototypes and instead release a completed product. LOWREZJAM allowed me to do just that, but perhaps not in the way I was expecting.

My experience in gamedev thus far can best be summed up as a trial-by-fire-where-everything-is-on-fire-and-new-fires-keep-popping-up.

The trickiest part of this whole process has been bridging the gap between expectations and reality. I’d tried to establish manageable goals for myself, and I don’t think my rationale was too unreasonable: a game limited to a 64x64 canvas using PICO-8. The constraints were so small that a game just had to get made, right?

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That was how LOWREZJAM began for me: cleaning the barrel, loading the chamber, and priming the trigger just so I could shoot myself in the foot down the line. I’d read several beginner's guides to game development and gotten it into my head to not start with my dream game. That was fine. My roguelike dating sim will just have to wait. From there I reasoned, “Well, why not use arcade games as a template? They’re simple and straightforward with plenty of replay value.” Not a terrible point of view to approach the project from. No, instead what was terrible was how much I allowed that initial concept to evolve into a Frankenstein’s monster patchwork of ideas and mechanics. The game, whose final release title is A-Taco-Lypse Driving, was supposed to be “an arcade-style vertical scroller where you deliver food to customers while avoiding hazards and battling enemy competitors. Easy enough, right?*

*see previously linked video

The original proof of concept drawn by my brother.

With a concept in mind, most of the time spent on the game was taken up by learning how to code. I’d attempted other projects in Lua before, but this was the first time I’d really dug into the language and what it was capable of. In spite of my best efforts, the problems that arose seemed to be unending. For every issue I solved two more would pop up in its place.

One of the issues I encountered early on. Lesson learned: be better organized.

For several days my process essentially boiled down to throwing possible solutions at the wall until something stuck. The big paradigm shift that increased my productivity occurred when I approached the game on its more elementary levels. For something that involves so much math and logic, it’d taken me longer than it should have to realize that planning out possible solutions with discrete data and information produces better results.

Remember kids: always show your work.

This was also the point in the development process where I realized my scope was larger than I had anticipated. In a bit of interesting retrospection, my friend Julian had the notion that I may have bit off more than I could chew and warned me as much. In a recent conversation with him, however, he admitted that it was something I’d have to find out for myself. While coding proved to be the bulk of my challenges, I most definitely learned more than just programming. Ironically enough, my focus on shoring up coding deficiencies resulted in me neglecting perhaps the most important part of the game: the gameplay.

Believe it or not, the released version of the game is just as cluttered and messy, if not moreso.

I had gotten so wrapped up in getting my game to work that I completely forgot to take a step back and figure out if the the game was fun. The development process for me was a triage of shoddy mechanics when it should’ve been a clear roadmap of priorities. My mistake was in not understanding what my limits were and what I was capable of. This goes back to my conversation with Julian where he helped me realize that perhaps this would be (and it was) a fact that I would just have to learn the hard way. The hard way ended up looking like:

Start with a nugget of a game idea

Add more facets/features to that nugget

Figure out how to program it into the existing build

Realize there are roadblocks and obstacles popping up that prevent me from easily implementing these features

Spend time to try and work it in anyways

Be pressured by the deadline and shift focus onto another aspect of the game

Realize these features also have their own roadblocks and obstacles

Back to Step 2 and keep jumping around Steps 2 to 8 depending on the mood of the day

I saw the words “Runtime Error” more times than I care to admit. And I’m already admitting having seen them a lot.

What was interesting to see in how I worked was my tendency to fall back to my comfort zone. On a micro level this meant fixing the issues I could immediately address and/or knew how to address. On a macro level this meant stepping out of the developer role into the manager role. I was fortunate enough to work with two incredibly talented individuals, my brother, Noah, and my friend, Grant, who helped to produce the visuals and sound respectively. Coming from a background in the arts and entertainment, it took me (comparatively) little effort to crystallize a final vision for the narrative aesthetic and tone for the game and communicate that to the rest of my team.

Original game is 64x64 but PICO-8 scales screenshots up to the engine’s default 128x128 resolution. Here you can see the ravaged post-apocalyptic wasteland of the distant future: 1999.

The end result is a game that has a strong personality, but is severely lacking in mechanics. There were far too many moving parts that weren’t intuitive and didn’t mesh well with each other, pitfalls of the game that stem from the seat-of-my-pants approach I took with the development process.

The final PICO-8 Cartridge.

In spite of all the glaring flaws with gameplay and the amount of stress I endured, creating this game left me with a complete and utter sense of satisfaction, something I haven’t felt in a long while. This was entirely a labor of love and I think (read: hope) it shows.

Organization is still very much an issue I face as an artist and developer. Maintaining focus and discipline towards a project is a difficult endeavor, especially knowing myself and how easily I lose interest or steam. But understanding my shortcomings is worthless if I don’t take steps to rectify them. The first step to avoiding these mistakes in the future is to take it slowly, ensuring that above all a finished product will have polish. What that means for me is understanding my limits, both in terms of what I can and can’t do.

And maybe, just maybe, that roguelike dating sim I have floating around in my end will someday end up on somebody else’s screen.

