Quotes From the Interweb

Storybook Tactics is easily one of the best strategy games on the 360 and the best of the genre I've played all year, and that's including XBLA and retail 360 releases.

Wow. Just wow.

Storybook Tactics, on the other hand, provides engaging and accessible tactical fun without compromising depth.

Indie Game of the Week from DealSpwn. I'm quite happy with that, since Tempura of the Dead came out the same week.

in only my fifth or sixth battle, I was using the Pirate's "Flash Powder" to keep three enemies stunned each turn, while a Knight lowered their Defense and a Legionnaire picked them off two at a time.

From xbla ratings. I think that's a great description.

I'm a bit disappointed with the rating on the channel itself, but I'm not surprised. It doesn't have the immediate payoff and instant hook to be really successful on the platform. Sales have been pretty poor if I'm honest, but I don't mind. I'm just happy to make a game I enjoy.

Also, in the comment for the first review I found this:

There is little real info about it anywhere inline and the demo is too short to get a feel for the game.

Eek!

Contact Info

It seems I don't have any contact info anywhere convenient. If you want to get a hold of me, drop me an email at alex.nelson@mercurywave.net.

I'm only now discovering all these websites that cover XBLIG, if you've stumbled on the game and want a copy for review on your website, please drop me a line or leave a comment here.

Once the real world calms down and I have some time, I plan on writing a postmortem for Storybook Tactics. I'm always a fan of video game postmortems, I'll probably end up getting carried away and have to break it into pieces.

New Dashboard

I figure I should say something about the new dashboard. In the update, Microsoft moved the indie games channel under something called "Specialty Shops". The immediate reaction from the internet was that this was a Microsoft snub, with some people going a bit further. We've got at least another couple weeks before sales data comparisons are meaningful, and I have some thoughts on the change.

I don't think this is actually that bad. I won't go so far as to say it's a good thing, but it isn't the end of the world. They haven't come out and said it, but I suspect some actual market research went into the moving menu.

It's hard to say exactly what the market looks like for the indie games channel, all we know is what games sell well. I suspect the sort of people who wander into the indie games channel and actually plop down money on a game are the same sorts of people who spend money on the avatar goodies and game room games. I think this target market is heavily invested in the services offered by xbox live, and is willing to spend the money (and I think more crucially - the time) to investigate the service, try games out, and purchase the good ones.

I imagine that a team at Microsoft looked at the marketing data when working on the final dashboard menu setups. They probably looked at the data and saw a correlation between the downloads and purchases from storefront A and storefront B, and put them into the same sub menu. That would be a logical move, and should be a benefit to sales for both. This is all guesswork of course. Marketing data of this sort is generally a trade secret, all we'll get is the generic press release.

Some of the other changes are quite nice, and I think much more important than the menu location. The longer lists were really needed, and navigating through games and viewing game pages is a lot nicer. The real question is whether the move and improvements translate to higher sales. In another week, we can get probably start getting some decent numbers, but until then we can only guess.

The Press-Releasening

I totally wasn't prepared for my game being released. Last I checked I still needed like 7 more reviewers. I found out it was approved when I checked my email at work, and it was on the marketplace by the time I got home.

I've written up a press-release-thingy. It has bullet points. I don't have much else to say about it.

Mercury Wave Studio is proud to announce the release of our first video game, available now on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace for just 80p (~1USD).

Storybook Tactics is a turn-based tactical strategy game with a unique pixel art style. Necromancers have cast a mind-controlling spell over the great warriors of the land. It's up to a squire and a wizard in training, along with whatever help they can find, to defeat the necromancers and lift the spell. Explore the world and defeat the cursed warriors to free them and recruit them to your team. Choose who you send into battle wisely - each warrior’s unique skills will be useful in the fight ahead.

• More than 20 levels - from swamps to caves, and temples to pirate ships
• More than 25 unique characters to recruit
• Explore a large, branching world map
• Think it's too easy? After defeating the necromancers, try hard mode for a real challenge.
• All this, for just a dollar (80 points)

You can find screenshots and a trailer for the game on the marketplace page, here.

Did I mention it's only a dollar? Because at 80 points - it is.

Now to send off some review copies.

I can now say I am a video game developer

Oh. And like that it's for sale on the marketplace.

Woah

My game's been approved and will be on the market place within two days.

[neo]
Woah
[/neo]

I hadn't been tracking it's progress very closely, this is a delightful surprise.

Doh

The game was back up for review. Note the "was". I just needed 3 more reviewers, but I realized I made a pretty major design mistake. So yeah. November maybe?

See, I hate unnecessary numbers. I made the decision early on to not include complex character stats and RPG elements because I wanted to streamline gameplay, put a focus on the balance, and avoid RPG grinding. So as much as possible, there are very few numbers on screen. A few too few as it turns out.

