Sell a Game in October 2013

[Colm Larkin]

I think we would all agree that we've seen some amazing game prototypes come out of this group over the last 6 months. For October I would love to see 1GAM Dublin try something a little different. This month I would like us all to take part in the October Challenge to try and make $1 from one of your games!

 

The challenge is to take any gamejam game or prototype you previously built, polish it up and have it for sale by the end of the month - and to earn at least $1 from it thereafter! 

We've proven we can create something - now lets work on the other side of game development for a month. Can we polish our creations to saleable quality? Can we market them?

The people who organise Ludum Dare also run the Challenge. There's a lot more info here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/09/27/october-challenge-2013/

Plus a list of marketplaces etc here:

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/09/27/october-2013-resources-and-opportunities/

Lets use this thread to share our ideas & progress!

Good luck! 

[Barry Keane]

Great challenge! 

More than happy to help people shill their warez if they are looking for help, or is that cheating? 

[Colm Larkin]

It's a completely casual challenge, there's no prizes .. so cheat away :) (collaboration is totally fine!)

For anyone looking to make something in October I would suggest having a read of this:

http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/articles/business-articles/1gam-how-to-succeed-at-making-one-game-a-month/

Break your game creation down early on like he suggests.

I would add start sharing EARLY. Marketing is more important than usual since you want to sell. More on this later in the week.

[Colm Larkin]

*** MARKETING 101 ***

I wrote up a pretty comprehensive guide to marketing your October Challenge game here:

http://blog.gambrinous.com/2013/10/03/marketing-your-game-in-a-rush/

I think this is more important than in other months, since we want actual customer interest by the end of the month. Comments welcome!

Also in the spirit of the guide I have shared the article, well everywhere:

https://twitter.com/gambrinous/status/385550366080638976

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1nmafm/marketing_your_game_a_guide_for_someone_in_a_rush/

http://www.reddit.com/r/OneGameAMonth/comments/1nmaag/marketing_your_1gam_game/

http://www.reddit.com/r/ludumdare/comments/1nmac9/marketing_your_october_challenge_game/

https://plus.google.com/112051071485956911317/posts/hPhrnguxvGY

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=36363.0

RTs, upvotes, etc etc all welcome

[Colm Larkin]

Whoops this is the /r/gamedev link, I had to repost it with a text excerpt. This one would really like some upvotes!

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1nmbh7/marketing_your_game_a_guide_for_someone_in_a_rush/

[Colm Larkin]

Interesting idea JK look forward to seeing some work in progress screenshots!

As for my October game here's my game name & elevator pitch:

Guild of Dungeoneering
"Recruit adventurers to explore dungeons for the glory of your Guild. Build the dungeon room by room, fill it with monsters, traps and treasure .. and hope your dungeoneers have what it takes to return victorious!"

[A dungeon crawler where you don't get to control the adventurer. Instead you lay out the dungeon one room at a time (including treasure & monsters) and he proceeds according to his AI. You want him to explore, level up, find treasures and ultimately survive - but you don't get to directly control him.]

I would love feedback on this. Does it sound intriguing? Does it explain what kind of game it is?

I'll be taking a 1GAM effort I produced earlier in the year (Dungeon Delver) and adding AI-controlled heroes + RPG elements essentially.

http://gambrinous.com/games/dungeondelver/

[John Kelly]

I spent a bit of time working on it yesterday, using placeholder artwork (doorframe and floor tiles banged out in a couple of minutes, character sprite grabbed off the internet). Got movement working with the keyboard. Here's how it's looking now:

http://glui.me/?i=wpsvuor1fr5xayx/2013-10-06_at_12.39.png/

The brown tiles represent objects (tables, chairs) the character can't walk into. The two doors are the 'exits' from this room and going through them leads to another randomly generated room. The display is shifted to the left to make sure that I have room for the GUI on the right.

I want to get mouse control/pathfinding working next. Then working on lists of assets, so if you're in, say, the bathroom, it'll randomly place a toilet and a sink, but if you're in a living room, it will randomly place a chair, or a fireplace, or a bookshelf etc.

Regarding your idea - I really like the idea of being the DM for someone else's adventure. But I guess my only query about this is: how do you make that fun? Okay, reading that sentence back and it sounds kind of harsh. What I mean is being a DM (IRL) is fun because you get to see how different people react to what you throw at them. Being a DM for an AI might be a nice sandbox, but what's the actual *goal* of the game? Is it just to have fun with the AI system? Or if the goal is to have the adventurer 'succeed', what's stopping me from just having one room and putting all the treasure chests in that and putting all the monsters behind locked doors, where the adventurer will never have to fight them?

