- what games have you worked on that have been finished & released? (links please?)
- how many games were you the lead in any respect on ?
- how many years experience in leadership do you have?
- what is your funding model? you say this is paid? Do you have capital on hand or your planning a kickstarter or something?

- what is your native language?
- are you of legal age of majority in your state/province/country?

- are you offering work for hire contracts or is this a startup with ownership percentages?
- have you completed a design document?
- what platform(s) is this intended for?

- what model of payment is the game expected to be (premium, f2p, shareware etc)

thanks

Trivial tasks I can break in to 25-30 mins but complex ones I may need 1-2 hours to reach what I call "critical mass of understanding". Braking that often would break my cumulative understanding and force me to either start over or retrace steps.

Fortunately that is not often but it does happen. All I do at those tomes is work through and once I figure it out I write it down and take a break.

A friend linked me this interview with Peter Molyneux regarding montezation and his thoughts that the current model is coming to an end, also his thoughts on the 5% conversion rate ..  very interesting the similarities he expresses to what I was writing about; I think there is some convergence on these ideas in the last year

http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/17/gaming-elder-statesman-peter-molyneux-on-why-ripping-off-people-with-free-to-play-games-wont-last-interview/

 Concept is still under construction so I am fully open to ideas.

What's your specific angle? What will make this website different from what's already out there? I have a hard time picturing your project, to be honest. 

alvarop , I agree but he did say the concept is still under construction.

So I would have to agree with alvarop in that I'm not sure what this GIGDN brings that many other sites do not already have?

Also the name sounds contradictory to your stated goal  "Individual" sort of sounds inverse to a site that sounds like it wants to hook people up together?

What about "Collaborative Game Development Network" instead ?

Also a killer feature that no site I've been to implements yet is find a way to separate the 'paid' positions from the 'sweat equity position' postings as those immediately poison the paid forum/area.

Anyhow, good luck!

Thanks for letting us know you have an assignment.

And; as I often tell my 4 year old son "Is there a question in there somewhere?"  ??

is comparing ur game to other games a crutch or no
wat u dums think??

Sure it is a crutch ; but it is also one of the most reliable ways to create an association between what they know (a popular game) and what they do not know (your unheard of game).

People  more easily connect with things that they understand or have a reference from which to understand.

Totally new concepts can eventually catch on ; but often people marketing them try to describe them in ways that help the potential customer associate it with something they already known & like.

You do not often hear this conversation:
Customer: What is your game about?
Developer: "It's like nothing you've ever seen! And can not be described (at all)!"
Customer : " ...."
Customer : "Yeah but what games would it remind me of?"
Developer: "None, nothing happens on it that has ever happened on a screen before!!"
Customer: " But what is the game play like?"
Developer: " Okay fine, there is this guy, an electrician.  He gets trapped in a strange world of mushrooms and monsters and has to jump on platforms and collect coins until he ultimately rescues a princess!
Customer:  "Sounds like super mario brothers?"
Developer: "Nooooooooo!"

We'll I'm working on my 8th game right now and the way I usually describe it is:

Its like Temple Run except you are a tank and blow shit up!

[- Find the worst thing in the game and make it better.]

Good thread and list!

some of my personal check list


- Find the worst thing in the game and make it better. 
Whatever is the worst thing in my game is going to bother me if I ship it that way, I always find what is worst .. a clunky control, a slow loading screen, a bad animation, a poorly done graphic; and make it better.  There's always something that got rushed or under-implemented!

- Wait at least a week until after I think its done before shipping it.
If I can play my game for a full week and not want to adjust or fix anything it probably really is done!  But if I'm still making changes, then I need to wait at least another week! Sort of also reverse encourages you to stop messing with it :-)

Don't start another project until it ships!
This one is another reverse one ; basically if you allow yourself to work on something else you are going to severely draw out the wrap-up process and either significantly delay the ship date OR worse yet just not do the work that needs to be done to finish it properly!  Not permitting yourself to work on another project is a good motivator to get this one done (to me)

Yeah I wish G+ has a downrank or such for linkbait posters; I can mute the poster myself but they don't belong in the G+ community and if enough of them make it in the new people joining the community might feel like its a linkbait community rather than a legit one, it also can drown out real conversations.

Looks nice, the pixel work is very sharp and suits the theme.

Your game looks really promising ; I really dig the ship construction and watched a gameplay / combat trailer which looked like tons of fun!  Good luck with the project.