-Kyle

#gamedev #indiedev #lowrezjam #lowrezjam2017 #pico8 #video games #programming #journal

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codexofaegis-blog · 8 years ago

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Monday Chat #5 – Video Games: A Constant Cycle of Rehashed Ideas?

So today’s topic originates from this Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/6slno9/cartoon_network_stole_my_game/?utm_content=title&utm_medium=user&utm_source=reddit

Basically what happened is that the creator of the flash game A Dance of Fire and Ice found that their was a Cartoon Network flash game strangely similar in concept released on their website…

Now, to be fair, A Dance of Fire and Ice is one of the top rated (and most played) Kongregate rhythm games whereas Cartoon Network tends to throw out their flash games every month or so to make way for content more relevant to the current programming; so overall, this specific instance isn’t that big of a deal. But what about the concept in general? After all, this has happened plenty of times – Bejeweled and Candy Crush, Crush the Castle and Angry Birds, and Pandemic and Plague Inc (just to name a few). So is there something inherently and morally wrong with the concept of “Great artists steal”, or is there some justification in it after all?

Now in order to really get a case on what a true “rip off” is, we need to focus on two things: style and substance. Let’s take an example with the CN debacle. A Dance of Fire and Ice and the CN game both have the same core gameplay element – rhythm based timing game based on two constantly rotating sprites that one has to time correctly to keep on the path. However, in style, both games differ – Dance has more of a concrete, minimalist style that models after the two elements which the game is named after, whereas the CN game… just has a bunch of shitty Gumball sprites. Secondly, there’s the substance – there’s the fact that its clear the CN game doesn’t run on Dance’s stolen code, cause the game runs like shit. That means that there’s only on real similarity between the two – the gameplay. But is gameplay copyright-able?

As you’ve probably been able to tell, of course not. There’s plenty of turn based RPGs, or first person shooters, or 3D collectathon platformers. Once one person makes a subgenre, its free for people to refine and edit themselves – as long as they make their own source code. After all, we don’t see people paying royalties to the creator of Wolfenstein, do we?

Another thing though, and perhaps a bit bigger of a deal, is with the size of the business. Bigger businesses can market better than individuals, and thus the mainstream appeal of two very similar games can go to a later game rather than an earlier one. Rovio probably had a much bigger budget to advertise Angry Birds than Armor Games had for Crush the Castle, and Armor Games had a bigger budget than all the other small developers doing similar games way before that! There’s also the choice of distribution. Crush the Castle was originally flash exclusive, which only has the audience of the every diminishing minority of those who play flash games. Rovio, however, took a chance with the ever expanding mobile app market and it ended up paying off big time. So, although people might not like it, business sense does play some part in it.

Now, all these games discussed so far have been fairly different in style and substance, but there is a possibility of blatant rip offs succeeding over the originals. Such is the case often within the mobile market. For a specific example, back in 2014 the app Bad Apples, a blatant stolen version of Cards Against Humanity, reached the top of the app store, causing it to overshadow Cards by over tenfold. Fortunately, due to some clever marketing by Cards Against Humanity – and the poor development upkeep by the Bad Apples creators – Cards was able to regain its spot in popular culture as the original adult party game. Still, one might consider poor moderation of the App Store like this proven case to lead to many other undiscovered rip offs that succeed the original in popularity by many times.

Now, to go back to the main question – is the original always the best? After all, is it really that much of a shame that the content rich and well maintained Plague Inc is more popular than the fairly barebones Pandemic series? Honestly, I think that as long as there are not blatant rip offs of a game, it’s fine to have a sub genre generate and to enjoy better, later games that come out of it. It’s always good to remember the roots, but it’s not mandatory to love them. So while the developer behind A Dance of Fire and Ice isn’t exactly justified in his worry, I think he’s in pretty safe hands.

- -

Just a quick heads up – there will be no new Monday Chat next week. I’m moving into university, and then on that weekend am going to a related camping trip, sparing me no time to write. But hopefully after that I’ll be able to make room for continuing to make new posts in my schedule.

Currently reading: I finished Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka in a single night, and damn was it darker than I expected – a great read, and worth spending a couple of hours on. Still, I’ve decided I’m going to chill on the digital library for now, seeing that my physical book collection is pretty sparse and I can probably run through them fairly fast. I’ll probably make this my main backlog goal going into university.

Currently watching: As I mentioned before, I saw Dunkirk in theaters. While I really enjoyed the movie, I still don’t understand Christopher Nolan’s insistence on adding some level of non-linearity to his stories, even if they don’t make any sense. In this movie its particularly blatant – each story takes place a certain amount of time from each other, a la one week, one day, and one hour. But the stories all end up lining up in the end… so what’s the point? It seems like Nolan just added this in since people know him as “the weird mindfuck story guy” and kind of as an afterthought. I feel like the movie would’ve been a bit more cleaner and more coherent without this in place. Still, despite this – I mean, it’s a Nolan movie, right? – it’s still damn good. 8/10.

Currently playing: Mostly Skyrim and Mount and Blade Warband mods… though I DID start running a new NCAA Footbal 09 dynasty game (you know, what all the cool kids are doing right now) with the plan of making a long game that would use the import feature for Madden 09’s franchise mode (pretty basic stuff, everyone knows this), but then I remembered I was going into college and probably didn’t have time to do all this. Whoops.