So if you don't mind me throwing out an idea (is this rude?) - something I was looking into for one of my ideas last month was the idea of using Firebase (https://www.firebase.com - free tier for 5GB/month transfer) to add a faux multiplayer component to the game. For your game, you could set up one player as the DM and another player as the adventurer. This would give you the fun of knowing you're helping/trolling a real person. See also: Sleep is Death (http://sleepisdeath.net/) for the kind of thing I'm talking about.

If you don't mind me throwing out another idea (okay, this is DEFINITELY rude), another way to approach it would be to give it a sort of a loose Card Hunter style mechanic. As the DM, you're given three cards each from a number of different 'decks' - a 'room' deck, a 'monster' deck, a 'loot' deck, a 'trap' deck - and you have to play one of each (or to make it more fun, since we have four categories here, one from *three* of the categories, giving the player a "fast/cheap/good - choose two" type dilemma). Once you've played your round of cards, you get a new set of decks (maybe random, maybe weighted based on the choices you made last time - if you played a hard monster and a small loot, there could be mostly easy monsters and mostly big loots in your next deck). So it's not really possible to fully troll OR mollycoddle your adventurer.

I don't know if that's the kind of thing you're already thinking of, so I should just stop here.

[Colm Larkin]

I like what you've got so far. Can he move around?

Regarding Dungeoneering, the goal would be to get your adventurer to level up through fights and find a bunch of treasure, then leave the dungeon. Then you the 'Guild' get a cut of that money that you can use for some sort of longterm mechanic (like hiring new adventurers etc), before sending an adventurer on another dungeon crawl. If you fail a dungeon you lose the hero, but your game continues.

I'm definitely thinking of doing it like you describe at the end there (card hunter style) where you have to play the cards you get each turn. Some sort of choice (eg decks like you suggest) would be great too. Maybe a mix of effects in each deck (a la chance/community chest). Also thinking of combining monsters with treasure (eg a L1 Goblin card, if defeated you get a random treasure from the treasure deck). 

Why do all my games end up with cards in them? :)

Thanks for the ideas! Always welcome

[Colm Larkin]

Work in progress - adding a hero to delver:

[Stephen Roantree]

I know this is pretty late to be getting started but I've got an idea! The one line pitch is a "trading card game-ified competitive tower defense" 

You draft a deck of cards, from what will be a very limited pool at the beginning, containing the tower defense staple of "normal", "splash" and "slow"

The game consists of either placing cards in the outgoing attack area, or in the defense area. Putting them in the attack area means that it will appear as a troop that the enemy's towers will have to deal with, placing in your defenses makes it act like a tower which kills enemy troops. Both players do what they want in a turn and the round takes places. If any creature gets to a player's treasure they lose treasure proportional to something or other, and the player who loses all their health first dies. Placing the same card down on a unit upgrades that unit, so that it's stronger by a factor of something.

I did a bit of a UI mockup to see how this'll look:

I also opened the mockup up on my nexus 7 which is the nominal target device for the game to see how it would feel to interact with and I think it's fairly workable:

I'll be using OpenFL for this I think, and plan to get cracking right now!

--

Stephen

[Colm Larkin]

Looks good Stephen, and I love any idea involving cards so +1 for that :D

[Colm Larkin]

Put in a good 10 hours of work this weekend, very happy with progress. I now have a (slightly) playable version of my game! Give it a go here:

http://gambrinous.com/games/dungeoneering/

Yes there are multiple ways to break it :P

It looks a bit like this right now:

[Colm Larkin]

Ok got quite a bit done this weekend, the game is starting to feel somewhat playable!

- Speech bubbles when the hero is thinking

- Light hero AI. (only considers rooms right next to him right now)
- More cards. Just some more monsters/weapons/etc. Could go crazy here but need to think of my art requirements at some point 
- Better placing limitations. Now it highlights only viable spots. Auto-discards your hand and ends your turn if you pick an unplaceable card (will improve on this later).

Play it here:

http://gambrinous.com/games/dungeoneering/

Source code here:

https://github.com/clarkin/Dungeoneering

FB page for the game here:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Guild-of-Dungeoneering/342388809241303

Bonus animated gif: