Poncho An Depressing Post-Mortem

Huh, I would have assumed FIGS and Simplified Chinese.

But then again, the Chinese console market is still kinda a new thing given the whole situation involving manufacturing and what can actually be released there, so....

 

As long as there's no RTL or ideograms, I'm good!

I've been curious about how localization is handled in the code. I should go do a search, but do RESX resource strings work cross-platform? Or, come to think of it, do they work at all with Mono? That's how we home-baked it in my Day Job projects.

 

I don't believe this is specific just to game development. There are people who start businesses in other industries this way too. Some succeed, some not so much. The people on this forum probably see more of it in game development than in other areas simply because we're interested in game development.

I know someone who opened a business by the skin of their teeth and ended up losing it (and probably carrying some significant debt from it) within about a year or so.

On the flip side of that, I know someone who started their business only part time while holding down a 40 hour a week job. Then when things were successful enough, she quit her day job and hasn't looked back.

 

I have very mixed feelings on this game / post-mortem.

While it's always great to get feedback on the real-world game development process, and good to have sobering advice that keeps us grounded, this one kinda seems more accusatory than anything. I've no doubt the publisher they opted to go with complicated things for them, and the struggles they faced were very real, but many of the missteps seem so obvious to me...

Why would you quit a paying job to focus on doing something full-time that you KNOW will make you no money for a few years? Why would you plan on the game taking that long to make, knowing you won't have income during that time? Any why would you, after having done any research at all, assume that a game will make you any money?!

Game development is the perfect trade/skill to pick up as a hobby. The skills have a huge overlap with regular development, so you can pursue a career in web or application development and what you learn doing one will improve your abilities in the other. And "real" (non-game) developers make a very decent income!

These guys didn't plan well. They were impulsive, and just wanted to make games. I mean, from the sound of things, they actually committed to the idea of going "full indie" based on nothing more than a character sprite. That just seems like madness to me. I have a dozen unfinished builds that would make a better basis for starting a company around, and I only do this stuff in my spare time.

I'm not trying to take anything away from their hard work, or the genuine mistreatment they may have received at the hands of their publisher, but please... any young and aspiring developers out there who want to make it big: don't do what these guys did. Don't risk everything like this on faith alone. Make a plan that has safeguards and fallbacks built into it so if/when your game runs out of funding, you don't have to choose between keeping the lights on or eating that week.

 

Absolutely agree. You're right it definitely isn't limited to game dev. Most business ventures of any kind fail. It's all around us all of the time. I live in a small town and the number of businesses that come and go is high.

It just seems like the game dev cases are a bit more extreme than the average. People outside of game dev can overreach take on way more risk than they should and it does happen sometimes but in game dev this overreaching seems to happen more often it seems to me.

It's a shame they didn't get the game out there much earlier on. I think @Player7
made a great point earlier. Had they released the game as a more standard platformer back when it looked like this...


... it would likely had turned out much better for them. While it is an interesting idea they had with the player being able to move back and forth in & out of the screen layers the final game ended up being so complex to build due to that decision.

And I personally find the earlier look of the game more appealing. It looks interesting and kind of has a charm of its own so to speak. And they could have just taken a more basic platformer route and for uniqueness gone with one special ability for the player character or any of a number of other things. This would have resulted in a very nice looking solid fun platformer game that probably more people could connect with.

Of course I also notice here we see the focus on graphics created additional workload with the graphics being redone 3 to 4 times. That was a huge cost (both in time and out of pocket money when they ultimately hired an artist). And looking at what they had originally this cost was completely unnecessary. Basically just a complete waste of time and money.

Hopefully they learned these lessons and everything will turn out better for them next time.

 

Simple pixel art character wearing one article of red clothing, named after the aforementioned single article of clothing, set in a 2D world that leverages 3D to bend the rules of traditional 2D gaming.

Edit: Maybe it's only obvious to me because I know what a fez and a poncho are.

 

I think this is the problem you run into when your measure of success is based on the highly visible but outlier success games. The desire to have a hit game blinds you to the damage that increased cost is doing, and makes you unwilling or unable to consider the possibility you won't be as successful as those targets no matter what you do.

