Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

jeffwofford.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 184 posts

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#131

Post by happimess »

lacker wrote: post #118
deciplex wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Early Access is a crapshoot though, and I'm glad Valve is taking steps to rein it in a bit. Too many developers start with basically a POC, sell it at normal release price points, and then development peters out after that. Godus and DF-9 are good examples of this. Strangely, it seems that you should avoid Early Access when it's for games by [i]established[/i] developers (Peter Molyneux and Tim Schafer are behind God…

Too many developers start with basically a POC, sell it at normal release price points, and then development peters out after that. It seemed like this happened with Minecraft, it was just popular enough that the POC was good enough.

Surely you're joking--Notch gave away the POC for free, and started charging for the beta somewhere before 2011 (when I started playing). Since then, new features and bug fixes have been essentially non-stop.

I picked it up after a long hiatus and found new terrain types, new monsters, new neutral creatures, an enchanting system, a brewing system, an entirely new dimension ("The End"), and several types of abandoned structures.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#132

Post by Kurtz79 »

duaneb wrote: post #79
MrMember wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to. Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. Hell, even the im…

> Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. I actually trace this to Diablo II and Torchlight. Yes, they aren't strictly rogue-likes—among other things they're realtime—but they raised excitement for the genre just the same.

Roguelikes are defined by permadeath, quick runs and procedural generation.

Diablo 2 and Torchlight have the latter, but they are quite old, and the resurgence of roguelikes is relatively recent.

I believe it's just has to do with it being a very solid (and addictive) gameplay model, and one that fits much better indie games than AAA titles.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#133

Post by arvinjoar »

A great game developed by a lone programmer I seldom see mentioned is "Haven & Hearth". It's developed by a (faux) company called "Seatribe", which actually consists of two people, but only one of them (Fredrik Tolf AKA loftar) does the programming while Björn Johannessen is responsible for the game assets.

It's pretty cool actually and they'll be releasing a 3D version of it at some point[1]. It's basically a survival MMO with permadeath, and hence a lot of cool stuff has emerged, like world wars and geopolitics, complete with player-run and protected trade hubs and so on. In the game there's no official carebear zones though, but if you kill another player you leave a scent that can be tracked, allowing rangers to exact justice. You also leave scents for vandalizing stuff or stealing things within staked "claims".

No game experience can beat the rush of adrenaline one gets when fighting for one's life in H&H, where you might irrevocably lose a character you've been building for a month or more, and where you get to take away that same thing from the person attacking you. It's amazing.

[1] = http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3797...

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#134

Post by graspee »

12 hours until Avernum 2 hits steam.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/337850/?snr=1_7_7_151_150_...

A remake of a remake; all games made by one man.

The second era of the bedroom coder is far from over and you can still make money from it without resorting to cheap, nasty, free2play tactics.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#136

Post by HolyHaddock »

graspee wrote: post #134

12 hours until Avernum 2 hits steam. http://store.steampowered.com/app/337850/?snr=1_7_7_151_150_... A remake of a remake; all games made by one man. The second era of the bedroom coder is far from over and you can still make money from it without resorting to cheap, nasty, free2play tactics.

Jeff Vogel is great, and I've been playing his games for over half my life. But he's written similarly themed blog posts himself: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/the-indie-bubble-is...

Part of the reason he can still do it is that he's been doing it for so long, and has a loyal long term audience quite happy to buy a new Spiderweb game because it's a new spiderweb game.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#137

Post by emsy »

zackmorris wrote: post #53

I dabbled in shareware games for roughly 20 years. I had high hopes for making a revolutionary game and my ship coming in like Notch, but what I found was that making a game was never the difficult part. It was always about funding - making rent each month, affording food, etc. It was also about telling people no, because the closest people around me were often the most demanding of my time and energy, even going as…

I'm currently working on a mobile game all by myself. So this article should worry me. But I share your sentiment. You should create the games you'd want to play yourself. There are many games that were developed with the wrong intentions and so I'm actually glad they fail because it makes the audience seem smarter than they are often depicted.

Every now and then I browse through the app stores for games that didn't get attention and I've never seen a great game among them. I'd like to be proven wrong on this but it hasn't happened yet.

I've also read a couple of postmortems of failed games and I haven't seen a single game that failed despite delivering quality. Most of the times I asked myself how they even thought they'll have success with such a low quality product. One of the best post mortems I've read was this one which emphasizes my point http://gamasutra.com/blogs/DomDrysdale/20150107/233677/Lesso...

