Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

The bar gets higher all the time

cliffski

I recently bought a present for a relative, from a fairly obscure website. It was clear that the companies heart was not in the whole website thing, and I suspect it was designed a decade ago. Lets put it this way. It used frames…

It was pretty clear that the nature of what they sell made it a poor mix for modern internet geek. However, they realised they needed a website and this was it. There was an online catalog, of sorts, but many of the links were broken. Worst of all, they had no prices next to items, just price codes. You had to go to a seperate page to lookup the price of an item. Plus (and here it gets laughable) there was no shopping basket. If you wanted to buy stuff, you would have to write down the codes somewhere, and then manually enter them in a form on the order page. And there was no running total, or way to calculate the cost. You had to add up the cost yourself, and submit your credit card details in a (secure) form. Lucky dip as to whether the final cost was as you suspected. No mention of shipping costs or tax, thats a happy surprise on your bank statement too. Did I mention no confirmation email or notice of shipping?

The world has moved on. Websites like amazon exist. If you sell online, you are competing with amazon. I don’t care if you don’t have the budget, the customer likely doesn’t care either.

The same is true in games. I just added the campaign map ability to zoom in. I thought it was needed. But thats not enough. Obviously if you can zoom, you can scroll, but how? using the arrow keys? yup, what about WSAD? yup, how about moving the mouse to do edgescrolling? yup. how about click and drag panning? yup, how about varying  scroll-speed based on zoom level to maintain a smooth feel? Every new triple-A game will add new features and expectations, and they trickle down to everyone. I feel like my games look cheap without smooth multi-threaded animating loading screens. I wish my games showed up in the windows game explorer like the big ones do… there are extra things being added all the time that people expect. Look at the Civ IV map versus Civ I, or the new total wars versus the first one.

Ultimately, you have to keep up, even if that means scaling back your expectations. A small, contained, polished game is better than a big sprawling but amateurish mess. I make this mistake myself. GSB is likely too ambitious a game for positech and I know it. I can barely keep up. The level of polish and features for the initial release of the game was too low. It’s way better now (37 updates later), but there is still room for improvement.

Everyone knows the bar keeps getting higher. But the worse news is, it’s tough luck. You still need to at least be reaching for that bar.

12 thoughts on The bar gets higher all the time

  1. and when you grasp it, beat the big guys round the head with it!

    If you re-release it as a Gold GSB with the new campaign, the Order, Tribe etc I wonder how much higher yr review scores will be!

    The only thing u need to do is have some of the race modules upgradable via the points.

  2. There’s always room for improvement, and I certainly didn’t feel GSB was lacking anything significant upon release.

    I think there’s a line, possibly fine, between meeting expectations and a clunky mess of a kitchen sink.

    Now Command & Conquer 3 and especially 4? There must be an internal competition for how much clunk can be packed onto a game before sales slip.

  3. A good point but there are always exceptions. If you make a niche game people can be pretty forgiving on features.

  4. There’s always the option of making something for which no conventions have been established yet. That way you can make others who follow you sweat about adding improvements.

  5. A small, contained, polished game is better than a big sprawling but amateurish mess.

    How DARE you speak that way about Dwarf Fortress :-)!

    There are also still “AAA” PC games that’re missing lots of important features: The bad console ports!

    Look at “Scarface: The World Is Yours”, for instance. You can’t even re-bind the keys in that. But the idea is so totally hilarious, and so much work went into the content and gameplay, that I’m sure many people at least stuck it out for a while in the PC version.

    (I still, whenever I hear Latin music, want to cruise around sim-Miami and proposition old ladies.)

    There are also more than a few people who still play old, sometimes very VERY old, games – Carmageddon 2, Total Annihilation, M.U.L.E. in an emulator, roguelikes, FreeCiv, Bolo, Lode Runner (I wonder if Lode Runner was the very first user of a WASD-type control-key layout?), Tetris, old Ultimas, etc.