And here's the problem. Combat is a black box of mystery. You select an attack, and until you really know the system, you have no idea what's going to happen. What I *should* have done is give players some way to see what will happen. Basically put a little box on screen that tells users "This attack does 20-25 damage, -30% since they're defending, and will stun them". Not in so many words. It sounds like a little tiny thing, but it'll really improve the player experience.

Chuffed to bits

Rejected. The screen said hold a button. Testers didn't hold the button down long enough. Let the passive-aggressive post begin.

I'm not actually annoyed at that assessment. In fairness, the timer for that was set too high. Besides, I shouldn't ever use "hold button" for navigation. It's just easier to implement and I'm lazy on some of the uncommon player scenarios.

I am annoyed at reviewer number 2, who I came in afterwords, saw reviewer 1 asking whether it was an issue, marked as fail, and proceeded to write a quite condescending comment to me. Now I remember why I don't actually participate in online communities.

Mostly though, I'm annoyed with the process. It takes is two fails to be rejected. With only one, you're fine. I know one fail is fine because I failed a game, which showed up on the marketplace anyway (strangely, I failed for something described as one of the "Most common review failures". Really makes me wonder what other people tested...)

As near as I can tell, I can't really contest it. I would argue it's not a fail reason, but I can sort of see the arguments the other way. It doesn't really matter at this point.

The problem with failing is it delays the game a month. It's a week before I can re-post, and it will be in review longer. No one wants to review a game twice, especially when very little changes. This took two weeks, the next time will be longer.

I suppose in the interim, there are things I can do. I can add in some proper dialog and confirmation boxes in some places. A number of reviewers thought the game was too slow. It's already very streamlined for a tactical game. I suspect some of that may be down to expectations of the marketplace. I can speed some actions up here and there, and I can definitely include a go-faster button or menu option to speed it up more. I'll probably take another look at font choices and improve the pause menu since I have the time. I might also make a retro-manual for it.

Here, have an unrelated screenshot:

Back up for review

The 7 day timeout is up, and the game is back up for review. I was just going to do a simple change to make player specific save files, but ended up reworking a bunch of behind the scenes user account stuff. I'm glad I did, since I found and fixed one crash bug.

Now I wait. I'm not expecting this review process to go quickly.

Once a couple people review it, I figure I'll throw together a better promo video and do some amount of marketing. The extent of my marketing will probably consist of a couple emails to sites I follow that review indie games.

Breaking out past the usual indie audience is a lot like trying to get a record contract:
You hope some DJ (major gaming outlet) happens to come to your show (plays your game on a whim) and plays your record on air (writes a fabulous review). What generally happens is you beg and plead (send out hundreds of personalized press releases) to anyone and everyone who could possibly promote you (every 2-bit blogger with a pulse). And in the end, you don't make any money, but your mother tells you she's still proud of you (actually this bit might be exactly the same).

So yeah... If I sold enough copies to make back the XNA membership, pay for the music, and still have enough left over to buy a pizza, I'd be pretty chuffed.

Anyway, instead of marketing, I've already started in on a new project. I'll talk more about it later, but it's a puzzle/adventure platformer I initially designed a couple years back.

Facepalm

I just realized that I only have only one save file per device. If you log in as some one else and save, it overwrites the only save on the device. I somehow assumed XNA gave you a unique folder per user when you selected a storage device and never thought twice about it. Nope. Not how it works at all. Not even a little.

If I pull it from testing, I'll have to wait a week to re-submit. On the plus, I'll fix that issue and improve the saving / loading in general. On the down side, I want it out the door and there's no guarantee testers won't still find major bugs that would push me back another week.

That's a bad excuse. I think I'll pull it.

I Hit the Button

Game is submitted. Not sure what to do while I wait. I suppose review other people's games. Otherwise I'll come off as some professional game developer that doesn't give back to the community.

I bring this up because there was a surprisingly nasty forum thread on an indie game that went in for review a few weeks ago. It sounded like it was a larger studio that couldn't do an arcade release and went with XBLIG since they were mostly done anyway. Things turned nasty and personal quickly.

I really felt sorry for the developers. Basically everything they had done was an affront to the 'scene' as it were. So very middle-school-circa-1997-ish. I suppose it was probably the best-tested indie game ever, just because it had so many eyes looking for an excuse to fail.

Yeah, don't want to be in their shoes. Relevant (2nd half very very NSFW).

Witty Title, Now With Bonus Video

First up, a gameplay video. (Go to youtube proper to see it in slightly-less-blurry-o-vision. I think there's a way to embed the higher res version, but I don't know how and can't be bothered to look it up.)



