Ultratron works fine with a controller. Droid Assault is most definitely not a twin-stick shooter.
We deliberately make our games easy because they sell more. The easier they are, the more they sell. Simple formula.
The target audience is me. I am a child of the 70s, grew up in the arcades and playing on C64s. The games of that era are shit. They weren't shit then, but they are now. What I do is take old game ideas and make them not shit, and I think I do pretty well at that. One of the biggest components of not-shitness is making sure that most players can see most of the game before it gets too hard for them.
FWIW I've never completed any of my own games, I'm that rubbish.
Indeed, if it weren't for people like us, there wouldn't be most of the games that people love playing today. There'd be no Minecraft, no FTL, no Terraria, no Binding of Isaac.
By selling a lot of copies AND putting barely anything into it. Super Hexagon is bereft of actual content and actually has very little actual game in it. It is a perfect example of how to make money from not much work.
That's not cricket, old chap, to knock the competition.
Super Hexagon has highly polished gameplay and a stellar soundtrack, not to mention being very, very fun. IMO Terry Cavanagh knew exactly what to leave out.
I've met Terry personally, and I didn't knock Super Hexagon. I've just said it how it is: Super Hexagon (and VVVVVV for that matter) are examples of how to make games on the cheap.
We don't do that, though. We put AAA polish and content into every title.
We knew there was no huge demand for Ultratron. Although, Binding of Isaac.
Our original blog post was about how much it costs to make such a game, and how much money such a game earns typically, not about whether it's a failure or success.
Very strange, because what I see has obviously been done deliberately.
From the main menu, after playing the game and dying and clicking the 'x' in the top left to quit, the game goes to the nag screen. It's the same screen that appears when you start the game, with with an icon in the bottom left to click if you want to buy the game and one in the bottom right to continue to the menu - only the bottom right icon is missing. After about 5 or 6 seconds the button that lets you end the game appears - the button says something like 'Fight evil another day' - and the game finally lets you click it and leave.
When I get home, I might fire up a screen capturer and upload a video to demonstrate the behavior for you.
>both buttons exit the game immediately. See the one on the left? The one that's always there?
And that button is clearly labelled 'Buy Now!'. I don't know which school of user interface design you went to, but when I see a link labelled 'Buy Now!', I figure that if I've no intention of buying the product, then I've no business clicking that link. I don't think I'm an atypical user in this regard.
Plus, since clicking that link does bring up your online store in a web browser (which, I'll reiterate, I've no intention of using), no matter which way you cut it, it still counts as an obnoxious nag and a user interface peeve.
What's more, it's not immediately obvious, in these days of in-app purchases and whatnot, that a link marked 'buy' will exit the game. For instance, suppose this demo was downloaded from a Steam account with some actual cash attached (I don't know if your demo is on Steam, this is a hypothetical), there's no way that I, as an ignorant user, can tell whether you've made some arrangement with Valve or if there's some call in the Steam API where clicking the app can extract the money from my account to automatically buy this game. Similar things are already in place in mobile app stores.
Asking users to go clicking on your 'Buy my product' links willy-nilly is definitely much worse than the behaviour I was originally grumbling about!
(And despite this now interminable forum conversation, it's certainly very far from being the worst crime against gaming out there. Grumbling about it has already eaten up more than it's fair share of time and effort on my part!)
There are a few detractors from Ultratron in here - and that's fine, I know it's absolutely not everyone's cup of tea - but often the reason given for not "liking" (for want of a better word) the game are specious.
I can summarise some of the perplexity that arise with five words: Explain the Binding of Isaac.
Binding of Isaac starts off with some elements of classic Rogue Like gameplay that also has a dual stick shooter battle mechanics and is finally topped off with an action adventure dungeon exploration and upgrade system.
It is made from three classic successful genres all seamlessly blended together.
Content in the game is given to the player at just the right rate of flow. Dozens of initial play-throughs each reveal new items, and on subsequent plays the player begins to understand how to start combining items together.
Then there is the masterfully done difficulty curve. Facing the game straight on results in death, it is only through understanding of items and upgrades that the player has a hope of surviving, with each new discovery extending the player's life span by just a little bit more.
Then finally there was controversy around the game that got it great press coverage, press coverage which was excellently taken advantage of through very well managed sales and deals.
Binding of Isaac isn't a surprise at all. It isn't just a well made game, it is a well made game that gradually unfolds before the player at just the right pace.
So far from what I have seen in this thread, the primary complaint about Ultratron is the pace at which it ramps up. It sounds like people are saying the demo never really ramped up, which is fairly disappointing for a dual stick shooter. Dual Stick Shooters should create a sense of outright fear at times, and pretty early on in the process. Sure have the first level be a "here is how you shoot!" and that level should be over as soon as the player learns how to shoot.
The next lesson? "Here is how you run away. You'll be doing a lot of it."
When we were making Ultratron for Steam we knew that it wasn't ever going to actually sell much, but that was not the point of the article. The point of the blog post I wrote was simply to say, it takes this long and this much money to make a game like this, and it earns about this much money, so we're not going to do them any more. I think it's a shame because it scratches an itch that just isn't scratched anywhere else. And that's what Jeff was getting at, indirectly; it's a shame that these kinds of games aren't really all that viable to make. I don't want to play endless zombie games and man-shooters. I want to play games like Ultratron, and almost nobody is making them any more, which is why we've made it.
Ah. Thanks for clarifying. For very small markets, like classics or nostalgic, maybe you could up the price because your potential buyers are price elastic?
If you are selling to 10,000 older, rich guys who crave old school arcade action, why not sell at a $40 price point?
That's the only solution I can think of that other niche markets do to stay alive (collectibles, etc).
We deliberately make our games easy because they sell more. The easier they are, the more they sell. Simple formula.
The target audience is me. I am a child of the 70s, grew up in the arcades and playing on C64s. The games of that era are shit. They weren't shit then, but they are now. What I do is take old game ideas and make them not shit, and I think I do pretty well at that. One of the biggest components of not-shitness is making sure that most players can see most of the game before it gets too hard for them.
FWIW I've never completed any of my own games, I'm that rubbish.