    And then there are the hardcore simulators. The interface in the most recent “Harpoon” game still looks straight outta 1995, yo. There are many other atypical games without a whole lot of polish – look at the Bridge-Builder/Pontifex series, for instance. Brilliant games, quite basic interface.

    Now, you obviously don’t want to restrict your market to a niche-within-a-niche by switching to the Harpoon interface for Gratuitous Space Battles 2. But just the same, it’s clear that particularly for indie games that aren’t directly competing with GTA Whatever or World of Warcraft, you DON’T need a tick in absolutely every control-and-presentation box.

  6. *sigh* yes there are developers who are constantly chasing the “bar”… and publishers and producers who sit around saying “but call of duty does that so our game must do it too”…

    And then everyones really shocked when everyone misses the bar, and the publisher comes along and sacks you for not being able to achieve the impossible.

    When in reality, rather than chasing, it’s much better to make sure that whatever you implement is as good as it possibly can be, infact, in someways, ignore everything else on the market and just concentrate on making your “thing” the very best it can be… Genuine bar-moving-companies very rarely look at their competitors and copy, they innovate instead of immitate.

  7. Perhaps you’re aiming at the ‘wrong’ bar? For example, there are some pretty ugly-looking games on Facebook that are still profitable. It seems like an issue of who your audience is, and I suppose that if you’re offering standalone PC games then you’ve picked yourself a pretty tough crowd in terms of the level of polish and usability they expect.

  8. Ben Sizer is right. There are so many new things developers want to keep up with, some are good, some are not always worth it or even detrimental.

    User interface improvements are usually good and people will expect many options of controlling the game (the scrolling methods, customizing controls, responsiveness).

    On the other hand, I still like the older Civilization map more. The new one is too cluttered. As you wrote a while ago, 3D can be bad for strategy games or any game with large overview maps. Camera rotation and gratuitous zooming is distracting.

    GSB is ambitious but far from a mess. Some wannabe AAA titles with million dollar budgets are much worse. They may have had a dedicated loading-screen programmer but the gameplay sucks.

  9. Good idea on the ‘Gold Edition’ GSB. When the time is right, unleash the Gold Edition and reap the reward of high scoring reviews (a.k.a Free Advertising).

    You could even release a ‘Silver Edition’ first. Then the Gold Edition a couple of expansions later. That way you get a double lot of reviews being published, which will bring even greater awareness of the game.

  10. Yes, gold edition! Milk it! No, really. Then do a more action oriented spinoff where you get to control one of the ships directly.

  11. Yep the bar gets higher however in some cases it’s useless. Take anno 1404: full 3d, ok. But is it really necessary? I think would be the same fun game even if the art was just plain isometric 2d ;)

  12. Adding a campaign is likely overextending. Like you say, with a campaign comes a lot of implicit expectations on how the campaign is going to look and work. The core gameplay, where the fun comes from, is designing ships, organizing them, and arranging their pre-battle order so that they’ll crush the enemy. That would be great if it went along with a strategic game of capturing shipyards to increase the fleet’s power and scheming against the enemy’s maneuvering… but how much work would it take to get the game to where all of that works satisfactorily?

    Take the Total War games, for instance. Those are spread way too thin. Sure, the graphics are good. Each Total War game has boasted cutting-edge graphics for the time it was released. Everything else? The real-time AI is passable. There are persistent pathfinding issues. All of the Total War games from Rome onwards are extremely prone to mysterious crashes. The strategic AI is a joke. The campaign interface is slightly painful to use. Modable game files are promised with each installment of the franchise, but never delivered. As a result of all this the fans are somewhat jaded.

    I think it’s more value to you, and more value to the fans to work on the core gameplay in GSB. Slick up the ship building, saving and retrieval interface with some filters or something. Add a skirmish mode, and a ship comparison mode so we can easily test our own designs against each other and so that newbies can more quickly figure out what works and what doesn’t work. Add some more orders so we aren’t gnashing our teeth when our ship captains inexplicably decide to charge into the mass of the enemy and die.

    I think a game with a limited, but very polished core gameplay will be much better received than one that tries to do everything at once and only partially succeeds.

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