Category Archives: development tricks

Changing your mind

Before I explain, let’s start with some famous quotes:

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” – Albert Einstein
“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” – George Bernard Shaw

I agree with them completely, and this applies to game development as well. What I am referring to, exactly?

The “indie freedom”

You probably hear around the net the story that indies means independent, so are free to do what they want. Well, yes as indie you’re free to do any game you want. However if you want to survive doing commercial games, you CAN’T do what you want 😉

I don’t mean that you need to do what some “developers” do, that is looking at the top selling games and cloning them (also because very often this system doesn’t work at all). But I mean listening to your customers’ feedback, and analyzing sales to understand what people want, and not just what maybe a “vocal minority” says.

For example after the past year I clearly understood that what made people love Loren wasn’t the RPG part, but the story/romances. I understood that while SOTW was my best RPG, it wasn’t my best game (or at least the most popular). And so on.

Changing your mind means changing direction, and create the future games adapting to the market and what (the majority of) people want. Obviously, you can also just follow your personal interest and do niche products, as long as they provide enough income to support you (sadly with SOTW wouldn’t have been the case).

Prototyping and testing

This is not really new, but worth repeating for the few people who don’t know about it: an essential process of developing a game is brainstorming, testing the ideas and keep the good ones (at least the one you think are good of course).

For example, I’ve recently resumed coding Queen Of Thieves, in particular the “robbery missions”.

timelimit As you can see in the screenshot above, I thought to use a very common stealth mechanic: each action would generate noise (even if in the game Joanne will use her magic to reduce it) and so it could increase by triggering traps, or fighting (guards, watchdogs, etc).

The only way to reduce it was to hide and wait, using time. Finally, you would have a certain amount of time to complete the robbery, before morning arrives.

The idea seemed fine: but when I asked for feedback in forums, I had the first doubts. People complained saying that it could lead to a luck-based gameplay, and as a consequence not really funny. I thought that since the mission are randomly generated, it wasn’t a big deal, but decided to make a few tests myself, and I discovered that indeed was a bad idea!

First because of what people said (good/bad luck would have too much weight) and also because the size / amount of rooms of those building won’t be really big. So the “hide and wait” mechanic was also a bit pointless if you could explore the buildings in 10-12 moves 😀

The result is that I’ve immediately discarded the idea, without even needing to do any public testing. Yes, I’ve changed my mind!

Making “tough business choices”

Somewhat related to the first point, I also realized in the course of the last two years, about certain choices that had to be done, despite I wasn’t really happy about it. The first one was to reduce the amount of complexity in games, a bit because they weren’t helping sales, but also because I was getting burned out while working on them.

It’s better to release a few more simpler games, than none at all for a year (like past year!). Also, even if you like a particular genre, but it’s hard to make and there’s the risk of getting you burned out, you need to take that into account. That’s why I’ve decided to keep making RPGs, but not so often as in the past.

Another “tough choice” I had to make was to treat people professionally and expect the same in exchange. If someone suddenly stopped responding, or delayed too much a project, in the past was chasing them, trying to understand what was going on, trying to motivate them, etc.

Thinking about it, I was a bit of a fool, and wasted of my own time. If someone that’s being paid to do something behaves that way, it’s his/her problem and not mine. This also led me to do some “selection process”, so the people I’m working with now are much more professional than what was happening in the past, and as a consequence more reliable 🙂

Happy Holidays!

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This year the latest blog post of the year will be the Friday 25th, so I’m wishing you happy holidays now 🙂

About the future : 3 points to survive

I’m going to review this year in the blog post next week, but here I want to talk about the necessary changes I’ll need to do in future.

You may have heard the word “Indieapocalypse” around the net. What is it? Well, some developers (I’m among them) have this theory that it’s going to be a tough future for indies, since the quality bar has raised, the market has been flooded, prices have collapsed, and exposure is really hard to get.

All those things are happening at same time.

While I’m not a big/famous indie, I’ve noticed this phenomenon myself too. Personally, I never had much exposure (I wasn’t on Steam until last year!) but what really changed is the prices drop and the market flood. I honestly think it’s an uncommon situation that will settle itself in the next 4-5 years (lots of devs entered the market thinking to make big bucks, but when they’ll see how hard is to just break even, they’ll probably quit and do something else). But the real challenge will be to survive those next 4-5 years!

