That's a serious blast from the past!
Can't say that I had that in mind when I created their core concept, and I'm not sure the concept artist drew from this influence, but you may be just right... except their are not water-bound
Their drive is certainly curiosity though, and it could lead them to emulate humanoid shapes should they encounter some.

I personally can't wait until somebody 'rules the galaxy' with this seemingly inoffensive little critter.

The AI Storyteller might be a hard-to-sell feature. Technically, its invisible, and to the untrained eye, it might look 'random'. It will need to be particularly good to emulate better gameplay, and yet, still random enough that players don't start expecting things (oh yeah, I've had a lot of food for this amount of time, so raiders will come in shortly!). Also, it shouldn't punish players to anticipating events (having a lot of food stockpiled shouldn't necessarily trigger a lot more aggression, otherwise, it would defeat the point of planning for the worst).

And yes, the visual needs to change, but that's precisely the point of the KS campaign (along with kickass music).

Here comes... the Propheons

This concept represents the Propheons, a liquid lifeform that takes refuge within an armored shell, using a magnetic field propulsion system.

While frail, vulnerable, and reclusive, they're one of the most adaptable species in the galaxy.
Their ability to alter their shape at will allows them to turn everything into a tool (notice how they've formed fingers?).

It was very important for us to keep separate from humanoids in general, and a liquid lifeform seemed very interesting. Unfortunately, a 'waterball' isn't that exciting of its own accord, and quite arguably, too frail to stand a chance during combat. This is how we came with the idea of the 'spherical' vehicle which was initially based on an early underwater diving suit reference.

I haven't entirely defined the exact abilities this species will have, but I can already tell its going to be a lot of players' favorite!

Thanks farcodev. Although, I wasn't a big fan of what I saw from Spaceward Ho! (it felt a bit too 'western' for my liking).

By the way, some progress on the galaxy generator (finally a breakthrough)!


The little 'green dots' are planets orbiting stars.
I'm still fine tuning my constants so that spacing between planets and stars makes sense, but you can see that clusters are starting to take shape!

If you take out the influence lines, it looks more like this:


Its starting to take shape into a 'cluster war'.

I think you'll be needing stretch goals very soon!

That said, very nice video, and it felt very authentic. I generally don't pay for kickstarters even when the project is exciting if I feel the guy 'in front of the camera' is full of shit.
I'll definitely contribute to your kickstarter!

Indeed Paul, you were quite hard to miss back in the days (for anyone even remotely involved with the community side of things). Was ohrrpgce monthly associated with reasonably septaweekly? I know Komera did some cover art for that as well (and I've seen her deviantart profile recently!)

I remember Komera, and obviously James Paige.
Its good to see that many of the developers stuck with development. I'd say Ohrrpgce must be the 'engine' I've used that really encouraged one to really become a jack of all trade (I started using it before importation was possible, thus, I've used the tools that were embedded for music and visual assets).

OHRRPGCE was a stepping stone for me, it taught me to elevate myself as a developer, and not stop at things I thought I couldn't do. True, the results were crappy, but I got s*** done.

Going to RPG Maker after OHR was a huge step down in retrospect!

Hey folks,

I was wondering if anybody else came from the OHRRPGCE community?
I know for a fact that Paul Eres did (known as Rinku Hero) but I'm wondering if that community has generated more indies?

By the way, I was known as J.A.R.S. back then. Amongst several failures, I did Magnus 13 in the Magnus sequel marathon (available on Castle Paradox).

Cheers!

Well, my primary competitor is subscription based, and it does relatively well so far.
I don't think the subscription model is dead. I find several shortcomings with F2P that can be addressed in a subscription-based model.
Subscription means the developer gets $ and can invest in the production of the game. F2P means that the developer has to trick you into paying money to survive.

I wouldn't even want to compare it to EVE or WOW, because, like I said, its not an MMO.

That said, I'm mostly interested in retention numbers here.

Interesting, though I doubt I'd have the patience to micro-manage through text input...
Thinking about speech-to-text implementation? That'd be too awesome...

