My first indie game: Save the Maidens

12May/114

My first indie game: Save the Maidens

I've been waiting a long time to finally do this and I'm super proud to finally announce my first indie game: «Save the Maidens».

This is a very important moment for me, since I've been striving to make my own games for over ten years now. What's more, this brings me one step closer to becoming an independent game developer, turning my own ideas into neat games and, eventually, make a living from publishing them. At least to some extend... hopefully...

Finished but not published - yet!

However, I'm stoked, this is finally happening, especially, because «Save the Maidens» has come a pretty long way. But before you click on that linked image and ask yourself «Hey, why doesn't it take me to the game? Where can I play it?» I have to tell you that it's not public, yet. Still I think it's a good moment to reveal some details and info about this baby and what we are planning to do with it...

We (that's me 2D artist Wolfgang Ruf and I) decided to load the game up on FlashGameLicense (FGL) in hope to find a sponsor for it and, thus, at least some financial support for all the hours of work we poured into making this small but neatly polished casual game (the hours of love will not be billed ;) ).

So, in fact, I'm only pre-announcing the game - awwwww... -, which is completely legal in my mind, though, because after three sessions of closed beta testing, lots of polishing, bugfixing and more polishing, we finally pushed the game into something we decided was worth calling «a Final».

Hopes and disappointments

Actually, «finally» has been almost two months ago and the game has been up for active bidding on FGL ever since. Originally, I was expecting the game would be out by now with a sponsor advertising it on his front page. I had high hopes getting a good sponsoring deal after all I'd read on blogs from other indie developers like Andy Moore or Sarah Northway, who apparently sold their games very successfully over FGL (peak at the numbers for Andy's «SteamBirds», and Sarah's «Rebuild» - plus follow up post).
Those hopes were additionally fueled by the great feedback we'd received from our beta testers and the initial rating from the FGL staff member, who approved the game. So, we were expecting to see quite some bidding action - but it never happened...

So far, interest in the game as been surprisingly low and the few bids that were trickling in during the first days were far from exciting. Considering the time we spent on making the game, I'd have to place them in categories ranging from disappointing to absolutely ridiculous.
Being new to the whole FGL ecosystem, I felt I had probably done something wrong. Had I not put enough effort into marketing the game? Had I misconfigured the auction settings or simply overlooked an important check box? The only difference to the other games up for bidding I could make out was that we weren't providing a game play video. I had considered it unnecessary since the game was right there for everyone to test and try (I might have been wrong there). So, I just waited...

Tries and Errors

After nothing had happened for more than a week, I politely rejected the outstanding offers, explaining that we had invested way to much time into the game's creation to accept. After that, the whole thing went dead silent...
As a consequence, I decided to open up the visibility of the game to developers with a certain experience status in order to push views and feedback for the game. I thought maybe the game became more interesting to sponsors, if more people actually played it, responded in the feedback thread and talked about it.

The views did go up as expected, but we received only little feedback mainly claiming the game was too hard for beginners - a feedback we hadn't received from our beta testers, but, as we figured, was very likely to be true: Once you've spent hours on refining a game's mechanics, you've gone completely blind towards its initial skill demands. However, not a single new auction bid found its way into my inbox.

Time for plan B: Going mobile

After three weeks there wasn't any noticeable activity going on, it was clear we'd have a hard time finding an exclusive sponsor. We were still believing in the potential of the game and, thus, decided to take care of publishing the game ourselves. The mechanics of the game - which effectively are throwing stones and other medieval objects with giant slingshots at approaching alien invaders - suggest to be even more fun (and easier) to play on touch devices than on a computer with a mouse. A few quick tests confirmed this assumption, so, it was immediately evident to us, that we had to port the game to the various mobile devices out there.

I had a small discussion with Andy Moore on twitter, where he claimed that shortly after his game «Steam Birds» had appeared on the web, it had been blatantly cloned (rebuild from scratch) and put on the Apple App Store within an incredibly short amount of time. Cloning successful indie games and bringing them into the App Store seems to be new a spreading evil other indie developers like Polygon Toys and their cool skater game «Tiny Hawk» have fallen prey to. If you'd like to get some details, Andy has blogged about this annoying mishap and shares some thoughts on the matter (you should be following his excellent blog on game development anyhow).

