This week I emailed the guys at Wargamer.com to give them a heads up about Valor & Victory. They very kindly mentioned me on their Friday weekly update – https://www.wargamer.com/articles/wargaming-news-may-31st/. Actually, it was a bit of a bonus as it just so happened they also had news on Unity of Command. There’s my game in the mix with a follow up to an outstanding game!
Of course, my main purpose was to start to generate interest in the game but also to expose the fact I am providing development builds of the game as I work on it. I certainly got a lot of interest because of that article as you can see below. Another unexpected bonus was that some people donated money when they downloaded the game. I also had a few extra sales with my previous game Kursk.
There is a risk to doing this and good reasons why no one else does it. What does developer build really mean to a downloader of the game? Are they expecting to be able to play a complete game, expecting a buggy beta or are they aligned with my vision of a “Hey this is where I am with getting the game working. Oh, btw nothing is tested and uhmm not much works”?
Indirectly this has been a discussion point for another game in development at the moment. Slitherine announced Panzer Corps 2 on 08 Mar 2017 and immediately fans of the game wanted to see screenshots and asked about when they can test the game –
http://www.slitherine.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=464&t=78967. They have seen very little and are fairly vocal about it. The point is they want to be involved and give early feedback. The risk to Slitherine is that the early feedback is negative and the fans are turned off to the game and doom it before its even released. A commercial disaster for a business. So I totally understand the reluctance to give out something too early.
I hope I am not unique in the fact I write code, feed in some new graphics and after a few playthroughs realize its just not working, something is not gelling or its plain too difficult to implement correctly. No one gets to see these failures if you keep them hidden. Sometimes I rewrite whole chunks of code because I suddenly have an “ah ha!” moment and realize I can make my life a lot easier. There’s no direct impact to an end user of the game so they see nothing new but I spent a week doing it. “Hey guys check out the new build – nothing new to see but the code looks great!”. Without frequent real updates perception can be – He gave up on the game as we have had no news for weeks now.
So why am I providing development builds so early in the process? Well, I play games in a certain way. I don’t read instructions, I never play in windowed mode and I use a mouse almost 100% if I can. No keyboard shortcuts for me if I can avoid it. I have no UI expert with 20 years of game design to help me. I have no AI genius who knows every algorithm there is to know and also knows how to code them. I don’t have much time, funds or indeed the skill set for PR & Marketing. I do this in my spare time. Sometimes there is no spare time. Should I focus on coding or testing during that time? I need help filling those gaps.
The first feedback I got was “Can you make a windowed version” and “Keyboard shortcuts?”. Oh maybe that is important then. “Hey your icons are overlapping with unit displays”. Hmm not everyone has a 1920 * 1080 screen then. There are my UI experts.
“Hey we passed on the news about your game” – Thanks guys from Burden of Command (seriously, thanks, after they twittered to their followers I saw a spike immediately). There are my PR and Marketing experts.
“Hey your AI sucks”. But I haven’t coded any yet! I reply. “It still sucks”. There is my QA team.
Sometimes I imagine myself as the lonely long distant runner at the back of the pack. Tired and despairing of ever finishing the race. Then I look up and I realize there is a crowd running alongside me cheering me on. I hope by the end of this race the crowd will be big. A recent blog on Gamasutra nicely covered this subject https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TellyLee/20180601/319126/Indie_Game_Marketing_The_Value_of_Fans.php
I hear a voice in the crowd “Your AI still sucks”. I put my head back down and start coding again…
// Try and beat this AI
if (player.equals(“voice in the crowd”){
stackEliminated = true;
}
