I've written way too much about money on here lately. Clearly it's something that's weighing on my mind. I have enough to live on for now, but I have worries about the future. I was intending to avoid it and stick to games and theory for a while but there are some things that came up and I feel are worth saying.
So there are some misconceptions around about the iOS appstore (the market for games in general, but the appstore in particular). Everyone's heard about the absurd successes - the shallow badly-aliased bird games, the fart apps - and there's this public perception around that it's an easy way to make money. This perception is harmful, I've seen it do harm, I've seen people who really couldn't afford to sink their time into making apps because "everyone knows" it's an easy way to make money, then have them inevitably fail.
But mostly it just pisses me off. I meet someone, chat with them, they ask me what I've been working on, I say I've been doing some mobile games lately. They say, "oh yeah? I bet that's pretty rewarding", rubbing their fingers together in a symbol for money.
No, it really isn't.
It is very rewarding in many other senses; there's cool hardware, there's a powerful immediacy to a touch-screen, it's great for in-person multiplayer games, it's an ideal context for small-scale games, it's lovely to be able to meet someone at a pub and right there show them something you've made.
I've been hearing among game developers for a while statements like "the iOS gold rush is over" (although some disagree that there ever was such a "gold rush"). But in the world at large, this perception's still there. People still believe in the gold rush. And it affects choices they make, it matters. I'm sure the gatekeepers are happy to keep this fable alive. It needs to be dispelled.
That's why articles like these two are valuable: Congratulations, Your First Indie Game is a Flop, IceBurgers: by the Numbers. Everyone hears about the successes - we need to tell more people about the failures. Or the.. things that aren't really failures, but aren't successes either. It makes me deeply uncomfortable to see millionaires rage at someone posting this kind of thing. The conclusions drawn by the developers in those articles may be invalid, but the raw data is not. Negative results are just as valuable as positive ones, but while there are a lot more negative results most of the attention goes to the positive ones. Maybe those are bad examples, maybe they're bad games (I haven't played either and certainly they don't look very attractive), maybe they approached things with the wrong attitude, but this type of message is valuable.
It's really easy to look at articles like those and with 20-20 hindsight explain why they failed. Had Minecraft failed, it'd be easy to write off why - unoriginal gameplay, looks bad in screenshots, no tutorial. But since it is successful we can comfortably praise the originality of the design, the distinctive graphical style, and the joy of figuring things out for yourself. It's much harder to predict ahead of time what will take off.
There are a lot of good reasons people might not make these kinds of numbers public - they consider it personal information, they're under an NDA, they want to avoid an internet comment backlash, they don't want to be seen as a failure and have that colour perception of their future work. It takes a certain courage to be public like this. I admire the people above for doing so. Maybe it's a tragedy of the commons thing - it's not in anyone's individual interest to say this kind of thing because it's negative publicity, but it's in the interest of the whole.
So, having talked about this, I should show some numbers of my own. I'm slightly reluctant about doing so - partly because of the reasons in the previous paragraph, and partly because I don't feel like they're very good examples. They're niche games, quickly made, without a focus on selling well.
Some background is necessary. I went through some serious burnout over the last few years, last year in particular. Trying to complete two very high-maintenance projects simultaneously. Hard work. Pushing my limits. Stress. Isolation. Depression. Sense of failure. Major loss of energy and motivation. Still haven't completely recovered from it. I've found some respite in working on small games that are easy for me to complete, using very low-resolution graphics because they allow me to work fast and still make something that looks good. So looking at things I've done in the last year.. there's some bloody good design there, I'm really pleased with some of what I've done, but I haven't been doing everything I could to optimise for sales because that's a kind of work that really drains me.
So please don't mistake me for expecting these to be big successes. I didn't. They're tests to see if I can generate some amount of income from the small-scale things I've been making. Minor forays into the appstore market. Experiments.
So, Glitch Tank. Sold 127 copies in 3 months before Zaga-33 was released. Another 251 in the 3 months since. 378 total.
Zaga-33. 1624 copies total. That's not so bad. At a dollar each, that's ~$1100 after Apple's cut. Not so much less than minimum wage for the month I spent on it. (If you disregard time spent on failed prototypes that don't get released.)
The free PC version's been downloaded some 1500 times. More people have paid a dollar for it than have grabbed it for nothing. I find this most peculiar.
These numbers aren't final. They're still selling a few copies every day.
So I've covered the cost of the iPad (and even the repairs after smashing it on the floor) and the Apple developer license. But not much more.
However, I emphasise again, I do not count these as failures. They've been good for my mental health, if nothing else. People have enjoyed them. I've had some very positive responses to them.
And looking at how Zaga-33 fared so much better than Glitch Tank, and how Glitch Tank tripled after Zaga-33 came out.. there's definite network effects going on. I'm reminded of Bennett Foddy's GDC talk - he showed a graph of ad revenues from his site as he added more games, and the shapes here are looking quite similar to the start of his graph. I suspect a comfortable level of income could be reached eventually just by continuing to release similar games. This is one major flaw in the two articles I referenced earlier - they're both looking at a single datapoint. Two is barely enough to be worthwhile, but at least it's something you can draw a line between. This is woefully incomplete research, hardly worth publishing at all. But maybe it'll be useful if contrasted with other numbers.
It's traditional at this point to ask what could be improved. The main thing seems to be graphics. Both these games look pretty good. Colourful distinctive style, appropriate to the overall design. But it seems like low-res graphics put a lot of people off no matter what. When I can bring myself to, I'll sink some time into high-res graphics and try to get a measure on how big an effect this is. I love abstract low-fidelity graphics and it'd suck to have to give up on them because people are shallow or whatever, but if it lets me keep designing games I'll do it.
Saturday, 30 June 2012
Tuesday, 26 June 2012
Kompendium
This is an album of nine 2-player local-multiplayer games:
Exuberant Struggle, March Eternal, Ora et Labora, Twilight Beacon, Capricious Atom, Chang Chang, Zeta Forge, Hostile Pantograph, Glitch Tank.
itch.io link (windows)
download (mac - almost certainly doesn't work anymore)
I started making these early last year, with Exuberant Struggle for the TIGSource Versus Competition. It felt very rich with possibilities, so across the year I made several more.
