Yearly Archives: 2010

Announcing Vera Blanc: Ghost In The Castle

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I’ve already uploaded two teasing videos on youtube (you see one above) and now I’m officially announcing the next episode of Vera Blanc, called Ghost In The Castle, that will be released this fall, probably in September. The game story is being proofreaded/edited, so all is need after that is some testing and reviewing the plot to be sure that there aren’t big mistakes (plot holes and such). As you can see from the video, there’s a new comic artist for this game, Ricardo Mendez from a Brazilian comic studio.

This time, Vera and Brandon are investigating a mysterious ghosts that is haunting a castle in a town in middle of italian countryside.  A local famous businessman, Roberto Anastasi, wants Vera to solve the ghost problem, because he doesn’t want the town filled by tourists. The first day seems to be rather quiet and relaxing, but as soon as the night comes, Vera will have a short encounter with the ghost! A short chase in the woods that ends up in a opening and a man hanged on a tree!

Stay tuned for more details and a more accurate release date for the game.

making of online games, a newbie perspective

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If you’re a player, this is going to be a bit tech-boring post, be warned 🙂

I wanted to share what I’ve learnt so far from the release of my first Public Alpha of my game Planet Stronghold. Was a good choice to make it a downloadable? What if was a webgame coded in Flash /JS /Unity ? This is what I think are pro and con of each:

  • the problem of updating: I coded an autoupdater in python. It SHOULD be cross-platform and work everywhere. The first version was a bit bugged and missed some error messages. I don’t have any real statistics but from what I gathered from testers, my guess is that only 10-15% of people couldn’t use it for one reason or another. Still, it’s a good percentage of people!
  • With a webgame, the full asset/code gets updated on SERVER, so there’s no possibility that it fails: that’s a BIG advantage if you’re interested in making a online/MMO game. However be warned, the bandwidth use is going to be HUGE, since most browser have a very small cache of 50mb which means players are probably going to redownload the whole thing everytime.
  • Unless you use JS, you can have pretty much all effect you have with Renpy (with Flash), or a 3d engine (with Unity3d), online. The problem is that python is really one of the best RAD languages, that is most top games like Civilization, The Sims 3 or even Google uses it internally. Damn it, if only there was a working python to SWF compiler…!!! Any coder who’ll make that will be covered by gold, mark my words 🙂

Also, it’s SUPER EASY to make mistakes with online games. A first thing to do is NEVER mix your test server with the live server. For example I uploaded a wrong file last night, and the autoupdater would keep looping, thinking it’s always 1 version below the latest one 😐 Luckily for me Ayu was testing the game and reported the bug, which was only a wrongly uploaded file on server…!!

So for now I’ve learned lession number one. Always do your test in local, and if you really must, have a BACKUP SERVER to do your own tests. Never test anything on the “live” server!!! 😀

Planet Stronghold Public Alpha 1

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I’m proud to finally announce the first public Alpha of my next game Planet Stronghold. For those who don’t know what it is, I’m currently also building the official website which will also contain more info about the story and each character, but for now I can tell you what you’ll find in the game:

  • a manga sci-fi roleplaying game – with beautiful art and really varied characters (not all the same good-looking boys/girls you find in manga games)
  • two different heroes to choose (male / female) – The choice will only impact the romance and few situations in the game, but the statistics / skills / gameplay will have no differences
  • battle system – similar to those you find in JRPG titles and a gameplay similar to adventure games
  • romace option – romance was always present in all my recent story-based game and this won’t be an exception, including new homosexual romance option for both the male / female characters! The romance is entirely optional so if you’re not interested in it, you won’t see it at all (you won’t have the chance to stumble in it by accident)
  • relationship system – with any of the 8 charaters beside the main hero. Keep them happy to increase their skills, piss them off and if you push it too much they could even leave your party!
  • autoupdating – I’m experimenting with an autoupdate system that should allow me to release updates on server-side, and players to download only the changed part. No more “redownload the whole game to get latest update” like before! 🙂

Instead what you won’t find on the game:

  • tilemaps – if you’re a RPGMaker fan, sorry to disappoint, but I really preferred to concentrate my time on writing the story and characters interactions than mapmaking. There will be  a generic map to move from a location to the other though
  • puzzles – since I’m building this game system from scratch, for this first game I want to concentrate more on the battles, the skills, the statistics and variety of enemies, than puzzles. However I’ll have an interesting character training system. More on this later.
  • offline play – to play most of the game past the alpha version you’ll need to be online. Partly to protect me from piracy, but also to offer new features like achievements, autoupdates, new missions / maps / weapons / items and so on.