It's one thing to say "we don't really care about money", but when you indicate your measure of success is to be able to have 3 people continue to make games full time (on a presumed multiple-years-per-title-before-release cycle as they did here), in addition to covering the loans you've taken to survive during your first game's development cycle, that's no longer an insignificant sum you need to hit that "success" mark.

Assuming these guys are US-based in an average-to-low cost of living area, $40k/yr is a modest but easily comfortable annual income. Multiply that by 3 and you have $120k / year to cover their team. Factor in publisher and platform cuts (seems to be an average of 30% each from what I've seen) and if my math is right (it probably isn't), your game now needs to make $200k or so to cover one year of living expenses. At $9.99 per unit, that's 20k copies a year they'd have to sell to keep doing what they do, and that's not even counting the debt they acquired.

As a fresh team of developers, that's just not a realistic expectation to make.

 

I agree. See now that's looking at it like it is an actual business. Which it is! But I have the impression most folks doing this Indie thing aren't even looking at it this way. I think they all think they are building Fez, Super Meat Boy, Minecraft, etc so the amount of time and money burned up is irrelevant. At least that is how it looks to me.

It would be so much better to set realistic goals.... "okay... so no matter how complex the game is to build.... or how good the game looks (within reason)... we probably won't make more than $10k from it. So what can we build with that in mind?" That is a more realistic business-oriented approach.

IF the game does better... say it makes $50k well then we're just that much further ahead. But don't depend on it. Don't rely on the game being a hit as just a given no matter how much work you put into it, how good it looks, how unique it is or how technically impressive it is. These kind of things are good for game jams, demo scene, showing to other devs, showing off to artists, etc. But not good thinking to bring to a startup game business.

 

Bit of a sad story. But I see a bunch of mistakes. Often it seems developers become a bit blinded by their own conviction that something is great when it's not, they don't see it objectively. The game seems to take itself too seriously and is maybe too complicated. It hinges around this one visually jarring mechanic of shifting into and out of the screen. It sounds like a sort of cool idea but just seems a bit boring after a while, like it just becomes work when you could've just jumped on the same platforms on the same playfield.

And one of the main mistakes I think these people make is, they make a platform game and the main character is just dull. Or it looks to childish and appeals to kids while the rest of the game is too sophisticated and appeals to adults - thus a complete mismatch of audiences. I'm really not inspired, it doesn't seem to have much personality and doesn't look appealing and doesn't seem fun to control. Their adoration of how the character was cute and adorable... .no, it's not that amazing and the second version was worse than the first.

A lot of the footage in videos also looks like just walking around not really having any interactions or challenges, platforming-wise, other than shifting back and forth. It's just sort of a sub-par platformer in that respect, seen it all before, done it all before, trying to differentiate itself in a way that is too kind of gimmicky. For me the shifting dynamic isn't enough to make up for that.

Someone posted that moustache game up above... immediately that looks more fun and engaging and less complicated.

Sometimes I think there's just really obvious things that to some people are too subtle and there's just some poor judgement involved in who decides whether something is good or not or whether people will like it or not. The game just doesn't have the right kind of personality, like it's a bit over-intellectualized or lacks heart or something.

And speaking of that... why the HELL are they making a dark dreary game about being homeless, when homelessness is something that most human beings fear and don't want anything to do with and have an automatic repulsion about? It's as bad as making a game about sickness. Absolutely awful decision marketing-wise, it will probably flop even worse. I would cancel that immediately and think again.

 

Great points and I shared the bit about Super Mustache just to illustrate there are two kinds of Indies out there. Well more than that I am sure but for the purposes of this discussion there are two kinds.

First are the people obsessed with making some kind of huge, phenomenal, super unique, most incredible looking or otherwise super complex game. They pour everything into these games and most sink to the bottom like a rock alongside all of the other games and have taken a huge toll on the developers as all of their blood, sweat, tears, money etc have been sucked away in making the game. But occasionally (rarely) one becomes a hit.

And then you have other Indies who are actually making a living from it or at least have a profitable part-time game dev business. These are the folks making things like Super Mustache and countless other games that make less than $20k each. They are keeping their vision pure.