Yes, because while for now things for me are “OK”, if the current trend continues like this, I would be likely forced to shut down everything next year around this period or early 2017. And absolutely don’t want ever to write a blog post called “I’m quitting the game business”! 🙁

Note added later: it sounds scary but to continue like this, means I shouldn’t release any game even in 2016. I’m fairly confident that it won’t happen! 🙂 However, I need to do some adjustment to my workflow, described below.

Point 1 – release games more often

If you have noticed, my newer games feature a LOT more content than before, and I kept more or less the same prices as before. But what I really need to do, is go back to releasing at least two games in a year. That is of course impossible, if one of those two games is a big RPG like SOTW, or a complex card game like PSCD 🙂

Which means, I really need to go back making more visual novel/dating sims. I have already a lot of them started to be honest (as you might know) but I need to get personally involved in some. Never Forget Me is one of those: I did all the storyboard myself, which was quite helpful for the writer since she is almost finished in about 10 months (and she had some troubles during Summer, otherwise would have been faster!).

This method works well because writers don’t need to imagine each scene or think about the story or anything else: I do that, and then they expand the storyboard I write. Luckily I don’t lack imagination, so I can do the storyboard rather quickly: I did Never Forget Me in a month. Of course writers still have a lot of freedom about writing the scenes. But is definitely easier for them this way.

So in the coming years I will need to make sure to have at least 2 games out each year, like I always did in the past.

From what I’m writing it seems that making a good visual novel or dating sim is easy: not at all!! But it’s just that… compared to a RPG/card game or similar, it’s honestly MUCH easier, for obvious reasons (think that just the balancing part of SOTW took me 4-5 months… lol).

Another possibility of course is to still do the usual games, but on a smaller scope. Long Live The Queen by my dev friend Hanako is the perfect example of something smaller, but still definitely fun to play.

Point 2 – I’m done with bundles

One of the big mistakes I did in the past 2 years was to do too many bundles. I thought it was harmless and a way to get more fans/attention, but the long term impact of doing too many is really disastrous and apparent now. No surprise there, it’s all my fault. So it’s safe to say that you’ll never see again another “Winterwolves Bundle” because was a total loss of money for me, thinking long-term.

The only bundle I might still consider is Humble, but anyway it won’t happen as often as before for sure.

Point 3 – moderate discounts

I still want to offer discounts to people, since I know not everyone can afford to buy my games at full price. However even in this case I need to be a bit more careful, and never go higher than 50% discount. Why? also because luckily there are still several people buying the games when they’re just out at full price, and I want to “reward” them. It’s not cool to see the game you bought at full price discounted by 50% shortly after. To be fair, I always waited at least 1 year before doing a big discount (for example SOTW was out in November 2014, and the first 50% discount was indeed last month, not sooner).

So it’s not like I’m doing what too many other indies do, starting to discount the game already after 6 months. But in future I’ll stick to smaller discounts and go up to 50% only when a title is really old.

Conclusions

The points above might make me look like a greedy person. The reality is that it’s what I think I need to do to survive 🙂 I see a dangerous trend recently in which everyone is bundling and discounting everything, without thinking about the future. And while I don’t know about the others, I plan to stick around for several more years to come.

Queen Of Thieves update

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First of all, SOTW DLC ending images were added to the game! So if you waited you can play the DLC beta using the download link from the forums:

http://www.winterwolves.net/viewtopic.php?f=40&t=3610

And now for today’s blog post…

Time to talk a bit about Queen Of Thieves! In particular the gameplay I’m going to try with it. As you know if you read my SOTW postmortem, I don’t want to do another “super complex detailed hardcore” RPG like that one again, because wasn’t worth it (in term of popularity but also burning out).

So this game will be really a more casual RPG. Before you complain, it doesn’t actually mean it will be “worse”, just different. I think might be even more fun to play if I manage to do right what I have in mind…!

The Skills

Let’s start from the skills: I will bring back the “beloved” skilltree system from Loren. Each character will have a unique offensive and defensive skilltree, each one with 6 skills with 3 variants each, for a total of 6 x 3 x 2 = 36 different skills each character.

Each character is an archetype: Kira the Warrior, Joanne the Mage, and Thalia the Thief.

