If the payoff is that low, it’s not worth working in the storyline (which is what would take 9 months (Edit: typo)). I’m already making a decent wage as a TA. It could still be worth publishing roughly as-is. But I’m hoping I can get away with publishing to PC/Mac/Linux and charging a few dollars per player.
You can publish it on google play now, as it is… and if you later decide so, edit the storyline, add a level or two, and sell it on PC later.
The advantage is that a) you get some money now, and b) when the final version is ready, you will already have a few fans, which will be more likely to buy it. (Another advantage is that if your game has some bugs or other problems, you can use the feedback to polish the game before you start charging players. I suspect a paying customer will be more angry about bugs.)
From what you say, it sounds like it would be quite a while before ad revenue from a free game would pay back what I spent on commissioning3D artists.
An ad banner like in AdMob would interfere with gameplay quite a lot. The control scheme is designed for full keyboard (but would work well with a game controller with joysticks). It would take significant work to translate it to a tablet screen (a cell phone screen is definitely too small). Maybe this kind of annoyance would be a feature if I was trying to sell a full version that was ad-free alongside it, but my game is complicated and I expect will take some getting into it, and I think this would just drive most people away and earn it 1-star ratings.
I’m not that worried about bugs that would significantly damage user experience in gameplay. I’ve been playing it for a while myself (Until Minecraft, it was my favorite game to play while listening to debates). The remaining few ones are basically just results of things I’ve added recently, like smooth camera transitions when you’re playing as a spider and you crawl on a wall. (which has caused the camera to wiggle a little bit under some conditions, I think it’s due to numerical instability in the way I made it rotate to follow the character) The bugs I would expect to take time to fix are the ones that only show up on other platforms than the one I’ve played on (PC), and I can find those by looking through the way my game interacts with the operating system (saving user-created files, loading them, browsing for them, changing screen resolution, accessing preferences files). It’s not necessary to play through the game to find them. The outside view says “There will be more bugs than you expect, and it doesn’t take much to ruin user experience.” To which I respond that I have published software before (not that I own, but that I developed during internships) and I have some feel for how bad bugs popping up is, and that I would take that “feel” into acccount when testing it thoroughly on different platforms before release, and I don’t expect that to take more than a couple of weeks.
The gaining fans thing is a good and important point. I might be able to do that with a Humble Indie Bundle,which has the advantage of a precedent that is pretty much accepted where basically giving it away for free ends when the humble bundle ends, you don’t have to create a “deluxe” version of the game to justify it not being free anymore.
As far as feedback about things besides bugs (level difficulty is a concern), I bet I can find people willing to test a beta version and give feedback for the privelege of playing it early, or (at worst) in return for playtesting their own games (if I ask around at my school’s gamebuilders club, whose meeting I’m planning to attend next week to demo my game and get their opinion on the same question I asked here (“how viable do you think this is commercially?”)). I have looked at the games they are making online. They appear to be a lot less complicated and polished than mine, and will not take much work to play as much as I expect them to maybe expect in return for playing some levels of mine. I have played many games, and never sent an email to a developer giving them feedback. I wouldn’t expect much feedback if I just published a game, even if I included a message saying “please send feedback.”
It’s not going to be worth spending nine months making a complicated storyline that players will press A to skip. Save it for an RPG.
Would would be worth doing, if you can do it well, is to take elements of a storyline that set a tone, and integrate it into the game to provide a unique setting (eg Braid, Binding of Isaac). But don’t do a convoluted plot that pops up between levels.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through. Edit: Double post, sorry. It looked like it wasn’t submitting my comment so I copied the text opened a new tab, checked to see that the comment wasn’t there, and then pasted, but apparently the other comment was just late to show up.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through.
If the payoff is that low, it’s not worth working in the storyline (which is what would take 9 months (Edit: typo)). I’m already making a decent wage as a TA. It could still be worth publishing roughly as-is. But I’m hoping I can get away with publishing to PC/Mac/Linux and charging a few dollars per player.
You can publish it on google play now, as it is… and if you later decide so, edit the storyline, add a level or two, and sell it on PC later.
The advantage is that a) you get some money now, and b) when the final version is ready, you will already have a few fans, which will be more likely to buy it. (Another advantage is that if your game has some bugs or other problems, you can use the feedback to polish the game before you start charging players. I suspect a paying customer will be more angry about bugs.)
From what you say, it sounds like it would be quite a while before ad revenue from a free game would pay back what I spent on commissioning 3D artists.
An ad banner like in AdMob would interfere with gameplay quite a lot. The control scheme is designed for full keyboard (but would work well with a game controller with joysticks). It would take significant work to translate it to a tablet screen (a cell phone screen is definitely too small). Maybe this kind of annoyance would be a feature if I was trying to sell a full version that was ad-free alongside it, but my game is complicated and I expect will take some getting into it, and I think this would just drive most people away and earn it 1-star ratings.
I’m not that worried about bugs that would significantly damage user experience in gameplay. I’ve been playing it for a while myself (Until Minecraft, it was my favorite game to play while listening to debates). The remaining few ones are basically just results of things I’ve added recently, like smooth camera transitions when you’re playing as a spider and you crawl on a wall. (which has caused the camera to wiggle a little bit under some conditions, I think it’s due to numerical instability in the way I made it rotate to follow the character) The bugs I would expect to take time to fix are the ones that only show up on other platforms than the one I’ve played on (PC), and I can find those by looking through the way my game interacts with the operating system (saving user-created files, loading them, browsing for them, changing screen resolution, accessing preferences files). It’s not necessary to play through the game to find them. The outside view says “There will be more bugs than you expect, and it doesn’t take much to ruin user experience.” To which I respond that I have published software before (not that I own, but that I developed during internships) and I have some feel for how bad bugs popping up is, and that I would take that “feel” into acccount when testing it thoroughly on different platforms before release, and I don’t expect that to take more than a couple of weeks.
The gaining fans thing is a good and important point. I might be able to do that with a Humble Indie Bundle,which has the advantage of a precedent that is pretty much accepted where basically giving it away for free ends when the humble bundle ends, you don’t have to create a “deluxe” version of the game to justify it not being free anymore.
As far as feedback about things besides bugs (level difficulty is a concern), I bet I can find people willing to test a beta version and give feedback for the privelege of playing it early, or (at worst) in return for playtesting their own games (if I ask around at my school’s gamebuilders club, whose meeting I’m planning to attend next week to demo my game and get their opinion on the same question I asked here (“how viable do you think this is commercially?”)). I have looked at the games they are making online. They appear to be a lot less complicated and polished than mine, and will not take much work to play as much as I expect them to maybe expect in return for playing some levels of mine. I have played many games, and never sent an email to a developer giving them feedback. I wouldn’t expect much feedback if I just published a game, even if I included a message saying “please send feedback.”
It’s not going to be worth spending nine months making a complicated storyline that players will press A to skip. Save it for an RPG.
Would would be worth doing, if you can do it well, is to take elements of a storyline that set a tone, and integrate it into the game to provide a unique setting (eg Braid, Binding of Isaac). But don’t do a convoluted plot that pops up between levels.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through. Edit: Double post, sorry. It looked like it wasn’t submitting my comment so I copied the text opened a new tab, checked to see that the comment wasn’t there, and then pasted, but apparently the other comment was just late to show up.
I think I will take this advice. I have code to let the player read “memories” of other characters scattered throughout the levels, which I can provide a little text for. And I like my backstory and setting more than I like the story that I came up with for the player to play through.