At some point someone suggested that I should try putting them on iPad. So I bought one, ported Glitch Tank over, and found it worked amazingly well. Better than the original in fact, as though it was meant for a touchscreen all along. (If you have the privilege of owning an ios device, I highly recommend getting Glitch Tank for it - even if you find this PC version too confusing for you, you'll likely get on with the touch version a lot better.)
I got a bit discouraged after that though, because the other games did not port over anywhere near as naturally and the sales figures for Glitch Tank were not very promising. So I've sat on these for a while, occasionally tweaking them a little, occasionally struggling with the ios versions. But they need to be released, to be played, so here they are!
They're local-multiplayer only: there's no AI, no networking, you just play against a friend sharing the same keyboard.
Find a friend. Play them.
Wednesday, 20 June 2012
Games vs. games vs. "games"
Yesterday this article by Keith Burgun showed up and sparked a bunch of discussion: a way to better games. Mostly fairly hostile discussion. And naturally so, for the article is written in a very provocative tone (intentionally or not). But there is something of value in there that may be being missed. Not something "new" that will pull us out of some ludic "dark ages" into "enlightenment", but something that might be of practical use to some people designing games.
(There's also a lot that I disagree with, but others are generously criticising most of that already.)
Going to backtrack from games for a bit, start at a high level and work my way down.
Logic allows us to deduce things that are absolutely true. This may be counterintuitive if you haven't studied it, since most of the time in real life we can't know anything for certain, but in logic we can. It's a conditional truth though - we only obtain statements of the form "if A is true, then B is also true", which may not be so useful if we can't confirm A. All mathematics is of this form; everything is logically deduced from a small set of initial axioms which cannot themselves be proved. Logic can only make true statements about abstract systems that don't necessarily correspond to anything in the real world. But as Wigner exclaims in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, surprisingly often these systems can approximate reality well enough to be extremely useful.
Formal definitions are a powerful tool in logic. I posted more succinctly about this last time this topic rose up: definitions. They let us specify a class of objects in a way that's amenable to logical reasoning, allowing us to deduce new facts about it.
How useful this is depends on how structured the objects you're dealing with are. In general, the more restrictive the definition, the more structure there will be, the more truths you will be able to deduce about the objects so defined.
However, if you have too much structure, this can complicate things. Even if you're only interested in studying a single specific object, it often helps to take a step back and abstract it out a bit. Figure out what are the salient features of this object and reason just with those. Very often it is actually easier to prove a general statement that answers more than your original question than to answer it directly on its own. So there's a tension when picking a definition in making it both restrictive enough and broad enough to be a useful abstraction.
You can give a word any definition you want. As when writing a computer program you can define variable names however you choose, when writing a text you can define terms however suits you. But obviously going against common usage makes it harder for others to read, so there's value in trying to construct definitions that are formally useful and also capture the intuitive meaning of the term. It's usually infeasible to define how words are used in a completely precise way, but approximations can still be useful.
A definition is not a value judgement. Specifying a category for consideration does imply that you feel it's worthy of study, but it does not automatically follow that anything outside of it is less worthwhile. (But it's not uncommon for people to treat such a classification as though it contains an implicit valuation. Please don't do this.)
A restrictive definition need not restrict creativity. Sometimes choosing to work under a constraint can be a helpful creative tool; going deep into one area and understanding it thoroughly can generate new ideas. Other times, while you might not have initially chosen to work under a particular constraint, you end up satisfying it anyway; and then you can usefully apply results about it to your work. And if a proposed definition fails to capture what you're interested in, looking outside the intersection of the two categories is often a guide towards good examples.
So, games.
There are two meanings of the word "game" in common usage. One is very broad; as Wittgenstein points out, the word is used to cover a vast range of activities with little in common between them. But the word is often used in a quite specific way as well, to describe a particular kind of structured play, as when one says "it's not really a game" in an attempt to describe a work of interactive art such as Proteus or Dear Esther.
I use both meanings all the time and expect people to understand from context. This expectation is usually justified, but it sometimes leads to confusion - for example, a few days ago I tweeted this provocative statement: "if a game's not worth playing a hundred times, it's not worth playing once", and I immediately received replies suggesting certain puzzles as counterexamples. I agree that once you know the solution to a puzzle there's usually not much value to interacting with it further, but puzzles are not the type of object I was considering; however there was insufficient context to make my meaning clear. (Note that I don't necessarily believe my initial statement, I was just trying it out.)
The first of these two meanings of "game" refers to a very broad unstructured class of objects. There's not much that can be usefully said about them in general! It includes a lot of interesting stuff, but it's not a category where we can expect to logically reason out much of value. That's okay, there are other ways to explore it. Anna Anthropy vocally encourages inclusiveness in the game-development community in order to get as many different people with different viewpoints as possible making different things, and I heartily agree.
The second meaning, however, refers to a tightly restricted class of objects. There's a lot of structure, and logic is useful for navigating it. Numerous people have studied this class over the years. There is not a consensus definition, but various have been proposed. Some authors seem keen to search for 'one true definition' (Burgun among them) but having multiple competing definitions is not a problem. There are at least six different definitions of "matroid" in common use - all equivalent, but not obviously so - and researchers will use whichever gives most insight into the problem at hand. The case with games is similar (although in general our definitions will probably be closely overlapping but not equivalent), and we can similarly pick and choose to think in terms of whichever characteristics suit our present goals.
Crawford defines a game as an interactive activity in which active agents (including players) compete with each other and can use attacks to interfere with each other. This does a fairly good job of capturing the intuitive common-use meaning, but the word "attacks" is problematic; it fails to describe positive mutually beneficial interactions like resource trades in Settlers of Catan or action selection in Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy. The concept of "active agents" is somewhat subjective as well, as he himself admits, but it can be a useful model.
Costikyan builds on this in I Have No Words & I Must Design, he declares decision-making to be the key characteristic of games; defining them as "a form of art in which participants make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal."
