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Maleficent posted:er, wouldn't making things people want be a service industry? How would that not be creative? Creativity is valuable in basically every industry. There's plenty of worth to be found in doing things outside that little bubble of whatever you're calling "creative". If you want to make games for your own personal satisfaction by expressing yourself or communicating an ideal or whatever then rock on, but if you want people to buy the things you make you have to, you know, make something they want (or convince them they want it). There's nothing wrong with giving people what they want and there's nothing shameful about being good at doing that. There's plenty of room between being your "creative" and being a soul-less drone. Not trying to be too harsh btw. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 12:07 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 12:02
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The trick is to get a real job and don't make games for the money.
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Mar 10, 2015 13:15
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Yay the gamedev thread is back on track. Talking about sales is much more fun than UE4 vs Unity! I'm just back from 9 days of travel to SF for GDC, then straight onto Boston for the last two days of PAX East, then flew home to Dublin overnight. Slept most of yesterday to recover! Got to meet Jay of Dropsy fame at PAX. His game is looking joyous / insane. Keep up the good work man! Also, there is now a Steam store page for Guild of Dungeoneering: http://store.steampowered.com/app/317820/ You can now go there and WISHLIST the game! Yay!
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Mar 10, 2015 13:31
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poemdexter posted:The trick is to get a real job and don't make games for the money. I have a fun job to pay for my videogame makin addiction..mostly.. Uh I mean don't give up on your dreams, game making thread!
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Mar 10, 2015 13:41
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Or just be happy with a modest income making games that you want to make. I completely disagree that financial success is the most important validation of your efforts in a creative field. If you're in it to make money, you are in the wrong place. That said, you can't complain if you churn out derivative junk and no one cares or pays you.
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Mar 10, 2015 13:53
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Maleficent posted:er, wouldn't making things people want be a service industry? indiegames.txt
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Mar 10, 2015 13:55
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Maleficent posted:er, wouldn't making things people want be a service industry? The games industry is creatively driven?
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Mar 10, 2015 14:37
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The Kins posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Making Games and Seasonal Affective Disorder Support Group Megathread Hi this is me. My game was supposed to be started last dst changeover ;(
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Mar 10, 2015 14:39
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I dodged this bullet once. Unlike all our other super ambitious projects, our first was quite simple and doable but I killed it because I realized it sucked. It really did. My partner begged me to keep going, he still thinks we just gave up on that, that we could make it good and that people would buy it. Ohh child, no. Sidescrolling strategy, don't even try. I actually look back on it fondly, it was a nice two months of work and I got a fancy demo to show at my job interview where I failed to mention it was not fun to play. I had little flags on my little tanks and moving or shooting would make the flagpole oscillate so they had to hire me. Shoehead posted:One thing I don't like about some modern racers (Mario Kart is a big offender) is they don't convey speed too well and you feel like you're going really slow. You've nailed it though, you totally look like you're zooming along at 900+KM/H It's real nice to hear this because I wasn't sure anymore! 10 get used to it 20 make it faster 30 goto 10
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Mar 10, 2015 15:00
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retro sexual posted:Yay the gamedev thread is back on track. Talking about sales is much more fun than UE4 vs Unity! Oh man, were you showing GoD at GDC or just roaming around? Me and Jonterp hung out a lot during GDC and met up with just one other goon. Also, I met Jay at Fantastic Arcade and he's about the funniest, most easy going goon I've ever met. Letting him watch you play Dropsy is just as entertaining as actually playing it. "No, you can't hug that yet. No, that either."
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Mar 10, 2015 15:03
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The Kins posted:The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Making Games and Seasonal Affective Disorder Support Group Megathread some of us have sad brains all year long don't brain shame
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Mar 10, 2015 15:15
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NeonCowboy posted:OK, but you're just talking about revenue here. Ignore the 25k for sure, since that was the budget, and I'm guessing not even all of it. For something that took you 2-3 years to do, 11k is pretty harsh in the context of the average cost of living in the States being around 35k - 40k a year, no? And that is assuming you are getting to keep everything yourself, whereas I think a lot of people are in partnership / studio types of situations and have to split it up.  Steam isn't about launch day revenue anymore, now most of your revenue (2/3rds) will come from sales later in the year, Humble, etc. By launch in February, we maximized things toward that sales runway, since revenue this early in the year is a bit lame. You're also ignoring console ports (those are likely ~$50k pops a piece for starters), etc.The game, if I poke it around right, should go on to make $200k-$300k + $25k KS. For a game that took 1.5 years and had only 3 effective full-timers (most of the team is part-time / drawing smaller %'s as a result), that ain't bad. It isn't what I could be making as a Senior Graphics Programmer in a AAA shop, but it's waaay above poverty line, and more than enough to happily make the next game and hopefully do better.