However, this all made me realize that I didn't want my game to be put on the App Store before I even had a chance to do so myself. And I was aware, that in contrast to «Steam Birds», «Save the Maidens» didn't provide a lot of content, so, it'd be an easy task to clone it once it was out there. Not that I expected this game to be so incredibly good that anyone would find it worth plagiarising, but still, I didn't want to take the risk.

Consequently I'll have to wait with releasing the web version until the mobile versions for Maidens (as we internally call it) are ready to be loaded up on the various stores, which has proven to be no simple task - but that's worth a whole blog post to itself.

To cut a long story short, I did a lot of performance testing in a sandbox, writing lots of new code, only to find, that with my current setup, I won't be able to make «Save the Maidens» perform sufficiently... bummer.

Starting from scratch

So, this is where I am now: Stuck with a game that's actually finished, but I'm afraid to release to the web because I don't want it to be copied. I'd have to go and rewrite the game from scratch, using all the nifty new code bases that I wrote for the tests. It feels cool to already have debugged solutions at hand, but still, it's a huge pile of work since everything, from basic object control to animation handling needs so be redone.

But that's one of the reasons I wrote this blog posts - thanks for bearing with me so far: I had to pin down the current situation in order to figure out a route from here. Plus, I want to write more about my game work in the near future, about mobile optimization and all, so I needed a point to start out from. And this is it.

The silence is broken, let's finish this game!

Filed under: Games, Marketing, Mobile Leave a comment

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flashopen
May 12th, 2011 - 22:23

Pity that you didn’t get the same enthusiasm back from the bidders.
I guess that to promote a product, even a game that is right there before your eyes and calling you to play it is likely not enough. I believe that in promotion everything counts and a video is always appealing. Going mobile and considering the gaming-environment of nowadays, it is a ‘must’. I wish you lots of success.

( REPLY )
- Michel
  May 13th, 2011 - 10:14
  
  Hey Carlos, thanks for stopping by and thanks for you opinion and wishes.
  
  I havn’t given up on finding a sponsor, yet, I just want to make all final adjustments and want the game ready for mobile so I can flexibly decide what to do. In the first place I’ve decided to not let me bring down by the fact that we havn’t successful found a sponsor, yet. I won’t let that fact dictate how I feel about my game. So we’ll see what happens once everything is fully done and ready for launch.
  
  I totally agree that you have to pull every possible string to attract attention and as we can conclude from various recent examples (e.g. Swords & Sworcery) gathering attention early on is a key to success – apart from delivering an extraordinary gaming experience.
  
  That doesn’t necessarily mean spending a load of cash – on the contrary, I think it’s already worth a lot to just open up to the community, talk about your idea and how progress comes a long. That way you’re very likely to get some feedback how people rate your ideas and, eventually, you may and up even with a small fan club that is willing to help spread the word once your game is done.
  
  Getting started with marketing isn’t all that hard, I guess, and it’s due to this revelation that I’ve also decided to finally start discussing the game on this blog – apart from the fact that I’d like to share my findings from the process of making it.
  
  I totally agree that going mobile these days is important, but, in my opinion, there are various aspects one should consider. For example, I don’t think that Adobe’s current credo to simply deploy your one app to all platforms is a good premise for delivering quality user experiences. On the one hand my recent experiments taught me that it’s simply not possible in terms of performance issues and on the other hand each platform/device has its own restraints and hazards to overcome: The experience of an app on the web is so different the one you’ll have running the same app on a tablet. So, in my opinion, just following the concept of simply deploying everything everywhere we’re most likely to end up with apps that run only half good on either platform and I don’t think that’s a state worth striving for.
  
  I’d rather have people pick on platform at a time and then tweak their game, RIA whatever until it runs perfectly on that platform and do whatever is necessary to make that happen. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very excited to see what AIR 2.7 can do especially in terms of bringing games to the iPad, but I’m a little sceptical. Currently it needs a lot of work to make an AIR game run smooth on Android and that hasn’t even passed a cross-compiler.
  
