week update

All 50 classes are illustrated! I should put them all in a single image and let folks guess who's who, but that would take a while, and I have better things to do, like write a long uninteresting rant about the indie games tab. Anyway, they're illustrated, and that's good. Hopefully I can make some progress on animations this week.

That's it really, everything after the jump is just a long series of rants that probably won't make sense.



Now I'm working on the attacks, then I'll move into attack animations. I finally listed all the attacks I wanted to include in game. Even after a little consolidation, it's a rather imposing list. 113 attacks, of which perhaps 6 are properly animated. Just over half are in game. Some of those are essentially duplicates of others with slightly different name, values, or images, but it's still a lot. Making the list has forced me to scale back some animations. I haven't even thought about sound effects yet, we'll see about those. I know they're critical for some attack animations, but it might be nice if I had them for more attacks.

I'm worried about the animations. They will probably be the weakest point of game presentation. I really can't remove them, but perfecting them may be too demanding. I'm worried they'll look unprofessional, mostly because I won't be using tons of movement and animation to distract from some rather simple animations (moving, rotating, fading). If you thought the animations from the original pokemon games were amazing, you'll enjoy my lazy attack animations. I could spend a long time trying to improve the animations, but the reward is too minimal for the effort. I want to make a polished balanced strategy game quickly. If I take three months perfecting all 113 animations, I'll end up dropping the project to stay sane.

I already feel like I'm on the home stretch for this game, which is sweet. Programatically, the attacks are each very quick, the amount of major code still needed is only a weeks work. The three unknowns are the attack animations, debuging/balancing characters, and final polish. My self aimed deadline of November is not looking good. I think I can expect all the attacks to be in game early this week, but animations are finicky and hard to debug. I know many will look strange when elevations start to get involved, and I'm woried about edge cases. They may look really silly, or worse, crash when using attacks near the edges of the map.

The remaining art assets are mostly not too troublesome. The landscape tiles don't take too terribly long to create. Levels aren't particularly difficult either, especially as I have a pretty good idea for all of their designs. The world map as well should not be terribly difficult, but I know that together those activities are easily two weeks.

I'm also worried that cutting back some of my more ambitious attacks is costing some precious strategic options. I'm worried some classes will be too similar. I don't want two classes to play exactly the same with one or two minor stat differences. I think everyone is unique, and I think there are a lot of ways to approach the battles. There are some overpowered attacks that with some support can be abused, but I think that's fine. I'm more worried there won't be any reason to use some classes.

The biggest worry is trying to keep myself interested. This has killed many a project in the past. But all this worry is somewhat minimal. I've hit the crest, I can see the end, and I can see that it is good.

On Xbox Indie Games

Xbox indie games are seeing some honestly good games come out. There was a platformer in one of the last weeks releases, and I saw a preview for an upcoming one I actually want to play. Not to say that there weren't good games before, but they were always games for other people. It's hard for me to call them good if I don't want to play them. I'm sure some of the games were lovely, they certainly looked polished, but they never held my attention past the demo. This leads to my angryrant (sic).

On Bad Xbox Indie Games

One particular game designer on a blog I will not name created a game, that I will try to not single out. To protect the guilty while making my point, I will pretend he wrote a game akin to tron:

Essentially he was annoyed that no one was buying his game, he talked about how polished his game was, all the features he had, the length of gameplay. It was all well and good, but then I looked up his game. Essentially it was tron. I'm sure he brought some interesting twists to the gameplay, and it certainly looked nice. The problem was that you were still playing tron. It's like trying to save a moldy cut of meat with parsely and garlic. In the end, you still know it's moldy. He had built a complete game on a pile of over-tread garbage. It wasn't fun then, and it isn't fun now. No amount of graphical upgrades and slight gameplay tweaks will make it fun. I'm sorry, but you chose your design poorly.

You don't stand out on the indie games tab with lots of particle effects. No one cares, it won't sell your game. Certainly, terrible art would be worse, but your demo better back up the polish and shine. We're reaching critical irony levels in there as well. Since the silly zombie game became wildly popular, you can't just have some crazy title and quirky graphics and expect to stand out - everyone else already did that. The Xbox team have essentially killed your easy prospects for great wealth. That rating system will bury you in the desert with the Virtual Fireplace. If a player doesn't like your game, he can tell the world, and the world will listen.

The thing most people don't understand about the indie games tab is who you compete with when you publish. You aren't competing with the other indie games, you are competing with flash and iphone games, but on a less successful platform. You can't just take what works there and remake it in XNA. People don't want to pay for a game they can instead play anywhere or play for free online. You need to make something innovative. It's basic economics. The mom and pop shop can't compete with walmart, so they don't try - they pick a new market that walmart doesn't serve. Provide something different that can't be had elsewhere if you want to stand a chance.

XNA developers everywhere cried themselves to sleep after seeing the first round of sales numbers. A quick reaction was to blame the system. I didn't. I still say low sales were due to an over-abundance of mediocre, overpriced games. But even if you did blame the system, it's been fixed. Games can now be sold at the why-the-hell-not-I-have-points-left-from-all-those-rock-band-songs price range, and the end users can sort out the crap in few button presses.

There is really only one way to go from here. As long as Microsoft is willing to spare indie games, the games can only get better. It takes time for markets to stabilize. Everyone is (hopefully) learning that users can smell crap. Eye catching titles and graphics do not work because of the ratings and the demo-heavy structure of the indie games tab. Gamers use the ratings to find decent games, then they play the demo. If they don't like what they see, or they feel like they've seen everything the game has to offer in one demo play-through, they won't buy. You have to give the gamers something good.

If anyone actually bothered to read that and want to point out the irony in six months, I'd like to point out that I expect to sell 262 copies over the next year and be universally rated poorly. I don't care. I'm with those tragically hip, stupidly artsy experimental games developers. I just want to make a game I would play. This is entirely focused at what I see as a casual observer of the XNA dev scene.


ahh, long rants that I don't expect anyone to ever read or understand. It's like I'm still in middle school writing in my livejournal.


And another non-sequitor, why is blogger this bad? Apparently the default RSS feed is just the title linking to the site, as opposed to say, something useful, like the text of the post. For a google service, I'm suprised at some of the default settings and behaviors. They seem strange and unintuitive to me. I'm still not entirely sure it works now, we'll see when I click publish.