I just finished writing an article about some of the thought processes I go through when developing our RPGs. You can read it here.

On September 23rd, just a little over 5 months after release, Breath of Death VII: The Beginning passed the 30,000 sales mark, with a trial-to-purchase conversion rate of 66.7%. To celebrate, here’s a post-mortem of the game – what we felt we did right and areas we could have improved.

Breath of Death VII: The Beginning

What went well:

#1 Team – Having the right team can make or break a project. Even if you’re one of the rare individuals who is simultaneously great at programming, art, and music, making an entire RPG all by yourself is a gigantic task. Having talented team members to divide the work and offer encouragement and suggestions is a huge advantage. Bill and I were on the same page from day one and this made the difficult task of making our first RPG much more manageable.

#2 Scope & Planning – There are so many RPG projects that get started and never get finished and a major reason for this is because the developers are thinking too big. Final Fantasy 6 style graphics, an epic 30 hour quest with multiple story branches, an innovative real time combat system – yeah, there’s no way that a small development group can realistically make something like that as their first project. With Breath of Death VII, we planned from the start to have a smaller game (around 5 hours) with retro visuals, and nothing too complicated in the gameplay department. It paid off – we finished the game in just under 3 months, whereas most indie RPG projects take years if they get finished at all.

#3 $1 Price Tag – Our initial inclination was to price Breath of Death VII at $3 or $5 since it’s an RPG and it’s much bigger in scope than the typical $1 game. However, by looking at sales trends on the XBox Live Indie Game marketplace, it quickly became evident that $1 games tend to be the most successful. Since we’re in this for the long haul, we felt that even if we could have potentially made more money with a higher price tag, a low price would help us to build up a fan base and garner us free publicity which would help with marketing our future games. It’s paid off – we’ve sold 30,000 copies at $1, whereas by my estimates Aphelion (another XBLIG RPG) has probably only sold about 2,000-4,000 copies at $3.

#4 Marketing – Most Indie developers fail to properly market their games before or after release. It’s an understandable failing – it’s difficult to get big media sites to take you seriously if you’re a small developer that nobody has heard of, they tend to ignore you. Despite this, we decided early on that we’d really try to market Breath of Death VII in every way we could short of actually buying advertising space. We put a trailer on youtube and gametrailers.com, we posted about it on forums, talked about it on our website, and emailed reporters & reviewers.

Most of our marketing efforts fell on deaf ears, but some were very successful. RPGamer gave us a lot of publicity, with 2 reviews, an interview, and even a guest appearance on their weekly podcast. The Independent Charles show (a video review show on the UK XBox dashboard) was very positive and gave us quite the nice boost in Europe. But we really hit a homerun when a very positive article about the game showed up on Kotaku. Not only did this article give us hundreds of extra sales a day for about a week, but it also resulted in another high profile article showing up shortly thereafter on yahoo games which gave us a similarly huge boost.

Sadly, our marketing stunt of sending out fake boxed copies of our digital game to various media addresses didn’t pan out, but maybe we chose the wrong targets.

#5 Pacing – If there’s one thing that Breath of Death VII: The Beginning has received almost universal praise for it’s the pacing. Most turn-based RPGs are slow plodding affairs. Not ours. We made a decision early on to make sure each element of the gameplay contributed to a fast pace – from the random encounter limits to the lack of battle animations to the free healing after combat to the frequent LV-Ups to the fact that enemies get strong with each consecutive turn. Slow is boring. Fast is fun.

#6 Humor – Sure, there were some naysayers (mostly people who don’t like referential humor), but for the most part, people really enjoyed finding the various references to various games that we stuck in the game (my favorite probably being the Phantasy Star IV sight gag that you see when you leave the first town with Sara). The central joke of our main character being a mute but letting the player read his thoughts turned out to be a big hit as well.

#7 Budgeting – All told, we spent very little money to make Breath of Death VII. Licensing all of the music cost us under $100 total. Many of the songs were even offered to us for free. Beyond that, we just spent a little money to buy a 360 Memory Unit (for testing out the save/load system) and for our boxed copy marketing stunt. Even including the $100/year XBLIG membership cost, we probably spent under $200 total.

I’ve seen several examples of indie developers spend thousands of dollars on assets and tools and that’s just wrong. You can make a good game with free tools or inexpensive tools. Use free tools and split profits with your teammates rather than hire outside help – save big expenses for later games when you’re already making good money.

#8 Music – We were able to find some great songs that cost very little to license for Breath of Death VII. Not only that, but we found our Cthulhu Saves the World composer through Breath of Death (he did the battle theme & final dungeon theme).

#9 Playtesting – Although the temptation was strong after working so long to just put the game into review ASAP, we held back and stuck it in official playtesting for a while first. I’m glad we did – we got some great feedback from other developers that really helped us improve the game. Stuff like the visual cues when you’re losing in battle and including jokes when you examine objects like tombstones were a direct result of playtesting.

What we could have done better:

#1 More thorough debugging – Being our first game, our debugging process consisted of me playing through the game again and again until I stopped finding errors. Unfortunately, we missed a few major bugs and though we were able to quickly release a patch to fix them, I still feel bad for those players who got caught by a crash in the first week.

With Cthulhu Saves the World, we are going to be doing more thorough testing & debugging, complete with checklists to try to ensure that we don’t overlook obvious things.

#2 Better difficulty balancing – Although I think we did a great job on gameplay balance in general, there were two areas that I think we could have improved on. First, the beginning of the game is too easy – I think the big culprit is the fact that most battles early on don’t have enough enemies. Second, the castle dungeon is almost universally considered to be the hardest part of the game – I toned it down a bit from its initial pre-release incarnation, but I should have toned it down even further.

