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Zowee Cavey and jinkers Scooby, this has been another interesting few weeks! BB has been our best-performing game, it's had the best reviews, and yet we did the least pre-release PR. Weird. I've had retro fans baying for my blood and then being really solid guys once I talked to them, I've had people asking for interviews, I've had a really good time all round. Join me now as we rent the flesh of the Blazin' Balls release and reduce the bones to a palettable stew!
The two key points to keep in mind about Blazin' Balls is that a) is was a project chosen to bolster my confidence after Space Pirates and b) it was supposed to form an example project for a book, which has now fallen by the wayside. I didn't know that at release time, or I would have done some things differently. Let's break her down Mr DJ!
BB is a really simple game. There are three main blocks of code (menu, game and "supporting stuff" like the audio engine), there are no fancy powerups or unlockables or missions. That meant that I could focus on what really matters - the core gameplay. I more or less started from scratch with the code base for the game - there're no complex shaders, the camera class is about 50 lines of code long, and I stuck to using DrawableGameComponents for everything - the main "game" is tiny teeny and only does highscores, profile management and transitions between game, menu, and ancilliary screens (instructions and "other games"). Everything else is managed within individual gamecomponents. That compartmentalizes the code nicely and lets you focus entirely on the task at hand, rather than trying to fit functionality in to existing code. That was one of the problems with Space Pirates - it was too monolithic. So I learned some good practices on this project. +1 cake to me.
A game like BB lives or dies on the design of the levels, and I think I did OK on them. Most of the reviews of BB are pretty good on this score. One is rather critical about the levels being too easy (but that was based on the trial) and one complaining that there's not enough to the game. I'll chalk the first criticism up to my not balancing the levels properly, but the second is something I think I need to address here. BB is 80 MSP. That's one dollar. If I'd have put in ghosts showing your (or other players) best runs through a level, I would have wanted to add lots of other polish too. If I'd have added other gameplay modes, I would still be working on the game. I think 80 points is a very reasonable price for what you get. On the assumption that you play the demo and like what you see enough to buy the game (and 10% of downloaders do), you know what you're getting - an arcade game which you only ever have to put one dollar in to. For me it really is that simple. It's not an RPG, it's not something which justifies 240 points, it's a little knockaround game which is worth about a dollar. The pressure to make our games available for next to nothing is unreasonable, unhealthy and unsustainable. I'm always very keen to take criticism on board, but this mad dash to price everything at 80 points is crazy. BB isn't a world-beater, but it does what it says on the tin.
More or less immediately after BB got released, I got a Google Alerts email pointing me toward an 8-bit retro emu type site. The guys on the site were clearly furious that I'd "ripped off" one of the classic (and sadly underexposed) 8-bit games - Trailblazer. Trailblazer was written by a guy called Shawn Southern, and that's a name which has stuck with me from my childhood (along with Jeff Minter, Greg Tuttle, Hewson, Gremlin Graphics, Mastertronic and dozens of others). I was really quite upset by the initial response the guys on this site had, but after actuallty engaging with them, and explaining why I wrote the game and the debt I feel the games business owes people like Shawn they have been very supportive. The lesson is to get involved with any and all people and sites who might be interested in your game - for good or bad reasons - and try to put your case in an honest way. I adored Trailblazer. It was an incredible game, and I fondly remember the fun I had with it. Saying that, and acknowledging Shawn as one of my influences, was a valuable thing. It defused an unpleasant situation and taught me a lesson. Bonus.
I've had dozens of friend requests on Xbox LIVE - a far larger number than the followers I picked up on Twitter after release. Now this can be a hard situation - I'm DrMistry more or less everywhere I go on-line (except FaceBook) and some people are keen to be your mate if you've released an Xbox game. I can understand that - I'd love to be able to talk to the guys who worked on games I like - but it can also be a problem. DrMistry is really only a persona, a device I use to seperate my "indie life" from my real life. DrMistry is a nickname I've gone by for a while, and it's (currenly) the only LIVE Gold Account I have. Even when I Gold up another account for developing network games, I use the DrMistry GamerTag all the time, so if I'm working or playing, DrMistry is on line. Some of the people who sent messages were really interesting guys who were wondering how exactly you get to write your own games, but there were a few who turned out to be real pains in the arse - to the point where I had to block them. I don't like doing that - contact with your customers is absolutely vital - but if I say to you "sorry dude, I'm working on some complex graphics code, message me tomorrow" I expect that to do the job. Sending me 8 morw messages in 5 minutes is not going to make me talk to you. It's an interesting problem and one I hadn't anticipated at all. I still think I could have dealt with those couple of situations better, but I'm not sure how.
I did two press releases and one interview before BB came out. It may, in retrospect, have been a mistake to do so little. Given the positive reviews the game has had, I suspect that we could and should have had more downloads and sales. Frankly, after the disaster that was the Space Pirates launch, I didn't really want to make that much noise. I still think there's a basic block between on- and off-dash exposure, so I'm not going to loose too much sleep over this point. The "important" review sites (the big ones outside the indie scene) will only be interested in your game if you make it to the top of one of the key lists under your own steam anyway. This isn't to belittle the indie scene websites - we all know what a valulable job they do - but to be successful in the medium term, you need big-time exposure. BB was never going to get that, so i can live with it. But for the next game I'm going to play safe and make a much more concerted effort on the PR front.
While BB made reasonable progress through peer review, it could have been a lot cleaner. I need to nail down some local testing procedures to be honest. Playtesting was great and I'm glad I went there quite early in the project. I'll certainly be doing the same for my next title (more on which will follow next week, now I've started on it!). That was a big lesson from Space Pirates - seek out feedback and implement it! I made a couple of mistakes with my profile handling code, and I'm going to move all that stuff to my code library very soon. I've also added a pretty good render manager in the last week, with about 8 shaders and a flexible scene-drawing system. Libraries are the future!
All in all, I would call BB a sucess in personal and critical terms, but not a commercial hit. I'm pretty happy with that, because it means I'm moving in the right direction. The direct user feedback I've had has been very good for the most part, we've had some really great reviews, and it's really boosted my confidence. For the next game, I'll be stepping the complexity up a little (from the gamer's perspective) but trying to keep a focus on basic gameplay. I'm looking forward to sharing my plans with you, but not tonight ;0)
Well, I think I'm about done. It's pretty late and I've had more than a few vodkas, so I'd better be off up the wooden hill or I'll be too tuckered out tomorrow to start on my 2.5d IK+ and kinematics engine!
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