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Mar 10, 2015 15:22
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poemdexter posted:Oh man, were you showing GoD at GDC or just roaming around? Me and Jonterp hung out a lot during GDC and met up with just one other goon. Also, I met Jay at Fantastic Arcade and he's about the funniest, most easy going goon I've ever met. Letting him watch you play Dropsy is just as entertaining as actually playing it. "No, you can't hug that yet. No, that either." VS Evil hired an apartment a block away from Moscone and set up games there, rather than buy a booth (it was nicer and about half the price). They then got a whole load of press to come round and check us out on the tues + wed. Useful, but meant I only had Mon + Thurs doing 'actual' GDC...
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Mar 10, 2015 15:25
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Shalinor posted:That's 11k in 2 weeks Don't Steam games that are actually good have a record of selling for a matter of years as well? There's also things like later steam sales and people going "well it's $5 today and I've heard of it, I'll buy it." Seems to me that Steam has utterly destroyed the need to rely on making most of your money in a small window and releasing at Christmas or relying on prayers and dreams.
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Mar 10, 2015 15:27
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Don't Steam games that are actually good have a record of selling for a matter of years as well? There's also things like later steam sales and people going "well it's $5 today and I've heard of it, I'll buy it." Seems to me that Steam has utterly destroyed the need to rely on making most of your money in a small window and releasing at Christmas or relying on prayers and dreams. I wouldn't call it ideal, the goal is still to build past this point, but eh, that's startup life for you. Besides - stack a few of those, and you eventually have a lot of flexibility in weathering failures / games that underperform. EDIT: For perspective, (WARNING poo poo IS ABOUT TO GET REAL) what happened during development of Hot Tin Roof (my mom dying in really awful circumstances / I found her and did the CPR / etc) would be like if the entire programming department and every single project owner/director on Red Dead Redemption stopped showing up for 2 months, and then couldn't be counted on for more than 20hrs a week for months and months after that. Small teams have a magnifying effect on tragedy, because we just don't have any backups for specialists. So that we were able to weather THAT, and still pop out the other end in a "yeah we'll be fine, makin' next gamu, woo!" state - hell, I'll take it. So this isn't even "average" numbers/conditions, my numbers still amount to some pretty atypically stuff. If we hadn't lost easily 3 months of dev time, which forced us to go find extra money, which in turn made our immediate revenue expectations maybe a little unrealistic, we'd be even happier with these numbers. EDIT2: VV Nothing I can share here, no
Shalinor fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 15:34
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retro sexual posted:VS Evil hired an apartment a block away from Moscone and set up games there, rather than buy a booth (it was nicer and about half the price). They then got a whole load of press to come round and check us out on the tues + wed. Useful, but meant I only had Mon + Thurs doing 'actual' GDC... Oh man, I wish I was press! I didn't get a chance to play GoD during PAX South. I barely left the booth. Oh well, I'll pick it up first day on Steam for sure. Shalinor posted:You're also ignoring console ports (those are likely ~$50k pops a piece for starters), etc. Do you have some data to back this up? I'm looking to release my game on console first then go to PC. Should I be looking to flip the order around? Should I be trying to target multiple consoles at once as a solo developer?
