mutantmagnet
07-14-2008, 11:02 AM
If you were ever interested in game design this post-mortem on an indie game (http://www.devmaster.net/articles/mmorpg-postmortem/part1.php) can be enlightening. It will atleast be mildy entertaining.
Some of it is filled with lulz.
Initially, we wanted to prevent 'stupid people' from logging in to our game. So we used a little trick: ...But many people didn't read the license anyway, so the first update gave them a hint, in case they couldn't connect to the server (just read the god damn license). Of course, not even with that hint there some of the players couldn't bother to read the license, so I guess we overachieved our goal (of not letting ignorant people playing our game). Eventually, a few months later we removed that trick, because we were losing too many players, and that wasn't really good.
In fact, before adding the combat, even though we had a big, red bold text on the download page stating that the game has no combat, people were still downloading, and their fist question was, invariably, "How do I kill something?".
Some of it is heartwarming
The thing is, by that time, we spent more than 8000 hours of work for the game, so even a Burger King job would have paid off better. Nevertheless, the donations proved to us that the game is somehow viable, and some people like it enough so that they will donate some little money to help us.
The biggest map had about 32K tiles, more than 5K 3D objects and more than 3K 2D objects. When one of our players, Moonshadow, offered to help with some map-making, we were, of course, very happy. He was very skilled, and soon after he became the head map0maker. Before having him in the team, we had three maps: the starting map and two other maps connected via portals from the first map. This was a little awkward, as the world had no consistency. 'Moonshadow' changed the way the maps were linked, making a "world map", where each map was a part of a big continent.
Some of it is both
...; so in February we got the first place and became the Game of the Month. It wasn't easy to win; our newbie helpers and admins were broadcasting a message every hour to everyone in the game to go and vote for us. They became so used to do it that few continued to do so even after we won, which was unnecessary since you can't win that title more than once per year.
Some of it is filled with lulz.
Initially, we wanted to prevent 'stupid people' from logging in to our game. So we used a little trick: ...But many people didn't read the license anyway, so the first update gave them a hint, in case they couldn't connect to the server (just read the god damn license). Of course, not even with that hint there some of the players couldn't bother to read the license, so I guess we overachieved our goal (of not letting ignorant people playing our game). Eventually, a few months later we removed that trick, because we were losing too many players, and that wasn't really good.
In fact, before adding the combat, even though we had a big, red bold text on the download page stating that the game has no combat, people were still downloading, and their fist question was, invariably, "How do I kill something?".
Some of it is heartwarming
The thing is, by that time, we spent more than 8000 hours of work for the game, so even a Burger King job would have paid off better. Nevertheless, the donations proved to us that the game is somehow viable, and some people like it enough so that they will donate some little money to help us.
The biggest map had about 32K tiles, more than 5K 3D objects and more than 3K 2D objects. When one of our players, Moonshadow, offered to help with some map-making, we were, of course, very happy. He was very skilled, and soon after he became the head map0maker. Before having him in the team, we had three maps: the starting map and two other maps connected via portals from the first map. This was a little awkward, as the world had no consistency. 'Moonshadow' changed the way the maps were linked, making a "world map", where each map was a part of a big continent.
Some of it is both
...; so in February we got the first place and became the Game of the Month. It wasn't easy to win; our newbie helpers and admins were broadcasting a message every hour to everyone in the game to go and vote for us. They became so used to do it that few continued to do so even after we won, which was unnecessary since you can't win that title more than once per year.