I may (or not) blog about this but wanted to share some numbers from 2013.

So 2013 was my second year as an indie; which was nice as it started off with some residual income trickling in each month.

My overall Gross Income was US $1067

68% of my income came from one title on PC WildTangent  Holiday Cheer

The remaining 32% of my income was split about 70/30 between  iOS (70) and Android (30) on these titles:
Pirates Jewels 80%
Holiday Cheer  18%
Space Chickens vs Angry Zombies 1%
Leprechaun's Luck 1%

In the end I ended up losing money for the year as I spent about $600 on some development tools and art assets and I purchased the desktop Unity Pro license $1500.

So my net income for 2013 as an indie was -$1033

Obviously Unity Pro and the other developer tools (video cap software, a paint program, terrain editor etc) will have future value so while they make the year look like an over all loss I'm really pleased with having a gross income that high in my second year.

Unfortunately I'm starting off 2014 really poorly as the big product I made in Q4 of last year wasn't published by my partners so I've only sold 2 copies of Pirates Jewels II on Desura and not sure that its going to do well for me.

Obviously I have other products in the pipeline for this year but it takes time to produce them so we'll see how 2014 ends up!

I think it's a lot more sinister than even this; I'll try to keep my terminology game-related but a lot of it is psychology and business.

That's a great observation and I totally agree. 

I'm quite sure game companies have spent countless hours researching psychology to reinforce their game loops for the type of behavior you describe.

I really like the MMO vs Casual Mobile comparison though because both are making millions yet we have extremely different play patterns by the users.

I'd like to research a lot more about the psychology behind all this and write another article from that perspective one day.

This is a repost from my blog but I know folks may not feel like clicking through so re-posted here in full.

================================
This post is about the State of Punishment Gaming in early 2014.  Punishment Gaming is most painfully obvious in the mobile category these days but it has a long rich history.

Bear with me I'm going to travel back in time here for an example from 1999 and then tie it to mobile practices in 2014 ..

Punishment Gaming is something I first became aware of in 1999 playing the MMO EverQuest.

I certainly lay no claim to have coined the term "Punishment Gaming" myself but certainly it was a unique thought to me at that time; after playing through certain scenarios in EverQuest over a year it occurred to me I was being punished as part of playing the game.

There were two categories of punishments that EverQuest utilized (which admittedly have some overlap but feel different to the player):

   - Time Sinks
   - Death Penalties

The simplest example of time sinks were travel related..  you want to go from game content A to game continent B?  Be prepared to wait at the docks for 10 minutes for a boat to show up.

But if you paid a Wizard or a Druid for a teleport you could travel instantly to another continent!

Unfortunately Druid's and Wizards usually had their own things they wanted to do and often either hid from other players or charged exhorbitant rates to keep hundreds of people constantly asking them for teleports.

Does this sound familiar at all to anyone who's played Candy Crush Saga or the new Dungeon Keeper for mobile (article here, another article here)  or even many other modern mobile applications?  You can wait a certain amount of time; or pay in-game currency to progress now ...

However time sinks were deeply ingrained in to every aspect of the game often in a exponential way.

The most egregious time sinks were associated with the death penalty in the game which caused me to come up with the term Punishment Gaming so let me explain what it entailed.  Please realize this is from memory  over 10 years ago so some numbers are estimates based on what I can remember but the overall idea is reasonably accurate:

   - Level your character from 49 to 50 took approximately 40+ hours of game play
   - Upon reaching level 50 play for 4 weeks to get appropriate 'end game gear'
   - Go with your group of 30 players to the Plane of Hate (an end-game instance which requires you to be level 50 to enter it)
   - Die in a massive raid wipe ( punishment 1 you died)
   - After dying you spawned without your end-game gear at your 'bind' point which was usually in a capital city (punishment 2 you just lost your gear) (punishment 3 you now have to travel back to the dungeon which involves travel time cost)
   - As part of dying you lose experience towards your level 50.  This could include de-leveling your character.  (punishment 4 de-leveling / experience loss)
   - Assuming you de-leveled you now had to go and regain level 50 to be allowed to go back to the dungeon and pick up your end game gear. (punishment 5 spend time gaining experience back)
   - If you could not get your level back quick enough; or perhaps due to the loss of your end-game gear and your now weakened backup-gear set you ran the risk of permanently losing your primary gear if you did not pick it up within a certain amount of time or before a server reset whichever came first. (punishment 6  permanent gear loss)

The developers of EverQuest were reasonably open and shared their thoughts with their audience in community forums frequently and when players complained about problems stemming from the aforementioned areas the designers would quote their philosophy of "risk vs reward" and that the game wouldn't be as fun without a significant risk or time commitment for the reward you were seeking.

