You have to do flappy bird with a friend.
"Hey man, I heard you were looking for a game. Check out flappy bird."
"What's it about?"
"It's about trying to get a bird through pipes."
"Sounds dumb."
"Yeah, well, Papers Please sounded dumb too. Just give it a shot."
"Ok."
(snickers)
"Dude WTF is this? All I do is hit pipes."
"Maybe you just suck it at it. You can't even get past two pipes."
"Yeah, and you can?"
"Sure watch me." (gets to high score of 8 after 10 attempts)
"Fuck that. You tried 10 times."
"Could you do it in 10 tries?"
(guy gets score of 12 after 13 tries)
"Yeah, but that's more than 10 tries."
"See who gets to 20 first then?"
"No, fuck this game. This is a horrible game."

At this point, both of them secretly practice while alone, on the toilet seat, while waiting for the microwave. They troll other friends into trying it. And the thing goes viral. Flappy bird is the My Little Pony of smartphone games.

"Bro are you still playing flappy bird?"
"No, but my high score is 33."
"Mine was 40, but I deleted it. You get a platinum medal."
"Yeah, right. Prove it."
"Fuck that, I'm not going through that torture again."
"Ok, whatever. Top score is 88 anyway."
"You don't believe me? I'll show you I can hit at least 30, it's easy..."

Yeah, it depends if by better you mean better or more sells.. Depending on your audience boobs might help

You know what's awesome? Salt. You sprinkle it on almost anything and it tastes better. I can eat rice and water and add salt and it'll taste awesome. I can eat potatoes and add salt and fry it and I get french fries or potato chips which are some of the best foods known to mankind. I can get lost in the woods and find a goat and kill it with a rock and overcook it. And it would taste twice as good if I brought along a little salt.

Boobs are like salt. You add a little and a bland game becomes awesome. Would you eat unsalted pretzels? Would you play a game without boobs? If none of the characters in the game have boobs, it's a sausage fest. Even girls complain about games without boobs. "Why are all the characters white males?" That's why you need boobs. Exception is if you have stick figures or something weird like Knytt or Reus or Binding of Isaac. Those are like MSG, unnatural, but it works. But I'd bet those Reus giants would look better if one of them had boobs (even small ones).

When someone is born, they cry, they cough, then they look for boobs. It doesn't even have to be a sexy thing. It's just human nature to want boobs. When people complain about boobs, it's only because there's too much of it, like an oversalted snack.

Might help to report them maybe?

Player has to learn something new.
Player has to achieve something unique via death... like dying to a very rare artifact guardian or treasure vault. Permadeath should never be caused by mooks.
There should be plenty of replayability. The death itself should be something to look forward to so that the player can try something new after getting bored of a role.

Sexiness. It doesn't even have to be an image, it could be like the Appearance attribute in ADOM or firetrap burning your clothes off.

A single completely useless item, that may even drain resources. Don't put too many (like bethesda games do) or it becomes messy.

I'm sure there are awesome mobile games I'm missing out on, and I totally exclude them from what I'm about to say, but man.. the majority of mobile games are poorly made and cash-grab scams.

I don't understand, why would you play Angry Birds, Flappy Bird, or Temple Run (do people still play Temple Run) when the alternatives are just so much stronger?

Flappy Bird is a masterpiece of game design. Just one button. Great difficulty curve. I've had more fun out of it than I did with a lot of the far more complex games on the mobile... I even play it more than Jetpack Joyride. Sometimes I pull it out, show this joke of a game to a friend... and end up playing it a lot.

People just haven't migrated from PC/console game design to touchphone game design. A lot of people underestimate how much fun solid controls bring. I actually bought Battle for Wesnoth and while it was a brilliant port, the game just wasn't fun because of the squinting and lousy control system.

My favorite mobile games for the moment are the Kairosoft games, Pixel Dungeon and 10000000. Kairosoft pulled off touchphone strategy gaming.