This second group generally aren't trying to change the world, make statements / send messages, achieve something spectacular or do anything other than build solid fun games in the easiest way they can. Their development cycles are far shorter, the risk they take on is far less and while they will likely never see a home run they have a long list of singles with an occasional double. They treat it professionally.... as in like a business. Having fun making fun games not agonizing over technical issues or graphics issues etc. Just having fun making games and making money from it.

 

It's funny you read so many of these failure articles of how they spent years on a project and put their soul into it, you eventually start to connect what they all have in common. Is it a platformer game or a space shooter shmup game? People are tired of them, and I don't understand how they think they can make their money back. The amount of money it costs for years of development for several people, also publishers cut, and steam cut, they would need a lot of sales to ever see money.

The major red flag they should have thought of was their "layered" platformer. The fancy screenshot they showed probably took them a week or more of dev time, yet the actual players going playing it would probably spend seconds walking across the screen and never see it again. I don't know who in their right mind would think that was a good idea to develop. How do you even remotely make up money in losses on that feature alone?

I figured maybe they would learn from their mistakes, reuse assets/code and make a better platformer in the future, but this time spend way less time. They decided to cut everything, make an entirely new game...which btw looks depressing, sad, ugly, and makes me cringe looking at it. I look forward to the post mortem of their second game.

 

HAHAHA, I don't know, but I think it goes like this...

First some crazy people seem to misjudge big time how long a game takes to make. E.g. For me, I thought my game couldn't take more than 6 months, hopefully not much more I mean it's a platformer. Certainly didn't even consider it taking me more than a whole year.

And second, you don't want to do bad from the start, right? so you try to make something you feel good about... And it's funny how much work that is.
And also, once you've put X amount of time and work into something, you don't want to water it down wrapping it up too fast and too unpolished.
Also, part of it is learning (or rather a lot of it) much of it is not focused on production, but becoming better.

Before you know it, boom, years have passed and you're responsible for product s that has no market research or even public relations to back it up. So you throw it in the sucking spirally hole that is indie games market and watch it drain, and get ready for a new game, lol.

 

Ha ha. At least in your case as far as I know you haven't racked up huge debt and starting smoking weed just to get through each day. It is ok to follow your passion and pour time in. But this craziness of wiping out all life savings, then racking up huge debt beyond that and suffering mentally and emotionally from it all so much that you turn to weed to relax... I mean clearly that is extreme stuff right there.

 

This does look so much better.

 

It's at least cleaner and easier to read, but I don't think any artstyle can fundamentally overcome how awkward the plane-shifting mechanic is.

 

I also must say that in your case you really did create a beautiful game. Solid, simple platformer game with exceptional graphics, nice level design and good variety from as much as I played anyway. I think you just need to find your target audience. Like I said in pm it has a strong Little Big Planet feel to it based on when the boys roped me into playing LBP with them years ago. So I think targeted at low to mid teens (possibly even like 7 and up) may be the key.

With that in mind I think perhaps targeting sites and YT channels that review family friendly games, kids games and perhaps even "Christian" or otherwise "clean cut" game seeking groups may be worth trying.

 

Right, that's what I was trying to get at, too. I have zero problem with people dedicating huge amounts of time on something. Hell, I spent 2 years on a project only to put it on hold and plan to come back to it SomeDay. But I was working full time during that period, supporting a family, and managing my mental health, too.

I think the moment you get to the point of running out of money -- whatever that means for you... whether it's "I can no longer justify spending time/money on this project" or "I literally have $0 in my bank account", that's when you need to call all your practices into question and see if they still hold up. When you're talking about putting your home on the line and racking up debt, you need to have a solid plan for how to deal with that down the road.

Anecdote Time!
In the Army, we had to qualify with our rifle every year. Rifle qualification is a timed event with 40 targets that "randomly" pop up between 50m and 300m. If memory serves, there are two phases, with the first set of targets to be fired at from the prone (lying down) supported (use of sandbags to steady your weapon) position, and the second set from the kneeling unsupported (no physical support of your weapon other than your body) position. You're given 40 rounds (2 magazines of 20). To qualify, you must hit at a minimum 23 targets. If you hit 30 - 35, you've qualified at the Sharpshooter level, and 36-40 makes you an Expert.

