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Chernabog posted:Great answers, those are exactly the sort of thing I was thinking about. Most of my design experience is self-taught and with really small teams so it is nice to see what the thought process is like in large studios. I'd argue that the Souls games actually do a pretty great job at this. There's a pretty huge range of difficulties you can take the game at--picking a min-Vitality melee character and always fighting everything solo on one end, and then pumping up your health and calling for help a bunch on the other. Non-boss stuff can seem really hard first time you try it, but so much of that difficulty comes from surprises/not knowing things capabilities that it's kind of inevitable that the game gets easier and easier each time you try an area. The stakes for death are also kind of opt-in, difficulty-wise; really tense and hard if you're hoarding souls, but the moment you lose your collection there's basically no downside to death and you get to switch to a much lower-stakes exploration mindset. And there's always grinding, as a last resort. I think Souls games are genius in how they actually let their players subtly set their own difficulty levels, while still making the game feel super intimidating and hard no matter how you play. Counter-point: If your experience was that the game was impenetrably hard and didn't feel there were ways to mitigate that difficulty, then I'm obviously wrong to some extent. I think it's actually pretty common for games that do this to have a really cool range of difficulties you can play at (Spelunky as the big other example that comes to mind), but for the bottom edge of that range to still be high enough for most people to bounce off of.
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Feb 7, 2018 18:51
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:And yes, I've been posting on Twitter quite a bit. Unfortunately I had zero Twitter presence before I started development, and gathering followers is a slow grind; despite regular posts, participating in Screenshot Saturday, and some other miscellaneous "get the word out" activities (including writing an article about the game for a zine) I'm up to all of 280 followers after a year on the platform. You can probably use twitter attention as a rough metric for how you're going to do on launch. If you're struggling to get responses to your twitter posts about the game, that's a pretty clear sign that the game (in its current presentation) is going to struggle with sales. From what I've seen of other comparable games (solo to tiny team, no budget, good design, but not a lot of marketing momentum) I'd probably expect you to sell in the range of 2k copies your first year? I'd also echo the other posters that the issue isn't gameplay or fun. It might be tweaking how you're composing your GIFs, or how you sell the core dream of the game, or how visually punchy you make some in-game events feel. You're still fairly far from launch, so I'd experiment with lots of stuff and see if there's something that consistently gets you more twitter engagement when you post it. TooMuchAbstraction posted:There's something of a circular dependency / snowball effect in what you say that I'm not sure how to resolve. It really is, and without financial backing it's real hard to break through. My experience is that it really relies much more on what you're selling than on how hard you hustle, too--you can show at cons, get a RPG article written about you, run reddit AMAs, etc, and each of those will get your game in front of up to a couple thousand people, but of those couple thousand people you're unlikely to get more than single-digit sales out of it--almost never worth the amount of time and effort you put into it. It only really works if there's something about your game that gets those people telling their friends about it, and those friends are telling their friends, and so on. If your game doesn't sell itself, there's no amount of hustle you can do that'll make it take off. That said, what makes a game 'sell itself' is extremely not the same as what makes a game fun. It's usually something real simple and memorable. Graveyard Keeper is Stardew Valley, but for an unethical gravedigger capitalist. STRAFE had that dumb melodic Smash Mouth cover trailer. Darkest Dungeons went hard on that Hellboy art style and over the top voice acting. These are all things that can get a person interested in a game, but also more importantly talking about a game. My experience is that people are way more likely to be like "Hey, I know you love Hellboy, you should check out Darkest Dungeon" to their friends than they are to be like "Hey, this game is good, you should try it". There are lots of good games--what's uniquely exciting about yours? What sort of fantasy am I excited to fulfill by playing it?
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Sep 21, 2020 19:56
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Conceivably I could try to make a game that was entirely "custom warship fights ridiculous superweapons". It'd be throwing away a lot of the work I did on fleet battles, though, and I'm not sure I have enough ridiculous boss ideas in me to fill out a complete game. But I will definitely be billing the bosses front and center in any trailers I make, and they'll need to show up early in the campaign to help hook the player. What gets people excited about your game isn't necessarily what they like about it once they've started playing it. Both the ship customization and the boss fights sound like good hooks to use for advertising, but that doesn't mean you have to change gameplay at all. Like, when I visualize your game maybe the thing that pulls me towards it the most is putting together dumb gimmick builds. Just a ship that's a huge top-heavy tower of the biggest guns I can find. That fantasy is what makes me buy your game, but odds are that once I play your game for a bit I realize that gimmick builds don't really work that well and I start making more reasonable ships and playing the game more 'normally'. That's totally fine--it's just that it's easier for me to visualize making gimmick ships than it is for me to visualize standard play, no matter how fun standard play might be. Same with the bosses. How can you really sell that first moment of "what the gently caress is this ridiculous superweapon" and make it really pop?
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Sep 21, 2020 22:27
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