Have as little as possible, but as much as necessary. It really depends on what kind of detail level you're going for. The more variables, the more complex it is.

IMO, you shouldn't even have attack, defense, speed unless it suits the game style. Once you add those, you'll have to start building even more complex levels to power up and balance between all the different power levels.

Retired from programming because fuck Android. Started a business. Got offered double the salary to get back into programming. Realized that Android is a gold mine, much like the dot com boom era. Getting way more projects than I could hope to work on.

I actually got started on game development because I enjoy simulations. Something like simulating a real world city inside a game, synthesizing myself inside that game, and seeing how long synthesized me would survive in a world war or against zombies. All that data collection and variable tweaking, fun.

Thanks to smartphones, we have sensors in our pockets, so I get to play around with those. Fun career move for me. But right now the business I started and delayed payments are burning a hole in my pocket.

Just buy everything off the Humble Bundles. There's almost always a bad game bundled in there somewhere. Also check out Metacritic for poorly rated games. Bad games are almost always cheap. Heck, you can even skip the buying bit and skim reviews for what makes them bad.

But what are you hoping to gain from this? It makes more sense to analyze good games. I wouldn't learn to cook by buying a lot of horrible food.

Combat's an abstraction for progress and overcoming obstacles. It's also fluff... otherwise a lot of RPGs would be over very quick.

Hillfolk doesn't really have much combat systems at all. Does anyone consider something like Harvest Moon a RPG even though it doesn't have attributes?

It also depends on how you define combat. You can still have PvP/PvE with other attributes. Dungeon crawling isn't the cornerstone of many games. The Monsterhearts system has only one 'attack' option, based on a single skill. Monsterhearts relies more on having influence over other characters, to manipulate them into doing things you want to do. So a character might try to seduce or blackmail a werewolf into beating up a demon, and then come in to comfort that demon to manipulate them into doing something else.

[Everyone in that niche WILL buy your game at almost any price (eg. train sims)]

Everyone in that niche WILL buy your game at almost any price (eg. train sims)

Personally, I wouldn't pay very much for a single niche game. The nichier it is, the more the developers lie about what the content is like. The amount I'm willing to pay is based on how much I trust them - something like $1 for several EA games to $25 for something like Avernum with a strong demo.

Of course, the niches I'm into (roguelikes and strategy/rpg) are easily available on the net for free, so I'd hardly pay for any of them.

Something like multiplayer really stretches the gameplay. A good single player game might be fun for a month, but a bad multiplayer game with good emergence can be fun for a year. Payment for multiplayer and single player games vary a lot.


Also, you're way more likely to sell niche games than mainstream games. The more mainstream you are, the more you're competing with companies with a huge marketing budget.

Treat it like a proper business: with salaries.

"This is good for experience and your portfolio" is an insult. People who don't have portfolios are almost always bad artists. Art/code/music is a skill. It takes time to build it. People without portfolios simply don't have that skill.

When I was in school, I'd jump up onto random groups and make games together, but it won't work if you want to make something saleable. If you're gonna just make a freeware game together, that's fine. Just go up to any group with teenagers and put up an ad.

If I had a brilliant game idea that would make tons of money, I'd be leading it myself. If I actually believed in this idea, I'd take out a bank loan to build it. Promising a cut of future profits means that the project head is free to throw away the project at any time and the people working on it get nothing. Without salaries in advance, it shows that there's no confidence in the project. And if there's salaries at stake, people are less likely to run away with the source code, they're less likely to slack off, less likely to abandon things, etc.

You don't need a huge salary - experience and portfolio can be a major part of the payment. But there should be enough of a salary to get people to commit to it and not feel exploited.

Evaluation is easy. Just work with them a bit and if they don't turn out right, fire them. There's tons of advice on how to interview people and stuff but I find that a week/month probation tells far more than good interview techniques... especially with the shy types who don't interview well.

Just look for passion, look for a lack of greed, look for people who are smart and get things done. On the job learning is expected in the software industry.