Burgun's attempt owes much to the previous two, so I take issue with his claim that his definition is "new"; it's an attempt to codify a folk definition that's been in use for decades, and while his exact wording may be different he exalts decision-making just as Costikyan does. The claim of novelty suggests unfamiliarity with the work of prior authors (as do the claims that the craft of game design has not matured - we've seen incredible progress in board games in particular across the last couple of decades). However, it's a worthwhile attempt; the phrasing of "ambiguous decisions" is clear and evocative, and more flexible than Costikyan's discussion of "resources".
I will not attempt to provide a definition of my own, but I will suggest strong replayability as another characteristic of games with which a definition could be crafted (possibly rendering my earlier tweet tautological).
This class of "games" is by no means the only one worth looking at. Let's explore the entire world of play in all its variety! Kanaga presents one interesting framework for examining playspaces in general: Played Meaning (Concerning the Spiritual in Games).
But when the systems we create do fit into an established category, games or otherwise, it's useful to draw upon the body of knowledge accumulated about that category. And if we're not certain how to proceed with a design, whether it fits into an established category or not, it can be helpful to abstract out its salient features and reason logically about them - possibly inventing a new category as we go. As in Science, we must confirm our ideas through experiment, but a sound theoretical framework helps to point out interesting directions to experiment in.
So this may not be an approach that you find personally useful - whether because of how your mind works, or because you're not working within any conveniently structured class of objects - but it is not without value at all. I find it useful, and some of my work I'm most proud of has been inspired by this type of approach.
(There's also a lot that I disagree with, but others are generously criticising most of that already.)
Going to backtrack from games for a bit, start at a high level and work my way down.
Logic allows us to deduce things that are absolutely true. This may be counterintuitive if you haven't studied it, since most of the time in real life we can't know anything for certain, but in logic we can. It's a conditional truth though - we only obtain statements of the form "if A is true, then B is also true", which may not be so useful if we can't confirm A. All mathematics is of this form; everything is logically deduced from a small set of initial axioms which cannot themselves be proved. Logic can only make true statements about abstract systems that don't necessarily correspond to anything in the real world. But as Wigner exclaims in The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences, surprisingly often these systems can approximate reality well enough to be extremely useful.
Formal definitions are a powerful tool in logic. I posted more succinctly about this last time this topic rose up: definitions. They let us specify a class of objects in a way that's amenable to logical reasoning, allowing us to deduce new facts about it.
How useful this is depends on how structured the objects you're dealing with are. In general, the more restrictive the definition, the more structure there will be, the more truths you will be able to deduce about the objects so defined.
However, if you have too much structure, this can complicate things. Even if you're only interested in studying a single specific object, it often helps to take a step back and abstract it out a bit. Figure out what are the salient features of this object and reason just with those. Very often it is actually easier to prove a general statement that answers more than your original question than to answer it directly on its own. So there's a tension when picking a definition in making it both restrictive enough and broad enough to be a useful abstraction.
You can give a word any definition you want. As when writing a computer program you can define variable names however you choose, when writing a text you can define terms however suits you. But obviously going against common usage makes it harder for others to read, so there's value in trying to construct definitions that are formally useful and also capture the intuitive meaning of the term. It's usually infeasible to define how words are used in a completely precise way, but approximations can still be useful.
A definition is not a value judgement. Specifying a category for consideration does imply that you feel it's worthy of study, but it does not automatically follow that anything outside of it is less worthwhile. (But it's not uncommon for people to treat such a classification as though it contains an implicit valuation. Please don't do this.)
A restrictive definition need not restrict creativity. Sometimes choosing to work under a constraint can be a helpful creative tool; going deep into one area and understanding it thoroughly can generate new ideas. Other times, while you might not have initially chosen to work under a particular constraint, you end up satisfying it anyway; and then you can usefully apply results about it to your work. And if a proposed definition fails to capture what you're interested in, looking outside the intersection of the two categories is often a guide towards good examples.
So, games.
There are two meanings of the word "game" in common usage. One is very broad; as Wittgenstein points out, the word is used to cover a vast range of activities with little in common between them. But the word is often used in a quite specific way as well, to describe a particular kind of structured play, as when one says "it's not really a game" in an attempt to describe a work of interactive art such as Proteus or Dear Esther.
I use both meanings all the time and expect people to understand from context. This expectation is usually justified, but it sometimes leads to confusion - for example, a few days ago I tweeted this provocative statement: "if a game's not worth playing a hundred times, it's not worth playing once", and I immediately received replies suggesting certain puzzles as counterexamples. I agree that once you know the solution to a puzzle there's usually not much value to interacting with it further, but puzzles are not the type of object I was considering; however there was insufficient context to make my meaning clear. (Note that I don't necessarily believe my initial statement, I was just trying it out.)
The first of these two meanings of "game" refers to a very broad unstructured class of objects. There's not much that can be usefully said about them in general! It includes a lot of interesting stuff, but it's not a category where we can expect to logically reason out much of value. That's okay, there are other ways to explore it. Anna Anthropy vocally encourages inclusiveness in the game-development community in order to get as many different people with different viewpoints as possible making different things, and I heartily agree.
The second meaning, however, refers to a tightly restricted class of objects. There's a lot of structure, and logic is useful for navigating it. Numerous people have studied this class over the years. There is not a consensus definition, but various have been proposed. Some authors seem keen to search for 'one true definition' (Burgun among them) but having multiple competing definitions is not a problem. There are at least six different definitions of "matroid" in common use - all equivalent, but not obviously so - and researchers will use whichever gives most insight into the problem at hand. The case with games is similar (although in general our definitions will probably be closely overlapping but not equivalent), and we can similarly pick and choose to think in terms of whichever characteristics suit our present goals.
Crawford defines a game as an interactive activity in which active agents (including players) compete with each other and can use attacks to interfere with each other. This does a fairly good job of capturing the intuitive common-use meaning, but the word "attacks" is problematic; it fails to describe positive mutually beneficial interactions like resource trades in Settlers of Catan or action selection in Puerto Rico and Race for the Galaxy. The concept of "active agents" is somewhat subjective as well, as he himself admits, but it can be a useful model.