Currently listening: Been picking up on a few new tracks. INOJ’s Time After Time cover has some pretty bumpin’ aesthetic. My Dead Girlfriend’s Danke is a solid banger. Other than that, I’ve been listening to some miscellaneous KPM tracks.

Well, that’s all for now. Remember to follow Codex of Aegis on Twitter and Facebook for more updates.

#gaming #videogames #games #ripoffs #mondays

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waynekelton · 6 years ago

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The Most Exciting iOS & Android Games of 2019

The mobile gamer can look back at 2018 with an affectionate and misty eye, secure in the knowledge that gaming on mobile devices gets more diverse, sophisticated and polished with each year. In this respect, 2019 also is shaping up to be a banner year on this front.

Roughly speaking, the most exciting upcoming games can be split into three groups: the name-brand megahits-in-waiting, boardgame adaptations, and indie projects. Read on to see what the who’s who of mobile gaming are cooking up for this year’s treats.

Quick Mentions

Fluxx - Playdek are bringing back their digital adaptation of iconic card game Fluxx, which was lost in the iOS 11 Appocalypse. It's due out on July 17th and provided you still have access to the original account you purchased it on, existing owners won't need to 're-purchase' the game again.

League of Legends Mobile - Riot are another company trying to port their heavy-hitter game to mobile. We've only had vague reports so far, and we're not even sure it's coming out this year, so it gets a quick mention for now pending further information.

Dead Cells - Being an action/platformer, this isn't something we usually cover, but the mobile port of this critically acclaimed indie game will be arriving on August 28th. Here's a trailer.

Commandos 2 HD (Real Time Tactics)

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If you're a reader of our sister website, Strategy Gamer, you may have spotted at some point us mentioning that Kalypso Media (on mobile you'd know them for Project Highrise & Crowntakers) are doing HD remasters of Commandos 2 and Praetorians, two classic RTS games from the "good 'ol days". What you might not have spotted is that, in addition to PC & consoles, Commandos 2 specifically is being ported to mobile platforms - so iOS, Android and Switch (including the Switch Lite, we assume). One of E3's more surprising announcements, especially from a mobile perspective, and we can't wait to see how it takes to being on handheld. If you've never played Commandos 2 (or any Commandos game) here's the official blurb to help you along:

In Commandos 2 HD Remastered, take control of an elite group of commandos who must venture deep into enemy territory and utilize their combined expertise to complete a series of notoriously demanding missions set in World War II. In this genre-defining classic, explore interactive environments and use your commandos’ unique skillsets to complete your mission against seemingly impossible odds.

The PC/Console version at least is probably landing in Q4 2019, but we're not sure if they're aiming to have mobile release at the same time. If not, this one could actually slip to our inevitable 2020 list, but we're happy it's coming either way.

Phantom Doctrine (Turn-based Strategy)

Phantom Doctrine ... mobile version, are you ready for the change.#indiegame #gamedev #mobile #PhantomDoctrine pic.twitter.com/fKM4RAVqkN

— CreativeForge Games (@CFGmain) June 7, 2019

Another one a few of us here are really looking forward to. Phantom Doctrine was an attempt to make an XCOM-like game set during the Cold War. You run an international spy agency and you must train up your agents, develop their cover and embed them in locations, as well as engaging in other acts of espionage and intrigue. There's a 'base/strategic' part, and then a turn-based tactical part. What stops this from just being a token nod towards Bond-style espionage is that most turn-based tactical battles can start off peacefully, and even end without a shot being fired provided you do your job well enough.

It's pretty good, although it was a bit glitchy when it first launched, but provided how well XCOM fits on tablet and mobile, I have no doubt the mobile version of Phantom Doctrine is going to be right up our alley. Considering there was no word of an actual release window, perhaps a 2019 release is a bit ambitious but what the heck, we're excited!

Tom Clancy's Elite Squad (Collectable RPG/Battler Thing)

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Not sure if this is turn-based or real-time thing - there's not much information beyond the E3 2019 trailer. Ubisoft will be offering players the chance to assemble a 5-person squad with characters from across their franchises, where you need to collect and upgrade characters and fight in 5v5 battles against either the AI or other players. There's going to be a single-player story + guild vs. guild warfare.

No release date, but pre-registration is already live so I'm expecting at least a beta or something this year, with perhaps the full release early next year if not by Christmas. I stand by what I said when we originally reported on this though - I think Ubisoft are missing a trick by not making this an Auto Chess game.

Game of Thrones: Beyond the Wall (As Above)

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Behavoir Interactive (them what made Fallout Shelter) had their own announcement as this year's E3. In the same vein as Ubisoft's Elite Squad, BE are working with HBO on Beyond the Wall, another RPG/Strategy/Squad Battler thing. Usually, separate new games sharing the same basic DNA signifies an emerging trend but, again, I think the guys have completely missed the fact that Auto Chess is happening.