If you had any argument that actually made sense (as people often did) they resorted to the mystical quote of  "that doesn't fit the vision".

The vision was this magical product design vision that we (the customers)were never fully allowed to understand. But over time it developed a pattern that I developed some conclusions about.  I sincerely believe "the vision" (or lets go ahead and call it design, monetezation and retention philosophy rooted in making tasks take an extremely long time) was deeply rooted in the fact that they wanted you to subscribe to generate recurring revenue for their company as long as possible.

Recurring revenue of course is the golden goose for any developer.  Pay me one time - I'll take it.  But pay me the same amount every month for years? Eureka! We're rich!!

To be fair  many other games have implemented similar time sinks such as World of Warcraft.  Any serious end-game raider in World of Warcraft knows you often have to work at farming gear, money, and consumables during the week just to finance your weekend raid.  This is another use of the time sink.

And so now finally were back to the state of punishment gaming in 2014 and what we see in the mobile arena.

It seems the biggest challenge faced by most companies is how to make a game that people will pay for that is fun rather than punishing.

I've been speaking about punishment gaming in terms of examples up to now; so finally that we have some solid examples I'm going to define what I mean by punishment gaming more solidly:

Punishment Gaming is where the player is penalized with any regularity as part of or specifically for playing the game.

Example: You've been playing the game for 5 minutes and a pay-wall / time-wall appears.

You have just been punished because you played the game for 5 minutes.

95+ % of your customers will stop playing at this time. That is crazy!  You just lost 95% of your customers? Are you insane? That's the best you can do?

To be clear : I'm not saying that having a character die in a RPG is punishment gaming. Part of the thrill of combat is that you might die.  But the EverQuest example quoted above shows what punishment really is.  When your character dies you feel a sense of disappointment and loss and some people even get literally upset or angry.

Dying is the first penalty for failing an encounter in that scenario; and often its really the only needed one.

But very few people play games with the hope that their character is going to die.  That's not the fun part.

People play games for fun and challenging experiences. People play games for sense of wonder and exploration.  People play games because they are stuck at the dentist, airport, or in line and want to spend 5 minutes in pleasure instead of staring at the wall.

Also people do not play games hoping to see a pay wall, or a "please wait 2 minutes for this task to complete or pay us 99 cents to continue now"

There are a lot of challenges developers  in the mobile arena have to face such as the cost to acquire users, ARPU's and more; but this is specifically about punishment gaming today so I'm not going to get in to that, but they are still relevant to a larger discussion so I bring them up briefly to not be dismissive.

And in fact it appears that the companies making the most revenue put "fun" last in line when it comes to designing their products core cycle.

Time sinks, pay walls, pay-to-win, and other terms are what games are all about these days and that is a problem for the long term health of both those companies and gaming in general for the mid term.

There will come a day when people wise-up and notice their cell phone bills and stop participating in this kind of predatory game design and monetezation techniques.

They will wake up and say "This game is like a job,  but even worse, it is like a job that I have to continually pay for to continue going to ... why would any sane person do that?"  and that is the day you lose that customer.

But not only that as the mass of people have an opportunity to come to that realization over time and become aware and jaded of these techniques the companies that rely upon them will suddenly find themselves scrambling to survive.

Oh wait;  it is already starting -- look at Zynga.

People are already getting wise, and tired.  But the companies that rely on these techniques are trying to suck every last drop of blood ... I mean money ... out of their customers.

But what they should really be doing is trying to spend some of that money and R&D time to develop a new game model that is fun to play; that makes you want to come back and spend 5 minutes whenever you can because you genuinely have fun when you play it.

Even the truly big monetezation/punishment giants have extremely low number of users who actually ever make a payment.  Many statistics point to 5%  being a 'good' amount of paying customers.

And here is where the conclusion starts tying in , aka the State of Punishment Gaming.

If your best effort is only getting 5% of your customers to pay.. (and I don't care if you are making thousands or millions when I say this) then your technique is ultimately a failure and you should be trying to find better ways to get more customers to buy in to your products.

It is extremely telling that punishment gaming as a business model typically nets in a 5%  or less conversion rate of free customers becoming paid customers!

