6 ms·
Yes. You did. Sadly. And it is very little to do with luck or numbers or the state of the industry. Good indie games: 1. are almost never distinguished by pr
by sago 8y ago
Yes. You did. Sadly.
And it is very little to do with luck or numbers or the state of the industry.
Good indie games:
1. are almost never distinguished by programming (the days of Doom are gone and you are not John Carmack). Far too much time is spent coding. Use existing tools. Code only gameplay.
2. are much more about art. The trailer looks like programmer art: no coherent style, no direction, no class. If this is what you produce. You need a collaborator.
3. are even more about feel. Your character movement is janky. Jumping is floaty. Shooting feels flaccid. There is little sense of gravity, inertia or impact. If it isn't fun to move around a single screen, it's not fun.
4. need a hook. There is almost nothing original about this game. You've got about 10 seconds to hook me. (10 seconds into the trailer you cut to a mostly empty UI.) Find the wow. And zealously focus on it.
5. need to be polished. Ambient animation. Consistent sound effects. Screen shake. Lighting. Particles. UI. These are implemented. But none of them particularly well. And they don't tie together into a whole.
6. need to be marketed. Someone needs to be working on that.
7. needs to catch (or create) a zeitgeist. So many features of this game shout '2014' to me.
8. needs a bit of luck. But beware! The converse is very rarely true. If your game isn't successful, it is probably _not_ because you were unlucky. The game probably wasn't very good. Don't spend your time trying to find alternative explanations. Be brutal with yourself. In game terms, git gud.
So this is harsh I know. I'm sorry. But frank. I've been in the industry for more than 20 years. 99.9% of games fail horribly. But 99.9% of them are not very good. This has absolutely always been the case. It's just that the 'fail point' used to be the publisher pitch. Now you don't need a publisher, you get to fail in public.
So yes three years have been ...um... call it learning. I suggest you do more jams. Figure out what it takes to win. Find a game artist. Use tools. Build prototypes. And start to build a community.
- bighi 8y agoAbout your number one: I see lots of programmers putting too much thought (and time) into code. As if the code was the important part of anything. I am a programmer, and I have this PSA for others: Your code is just a necessary evil, not something to be praised and cherished. No customer sees your code, no customer cares about the code.
- zodPod 8y agoAgreed! As long as it works well, who gives a damn what it looks like.
- krinchan 8y agoIt kinda feels like the effort is directed improperly. If graphics programming and tens of thousands of lines of C++ code is your passion, you probably would be better suited to working your way into some of the major gaming framework's shops. There's definitely a unicorn quality to a developer who wants to work at the framework level. Unfortunately, there isn't really room for Yet Another Gaming Framework. That said, my personal experience is that it's hard to find people who are passionate about working at that level. Me personally, if I ever did break into the Gaming Industry it would 100% be at the framework level. Transformation matricies, graphics pipelines, shaders, and all that low level stuff interests me way more and plays well to my strengths. Making an "Indie Game" that stands out is well beyond my skill set. Grinding my life away for next to no money in a non-stop death march to hit a AAA studio exec's deadlines just seems a way to destroy my marriage and mental health.
- fphhotchips 8y agoCan agree with all of these critiques of the game. In particular, this feels like a game that was created in a weekend or two in Gamemaker. The UI is quite simple, the mechanics (or at least the ones I saw in 10 minutes of poking around) are unoriginal, and the enemies all seem to be variants of "fly/walk towards me". There's no feeling behind the gun, there's no real feedback when I get hit, I have no idea how much life I have left (yes it's in the UI, but it's not prominent at all). If I had to guess where the 3 years of effort has gone into, I'd suggest it was the level randomiser. That's a big mistake, and one probably made by a programmer mindset rather than a game design one. The game isn't fun, so it doesn't matter how much replay-ability there is. Whereas if the game were fun but not replayable, I'd probably buy it on the promise of a randomiser coming.
- yifanl 8y agoThere are absolutely indie games that don't have any of that, and yet are wildly successful. See: Five Nights at Freddy's and Getting Over It. (You could argue that the hook of Getting Over It is the intentionally annoying controls, but I highly doubt that that much of the market is a bunch of masochists.)
- OskarS 8y agoYou're 100% wrong about Getting Over It. The graphics of that game are extremely intentional, as are the controls. Bennett Foddy is a veteran who knows exactly what he's doing, and it's no accident that that game hit.
- yifanl 8y agoFair, I'm letting personal bias bleed into my criticism of the game.
- OskarS 8y agoYep. It's certainly true that indie gaming is a harsh place to be in right now, but there's no mystery or deeper reason as to why the writer's game failed.