Recently, I’ve had a trial of faith when it comes to game development. Let’s look at the sales statistics of my first two games, shall we?
Epiphany in Spaaace! (released Oct 20th) (Purchases/Trials)
October – 322/2418 = 13.32%
November – 96/284 = 33.8%
December – 90/263 = 34.22%
Total 2009 – 421/2965 = 14.2%
Molly the Were-Zompire (released Dec 10th)
December & Total 2009 – 355/3651 = 9.72%
Now, on the one hand, I know I should probably be pleased with these figures. I’ve made two interactive novels that are almost entirely text based on one of the most powerful gaming systems available at the moment and I’ve sold several hundreds of copies of each, which is far more than some games on the service has sold. On the other hand, you have other games that have made their creator’s over $100k so as someone who was hoping to turn independent game development into a viable part-time job and maybe even a full-time job, making around $500 for your first quarter is disheartening.
Even moreso than the money, Molly the Were-Zompire’s reception has been discouraging. Despite my thinking that it was the superior game, it’s getting worse ratings that Epiphany in Spaaace and is selling slightly less despite getting more trial downloads. Still, there’s no point in getting too depressed about the matter. Rather, I’ve been trying to figure out what I did wrong with Molly so that I can do better with the next game. After much thought, here are some things that I think may have caused its poor performance.
1 – The pictures may have thrown people off. In Molly, I put in around a dozen intentionally bad pictures as a joke. I’m afraid that some people may have found these pictures to be less funny and more bad.
2 – Less focused. In Epiphany, I received some complaints that the humor was too focused – all sci-fi cliches and not much else – so with Molly, I tried to do a wider range of humor. So in Molly, you got some 4th wall jokes, RPG cliches, various gaming references, undead stuff, and just random silliness. People knew what to expect in Epiphany (Star Trek & other sci-fi cliches) whereas with Molly, there was less certainty.
3 – It’s essentially a stand-alone expansion pack. Sure, the plot & characters are all new (like many expansion packs), but nothing else is substantially different than Epiphany. In both games, you read a story, make choices, and see what the result of those choices are and that’s it. Either game can be experienced in a single play session of an hour or two. Had the second game had substantial improvements like beautiful artwork, new gameplay elements, more content, or drastically better writing, I think it would have been received much better.
I think that last reason is the key. It’s evident from these two games that there’s an audience for straight Interactive Fiction on the XBox 360, but it’s not a horribly large one. If I drastically improved my writing skills or art skills, that audience would probably increase, but I imagine not drastically. On the other hand, if I was to expand my games so that they’re not just interactive novels but also traditional RPGs with all the character building & strategic combat that a good game on the genre entails, I think I would hit a much larger demographic. RPGers aren’t necessarily attached to great graphics – just look at the niche popularity of text-based roguelikes – so I think that a quality entirely text-based RPG could go over very well.
So that will be my next project – a text based console-style RPG. My working title is “Mulan vs. the Zombie Apocalypse.” I’ll talk about some of the gameplay specifics in my next post.
A Ten Step Guide to Creating Awesome Indie Shmups.
Step #1 – Make sure that the hitboxes for enemies don’t match their visuals. Players love it when they die merely from getting close to enemies.
Step #2 – Give the player 4 weapons, one for each button on the controller. Fill your game with enemies that can only be killed by using the appropriate colored weapon. Other than that, make each weapon exactly the same.
Step #3 – Give the enemies very straightforward AI like “Go straight” ensuring that the only way that a player could possibly lose is if they’re trying to shoot enemies instead of just getting out of their way.
Step #4 – Give all enemies machine guns that track the player. To counteract the difficulty in dodging, give the player a ton of health.
Step #5 – Give all enemies a ton of health. Players don’t like to mow down grunts with their superior firepower so ensure that every single enemy is a juggernaut. If an enemy is especially agile and hard to hit, give them even more health.
Step #6 – Give no indication of how much health boss enemies have or if the player is even successfully damaging them. Players like to be surprised like that.
Step #7 – Take away all power-ups whenever a player dies. Make the game ridiculously easy when fully powered-up and ridiculously hard right after dying. Players will enjoy the fluctating difficulty.
Step #8 – Use every button on the XBox 360 controller including both thumbsticks & all of the face buttons. The buttons are there for a reason, after all.
Step #9 – Players care more about length than variety. Take a level, change the background, and voila! Twice the levels!
Step #10 – Garish programmer art involving outer space is what sells shmups. If your title’s name is mostly illegible, that’s a plus.
My next game, Molly the Were-Zompire, is in peer review right now with a little over half of the reviews necessary to pass. I’m hoping that it will go up on XBox Live sometime this week. It will sell for 80 MS points ($1 USD).
Like Epiphany in Spaaace!, Molly the Were-Zompire is an interactive novel. Whereas Epiphany focused on sci-fi cliches, Molly focuses on making fun of RPG cliches. Although I like Epiphany, I think Molly has the stronger story – it’s less concerned with parody and has more general humor in it. As for the technical aspects, Molly is using basically the same game engine, although I upgraded it slightly to support the inclusion of pictures. Scattered throughout the game are a few wonderfully hand drawn pictures to go with the written text. And by wonderful, I mean they were drawn by me. Come to think of it, maybe I would be better off claiming that my 9 year old drew them.
Although it’s coming out after Epiphany, Molly the Were-Zompire has actually been in development for a much longer time. I actually came up with the idea of Molly many years ago in a story called MaZoGiDeSto – A Magical Zombie Girl Detective Story. I never actually finished the story, but I kept messing around with the character until eventually I came up the idea of a Were-Zompire (part werewolf, part zombie, and part vampire) and she switched to that. When I found out about XBox Live Community Games, I was determined to make a game starring Molly. At first, I was going to make a traditional RPG, but when the gameplay system I created for Molly turned out to be more complicated than fun (involving matching power-ups to various battle situations), I scrapped that idea and made the game an interactive novel instead. If you were to hack into the code for Molly the Were-Zompire, you’d actually find a lot of code from that earlier form of the game for stuff like battles and character stats. You’d also discover that Umiko the pirate-ninja was a member of your party (she’s still in the current game) but the other two playable characters that join Molly – Torment (a being of pure evil) and Sleet (a washed up rock star) – are nowhere to be found. I thought about including them, but in the end, I didn’t find a good place to stick them in any of the plot threads so out they went.
In any case, I’m excited that Molly the Were-Zompire is finally going to be released. Now onto my next game idea! I think I’m going to take a break from Interactive Novels for the moment and am going to do something more gameplay oriented. Maybe a dungeon hack RPG with historical and mythical characters as party members (Mulan, Santa, and Einstein unite to fight evil!).