The takeaway here is that you need to manage your own known ability with what you have. If you're focused on just qualifying, you can gain a few "extra" rounds by not shooting at the farthest targets. So if you mess up a 150m target, take another shot at it, and just don't shoot at the next 300m one that comes up. You've effectively eliminated yourself from qualifying as Expert, but increased your chances at not failing the qualification altogether. It's also important to consider that the second half, because of the changed firing position, is more difficult than the first half. If you struggle to hit targets from the kneeling position, it's imperative you hit all your intended targets from the prone position.

Managing your time (effective reloading so as to not miss a fast, close target) and resources (rounds), and knowing the limits of your skills (how well you can hit distant targets) will ensure you never fail a qualification. However, it never failed that every single year, a number of guys -- the same or similar group of guys ever year! -- would fail and have to go through the range again. These guys failed at one or more of the steps, and refused to listen to advice on how to succeed. I had zero sympathy for these guys, and couldn't listen to their sob stories of how their firing lane was the hardest one, or how their weapon jammed at the worst time (again, their fault for not maintaining the weapon properly... probably a gamedev lesson in that, too), or the sun, or a cloud, or the rain, or the cold... All the things that contributed to their failure, with their own contribution to that state being downplayed more than anything.

- - -

Know what you're capable of doing before taking on a big project. Leave those distant targets alone if you don't feel confident you can hit them, and save your effort for the core mechanics you're sure you can nail. Maintain your project (version control, off-site backups, etc) in a way that will ensure it doesn't fail you at a critical time. Know that it gets more difficult the farther along you get, and be sure to have your early work set up to handle the burden of that.

And when someone who's already qualified plenty of times before gives you advice, for God's sake... listen to them!

 

Yeah! There's a whole field of work regarding matching the right game with the right audience. And yes, this is so taken for granted by so many. In part is because making the actual game is such complex task, there's not enough focus in other such important things.

Plus, it's not like the game vaporizes after the first release hype wave. Many games start out horribly and do better along the way.

 

For translations:

FIGS is the usual demand in addition to English (highest paying markets). Although if you're on Sony, Japanese isn't a terrible choice either

 

I am all for hiding in a basement and coding for years at a time on a project. In fact, I am typing this from my own basement office right now. But there has to be a sensible balance. When I read about developers going full time indie after drawing a single sprite on the screen, I can usually guess the rest of the story.

The problem is not the number of years invested. The problem is that the developers quit their day jobs before learning their tools or establishing a market for their product. If the developers had kept their day jobs and worked on their game in their free time, their lives would have been in a better position. The failures would not have been as devastating to them. It might have even given them enough time to polish their game more and establish a market.

Everybody hears about "overnight success stories", but very few people realize there is no such thing. Most hit games come after many non-hit games. The non-hit games (both released and unreleased) serve as valuable practice to gain experience.

 

DO NOT GIVE KEYS TO YOUTUBERS WITH LOADS OF SUBSCRIBERS WHO REQUEST IT. If you get a request from a you tuber who has a million subscribers, that should raise a red flag. Popular youtubers do not request keys. If you give them a key, your game will be all over torrent and pirate sites within a week.
Anybody ever hear this advice/takeaway before? All other (successful) developers say - give away as often as you can. I guess this is only for those who approach the developer requesting a steam key, not those popular tubers who are given keys without solicitation.
What is the alternative to this approach they suggest? "Hello Total Biscuit - yes you can review our game, please purchase it from steam and give us your most honest review you can".
I assume most/all popular youtubers hardly EVER purchase a game they want to review.

Also the social relations Fish had that were outright promoting the game continually helping it stay relevant through its development working towards its eventual success. Social/community connections these guys obviously didn't have.
(unrelated) By the way - very cool website! but the blog offering is underwhelming.
http://justinschneider.com/

Glad you said this because I was thinking the same thing when I read the article but couldn't articulate it. Well said.
The environments are beautiful, but not so beautiful to go into debt and quit your job "beautiful". I also prefer the first iteration of the character, though I'd not bank my livelihood on a simple character design.

