AD&D Gold Box: Pools of Radiance it's so hard to describe this game if you haven't played it. At its core it is a RPG with turn based strategic combat. If you played Neverwinter Nights on AOL it used the same engine.  It took the amazing depth of AD&D and brought it to computer gaming. Playing this game turned me in to a PC gamer for life.

Wizardy / Might and Magic / Ultima  series:  Three RPG series that have now gone extinct but ruled the RPG world for over a decade with in depth party-based RPG systems and pioneered many RPG game elements that have been refined and improved on in RPG's today.

TES: Arena   ; I remember the first dungeon creeped me out so bad. There were these ghouls who would howl off in the distance and it was dark. You never knew which way they would come from but the sound would get louder and you would be whipping your mouse back and forth until you saw their red glowing eyes coming out of the dark at you quickly followed by the visibility of their extended yellow clawed hands as they attacked!  Talk about being immersed!

DOOM:  This probably won't ring a bell with the younger folks here but this came out when windows was still not very prominent. Many if people used DOS still.  Using a mouse was awkward for a lot of people.  I went over to my friends house and he had the DOOM shareware version and he was trying to figure out how to move with the mouse .. scooting the mouse along back and forth and watching the faux 3d environment scroll by so digitally impressive .. the art production quality for that day was amazing and the smooth movement was just mind blowing.

So imagine watching someone play the most viscerally realistic game you have ever seen in your life .. and he can barely move with the "horrible' mouse controls and a zombie comes up and starts kicking his ass. We both freaked out and he died in the process and we started laughing our asses off.  We were both instantly hooked.  This began my game dev career when I found out you could Mod DOOM.

Quake:  Quake invented modern multiplayer.  Sure DOOM got its foot in the door but you had to do it on dialup modems in groups of 4 players max, usually dialing in to a BBS system (no internet gaming back then).  Quake took it to the internet and upped the match making system incredibly. All of a sudden you were playing these huge CTF or DeathMatch 16 player multiplayer games and the entire world of online gaming changed.  id Software / Quake invented online FPS gameplay as we know it today. It utterly shook the gaming world to its core and the waves still ripple today.

ANY Sierra Online Adventure game:  They don't even exist today but for a while Sierra Online made the coolest adventure games on the planet. Kings Quest, Hero's Quest. Phantasmagoria and others.  These games were RPG-light with rich story telling and involved plots. They opened the door for many other sub-genre games today.


XCOM:  You may have played XCOM: Enemy Unknown a recent re-hash of XCOM and its quite an excellent modernization but for YEARS no turn based strategy game could come close to the cool intensity of the squad based , turn based, strategic game play in XCOM.  RTS genre became popular shortly after XCOM series and no one looked back for quite some time.  The game play here is masterful and I think with Enemy Unknown people are going to become re-inspired by it and iterate upon it more in the near future.

Master of Orion:  One of the best and earliest 4X games.  Master of Orion offered a massive technology tree combined with interstellar politics, strategic combat and galactic exploration. Interestingly enough this genre seems very stagnant to me and could well use a revitalization like XCOM had.


DUNE:  This RTS began the RTS genre in my mind. It was also the most fun of them - really even to this day.  Command and Conquer / Starcraft/Warcraft all lean extremely heavily on its legacy.

EverQuest: To me the first true MMO.  Yeah I know Meridian 59, Ultima Online and some other things were first but EQ was king for years. And its still running.  EverQuest had so many problems I can't begin to list the including being one of the premiere promoters of "punishment gaming" but they also had a magical world that felt mysterious and dangerous. It took a month of game play before I was able to reach from the starting side of the continent I was on to the opposite side. EverQuest to my mind invented the epic "boss raid" with 80 or more players attending take downs of bosses that could kill you with 1 hit.

I would never go back to it; but it changed MMO's and raiding for ever.


I could go on but that's a nice list to start with :D

Looks nice, bookmarked for reading this weekend thanks for taking the time to write this up.

There's only one game I ever found perma death to be even reasonably meaningful enough to keep playing and that was Realm of the Mad God; because that was the only way to unlock new classes.

So you deliberately had to die to in 2 or more classes to unlock certain other ones.

Pretty much every other perma death game I either wont buy or stop playing after I die. Its just simply much to severe of a punishment to be fun in most games.

I know some people get a kick out of punishment gaming but I think there are more than don't?

That's funny my 'biggest' Android app is Pirates Jewels  but I only make about 1/4 of the revenue on Google Play as I do from the Apple iOS App Store  so I never bothered to check out their stats.. very interesting.

Some things I found interesting

By Android version
Android 4.1  35.71%
Android 2.3.3-2.3.7  21.43%
Android 4.03-4.04  17.8
Android 4.2 11.9
Android 4.3  11.9
Android 2.3  1.19

I was worried about market share of lower Android versions .. and while they do represent 22% roughly ; I could have used some 4.x features and maybe gotten more business than I would lose by not supporting 2.3.x ?

Also by Country:
United States 35.71%
Germany       33.33%
United Kingdom  7.14
France          5.95
Canada          2.38

And down from there.