The biggest difference vs Loren or SOTW is the “combo” skills. I have yet to implement it in the battle, so take everything I say with a grain of salt since as always things might change from now until the final release. But in practice while fighting you’ll have the chance to unlock some combo skill once you fill a combo bar. There will be two offensive and two defensive combo, and will obviously be very powerful skills.

Another difference is the combat itself. In Loren/SOTW was common to have a LOT of condition/status effect. Here, having TWO will be uncommon 🙂 This because I’ll limit the number of special moves you can do each battle and there will be no healing except the potions (which will be limited).

It is a completely different approach as you can see. Will require some testing but the goal is to make the battles last less and the skill be something very “special” and not just another type of attack.

The inventory

Then there’s the inventory screen. Each character will have 5 slots: head, chest, legs, feet and weapon. Each slot will have 5 item, except the weapon that will have 7. Yes you read it right: the number of items is LIMITED 🙂 I’m sure this won’t make everyone happy, but is part of the design. Each item will give a specific bonus. Some more attack, other more damage, and so on. There won’t be a “better” or “worse” item, maybe with the exception of the starting gear and the ending one, just different ones that will be better suited for specific battles.

The fact that each character has unique gear has also some positive effects, like each item will be unique and more detailed, as you can see from Kira’s weapons in the image below:

Check the work-in-progress screenshots below: when you open the inventory the first image will be like this:

You can see the whole character body, so everything she’s wearing. If you click a Legs or Feet slot, the image will zoom in to show better what she’s wearing:

Similarly if you choose Head/Chest slot, it will zoom in on top:

Thalia is really cute, isn’t she? 😉 Since the screenshot above were taken, I’ve also been trying to implement an even more intuitive way to use the inventory, in practice next to each slot there will be all the items that the current character can use. Since items are limited, we can fit them all in one row like in the screenshot below:

Elementary!

I also plan to have elemental resistances, but done differently. By default all characters will be weak against elemental damage, and the armor (in case of players) will give resistance bonus, but in small steps. Everything about this game uses smaller numbers which I think will be easier to balance.

For example let’s say you’ll start with -5 in all resistances. A fire based attack would inflict base damage (5) + 5 = 10 total dmg
Now you get armor resistant pieces, but you have only 4 slots (head, chest, legs, feet). Each will give +1 fire resistance. So the same attack above would deal: base damage (5) +1 = 6 total dmg.

In this game, 4 point of damage difference will be meaningful 🙂

Anyway, I’m still thinking about it, I might also just ignore elemental damage but only apply elemental statuses. So Frozen would reduce speed, Burning would damage HP over time, and so on. I might even just go for this simpler solution.

Playing games is important & time optimization

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Playing games is important!

Yes you heard me well: is important to play games! Especially if you are a game developer like me 🙂

I have less and less free time now (in particular in recent times with everything happening all at once, Steam, iOS ports, etc) and as you can imagine, when I have some I prefer to spend it with my wife, pets and doing outdoor activities.

However, I still try to find the time to play for a few hours a week the new games. Because that’s the equivalent of “research & development” of other industries.

Some practical examples and games that inspired me while I designed and coded my latest RPG ToA: Seasons Of the Wolf:

– Guild Wars 2: from this game I grabbed the ideas of “solve all quest in an area” and “discover all locations” and so on, to get bonus EXP. From this game I also wanted to implement the idea of stat-derived enemies (no matter your level, all enemies would be a challenge) but after a week of testing I realized that it wasn’t a good idea 😀
– Diablo 3: it’s nothing new, the random items I mean, but still while playing this game I thought that would have been cool to use random items with tiers even in my games, alongside manually created ones.
– Everquest 2 and another MMORPG I can’t remember now, the idea of offering items as reward for quests. Again it was nothing new, but just playing those games reminded me of this feature.

chooseitem

And by playing Hearthstone I had the idea to change PSCD from a tower defense game to a collectible card game. So if you’re a game designer, try to find the time to play a few games. Your own games will benefit from it!

Time optimization

Speaking of SOTW, this week I made more progress on the DLC. I was a bit stuck with all the other titles for various reasons, so I thought that instead of waiting for the SOTW missing art, I could code all the remaining things using placeholder art, so I don’t waste time.

