GameDevBlog

On Closer Inspection...

It's not just that they're not buying energy; they're not spending energy.

I suppose that makes some sense. Once you're good, starting on a lower level is a huge advantage, (much more than 10%, I'm afraid) but probably pretty daunting when you're new. Buying the bonus multiplier every game seems like a no-brainer, though.

Hmm...

Woah

Last week, jumsimbab87 continued to hold the world champion title with 11909211 points!  He's looking untouchable. Nobody else has even broken 4 million. I had a personal best last week with 1.3M but haven't been able to hit those heights again. I don't know how he does it!

No updates today what with Thanksgiving and all, but I did just notice the global leaderboards are not showing your correct position unless you score in the top 10, so I'll be fixing that asap.

Unfortunately, nobody (other than friends) has bought energy yet, so apparently I need to think about my business model ... or stop working on the game and move on to some other project.

On the one hand, it's so much fun it seems like there has to be some way to make some money off it. On the other hand, um, how?

 

 

sixty second shooter update day!

This is a big one.

And there it is. Facebook friends. So. Invite your friends to play. Throw down.

Even if you don't use the facebook, the global leaderboards are more responsive now - they'll show you your position in the leaderboard instead of just the top 10.

You don't have to use your google account name in the leaderboard anymore - you can put in whatever alias you please.

And you can buy energy, support the game, and get cute little badges by your name on the leaderboard. Please do! 

I should add that I changed the way the database works, so if you got on the leaderboard this morning or yesterday evening, you're temporarily off it - but simply sign in and your old data will get copied over.

And the winner last week was jumsimbab87 with 5932288 points!  Congrats!

Whew. I'm taking a nap.

 

18 and a chunk hours left in this week's tournament

Those are some high scores...

Cool watching the scores go up!

It seems like I've gotten my server costs back under control. The key seemed to be sliding the "maximum number of instances" down to 1.

And I'm still on track for getting friend leaderboards and energy-buying in on Monday.

Django templates are infuriating

In App Engine anyway - at least partly because the Django docs online are for the latest version of Django but that's not what App Engine comes with. 

Cue a whole lot of head banging and "why isn't this working?"

Note to self: do as little as possible with the template system; format things with python instead.

Notes on sixty second shooter - why?

So, the first of some designer notes.

When I heard about Chrome's native client, my first thought was to take the game we had been working on with Richard Garfield and port it to the new "platform" ourselves, self-funded, and see what would happen. Nobody was as excited about that idea as I was - and for good reason, I suppose, since native client isn't a new platform per se. Chrome Web Store is the platform - and it's too late to be a launch title for that platform. In a way, it's a repeat of what we did with Schizoid, the first XNA game studio game for XBLA. The platform was already crowded, and using new tech made for a nice PR story which did drive a lot of attention to the game but the XBLA gold rush was over by the time we'd shipped.

But, to me, there's a huge difference: because, with Chrome and native client, you can do things in the browser that you couldn't do before (which was not the case with XNA Game Studio and XBLA - although XNAGS made things easier, it didn't necessarily enable new or better games) it's an ecological niche waiting for the right game to evolve there. 

So I thought to myself, what is that game? 

• It can't be a "big game", a Halo or Unreal, because nobody will want to sit through the load times. Even a "medium-sized game" is iffy.
• But it still has to distinguish itself from the sea of flash and javascript games out there. So it should be a game where native client and gl matters.
• Mouselock wasn't available yet, so first-person and Shadowgrounds sorts of control systems wouldn't work.
• I had to be able to do it in a short time with little-to-no help.

So an arcadey shooter started to look like the obvious choice. I was a little leery about mouse+keyboard: most browser games seem to avoid that, probably because it alienates the casual. I believe that's 'casual games conventional wisdom sacred cow #1': only use the mouse. (Looking around on Kongregate, WASD + mouse shooters are pretty rare.) But Realm of the Mad God demonstrated that you could get a decent sized fan base with a WASD shooter, so I went for it.

Why, what sort of game do you think is perfect for native client?