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Mar 10, 2015 15:39
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poemdexter posted:Do you have some data to back this up? I'm looking to release my game on console first then go to PC. Should I be looking to flip the order around? Should I be trying to target multiple consoles at once as a solo developer? Some good info on sales numbers for each platform from Mike Rose's GDC talk last week: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/237811/500_games_launched_per_day_on_iOS_last_year_and_other_digital_sales_facts.php
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Mar 10, 2015 15:49
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Don't Steam games that are actually good have a record of selling for a matter of years as well? There's also things like later steam sales and people going "well it's $5 today and I've heard of it, I'll buy it." Seems to me that Steam has utterly destroyed the need to rely on making most of your money in a small window and releasing at Christmas or relying on prayers and dreams. This. Not just for steam, but for all platforms. People forget about the long tail of digital games. I was at a small indie conference in London last week and Jake, the guy behind http://www.greyaliengames.com gave a very nice 2-min quickfire presentation on his one-man-band studio. To us, his games don't look like much, right? He's made a million dollars in the last ten years from those games. Off the top of my head, that would work out at around $8,000/£4,000 a month. That's a comfortable income for one duder. Granted, most of that income was made in the last few years, but it shows that going indie is a long-term endeavour. All you need to do is: - Make a small game every year, or a mid-sized one every couple of years - Make them as polished as possible - Make them available on as many platforms as possible - Sell them on as many stores as possible - Keep talking about them until you are blue in the face
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Mar 10, 2015 15:59
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Shalinor posted:They beat you to market. This is the danger of long-term projects. Now you kinda need to change it, if you want any odds of being a first-page google hit on your own game. I changed it. I'm not happy about it, but I changed it. I was considering <Something>: Dreadnaughts, as if it were one in a potential series of games (if I live that long). But then, while thinking of alternate names (during which I cleverly put 'Astro' and 'naught' together before realising how stupid I am) I came up with: Leviathans So now I have to remake the logo etc. Sigh.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:06
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Dewgy posted:I think his point is your game has to not suck. Sales are the only criticism that counts, after all. I don't think sales really mean much in terms of quality. A game that sells a lot is probably going to be fairly polished, but a game that doesn't can still be really decent or even great. With more people being able to develop games there is of course more garbage, but there's also a lot of games that are really decent that probably don't sell very well. I was blown away by just how many indie devs there are with games that seem pretty alright, and a lot of them were demo'ing multiple games that were in that state of being perfectly alright. Some of the business reality isn't even the fault of the indie developers or even specifically the fault of anyone in the gaming industry. Online store fronts, for any medium, have not been able to keep up with the influx of user-created content. Nobody has solved that problem yet, and the company that does is going to rake in billions. I do think that a lot of indie developers bite off more than they can chew from a business standpoint by misunderstanding how most of the currently successful indies came to be. The upper end of the very polished indies tend to be games that caught on well enough at some point DURING development that the creator was able to justify putting a lot more time into making it the product we think of today. Spelunky became Spelunky because Derek Yu spent years releasing builds on TIGSource and refining it. He also spent years before Spelunky making other freeware games. Meat Boy was a flash game. 868-Hack was a 7-Day Roguelike game. Putting all your eggs in a single basket that is your first commercial game release I think is a recipe for disappointment, and that's true in every creative industry. The screenwriters who spend 30 years writing their magnum opus usually don't get anywhere. The advice a lot of the successful people give is to try to work on more projects rather than get hung up on a single monolithic one. I think more indie developers that are trying to make a commercial go of it should try to shrink the scope of their game to fit the amount of capital they have. I think there would be less disappointment if a 3-month project didn't gain the traction they thought it would than a 3 year project. History has demonstrated that if your ideas are good and you have a polished proof of concept then you will probably be able to generate enough interest to continue working on it, and you'll have a lot better understanding of how many sales you're likely to get when you do eventually start charging money for it. If you want to make money from the games you make then it makes sense to get them out the door as soon as possible in some basic form so that you know if it's worth it to continue working on. ErIog fucked around with this message at 16:28 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 16:12
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Pi Mu Rho posted:I changed it. I'm not happy about it, but I changed it. I guess your game is way different than Leviathan: Warships?  http://store.steampowered.com/app/202270/
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Mar 10, 2015 16:16
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Yodzilla posted:I guess your game is way different than Leviathan: Warships? Yes. It was very different from Dreadnought as well. There comes a point where I have to say 'gently caress it' and plant my flag.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:19
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Pi Mu Rho posted:I changed it. I'm not happy about it, but I changed it. Well...  And there's a popular board game with the exact same name. You don't have a major space combat game to compete over with that name but in terms of brand recognition it's not exactly fresh. Pi Mu Rho posted:Yes. It was very different from Dreadnought as well. There comes a point where I have to say 'gently caress it' and plant my flag. That's fine, you do you, but an iconic name means better visibility. You've got Leviathans the board game, Leviathans the Supernatural TV show monsters, and Leviathan the biblical creature to compete over in searching demographics. al-azad fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 16:20
