I agree that the fear of people "being jerks on the internet" is a bit unfounded. Review bombing? Certainly possible, could be very annoying for a few select games that have polarizing audiences. Easily solved by letting developers opt out of refunds... most games KNOW they are going to have a polarizing effect. A few people may get hurt by this but I doubt we'll see if very often.

People buying the game, playing it, then refunding in order to get free games? Absolutely going to happen. Will that be worse than piracy? Not at all, its significantly better since there's a decent chance they'll enjoy the game enough to keep it.

For the most part people will use the system as intended. If you're afraid of your audience you've got a big problem

That said a client of mine finished up a big youtube event last week and someone didn't enjoy it enough to create an annoying DDOS attack that took their server down for several hours (spread out in chunks) over the weekend. Sometimes people are jerks - but on the whole they're not aiming to abuse your business.

Demos and doing the PR to get them out to the public are a huge part of Kickstarter success these days- I can't see doing a Kickstarter that doesn't have a name attached to it without one

Im mostly thinking 2 hours isn't quite enough... but that the person whom this policy will damage most are games that take more than 2 hours to really get into, as the knee-jerk reaction will be to abandon it rather than stick with it and find it to be great.

That said, overall, I think its a positive thing and "about damn time"

I'm always a fan of style over sheer graphic quality, so excellent work It ain't about the number of triangles, it's about how you use em!

I was going to say the same thing - I always feel vector items are best for cartoony animations. If its a traditional P&C usually only a handful of assets ever move (almost all static). A VN virtually nothing is animated.

VNs rely HEAVILY on extremely good art quality and direction for success. P&C focus more on strong thematic art direction. (See Wadjet Eye Games for example of "ok" art but amazing art direction creating a great P&C)

Im a little concerned you're heading into the trap of neither being true

I find I always burn out on CK2 before the "end date" - I can work my way up from a single small nation to an empire level powerhouse but the game really looses me once I do. I will say that conquering Spain as a Muslim nation is super fun since you end up dealing with like 5-7 allied nations every time you declare holy war unless you can sew some crazy problems into their ranks.

But yeah once the empire of Hispania forms the result seems to be and endless annoying series of wars between various other super powers and very little progress. Soon as I took Hispania in the game in question France DOWs, then Byzantine, then Famatid (Because my army was signficantly weaker by after winning those two) - THEN FRANCE AGAIN... so basically I have nothing to do but endlessly defend my territory and after like 40 years of war with no hope of continued expansion I just get tired of it.

Basically I seem to end up in a cyclce at high levels where a super power will DOW, and the damage will decrease my army size enough that another superpower will DOW seeing me as weak... and so on to infinity. Not that any of them actually WIN, but defending takes SO MUCH LONGER than conquering....

That's my rant :D

Boy I run into you everywhere :D

All I know is: Beware physical gifts. Seems like you have yours pretty high up in price, so that's probably good. Success can sometimes be very odd though with physical gifts. When my client hit 280k on Kickstarter we had... I think about 200+ items to pack and ship by hand afterwards. Took an entire month!

To put the quantity of work you've done in perspective. My email list is about 4,000 editors/personalities. About 200-300 of them I will write a personalized email of some type (some simply a single sentence, some entirely custom).

That's just the initial launch work. From there I try to begin conversations with anyone who replies/shows interest or I feel SHOULD be interested but wasn't. Using that conversation I attempt to open new doors to other people they know who may be interested/can offer assistance.

Additionally I'll also reach out to anyone with any pull in the industry, such as other developers, who can offer aid.

It's basically a full time job to promote any product. I've been doing it professionally for 12 years now.

So good work so far, keep it up! It takes time and persistence!

Certain genres lend themselves to certain areas better. Hospitals are used a lot in horror games, for instance.

Caves are a good setting for some things, but not FPSs... usually. So like that kind of thing.

If I were going for a unique setting... Car Dealership... One of the big ones that is several acres large... endless...rows...of...cars.

Uh... Elementary School?

Football Stadium?

Manufacturing Facility?

Really anywhere with a big "footprint" should work, vertical or otherwise.

Looks great man! I would worry a bit the blood will restrict your audience a bit due to higher rating than E... or whatever apple's equivalent is

Always handy to see some numbers, so thanks. A shame you guys fell into the extremely common hole of "we made some money, but not enough." which is pretty much the plague of iOS (and now Steam too, more and more).

Keep this updated with how the switch to free to play impacts the overall numbers and income numbers! Especially in regards to multiplayer.

As you noted and I want to echo: Traditional media coverage (IGN, Toucharcade, etc) does not seem to equate to more downloads or sales. Fact is, there's very few ways to promote an iOS product.

There's two ways I see doing this:

First, for any of this to work, the two players need to have their relationships tied together. That is to say, you make them from the same... faction and make them (story wise) so well known that everyone knows they're together. In this way one player's actions will impact the other players'.