What could they do with what they have - time/layer shifting homeless guy? Can shift from rich extravagant to homeless or super hero to homeless but time limits make him unable to stay in hero mode for long periods of time. Staying in homeless mode allows him to recharge his hero ability but also comes with getting mugged, starving, catching disease wich effects his hero mode?
They are essentially re-using knowledge (staying in 2D) and will benefit from the experience they had developing the original 2D game. So they will do better, be faster, and have a overall better development time, even if the game doesn't do well, due to the dreary theme. Cutting everything would be equal to changing engines and going full 3D or VR.

Maybe this could have been an interesting mechanic - IF - it wasn't created to be used as a twitch shooter type mechanics. Games that require phase shifting to solve puzzles isn't novel, Simons Quest, Zelda A Link to the Past, among other more modern game (Fez) were phase shifting 2D games that imo were fun and successful. But making it like a twitch mechanic seemed to be a miscue.

And cat lovers of course! A huge demographic that you need to agressively target, hopefully some of that demographic plays games!

I'd say it would have given them better clarity to de-scope and polish a less sophisticated/spastic core experience.

 

Absolutely! I figured that was the top of his list already. I actually have the feeling the dev himself must love cats. But yeah @dogzerx2 if you haven't gone after the cat lover market then certainly start there. Find some forums link to your game in signature and start posting. Not about your game right off the bat; instead just talking about cats (assuming you are a cat owner / lover). Maybe contact websites related to such and see if they review such games. Same for Twitter, etc.

Can't hurt and I do think as @theANMATOR2b mentioned any cat lovers would certainly greatly appreciate the game.

 

I've heard this multiple times in the past but it's not been always related to youtube only. Plenty of people have warned that there are a lot people trying to fish keys just for their own purposes or to sell the keys. Some just link random large youtube channel and say it's their relying that people do not do background checks. Some can even try to extort and say their bot army will downvote the game demo or other channels where ever it's possible if they are not provided with a bunch of keys.

In the case of Total Biscuit for example, at one point he had a video where it was explained how to have the best chance to get a game looked at in his channel. Most big youtubers have staff to handle these requests and to filter out the crap. Also note that at youtube many of the channels think of the games more from viewer perspective as in whats fun to watch and have a commentary over so good games can get left out if they are boring for others to watch.

 

My impression, from reading over Gamasutra articles, is that they suggested proactively contacting the YouTubers. A list of contacts was made and a link uploaded to Gamasutra by one of their community members.

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/Albe...uTubers_contacts_list_for_Game_Developers.php

Additionally I found a talk by Northernlion (https://www.youtube.com/user/Northernlion) from GDC 2014 for the subject.

http://gdcvault.com/play/1020499/Using-YouTube-to-Market-Your

I believe you're referring to this video but if not it may still be beneficial.

 

Write what you know is frequently good advice.

 

Hence why my game is about thwarting an alien invasion with a pair of bootleg shoes.

 

I thought the homeless thing was a joke. If it's serious then I know for sure these are not developers that are destined to be financially stable.

 

Maybe they'll wise up and stay at their jobs while making this one.

 

Am I the only one who thought these platforms were an odd choice? I would have thought the game would be more ideal on a mobile platform (PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and so on). I don't even know anyone who owns a Wii U.

That music was painful to listen to. I had to turn the volume way down to tolerate it. Plus the trailer didn't actually show anything gameplay or otherwise.

 

The take away is they should've done more research and so on. The market does not forgive any form of hubris.

 

On the topic of key give-aways, are you guys familiar with https://www.keymailer.co ?

I used it for managing all keys for The Deep Paths and found it... reasonable. Definitely better then the alternative of handling things through email. And any emails I did receive, I just pasted a standard response telling them I was managing keys via Keymailer and that they should request one there.

 

I used that service. At first I was unease about giving steam keys like that. At first I was a little suspicious, though I decided to massively distribute keys. And I did get multiple gameplay video reviews. So I think it works.