If you can find me a game with the exact same mechanics as XCOM EU, I'll buy it. The controls have to be smooth enough to be relaxing too... clumsy controls were why I stopped playing a lot of tactical RPGs and dwarf fortress.

It's EA. What do you expect? I wouldn't even touch their Google Play stuff. A lot of their earlier games crashed on phones. To prevent refunds, they required a 60+ MB download of some sort within the app, long enough to delay people past the refund time.

I played Simcity Social on Facebook for a while, which was actually a fun game IMO. They added events and missions as time went by. They introduced diamond vaults, which were purchased from diamonds (paid currency) and gave diamonds.. those vaults would pay back in roughly 6 months. As they started to run out of event ideas, they did this big UFO invasion thing which required a hell lot of diamonds. After that, at the peak of its popularity and profit, they simply announced that Simcity Social is shutting down because of its old age (the game was barely a year old by then). I don't think anyone could have done a shittier move.

F2P is not the problem. Right now I'm playing (and paying for) Mush, which IMO implements Freemium perfectly. The problem is greedy companies like EA abusing that system.

I think AAA games suffer from a couple of major issues:
 - They get distracted
 - They're huge and bureaucratically slow

I saw a lecture made by someone in the AAA industry a week ago. I feel that they waste a lot of time on trivial things. When you get a crapload of money and hire 20 artists, you're probably going to get distracted real easily. About 80% of the game is in 20% of the content. Like someone mentioned that big budgets allow huge worlds. But I think that a lot of huge worlds unnecessarily dilute the good content. They seem nice, but they're less fun than a small world with more focused content.

Indie developers are able to focus on that 20% and can ignore things like lighting, shaders, bump maps, etc. They really polish and refine the core of the gameplay. I find that it's not quite the idea behind the game that makes it good; it's the implementation. Chris Crawford has said that the reason his Balance of Power game was such a hit was because he spent a lot of time fixing the kinks of the game. There's not a lot of respect for this polish phase which is what IMO makes games truly good.

Unfortunately, with all the crowdfunding going around these days, it's normal for indie developers to get distracted with all that money and requests made by hundreds of people.

A lot of resources makes people lazy, which is what really kills the creativity.


With regards to bureaucracy... I don't think it's true that AAA games can't try out new things. Look at XCOM:EU. That's clearly an AAA game. And they clearly went against the flow of things. Firaxis, while AAA, does experiment with new things, though their experiments may not always work out.

You do have prominent indie people like cliffski and Spiderweb Software who are reluctant to try something new.

It's really up to the people in charge of those companies. A lot of game companies in my area are founded by game programmers and artists, not game designers. They're technically focused and are often flop on game design. Eventually the money runs thin, and after hiring a group of highly paid professionals, the company is forced to make money grabbing stuff.

I used to hire people. Some jobs, even when poorly paid get like 24 applicants. About half of those are really good. As in 1 year of experience, $5/day, finishes tough stuff in 3 days kind of good.

I first wrote responses to people who I rejected, then 8 more people would apply while I was writing those responses. It's a neverending cycle.

You'd need a portfolio or a recommendation to squeeze past most of those applications. Otherwise, you'd need to bid much lower than everyone else. Personalized cover letters are good. Research isn't really worth it, unless the HR you're targeting uses it as part of the metric in interviewing you ("Applicant is familiar with the company's history"). But you don't really want to work with people like that.

I learned programming by myself and got a job doing it. I'd still recommend a degree. A tough one. Most universities are scams which teach you stuff they plagiarized from Wikipedia and give you a worthless piece of paper which nobody cares about.

A rare few universities will give you a couple years of programming experience within a semester. You'll cry when you're at the comp lab at 2 AM wondering why it keeps crashing, but that means you're learning something.

There are a lot of dumb HR. If a company has dumb HR, you probably won't want to work there. You'll end up putting more effort pretending to work than actually working. The good companies are the ones which let you come into the office at 10 AM as long as you put in decent effort.

