next »

[chrisjan]

Hello there!

My name is Christiaan Janssen.  I am one of the organizers of the Berlin Mini Game Jam (http://berlinminijam.de), a monthly game jam taking place in Berlin.  During these years of jamming I've made several free games that can be checked at my blog, "Just for fun" (http://chrisjangames.wordpress.com). One of the first games I made, years ago, was GunFu Deadlands (http://sourceforge.net/projects/gunfudeadlands), which had some success back in the time.  I am still receiving e-mails from players who enjoy it from time to time.

Last January I had the chance to team up with Miguelito (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=18815.0) in one of our jams and make a game together.  The theme was "strange powerups".  We decided to go for a simple, straight-forward shoot-em-up, and implement some crazy powerups just to mess with the player.  After some time of "finishing the game as it was intended during the jam" (a.k.a. polish), I am able now to share it with the public.

The game is called "Because this is literally the best we could come up with: retribution", since we couldn't come up with a better name than "retribution", "better" meaning "ridiculous" in this case.  It's a 2d shoot-em-up where the goal is not so much to destroy the enemies, but to make it as far as you can without loosing your 3 lifes.  The game has an ending, and it keeps track of your progress, with highscore table and all.

Before someone complains about the huge logo taking part of the screen or the annoying power-ups that get in the way: that's the joke, it's on purpose.  Some of the power-ups are beneficial, though.  The challenge is to learn to recognize which ones are which and dodge the bad ones.  Through development the game evolved into something that doesn't go 100% humorous nor 100% straight-forward shoot-em-up.  The reason is that I was afraid that if we made it "only" a joke-game, the game would not survive replays nor get the interest of the player for more than a few minutes.  But on the other side, if we took out all the humour, the game would be completely unremarkable, just one more shoot-em-up in a sea of hundreds of them. With the current compromise between the two extremes, the game can now be played repeatedly, feeling somewhat fresh each time, since the enemy waves and the order of the pickups is randomized, and still make you smile at the ridiculousness of some of the power-ups.

Some people asked me why am I giving the game away as pay-what-you-want, instead of charging up-front.  Well, I am skeptical about anyone wanting to pay it only based on a bunch of screenshots, specially before they have the chance to try it and figure out if it's any different from all the other shoot-em-ups out there. On the other side, they have a point that the game is worth something, that I don't have to give it away for completely free. I thought about a possible shareware model (for lack of a better name for it), that would be free demo + paid full, but again, in that case the scope of the project would have gone beyond "polished jam game", so I left the idea for a possible sequel if this one has some degree of success.  The intention here is that people can try the game for free and if they like it maybe they'll be gentle enough to go back to the store and pay something for it, choosing the price they feel is right.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the game.


Link to the game in itch.io:
http://lairofpixies.itch.io/because

Trailer:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=50x0nxRHJqQ

Presskit:
http://lairofpixies.com/presskit/because

Announcement in the blog:
http://chrisjangames.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/because-this-is-literally-the-best-we-could-come-up-with-retribution/

Animated gif with absurdly low framerate:


And some screenshots:

[chrisjan]

Hello all,

  first of all, thanks for all the views and downloads the game got so far.  Really appreciated.

  I just uploaded a new version of the game (Version 1.1) with some fixes requested through user feedback.  The most important feature is the addition of unlockable achievements, which adds a lot of replayability.  The changelist is:
 

• achievements
• more in-game music
• some fixes in the menu and better gamepad support
• improved explosions

  Enjoy!
  http://lairofpixies.itch.io/because

[chrisjan]

One quick note.  Not sure if anyone is interested, but I find it curious.

As of today, when I uploaded the new version of the game, I checked the download stats so far (the game has been online for a week and a half).  The split across OSes is:
  · 51% Windows (32bit+64bit)
  · 40% Linux (32bit+64bit)
  · 9% OS X

For comparison, GunFu Deadlands has been available for 4 years and a half (14,206 downloads total), the download stats from Sourceforge are:
  · 71.6% Windows
  · 8.5% Linux
  · 6% OS X
 (This doesn't add to 100% because there is a category "other", which I guess refers to people downloading the Löve2D file.)

In the first case, it's clear that I've been more effective in promoting the game to the Linux community than to users of other platforms, these results are not representative of anything but my own capacity to reach each audience.  Yet looking at the GunFu case, it still seems to make sense to me that, if I was forced to support either Linux or OS X but not both (which is not the case, I can support both OSes), and if I based this decision on potential revenue, assuming it to be directly proportional to number of downloads, well...

The reason this catches my attention is because, as unreliable this data is (just two specific cases, very far from a scientific measurement with a big sample population), it still contradicts what I'm hearing again and again from other developers considering partial multiplatform support.  Well, it half contradicts it: the part that says "most gamers use Windows" is still confirmed and very true.