I DO feature localized English, French, German and Spanish .. so apparently my german localization paid off but French and Spanish not so much!!

i think the difference with that, though, is that a kid wanting to be an astronaut doesn't go "i'm going to reach the moon in 3 months". making a 10 hour long rpg is a great goal, but don't put a time limit on it

Absolutely agree Paul, that's where perspective comes in.

I appreciate the realistic responses and measured approach recommendations being given by experienced community members but I have a little bit of a different outlook myself..

First a story:

When your  young they ask you what you want to be when you grow up?
And you reply "An Astronaut!" or "A video game designer!"
And they say "Well those are nice but not very realistic maybe you should consider one of these more realistic things .. like " (pour out the list of mundane jobs that no one dreams about but most people end up with )

So that's sort of what we are doing to OP here.

My advice:

Set whatever goals you think you can achieve production wise. Work hard and do your best to achieve them. 

If you find in production one or more is unrealistic find ways you can still make your game by trimming features without trimming game play.  Maybe this means a lower level of art production? Maybe it means procedural quests rather than hand writing every quest?

Do not set any sales goals because you can not control who will sell your game, or which consumers will click 'buy'.

So what I'm saying is make the best game you can and release it to the world and hope for the best, but have no expectations.  With no expectations you can not be dissapointed; but you could be pleasantly surprised!

And afterwards you'll have at least one thing you don't have right now : perspective.

Good luck with your project.

Thanks for the nice article I enjoyed it!

Cool idea -- and I didn't know about itch.io either.

I still think there is some room for this idea from my perspective.

I'll give you my 'user story' , do with it what you will.

As an indie Dev I want to be able to sell my game directly from my website but not have to go through the process of setting up and maintaining an online merchant account and digital distribution services.

Features of this service that would add the most value to me are:

- the site maintains a database of my customers. Preferably I could download my customer data via .CSV or other format. This would be useful for sending out update alerts, marketing etc (for those who opt in).  It would also let me verify if the person requesting support was legit or pirated for instance.

- the site has a built in patcher when I update my games

- the site takes a minimal /honest revenue cut rather than the exorbitant rates seen on big portals

- the site does not involve itself in rating or curating my game ; this is a service to fulfill my need to sell games .. Not a game portal (there are plenty of those already out there)

- the site does not discriminate / gatekeep me based off of my small size as an indie

- the site let's me take my revenue as often / when I want ; understanding I may have to pay a distribution fee if there is one.

That's my biggest points I can think of at the moment

some others that come to mind

- Terraria
- Starbound
- XCOM Enemy Unknown
- RUST
- Dead Island
- Cube World

probably 500 others too cant recall atm!

Not sure if this has been linked before but its about an hour long talk given by Gabe Newell and he hints at what he has in mind for Steam and developers releasing on the platform.





Edit:this video is from the same talk series as the other linked just better audio

Hopefully its not a break of etiquette to keep posting in this thread, I wasn't a forum member last year and just saw this and its still January .. :D

2013 I did the following

January: Released Space Chickens VS Angry Zombies for iOS and began teaching myself Java
February: Released Leprechaun's Luck for iOS
March: Ported Leprechaun's luck to Android
April: Ported my Pirates Jewels game to Android
May: got hired as a full time software engineer for my day job! (using Java ..)
June-August: mostly kept my nose to the grindstone learning more about Java and coming up to speed in my new job
Sept October: Totally rewrote my match-3 game in Object Oriented C++ rather than straight C and released Pirates Jewels II which made it on Desura (my first time on Desura!)
November: Started learning Unity and C# and created Nanobots as a test/learning project. Also began first steps of a new untitled project with a friend at work
December: did Ludum Dare 28 compo using Unity and actually finished on time!!  My game was "One Minute of Light"

Thanks Zaphos for finding that link. I seemed to recall it was pretty big like that.

Paul: you are right unless you make it on the front page or one of the genre pages its probably no better than being on the iOS app store. 

Somehow I miracously make money there every month but I don't know how people find me!

if the store was completely open, which i doubt it'll ever be, will steam still take 40% of your sales away from you? my guess is yes

and if it does, what is even the point? you could sell your game on your website and not lose 40%. either way you still have to do the marketing yourself and nobody will see it unless you yourself promote it

Arguably the point is Steam gets millions of visitors and my site gets... eh .. well you know -- I go there a lot!

You need visibility of extremely large market places and the sales they bring is my point (even if you get more traffic than I do)

The 40% cut is arguably worth the millions of impressions to your sale point on steam to most people.

i didn't mean to disrespect erebusman by saying he necessarily has a thin skin, i was just saying that the more popular your game gets, the more negative comments it's also going to necessarily get. greenlight isn't even particularly harsh compared to places like youtube, newsgrounds, etc., which can all be much worse, to say nothing of the tigsource frontpage

No worries man I've been on the Internet's long enough I have thicker skin than that.

And honestly I'm often my own biggest critic , I think far worse of my work than others do most of the time.

And you know if some one actually tells me honestly ( even in a rude way) that part-X of my game has a problem or sucks.. I'll take the damn feedback! At least they cared enough to say something which is so much better than silence!