Still, all the parts are there to make this a potentially compelling experience - you've got to recruit people into the Night's Watch, go on rangings beyond the Wall and defend said Wall from wildlings. This trying to cash-in on the recently finished television show, there will be some magical based mumbo-jumbo reason to recruit, or collect, famous people from the TV series as well (this game is officially set half a decade before Book 1, so you can imagine there'll be a bit creative license going on here). Pre-registration is live on both iOS & Android, so hopefully we'll learn more about this soon.

Battle Chasers: Nightwar (Tactical RPG)

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This is a tactical RPG inspired by Final Fantasy and its ilk, but made by a western studio. It was incredibly well received on PC/consoles when it released in 2017, and now we're finally getting a mobile port. It'll feature featuring deep dungeon diving, turn-based combat presented in a classic JRPG format, and a rich story driven by exploration of the world and will release on August 1st. We've seen that there's info on minimum device specs around, so make sure you've got the right tech.

Final Fantasy (Tactical RPG)

We're lumping two Final Fantasy games into one entry because there's not much to say on them at the moment. At E3 it was announced that Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicle's Remaster will also be hitting tablets and smartphones. We're expecting that to drop in the Winter. Here's the trailer:

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Meanwhile, Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius is getting a tactical RPG spin-off, War of the Visions. We're not 100% on details or release window yet, but it's also got a trailer:

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Minecraft Earth (AR)

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It seems 2019 is the year people finally try and jump on to the Pokemon GO craze. It's only been three year! Minecraft Earth is Microsoft & Mojang's answer to the likes of Ingress Prime and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Different from the existing Minecraft experience on mobile, this AR-fuelled game comes with a number of key concepts. First and foremost, people can explore the world in real-life, checking into locations on their phone much like how Pokestops work. These locations net them resources which can be used in the building mode, which is reported to be just as free-form as the original game. Finally, those constructions can then be placed in the real-world, so anyone with their phone can explore and interact with them.

This seems like a pretty decent marriage of Pokemon GO-style AR and a popular IP. Say what you want about Microsoft, none of their various Minecraft versions have felt like cynical cash-ins, so it'll be interesting to see how this one turns out. A beta of some kind is expected later this summer.

GWENT: The Witcher Card Game (Card Game)

One can never have too many card games in their lives, or at least, that's what the makers of all of the Hearthstone wannabes like to tell themselves every night before going to sleep. GWENT started life a a mini-game within The Witcher 3, but it proved so popular CDPR decided to spin it to create their own take on a digital card game. It's been out on PC for a little while already, and is now officially due to make its leap to mobile later this year. No details as to when yet, but we'll keep you posted.

Out of the Park GO! (Sports/Management)

While not the all-father of sports sims that is Football Manager, the OOTP Baseball series holds just a firm a place in baseball fans hearts. The mobile incarnation of OOTP has been a series of games called MLB Manager, the most recent of which we reviewed last year. It seems the developer is starting from scratch for the next iteration, even re-branding it to become OOTP GO! Here's what they have to say about it:

OOTP Go! will be free to play, which includes full access to Perfect Team and the ability to create and play fictional solo leagues. The current MLB rosters are a $4.99 in-app purchase, international leagues will be $1.99 each and historical MLB seasons will be (as usual) $0.99 (plus there will be bundles available for a reduced price).

Last thing we knew, it was due for release sometime this summer on iOS & Android.

Dire Wolf Digital (Board Game)

This isn't the name of a game, but the name of a company that announced this year they're making a bucket-load of digital board game adaptations. Because we only have the announcement text to go on, we've decided to keep the new games all in one place until we know more. The games Direwolf are bringing to digital (which afawk also includes mobile devices) are:

Mage Knights – It's worth noting this is the first step in a bigger agreement with WizKids, so it's likely we'll be seeing more announcements this year.

Wings of Glory – A popular table-top aerial skirmish game.

Raiders of the North Sea – An excellent worker placement game themed around the 8th and 9th century viking raids (pictured).

Yellow & Yangtze – a Reiner Knizia tile placement game of civilization building.

Sagrada – A dice drafting game about creating works of art.

Root – the recent Kickstarter sensation about asymmetrical warfare in the woods.

We're not sure which project is due to appear first - possible WizKids & Mage Knights, given the importance that project has within the announcement? We'll update as we learn more.

Call of Duty Mobile (Shooter/Battle Royale)

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Announced at GDC 2019, this latest Call of Duty-on-mobile spin-off is the latest in a long series of mobile adaptations of the hugely popular FPS franchise. This latest attempt appears to be following in the vein of games like Fortnite & ARK - offering a fully 3D, fully-developed version of the main franchise that can run on phones and tablets. From what we know so far, it's going to be a kind of 'greatest hits' compilation of modes, maps, characters etc... and may even feature a Battle Royale mode (putting it in direct competition with Fortnite, which is popular on mobile as well as desktop). We've not had official confirmation its coming this year, but pre-registration is open and we'd be surprised if Activision allow too long a lead time on this.

Mario Kart Tour (Racing)

It’s been practically a year since this title was first announced and outlined with few concrete details added between now and then. Nintendo’s mobile offerings have run the gamut, from the premium Mario Run, the Miitomo social & style app everyone tried and forgot about, to the successful and generally great Fire Emblem: Warriors. Mario Kart is a treasured and classic franchise, even amongst Nintendo offerings, so that reputation guarantees some level of careful handling. It remains an open question whether the game will be a premium or freemium model, but the launch date is still projected to be March.

