I think it needs to be re-branded with an actual theme (airport would work fine imho).
Gameplay looks good and fluid, but it needs more lasting appeal and a theme might work.
Good luck!

I follow Henry Ford's philosophy:
The primary responsibility of a company is to make a good product. Its second responsibility is to pay its employees as much as possible.

Forget charity, changing mindsets, changing the world. Create a product that's so damn good and solves such a serious issue that people throw money at it. There are unethical companies that make mountains of money lying about their products. Ignore them. The point is that most ethical companies forget that their responsibility is to make a product that people pay for.

Money comes to those who solve a problem and get the solution to as many people as possible. This applies to drug lords too; it's just that the unethical ones createor exaggerate the problem before offering the solution.

Amen

trello.com

Except it doesn't tell you how many days you have left (one of Trello's few shortcomings).

Jira might be closer to what you're going for, but given the steep cost, googledoc spreadsheet might be better. It also happens to be usable from mobile, so you can use it offsite to review the numbers.

That's an easy rant, but the truth is as follows:

You might be doing the "right thing", but that doesn't mean your concept is profitable in and of itself.
Much like a MMO model may be perfectly ethical, and unfortunately not pay off for its own costs.

That doesn't mean your product fails, but your expectations may be too high. What you need to do is jump on the next project with that in mind and adjust. Don't fall prey to scammy practices, but learn that you need to build your game with profitability in mind (not necesarily making a lot of profit, but at least being able to pay for your staff).

You're still running a business afterall, so it needs to pay off. Truth be told however, kids' games are tough to market. I've delved in that market for a while, and we've earned massive amounts of positive reviews, but this didn't translate into actual sales either. I don't think your pure indie approach is at fault, but rather, the market you're going for (kids).

There's a reason why big corps are still targetting the casual and mid-cores so heavily after all. Now, whether its a good thing that people spend so much in candy crush and so little for their kid's education is an entirely different matter...

Just to let you know we aren't dead!

My development computer was victim of an electrical problem and is still undergoing repairs as we speak now.
With that said, we're targetting a development spree over the christmas break, so stay tuned for hopefully heavy progress in January!

Added an unlockable CRT screen mode a few months ago for the ones that like scanlines; you can turn it on in the options screen and play the whole game like that if you want to. The picture itself is of one of the save statues.

That color palette is incredible.  Mmm I want that.

Gorgeous.

I'm going to rectify this statement slightly.
I strongly believe that casual playtesting should only be performed if your intend is to reach to a casual crowd. This may sound stupid, but its important to know your target audience.

While many UX changes wouldn't have much of an impact on your hardcore crowd, its possible that by "dumbing down" your game for the casual market, you end up hurting your actual target audience (provided its different).

I also believe that playtesters can be broken down into much more than casual vs hardcore.
For example, you can scale players based on their neuroticism (aka "rage quit factor").

Thus, thinking that your game will be better because you fix everything based on a casual gamer's eye isn't necessarily accurate.

In my opinion you should always be play testing, even before you have a playable prototype. There's no such thing as too much feedback.

While true, as Paul underlined, playtesters are a finite resource that you can only tap into every so often. I'm trying to make sure not to dry the well down by playtesting too much / too early.

I liked the control scheme for Brothers: A tale of two sons.  You have your directional keys and one interaction key for each of the brothers.  Each of your hands controlled one character.  WASD + space for one, and arrows and right control for the other, try it, it's a comfortable setup. 

Brothers in Arms, (I think), an fps, you controlled a squad from the perspective of the leader.  You issued commands, by pointing your crosshairs and shouting something like suppress, or move.

For a top-down zelda, maybe you could have a targetting system, switching between targets, and map 4 keys to four different actions or 4 different characters to take actions based on their specific roles. 

I've seen a game on Xbox where you did control a single character, and each of up to 4 keys would 'summon a specific ally from the fray' so that they would perform their special attack.
While it was an interesting approach, it really did not capture the feel of commanding your party much: there was a lot of AI involved.

The WASD+key approach is interesting, but it cannot scale up.
Maybe I'm looking for something more in the vein of four swords, without the gimmicky look?

That would be like Baldur's Gate...
Unfortunately, this doesn't really feel "jrpg" to me. Binding controls directly to a character, which is a bit more arcade, is perhaps what I'm concerned with the most at the moment, and Baldur's Gate offers a more "tactical" approach.

To a certain degree, tactics games such as Bahamut Lagoon capture the essence of what I'm trying to achieve a bit better, but their battles are too long.

They can, but I don't want them to be A.I.-controlled though.

Thanks for the obscure reference. If anything, a simple youtube search has convinced me to drop the Ys approach (First Queen looks terrible).