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Pi Mu Rho posted:Yes. It was very different from Dreadnought as well. There comes a point where I have to say 'gently caress it' and plant my flag. Did you, by any chance, consult a nautical dictionary? I bet there's some real obscure crazy word that would be perfect for your title buried somewhere in here: http://www.seatalk.info/ You can always add a subtitle if you think it'll be too crazy for people to understand what kind of game it is.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:23
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Pi Mu Rho posted:Yes. It was very different from Dreadnought as well. There comes a point where I have to say 'gently caress it' and plant my flag. The only competitor for our Next Game name is an old GTA 5 mod. There are many more names out there than you'd think.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:27
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Sometimes you beat the big-boys to market. Like with my seminal Atari ST FPS "Hellgate". "oh poo poo, erm, better stick a subtitle on the end then" -- Flagship CEO. (oh poo poo, someone uploaded a video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdFW8cV38SQ haha, what a pile of crap - fond nostalgia memories destroyed. Bet you can't tell what my favourite game is  )Yodzilla posted:I guess your game is way different than Leviathan: Warships? Yeah, that's what I thought of too. Naming things is hard  edit: vvvv Could you have a 'cold case' mode and drop in fresh evidence after the fact? without making a whole other game on top? vvvv Hidden Asbestos fucked around with this message at 16:36 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 16:32
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Hmm, so I'm running into a bit of an argument with myself about how to handle players who completely screw up at every turn. Every crime you investigate generally boils down to generating a small suspect pool through a combination of a) examining the scene of the crime, and b) interviewing witnesses. I really want to let the player be capable of screwing up(missing/destroying key evidence, or alienating a key witness so they won't talk to you), but the problem is that if you screw up too badly your only two options to close the case are to either guess at random from the guys in your suspect pool, which feels unrewarding if you're right and feels like the game's fault if you're wrong, or to basically trail a suspect day-in and day-out until he commits a crime right in front of you, which gets boring quickly and is rarely what I want to be doing when I playtest it. Is there an easy out here? I really don't want to force you to wait until you're 100% sure to accuse someone, or keep generating new evidence to handhold the player through solving the case... I suppose I could require a minimum evidence threshold to arrest someone (say, 70% certainty) and allow the player to plant enough evidence to "solve" the case at the expense of sacrificing most of the reward in return for getting the case off of their desk, but that opens up the possibly to completely skip the central mechanic of the game if you don't feel like doing it.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:34
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ErIog posted:Did you, by any chance, consult a nautical dictionary? I bet there's some real obscure crazy word that would be perfect for your title buried somewhere in here: Some of my favorite nautical terms that would make great game names: Run Afoul, Heave Out, Broadside, and Abyssal Plain. Here's a free name for you: Antares Watch. A spin on anchor watch (people watching the ship at anchor) and Antares, the bright red star of Scorpio also called the heart of the scorpion which is loving metal in itself.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:39
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Omi no Kami posted:Hmm, so I'm running into a bit of an argument with myself about how to handle players who completely screw up at every turn. Every crime you investigate generally boils down to generating a small suspect pool through a combination of a) examining the scene of the crime, and b) interviewing witnesses. I really want to let the player be capable of screwing up(missing/destroying key evidence, or alienating a key witness so they won't talk to you), but the problem is that if you screw up too badly your only two options to close the case are to either guess at random from the guys in your suspect pool, which feels unrewarding if you're right and feels like the game's fault if you're wrong, or to basically trail a suspect day-in and day-out until he commits a crime right in front of you, which gets boring quickly and is rarely what I want to be doing when I playtest it. Alternate endings based on the amount of evidence, you guess right and the criminal walks due to lack of evidence, you guess wrong the guy goes to jail his life is ruined and another person is victimized.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:43
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Omi no Kami posted:Hmm, so I'm running into a bit of an argument with myself about how to handle players who completely screw up at every turn. Every crime you investigate generally boils down to generating a small suspect pool through a combination of a) examining the scene of the crime, and b) interviewing witnesses. I really want to let the player be capable of screwing up(missing/destroying key evidence, or alienating a key witness so they won't talk to you), but the problem is that if you screw up too badly your only two options to close the case are to either guess at random from the guys in your suspect pool, which feels unrewarding if you're right and feels like the game's fault if you're wrong, or to basically trail a suspect day-in and day-out until he commits a crime right in front of you, which gets boring quickly and is rarely what I want to be doing when I playtest it. If you make it impossible to totally screw the case up but it involves anything resembling detective work (ie. they really have to pay attention to context), you'll get players annoyed at that too. The "easy" way out involves heavily tutorializing it and making it heavily linear, to the point where it's impossible to miss anything. LA Noire did things that way for a reason. The further you stray from that, the more you'll end up in "niche cool game with vocal confused people" territory. My target would be to try and make screwing the cases up fun. Make it both not a bad ending, and something that players feel ok with / don't make players immediately assume that's the bad ending and avoid it. Turn the "good" ending into a completionist goal. I think somewhere in there is a niche-but-still-fun sweet spot that'll make you distinct. But I don't think we personally found it, so I don't know the odds of you finding it either.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:46
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KRILLIN IN THE NAME posted:
Since TB and JimSterling both mentioned your game, you may get another mention on the Co-optional podcast today. It airs around 3pm eastern.