You'd need to get your foot in the door somehow though. I worked for a 'half pay' probation for a while, learned to program while on that probation, and secured the job after proving I could do it.

Don't start off indie. I'm a full time indie programmer now, but that's because I get an endless stream of contracts and get the flexibility to turn down a job every two weeks. You'll need to prove that you're a proficient and reliable programmer to get to that stage.

Don't try to be good at everything. This is what they train you in Comp Sci class but it's not profitable. You'll want to be better than the next person. If that guy has say... 3 years doing C++ and you have 2 years doing C++ and 2 years doing Java, that other guy will get the job. But in the software world, you'll often have to multiclass... so stuff like Python and PHP and javascript make a good combo. Sometimes you have like a PHP front end and Java back end and knowing both pays well. Might want to check out job openings before you choose a specialization.

Was going to post this. Might be of interest to people who like Game Maker and Construct as they're in the same family. It's not even bound to the $1 Steam restriction.

Are you sure you mean the core mechanic or important mechanics that aren't quite "core" but used very often later on? I can't really think of an example off the bat.. but something like introducing knights and bishops in chess in a later stage?

I'd still say introduce it early to get players to enjoy the game ASAP, but if you have other important mechanics, you may introduce some bits later on to prevent info overload.

[everyone has a different sense of productivity]

I think gamification is a good way to make people more productive. I'm not the only one. There's Habit RPG which I've been playing for about 2 months.

It's so far looking to be the best To Do List game. But Habit just.. isn't fun. And there's a lot of flaws. Most of the people who play it simply want a 'themed' to do list.

The first flaw is that everyone has a different sense of productivity.

On Habit RPG, you have some people who put "brush my teeth" as a goal and some people who use "avoid eating any wheat products the whole week" as a goal. Those are entirely different difficulty levels. The ones playing it on easy complain it's too easy, and the ones playing it hard complain that it's too brutal.

Habit tried to 'normalize' the difficulty by making tasks reward more or punish less but so far it hasn't worked. It's still damn hard to design a game when someone is accomplishing 60 tasks a day and another person is accomplishing barely 3.

The second flaw is that there's no epic goals.

In just about every grindy MMO, there's a goal at the end. In Candy Crush, it's level 225 (or whatever your friends don't reach). In Farmville, it's the Villa. In MMORPGs, it's some hidden plot... but nobody really cares about the plot, they just care that they're one of the few who got there.

Habit RPG has no goals. You just... level up and get better items. I'd expect Habit to actually kick up once parties, classes, and bosses are implemented, though.


So, I'd propose a better design for a productivity app:

• Base it off Pomodoros. Pomodoros are roughly 25 minutes of time. They're generally 25 minutes of productive time, even if you're just sitting there trying to figure out a solution. The best part is because these are based on atomic units of time, they're limited. Most people can only do 12 Pomodoros a day at best. Someone who has Wednesday off and works on Sunday (like me) can still do 40 Pomodoros a week comfortably. Most people will not go below 2 a day, and if the game simply pushes them past that limit, it's working.
• Have a proper plot. The plot can be procedurally generated. It might be something cliche like people trying to survive in a zombie infested world and get an action point to shoot zombies or build a guardhouse for every successful Pomodoro.
• Combining with the above, let people work together. Stakes and fear of punishment/embarrassment are very important for productivity and motivation. Assign unique roles and classes to each member of a group. If the 'zombie shooter' slacks off, the team is overwhelmed. If the 'builder' slacks off, the team's defenses are not fixed.
• Don't allow people to engage in bad habits as a 'reward'. That's like a sports teacher buying the whole team junk food for winning a game. The game needs to be fun either on the lower atomic levels or on a much higher level. That's why I propose giving in game currency (like action points) as a reward.

Anyone has any other ideas for a game that encourages productivity? If someone wants to steal this idea and make a game out of it, by all means do so. I'll even fund it.