-

I would say, for the unknown starting out devs in the darkness, it is pretty much a requirement that a community is built along side with the game. If you want to work with a peace of mind at least. And ease a lot of the anxiety.

I'm sure there are people half way building a game struggling to make it work and eager to finish as it is, and that's enough on their plate so wont listen to me. But if you're just starting, or haven't started, plan a game that's fun to share from the start. Hype yourself about the fun to interact with other people about the game you'll build.

Sure it's more work for one guy, or a small team, twice the work perhaps... But it should be a good measurement on how well the game's doing along the run. And to really to be serious about making games full time, at the time of release, you should be almost confident of the results, if you're not, then odds may not be so good.

 

To be honest, I just wanted to disagree with @Master-Frog

I don't like when developers use terms like "rip-off" when referring to other developers. Everyone's game is influenced by some other person's game. These guys clearly stated that they were influenced by ideas in Braid and Cave Story, so it's not like they were trying to say their game was 100% original. Maybe there's some FEZ in there too. Who cares. Bottom line, they spent 5 years creating a finished product, and that's more than most people manage. That alone earns them respect.

I get S*** all the time from dopey Steam gamers saying - "This is like Legend Of Grimrock - just play that instead", like there only needs to be ONE of every type of game or something, and like that other game invented the genre, just because it's recently popular. Doesn't matter that I've been working on this style of game for YEARS, or that all games of this style are ultimately influenced by games created 30 years ago.

I feel like accusing a developer of ripping off someone else's game (when it's simply influenced by) is the sort of thing dumb gamers do to troll developers. It's not something developers should be doing to each other.

Anyway, that's my little off-topic rant.

 

I had the same experience. I got enough of a positive result out of it, that the many keys which DIDN'T result in anything, didn't feel like a loss. If that makes sense.

I still strongly believe in that whole thing of keys being a little like piracy. The people that take a key and use it to get your game, aren't people that would have bought it anyway, so you don't lose anything from a monetary point of view, but you gain another person that *might* mention your game to someone else, and that tiny chance makes giving that key away worthwhile.

 

Funnily enough, some people have said Fez ripped of Cave Story's graphics a bit.

But that's just similar aesthetics at best, a long way from ripping a game off.

 

100% - there's a lot of Cave Story influence in FEZ. That's kind of a running joke in the indie scene now though to say your game is influenced by Cave Story, cause pretty much everything is influenced by Cave Story

 

Well, steamspy says they have 20k sales on steam. Assuming something similar on PS4 and a few more on Wii U, I think they didn't do as terrible as the article led me to believe.

So I'm thinking they got screwed by the publisher and got a terrible deal.

 

Steamspy is notoriously inaccurate and even if it were accurate, that'd be less than $25,000 salary for two and a half years of work. That's about on par what I get for disability benefits. That's also provided we live in a fantasy world where income tax doesn't exist.

 

I've never understood the ± thing on SteamSpy. What does that actually mean?

The Deep Paths says 1,992 ± 1,231. Actually units (according to Steamworks) is 2,310.

 

Wait, you guys pay income tax on a salary less then 25K a year? Ours doesn't kick in until you are above the poverty line.

That fantasy world you speak of does exist. Come visit us some time.

 

It's for indicating a statistical margin of error for a quantity. The number on the right is by how much it's off.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/±

 

It marks the range for statistical error. In your case, it means 1992 plus or minus 1231, or between 761 and 3223. Your actual number of 2310 is within that range.

 

Steam Spy doesn't actually have access to sales numbers. What they do have is a bunch of guesses. So the number is based on a bunch of available data. This data include things like the number of reviews, number of plays ect. But they don't actually have sales data.

http://steamspy.com/about

 

Poverty lines are different between countries. In the United States you'd need 5 people to be in poverty for $25K. Someone like myself who is single has a much lower poverty line at just under $12K.

https://aspe.hhs.gov/2015-poverty-guidelines

 

Amazing how optimistic the paper numbers are. One of my great wishes is for the egg heads who come up with this stuff to try it in "real life" be living on the step or two above poverty for their case. I think some revisions would happen.