Yeah, learning curve.

You, the creator, are at a much higher skill level than your playtesters. I don't agree with the whole "modern gamers are sissies" argument. Modern gamers are on both ends - you have people who give up on the slightest problem and you have the people who win all the XCOM games on maximum difficulty without loading in less than 48 hours. The speed run on Pacman and Super Mario has probably improved. Gamers are both softer and tougher.

But even a good gamer will have problem if the learning curve is too sharp. That's one of the biggest mistakes I made with my first game. I expected people to take on a sharp learning curve, but didn't realize that I had about 2 months of experience in the game, and way more hours put into it than they would have.

Eventually you'll come across the problem that your levels are too easy because some of your players have invented a technique you never saw coming.

I'm not really a fan of CYOA games. They're rather outdated these days and I prefer the more management style interactive fiction games like Long Live The Queen.

Worse than anything, CYOA doesn't give the player a sense of agency - making them feel that their actions, skill, and strategies make a difference. That's why games like D&D and adventure evolved from it, even though those games introduce their own set of problems.

CYOA game design is almost 100% level design.

Try to move away from the "story tree" model. Move towards a lock and key design, much like adventure games. Unlike adventure games, where people are always picking up every damn "key" they come across, you don't need inventory with CYOA. If the lead character wants to make a certain friend, they need to make a mutual enemy which is done by following another path first, etc.

You should probably model your story down on paper like levels... what leads to where, which 'key' unlocks which 'lock.

I think people are thinking "plot" when they say "story". Bastion's plot was not outstanding, but its narration really stood out and was very interactive. It also got you right from the start of the game, and first impressions matter a lot.

Early access and full game is good. The others are really meh.

What people like is personal attention. "Get your name written in..." is not that good because then you end up on a credits page with a thousand other names and nobody will see yours. Limited bragging rights.

Something more fun is having characters named after you. Bosses. Have one of the portraits similar to your face. That kind of thing. It's more work, but easily $100-$200. I think the Rebuild 3 kickstarter is a good example of how a lower profile indie game should do crowdfunding. ADOM probably had the best RPG crowdfunding rewards, but it was finished and very high profile.

So here's an official definition of games, as taken from Dr. J. Dorman's Engineering Emergence:

A game is a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined
by rules, that results in a variable, quantifiable outcome affected by player
effort and ability.

So if you guys want to debate this, at least toss in a different definition of games. Or explain why IF doesn't meet one of those criteria.

Artificial - not real life
Conflict - Player vs environment. Player tries to get to goals, which is advancing the storyline.
Rules - Syntax. Or in the case of VNs, being limited to only the given dialog options.
Variable, quantifiable outcome - Score. Different endings. Bad endings.
Effort and ability - Choosing the right dialog options. Or the wrong ones, if you're purposely trying to get at a 'bad ending'.

Most people will disagree with the "Rules" and "Effort and ability" bits.

If a game requires little effort to get to the ending, it's still a game, just one targeted at players who don't want to put a lot of effort into it.

A VN where you press next or click any speech dialog and get to the ending anyway is not a game. A VN where there is only one ending no matter what you do is not a game. Bad endings count as alternate outcomes, and so does being prevented from getting to the ending.

But then again, VNs don't even sell themselves off as games. That's why they're called "novels". Something like King's Quest is clearly a game.


You can say that an interactive story game has no mechanics, so here's a definition of game mechanics:

The mechanics of a game is a set of rules governing the behavior of a
single game element. These rules are specific: for example, a mechanism
specifies exactly how fast a character moves, how high a character jumps
and how much energy this costs.

In this case, if your character is at a cliff, and you type "jump", the character jumps off the cliff and you get a Bad Ending. Type "jump" in a forest and nothing happens. Type "kill bear" when you're unarmed gives a Bad Ending. Type "kill bear" when you have a shotgun and the story progresses.

The mechanics might be really... precise, but they're still game mechanics.

Try and put up a definition of 'juicy'. Otherwise, we'd be tossing in answers but have different interpretations of what the question is.