Your idea is much more interesting, but I think it comes with a strong thematic baggage. It can only really work in a game where you control like-minded critters (such as lemmings).
It *could* work, but I'm looking for something a bit more heroic, and with smaller numbers (possibly 3 guys).
Thanks for the heads up though.

Hi,

I'm currently struggling with a design concept that's hard to deal with:

I'm trying to build a prototype where the player is able to control a party of heroes, in a game like Zelda: A Link to the Past (or BrainLord).

The problem is that I want to keep the party as a single entity instead of falling in the trap of making it RTS-like (it worked for Baldur's Gate, but I'm looking for a system that's more character-centric).

Thus, I'd like to map the movement to a D-Pad or W,A,S,D-like control, but find a way to control all of the characters independently.
One of the things I've looked into was the creative simplicity of 'Ys' series, where the default fight command is applied whenever you collide frontally with an enemy.

I was wondering if anybody had any idea on how to keep this as close as possible to zelda-like gameplay all the while tolerating multiple party members?

Still looking?
Definitely something Im used to do.

still looking?

still looking?
If so, you can PM me.

4. Rather than have a chaotic mess of ships attacking the 'nearest' ship to them, you may want to subdivide a combat group into squadrons to group up and adapt a role/share a target. If you have detailed roles and combat behaviour, of course, this will occur somewhat naturally, but in large-scale engagements you might see absurdities like an entire fleet piling in on a single ship, taking half a second to kill it before orienting on the next.

I doubt an average battle would have enough ships to warrant this type of behavior. I'm expecting the majority of fighters to be 1v1, 1v2 or 2v2.

If the player has no control over the combat, isn't having them watch a long battle sequence play-out each time going to get tedious?  Personally I'd use a more abstract and quicker way of showing the results of battles (think advanced wars for example) to keep the game flowing and then you don't have to solve any of the problems you mention in the OP.

Well, assuming the sequence is 30 seconds, and can be skipped to the result screen instead, I consider it mostly a tool to visualize victory/defeat. The key component here is that its interesting to see how ships behave in combat, so that you understand when you need them. How manoeuvrability, speed, attack range, etc affect combat is interesting.

Not seen in my previous videos is an interesting thing that can happen: minimum weapon firing range. Some ships will equip long-range missiles, which can lead to some epic flawless victories (launching volleys of missiles at incoming enemies). However, if fast ships equiped with deadly short-ranged cannons come too close to these battleships, they'll find themselves losing despite being technically far superior.
It would be hard for a player to figure out why he's lost unless he sees that.
Since there will be many subtleties to combat (cloaking for example), a playback will really help players understand when and how.

Advance Wars was actually suggested by Yannick (the other developer on this team). We haven't ruled that option out yet either.

As motorherp said, I think it will become boring for the player very quickly by having no control over it. 4X are big games, it takes a lot of time to play one game and it can spread through weeks sometimes. Players are mostly interested in the grand plan of things and not in little skirmishes. If you have 10 fleets and battle each one ten times a day, you would skip such non-interactive features after watching a couple. Even the "Skip to results" button would be hard to press 100 times during a war.

In our case, games will be possibly far longer than weeks. Assuming 1 turn per day, its not impossible to imagine a long game to span 6 months, and it may be interesting to make turn frequency lower than once per day to account for people's lives, therefore, a year is not impossible.

Assuming "playing the turn" will represent a minor part of the entire span of the game, I believe its good to provide playback tools that you can learn from when you are waiting on your next turn. This provides means to analyse the outcome and learn from it.
Also, note that, with the given scope of this game, a battle of 3V3 is not a skirmish, by any stretch: it's a major encounter, possibly deciding of the entire war. Players won't be expected to own more than 100 ships at any given point in time (most likely much less), therefore, losing 3 will matter.
If you have 10 fleet and battle each one, chances are you're left with no more ships, or have destroyed 1 or more players.
I think its all a matter of assessing the scope of this game.

I realize this is a bit different from modern 4X games, but this title is meant to be true to the origins of the genre, most notably, similar to VGA Planets 3.0

Hey, thanks for reaching out, this was an interesting play through.

First, as many have put it, your key game changer here is the teleport (and MAN, there's potential there).
After a few tries, I realized that it was MUCH easier to teleport in my enemies than to try and overcome them hand-to-hand (because of the movement speed mostly, and limited punch range).

Another key factor here is stealth. After a few tries, I realized I could skip a few enemies for a better playthrough. Please do find ways to reward players for playing stealthily.

Everything else is allright (and I did find your secret room).
Possibly, with the use of guns, breakable walls or props would be cool. While props may not play a game role per se, they'd add to the overall feel that you're shooting bullets.

What are your plans with this one?

is that number grounded on an elaborate plan oran educated guess?

and November 12, 2013, is Saturday in... which country exactly?