In the image above, a special event in the “Rebuild Ninim” minigame

Another thing that many indies should learn is to optimize your time. You don’t necessarily need to do things in order. So like in my example above, you can finish coding something even if the art is not ready using placeholders. Or if you’re tired/burned you can do some trivial tasks. I often do that when I’m too tired to code. Trivial tasks could be:

– webpage design: sooner or later you’ll have to do it, right? so why not create the page already? you can always tweak/adjust the texts or images a few days before the release, but at least most of the work is already done!
– product setup: doesn’t matter if you sell only through Steam, or direct, or mobile. There are a lot of steps to do to setup a new game. Screenshots, box-shots, icons, description texts, etc etc (every platform is different but you need to do them for all). This is another thing I do in advance.
– testing: I now do open-betas to test, since 10-50 people testing are better than 1 or a small team of friends. However, I always do some preliminary testing to make sure that at least the most obvious bugs are fixed. Sometimes when I am too tired to code I just start the game and play a bit to see if there’s something that I missed.
– create banner-ads: assuming you do some form of advertising, another thing you can do is designing the banners for the game ads (unless you outsource it to an artist).
– write blog posts like this one or other marketing stuff: writing is easier than coding, so I always do the blog posts one week in advance. I think that never miss a blog helped overall, on each blog post I get several views and many comments. Other things you can do is forum polls to see what people think of your next crazy idea, or anything else really, an interview, a tumblr post, or other social marketing stuff.

So as you can see there are many things you can do, even when you’re tired from coding 😉

small indies growing…

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Otello has found a comfortable (?) place in the bathroom…!

Today’s blog post is a bit different. I want to talk about a side-effect of when small indies grow 🙂

Back in 2007-2008, I was doing some “research” on indie CRPGs and of course I’ve checked also Jeff Vogel’s site (Spiderweb games). He’s one of the most famous indie doing RPG, so I was curious to see how he was doing. I was surprised when I read in the official forums that “he used” to post there, but now he doesn’t even show up anymore. I was thinking “What? how is possible, he doesn’t care about his users?!”.

Now, several years later, I understand completely his reasons! When you start growing your business, when you have more titles under your belt, the things to do increase exponentially.

Just think what there’s to do for each game:

– support: that’s the biggest problem. No matter how fool-proof you made your registration/full version delivery, there is always going to be an issue with it. But not just that: hardware configuration problems, sometimes files are downloaded incompletely so people think are corrupted, false antivirus positives, etc. It’s just insane, believe me! Some indies I know have hired people to deal with that, but I honestly wouldn’t trust anyone (since I should give access to orders database, Steam keys, etc). So I do it myself…
– marketing/promotion: I honestly don’t do much of this, but even in this case, there are many things to do. Send press-releases, answer journalists, do interviews, send press-copies, etc etc
– social presence: nowadays is essential, so I try to post daily updates on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and so on. Is not a big amount of work each: but if you sum everything, starts to add up (5 min there, another 10 there, etc and voilà hours are gone!)
– game production management: emailing people, checking what they’re doing, etc. Note that I don’t include the actual game coding in this part, and still is big!

OK I’ll stop here, I think you got it 😀 so what is happening is that (luckily) this year was very good for me, but also means that my “free time” has greatly decreased…and I don’t mean to be rude or snob people, but I won’t be able to answer anymore people emailing me “to chat”, or “to know how is going”, or asking “when game XYZ will be out” and so on like I used to do in the past. I simply don’t have the time anymore! 🙁

Of course I’ll still provide support for customers, I don’t plan to disappear from my forums, and will try to reply on the various sites (blog, twitter, Steam forums, etc…there are so many!) but it will depend on how busy I am in that moment.

I also realized that I’m spending really too much time in front of the computer: I want to stay more with family… the wife and pets 🙂

End of the rant! Now, for some quick update on the games, check those screenshots:

The skills screen of Queen Of Thieves

Attributes screen, similar to SOTW one (work in progress)

I got new GUI art done by a new artist who did a great job in my opinion. Is still work in progress but you can see the “return of skilltree” that some players liked so much in Loren 😉

Stay tuned for more info next week…Christmas is coming! 🙂

Computer Games

Development diary of Celso Riva