Our first game doesn’t really aim at a specific niche although you can say platformer gamers will keep an eye on it. We wanted to start small, but with a game which any gamer can try it, play it and have fun with it. It’s not your typical platformer if I may say so: it starts with the basic platformer features, but goes further with challenging puzzles and a unique morphing system to overcome the challenges you encounter in the World of XI. So far in my opinion the recipe is correct. This is because I was talking with a few developers these days about what makes a game good for each of us and I remember that my answer was composed from two choices: the “wow” moment and a specific gameplay feature. The memorable wow moments for me were in Call of Duty 4 in the heavily scripted, but spectacular sniping mission, which is full of adrenaline, fast movement, and incredible scenes and in Final Fantasy XIII, where at the beginning of the story there is a presentation of the main city, which, I must say, is incredible. On the gameplay feature side I chose the superb combat from Mount&Blade.
In my opinion, as an indie (independent) game developer you got to start small with something YOU would like to play, and add the novelty element consisting of one or a few things the other developers haven’t tried yet. If you can’t find anything new, just make sure that whatever it is, you make it better. Then work at the game and release it ONLY when you and the team are happy with the state of the project. Is it fun? Is it challenging? Is it memorable? These are the questions you need to ask yourself and find answers to. Also a good way to see this when the game is ready (playable version) is to do a gameplay test session with several people, from veteran gamers to simple non-gamers, and analyze how they react, see if you spot any big gameplay problems. Tell them nothing more than how to play and then just watch them and take notes – you will find out more than 50 editorial teams can tell you.
Why indie developers? Well some people decide to become indie developers because they’ve always wanted to create games. They have no big design experience, but they are very dedicated and in the end they actually come with interesting products. Some people were already developers at big companies, but due to limitations, mainstreaming gameplay for sales, they move to indie to try their best, have fun, and experiment with new things without worrying if for example a “feature” is both fun and easy to understand by 1 million people. Of course accessibility is not a bad thing, but when you take an RPG and you mainstream it for FPS players you end up having RPG developers and fans going mad.
One big step that not many indies take into consideration is the web promotion/marketing. When you have a product you gotta start heavily promoting it, from videos, media in general, to press releases, interviews and previews with Gaming Sites, and web site promotion – this is one of my jobs at Pixel Toaster Studios. As indies many of us sale the game directly from our site and if we are lucky and the game production value and gameplay are good, we may get a chance to be on high traffic portals like Steam, Impulse, Gamersgate, etc. thus getting some money back from the investment which translates into money to produce more quality games. Remember: no matter how good the game is, if nobody knows about it, you will have no sales, and that it sad.
Well these are some thoughts I liked to share with you guys in my first blog post, hope you enjoy it.