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Mar 10, 2015 16:48
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Shalinor posted:If you make it possible to totally screw the case up, you'll get players that aren't frustrated with the gameplay, but get angry at you for stumbling into a bad ending they had no idea was coming. I thought the best scene in L.A. Noire is when you have to choose between two suspects in a murder case. Both characters have alibis that are equally shaky. It doesn't matter which one you pick and the game doesn't confirm if you made the right choice or not. It's a completely linear choice in that you have to make it to continue the game but the choice is entirely the players. This is something Telltale excelled at with The Walking Dead. Some people criticized it for your choices not meaning anything but it wasn't a story driven game like Alpha Protocol, it was a character driven game. Your choices influenced your perception of the characters, not the order of events. So I think there's some importance in making every choice the player makes a "right" choice in the end. L.A. Noire was really clumsy in its script and execution but the actual case work was its strongest element. Getting all the right answers felt great. Getting all the wrong answers but still fumbling through the case was hilarious. Whether the player succeeded or failed they enjoyed themselves (and failing at L.A. Noire produces the funniest interrogations). Omi no Kami posted:but that opens up the possibly to completely skip the central mechanic of the game if you don't feel like doing it. I think it's important to give the player that choice. Look at Murdered: Soul Suspect if you want an example of a game that poorly handles investigations. It's a game that tells you exactly how much evidence there is and what you need to find before being able to move on. The actual investigative work is unsatisfyiing as a result. Again, let every choice be a "right" one but feel free to pull at the player's heartstrings. Did they hastily put away an innocent person out of pressure to close the case? Drive that point home. But don't invalidate the player's choice and don't invalidate the effort (or lack thereof) they put in to get that far. If they care they'll give it a second shot. If not they'll push on ahead.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:11
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al-azad posted:So I think there's some importance in making every choice the player makes a "right" choice in the end. L.A. Noire was really clumsy in its script and execution but the actual case work was its strongest element. Getting all the right answers felt great. Getting all the wrong answers but still fumbling through the case was hilarious. Whether the player succeeded or failed they enjoyed themselves (and failing at L.A. Noire produces the funniest interrogations). There's the idea for the game's sequel: you're the prosecutor that has to deal with all of the player's detective's cases, and thus all the ways in which they screwed up.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:16
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Shalinor posted:The "easy" way out involves heavily tutorializing it and making it heavily linear, to the point where it's impossible to miss anything. LA Noire did things that way for a reason. The further you stray from that, the more you'll end up in "niche cool game with vocal confused people" territory. I'm definitely trying to avoid linearity, simply because I find it boring... that's one of the big reasons our forensics system took a big dive early in playtesting. You originally had to do a lot of complicated work gathering trace evidence, processing physical evidence for prints, deciding what went to serotology versus what was scraped for DNA, and so forth. Ultimately it seemed like the closest compromise resembling fun was arkham detective mode with multiple color filters, at which point you were just walking room-room and mindlessly clicking buttons until you'd gone through every combination and picked up everything that glowed, and that's not fun.[/quote] Shalinor posted:My target would be to try and make screwing the cases up fun. That's a great idea, and possibly not too hard to do. We have a fast and a slow game loop, the fast one is investigating cases, and the slower, high-level goal is to keep crime down in your assigned beat. Since a lot of your ability to effectively investigate crimes relies on the locals helping you, the penalty for screwing a case up right now is that everybody in the accused's social circle gets really, really mad at you and suffers a major loss of affinity that will make working another case in that community massively difficult until things calm down. I'm going to have to massage the numbers a lot, as right now one bad case tends to make every other case touching on that community borderline impossible to solve and creates a domino effect that eventually results in everybody in your beat going out of their way to ruin your day. That might introduce an interesting strategy component as well: if you have two guys who might've done it, and both are members of a community or social circle that you can't afford to antagonize, it might well be smarter for you to fabricate evidence and accuse suspect #3, who obviously didn't do it but belongs to a group you can afford to have mad at you.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:18
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al-azad posted:Some of my favorite nautical terms that would make great game names: Run Afoul, Heave Out, Broadside, and Abyssal Plain. That's not bad, actually. It fits with the really vague and non-essential storyline to the game, too. I'd want to keep the subtitle, though. So Antares Watch: Dreadnaughts.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:21
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Does anyone have a good source for guided tutorials for Unreal Engine 4? The documentation is fine, but I'd really like a more coherent guide to things I need to be aware of. While the official documentation is fine, it doesn't help me if I don't know to look something up.