Costikyan builds on this in I Have No Words & I Must Design, he declares decision-making to be the key characteristic of games; defining them as "a form of art in which participants make decisions in order to manage resources through game tokens in the pursuit of a goal."
Burgun's attempt owes much to the previous two, so I take issue with his claim that his definition is "new"; it's an attempt to codify a folk definition that's been in use for decades, and while his exact wording may be different he exalts decision-making just as Costikyan does. The claim of novelty suggests unfamiliarity with the work of prior authors (as do the claims that the craft of game design has not matured - we've seen incredible progress in board games in particular across the last couple of decades). However, it's a worthwhile attempt; the phrasing of "ambiguous decisions" is clear and evocative, and more flexible than Costikyan's discussion of "resources".
I will not attempt to provide a definition of my own, but I will suggest strong replayability as another characteristic of games with which a definition could be crafted (possibly rendering my earlier tweet tautological).
This class of "games" is by no means the only one worth looking at. Let's explore the entire world of play in all its variety! Kanaga presents one interesting framework for examining playspaces in general: Played Meaning (Concerning the Spiritual in Games).
But when the systems we create do fit into an established category, games or otherwise, it's useful to draw upon the body of knowledge accumulated about that category. And if we're not certain how to proceed with a design, whether it fits into an established category or not, it can be helpful to abstract out its salient features and reason logically about them - possibly inventing a new category as we go. As in Science, we must confirm our ideas through experiment, but a sound theoretical framework helps to point out interesting directions to experiment in.
So this may not be an approach that you find personally useful - whether because of how your mind works, or because you're not working within any conveniently structured class of objects - but it is not without value at all. I find it useful, and some of my work I'm most proud of has been inspired by this type of approach.
Friday, 8 June 2012
Because We May results
Following up from previous post:
Sos had a similar idea to me; he raised the price of Super Office Stress to $99.99. Which is pretty great; I was too timid to go off the scale like that and I'm stoked that someone else did. His writeup is here. Between us we provoked some discussion and provided some entertainment, so I definitely count it as a success. I enjoyed browsing various forum threads about the sale and seeing people have a bit of a chuckle when they noticed what we'd done (or in some cases freaking out, getting angry, or assuming it was an error).
To clarify some things: I'm not stupid, and I know how sales usually work. I know sales do work - Vertex Dispenser was in the Indie Royale bundle recently and that was easily the most profitable thing I've done in game-selling, I'm very grateful to them for that opportunity. I know that not everyone has a huge amount of money - I don't - and I love that sales can make things (legitimately) available to people who simply can't afford to purchase them at full price. I certainly don't think that sales are something we should never do.
But it worries me if massive discounts become the only way to sell games at all, because that's an environment in which only those selling a huge number of copies can survive. I'm way more interested - both as a creator and a consumer - in weird obscure stuff that doesn't tend to appeal to a mass audience, so I'd like to encourage a system where that sort of thing is viable.
So here are some numbers:
Glitch Tank
Week before the sale: 14 copies.
During the sale: 7 copies.
Week after the sale: 25 copies.
Zaga-33
Week before the sale: 27 copies.
During the sale: 3 copies.
Week after the sale: 90 copies.
So my total income from those games those weeks was about $40, $50, $100.
(It's fiddly to work out the exact numbers for this because appstore prices vary between regions, and they don't tell you directly.)
Thank you to everyone who bought my games - at either price.
Sos had a similar idea to me; he raised the price of Super Office Stress to $99.99. Which is pretty great; I was too timid to go off the scale like that and I'm stoked that someone else did. His writeup is here. Between us we provoked some discussion and provided some entertainment, so I definitely count it as a success. I enjoyed browsing various forum threads about the sale and seeing people have a bit of a chuckle when they noticed what we'd done (or in some cases freaking out, getting angry, or assuming it was an error).
To clarify some things: I'm not stupid, and I know how sales usually work. I know sales do work - Vertex Dispenser was in the Indie Royale bundle recently and that was easily the most profitable thing I've done in game-selling, I'm very grateful to them for that opportunity. I know that not everyone has a huge amount of money - I don't - and I love that sales can make things (legitimately) available to people who simply can't afford to purchase them at full price. I certainly don't think that sales are something we should never do.
But it worries me if massive discounts become the only way to sell games at all, because that's an environment in which only those selling a huge number of copies can survive. I'm way more interested - both as a creator and a consumer - in weird obscure stuff that doesn't tend to appeal to a mass audience, so I'd like to encourage a system where that sort of thing is viable.
So here are some numbers:
Glitch Tank
Week before the sale: 14 copies.
During the sale: 7 copies.
Week after the sale: 25 copies.
Zaga-33
Week before the sale: 27 copies.
During the sale: 3 copies.
Week after the sale: 90 copies.
So my total income from those games those weeks was about $40, $50, $100.
(It's fiddly to work out the exact numbers for this because appstore prices vary between regions, and they don't tell you directly.)
Thank you to everyone who bought my games - at either price.
Thursday, 24 May 2012
Pricing
So here's a thing: http://www.becausewemay.com/
When I first heard of this it seemed pretty irrelevant to me. Control of prices isn't something I've personally had a problem with, and it's certainly not the direst problem in the world. Seemed a bit of a silly thing to make a fuss about.
But thinking about it some more, maybe I am indirectly affected. I'm affected by expectations of what the costs of games should be, for what a game of a particular cost should look like. I'm not entirely free to set prices how I like, if I need anyone to buy them.
One review of Vertex Dispenser said "this would be a great game at $7, but at $10 I can't recommend it to anyone".
Oh yes.
Couple of days ago a customer review of Zaga-33 said it wasn't at all worth the price (along with being very bad, a scam with fake reviews, etc.).
It cost a dollar.