From my devlog (link in sig)

I was considering having a system that 'pokes you' when you're the last remaining turn to play. I figured its an information that wouldn't be considered spam anyway, as its something you're likely to want to know if you're actively playing. Chances that these would actually 'retain' players however look grim to me.

I've been using Flurry, Kontagent, Google Analytics and a few in-house metrics tools in the past to check on a series of games I've developed (professionally) and the numbers you're putting up are (as you expected) utter crap
That said, I've seen pretty much of everything: from the established brand that gets a d60 > 50% to the crappy D1 < 10%.
Unfortunately, most of my experience here comes from social/casual games which is not necessarily relevant.
When I ported a casual game to Kongregate, for example, I was stunned to see that the amount of players, though lower, provides much more whales, and generally, a much higher retention. This appears to be platform-specific.

In regards to your last point, you're absolutely right, this is critical.
My competitor devised a system (post-launch) to factor player behaviors (do you drop from games? do you miss turns? etc.) Accessibility to games could then be restricted to people with a score above a certain value. Its a clever system, but it looks punitive.
I'm still trying to figure out a way to make it an incentive to come back.

AI is out of the question, as it would take years to develop a decent opponent. And given the chance of choosing between a stupid AI and fighting off an inactive npc, the latter sounds just as bad (minus the development time).
One player dropping out wouldn't be the end of the world, but 2+ would wreck a game. I'm considering the possibility of allowing players to join an ongoing game when such a slot is liberated.

If you have any suggestion, let me know. You can find more 'details' on the game if you follow the link in my sig. (I would recommend any suggestion to be replied there as opposed to here, in an effort to remain coherent with the thread title and the 'Business' category).

So what are the qualities of a good producer? I'd like to be a producer eventually. Are they typically from programming backgrounds?

- Know a little about a lot (this way, you can talk to everyone in a way they don't feel they need to explain everything, and you can translate this 'gibberish' to somebody else, using a different language).

- Be organized. Don't struggle to find that 'one email' in a pile of 5000 (realistic figures here).

- Be able to organize the work everybody will do. More importantly, accept that these people might have interesting on how to proceed. Some will be bad, learn to refuse them without breaking their spirit. Others will be good, but won't fit this particular scenario, or wouldn't work based on a number of reasons: learn to explain your decisions. Your goal here is to make sure everybody is on board, whether they're in agreement or not; they must recognize the common goal.

- Be humble; don't stick to your method because its 'yours'. If someone comes with something that works better, even if he's not a producer, roll with it.

- Show clarity. Keep people upstairs informed on key metrics of your project. Whether it be how much money has been spent, how much you expect more will be spent to the end, or just the pace at which you're tackling features. People upstairs should always have a clear understanding of what you do, with as few words as possible. Anticipate that they'll want to see builds at regular intervals, and account for the fact they'll comment on your work and will expect modifications.

- Show clarify (2). Keep people 'downstairs' (your team) informed on what everybody else is doing, including what people upstairs are considering for the project. What are the milestones? etc. A lot of people work better with goals in mind as opposed to a task list. Show them why its important that these things be done in that particular order.

Or you could sum all of the above by 'have good communication/organization skills'

I don't think one truly benefits from going through university to learn these skills. Its all common sense and experience. It takes a while, but you can get there.

One thing that really helped me was to fail early as an indie in the 90s. I failed repeatedly on a number of projects. Though this isn't recognized in the industry, it makes for a great source of 'experiences' to tap into. The more you know how to fail, the more likely you are to succeed.


As per your second question, I believe programming helps, but this is not mandatory. I've seen good producers that didn't understand anything about programming, but they had great people skills. I've seen great producers with the same people skills, but a basic understanding of programming. I think one way to really communicate with people is to try to do what they do. By seeing how 'hard it is', it helps you treating them with respect, and this is key to being a good producers I believe (I don't believe in super-star producers that walk in a room in which they know only half of the people by name, and just fire insults to 'get things done')

I realize that. I'm just trying to build a 'likely scenario range' just to get a realistic estimate here. Unless I screw big time, I wouldn't anticipate a null retention, and I've rarely seen retentions in the ranges of 1-10% for example. Likewise, I've hardly ever worked on any project where the retention was 90+%
I'm also considering the 'lifetime value' of my game (in essence, how long would an average player want to spend into the game) as a measure to gear my estimated.
For example, if I believe the game would be appealing to an average person for about 5 months, I'd say my monthly retention is one fifth of the people I've got (so that after 5 months, all of 'these' players are gone). It's not an exact science, but its intelligible.