Diablo Immortal (Action RPG)

Diablo Immortal will draw some side-eye and mockery, having been already made notorious because of its horribly mistimed announcement. (Yes, we have phones, but read the room, Activision-Blizzard). Even more puzzlingly, the game is being created in partnership with NetEase, a Chinese developer whose resume already includes ‘Eternal Realm’ (无尽神域) itself essentially a Diablo clone. Weird stuff: the official license merging with a pretender to the throne to make a hybrid project together. Concerns about endless grind or re-skinning of Eternal Realm are well-founded, but while most of us will be as judge-y as possible we’ll also probably still give the final product a try. Good action RPGs live or die by loot, character progression and above all, delicate-yet-accurate controls, so it will be interesting to see if Diablo Immortal will be a good game as well as the inevitable cash cow.

Five Tribes (Boardgame)

Five Tribes, oldie but goodie, will make its digital debut this year. Days of Wonder has been updating and digitising its catalogue at a steady pace and with fantastic results. Five Tribes central mechanic is just like mancala. Pick a space and drop the meeples one by one along the path. Dead simple, but if you think it makes the game easy, you’d be dead wrong. The Five Tribes each possess unique scoring criteria and effects, and the turn-order bid means timing depends on correctly valuing the current layout. Many simple bits add up to make a nigh-perfect game.

Scythe: Digital Edition (Boardgame)

In another history, the Great War also ruined Europe and annihilated a generation, but its nations and technologies faced the blight and devastation quite differently. With large mechs, steampunk agricultural combines and faux-Eurasian player nations, Scythe gives each player a unique entity to steer to victory. Engine building games are always efficiency races, conversion puzzles, but Scythe’s unique setting, eye-catching miniatures and indirect player confrontation quickly made a it a fan favorite amongst the gaming community. Its rollout on Steam has been smooth experience, with decent AI and a robust tutorial. The assets and UI will translate well to mobile and what used to cost near three figures will be available to most anyone for a fraction of the price.

Terraforming Mars (Boardgame)

Terraforming Mars sounds like a noble goal for all of humanity. In reality, the game is a push-and-pull competition for corporations to garner by prestige by...terraforming Mars. Three categories: oxygen, temperature and ocean coverage dictate the endgame, but to get there, players will reshape the red planet into a bright blue hope. It’s a Euro though-and-though: precisely balanced, intricately co-dependent and inevitably point-based. But the close match between theme and mechanic makes this game deeply satisfying and intuitive to learn and explain, and the action selection mechanic is uniquely innovative and inspired. Just when I think boardgame design is tapped out, something truly exceptional rises to the top.

A limited beta is already in progress on mobile, so hopefully it's not too much longer before we can get our hands on this one.

Mew-Genics (Sim)

This one has been incubating forever but should be worth it when it finally gets here. Ed McMillen (of Binding of Isaac fame) has been teasing this cat-breeding simulator for ages. The game has been described as a mix of Tamagotchi, Pokemon and the Sims, with its signature art style courtesy of McMillen. All bets for a playful wild game about the weirdness, sweetness, malice and all-around havoc of cat-raising seem to be right on the money. The ideas are there, the premise is promising, the only question remaining is when it will get here.

Overland (Finji) (TBS/Survival)

Overland is tactical turn-based survival meets cross-country road trip (from hell). Each waypoint is a battle, a flashpoint conflict over some minor life-extending objective. Its overland map and procedural generation seem reminiscent of FTL (or its follow-up Into the Beach) but the setting here is familiar people struggling with post-apocalyptic daily hardship. Water, medicine, gas, weapons: the items are banal but vital. The game uses minimalism and scarcity to great effect, sketching characters and strategic scenarios alike with the barest elements.

Impossible Bottles (Rhythm/Action)

Various robots move about in their bottles and raging about like a bull in a china shop. Each level presents one of these Impossible Bottles for the player to fix by manipulating the environment and repairing the situation, or at the very least soothing its sole occupant. A scientist built these robots as part of a perpetual motion machine for unlimited energy, but they don’t quite work as is. The secret to fixing everything is music, or in gameplay terms: rhythm. One-touch gameplay and lush, fantastic art, with a slated mid-year release.

Nowhere Prophet (Card Game)

Nowhere Prophet (Pictured): this one is a doozy and a little secretive. The dark horse of this race, if you will. In the game, post-apocalyptic leaders trek across a scabrous landscape to gather supporters and supplies, occasionally clashing with foes or environmental dangers. This card game has grid-based combat as well procedurally generated encounters. It’s a card-battler roguelike, essentially, with a unique setting and what seems to be a robust battle system. Current indications state it's due to release this Summer.

Heaven’s Vault (Interactive Fiction)

Inkle (of 80 Days interactive fiction fame) has been teasing their mechanically ambitious Heaven’s Vault for some time now. An archaeologist-slash-xenolinguist explores the dusty remains of an alien civilization on an unknown planet, with a vivid backdrop of sienna sand and celestial blue. There’s some pretty nifty procedural tricks behind the code-breaking and translation, and while its approach to storytelling is a little less handcrafted, it has the potential to have even more surprises and replayability than the globe-trotting 80 Days.