   - The State of Punishment Gaming is that is a failure.
   - Punishment Gaming makes for shitty game play. 
   - 95% of customers don't like it because they stop playing your game when you do it.
   - Even those who do buy in will eventually quit because many will eventually see the treadmill and get off.

And its funny to read it like that isn't it? Because when you read articles about how to properly monetize your mobile game and core game loops it never mentions those bullet points does it? Money vampires, I mean punishment gaming evangelists, I mean IAP 'experts' will try to tell you these techniques are the hot thing right now and that they are what you should be doing too!

But if 95-98% of customers don't like it (notice stats here from 2012 , here from 2011, some 2013 numbers here about halfway down, averaging about 3% of free to play users become paying users) because they stop playing your game when you do it why are other developers trying to mimic this behavior?  Because Candy Crush Saga is doing well right now?

That feels short sighted to me.

Just because EverQuest was good at Punishment Gaming doesn't mean World of Warcraft had to do everything the same.

And in fact they did not.

Something I did not mention above was that the peak of EverQuest subscriptions was about 550,000 users , whereas the peak of World of Warcraft subscribers was about 12,000,000  (12 million).

Assuredly one of the reasons for this titanic subscription difference was that World of Warcraft reduced and eliminated 90% or more of the time sinks and death penalties for users below the level cap.   At the level cap World of Warcraft admittedly does continue some punishing techniques - that I sincerely believe could be further reduced or eliminated.  But for the purpose of comparison as of the date that I last played these two MMO's World of Warcraft had the gentler treatment for its end game customers over EverQuest by several factors of scale.

In other words ; by punishing their customers less they both obtained and retained more customers.

Obviously these companies and products have many other differences but in the area where we are discussing today the differences are very significant.

So I believe that some day a "World of Warcraft" of monetezation is going to arise in the mobile ( &/or social)  market who will destroy all previous revenue expectations as well as conversion rates ; and additionally I'm going to predict that the product that does it will utilize considerably less punishing game mechanics and pay-walls than the current crop of games.

That moment will be a pivotal moment (for the better of gamers, customers, and our industry) and will spawn a rush of 'me too' players in to the patterns that derive the success.

The real questions are:

Who is who is it going to be?  What will it look like? How much money will they make?

And most importantly ; how fun will the game be?

Punishment Gaming will live for many years to come; but one day we'll have a brighter formula that is is more engaging and honest with our customers trading value (read: fun) for their money and I can't wait for it.

================

Discussion / ideas / thoughts on the topic ?

So .. forgive the comparison here but it sounds like you are making Unity 3D over again essentially right? Even to the point of the C# ..

With Unity  3D free version out there what do you feel will make your product unique vs Unity 3D?

Hello,

This doesn't fall in to a game post mortem so I did not add it to the pinned thread, this is a personal indie year recap/postmortem. If this is the wrong area feel free to move it mods



I blogged about my 2013 experiences in my blog here.  

I know I always get a few insights or learn a thing or two when I read other people's post postmortems so I tried to share as much insight as I could from my experiences for the year.

I'll monitor the thread if anyone wants more detail about something let me know I'm glad to answer questions.

Thanks!

Really nice idea I think a lot of casual game players want more depth without terribly complexity and you might have a nice formula here. Good luck!

Add a difficulty variable to many items that will scale according to the difficulty

example:

- Badguy1:  takes 2 shots on 'easy' , 3 shots on 'normal' 4 'shots' on hard, and 7 shots on 'nightmare'

- Blade Trap: gives 1 dmg on easy, 2 dmg on normal, 3 dmg on hard, 5 dmg on nightmare

- Monster2:  This monster splits in to 'two' smaller monsters when killed on easy and normal.  When killed on hard it splits in to 3, and nightmare in to 4

- GunMonster: this monster has a projectile they fire that has a speed and a re-fire timer.  On Easy/Normal it has  1 fire per .5 seconds.  On hard it is 1 per .4 seconds and Nightmare it is 1 per .3 seconds.

- Swinging Pendulum Blade obstacle:  this obstacle swings and if you don't jump properly to avoid it you take damage.   In addition to damage scaling noted in blade trap example above the speed of the pendulum scales in difficulty making it harder to time the jump.

Be careful though ; scaling *everything* should be done gently IMHO. For instance it might be enough just to scale monsters rather than traps.  Just because you can think of a way to scale everything; doesn't mean everything needs scaling?

