Video game development

[basketweaver]

Does anyone have general advice to building an independent game? Two main issues are marketing and finding art & music.

Our game's focus is on content and storytelling. In terms of technology, we aren't expecting to make major innovations, since our game is just a 2D platformer. But our vision is very keenly focused on having memorable characters and a compelling, well-written storyline. One of our sources of inspiration is Ghost Trick, an amazingly-well written game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Trick:_Phantom_Detective.

While conducting research on other indie games, we notice that the overwhelming majority of indie success stories focus on content creation, establishing a solid brand, and having generally memorable characters or a rich storyline. Although it's obviously true that you can have successful indie games based purely on programming mechanics and fancy art alone, these seem to be comparatively rarer.

Our team currently consists of just two people: me and a friend of mine. I do all of the story writing and character building, while my friend does all of the programming. We both share some responsibilities in marketing and other tasks. Looking forward, we will probably recruit another friend specifically as a marketing expert.

I know that you have no reason to believe me, but I can say with reasonable objectivity that I'm a good writer, and I know from experience that my friend is a good programmer. We are both hard workers and organized people, and we have been looking on at our project with a huge amount of self-awareness and scrutiny. At the same time, I'm also a dreamer and have been very dissatisfied with some of the writing that I've been seeing in recent indie games (which, for good reason, haven't exactly been edited by professional writers).

The inspiration for our game actually started in a Hackathon project we made a year ago, but we recently picked up the project again. So far, we've been working on it for four months. We are making serious project in developing both the storyline and the technology.

If any of you have advice for us, I would love to hear it.

[crackers]

i dunno man your taste in waifu's is seriously subpar

[rtil]

my #1 advice is always to keep it simple and small. most game projects don't get finished because a team gets too ambitious, and as you get deeper in to it you realize how much work has to be done and the project is abandoned because the workload is too much for too few people.  and i'm assuming you're both volunteering your time, so there's that to consider as well.

the good thing about starting out with small projects is that it's easier to figure out how long it takes to complete something. from there, you can determine the length of time it will take to make your next project with more accuracy.

[soup]

i cant talk from a developer point of view, but i can say as a consumer that when i buy a game i dont really care about the story graphics platform ect i just want it to be fun

be it snappy responsive controls, rewarding content. im playing the game because im bored and have decided i no longer want to be bored anymore

[Gerkinman]

I have been dabbling with game development for ages now, mainly just little things in RPG Maker because I find it easy to use. I wish I had some advice but all I have really done is experiment. Just start small I guess, tell small short stories to get to grips with developing and your games will grow bigger as your confidence grows.

[cipher]

A few other things I can think of off the top of my head.

-What platform are you developing for? And what software are you using?

-Determine your target audience early on and make sure the game sticks to that

-Design docs design docs design docs. Make a lot, for everything. You should also have a good elevator pitch for the game as well. A tip I heard recently that I like is to create one page (keep it light) that stuff on the most important elements of the game / your main goals with what you want with gameplay, player emotion, whatever. Then just keep it on your desk and always refer to it to make sure what you're doing is staying on track with your initial goals

-Test / iterate a lot. And get other people to play test as well, not just you guys. People get 'designer blinders' and don't realize a lot stuff about their design since they've been looking at it for so long. Also play the game like an idiot and try to break everything

-Going off what rtil said, keep it simple. Try and find 1-2 really good mechanics and make that the foundation for your project

-Even though your team is small, make a task list of some kind with everything that needs to be done. You can just use spread sheets (google docs), or use something like Trello. This includes bug tracking

-Organize some kind of pipeline for your design/art/engineering. The team is small so you have a lot of opportunity to be a little more freeflow, but having structure is good. "SCRUM" is a nice framework for small a big teams alike, but do whatever works

-Don't underestimate good audio


ok thats all for now

[BluPhoenix]

make sure it's fun

[basketweaver]

Ty cipher.

Organize some kind of pipeline for your design/art/engineering

What exactly do you mean by a pipeline? Sounds like something I should be working on.

What platform are you developing for? And what software are you using?

We're developing for PCs using the Allegro framework on C++. We're currently deploying all our demos to Windows, but apparently with some tweaking we should be able to get OS X working too.

[basketweaver]

i cant talk from a developer point of view, but i can say as a consumer that when i buy a game i dont really care about the story graphics platform ect i just want it to be fun

be it snappy responsive controls, rewarding content. im playing the game because im bored and have decided i no longer want to be bored anymore

Yeah, I know most gamers (esp. those who are willing to subject themselves to the torturous process of playing independent games) aren't looking for a serious storyline engagement when they play a video game. I'm very aware that being storyline-heavy is an easy way to alienate potential users.

