When Game Development Stinks

It seems like the more interesting question is what a developer can do to increase their likelihood of winning the indie game lottery. Besides making a good game. FTL did it by getting lots of publicity from being an early game development kickstarter success story. Legend of Grimrock had excellent graphics for a 4 man indie game, resurrected a genre that had been dead for a couple of decades, and got good launch-time reviews in a lot of big PC game publications. (I expect that the nostalgia effect was a factor both in getting the reviews in the first place, as well as in them being so positive).

So I downloaded and fired up the Ultratron demo. I figure this might be right up my street.

But I passed on it.

To begin with, it didn't play, or sound, anywhere near as compelling as Robotron. Robotron is a visceral, intense experience. When it starts up, it starts up LOUD, your gun fires a rapid, punchy pow-pow-pow noise, amidst various other electronic squawks, you are placed slap-bang in the middle of a higgledy-piggledy gang of hostile robots all heading in your vague direction, and you've got about a quarter of a second to work out which is the right way to move and which way is the right way to shoot to Macguyver your way out of this wave and live for a few seconds more. It's fast, intense, and if you're doing it right, at some point zen kicks in, and conscious thought gets out of the way - you're running on instinct and adrenaline; the game has shortcircuited most of your brain and you're just a vessel for connecting the Robotron machine directly to your lizard backbrain, via a set of fingers. Somewhere in that zone, high-scores get made.

When the Ultratron demo starts up, you're in the middle of the screen, a few slow, passive bad guys are placed somewhere out of the way in the corner, and you have plenty of time to shoot them all (by pointing and clicking) before anything dangerous happens. And then you do it again. And again, with some slightly-varying bad guys. There's nothing intense, or rewarding or difficult about getting past a wave. I figure the game might get better or harder later on, but there was nothing to indicate it would get harder in a satisfying way. It's just chewing-gum for your thumbs.

Ultratron (or at least the demo) doesn't bring any new or compelling game ideas or mechanics to the table either. There's things to pickup including Pacman-style fruit. There's things to shoot at, including Centipede-style spiders. There's boss monsters. There's powerups you buy with coins you pickup. The demo didn't show me anything I hadn't seen a thousand times before in a thousand other games.

The name and the advertising played up Ultratron's Robotron roots, but it didn't once hit my Robotron G-spot, and I didn't see anything new to engage my interest either. Nothing about the game (as opposed to the front end) struck me as bad, but nothing struck me as particularly good either.

We're spoilt for indie games these days - even us Linux-users. I'm currently divvying my gaming time between Super Hexagon (a hypnotic arcade-style one-more-go two-button frustration-fest that DOES tickle that lizard-backbrain), Kerbal Space Program (don't let the muppets fool you, there's a pretty hardcore sandbox space sim going on) and Crusader Kings 2 (medieval grand strategy, where incestuous Royal Marriages and tactical infanticide are as essential as warfare for achieving your territorial ambitions. Think of it as a blend of history book, wargame, soap opera and crack cocaine).

I'm being introduced to new, clever, and interesting games all the time now. It's a buyer's market for gamers these days, and Ultratron just isn't cutting it as far as my free time is concerned.

Oh, one more thing - if you're reading this Puppygames, having a 5-second nag screen advertising the full version after the player has played your demo and is trying to quit is a big turnoff. I tried your demo, I quit it, and I want to do something else. Making the player wait 5 seconds to watch your nag-screen BEFORE playing the game is acceptable - these days, the person playing the demo realises it's the cost of playing the demo without buying the game. Holding the player's operating system to ransom while you throw advertising at him or her is simply not cool at all.

People just want to have fun with games, they don't care about how advanced the AI is, or the physics of explosions and stuff like that. Sure, some people do care about this things...

Did the company make any research to see if there was demand for this kind of game? Doesn't matter how technically advanced the game is if no one want's to play it.