I spent like 10 minutes looking for a proper definition:

“Juice” was our wet little term for constant and bountiful user feedback. A juicy game element will bounce and wiggle and squirt and make a little noise when you touch it. A juicy game feels alive and responds to everything you do – tons of cascading action and response for minimal user input. It makes the player feel powerful and in control of the world, and it coaches them through the rules of the game by constantly letting them know on a per-interaction basis how they are doing.

Some juicy examples you may have experienced might include:

Alien Hominid – enemies exploding and flinging blood to an almost unjustified extent
Mario Bros. – bouncing through a room full of coins, blinging with satisfaction
Pachinko - a never-ending gush of balls all under your control
Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo – animation and sprites abound on multiple chains

The video is being quite lazy in using terms like "juicyness makes the game better", "maximum output for minimum input".

You save money on living costs, but you lose all the possibilities to socialize with press and other indie developers

Why's that? I thought most people socialize with the press/other indies through Internet. I get that some spots in USA/Europe might be more suitable for indies. But if you're currently living somewhere like Australia, you can probably get more press contacts in Malaysia/Indonesia.

I do see logic in what people said about moving from a richer city in the USA to a poorer city/state.

And a lot of the poorer countries quite often have very good internet infrastructure. Malaysia has fiber optics for about $40/month. A friend in the telecommunications industry said it's because there's just too many telecommunications engineers in the country and because the low bureaucracy and safety procedures makes it cheap to install fiber optic cables everywhere. Also stuff about SE Asia being a communications route from China/Japan to much of the rest of the world. I think central america would be similar to SE Asia, because of the strategic location.

Basically, I love interactive fiction. It's just that there's so little good ones. They're kinda like Game Maker games... something that's so easy to get into that the field gets overwhelmed with amateurs. Similarly, they hit upon a limit really early too. It's hard to predict every move a player will make, without extensive playtesting.

To be good, interactive fiction needs to actually be interactive. Let me try to stop the car by standing in front of it. Have the world interact with my character when he's running around without his pants on. The game shouldn't actually predict every single thing the player does (because then the scope would be narrowed), but it should at least interact with what players normally do.

i think there's three forms of this

the first form is excelling in sheer details, like the lore has a huge amount of facts -- this is often the case for big game series or games based on lore from non-game franchises, like star wars, lord of the rings, star trek, etc. -- basically you need a wikia of the universe that has like 5000 pages to cover it all

another is in coherency of it -- when it all works together well and has a theme and unique style to it, and is self-consistent with a cohesive vision. this is fairly important, because often universes that are good at the above (lots of details and facts) aren't that great when it comes to this

lastly, and most important to me, is when there are relatively few details, and very little of the world is known, but it gives just enough suggestive details that there's the impression that there is a huge mysterious world that you can't ever know, but it's there -- somewhere. as if it's a universe that really exists, in some other universe, but almost nothing about it is known. for example, kartia (ps1 game) did that well for me

For the most part, I think too many games info dump. Good example of this is Dwarf Fortress. There's just tons of info everywhere and the game just buries you in it, right down to your orthoclase walls with cat leather engraving depicting a conversation between some Important Dwarf III and Important Dwarf IIVI in the Year 1231. Nobody really cares about most of that.

A lot of writers also build the world from the outside in and find it hard to go back inside out.

I think the Fallout approach is the best. The fact that Fallout actually survived - and thrived under the transition from Fallout 2 to 3. Fallout 2 had a very details based approach... everything you did changed the world in some way. Fallout 3 was the opposite... it was a world which you were a guest of and what you did didn't really have any effect. Heck, the world was so well built that it pulled off Fallout Tactics well and even the casual console games. The best thing was that they didn't really put that much active effort into world development. Fallout 1 was just cobbled together, trying to make a game which would let characters of any type survive. There was this place with Mutants, this other place with Ghouls, and so on. Fallout 2 actually developed into a proper world.