Other Missing Games From 2018

As a reminder, here is a quick list of some other games we were expecting last year, but never turned up:

Bad North (RTS)

Exodus: Proxima Centauri (Boardgame)

Epic Card Game (Card Game)

Lord of the Rings Living Card Game (Card Game)

Monster Slayers (Card Game)

EVE: War of Ascension (MMO)

Best 2019 Mobile Releases So far

There's already been some excellent releases this year, and not all of them were expected/on this list. If you haven't already, check these games out:

Astrologaster (??)

Tharsis (Turn-Based Strategy)

Shards of Infinity (Card Game)

Fort Sumter (Boardgame)

Dungeon Warfare 2 (RTS)

Cultist Simulator (Card Game/Sim)

Necrodancer AMPLIFIED (Roguelike)

The Castles of Burgundy (Boardgame)

Star Traders: Frontiers (RPG)

Legends of Andor (Boardgame)

Evolution: The Video Game (Boardgame)

The Escapists 2: Pocket Breakout (Simulation)

Seen any other games coming out this year you're excited about? Let us know in the comments.

The Most Exciting iOS & Android Games of 2019 published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

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keegames · 7 years ago

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Sonic Adventure 2 Design Thread (mirrored from Twitter)

This article was originally a Twitter thread I wrote. I am mirroring it here as I plan to revive this blog, and feel its content fits the theme.

Released for the Dreamcast in 2001, Sonic Adventure 2 remains a VERY divisive game, yet deep analysis of its design as a game is surprisingly scarce. I hope to change that. To paraphrase a friend, gamedev, & Cheesecake Factory patron, this is Sonic Adventure 2: A Design Thread.

Sonic Adventure 2 follows up 1999's Sonic Adventure, which was Sonic the Hedgehog's first proper foray into 3D platforming after skipping the Saturn. Though this thread is about Sonic Adventure 2, comparisons to its predecessor will be made to examine how things changed.Sonic Adventure was a very ambitious game. Rather than simply bring standard Sonic gameplay to 3D, the game was divided between six different characters, each with their own very unique missions and abilities, with tasks ranging from racing to treasure hunting to fishing. While its six separate stories and hub worlds showed off massive ambition, certain parts of Sonic Adventure felt relatively half-baked; Sonic's story was much longer than everyone else's, the hub worlds felt barren. and certain gameplay styles just plain weren't fun.

So SA2 downsized things a bit. The hub worlds were dropped, and while the playable character count remained at six, the types of gameplay were narrowed to three, with three of the characters being near identical to the other three, divided between just two stories.The upside to this is that, rather than every character visiting some of the same stages as it was in the first game, every stage is unique (though they still share environments and some geometry). SA2 features three gameplay styles: -Sonic/Shadow -Tails/Eggman -Knuckles/Rouge

Sonic/Shadow stages are fast-paced, linear platforming. Sonic and newcomer Shadow have to run, jump, Homing Attack, and grind to the end of stages at high speed. This is generally the most fondly-remembered part of the game.

Tails/Eggman stages see the characters piloting armed mechs through linear stages. The mechs are equipped with a lock-on shot that can target multiple enemies at once for more points - more on the scoring later, as it is the key to the whole game.

Knuckles/Rouge stages task the player with navigating open levels to find three hidden objects through the use of a "hot/cold" radar and optional hints. Their abilities to glide and climb allow them to explore in all directions easily.

The division of SA2 into essentially three different games that the player alternates between is frequently derided, and while a more focused game could indeed be a better product, I would argue that SA2 realizes all three of its styles fully, thanks to another new addition.

That new addition is the Rank system. Sonic Adventure 2 keeps a score for each stage as you play through it, and at the end of each stage a letter grade is awarded. Higher scores lead to better ranks, with A ranks being the best and E ranks being the worst. The thing is, scoring systems in both 3D platformers and console games in general were essentially a thing of the past. As games on consoles diverged from their arcade counterparts, scores became less relevant and were frequently removed all together. Super Mario 64, which codified the 3D platformer, featured no proper scoring system at all. And while the first Sonic Adventure did feature scores, there was no in-game incentive to reach for higher scores, rendering them mostly meaningless.Super Mario 64 also did something else that many 3D platformers would follow suit in: it placed a focus on collection. Gathering the game's 120 Stars put exploration and problem solving at the forefront, and games like Banjo-Kazooie and Spyro The Dragon followed similar formulas. Notably, these games did not care how you reached their goals. Time constraints were rare, and moment-to-moment performance was de-emphasized in favor of letting the player progress as they see fit. Their mechanics reinforced that freedom. SA2 went in the opposite direction.Perhaps thanks to SEGA's history with arcade games, Sonic Adventure 2 uses its scoring & ranking systems as in-game incentives to perform as well as possible. This probably bounced off many players (for valid reasons), but I'd argue it's the key to the entire game!