1: How did you get started creating and designing games?

1995 : DOOM ; they made it so you could "MOD" the game ; aka create your own content. I started building levels, then sounds, then textures, then complete level packs. This was my gateways.

Many years later in 2012 I had gathered every skill necessary to create a game by myself *except* programming and so I decided to finally teach myself programming also.

Since that date I have now completed 7 games by myself.
   
2: Why were you interested in going into this field?

Most work is dull, repetitive, lacks any creativity, pays very low in both real wages and in non-tangible rewards.  While I have rarely gotten paid for my game related projects in money I have enjoyed it immensely and it has been very creatively rewarding.

   
3: Did you go to college? (if so, where?)

I attempted college three times and had to drop out all three times due to lack of finances.  Most of the time at my college age I was working for minimum wage. After dropping out the 3rd time I had to pay back thousands of dollars in student loan depth which took about 10 years which has discouraged me from going back other than for 'one class at a time, pay as I go" basis which I have done a few time for art classes.
   
4. What games have you worked on/created?

Games, Mods & Projects that I contributed to in various artistic/design ways:

Wizard World for Tapwave Zarux
Eligo for Palm devices
GravBlox for Palm devices
Hexen 2 CTF
Shotgun Messiah for Q2/ Action Quake 2
Space Base for TF2
NightWatch for HL
Wages of Sin  for SiN
Marvin the Martian for Q3A
#1Image map pack for DOOM/DOOM2

Maybe other stuff thats escaping me at the moment?


Games that I programmed &/or did by myself

- Pirates Treasure ; a match 3 game written in DARKBASIC. Ran slow so I learned C and rewrote it as ..

- Pirates Jewels : my C re-write of Pirates Treasure; except when I went to publish it on the iOS App store the name "Pirates Treasure" was taken so I renamed it.

- Holiday Cheer :  a re-skin of Pirates Jewels to capitalize on the Holiday App Market. This took me about 2-3 weeks of work. My largest grossing game as of yet.

- Space Chickens VS Angry Zombies :  A small platformer where you play a space chicken saving the world from a zombie invasion.  The controls didn't turn out too well so I need to go back and update it when I have time.

- Leprechaun's Luck :  A fairly simple mobile game where a Leprechaun runs around picking up gold and avoiding insects like Lady Bugs and Ants and puts them in his pot of gold to finish the level.  I wrote it because Holiday Cheer was making the 'most' money I had so far and I hoped this holiday themed game would get more sales.  I sold 4 copies on Android store and about 3x that on iOS.  Controls were a little laggy and need rework but not worth my time for less than 20 customers at .99 cents a pop.

- Nanobots : a small shootem up I wrote in Unity 3D to teach myself Unity.  Largely done by gathering different tutorials and finding what I needed to get a basic game going. Also this project introduced me to programming in C# which I found fairly simple to pick up after C/C++.  Was not released.

- Pirates Jewels II :  A complete Object Oriented C++ rewrite of my match-3 engine. I hoped to use this as a future framework to create more match 3 games like Holiday Cheer II. I was able to create some amazing new features (for me) including an artificial intelligence driven gem battle against another pirate.  No one took the game for 3 months until recently Desura finally took it.  Pretty sure it sold 0 copies so I'm done with gem games

- One Minute of Light:  Having been working on my Unity skills I entered the Ludum Dare 28 competition and create this short game in 48 hours. Released on webplayer free as part of the competition.


Mind you ; I did all these things while maintaining a day job in the IT industry until 2013 I got a job as a Software Engineer after teaching myself Java.

I honestly don't know about actual figures, but if I had to judge on how popular the roguelike-likes market has become (spelunky, dungeons of dredmore, binding of isaac, rogue legacy, nuclear throne, etc. etc. etc.) I would say the number of people who "get a kick out of punishment gaming" is large enough.

Plenty of Rogue-like's don't feature perma death.  Or some that do you have it as an optional choice. 

Diablo is a probably the most popular rogue-like ever and you don't have to have perma death unless you choose it.

It's just like PVP ; lots of vocal people scream for it but when you see MMO's settle down after launch there are a large ratio of PVE servers to the PVP servers.

Is the audience for perma-death punishment gaming 'large enough' ?  I guess it probably is??   What do you feel is large enough for you??

If your game had the -option- to have it or not would your audience be larger?  No doubt about it : yes.

Am I okay with a larger audience?  Heck yeah.