So how much should a game cost? I don't have a clue; for mine I've been picking numbers fairly arbitrarily and probably getting it wrong. It's tricky because the value you're trying to maximise (or at least to get high enough to cover living costs) is Price*Sales, but you can't know the number of sales in advance and it's going to depend somewhat on the price. If you're selling hundreds of thousands of copies (as some are) then this will come out high enough no matter what, but when sales are low the other factor is important. Apparently my games are "niche" (i.e. most people don't like them) which means I should be charging more per unit than someone with a bigger audience does.
So while I kind of get the point of this sale, I feel like it's going about things backwards. Dropping prices - well hey, they might be too low already, the thing to celebrate is being able to set them higher. Get out of this race to the bottom.
So I've signed up for the sale. And it amuses me to set the sale prices higher than the originals. Make of this what you will.
Vertex Dispenser is on a "50% on sale" for $15.01, antidiscounted from $9.99. (If prices ending in .99 make you a bit more likely to buy something, maybe the .01 will slightly deter you.)
Glitch Tank and Zaga-33 are both at $6.99, antidiscounted from $1.99 and $0.99 respectively. The apple store doesn't allow prices that don't end in 99 - a mark against them.
Gotta mention Sophie Houlden's price-swinging sale somewhere here because she did something similar and it's a great story: link.
When I first heard of this it seemed pretty irrelevant to me. Control of prices isn't something I've personally had a problem with, and it's certainly not the direst problem in the world. Seemed a bit of a silly thing to make a fuss about.
But thinking about it some more, maybe I am indirectly affected. I'm affected by expectations of what the costs of games should be, for what a game of a particular cost should look like. I'm not entirely free to set prices how I like, if I need anyone to buy them.
One review of Vertex Dispenser said "this would be a great game at $7, but at $10 I can't recommend it to anyone".
Oh yes.
Couple of days ago a customer review of Zaga-33 said it wasn't at all worth the price (along with being very bad, a scam with fake reviews, etc.).
It cost a dollar.
So how much should a game cost? I don't have a clue; for mine I've been picking numbers fairly arbitrarily and probably getting it wrong. It's tricky because the value you're trying to maximise (or at least to get high enough to cover living costs) is Price*Sales, but you can't know the number of sales in advance and it's going to depend somewhat on the price. If you're selling hundreds of thousands of copies (as some are) then this will come out high enough no matter what, but when sales are low the other factor is important. Apparently my games are "niche" (i.e. most people don't like them) which means I should be charging more per unit than someone with a bigger audience does.
So while I kind of get the point of this sale, I feel like it's going about things backwards. Dropping prices - well hey, they might be too low already, the thing to celebrate is being able to set them higher. Get out of this race to the bottom.
So I've signed up for the sale. And it amuses me to set the sale prices higher than the originals. Make of this what you will.
Vertex Dispenser is on a "50% on sale" for $15.01, antidiscounted from $9.99. (If prices ending in .99 make you a bit more likely to buy something, maybe the .01 will slightly deter you.)
Glitch Tank and Zaga-33 are both at $6.99, antidiscounted from $1.99 and $0.99 respectively. The apple store doesn't allow prices that don't end in 99 - a mark against them.
Gotta mention Sophie Houlden's price-swinging sale somewhere here because she did something similar and it's a great story: link.
Tuesday, 15 May 2012
Score, Comment Threads, Dominant Ideologies
Came across this article yesterday: Score in Videogames. I agree with much of it, but not all. But what I wanted to talk about was how some of the responses I've seen to that article got me thinking. See e.g. the comments on that article, or where it's linked on tigsource, or on RPS. Or actually don't bother, because comment threads are unpleasant places to visit, I'll sum it up for you here.
(Aside: I saw a discussion recently about how much of a nicer place the internet is if you block out all comment threads. But the truth is that it isn't always a nice place, and neither is the world, and there's honest human expression there. Better to engage with unpleasant realities as they are than to construct a filter bubble to censor things you're not comfortable with.)
To summarise: a lot of people take issue with him making claims about what games "should" do, especially where this conflicts with a particular game that they liked. This doesn't come as a surprise; I've seen the exact same response to similar claims before. Nobody likes being told how things "should" be. And that's mostly fair enough, placing restrictions on creativity is a bad thing.
I wrote about definitions before; basically with this kind of article I'd prefer writers to precisely specify what they're talking about - here Keith is implicitly discussing endlessly replayable single-player games (and I largely agree with his conclusions when seen through this lens), and it might have been better to make this explicit from the start. Not all games should aim to be endlessly replayable, and when that's not your goal you'll have different conclusions about what you should do. I don't agree that putting stories in games is a terrible idea overall, but it definitely does conflict with replayability - e.g. Planescape: Torment is akin to a fine novel and I will replay it in a few years time, but most story-based games I'll never play again and ZiGGURAT I'll replay tomorrow. The question of what's "wrong" depends on what ideal you're aiming for.
But there's something I love about such claims, the boldness of saying "you're all doing it wrong, your taste is wrong, this is how things should be done and I'm going to do it better to prove it to you!". It's a fantastic motivation to make stuff. I love that Keith has strong opinions about how games are doing score wrong and how putting stories in games is a terrible mistake, and is making games to show how to do it better. I love that Jonas Kyratzes has strong opinions about how stories in games are important and that people who think we should consider them in a strictly mechanical way are wrong, and he's making games to show how to do it better. I love that Tale of Tales expound their opinions about what games should be doing and are making games to show it - even though I think they're pretty much wrong and their games are kind of terrible. Fighting against the way things are usually done is a good way to make things that are interesting.
I'm more interested in the art that comes out of these opinions than in words written about them, but writing words is a good way to enter a structured mode of thought and clarify ideas for personal use. It's also useful to communicate these ideas to an audience that isn't necessarily ludoliterate enough to interpret for themselves what a particular game says.
I guess part of why this appeals to me is that this is largely my own motivation for making games. Everyone else is doing it wrong and I can do better. If enough other people were making stuff that I considered satisfactory I wouldn't bother, I'd go do something else. (Personal aside: this might explain why I've struggled to maintain motivation in doing mathematics; for the most part I'm satisfied with how everyone else is doing it. There are some things they're doing wrong that I might have to fix sometime, but overall I'm happy with what others are doing.)