Anyway, I didn't get much feedback from other developers, but I did find out that it's a bit hard to get into. I spent a week focusing on the initial user experience. I had originally wanted it to be like a classic game where the story is in the manual and you figured out the game by trying new things. Then I looked at the games I have to compete with.

I might have gone a little overboard with polishing the user experience:

• I added an intro cinematic, which explains the story.
• I made it ever so slightly easier. I think people forgive "too easy" more readily than "too hard" (regardless of what online forums would have you believe).
• I didn't think that was quite enough so I added in a dialog system that I could use to give some amount of hint and direction to the first couple levels.
• I still needed some way to explain all the status effects and such, and I just couldn't bring myself to do that in the dialog system. It would have been too much initial reading.
• So I opted for a few screens of reference material in the start menu.
• When trying to tersely word a help file, I realized that my combat system was generally just complicated to explain and a bit too random. So I made some technical changes to combat. Now attacks deal slightly less, but there's a chance of getting a critical hit.

As I write, I'm playing through the game and making sure the combat changes haven't broken anything. Then it's time to submit.

I'm kinda... finished?

So.

My game is available for playtest in the XNA creators club. It has to go through peer review before being put online. Playtest isn't actually the review, it's just a trial for anyone interested in the game. I'll give it a week of that before moving it to peer review. I have no idea how long that takes, but I imagine a few weeks.

Here it is. I think you need to be a member to even see that page, and I think a paying member to playtest. So that link might be useless.

Aynway. I'm releasing a game. Holy crap.

Slow going

Between making a film and seeing family, I'm pretty well busy. I've found time to get hard mode working, saving, and all that jazz. Some descriptive text, a couple sound effects, and some animation fixing as I go is all I can do without running on the 360. I might have to move to the console this week. I keep surprising myself with how fast things go when I do have the time.

I'd post a screenshot, but I can't be bothered.

And a title screen

So here's the title screen. It's just a still image, so you can't see the little bits of animation going on. It looks pretty spiffy in motion. As always, clicky clicky to see the full version.

So I also did the credits, and some more odds and ends. I think I'm going to have to break down and get the XNA subscription this week so I can do the final rounds of testing. I think the only things left are presentation tweaks. I've got some animations that I could improve, and some additional sound effects to insert. Those are the only enhancements I need. I'd like to get a user test in, but I'm not actually that concerned, it's pretty solid.

I may be able to submit for testing in the next two weeks. I might see a release in early August. Holy crap. I'm really going to have a video game on the marketplace, and I have a hunch it might actually be decent.

And Thus, A New Title Was Created

I have come up with the final name for the game. I'm putting it down here and now so I lock myself in and stop myself from changing it again.

Storybook Tactics: Tale of the Nefarious Necromancers

I don't think I'll have the subtitle appear in the official game title, so it'll just be Storybook Tactics in the catalog.

I've got the title screen close to completion, I just need a title image and some small effects. I'll post a screen shot this weekend once I'm done. I'm getting spooky-close to needing to test this on the 360.

It's 3am, do you know where all your threads are?

If you're using the MediaPlayer framework, it turns out that no you don't. Moreover, you can't know. It looks like every time a play action is triggered (this includes a looping Song looping or changing songs) two new threads are created. And they never get disposed.

I discovered this when I hit a memory exception after four hours of playing and had 1147 threads open. The MediaPlayer interface is convenient, but I can't use it if it has a memory leak. Problem is that crashes in any form are grounds for a XBLIG failing in review.

So I have some alternatives:
Manually trigger sound effects, basically roll my own framework. Then I *ought* to handle the user playing their own music. Also, sound effects don't get compressed.
Use the XACT framework. It's a real pain to work with, and all I really gain is compression over just using sound effects.
Try to kill the rouge threads. As nears as I can tell, this is impossible. Yay managed code.
Or, (and this is the one I like) just stop playing music when memory gets close to full. It's easy to implement, and the few players that run the game that long will probably just think it's a small bug.


So this leads me right into why I was playing the game for four hours. The game is playable start to finish. I have to work on a credits sequence and revise saving/loading code, but the game is there, I played it start to finish.

Well, when I say play, the AI controlled all my characters. It's literally 1 line of code to enable, and it makes debugging victory screens and other things so much easier. I wanted to get a good number for how long the game actually was. The AI is a lot faster than a player, but it took about three hours for the AI to beat the game. I'd expect another hour just for user input, more if you didn't know where you were going, and more if you lost more frequently. I think 4-5 hours to beat the game is a very safe gameplay estimate.

I'm also a bit more confident about the difficulty now. The AI is a bit brute force, so if it can manage, I think a player will be able to. This doesn't let me test the learning curve though. That is what testers are for.