How can I expect to improve my game if no one ever says a darn thing to me?

But that misses my point..  Valve is running a business. A product review and approval process that involves end user customers telling software vendors to go have at themselves with a dildo CANT be what Valve has in mind hahaha!

While the art is polished and well done I have some critiques.

- the overall color theme strikes me as very 'pastel' meaning soft and under saturated. This color theming does not(to my eye) work to your characters benefit.

- the health/energy bars suffer from the same color issues

- I did not realize from the characters and poses this was a beat em'Up at first. I actually thought the blonde guy was dancing for a second until I saw the strong guy doing the suplex slam or whatever move he's supposed to be doing.

I had to think about it for a while why that was because that feedback would be very important but I can't nail it down exactly.

Some other random ideas I had that might contribute are:
-about half the characters (starting with the blonde guy) don't strike me as fighter characters because the look like highschool kids in sweatpants etc?

- the backwards bent strong guy is your best fighter looking human

- the scene looks like you have melee based humans (mostly) against gun toting robots... I haven't played it so maybe you have a plausible reason for it.. But wouldn't the robots just kill everyone from afar with guns?

Aka give me a visual reason (power shield bubbles etc) to believe sweatpants wearing kids can resist bullets!

Good luck with your project

Sharing some plot elements could stir (or remove) interest in different people.  It doesn't even have to be of the spoiler level.

"An important part of the plot is the conflict between two warring factions forcing the player to make tough choices about who it worth associating with and what they will gain or lose by doing so,"

Did I just spoil the game? I don't think so myself.  If I'm marketing to players that I think enjoy plots with opposing factions and reward/penalties I just scored some interest points!

Depending upon what State /Province you work in there may be laws that protect you or your employer in this regards.

The US State of California has laws that say your employer can't prevent you from doing things when you aren't being paid by them.   AKA stuff you do at home on your own time.


Naturally even with laws like that you have to be very careful to keep your work very separate.

You should do some state/province context specific searches for laws in your region and see if anything can benefit you.

Otherwise your only option that I find reasonable to continue your work at home would be to keep it entirely under wraps until your employment ends.  You can do sketches at home and save them and never show anyone - you are just practicing your skills right?

I know it has treated some people well but I'm super jazzed they are doing away with it!

It delegates the responsibility of accepting programs to a "mob" mentality.

Watch the 2013 Unite (unity 3d) presentation by the Girls Love Robots team and you'll get a clue of how much rage a Dots or FPS fan can throw at a product that's just not the genre they like.

Its totally unmoderated and unprofessional for some 11 year old kid to tell you to take your product and do something to yourself with a dildo regarding it.

I can only assume vavle finds that as reprehensible as a product approval and review process as I do ( and I hope you do too) and I hope they are changing it to a more professional and cordial environment with a sidewise way to engage in community feedback and comments so they don't poison the review process.

I'd personally say:

- for now keep the self promotion to highly skilled / technical / developer circles as they will understand the difference.

- once art starts coming in then slowly open it up to a wider gamer audience, hardcores will understand unpolished art more than casual gamers for instance ; it depends where you have traction and audience though you may not have a lot of choice.

Timing is everything?

[7]

You started this project as the artist, looking for a coder - or at least, it seems like that's what he thinks. So for you to go back on that now, and say 'yo, look dudeman, I really like doing programming but not as much art, can we switch it up?' is a pretty mega dick move. Also, it'll probably actively hurt your project, potentially really badly - you admit that he's a better programmer than you, and you're probably a better artist than him, so getting involved with each others' shit is almost definitely a terrible idea that will lead to a worse game.

You had my LOL'ing out loud man, thanks for the comments.

It's fairly amusing how a portion of the posts are assuming I'm a complete dillweed of a programmer and that I'm ashamed of having art skills when I said nothing to that effect :-)

Let me correct some misconceptions:

Games I have programmed from top to bottom as the sole and lead programmer by myself : 7
Games I have shipped to market and currently available on iOS, Android, Desura, or Wild Tangent: 5

Games he has programmed any portion of : 0.5 (the one we are working on now)
Games he has worked on available anywhere: 0


The reason we partnered is he and I talked about a lot of ideas and decided we wanted to work together on something.  It was never stated that I was the "artist" and he was the "programmer".   

That is an assumption that people have taken on themselves in the responses.  In fact let me quote exactly what I did say for clarity here:

I end up having to do 100% of all the creative work; which comes around to him doing more programming and me doing more art.   In the end sometimes I feel like I'm "his artist" and I'm not really getting to be a programmer and explore and code out things that I might really enjoy doing and learning by doing them.

We did explicitly discuss how we could share creative work, with an understanding that the pure art elements (creating a texture for instance) might be suited to me, while the tasks like 'level design' might be better suited to him.

But like I said at the beginning I didn't write down the entire history as I was not trying to write a 12 page post.

I know that leaves people with lack of information and assumptions - so I'm not butt-hurt about it but it does bear clarification at this point and that's why I'm responding to this point.


I do sincerely appreciate the frankness of your response though it helps give insight to what he/people might think or take out of what I do or do not say about it.