However, not all goals are equal! I've maybe veered towards being a bit wishy-washy here. Design choices should be evaluated in terms of your aesthetic goals, and conclusions that are valid for one set of goals may be invalid for another, but the goals themselves need to be evaluated. There's not one true aesthetic that we should all aim for, but there are better and worse aesthetics.
The dominant ideology in videogames follows from the necessities of large commercial studios; the need to sell to a large audience, the need for a clear pipeline that outputs games in a predictable amount of time and can have lots of people working simultaneously on different parts, the need to keep selling new things each year. There's no reason to expect that fulfilling these requirements will produce something that's artistically valuable, that's good for people. And there's every reason to expect that it won't produce something endlessly replayable. (Subscription-based games and the so-called "free-to-play" model work slightly differently, aiming to continuously harvest money from players in a single game rather than selling multiple discrete games; this tends to lead to an even worse aesthetic.)
The necessities of an independent developer are somewhat different; we can survive selling to a smaller audience, we don't need to coordinate large groups of people. We still need to produce new things regularly and sell them to a non-trivial number of people to survive though. (Exceptions of course for people making games as a hobby while getting their income somewhere else, but my experience is that it's really tough to get much done at all this way. Oh, and a big exception for notch.)
But the unfortunate thing is, much of the current audience for games has bought into the mainstream ideology, the types of games that it produces are what they're comfortable with, and so there's a feedback effect that affects all developers - people like what they're used to, it's easier to sell them what they already like, so it's more viable to create things in the same mould, and so that continues to be what people are used to.
I've been thinking a lot recently about what games to make. I kind of need to figure out how to make games that people will buy - not necessarily for everything I make, but enough for a sustainable income. But more importantly I want to change the world, I want to make things that will influence people for the better. The paradoxical thing is that at one level these goals are well aligned - more people playing my games means both more people buying them and more people I'm having an effect on, but at another level they directly conflict - the aesthetics I believe are beneficial are opposed to what sells, what people are comfortable with. I don't have a resolution to this yet.
(Either way, I'll show you all how you're doing it wrong.)
(Aside: I saw a discussion recently about how much of a nicer place the internet is if you block out all comment threads. But the truth is that it isn't always a nice place, and neither is the world, and there's honest human expression there. Better to engage with unpleasant realities as they are than to construct a filter bubble to censor things you're not comfortable with.)
To summarise: a lot of people take issue with him making claims about what games "should" do, especially where this conflicts with a particular game that they liked. This doesn't come as a surprise; I've seen the exact same response to similar claims before. Nobody likes being told how things "should" be. And that's mostly fair enough, placing restrictions on creativity is a bad thing.
I wrote about definitions before; basically with this kind of article I'd prefer writers to precisely specify what they're talking about - here Keith is implicitly discussing endlessly replayable single-player games (and I largely agree with his conclusions when seen through this lens), and it might have been better to make this explicit from the start. Not all games should aim to be endlessly replayable, and when that's not your goal you'll have different conclusions about what you should do. I don't agree that putting stories in games is a terrible idea overall, but it definitely does conflict with replayability - e.g. Planescape: Torment is akin to a fine novel and I will replay it in a few years time, but most story-based games I'll never play again and ZiGGURAT I'll replay tomorrow. The question of what's "wrong" depends on what ideal you're aiming for.
But there's something I love about such claims, the boldness of saying "you're all doing it wrong, your taste is wrong, this is how things should be done and I'm going to do it better to prove it to you!". It's a fantastic motivation to make stuff. I love that Keith has strong opinions about how games are doing score wrong and how putting stories in games is a terrible mistake, and is making games to show how to do it better. I love that Jonas Kyratzes has strong opinions about how stories in games are important and that people who think we should consider them in a strictly mechanical way are wrong, and he's making games to show how to do it better. I love that Tale of Tales expound their opinions about what games should be doing and are making games to show it - even though I think they're pretty much wrong and their games are kind of terrible. Fighting against the way things are usually done is a good way to make things that are interesting.
I'm more interested in the art that comes out of these opinions than in words written about them, but writing words is a good way to enter a structured mode of thought and clarify ideas for personal use. It's also useful to communicate these ideas to an audience that isn't necessarily ludoliterate enough to interpret for themselves what a particular game says.
I guess part of why this appeals to me is that this is largely my own motivation for making games. Everyone else is doing it wrong and I can do better. If enough other people were making stuff that I considered satisfactory I wouldn't bother, I'd go do something else. (Personal aside: this might explain why I've struggled to maintain motivation in doing mathematics; for the most part I'm satisfied with how everyone else is doing it. There are some things they're doing wrong that I might have to fix sometime, but overall I'm happy with what others are doing.)
However, not all goals are equal! I've maybe veered towards being a bit wishy-washy here. Design choices should be evaluated in terms of your aesthetic goals, and conclusions that are valid for one set of goals may be invalid for another, but the goals themselves need to be evaluated. There's not one true aesthetic that we should all aim for, but there are better and worse aesthetics.
The dominant ideology in videogames follows from the necessities of large commercial studios; the need to sell to a large audience, the need for a clear pipeline that outputs games in a predictable amount of time and can have lots of people working simultaneously on different parts, the need to keep selling new things each year. There's no reason to expect that fulfilling these requirements will produce something that's artistically valuable, that's good for people. And there's every reason to expect that it won't produce something endlessly replayable. (Subscription-based games and the so-called "free-to-play" model work slightly differently, aiming to continuously harvest money from players in a single game rather than selling multiple discrete games; this tends to lead to an even worse aesthetic.)
The necessities of an independent developer are somewhat different; we can survive selling to a smaller audience, we don't need to coordinate large groups of people. We still need to produce new things regularly and sell them to a non-trivial number of people to survive though. (Exceptions of course for people making games as a hobby while getting their income somewhere else, but my experience is that it's really tough to get much done at all this way. Oh, and a big exception for notch.)
