Category Archives: simulation games

Simulate my life, please

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Of my upcoming games, there’s basically no “pure-VN” game. Flower Shop spin-off will have mini and meta games (more details in the coming weeks), and the other two otome game projects will have all a dating sim / life sim structure.

I know is a bit hard to define what is a “pure VN” and what isn’t. As practical example, Heileen is a pure VN: mainly text and choices (there are also quests but they’re not complex as the quest you might find in a RPG game). Summer Session instead is clearly a dating sim: you have stats to raise, several places to visit, character relationships, and so on.

What’s the difference then between a dating sim and a life sim? This is really tough. I might say that Summer Session and Flower Shop were dating sim, while Spirited Heart was a life sim. But really in this case the difference is much more subtle! I dare to say that dating sim focus more on the romance/relationship, while life sim have also other aspect. Spirited Heart has romance option but you can play it completely ignoring that, trying to raise your stats and become the best researcher, dancer, and so on.

I always loved life simulation games: I played The sims until the latest installation. However, while they’re very nice and varied to play, they miss completely dialogues as you might know. Making “dynamic dialogues” that change every time is impossible even for EA. However I would prefer some sort of “scenarios” where you have specific character background, life goals, relationship, etc. Sort of smaller scale, but more detailed.

On other news, I might be opening a new website soon specifically for otome games, since in my main website I always focused more on RPG/Strategy games. Games like Spirited Heart are OK, but for the new ones I’ll use a separate website. Beside I’ve read somewhere that if you put too many choices in front of the user he gets confused (I seem to recall the number was 12, don’t ask me why!).

So makes sense to keep in homepage only the best selling games, but some games deserve space anyway. So, better start a new domain with a new specific market in mind.

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.

A Trip To Bavaria

Last week I finished a small visual novel in flash, free to play. It tells an episode of Heileen life, before sailing to the New World. I posted it on several flash portals and also put it up on my tycoon games website. I liked doing it even if working with flash is really slow, and I don’t think I’ll make more games like that in future (of course, you never know for sure).

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My other game, Spirited Heart, is going well and is almost finished. I think I could start beta testing next month and release it early March, if I don’t get stuck in my writing! Indeed there are lots of events to create, and each events is specific to a job, and is really hard to come up with good ideas for events, but I’m doing my best, of course 🙂

I wonder if people will be ok to define that game a roleplaying game? it doesn’t have combats (I didn’t had enough resources to put those in the game), but I don’t think is an essential part for a roleplay…? basically it plays a lot like Kudos , only with different settings and lots of fantasy skills. Probably is better to call it a life-sim game.

TV Station Manager BETA

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Yes, that is the game I was working on in the last 3 months. What it is? is a simulation game that lets you take the control of a small TV Station about to go bankrupt. More info can be found at the official site , and the demo can be downloaded from the following links:

http://www.didone.com/games/TSMTrial.zip [Mac]
http://www.didone.com/games/TSMTrial.exe [Windows]

Beta testing is quite advanced and the final game should be released next week. Let me know what you think in my forums!

A new game on the horizon

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Yes, I’m almost finished with my new “effort”. It is yet another kind of game, a simulation/management one, but very far from the sport simulation I’ve been releasing until now.

I don’t want to reveal anything yet, but I’m sure you’ll find it interesting enough to download and try it (and hopefully buy it!). It is quite innovative, and so far I know only 2 games that are related (one dates back to the Amiga age!).

I added so many new interesting gameplay elements to the basic idea, that I think the game will appeal the fan of the management genre. The only hint I want to give, is that my next title has something in common with Cinema Tycoon Gold.

But just something eh… !