>... we were inspired by the success of games like Ski Safari and Jetpack Joyride. These are not good reasons to make a particular type of game

>... I don't think we ever really had the passion for this genre of games to make something truly great.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#138

Post by tragic »

brownbat wrote: post #115
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge sense of entitlement with respect to iOS and Android apps. People want the world for free, and $1 means they OWN you. The race to the bottom with free being the default has spawned this attitude. And the economics work out so that an indie developer can't really break even on free; you need 10s of millions of users to produce a reasonable income from ads. You can be a critically acclaimed indie game an…

> There's a huge sense of entitlement with respect to iOS and Android apps. People want the world for free... Available substitutes affect the price of goods, and the internet has brought us endless hours of free distraction. (Also, prices can trend towards the marginal cost of production over time.) Supply and demand determine pricing, not the amount of labor that goes into production. The labor theory of value is t…

Pedantry Corner: The labour theory of value[0] does not claim anything of the sort. It is not about the amount of labour time actually invested, in reality, in creating a commodity ("concrete labour") but the amount of labour necessary to expend, given the level of technical development in the given society, to create that commodity ("socially necessary labour time", "abstract labour").

Price, of course, is a different thing from value, but that's another matter entirely with a vast literature, pro- and anti-LTV.

The LTV is a reasonably good predictor of the behaviour of markets in commodity goods, with some exceptions (the rent-economy around oil is a good example). My feeling is that with indie games, niche music and so on, there's a problem in that some people will make them for the sheer joy of it, which means wider movement in these small sub-economies do not track things so closely.

[0] Using Marx's version here, not so well read on Smith, Ricardo and so forth.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#139

Post by Morgawr »

MrMember wrote: post #72
gavanwoolery wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

:) Yes, pretty much. DotA was created as a small mod, and now look at the commercial explosion it has spawned, with tournaments containing $2+ million in prizes and everyone wanting to make MOBAs. I think in the past 20 years, we actually have not made as many breakthroughs in game mechanics (of course, this was easier in the early days). Games are still fairly similar to those of the 90s, only technically more compl…

I feel like we are in a golden age of PC gaming right now. Genres completely abandoned by AAA developers ages ago are seeing a resurgence thanks to crowdsourcing. Space sims have been all but dead since Freelancer in 2003 but now there are several to play and look forward to. Formerly obscure genres like roguelikes are seeing mainstream success thanks to high quality "roguelike-like" games like FTL. Hell, even the im…

I have noticed an amazing resurrection of the point and click adventure genre. It is my favorite genre and I could never get enough of it when I was younger (Monkey Island, Indiana Jones, pretty much all the Lucasarts games, Phantasmagoria, etc etc). I was very sad when I noticed a total lack of point and click games between the years 2005-2012ish (more or less, obviously). Now, I see a lot more games like this coming out on Steam, Kickstarter, Indiegogo, etc etc and I am super happy.

Re: The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer

#140

Post by tvararu »

increment_i wrote: post #99
gavanwoolery wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The gold rush was almost over before it started on mobile - it did not take more than a year for things to become extremely competitive. Flash games suffered a similar fate. Consoles have not generally been indie-friendly but Playstation is now making a better effort on that front, although they are still mainly catering to indie devs who have already "made it." Greenlight is becoming quite competitive (there were 17…

I agree. I think one of the worst things to happen to indie devs on mobile was the concept of the App Store(s) itself. When I open the App Store, my brain just...drifts off. Its a bunch of icons with little context. It's like looking at the rack of magazines and trinkets while you checkout at the grocery store. While Moore's Law marches on, I'm hoping the days of AAA titles for mobile are just around the corner. It's…

> I would be willing, however to pay 20+ dollars if someone could give me something close to say, Fallout 3 for my phone though.

We're already there. You can play, today, on your iPhone and/or Android device: GTA San Andreas, Bioshock and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic. These are complete ports that spare no features from the originals.

However, I found that the experience is not what I sought it out to be. I realised that these are games that require focus, since they rely on immersion. The only situation in which I can actually sit down to play them for any meaningful amount of time is when I'm at home on a weekend; in which case, why not just use a console or my computer, with vastly superior input devices and display quality?

Post reply on HN