Anyway, Fallout gets my vote for best world and best world lore.. and even best adaptation by very different players.

I also like the X-COM universe, because it remained so consistent throughout the different games. Elerium from aliens brought in elerium anti grav technology, Marsec, Cult of Sirius.

On a similar note the UFO games also did an impressive job. Certainly better in world creation than in gameplay.

Warcraft and Starcraft actually does the exact opposite to Fallout. It starts off with a massive, massive lore and history. You could build it into MMOs and books. But it shows very poorly in the game world because it doesn't integrate into the game mechanics. The game even takes you through the development of the world first hand. But because you have so little say in things, nobody cares why you're blowing up one base after another.

I'd say Avernum/Exile was good too, but more in how it portrayed things. So good that it gets recycled a bit too much. I knew someone who just made a character in Avernum 3 who did nothing... he just stood there, passed time and watched what happens if he didn't do any heroics. It was interesting how the game world win and lose wars without the player's meddling, and how the boundaries of empires changed.

Cyber Nations. It's pretty much dead now because of the dull game mechanics, but I think they pulled off free to play just right.

The wiki shows how much depth that kind of environment created. The Great Wars showed how much political complexity was possible. It looks a bit overwhelming, but note that everything there is player driven, so you have like a few thousand individual players trying to influence things to their own personal goals and writing all that stuff up.

I've heard the same thing over and over again... $1000/month is barely enough to pay rent and food for an American or anyone in a first world country. Compare it to here in Malaysia or Thailand where $1000/month puts you in lower middle class.

For many indie developers, the main cost of development is the cost of living. Most indies don't actually hire anyone. Some have some kind of partner, but that partner would often put their own money and time into the game for a cut of the profits later.

So, why not just move somewhere with lower living costs? There's a cost to moving, of course. But if your money comes purely from the Internet, you'd be effectively doubling your salary. Heck, the less educated (or more rigidly educated) those countries are, the higher the job availability (and salaries) are for creative positions like designers, programmers, and composers.

There's also the pay-for-advantages model that a lot of good MMORTS games take. I once played this persistent MMORTS game over 2 years. Major wars would break out every 9 months or so and the results of the wars set people back in development by 4 or so months. The game allowed you to 'donate' $25 and get rebuilt by a week.

This was limited to about 1 donation a month, though you had limitless donations on other people. So a rich person or a fanatic of the game could donate a few hundreds of dollars to reward people in their alliance. There were people who devoted a lot of time running the metagame aspects of the games, like forming alliances, training alliance members, auditing the alliance's economy... most of these were often high school kids and students. The busy working people would then just channel money into maintaining the alliance and reward these metagame contributors.

Out of game rewards allowed some progress, but not enough to win. If anything, it made the periods between wars shorter (and promoted more player-driven events), and encouraged a mix of players who had lots of time and players with little time but lots of money.

The limitations of play-to-win also encouraged people to pay, because they know it wouldn't be an arms race to see who can donate the most money to build the biggest alliance. A $25 donation gave a bunch of in-game resources, but training is needed to know what to use those resources on, so an incompetent person donating a bunch of money to win would get nowhere.

Eh, I spent about $1k on my laptop every 2 years. Maybe prices vary a lot by country. Where I live, $1k about a month's wage for a programmer. Or maybe a high-end desktop offers the same features for $600... though I don't know any $400 laptops which are useful for anything other than word processing.

I started off on a cheap laptop and unless you're writing C++ on Notepad with little compiling time (which makes sense), it's quite unproductive. I need i7 Core and SSD for 2 GB databases and a hell lot of RAM for Eclipse. But also answering the original question, it really depends on what you're trying to build.

I code in a different location every day because I feel it's just more productive like that. Being stuck in a dim room the whole day is demoralizing (but YMMV). As it is, I can go to hotels, cafes, parks, libraries, other people's offices to code. Even do it in my car while stealing someone's wifi. The only two places in my home which fit a desktop are dim and demoralizing or way too hot. There's also a lot of interruptions at my house from family, so I like the flexibility of not being at the same location every day when someone wants me to drive out through heavy traffic for 2 hours to pick someone up. If you're in a class, they're great for note-taking too, but phablets and tablets have taken up that role these days.

