Galactic Melee is turning out pretty well.
From the game side
Graphics: All positive compliments My goal wasn’t to make the best looking game in the world, but to make something marketable, and in that I succeeded.
Performance: Every one I’ve tested with has gotten over 60 FPS even with lots of bullets on the screen.
Sound: DSonic did a good job for a fair price. The game still needs tweaks and polish but I have no complaints.
Music: I bought a few songs, they are all pretty good. My original goal was to get something very memorable and distinct (like the SMB music, or Zelda music, or Star Wars music). While I don’t have that what I have is good enough. By buying premade songs I saved a lot of time and money and got something higher quality than I likely would have through direct contracting.
Gameplay: Most of the features I wanted have made it into the game. 5 game modes, about 20 items + weapons, a leveling system, and a database to store stats. The only major missing feature is the command screen, where you could give orders to your fellow pilots. However, I don’t see this missing feature as losing sales. It’s still to-be-seen how people like the game design but since I control this it’s not a major risk factor. Peer to peer voice chat is also missing but it’s also not an issue that will lose sales.
From the business side:
Website: It looks good, but lacks content. I think with content it’s good enough to drive interest, which is the whole point.
Cost: Massively overbudget and over time. On the other hand, if the game does well it can make it back. This is the risky part. I’m definitely out of time and money so it’s time to ship or die.
Art development: Late, overbudget, but things got done in the end. This was in large part because I learned how to do everything myself, so was able to and did fix everything.
Programming: Late, overbudget, plus had incredible difficulty finding good people. With the exception of my excellent programmer in Portugal, I was consistently disappointed. As with art, I eventually had to learn how to do everything myself, and was able to and did fix almost everything.
Marketing: Big risk point, we’ll see how well word of mouth does. I believe that marketing is what businesses do to deceive people into buying products that are not good enough to sell themselves. Plus, I don’t want a million customers at launch because I’m not able to support that yet. I’m looking for a few thousand sales to pay for further development before really branching out.
Server hosting: Hypernia‘s service was mixed at first, but once they moved their data centers things got much better. Now that they know I’m going to be a huge customer the service is really good. I have a game server and a database server and it’s easy to replicate game servers.
Billing: Aria is helping me here. It’s a good service because developing a billing system is more than just taking credit cards. You have to provide a way for users to manage their accounts, it has to be secure, and you have to be verified by various third parties. It would cost so much to do all that it wouldn’t be worth it for small games. Word of advice: I got very bad service from my original representative, so asked for another. I then got very good service. Don’t assume the service you get from one guy is representative of the whole organization.
All that’s left to do is get the game running bug-free, polish it so it’s fun, and then hope people like it and draw in sales.
2 replies on “Game turning out OK”
“I believe that marketing is what businesses do to deceive people into buying products that are not good enough to sell themselves”
While it’s true that once you’ve achieve a certain level of success with your game the marketing will become superfluous, in the beginning you need the marketing to sell your game just as you needed artists and programmers to create it. Marketing creates awareness of your game and educates people on why they would way to play/buy it. No marketing will mean no sales and all of your hard work will end up for nothing.
I don’t think you don’t REALLY think marketing is deception, otherwise you wouldn’t have created this blog, posted pictures on the Ogre forums, or even created a web site for the game. Instead, you’re probably thinking of all those companies that have released previews or commercials with prerendered footage that ends up having no resemblance to the final product. That’s worse than deception, it’s outright lying.
And nice find on Aria Systems, I’ll look into using their services in the future. For server hosting, you might also want to look into Calpop (www.calpop.com). I’m using one of their dedicated servers for web hosting, but they’ve indicated that they have a number of customers that use the servers for hosting games as well. Their prices are also very reasonable. Don’t let their shoddy web site fool you, it’s a legit company.
To be more accurate I was referring to deceptive marketing. In the US marketing and deceptive marketing are almost synonymous, so it’s almost at the point where you can leave out “deceptive” as it’s taken for granted. Look at mass market commercials on TV. They show supermodels rather than regular people, atypical results of some diet product, sell lifestyles rather than the product itself, and so forth. The results for you as an individual almost certainly won’t be to change your lifestyle, or to become super-thin with no other effort. Of course if they did show the typical results, which is some fatty who spends a lot of money, doesn’t change his lifestyle, and regains all the weight nobody would buy the product, which is why it is a trick.