There's no issue in letting players "fight" with eachother by having different goals. You can even tie it into the mechanics, where one player may benefit from pissing a group off and the other may benefit from befriending them and let them create their own dialogue/deal as to how to sort that out. Sounds like fun to me... just because it is co-op doesnt mean you have to work as a team!

Second, you have to tie the plot into the mechanics. I am with you 100%. When i play a game co-op we skip dialogue because nobody wants to sit and read a book while the other guy is sitting there waiting for the killing to start again. However, with short and punchy dialogue and impactful decisions for character development/reputation on the line, we'd do it - ESPECIALLY if you have the potential to screw with your friend

That brings up a third, more complex, item that isn't really a requirement in my mind:

Which is you'd end up needing 2 dialogue sets for each encounter. You have the person who initiates it and the person who may be nearby. If a player is nearby they can join in (and influence) the dialogue. If not, you can't... so staying together means you can potentially temper the craziness of your partner, but staying apart means both of you get full control over a dialogue.

Then you tie the whole thing together by making key events/quests require two people to complete (and a system to quickly move to another player's location). In this way even though you may be out adventuring solo, at key moments the team will unite to take on a problem.

Serpent of Venice, sequel to Fool (One of the best books ever!)

Horror games are actually a very well selling popular genre IF and ONLY IF you can make them scary enough that the key youtube personalities make them a thing (See 5 nights at freddies). Now you dont need to go in for the "startle" kind of scare, but it has to be incredibly scary in various ways to succeed.

Once you manage to put together something like that, the money will come by the truckload despite Jim Sterling's 100 fans that actually have credit cards :D

Seriously though, it's a hard genre because it incorporates a lot of different aspects of game development that need to come together seamlessly (Sound, art, music, design) and when one fails the entire project fails - unlike other genres which can be forgiven. This has to do with the amount of immersion required to really terrify someone.

I think we may be splitting hairs here. A prototype should still have a design and abandoning a prototype (normal) is the same as abandoning your design.

Other issues come up with established studios (IE: Blizzard) where their reputation is SO valuable that cancelling a project, even when it is 80% finished, may be their only option since releasing a product that doesn't live up to expectations could damage their image and future sales of better games. At the end of the day sometimes the best plans in the world turn out to be total crap :D

No plan lasts past first contact with the enemy!

Based on not knowing anything about the game or what is required, I actually prefer #1 the best. Assuming you NEVER need to see what is below your character (if that is not the case, disregard this).

Simply put that area of your screen is already wasted by the ground, so why not make the most use of it by placing as much information as close to the center of your vision (which is, I assume, your character in the center) as possible.

Basically you want to keep as much data as possible as close to where you are looking as possible, else the information will be lost whenever there is action.

That's my 2 cents.

Yeah I second Gimym. Camera issues are what kill 3d platformers, today, yesterday, and tomorrow. Crisp controls are of equal concern... All in all I suspect the extreme difficulty in that mixed with the usually higher amount of development cost for these kinds of games further mixed with the fact the entire genre is not hot at the moment means very little development in this genre.

Not to say you shouldn't, that's my 2 cents of why we don't see many and why Gimym is so damn correct with his assessment

Well, ignoring the question on hobby vs. job, I still have to go with smaller first. I just think its better regardless of what you're trying to do to get a feel for what you want to make before you embark on a long and difficult task that was doomed from the start

Space, the guide says, is big. Really big.

:D Couldn't resist.

Ok so bounding open space - the first piece of advice I have is SPACE IS BORING.

That isn't to say you should not be making a space game, I love space games. What it really means is you need to make space more interesting than it really is, and in doing so, you can find ways to make fun boundaries.

Games I have worked with in the past had each area of space as a sort of "nebula" with an electromagnetic fence around it that held in all the stuff those happy space people needed (asteroids, gasses, whatever). The fence worked like a rubber band, if you left it the further you went away from the area of play the stronger it would pull you back. Given this was an FPS of sorts it created lots of fun tactics of using the fence like you were a luchador and launching yourself back into combat at breakneck speed.

That said, I have also done work with Ascent, the Space Game (www.TheSpaceGame.com) and here we don't bound space at all. That's an option. Granted there's nothing out there and since it uses real-ish physics you can get going to insane speeds of like 1 million miles/second... but there's simply nothing to see out there... because space is boring. So while it's fun to zip around through the void at mind boggling speeds (and most long term players will do it once or twice just to see) ... well, we don't need to add boundaries because there's nothing interesting to do out there. This is space economic sim though, and that plan simply wont work for other genres.

I don't know if either of those examples helped, but the shorter version of this is really: Because space is boring you need to make it interesting. You can kill two birds with one stone if you can make what is interesting also be the reason space is bound in area.

Dominant Species is a good game but the fact that you're a lizardy thing trying to become the best lizardy thing is about as far as it takes this Spore concept. It's really just a resource and land area management game, nothing more. A good one, but only fits this topic thematically

I recommend playing it though none-the-less!