tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-43877989926095774862024-03-13T03:27:15.912-07:00MoDDiB's DevblogMoDDiBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03992356250021391325noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4387798992609577486.post-71708608420972583222013-02-06T05:39:00.000-08:002013-02-06T14:37:33.336-08:00How we failed - No one cares about our game<br />
While you can find a lot of <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/185535/postmortem_11_bit_studios_.php">indies</a> <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/182380/postmortem_mcmillen_and_himsls_.php">success</a> <a href="http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/180520/postmortem_humble_hearts_dust_.php">story</a> on the internet, it's harder to find failure.<br />
Because I think<b> <u>there's more to learn from failure</u></b> I will share with you how we failed to "sell" an indie game as a voluntary team.<br />
Sure everything isn't so dark :<b> <u>we succeed to deliver a full and nice game</u></b>.<br />
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(I won't speak much about the game, if you want more information feel free to visit the <a href="http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93510513">greenlight page</a>, you will learn more about this amazing mix between Bomberman and Powerstone.)</div>
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That's really not common for an <b><u>unpaid team</u></b> to finish a game.<br />
Sure some members like me have professional experience but it still was a day to day fight : it's really hard to work hours right after your daily job is done.<br />
Doing it for 3 years for me and about 5 for some artists and never give up was an achievement even if we were all exhausted by the experience....<br />
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<a href="http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/c0.0.851.315/p851x315/472347_394220400592616_1115438314_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="118" src="http://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash4/c0.0.851.315/p851x315/472347_394220400592616_1115438314_o.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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During the development we shared our work on some french forums, people seemed to be interested by our game, our work and we even were congratulated a lot.<br />
We enter the <b><u>Dream Build Play</u> </b>contest and we were <b><a href="https://www.dreambuildplay.com/Main/GalleryDetail.aspx?EntryID=226">finalist </a></b>: we thought everyone will now speak about our game and actually only one private french channel noticed us : <a href="http://www.nolife-tv.com/">Nolife </a>.<br />
It brought few people to our greenlight page : not so bad but not really effective...<br />
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During September 2012, we launched a <b><u>100 people limited beta</u></b>.<br />
It was a <b><u>disaster</u></b>, we got only 50 people in one month and not a lot of feedback.<br />
We thought we got so few people because you had to subscribe to a forum to download the beta.<br />
So in November 2012 we decided to go Open Beta : nothing changed.<br />
We needed some advertisement so I tried to contact every video game based website : indies or not ; I sent a lot of emails , trying to find personal email of specialized indie journalist like <a href="https://twitter.com/casskhaw">Cassandra Khaw</a> : I got for about 30 emails/forms 0 answer.<br />
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<a href="http://foxcoon.free.fr/ChibisBomba/ChibisBomba_Promo_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="292" src="http://foxcoon.free.fr/ChibisBomba/ChibisBomba_Promo_1.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Because of these hardship our team got a 2-3 months break ( sort of nervous breakdown ).<br />
Now we are ready to begin a whole new project but we will try to avoid the mistakes we did :<br />
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- <b><u>No international communication</u> </b>: now we will share with the world how our project is growing and not only with a few unknown french game development forum.<br />
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- <b><u>No social interaction </u></b>: no one in our team used the new media, we'll tweet a lot now because it sounds like the place where everyone's attention is.<br />
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-<u> H<b>omemade engine</b></u> : We made the whole engine and tools (XNA's based), it took us about 2 years before we really started the game itself, that's really too much for an unpaid project.<br />
Furthermore I never got the time to deal with some network headaches : to host a game the player has to open his UDP port : that's totally unacceptable these days...<br />
Our next games will be done with Unity : it's easy, effective and has a great community !<br />
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- <b><u>No solo gameplay</u></b> : you have to find 3 opponents to have fun ; for a new game created by unknown people it's really too much : our server is empty so people won't come : it's a vicious circle.<br />
We urgently added bots and made a <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nEMPfuG9_Zk">video</a> for this patch, but bots are only great to discover the game, not to have fun with.<br />
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- <b><u>Gamepad only</u> : </b>our game is barely playable with keyboard only ; not a lot of people use a gamepad on their computer<br />
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- <b><u>Unfinished menus </u>: </b>we kept online menu for the end of the development and because there's no player we were not motivated to finalize them ; and those menus could have scared a lot of players....<br />
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Hope this postmortem was interesting for you ; If you have any question I'm here ;)<br />
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Please RT :<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="fr">
"No one cares about our game" : Postmortem of Chibis Bomba is ready : <a href="http://t.co/5drrhmFw" title="http://tinyurl.com/b3jleof">tinyurl.com/b3jleof</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search/%23INDIEGAME">#INDIEGAME</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/search/%23gamedev">#gamedev</a><br />
— MoDDiB (@MoD_DiB) <a href="https://twitter.com/MoD_DiB/status/299161109947092992">6 février 2013</a></blockquote>
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<br />MoDDiBhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03992356250021391325noreply@blogger.com7