Decay is a bit more complex. Its very hard for me to try and estimate the amount of people that will come in because I've reached out to them through friends, etc.


1. The game revolves around self-sufficient gameplay sessions which are nested in a metagame. In essence, playing for a few weeks would allow you to complete the loop of a single 'game', but if the metagame content does its job, you'll want to play more 'games'.
Think of it as sophisticated (long) games of chess with a leaderboard. If you want you ELO score to rise, you'll play the same game (chess) over and over again in an effort to get your score up. This is the loop I'm trying to build here.

2. Luckily, this isn't an MMO. Games would have a finite number of players (in the range of 4-16) which would insure that players don't have trouble 'filling a game' with players. Assuming the community isn't very active, it wouldn't affect gameplay. The asynchronous nature of the game would also limit downsides of potential community inactivity.

3. That, I can only speculate for now. Coming in with the best of intentions to update this as we go, but reality might prove different.

4. My direct competitor is a game that's a remake from a DOS-era original game.

My strengths are:
- I'm not bound to be canon to the original game (and its weaknesses). Since this is a new product, I can address any potential flaw that this game had without fear of community backlash.
- Visually, the game will be more appealing.
- The game will have a strong focus on competition, and hopefully, will be more balanced. (I'm hoping to tap into a sub-group of people from the niche audience interested in these games).

My weaknesses are:
- They have an established brand, which brought a LOT of u (23 540). Likewise, when our product is released, it will be hard to tap into the same niche market as my competitor as they have a history and we're quite new.

If you do watch Ben Kuchera's lecture, be sure to watch it entirely. The most interesting part is definitely the 'questions' segment where Ben glosses over very interesting topics.
(when someone's presentation is more interesting by interacting with the viewers, you know the guy isn't full of shit).

Hi,

So I'm trying to build a realistic model to forecast the potential sales for a game I'm working on at the moment.
The game works along the lines of the (now out-dated?) subscription model, where you need to pay a monthly fee (of something like 3-5$).

I'm trying to determine the 'initial seed' (how many people I'll reach out to in the first month) knowingly that this variable is subject to heavy change.

What I believe however is that the decay of newcomers, and the retention are not entirely 'unknown'. Sure, many things can change that, but overall, these are subject to fallback to user habits.

I've based my work on previous evidence from work I've produced in the past, and have set tentatively the value of 'retention' as something between 20-40% from month-to-month, and decay around 60-80% based on inherent traffic and easily accessible user acquisition (discarding any outstanding marketing efforts).

According to this model, a sample of 500 initial users (seed) would come down to 43 new users on month 12, along with 11 returning users, essentially stating the game would be 'dead' by then.

Are my numbers even remotely right? Anybody using this model can shed some light?

Good luck with the kickstarter!

Replied to you.
Thanks for taking the time!

Updated original post.

Yes please do this.

The one thing we've been staying clear from though is the friendly codes. Though its an interesting addition, we felt it was 'too VGA Planets' to our taste. It's also complex and confusing and could be done more efficiently in a different way.

With regards to supply lines, VGA Planets had many important tools:
1 - Fuel, as you've mentioned, which can be quite obvious.
2 - Supplies, which allowed you to perform repairs on your ship, this necessary for long 'campaigns'
3 - Torps (and fighters), which were a unit of ordnance that would go down over time. Much like supplies, a longer campaign would require you to setup means to reinforce the front with these

We obviously have our own ideas on how to achieve this, but rest assured this has been in our minds all along and the victor will be the player that understand this.

Subterfuge will also be a big part of Grand Strategy: Spacewar... but there will be tweaks here to make it a more widespread strategy (available to all). It won't be as unforgiving (there won't be ships you can't detect if you think you know where they are).

As for tech levels, I've touched on that earlier. It will be much simpler than recent 4X games.