#3 Ailment Attacks – Ailment attacks are usually useless in most RPGs and I wanted to change that with Breath of Death VII, but I forgot one important thing. It doesn’t matter how good your ailment attacks are – nobody is going to use ailment attacks if you can quickly win every battle through direct force. I hope to change this with our next game and make some battles where ailment attacks have a chance to shine.

#4 Post-release obsession – Immediately after releasing Breath of Death VII, we were more than a little obsessive with checking google and websites to see what people were saying about our game.  What we should have done is to limit our searches and taken a break from development – not only would this have been healthier, but I think we would have started serious development on our next game quicker had we done that.

Conclusion: Making Breath of Death VII: The Beginning was a great experience for us. It taught us a lot about game development and has allowed us to gain contacts & fans that will help us when we release our future games. Oh and the money is nice too. Sales are definitely down from what they once were, but I guess the surprising thing is that it’s still selling as good as it is now (around 50-100 sales/day) when the game has been out for over 5 months already. And to be honest, any sales the game makes now are just icing on a delicious cake – the game has already paid us handsomely for the work we put into it.

So there you have it, our first post-mortem! Thank you for all of your support and I hope you continue to support us and enjoy our games when we release our next RPG, Cthulhu Saves the World, in a few weeks.

From the look of things, Hypership Out of Control isn’t selling very well, which is sad since it’s a really fun game. Can’t say I’m horribly surprised – releasing within a day of a new Halo game & 3 XBLA titles isn’t good timing. But it got me thinking about another reason why it could be underperforming – nostalgia.

There’s a big trend of late to make games with retro aesthetics. Gamers like being taken back to their childhood and developers like making these kinds of games because they’re easier to develop. However when developing a retro game, you need to take into account that most gamers don’t really want a RETRO game. They don’t want a game that adheres strictly to the limitations of an NES or Genesis or whatever. Instead, they want a game that matches the rosy and inaccurate picture they have in their memory.

People see stuff like the Scott Pilgrim game and they think retro, but Scott Pilgrim’s visuals are probably better than what you would be able to get out of a real SNES game, to say nothing of a NES game.

Here’s another exmample – a screenshot of Dragon Warrior IV (i.e. Dragon Quest IV), a late era NES RPG.

…and here’s a screenshot from our retro RPG, Breath of Death VII: The Beginning.

See the difference? Breath of Death VII has a bigger field of view, more variety in tiles, and more detailed and colorful tiles & characters than the NES game. There’s no way on earth that the Breath of Death VII graphics could be done on an actual NES, but when most people see those visuals, they think 8-bit.

Sure, we could have done Breath of Death VII in a more faithful 8-bit style, but that’s not what most people want. They want perceived reality, not actual reality.

Same thing with gameplay. If you want to evoke the same kind of feel that people got from playing those old classic games, you can’t just copy their gameplay, because the gaming world has changed since then. The gameplay needs to match the nostalgia, not the actuality. With Breath of Death VII, we kept the same basic gameplay structure of an old NES RPG, but we added some new systems like multi-character techniques and LV-Up options. More importantly, we changed the pacing – most NES RPG are glacially paced by today’s standards. We didn’t just speed up the pacing to match today’s standards, we actually sped it up beyond the pace of most RPGs today. As a result, you have a tight, streamlined, fast game that most people seem to really enjoy.

Going back to Hypership Out of Control, it looks like an actual early NES game and that could be its undoing. To be successful, you need to give players what they actually want (retro evolved as Geometry Wars puts it), which is not necessarily what they say they want.

Some more Cthulhu Saves the World media for you.

First, we have some screenshots of the first town in the game. Townsfolk haven’t been added yet, but this ought to give you a nice idea of the kind of visual improvement we’ve made since our last game.

Next, we have some animated GIFs of 2 of our main characters – Cthulhu himself and the lovely Umi.

Finally, we have some additional songs from the game. We’re planning on releasing the entire soundtrack for free when the game comes out, but in the meantime, we hope you enjoy the music from two of the dungeon types - Caves & Shrines.

Hi everybody. I’ve been taking a bit of a break from programming while I wait for playtesters to play through the game and give us their suggestions. We’ve received some good suggestions so far for things that we can tweak to make the game even better (mostly about areas that are too hard or too easy), but I’d like to wait for a few more people to give it a try before updating the game. Interestingly enough, my 9-year old daughter has ended up really liking the game. She played it for about 3 hours yesterday and not at my behest (I even made her get off at one point and she asked to play it some more later on). When I asked her if she liked it and why, she said that it was funny and easy. Now funny, I understood – even though she’s not going to get the obscure RPG references, she obviously is enjoying the other jokes – but easy surprised me because I had seen her die MANY times. With some further questioning, it turned out what she meant was that it was faster paced than most RPGs she had experienced. For example, with Blue Dragon, it can often take an hour or two just to finish a single dungeon, that may or may not advance the story in any real way. Final Fantasy XIII is even worse. Contrast that with our game where the whole thing is only supposed to last a few hours and that sort of pacing obviously won’t work -we had to speed things up a bit, to the game’s great benefit (nobody likes slow and plodding).

Speaking of length, the first playtester to go through the game (besides myself, obviously) said it took him about 5 hours to reach the final boss so it looks like we hit our time estimate.

In other news, I just discovered how easy it is to publish stuff for the Kindle. I think I’ll put my two previous games (Epiphany in Spaaace! and Molly the Were-Zompire) up there for $1 a piece - they’re already basically e-books so why not sticking them on an actual e-book reader?

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.