I'd personally love to see a weekly recap hosted on youtube and embedded in your site. You could do a 2 minute interview each, and further down the track start including screencaps.
I love this. If you want any art to start off with, CodeCombat has a bunch of vector stuff that's open source and are always adding more: http://codecombat.com/editor/thang
If you're mentioning open source game assets (and your site looks really good - bookmarked, too), it's also worth mentioning http://opengameart.org. Tons of good stuff there that can come in handy!
How about see who can get the most fire from Heaven?
Hymn?
That will be the biggest thing on TV.
God says...
C:\TAD\Text\BIBLE.TXT
gather the whole assembly of the children
of Israel together: 8:10 And thou shalt bring the Levites before the
LORD: and the children of Israel shall put their hands upon the
Levites: 8:11 And Aaron shall offer the Levites before the LORD for an
offering of the children of Israel, that they may execute the service
of the LORD.
8:12 And the Levites shall lay their hands upon the heads of the
bullocks: and thou shalt offer the one for a sin offering, and the
other for a burnt offering, unto the LORD, to ma
Chris and Ryan were my cofounders at Wufoo. When I heard they were going to do this, I was super excited because 1) it's going to be really entertaining and 2) they're going to be blogging again. They haven't written about startups since we were going at it on Particletree.com before Wufoo. The only reason I got into entrepreneurship was because of them. This is because they know how to make startups fun, which is something you can see in Wufoo's DNA even to this day. It's something I think a lot founders forget is the key to making it through in the long run.
Not sure who I'd put my money on, though. I do know it'll be a win for everyone to see them try this.
Actual business advice: one really good game is better than a thousand OK ones. Gaming is a hits based business.
Making small games and prototypes may be helpful for learning code and game design since there is more experimentation in the early stages of a project. But there's lots of things shipping a larger project will teach as well.
Flappy Bird was extremely well-designed and was very high quality, there was a lot of work put into it. Dong Nguyen has been designing games for awhile and isn't stopping anytime soon.
Quality isn't the be-all, end-all, but there's definitely a correlation. Flappy Bird wouldn't even have gotten off of the ground if there were problems with something like collision detection. Even something as simple as increasing the delay between rounds (by as little as a few seconds) could have hindered its success.
Quality isn't just cool graphics and complex plots and all that. Dong understood how people want a game that is simple to learn but insanely difficult to master. And he understood the need to make controls simple enough (tap anywhere on the screen) so that people can play even in the subway with only one hand free. So gotta give the guy credit
Actual business advice: creating a really good game is a black swan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) and multiple attempts will yield better results than a first big one (think very low probability as opposed to very very low probability).
If making games were like spinning a roulette wheel this might be true. Making games is an art though, and part of that art is learning how to make really great experiences for the player. You can't do that without a focus on quality over quantity. Especially as an indie-developer with limited resources, what exactly are you going to make that anyone is going to care about if you're constant releasing half baked stuff and starting new projects?
You're right of course -- to a certain point. Half baked products will not succeed. Still, law of diminishing returns is in full effect here. When to launch? When is the MVP ready? I don't know the right answer.. Some say earlier than gut instinct would compel.
If you come in under budget it won't help. The reasoning is that we should each be encouraged to experiment. One of us may go heavy on the art while the other focuses on marketing. Either way, there should be no punishment for trying as much as you can within the rules.
If one of us goes over, that will count against the final profit.
We did, but in the end this has to be treated as a business. All aspiring game developers have a fear of quitting their jobs, so money is probably the most important benchmark for anyone else who would try this out. And we have an agreement not to go into shady/unethical IAP territory, so we should still be proud of the final products.
Not at all -- they are a necessity. I just feel that some developers implement them tastefully (map packs, new characters) while others are only focused on money. I'd like to offer IAP's that look like a mini expansion where at least a solid amount of dev effort is recognizable.
This is nice in theory, but the masses (aka mobile game players) have mental space for three game types: free, paid, and scammy/clone/ripoff.
You will put a sizable dev effort into a 5.99 IA purchase that statically will not sell nearly as much as the game itself. Maybe that's not the exact case but this is the balancing act.
Personally I'd like to see the brothers produce concrete milestones. For instance, in the first month you have to ship the first paid version. Or whatever. So far, they haven't put their butts on the line for anything less than a year.
Some things i really loved about the devs of BADLAND are that not only did they provide a huge amount of free content before the paid expansions, but the expansions were absolutely worth it! Further more they recognized the existence of a particular audience segment that would get absolutely hooked to their game and would aspire to be the "hard-core" ones. They rewarded them by providing challenges that would unlock the premium content. And while these were reasonably tough, they were also doable.
I subscribed to the two blogs. Anyone know why certain blogs only syndicate post samples? It's annoying when you are using an RSS reader and find that you have to open up your web browser (especially annoying on a mobile phone) to read the full post.
It's a decision by whoever writes the code for the xml feed of a site. Most of the time short snippets in the xml feed are meant to tease you so you visit their site.
It would be interesting if you each pick a different development SDK (unless you are writing raw Objective C or Android Java). Comparing how long it takes to get up to speed as a new user would be useful for future gamedevs.
41 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 94.9 ms ] threadWe also have a few music tracks we've commissioned that are Creative Commons if you're interested, like http://codecombat.com/file/music/music_level_5.mp3
Hymn?
That will be the biggest thing on TV.
God says... C:\TAD\Text\BIBLE.TXT
gather the whole assembly of the children of Israel together: 8:10 And thou shalt bring the Levites before the LORD: and the children of Israel shall put their hands upon the Levites: 8:11 And Aaron shall offer the Levites before the LORD for an offering of the children of Israel, that they may execute the service of the LORD.
8:12 And the Levites shall lay their hands upon the heads of the bullocks: and thou shalt offer the one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering, unto the LORD, to ma
Not sure who I'd put my money on, though. I do know it'll be a win for everyone to see them try this.
Making small games and prototypes may be helpful for learning code and game design since there is more experimentation in the early stages of a project. But there's lots of things shipping a larger project will teach as well.
The game is not without merit.
You should be able to take your remaining budget and count it as profit.
If one of us goes over, that will count against the final profit.
That could inspire a lot of new young programmers who want to learn more!
Granted money is easy to count but it is a debatable measure of which game is better or who was most successful at the task of learning to make games.
You will put a sizable dev effort into a 5.99 IA purchase that statically will not sell nearly as much as the game itself. Maybe that's not the exact case but this is the balancing act.
Personally I'd like to see the brothers produce concrete milestones. For instance, in the first month you have to ship the first paid version. Or whatever. So far, they haven't put their butts on the line for anything less than a year.
Some things i really loved about the devs of BADLAND are that not only did they provide a huge amount of free content before the paid expansions, but the expansions were absolutely worth it! Further more they recognized the existence of a particular audience segment that would get absolutely hooked to their game and would aspire to be the "hard-core" ones. They rewarded them by providing challenges that would unlock the premium content. And while these were reasonably tough, they were also doable.