Comments on: So, What Next?

By: Ronin

Ronin — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 15:21:15 +0000

I also like the idea of that Guards! game.
What makes me interested is that you’re thinking of making several mini-games into one bigger game.
We @ Kybernesis is actually dabbling with a similar idea for our 2D side-scroller ;)

By: Lumooja

Lumooja — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 22:11:43 +0000

You could make an ASCII text version of Dead Wake, then it would run also on modern laptops, and not only 3 years old PCs with nvidia 8800 :)

I’ve seen people playing Nethack on a 50 inch widescreen LCD, and it looks really cool!

However, ASCII text games run faster in a window than in fullscreen (BIOS text) mode, so you have to make a big overscan window to get maximum performance out of the game.

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:18:21 +0000

Sure it could. It depends on your goal: a) to have fun, b) to make money c) both.

By: Juuso

Juuso — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 18:04:04 +0000

Yeh… possibly.

But doing it differently could be tons of more fun (for me)? :)

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 17:52:46 +0000

Re: HOG form a totally different angle. Sure that may succeed and be a hit but there’s a much greater chance of it flopping due to it being too different. Customers like more or the same but ideally with a little bit different angle, look at Fairway, look at Unwell Mel, same but with a twist.

By: Juuso

Juuso — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 14:12:05 +0000

@Oliver: regarding guards, what do you like about it? Do you mean “prototyping” is the thing that you like?

@Jake: I don’t like those “find Waldo”. But… I would like to approach the genre from totally different angle.

Donuts is not a problem. I had healthy budget for Dead Wake (not putting it in public though), and think that creative use of donuts would allow me to get things in such level that I can donutize it. After all, you gotta spend donuts to make donuts. There is potential in Dead Wake 2 (having Dead Wake free brings extra traffic, thus those people who like it could be interested in Dead Wake 2 as well) – as for technology, I would need to downgrade from Leadwerks to 2D or 3D (Unity/Bmax/GameMaker or something similar) to ensure that the game works on peoples machine.

As for Facebook. or iPhone (=everybody is into iPhone, right ;). It’s of course a possibility. If I’d want to go for the “traitor” direction then I might actually go for some sort of AJAX/PHP/JS/HTML/SQL “real time” solution.

I don’t want to go too much into technology just yet.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 09:06:01 +0000

When I’m thinking about new projects I always like to create some options. So I’d also say to start out with the Guard collection and get prototyping and either finish that or jump into a bigger game when a killer idea hits you.

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 19:37:16 +0000

If you want donuts your best bet from the above options would be Hidden Object BUT only if a) you played lots to become familiar with the genre b) you were prepared to have a big art budget c) you were passionate about it (sounds like you are not).

Dead Wake 2 could do good if it was commercial quality and on Steam and XBLA etc, but again that will require budget and lots of time. Basically you have to spend money to make money, that’s something I’ve learned.

Otherwise you need to something else (to make donuts) – maybe iPad, maybe Facebook, maybe something else. If donuts don’t matter, then just do what sounds the most fun and that you’ll learn from and that there is maybe a chance of donutizing later on.

Good luck. Watching with interest.

By: Juuso

Juuso — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 16:35:37 +0000

Thinking, thinking.

UDK is not for me I believe, but I guess I could take a look at it (=that’s something I’ve learned: to not ignore everybody right away… ;)) if/when Dead Wake 2 sounds doable.

By: ISOTOXiN

ISOTOXiN — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:32:45 +0000

Well, I’ve tried Unity3D few times but I don’t like it. Maybe you could try UDK, for DeadWake port it will be better and I think just easier :)