But the unfortunate thing is, much of the current audience for games has bought into the mainstream ideology, the types of games that it produces are what they're comfortable with, and so there's a feedback effect that affects all developers - people like what they're used to, it's easier to sell them what they already like, so it's more viable to create things in the same mould, and so that continues to be what people are used to.
I've been thinking a lot recently about what games to make. I kind of need to figure out how to make games that people will buy - not necessarily for everything I make, but enough for a sustainable income. But more importantly I want to change the world, I want to make things that will influence people for the better. The paradoxical thing is that at one level these goals are well aligned - more people playing my games means both more people buying them and more people I'm having an effect on, but at another level they directly conflict - the aesthetics I believe are beneficial are opposed to what sells, what people are comfortable with. I don't have a resolution to this yet.
(Either way, I'll show you all how you're doing it wrong.)
Sunday, 6 May 2012
zaga 33 assorted comments
Zaga-33 seems to have gone down really well - I've had lots of positive comments about it, and I'm just really happy about that (and no really negative comments, which is even better). The iOS version's sold ~1200 copies so far, which I guess isn't super amazing or anything, but I'm still pretty pleased with it.
It's a bit of a weird one for me because the game isn't really "innovative", at least not in the way I usually try to work - it's more of a fresh combination of old ideas rather than having new ideas.
Just wanted to make a few more comments about it, address a couple of things that have come up in user reviews and such. Quickly written poorly-edited post.
Gamecenter. Before release of the iOS version Brandon recommended I add an online scoreboard thing because people like that. I decided no. A few user reviews have said they'd like it. I'm still leaning towards no.
I decided no after listening to Bennett Foddy's GDC talk this year, in which he attributed some of the popularity and social-mediability of QWOP to the lack of any built in social media elements which forced people to find their own ways of sharing things. Lots of videos posted to youtube of people inching their way along on their knees terribly slowly, which they were proud of because they thought they'd beat the system. If there's an online leaderboard, instantly everyone can compare themselves to the best in the world and feel inferior with their lesser achievements.
So in Zaga-33, I'm seeing people being proud of getting to level 17 say, and feeling like it's an accomplishment - and I totally support that, it *is* an accomplishment, level 16 is damn hard. If they knew that @rocketcatgames had scored 40pts within a couple of days of release it would deflate that whole sense of achievement. If you're familiar with playing roguelikes, it's not too difficult to complete it; the leaderboard will full up with COMPLETION scores in no time; without a board everyone can just compare to their own best and feel good as they improve.
Also, there's a limited range of scores. Score is "level reached", plus if you kill the end-boss 5 points for killing him and 1 for each item left in your inventory. I think leaderboards work best if there's a wide range of scores with more incremental improvements. I'm by no means ruling out doing it for a different game.
Lack of a "wait" button (or diagonal movement). This makes combat a bit weird because the game board is bipartite; monsters move whenever you move so if an enemy has the same parity as you you'll never be able to get next to it without it getting a hit on you first, unless you find some way to switch your parity (fighting a different enemy or using an item). It pushes it away from 'realism' to more of a puzzle. I think most roguelikes go through this phase early in development before a "wait" key is added; in keeping with minimalism I chose to keep it and make the weirdness that comes from it be part of the game. If you could wait a turn, an item like the nuke would be way overpowered given the deterministic combat system - it would reliably let you clear a level while taking no damage.
"More powerups/monsters/levels"
I don't want to; minimalism is most of what makes this game any good. I totally get that this is the kind of thing people like to see in updates, but just adding more stuff indiscriminately would break the game so I have to be careful.
Lot of people complained about the touch controls. Something I'm learning making iOS games - no matter what controls you pick someone will complain about them. I don't like adding lots of different control options (Hard Lines has ~8 and they all have weird names so you can't guess what they'll do without trying them out). But I added swipe to move as an option you can turn on from the titlescreen, that seems to have cheered people up. I find the original controls (touch somewhere to move towards there) feel really good on iPad, but I can see why they're not ideal for everyone on iPhone/Pod, especially if you're trying to play one-handed.
If you're using the original controls and having trouble exiting levels - just tap on the @ when it's by the exit to exit. There's not touch-sensitive material past the edge of the screen, so obviously you can't touch there to move there.
One review suggested: "some kind of benefit to killing monsters, as it would another dimension to the game".
Most people seem to appreciate this but I wanted to address it anyway: adding a benefit to kill monsters would actually *remove* a dimension from the game. As it is, you have a choice about how to get past enemies - fight them, use items, or try to stealthily sneak past them. Or some combination thereof. It's a strategic puzzle to find the best approach to each random level while conserving resources (items/hp). There *is* a benefit to killing monsters - it removes them as obstacles. Most roguelike (or generally RPG-style) games give direct benefits from killing, usually experience levels making your character more powerful. Generally this means you're almost required to kill them; otherwise you fall behind in power level and won't be able to keep up as the game gets more difficult. It removes a choice; bypassing encounters is suboptimal. Omitting this killing-bonus restores that choice.
(aside: in some tabletop RPGs experience points are awarded for completing encounters regardless of the method used - whether you fight or sneak past or sweet-talk your way out of trouble; this is cool.)
The area-damage items (laser, bomb) damage monsters if they move into an affected tile on the next turn. I'm really pleased with this. It came about by accident (remind me to post about creating in a way that admits serendipity next time I'm ill). Because the monsters move straight away once you move they were overlapping the explosion animations and it just looked off. Obvious solutions were to delay monster movement, to make the explosions animate faster, or to make monster AI just not go there, OR to do as I did and make it destroy them as they move into it. Turns out this made for a really interesting mechanic! It interacts really well with the game of understanding the monster AI and predicting where they're going to move. Generates a moment of excitement when you use these items, because there's an element of gambling, you don't know what the precise effect will be because the monster movement has random elements. (Also made the items a little stronger, which felt generous.)
Whenever I play another roguelike now I expect area-effect powers to act like this and it throws me for a moment when they don't.
