Visiting the Village: Episode 38
Better late than never! This week, we discuss tips for indie game developers, ModDB’s Desura, the cult of personality, Ron Jeremy and lots of other things that we probably shouldn’t talk about in public! Take heed!
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6 Responses to “Visiting the Village: Episode 38”
§ January 21st, 2010 at 6:27 pm
Ok, from the top:
- don’t forget to link those dos and don’ts (how the heck do you write that?) about indie development.
As for what is being used or not, well, people will use their experience to filter through these advices. And this is sometimes good: for example, you can’t use the strategies to handle one type of community on another type of community (say hardcore versus casual). And it will be up to you to judge what type of community you have.
As for the numbers being too scary, Henley (the media editor at moddb) posted something nice:
http://www.moddb.com/groups/editors/news/the-road-to-success
- polish in a game is very important to customers. Don’t ignore it completly, it’s a VIDEO game after all.
- gamers hated Romero because of his Daikatana game, and making them his bitches. Oh and yeah, “suck it down!”, then release a franken-game, not a good move.
- ADIDAS: say what?! Games controlled with the shoe?!
- EA and online support: well, Microsoft ended support to WinXP to sell Vista. Companies do this. Plus, you don’t worry about supporting the game.
As for expenses, it’s more than what we know. Derrick (from another podcast) mentioned that it’s also about switching the hardware and having compatibility issues from the older software, maintaining another set of cables and so on. Plus, removing a server (or more) from a server rack it means the cooling requirements for the room are smaller.
As for good will, well, how much noise 40-50 people that still played the old game? And let’s face it, who likes EA anyway? They lose nothing.
- loved RPS’s hinting that mods can supplement DLC
- NATAL and old games: well, it should actually depend on the game type itself, not on its age.
Unless you plan to earn money from selling the new games (I expect that even upgraded, you won’t be able to sell old games at the same price as the new ones).
And my question for the next show:
Should expansion packs be replaced with (payed) DLCs?
In terms of expansion packs, think MOH: Spearhead, or AvP2: Primal Hunt, CoD: United Offensive. Basically no major advancements in terms of game engine, but plenty of contents.
As for the length of my comments, well, you guys give me no choice
§ January 22nd, 2010 at 5:26 pm
Link: http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/12/opinion_indie_game_design_dos.html
Polish – yes, absolutely. We have learned this now. I ALWAYS want *our* games to be polished, because the general population wants and needs polish to get into a game. Only critics and uber-fans like the unpolished gems-in-the-rough.
Romero – that was a big part of his downfall. I saw some people calling his MMO being good – I literally don’t know what to make of that. I don’t reckon it will be, I have to say. Nice guy though!
Adidas – it’s RIDICULOUS
EA – we’re not talking about support, we’re talking about *actual* servers. If you couldn’t run XP because you had to connect to a server on startup that Microsoft had switched off, the analogy would hold.
I think we’re starting to establish that this might be a straightforward transaction, in that the group of people you piss off by doing it are statistically insignificant. But, as I said, this is very dangerous – it can be unimportant for ages and then undermine people’s confidence in you as a whole. It’s something that they could keep doing for years, with increasing flagrancy, and then will eventually bite them on the ass.
Ian doesn’t care about that and just thinks its morally objectionable, which…it kind of is.
- Mods and DLC – two things I never personally bother with.
- NATAL – I didn’t really get your point. I’m a bit tired – sorry!
Noting your question – thanks!
I LOVE your massive comments threads.
§ January 23rd, 2010 at 12:23 am
Second Life does have the advantage of having been around (and alive) for a very long time.
I agree that SL will fall behind on the technology side, even though they have made efforts to keep up (e.g. releasing the SL client source and overhauling the rendering system), but I also think the core audience won’t actually care that much as long as it just works.
There are other virtual worlds popping up, and while they may attract more new players with their shiny graphics, they’ll remain nothing more than curiosities to the SL crowd for at least another five years, if simply because of the sheer mass of user created content and community knowledge that SL has accumulated.
Whether it’s a paradigm for other virtual worlds or not, it’s certainly something others will have to spend a long time striving for. I predict that a lot of future virtual worlds would rather employ a much simpler approach to user created content (e.g. Minecraft) than both solving all the headaches SL had, and do a better job than SL on top of that.
§ January 23rd, 2010 at 8:43 pm
FAXMACHINEN! Good to see you sir!
SL is completely crazy. Reading that article made me really not want to go back on there.
I did get really into it for a while, exploring and finding the completely mental shit that people would make was my favourite thing to do.
Then I got totally bored with it.
Yeah I think it was innovative at one point, and that others would do very well to learn from it, but ultimately it stagnated.
§ January 23rd, 2010 at 11:42 pm
About NATAL, there are two choices:
– upgrade older games to support NATAL. Question is, will you buy (again!) those older games just to play them on NATAL?
And as a publisher, when selling NATAL-ized versions of older games, can you really ask for the full 60 USD? For an older game?
- make new games for NATAL. Since nobody has them, there are higher chanches of them being bought. And being new, you can ask for the full 60 USD.
§ January 24th, 2010 at 3:35 pm
MY THOUGHTS:
1.) Upgrading – yes, people will buy re-issued upgraded games a great deal. Yes, they will probably be full price.
2.) People will do this as well – they will use old IP. It will be boring. There will be a few original things on launch, one of which will be funny and probably sell quite well, the rest of which will suck royally.
I’ll stop making mind-flailingly obvious calls now.