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Mar 10, 2015 17:24
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Omi no Kami posted:That's a great idea, and possibly not too hard to do. We have a fast and a slow game loop, the fast one is investigating cases, and the slower, high-level goal is to keep crime down in your assigned beat. Since a lot of your ability to effectively investigate crimes relies on the locals helping you, the penalty for screwing a case up right now is that everybody in the accused's social circle gets really, really mad at you and suffers a major loss of affinity that will make working another case in that community massively difficult until things calm down. I'm going to have to massage the numbers a lot, as right now one bad case tends to make every other case touching on that community borderline impossible to solve and creates a domino effect that eventually results in everybody in your beat going out of their way to ruin your day. When Franky is in jail, you can either do this BIG clue hunt to get a warrant that lets her out (which is every bit as obnoxious as the final hunt in Windwaker), or, there's a Bail Bond you can buy that gets her out instantly. If you do that, she all but tells you hey let's ignore Investigator procedure and go threaten our way into Button's lair! but I worry players are still going to feel like that's pushing them toward a bad ending. Everything else in the game wants you to find clues, and some of the NPCs even nudge you in that direction, so a non-zero percentage are still going to do that long hunt. Even though they really don't want to. And then they'll get frustrated and angry at the game, because it made them do a long boring hunt they didn't want to, even if the game was trying to hint them the other way. That's the basic divide. I don't think there's anything we can do, shy of smashing the player with a popup that says "hey! don't be frustrated! there's lots of endings!" that breaks our narrative into tiny pieces. Future games, I'm going to abandon all illusions of low-impact UI and probably literally go for that, because subtlety didn't work for us overall. Mind you, it isn't the fault of the player, since other games have trained them that forcing an ending is Bad and will result in Bad Things. But that's what you're up against, and somehow, you've got to work around it. EDIT: In our case, my hope is that as our game gets walkthroughs written about it, the authors will all put "ok, and now you have A CHOICE!" paragraphs right there, since our game's very much the kind of thing that the frustrated players would be referring to walkthroughs for. But that doesn't help you in initial reviews, or press playthroughs especially (since at least users will usually ask you for help on twitter or Steam forums). It might not be an awful idea to write a walkthrough for your game yourself, and give THAT to the press too. Shalinor fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 17:28
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retro sexual posted:Some good info on sales numbers for each platform from Mike Rose's GDC talk last week: This is exactly what I was looking for thanks!
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Mar 10, 2015 17:31
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poemdexter posted:The trick is to get a real job and don't make games for the money. Not actually that bad an idea
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Mar 10, 2015 17:35
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I just had a thought- since managing the state of the neighbor/beat is the primary goal, the easiest way to keep crimes from being unsolveable/failure-prone might be to try the X-Com model: once a crime (and thus, criminal) is generated, he'll continue to commit crimes at random, with each crime generating more evidence, but also making the neighborhood more nervous and upset, which will ripple across all of your other cases. This way you have encouragement to close cases quickly, incentive to not fabricate evidence unless you really, really want to, and a guarantee that no one case will ever be truly unsolveable. That also allows for interesting mechanics, like never allowing players to know how much evidence actually exists to collect. There's a bit of a narrative component I would have to work with, as it's silly for investigators to instantly know that this robbery is done by the same guys who held up a bank last week... maybe I can have the department automatically author a psychological profile of each case: "Judging from technobabble, this was perpetrated by a group of highly aggressive, moderately educated criminals with low to moderate social skills. Details of the case match <whatever cases the same crew already pulled>".
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Mar 10, 2015 17:39
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