I really like that "how you have to limit yourself to something quickly" overlaps so much with "good design". I've started making roguelike games before and they tend towards complexity - all these different item types, spells, experience levels, character classes, etc. Just sticking with single-use items, a linear sequence of levels, deterministic combat, all monsters having 2hp - these were decisions to make sure I could complete the original game in a week, but they turned out to be really good design decisions as well. There's a lesson there about both the value of jams and how to do design in general. Roguelike Radio did an interview with Glenn Wichman, one of the creators of the original Rogue recently; what interested me was how much of the design of the game came out of the hardware restrictions of the time - things that turned out to be really elegant design decisions were forced upon them by technology rather than deliberately chosen.
It's a bit of a weird one for me because the game isn't really "innovative", at least not in the way I usually try to work - it's more of a fresh combination of old ideas rather than having new ideas.
Just wanted to make a few more comments about it, address a couple of things that have come up in user reviews and such. Quickly written poorly-edited post.
Gamecenter. Before release of the iOS version Brandon recommended I add an online scoreboard thing because people like that. I decided no. A few user reviews have said they'd like it. I'm still leaning towards no.
I decided no after listening to Bennett Foddy's GDC talk this year, in which he attributed some of the popularity and social-mediability of QWOP to the lack of any built in social media elements which forced people to find their own ways of sharing things. Lots of videos posted to youtube of people inching their way along on their knees terribly slowly, which they were proud of because they thought they'd beat the system. If there's an online leaderboard, instantly everyone can compare themselves to the best in the world and feel inferior with their lesser achievements.
So in Zaga-33, I'm seeing people being proud of getting to level 17 say, and feeling like it's an accomplishment - and I totally support that, it *is* an accomplishment, level 16 is damn hard. If they knew that @rocketcatgames had scored 40pts within a couple of days of release it would deflate that whole sense of achievement. If you're familiar with playing roguelikes, it's not too difficult to complete it; the leaderboard will full up with COMPLETION scores in no time; without a board everyone can just compare to their own best and feel good as they improve.
Also, there's a limited range of scores. Score is "level reached", plus if you kill the end-boss 5 points for killing him and 1 for each item left in your inventory. I think leaderboards work best if there's a wide range of scores with more incremental improvements. I'm by no means ruling out doing it for a different game.
Lack of a "wait" button (or diagonal movement). This makes combat a bit weird because the game board is bipartite; monsters move whenever you move so if an enemy has the same parity as you you'll never be able to get next to it without it getting a hit on you first, unless you find some way to switch your parity (fighting a different enemy or using an item). It pushes it away from 'realism' to more of a puzzle. I think most roguelikes go through this phase early in development before a "wait" key is added; in keeping with minimalism I chose to keep it and make the weirdness that comes from it be part of the game. If you could wait a turn, an item like the nuke would be way overpowered given the deterministic combat system - it would reliably let you clear a level while taking no damage.
"More powerups/monsters/levels"
I don't want to; minimalism is most of what makes this game any good. I totally get that this is the kind of thing people like to see in updates, but just adding more stuff indiscriminately would break the game so I have to be careful.
Lot of people complained about the touch controls. Something I'm learning making iOS games - no matter what controls you pick someone will complain about them. I don't like adding lots of different control options (Hard Lines has ~8 and they all have weird names so you can't guess what they'll do without trying them out). But I added swipe to move as an option you can turn on from the titlescreen, that seems to have cheered people up. I find the original controls (touch somewhere to move towards there) feel really good on iPad, but I can see why they're not ideal for everyone on iPhone/Pod, especially if you're trying to play one-handed.
If you're using the original controls and having trouble exiting levels - just tap on the @ when it's by the exit to exit. There's not touch-sensitive material past the edge of the screen, so obviously you can't touch there to move there.
One review suggested: "some kind of benefit to killing monsters, as it would another dimension to the game".
Most people seem to appreciate this but I wanted to address it anyway: adding a benefit to kill monsters would actually *remove* a dimension from the game. As it is, you have a choice about how to get past enemies - fight them, use items, or try to stealthily sneak past them. Or some combination thereof. It's a strategic puzzle to find the best approach to each random level while conserving resources (items/hp). There *is* a benefit to killing monsters - it removes them as obstacles. Most roguelike (or generally RPG-style) games give direct benefits from killing, usually experience levels making your character more powerful. Generally this means you're almost required to kill them; otherwise you fall behind in power level and won't be able to keep up as the game gets more difficult. It removes a choice; bypassing encounters is suboptimal. Omitting this killing-bonus restores that choice.
(aside: in some tabletop RPGs experience points are awarded for completing encounters regardless of the method used - whether you fight or sneak past or sweet-talk your way out of trouble; this is cool.)
The area-damage items (laser, bomb) damage monsters if they move into an affected tile on the next turn. I'm really pleased with this. It came about by accident (remind me to post about creating in a way that admits serendipity next time I'm ill). Because the monsters move straight away once you move they were overlapping the explosion animations and it just looked off. Obvious solutions were to delay monster movement, to make the explosions animate faster, or to make monster AI just not go there, OR to do as I did and make it destroy them as they move into it. Turns out this made for a really interesting mechanic! It interacts really well with the game of understanding the monster AI and predicting where they're going to move. Generates a moment of excitement when you use these items, because there's an element of gambling, you don't know what the precise effect will be because the monster movement has random elements. (Also made the items a little stronger, which felt generous.)
Whenever I play another roguelike now I expect area-effect powers to act like this and it throws me for a moment when they don't.
I really like that "how you have to limit yourself to something quickly" overlaps so much with "good design". I've started making roguelike games before and they tend towards complexity - all these different item types, spells, experience levels, character classes, etc. Just sticking with single-use items, a linear sequence of levels, deterministic combat, all monsters having 2hp - these were decisions to make sure I could complete the original game in a week, but they turned out to be really good design decisions as well. There's a lesson there about both the value of jams and how to do design in general. Roguelike Radio did an interview with Glenn Wichman, one of the creators of the original Rogue recently; what interested me was how much of the design of the game came out of the hardware restrictions of the time - things that turned out to be really elegant design decisions were forced upon them by technology rather than deliberately chosen.
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