It looked like I actually did get the difficulty curve about where I wanted. For about the first half of the game you can sort of bumble about. Even with a bad mix of characters you can still win. The second half requires some thought, as do the optional battles. The last three were challenging, but not impossible. If anything, the last fight was a little too easy.

Anyway, enough rambling, have a screenshot of the character select screen after I made some improvements earlier this week:

Update

I've basically settled on music for the game. Music and sound effects have always been a concern for me. I can just about scrape by on sound effects, but there is no way I can fake music. I'm ok with paying for some quality music, I was hoping to avoid it, but it's difficult to find free, quality, loopable music with anything approaching a consistent style.

Music is not an important part of my game, I just don't want to screw it up. Perfect music would get me an extra point or two, but bad music will kill everything else. In the end I settled on some very calm, inoffensive orchestral stuff. It's nothing to write home about, which is exactly what I need. If I was willing to contract out for some music, I'd like to try something a little more exotic. Maybe a few different tracks with some exotic instruments and a little more upbeat. I might try playing with some modern version of 8-bit music ala bit.trip games, but it's just not worth the risk when I don't really have that luxury.

I did decide that I needed multiple tracks for battles. Most of a players time is going to be spent there, and if there's only one track, that could be a problem. I might think my placeholder track is fine, but I know not everyone will agree. I read a review of an an xbox indie game I liked, and one of the negatives was the repetitive music. I don't want that to be me if I can avoid it.

Early on I found some great free music over at incomptech. Unfortunately I couldn't find enough looping music from there, but I did get one track that was perfect for one thing. I did find another great site with musicloops. The site is great for looping music which is exactly what I needed. $30 got me enough music to finish out the game. That's not a bad price when the XNA club membership is $100 a year (I need to get that again at some point to test on the 360 and put it on the marketplace). What's nice is I can use the music on future projects as well, go creative commons liscense go.

Anyway, this week has basically been spent tightening up the graphics on level three, I've just been doing graphics tweaks and finding music mostly. I've got a few more weeks of tweaks before I can really show the game off end to end.

The title screen and the name are still problematic. I really need a final name before I can do the title screen. Unfortunately (or fortunately, since it was going to be a lot of work) I can't do the 90's style title screen with a big piece of pixel art because of the resolution difference between widescreen and standard def, so I'll have to come up with something else.

Here, have a screenshot.

Holy cow, I think I can see the finish line

Just hit a milestone, all the levels are mapped. I thought it would take a lot longer. I also thought I needed a lot more art assets, but what few I needed didn't take long at all. I'm really pretty happy with almost all of the levels. There are a few that didn't turn out the way I'd imagined, but I think they'll grow on me.

This one was actually one I had no definitive plan for. Something in a swamp. Maybe there would be a big tree. Stared at it for five minutes and came up with this.

I also spent a good day just doing a little bit of math to balance the game. I had wanted to avoid trying to mathematically balance the game - just sort of out of principle, I guess. But then I realized that the AI was leaning on just a move or two per character, which was predictable, if effective. The characters that were the most fun to fight against were the ones that constantly changed up their moves. I did some math to get rough estimates of how the AI estimated each attack, and used that to even out some of the extremes. Adjust some costs here, and some damage there. This is good because the AI is more unpredictable and you get to see what their various moves do before you unlock the character.

Along the way, I had time to fix some camera glitches and add a free-look button, catch some bugs, and improve pathfinding.

So I'm totally done, right? I started a to-do list, but it was growing longer than the rest of this post on it's own. So yeah, no.

Not Dead Yet

I was distracted for a while with work and stuff, but I started working on the game again over the last month. I had sort of hit a wall at one point. I felt like there was just too much to do, but then I had a brilliant thought - cut the game in half. I had planned 50 characters. One per level meant 50 levels. I still had a bunch of attack animations, a huge number of pieces for levels, and various other content - not to mention the testing and polishing. I was losing motivation and it just felt like I would never ship.

So I stopped working on new animations, cut the number of planned characters and levels in half, and started working on fleshing out what I had. I figure that I can release a second game with all the cut content later if people enjoy this one. In 15 minutes I went from a concept project that will likely never ship, to something that actually resembles a game.

So recently I've been playing with the AI, creating new levels, and balancing the game a bit. I'm actually really happy with the results. The game plays really pretty well.

I'm a bit concerned about the learning curve and difficulty. I don't want players to be able to breeze through the levels using the same characters, but I don't want to overwhelm players. I don't really want to do a tutorial, so I'm hoping I introduce new concepts slow enough for players to pick it up as they go. This is probably a bad assumption. So I think I'll have to bribe some co-workers to test it a bit this summer. The statuses and buffs might be slightly confusing, or it's quite possible I've made the initial encounters too difficult.

Tl;dr: still alive, working on game, worried about the difficulty.