Scoring in Sonic Adventure 2 is based on a number of factors, some universal and some specific to the gameplay styles. Universal ways to score are: -collecting Rings (10 points) -destroying enemies (varies by enemy) -Time Bonus (awarded depending on how long the level took)

One notable scoring mechanic is the Gold Beetle, a special version of the standard Beetle enemy. There is a single Gold Beetle in every stage; it appears for a few seconds before vanishing. Destroying this is worth 1000 points, which is a hefty fraction of points on most stages! The other most important thing to remember about scoring for all characters is that if you die, when you reappear at a checkpoint your score is reset to zero, basically guaranteeing a bad rank. Therefore, step 1 to attaining good ranks is completing levels without dying at all.

Now, for specifics: Bonus points can be awarded as you play through stages, but how exactly you get them depends on the type of stage you're currently playing.

Sonic/Shadow stages are perhaps the hardest to describe. While you can consistently get bonuses from attacking multiple enemies in a row without touching the ground with their Homing Attack, as well as performing tricks off ramps and certain rails, other methods vary by stage.Taking different paths or rails, using certain abilities, or interacting with some objects in specific ways might give you points. While there's no one way to do it, the bonuses become pretty intuitive if you keep an eye out for chances to do cool or tricky things.

Tails/Eggman stages have the most straightforward bonuses, and the only ones the game directly tells you about; simply lock on to multiple enemies at once before firing to gain bonus points. The more enemies you lock on to, the more points you get.

Knuckles/Rouge stages have tricky bonuses; points are awarded when you collect each item depending on how quickly you did so and how few hints you used. As the items' locations are randomized each time you play a level, it could take a few restarts before you have a good run.

Knowing the sources of points and really striving for A-ranks is only required for 100% completion, but I'd argue that being aware of these systems is actually what makes Sonic Adventure 2 fun. Sonic Adventure 2 is known as a frustrating game for new players. The game doesn't do a good job of drawing focus to the bonus points, and the lives system (where it costs a life to restart a stage without returning to the menu) doesn't encourage the actions needed for A-ranks. The boss fights are another slight wrinkle; they're not ranked at all, leaving players to just go through them. Like many platformers, bosses are the least interesting part of Sonic Adventure 2. And, of course, there are a few stages or sections that are a bit annoying even when you're good at the game. SA2 definitely isn't perfect, and even if you understand the game you might still find yourself frustrated with Mad Space or Eternal Engine.

So Sonic Adventure 2 is a game with a design philosophy that goes against most of its genre, an unusual divided gameplay setup, some issues with communicating its core design, and some incredibly "early 2000's" aesthetics on top. It's no wonder many people don't like it. BUT.

That aforementioned design philosophy is EXTREMELY satisfying to play with. Mastering the stages in order to get A-ranks gives a feeling that not many platformers can give, and you can do it with some time & effort. Sonic Adventure 2 is a game where you get out what you put in.On a more general note, scoring/ranking systems are somewhat rare in console games, but they're a great way to add longevity to a game by encouraging a player to play better, rather than just completing the given content once.

So anyway, I hope this thread gave you some stuff to think about in regards to game design, and maybe even encouraged you to give Sonic Adventure 2 a closer look. It's an odd game, but certainly an interesting one, and it's relatively unique among 3D platformers even to this day.

#game design #sonic the hedgehog #sonic adventure 2 #video game design

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masterzii · 7 years ago

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GameDev

I periodically get emails from indie devs who are just getting started. They're looking for advice. Sometimes, their questions are so relevant to the kinds of things that I'm currently thinking about that I end up typing way too much in response to them. Seems like a waste of typing for just one person's benefit. I post what I typed here, hoping that it will benefit multiple people.

In this case, the person was looking for advice based on specific games that weren't total failures, but didn't sell as well as they were hoping. They were thinking about giving up, getting a job, etc.

The games in question are here:

Pillar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z7AAJbMFeU)

The Path of Motus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXEjMuZmVww)

It's a little weird to make a public example out of someone, but it's hard to understand what I wrote without this context. And furthermore, I think this particular designer is doing something pretty cool, and above-and-beyond what I usually see from first-time designers that email me. So I feel okay elevating the profile if this work while also dissecting it at the same time.

To summarize the question with condensed quote:

I've come to the conclusion that maybe my games just aren't appealing to the mass amount of gamers. Both titles are really strange conceptually... but then I see your games do very well and I feel that debunks my theory as your games also stand out conceptually. I also feel I've made a mistake in taking too long on my games. Perhaps I need to churn out games faster and work on building up more of a following. I'd appreciate hearing any thoughts or advice you have. What do you think helped your games have financial success?

Here's what I wrote in response:

Well, Step #1 is email me so that I watch your Pillar trailer and have my mind kinda blown by the vibe that it's giving me. :-)

Really complicated and haunting feeling. Reminds me of the feeling that I got years ago from "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."

Next step is read this Reddit post of mine:

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/7wnud8/note_i_didnt_make_any_money_until_game_14_if/

And gird your loins to keep failing and not give up yet.

That said, when I look at these games, I'm not at all shocked that they're not selling well. I can't put my finger on it.... but there's something about the presentation that feels a tad amateurish. I think part of it may be that you're overshooting your abilities in terms of content creation/animation/etc. You're trying for a "pro" polished look, but falling short. I mean, these games don't look as put-together as Braid, for example, but they're clearly shooting for something like that. Whereas, The Castle Doctrine achieves a cohesive "nu low-fi" look, and no one would try to compare the look to Braid.