My mode of attack as a developer is to "cross the chasm" by luring players in with colorful graphics, fun and smooth mechanical gameplay, and good music. As the players roam around in our world, I hope that they'll fall in love with our characters, engage themselves with the world and dialogue, crying when tragedy occurs and cheering when they meet success. In this way, they'll passively consume the story and probably enjoy it.

[Mightydein]

Your video game may end up as obscure and you will be directly in competition against other games with bigger promotion budgets.

You will need to shamelessly self promote your game. You will need to use creative promotional methods that will differentiate from other gaming companies for less money.

You will need to be a lot more creative with promotion.

You will need a title that can be easily found in search engines.

  The title of your game needs to be unique enough to crop up in search engines as the number one result.

My user name; "Mightydein" has cropped up in search engines because I registered that screen name on so many websites.

It is not too early for you to think up a unique title that will appear in search engines as the number one result.

Have you thought about distribution?

Who will be distributing the video game yourself?

Are you hoping to sale your game to a company?

How will you handle distribution of your game?

You gotta ask yourself these questions.

I hope my advice serves as helpful.

[basketweaver]

Thanks Mightydein.

Your video game may end up as obscure and you will be directly in competition against other games with bigger promotion budgets.

Sadly, I'm aware of this. I'm hoping that our product ends up being differentiated enough and of high enough quality that we can level the playing field somewhat.

You will need to shamelessly self promote your game. You will need to use creative promotional methods that will differentiate from other gaming companies for less money.

Yeah, I'm ready for this. I'm planning on marketing the game very, very aggressively and going mega tryhard in terms of self-promotion.

The title of your game needs to be unique enough to crop up in search engines as the number one result.

That won't be an issue. Our title is pretty catchy and unique.

Have you thought about distribution?

Probably Steam and Desura. We might try to join Humble Bundle.

Are you hoping to sale your game to a company?

Not really sure. Hopefully if our game is successful enough to be bought out then we can make a decision.

[bd648]

do you have awesome voice actors? cause ya know...  i got your back

[zwimmy]

What makes a good game:
Achievements
Graphics
No Scopes

This post brought to you by Mountain Dew® Voltage™

[cipher]

Ty cipher.

Organize some kind of pipeline for your design/art/engineering

What exactly do you mean by a pipeline? Sounds like something I should be working on.

Kind of just referring to your general production plan. It's a term you should understand a little bit if you're interested in that area of development, google has stuff.

Here's sort of like a simple type of design pipeline. Each time you do a cycle, the next one should be a little quicker, unless you're just doing small stuff. A really simple (but efficient) approach to design. There's a certain image I was looking for but couldn't find it, this is close enough.


Also, set some deadlines. What do you want to have done by X date? (setting deadlines also helps motivate you)

Also also, use version control. I've done projects with 2-3 people and just manually compiled from time to time. Not worth it, make a github server or something

[basketweaver]

Ah ok, so it's like a flow diagram/organizer thing. We have been doing ad hoc diagrams for this, but ok, this looks cool too.

We have everything on Bitbucket.

Yeah, I totally agree that deadlines are awesome in motivating people and exploiting Parkinson's law. By Dec 21, we want to have a playable demo with a full level implemented. We also have various deadlines for Jan 30, March 2, Dec 2015, etc.

[basketweaver]

45 pages of the story script written so far. Potential teammates are all being lined up and evaluated. Wrote a 3 page business proposal and analyzed some market stuff. Developing a good culture among our teammates. Starting to wonder how far this can go (and obviously trying to avoid that arrogance that leads to indie disaster all the while).

[rtil]

45 pages? how long do you plan this thing to be?

[basketweaver]

45 pages? how long do you plan this thing to be?

I might take a year off of school to work on this. I know several friends of mine who have done that for their entrepreneurial ventures.

And it looks like 45 pages is not that long. With that number of pages I've finished off a substantial part of the storyline, and it looks like the entirety of Fire Emblem 7 is 216 pages of script-writing. On top of that, this game is intentionally dialogue-heavy so that more lines of text will tend to be associated with fewer chapters. I'm also double spacing a lot of lines.

Edit: Oh yea, and I forgot to mention that I'm including a lot of stage directions as well, which is missing from Fire Emblem's script

[rtil]

it's a bit trivial to compare it to a game like fire emblem, developed by a studio with plenty of cash on hand and a large staff. just be sure to overestimate the amount of time it's going to take to develop

[basketweaver]

When I compare it to Fire Emblem I'm purely talking about the relationship between page count and game length. I was saying that Fire Emblem basically translated 216 pages into full, ~20 hour game, so 45 pages with stage directions isn't necessarily super long.

But yes! Definitely keeping things modest as an amateur here. I know it's probably going to take hella long to finish and I'm already thinking of cutback measures in varying degrees should issues arise.