Are you still here? Good because now comes the good part, the download links:

http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.exe (Pc Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.zip (Mac Version)
http://www.didone.com/games/PSDemo.tar.bz2 (Linux Version)

I absolutely love to get feedback on gameplay and/or any bugs you encounter. Especially for the mac and linux platform, since I have already many testers on Pc! The build uses a very new version of Ren’Py game engine so you should be able to play with openGL acceleration enabled (press key F to go fullscreen).

Thanks and I hope you’ll enjoy the first alpha, even if is quite short for now 😀

Making story-based MMOs ?

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It sounds impossible, doesn’t it?

While talking with some other developers last day, it appears clear that to survive in the struggle that is happening right now in the shareware games (in which we are seeing the return of middlemen, cutting indie revenues even more) there’s only one effective way: do online / MMO games.

As a player personally I hate them. I was a long-time player of Everquest, but when I started working I didn’t had hours to spend (waste) into that kind of game anymore. Anyway, as developer, I can clearly see how this is the only viable solution for long-term revenues nowadays.

Problem: how do I integrate online/multiplayer/MMO with a story-based game ? I’ve come up with some ideas, nothing really new of course:

  • making simple flash / JS singleplayer online games – this would mainly have the purpose to eliminate completely piracy, but no particular advantages for the player
  • do some sort of series of games centered around a character – somewhat similar to what I’m doing with Vera Blanc, but not simple offline downloadable games, but a series of games connected each other, using achievements and maybe even some RPG elements. However this is a big risk since if the first episode for some reason doesn’t sell, it’s really not worthwhile to continue the others
  • a MMO based on missions, each mission with a story, still playable as single player, maybe with some limited player to player interactions (but not real-time) – I like this idea, like a collection of stories, each story representing a mission (like in a fantasy or sci-fi RPG) that the player must complete, playing as single player game

I think it is possible to come up with something like that, keeping in mind to focus on the single player experience. I would love for example to do a sequel for Bionic Heart, but apart some art problems (I would still need to wait for the artist Rebecca to be free, which will be next year anyway!!) I would need more guarantees to make it. The first game was VERY popular amongst male, sci-fi userbase, as much that I got lots of emails asking me about a sequel. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, there’s also lots of piracy in that market segment: so much that clearly damaged the direct sales, demotivating me from even just considering the option to make a sequel!

This is one of the most common situations for a developer and I hate it: have a game that has a good following of “true-fans” (people who would instantly buy a sequel) but that unfortunately has also a lot of piracy, so that makes me think twice before starting a sequel 🙁 So it’s really not a surprise that many of my developer friends completely abandoned the road of single-player offline games, and I believe many will in the near future.

I would love to start something new like this. Imagine a normal game like my others, but that could connect and auto-update, downloading new chapters, books or missions. I could add the new content anytime, after 2 weeks, after 1 year, of the initial game release (of course with some sort of notification like email/newsletter). Each content could be only a small fee, so there would be less risk for me and less money to pay for the player.

Yes I like this solution, maybe I could try it already with my next game Planet Stronghold… by the way an alpha is coming out very soon!

Is worth having a Flash version of your downloadable?

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That’s one of the most frequent questions I see asked around in game development forums. I released in May a flash version of my downloadable game Spirited Heart, so thought to share some info about it.

The stats are quite clear (timeframe, 2 months):

gameplays: 60-70k estimate (mochi-ads is 55k, plus a few more thousands in Kongregate, Newgrounds and other portals I submitted my game to)
unique visitors to my site:  12,886
tracked sales: 7 !!

As you can see, the visitors to sales ratio (called also CR, conversion rate) is 0,05%! Well below the standard CR of downloadable demos that is around 1% (actually, for my game it’s 2,6% well above average). If we calculated the people per sale ratio from everyone that played the game, we would get 1 sale every 10.000 players 😀

And I even put lots of “nag stuff” in the game, in several parts there was a hint that certain game functions would be available only in the “Deluxe Version” and not in the free flash demo.

That said, I probably made some mistakes in it: putting too many “hints” that the game was only a “flash demo”, pissed some people off and especially on Kongregate I got very low rating only because of that. Also, the flash market is known to like more male-oriented games (zombies, blood, violence!) so my game was badly targeted also for that.

Still, even if my game was played by 7 milion people (that would be a TOP record!) according to those visits/buy ratio I would have got “only” 700 sales, or translated in money, about $15000. But just so you know, Desktop Tower Defense, one of the most popular flash games of all times, made 15million plays. So getting 7 million would be almost an impossible task unless you have something really UNIQUE.

Based on this, the conclusion would be quite easy: is NOT worth it. However, I know some other devs doing online only games or browser MMO got much better results than me. So is correct to say that making a flash version of your DOWNLOADABLE game is a bad move. But for a online/browser game that could be very different.