I'm too close to One Hour One Life to judge it properly (I absolutely LOVE the way that it looks), but I think that other people describe it's look as "charming". Somehow, these simple cartoons "work" and are seen as cute. Again, the low aim disarms people a bit. It's not pixel art.... but it's like the hand-drawn equivalent of that. Doodles. My first non-pixel-art game in like a decade, but I somehow hit a different kind of sweet spot.

So that's the look component of it. The Pillar look is actually the better of the two. The only thing that feels slightly off on that one is the walking animations, but it almost works anyway.

Next: WTF are we doing in these games?

Weird new games need to be CRYSTAL CLEAR about how they are innovative. The trailers need to get people's gears turning, and make them understand exactly why they've never played a game like this before.

Take a look at the The Castle Doctrine trailer or the One Hour One Life trailer. After watching those, you really have a deep understanding of how these games work (the trailer is almost like a tutorial), and you can clearly see why there has never been a game like this before.

And that may be another canary in the coal mine moment for you. Even if your trailer did explain it better, would the core "what people are doing in the game" part be mind-blowing enough to even be included in the trailer?

"A game where you build security systems and then try to break through security systems designed by other people"

"A game where you're born as a helpless baby to another player as your mother, and you live an entire life in one hour"

Pretty much everyone I've ever told those elevator pitches to (even non-gamers) was instantly intrigued.

I often wait until I have that kind of idea before making my next game. A "Holy crap!" idea. An idea that is so obvious and perfect that I rush too Google, hoping that no one else has thought of it yet. An idea that will make everyone else say, "Why didn't I think of that?"

In the case of The Castle Doctrine, I had at least 5 designer friends of mine sheepishly admitted to me that they had been working on exactly the same game. So I was right to be nervous about someone else doing it first. Then I saw the movie The Purge. A lot of people were thinking along the same lines around that time....

And if you have that kind of idea, it's easier to communicate that in the trailer and get people really excited about it.

Finally: Value proposition

When people decide to plunk money down for a game, they are generally doing one of two things:

They are so overwhelmed by the emotions stirred up by the very idea of your game that it's an impulse buy. Games with extremely evocative visual styles can often pull this off. The Last Night is a great forthcoming example of this. It will make enough people scream HERE DAMMIT TAKE MY MONEY that it will sell well no matter what. Hyper Light Drifter is another. These are first-week games. These games are like Levitron Tops. The idea of a floating top on your coffee table is enough.

They conduct a careful research project about your game, and the math works out to them. This is a deep game that they could get into for a long time and reap many weeks/months/years of enjoyment out of. They kick the tires, pinch the fabric between their fingers, heft the thing in their hands.... yes, this is gonna be worth $20. These games are like backpacks. You spend some time finding just the right one. You're going to be wearing it on your back for a while. (Monkey-on-my-back metaphor is not lost on me here.)

Single-player games usually have to rely on #1 to sell well. There are a few exceptions---usually some kind of endless building games where what the player does is up to them (Stardew Valley, Factorio, Subnautica), or steep-curve rogue-likes (Spelunky, Nuclear Throne). Emergence and long-term replayability is key, either way.

Sadly, as a result, I think single-player games are kindof a dying breed in the modern ecosystem. We're not going to see many Braid or Fez type success stories these days. And the few that do succeed will do so on raw emotion alone (pure #1). But the road is currently littered with big-budget single-player indie failures that totally would have been successful five years ago. Also, we must keep in mind that even Braid- or Gone Home-level success is small potatoes next to Stardew Valley or Factorio.

Thus, I'm skeptical of the indie apocalypse. People are just generally playing different types of indie games now than they were before. The old guard is experiencing system-shock when their short, consumable, single-player games aren't selling like they used to, and first-time indie devs are experiencing the same thing for the same reasons (because first games are almost always short, consumable, single-player games). But indie games are making way more money now than they ever have made.

So, if you're making this kind of game.... you REALLY better be sure that you're punching #1 square in its impulse-buying heart. If your game's initial impression gives people pause, it's already over.

But it's much more viable to target #2.

Many people played The Castle Doctrine every day for 11 months straight. Many people have played One Hour One Life 900 hours over the past seven months. Can your game do that? If so, then it can fit into the #2 ecosystem.

These games are NOT first-week games. These are the types of games that have their biggest week a year after launch, when people collectively realize just how deep the value proposition of the game really is.

Multiplayer is the easiest way forward. But there are also single-player paths here, as mentioned above. But my first "hit" game (14 games in, Sleep is Death) just happened to be a multiplayer game....

Even so, you still have to have a tiny bit of #1 in there to get people intrigued enough in the first place that they conduct the research project and find the value proposition. But it doesn't have to punch them in the heart. It can also tickle their brain conceptually. If they walk away from the trailer musing about the game, that's the seed that will grown into a research project where they will eventually decide to buy it.

But most importantly, you're only two games in. You have a lot of learning to do, and you will keep getting better and better at designing and making and selling games. Go back and look at my second game, and imagine if I had given up there.

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