Progress

The "money shot":

The gotchas with Google In App Payments: you can't buy from yourself, so you need to make one account for the seller and another account for the buyer. And it's hard to test locally without opening up your computer to the world, but it's easy to write a batch file to deploy an app engine test app (the name of the app has to match the directory it's in, so my batch file copies the whole app folder and then copies over the yaml before deploying) and read the postback-verify logging from the dash.

I decided to do monetization with Google and friends with Facebook ... I can always add G+ later when they make it available. The problem there is managing the data. It would be nice to have one record per player. What if you log in with facebook, set a high score for friend-leaderboard-purposes, then log out, then log in with Google, and set a high score on the global leaderboard, and then log in with both? Wouldn't it be nice to combine those two records? I'm not sure if I'll have solved that in Version 1.1.

My plans for Version 1.1:

- friends leaderboards

- buy energy

- respond to the latest batch of feedback

Can I get it done by Monday? Seems like it's in striking distance.

3rd edition D&D considered as an illustration of the dangers of free-to-play

Lots of people have blogged about how your business model affects your game design. Here's yet another way of looking at it. This may sound like a slam on 3rd Ed but it's not - all I'm doing is pointing out that the nature of D&D fundamentally changed with the release of 3rd Ed, and the business model made that happen.

3rd edition D&D was almost completely open source - so much so that Paizo has been able to effectively re-release it as Pathfinder. Of course, the people at Wizards of the Coast said, "If we make this free, so that everyone can download most of it off the internet, how are we going to make money?" Every way they could think of: selling books (effectively merchandise at this point, something you buy because it's more convenient than looking up the rules on the internet, or because you're in a store and it's there and tempting, or because it looks good on your coffee table) and add-ons (splats, modules) and miniatures.

And, of course, they wanted to encourage their players to buy these things. The problem, as I see it, lies with the modules and miniatures. Moldvay's edition of Basic D&D - I believe the most popular D&D product in terms of units sold - said, on the back of the box: "This is a game that helps you imagine." Miniatures weren't required. Even modules weren't required - you could get a whole evening of play by rolling up some encounters on random tables.

But now they want to sell pregenerated modules and miniatures - so they design a game that's heavily about tactical combat, about moving your playing pieces around on a board, so you'll be encouraged to buy miniatures. And they design a game that's complex enough, that takes enough time to block out encounters, that it's almost foolish to design your own adventures, or make up what happens on the basis of encounter tables, so you're encouraged to buy modules. In comes the railroad. Out goes the imagination - instead of imagining whatever we want, we're constrained by the minis and modules.

Obviously, a lot of people - probably even most people - like their D&D that way. The minis and modules bring a huge amount of clarity and rigor to the game, and make it a more consistent product. And while the old Red Box Basic D&D may have been the single most succesful D&D product, certainly much, much more money was made off of 3rd edition in all.

But it had now become a different game. A game I enjoyed some for what it was, but never got the same sort of awesome out of as I did with Basic D&D or Paranoia or Call of Cthulhu or Space Opera or the new school of indie rpgs like Apocalypse World - games where it's all about the imagination.

So - am I suggesting we avoid free-to-play? No, of course not, I'm planning on making sixty second shooter free-to-play. I'm just saying I'm going to tread carefully on the path and try not to lose my way.

Crap! Didn't read the API closely enough

Remember my plan to monetize through Facebook?

Didn't read the docs closely enough: "Web Sites integrating Facebook (Connect) ... can not use Facebook Credits."

I wonder why not? Why leave that money on the table? Anybody know?

So ...

What am I going to do now?

I can only do friends leaderboards through facebook.

I can only sell in-game energy through Google.

Hmm ...

The Mac Framerate Bug Is Fixed

For now, anyway! I don't know why it's working but it is... or rather, I don't know why when I don't do this certain voodoo, the framerate goes to hell. Anyhow, the voodoo is in, and some day I hope to get to the bottom of what's really going on and report.

And with App Engine, still ran out of quota last night. Apparently it was spinning up more instances than I needed - it's favoring low-latency over cost-to-me. But I seem to be able to force it to not spin up too many extra instances, so maybe it's fixed.

Anyhow, for last week, biethb holds on to the world champion title with 3074819 points!