I can bring my laptop around for presentations - too often, you don't want to just present a powerpoint slide, you also want to present some code or access something that takes an hour to configure, and so on. It's too time consuming to transfer data between the two and very often you don't want to risk the embarrassment of presenting something that crashes because it's designed to work on PHP 5.3 but requires additional changes to work on PHP 5.4.

On the ergonomics angle, I can adjust positions while using a laptop. I heard the second best investment a programmer can make is a good chair, but decent chairs and desks get expensive.

However, back on topic, the worst thing about a laptop is that it's tempting to just lay down on a bed with one and procrastinate the whole day.

Maldives. I'm a sucker for places with poor facilities surrounded by water and fish. Honestly, there's plenty of that in my home country, but sometimes it's nice to see what other beaches are like.

Finish it. It levels up your "finishing stuff" skill. Starting projects is easy, finishing projects earns you fame and fortune.

Your game may suck, but it will be complete. Make a list (you already have one right?) of things to finish. Chop out as much as possible. Do the bare minimum to declare your game complete. Toss it away or come back and fix it later.

Here's a nice trick. Bet a friend $1 for every day you don't work on your game. Define what working on your game is (1 line of code, a repository commit, a frame of artwork, working days, etc). It's tiny but it gives momentum and won't burn you out.

i'd say the vast majority of professional programmers and computer artists (upwards of 90%) probably use desktops rather than laptops

Huh, indies? I really can't make do without a portable workstation, though I live in two different locations. If you're making a lot, you can have both a laptop and desktop, but if I had to pick one, it would be a laptop. I've been programming professionally on a laptop for over a year and 100% of my fellow professional programmers also work on a laptop almost exclusively (small companies often have a BYOD policy).


As for procrastination, two words: Pomodoro technique

I don't even bother blocking sites. Block 9GAG and you'll hang out at Cracked. Block TIGS and you'll hang out at Steam forums. Block Facebook and you'll just be refreshing your email.

I'm surprised the American Dollar didn't plummet during the shutdown. Guess people still maintained hope in the stability of the USA and those who lost hope never had it anyway.

F2P is perfectly fine. Pay-to-win or pay-for-cheats is what most hate.

But hey, plenty of people enjoy Candy Crush, so it's not entirely evil.

Book stories and game stories are very different. I'd say Bastion's storytelling was very... interactive. But haven't played the full thing so can't say if it was really good or bad. I liked stories from Live a Live, Mafia, Starcraft, because they fit into the gameplay very well.

Baldur's Gate 2 had a more outstanding story. But it became repetitive and boring when you replay the game so it's actually a case of where the story made the game more boring. The 'novel' equivalent of a game is probably in the Final Fantasy series. The cost in both of these is that the gameplay was pushed aside to make way for the story. The epic RPG genre and especially the JRPG becomes a carrier of good stories diluted to last much longer than it otherwise would.

I think the advice not to write everything from scratch is kind of sketchy.  It really depends on what you're doing.

Yep, that one definitely needs to be tempered with the point the article makes right afterward. Maybe a good rule of thumb is to minimize third-party dependencies by default, but don't hesitate too much to use them when appropriate; as in, when they'll save you time both in the short and long term.

I've seen plenty of frameworks actually slow down coding drastically. Well, by drastic, I mean spending 2 weeks learning the framework on something which had a 3 week deadline. If the code was going to be maintained over 3 months, there's some saved time there.

However, 'maintainable code' is more of a 'shared code' issue, not so much an indie/solo programmer problem. Sometimes it's faster to ask the guy who wrote the code than to comment it.

Writing 100% maintainable code will mean that you end up coding 10 lines/day. I've learned the fast way is just to stuff it. If I sell code, I also sell support for undocumented code. Doing everything the right way takes twice as long as finishing it, no exaggeration.