  But I think I’ve gone off topic here. Thanks, Carlos, your comment has set off a whole avalanche of rumblings in my head. Should be enough fuel for yet another blog post. :)
  
  ( REPLY )
flashopen
May 13th, 2011 - 14:03

I quite understand your point of view and, somehow, your skepticism makes lot of sense. Off-course that the diversity of devices makes things more difficult for developers and not only for Flash developers.

Adobe has been run after an ideology (as Macromedia has in the early days) of which, Flash-technology is the most exposed to its success and failure. The user experience hasn’t changed, either they are on a mobile or on a computer, hence we’re talking about humans, and having in mind the Darwin’s theory of evolution :), they couldn’t care less about ‘the making of’ of a some application, as long as it runs on their machine.

I develop, mostly, educative games for the schools in the Netherlands where the iPad came too late! If they can’t run their school-material on the iPad then, the iPad is the one to blame and it won’t be used, period. Flash has, obviously, won this battle long time ago.

I must confess that I have been apprehensive about the future of Flash which reflects pretty much the future of my career. So, and trying to keep up the optimism, I would say that sometimes, it wouldn’t hurt to make some time for reflection. Meaning, trying to reach everybody in all their devices can be a frustrating task with a great chance of little results, actually.

I began to develop for Android no so long time ago and I’ll stick to it. IPhone, iPad? No, not now, maybe someday, who knows? Adobe offers a lot with Flash in terms of cross-platform development, nice, but I’ll take what I have previously decided to take and just that.

Indeed, to go along with the new technology it is most exciting for developers. I had my climax in 2005 with Flash8Pro can you believe it?! AIR 2.7 and then 2.8… you know?… this way, Adobe shall keep you busy forever… you are a speaker, and you should be on the ‘edge’, I understand that. But if you really want to monetize an app, then, I really believe you should narrow your platform-choices in order to get more room for creativity …and performance.

I hope I don’t provoke here any kind of undesirable influence by sharing my experience and thoughts! But your blog gave me also a lot to think about, because I admit to have been in the same kind of boat before… I even thought I should go on therapy!

Greetings
Carlos

( REPLY )
- Michel
  May 13th, 2011 - 14:52
  
  First of all, this is a free blog and you can share whatever ideas and influence you have to share ;)
  
  Secondly, I’m not really frustrated by the fact that I cannot simply deploy my Flash apps anywhere without making (partly large) adjustments. Actually, I would expect it to be not as easy in the first place.
  
  I’m pointing out, that the idea Adobe’s been creating in every Flash developer’s mind that everything he’s done so far can be simply ported to all devices, is quite far from the truth. That may change in the future of AIR development and I think it’s a great effort they’re doing here and I’m not planning on ditching the technology because it’s not as ready as Adobe claims it to be – no way. My major point was, though, that we’ve been talking about technology way to much, recently, when we should care more about the experience the user has with the app.
  
  My point was, that using the mouse and keyboard to control an app differs so vastly from controlling it via touch that the very idea of porting the same app to different platforms without applying the necessary changes to meet these differences doesn’t make sense in the first place – or only in very few cases.
  
  What I’m trying to say here is, that people should be aware that porting an app to a certain platform/device means more than just changing some deployment configurations – if you want the user to have an appropriate experience on the targeted platform. People should invest time to think about what the differences are and how to overcome them. If that means changing a deployment setting – perfect! If if means setting up a ne project and exchanging some classes – fine! If it means writing the app from scratch using a different technology – so be it!
  
  Big words, I know. But I’m starting to understand that experience is everything and if you’re about to deliver a half-assed experience just because you’re not putting in some extra effort to improve it but instead simply rely on pressing another button, you’re very like to scare of lots of potential users.
  
  In one sentence: don’t try to swallow it all at once, try to go for one platform at a time, do not hesitate to make the necessary adjustments even if that means leaving your comfort zone and don’t choose lazyness over a half-assed user experience. So basically, we’re on the same page here, right? :)
  
  I know that this means a lot of hard work and it’s the music that I’ll have to face for Maidens ;)
  
  Thanks for sharing you thoughts, Carlos, I appreciate it!
  
  ( REPLY )

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