I worked on some casual puzzle-crossword game last year and due to some complications with graphic designer I did not finish this game. The source code lays in the dark corner of my hard disk for many months until I spoke with Gee about it. From that time I have dilemma what I can do with this game.
Last year I wanted to have epic (casual) game full of elves and pots of gold, nice Irish music and beautiful hand drawing graphics. First months everything was going well, then started problems with my graphics designer that went to fail of the project. I lost attraction, but most of code is written, also some levels and others stuff.
These days I spend a lot of time thinking of what I can do with this unfinished project. I can continue at the point I left this game and finish it into A grade casual game and sell it at the portals. This sounds good, but it requires a lot of time and effort that I probably do not want to spend at this project with such a uncertain outcome (my game developer myself cry, but it is not so fun to find another graphic designer, than another, because first left than start again).
I can also finish this game as a B grade casual games and go indie way. Just finish the code, throw all the elves and nice story away; add some generic graphic created by myself (graphics is not crucial in this kind of games) and try to sell it via download sites. This looks nice for me, because it is everything just about me and I do not need to spend a lot of effort at the business site (like dealing with publishers and so). Game could be also much cheaper: if it will costs $5.99 I will get more money than if I release $19.99 game with some publisher (yeah, they take more then 70% of game sale).
Or I can just leave it at the dark place of my hard drive. What do you think, what is the right way? Try to make it big, spent a lot of time and money to get the chance and have about 5 percent to make nice income or try to publish it and just see what happen later. If you are a developer what are you doing with your abandoned projects?
There are tons of flash games available and each day pops hundreds of another new games. Question how these developers and whole developments teams makes living is usually undiscovered which leads me to wrote this list.
Pre-game advertising
This is most common way how developers makes money: you must see the ads before loading of the game many times before.
Portals Revenue Sharing
Portals like Kongregate forbid in-game advertising, but they provide revenue sharing based on their own advertising solution.
In-site advertising
This way was most common before rise of in-game advertising by companies like MochiAds. Developers created game with faith that this game will spread virally and brings a crowds of players to his sites and then monetize it by classical advertisement like Google AdSense or so.
Sponsorship
There are a couple of sponsorship methods: developer could sign a exclusive publishing deal with game portal and this portal will pay him for his game or some other business or individual could pay him for including link which leads to their site or whole game might be branded to payer theme.
Pay Per Play / Pay Per Item
This is well know in MMOG genre and the method is simply: you have access to the free version of game and if you want some advantage or more content you need to pay some small amount money to the developer.
This list do not contains all possibilities, I want just provide some basic info about how developers makes living by creating small flash games. If your favorite method is not listed do not hesitate to post comment.
Most of gamers will tell you that current games sux, because most games are similar of each others (and then they will go to the shop for new sequel of Fifa, NBA… you named it). The gaming geeks and journalist are more persistent about this and if they see something new they start to sing ode. While fascinated by something new they can easily omit some things which can degrade the game.
There are small independent company in the England: Introversion software and they’ve got all this press for everything they do. I played most of their games and like it, but I can’t say that these game are superiors, they are just unusual. This games have different graphics than other games, have differentgameplay and although their games are not special journalist and hard core gamers like it. This is clear message for other developers: stop doing poor alternatives of successful games and make something different. People will love you.
If you are not familiar with Introversion Software, take a look at the video of theirs further game: Multiwinia, which will be relased during 2008.
There is no doubt that casual games totally dominate the portal sales, but which type of game mechanics is most profitable?
For few years was Bejeweled (and clones) the Bestseller no. 1, another years there was Zuma and their clones and now it is hidden objects. It was surprise me a lot, because I do not like this type of game, but I am probably not typical costumer. Hidden objects dominate on most portals during whole year.
Second big genre is Click Management (Cake Mania, Diner Dash and clones) and during end of the year 2007 there pop up fewSim games like Alice Greenfingers or Virtual Villagers which takes a lot of attention too (23% on Yahoo Games).
These days the most important part of games are graphics. And of course physics. But how can I play great looking game, which’s control absolutelly sucks?
I spoke about it in my post about Resident Evil 4, but now I want to think about it from a little different angle. As I wrote already, right now I’m playing SimCity Societies. And so I bethink of The Sims 2. I was searching a while and finally after few minutes installed it on my laptop.
And even if it’s still so much fun I have one little notice for developers - why don’t you use same control scheme in games from one “family“? Okay - when you wanna implement absolutelly new control scheme, it’s almost impossible to keep at least controls the same. But SimCity and The Sims 2 use the same scheme - one mouse button to build and choose things, one to change the angle of camera and one for slide along the map. So why the hell is SimCity using right mouse button for changing camera angle and The Sims 2 the middle button? I know, it’s a detail, but it’s really confusing, don’t you think?
I start creating games where I was very young and create tons of small games as a amateurish game developer and two commercial games. I seen a lot of other beginner game developers that do same mistakes I did when I start with games and this is why I create list of five basic recommendations and hope that this tips helps to others.
1. Don’t aim too high
Many beginners want to create the ultimate FPS or MMORPG that can compete games from professional studios. Don’t do that and I recommend you don’t start working on FPS, RTS and similar genres: people will like the “Big” games instead of your clone.
2. Focus to small addictive games
Start creating small addictive games. Create simple game play with few unique features. Don’t forget on some score system. Users like to beat other players or ourselves.
3. Write concept document
Don’t starts creating your game until you write all of yours ideas to any document, although small games don’t required formal design document, some kind of idea list in notepad is great help. Don’t add new ideas to your games during development.
4. Play similar games
Find and play as many similar games as you can. That give you more expertise in your field and you can avoid the worst things that do your competition and find some great features that you can implement to your games.
5. Find team members
Game development is very complex area and nearly nobody can expertise all parts of work. Someone is great programmer, artist or game designer, but I can’t remember to a lot of people who can do it all in good quality. And you can find another advantage of having team members: game development will be much funnier with some other guys.
You know it, playing some (usually) flash game for a couple of hours and you’ve got an awesome score that can’t be bet by anybody, send it to the high scores and see that you are in 78,000th place. This must meet everybody who played any game with high scores.
It is a pity that none of developer don’t do anything with this and lost their players, because nothing is that frustrating then spend few hours of playing, feels that you play it like the God and seen that your score is completely rubbish.
Well, we found that global high scores are usually bad, unless you are really great player, but how to solve this kind of problem? Player likes to have high scores and competing to any score. The easier and efficient way is provide the high score of player: this model use developers very often and it is successful. The player sees their best score and tries to beat it. The player mind their progress and usually enjoy it.
Competitive players share theirs scores and try to beat each other. It is very similar to the global best scores table, but you shared it with few other (well known) players and it is much easier to bet few other players instead few thousand of the gamers.
When we work on Fish Fillets 2 we have this idea in mind and we develop comprehensive system of statistics. The Fish Fillets 2 is complex underwater puzzle game (I could write about it in some further post) and you have few types of statistics: How many rooms you solved, which rooms you solved, how much moves you need and so on. This statistics are automatically sorted to few categories and you can seem how good is your score in global table, how good you are in your nation or create group with your friends and compete each other. Our players like it and I hope that much more game developers will start doing the high scores this way. To see how our statistics works see online part of the Fish – Fillets page.
