A New Game Is On The Horizon – Code Name: West Wars

After a fair bit of experience making Alley Avenger, I’ve decided to a promising fresh project with a new genre. Strategy games! Anyone who knows me well knows how much I love Civilization 5. It’s a turn-based 4X game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) that never gets boring! Building up cities, being diplomatic with neighbors, creating an epic military in the age-old struggle to be ruler of the world…it’s such a fun experience!

On that same note, I love mobile games. As a frequenter to /r/AndroidGaming, I found there to be a huge void where good strategy games should be. Many users have requested strategy games, to which the community would respond with options that were either horribly implemented (Civ Revolution 2), had unbearable controls (FreeCiv), or were actually promising Indie games that are perpetually in alpha. Every post that requested a good strategy game looked grim…the pickings were slim! (Did I just rhyme?)

Well, with that said, my next game was clear. I needed to attempt a strategy game…Code name: West War (literally, I’ve been writing the game code with this name 🙂 ). I haven’t gotten far, but I’ve already rallied another developer and fellow Civ 5 fan in my office to join my cause. We’ve already made a cardboard cutout “simplified” version of this in board-game-form and hashed out all the rules for Phase 1.

I won’t reveal much so far, but I WILL say that we’re aiming for the following:

• Turn-based hexagons, with a focus on hexagon development. Each hex will have 6 different resource triangles which can be built upon.
• Western setting.
• Entire game playable in portrait mode with just one thumb.
• Online play-with-your-friends.
• 99 cent price tag.

A few nice-to-haves (which we are giving serious consideration since the Unity engine supports a fairly painless way to do these):

• Google Cardboard / Occulus Rift support for hands-free virtual reality!
• Cross-platform play (PC, possibly Mac, possibly Web).

Below is a screenshot from current development on the progress I’ve done in the past couple of months. More to come in the future!

Release A Game Early Or Not? That Is The Question!

Early last year I ran into the conundrum of releasing my game, Alley Avenger, early for the public to play. Should I wait for a polished product or should I go ahead, release something “kinda cool” and build from there. As it stands, I don’t seem to be the only one with this problem. Steam had, in recent years, began supporting developers by allowing them to advertise their partially-completed games as “Early Access”, and since then the practice of releasing barely playable games has gotten massively popular. Sure enough, many of these developers, after earning their money, lost all the incentive to finish their game, leaving many disappointed fans.

While the Android platform is a bit different than Steam, many of the same rules apply. I weighed the following pros and cons before deciding on whether to release my game or not:

PROS

• Get Visibility Sooner – If your game is good, people will notice and you will get a following.
• Testing Against a Wider Audience – Google Play allows for beta testing, but you have to require that every tester subscribe to your Google Group. There’s a large barrier there that many are unwilling to go through.
• Bragging Rights – As bad as it is, you have the ability to say “I have a game on Google Play”. Granted, there’s a LOT of crap out there, so it’s not hard to become published, but a half decent game will still be a cool little achievement which should, in turn, boost your enthusiasm.
• Motivation – Now that your game is out there and not in the final state you want it in (and people are playing it!), a fire is now lit under you. This can be good. It’s more than a pet project now.

CONS

• Bad Impressions – It’s important to note that a user’s initial impression of a game, if bad, can totally ruin it. Remember all those media outlets you advertised your partially finished game on? Well now advertising there won’t be as effective.
• Consumer Confidence – So now that you’ve done an early release, you will naturally be lumped into the category of “Developers Who Don’t Finish Their Games”. Many players are sour by previous experiences both on Steam’s Early Access and Google Play, and they don’t want to be your testers.
• No Turning Back – Your core game mechanic becomes locked in. Assuming you’re like me and don’t quit on projects, this is a huge milestone that is incredibly hard to turn back from. Changing a mechanic in the game that is heavily used can really annoy your existing user-base.

So in the end, as many of you know, I decided to release Alley Avenger early. Having no financial incentive in doing so, I wanted to simply release my first game for all my friends and family to see. As a first game and a small-time developer, it made sense. If I were a bit larger, or had a more highly anticipated game on the drawing board, then I may consider waiting.

Gameplay Sucks – Time to take a step back and reevaluate

Some times you need to step back from development, play your game, and deeply scrutinize everything about it. Not only that, play other games using the same engine. Or even hand your game off to a friend who you KNOW will show you no mercy! This is constant feedback necessary for the development process. Are you doing something wrong? Change it, and change it early!

Story time: After taking a small break and picking up development again earlier this month, I found myself focusing pretty heavily on the menu system. In fact, my menu.lua file is now over 1000 lines of code because of all the work done (Granted, if I had to do it over again it would probably be much shorter, but that’s another story!). Pretty soon, I had a dynamic, fun interface for the user to navigate through. I became satisfied that I had a semi-professional looking menu system, so I moved back to focus on gameplay.

After playing the game and listing the features I could add or fix, something hit me. I couldn’t lie to myself.

Superman 64 should have been called Fly-Through-Rings 64

The gameplay sucked! It wasn’t fun. Period. The objects that the player had to destroy moved too slow, my collision was wonky, and having to melee each object was cumbersome and, after a while, predictable and redundant. Even if I upped the challenge, I didn’t see any way I could make this more fun. It felt like Superman 64, arguably one of the worst games ever released on a Nintendo console.

That said, I knew I had to add to adjust the way the game was played. I made some major changes:

• Introduced GUNS. Oh yeaaaah! This definitely means I’ll have to change the name from Hack ‘n Slash to something else. Oops!
• More physics! Players like physics, so I tried to adjust my collision handling to work with the physics built into the Corona engine. This especially works well with objects that are deflected when hit. By the way, deflecting an object with a bullet feels oh-so good!
• Difficulty. Not saying my girlfriend is bad at video games, but if she was able to beat 12 levels fairly easily, something must be done. Speed of objects were increased and guns, which became the primary method of attack, now need to hit certain objects multiple times before exploding. Basically, a player shouldn’t be able to destroy every object coming at them, which made dodging all the more important.
• Sound effects make you more engrossed in the game. Something I’ve always planned, but adding them just made the game more satisfying.

Will soon be starting on stage bosses. T-minus 2 weeks for beta! Wish me luck!