The Magic Number

In any kind of media, there is something about a large cast of unique characters coming together. Whether it is the main crew from Star Trek, the characters from LOST, or the heroes who fight with Commander Sheppard in the Mass Effect trilogy, the media format, television, film, video games or literature, doesn’t seem to matter.

Large groups allow for a diverse set of individual characters that often break traditional character molding in order to differentiate them from the others. This gives viewers/readers/players a chance to develop favorites within the chosen media.

But in order to create a large cast a few rules have to be followed from a writing standpoint.

1. Each character must be given the limelight to allow the audience to view the world from their perspective and generate sympathy.


2. All characters must interact with one another; have relationships, conflicts, and experience with each of the others.

Because of these rules, a large group is very difficult to create within a short time period, like films. Oceans 11, is one of the few films that is able to pull off a large cast of uniquely varied individuals, who are memorable. But looking back on films like Inception, which requires a “team” of people to successful accomplish their given objective, you can see that their large group was scaled back to about four or five individuals, compared to nine that seems to be the magic number.

TF2, has nine playable characters, Firefly, has a crew of nine aboard the Serenity, LOST has a core cast of around nine that fluctuates between seasons adding and subtracting minor characters, Mass Effect has a core unit of characters that spanned all three games and like Lost added and subtracted minor characters between 2 and 3.

So why is nine the magic number?

The one thing all of these media have in common is they all stem from writing. They all began as something on paper before Patrick Steward forever became synonymously known as Captain Picard. Except for TF2, the lone odd ball, whose characters are more driven by physical appearance/animation word and snippets of dialog, but that is beside the point.

Building all of those connections is a monstrously huge task and nine seems to be the limit of how many major characters can be part of a single event, while each getting their own unique action and dialog. Most episodes or chapters actually break the larger group down into fragments of two or three characters in order to better showcase individual relationships between characters. The award winning Game of Thrones book series, now a television show, never has its wide range of cast ever been in one place at one time.

So that is what I have been thinking about as I prototype this adventure game that I have been working on and off with for a while now. At the moment I am trying to figure out my classes, which would then evolve into a cast of unique characters. But we will see as things progress forward.

Rebranding (again)

Off-Shoot Studios, our sister company that takes in contract work, is undergoing more than just a little corrective surgery.

It was July, when we originally launched the site and I posted about it here. Since then we have analyzed and reflected on what is the best way to try to sell our services to average consumer, who may have little to no idea how games function.

The major problem that we have been facing is we were attempting to catch a ride of the wave of Gamification. That would have probably worked in a major industrial sector like San Francisco or Boston, but in somewhat rural Burlington Vermont, people just don’t seem to want to understand.

As a result, we have been spending far too much time explaining what Gamification is and not enough selling our services. And so, a rebranding effort has been pushed forward.

The site, as you would see it today, is about the merging of the physical and digital worlds. That ideas/products can take on a digital life as a counterpart to what is being shared physically and we feel that this concept is a bit easier to grasp right away.

In addition we have created a mission statement that explores this idea to a greater depth and our website showcases our past/current clients we have worked with and the products we have made. It’s our version of a living portfolio, a place where we can point people too if they have questions on what our skill sets are.

Launch Week!

So this is it!

Loc, will be available on the app Store on Thursday the 13^th! The press letters have been long since sent out, a total of a 26 emails given to a variety of press sources, of which a whole 2! Have responded! That is 200x better then when we first launched Loc! Which means we did something right!

The Press Kit webpage has had 23 unique views, thank you Google analytics, which means maybe, just maybe, more press sites looked at it than the number who responded.

Mike is heading up the Twitter Blitz, we will be giving away five free copies of Loc on iPad, one every day until launch and two on launch day!

Need to update the website page to showcase the release of Loc still as well as change the twitter and facebook backgrounds.

Cannot think of anything else to do, besides try to get the word out on social media more, It’s kind of like we have done all we could and now just get to wait and see how everything plays out.

So spread the message! Click the like button at the bottom of this post!

 

Too Crowded

Even though PAX happened over the course of last weekend and is now over, most of the press sites are continuing print stories, game play trailers, and interviews from the event.

Remember Me, got another 10 minute gameplay demo, the Last of Us has a 15 minute walk through, and so on and so forth. But what I was surprised to see was the emergence of another new Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO)  game called RaiderZ and an announcement that Everquest II is getting another expansion pack as is Rift.

For those who don’t know Everquest (1999) was basically the first MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Game) to really take off. It hosted millions of players and had literally thousands of hours of content. Everquest II came out in 2004 and was eclipsed by the industry giant, World of Warcraft (WoW) in .

These MMO’s are huge projects, taking several years and hundreds of developers to not only create the content, but to support it throughout its lifestyle. Games like WoW and Everquest are so massive in scope that players can sometimes spend years in these virtual spaces.

Guild Wars II just launched two weeks ago and added itself to the growing list of current MMO’s out there, Everquest II, WoW, Age of Conan, The Secret World, Rift, SWTOR, LOTRO, ect. There are so many of these games that, when you boil them down, offer the same thing. The market is extremely competitive because of the time players must sink into them in order to get the full experience.

And the result is that a few, really polished, fan driven games rise to the top while the others struggle to get by. Star Wars the Old Republic (SWTOR) was one of the largest projects costing somewhere in the realm of $200 million dollars, within six months of its release it had to switch over to a free-to-play model because of the lack of players. The Secret World’s developer Funcom announced recently that because of the poor press reviews it had to let nearly 200 people, about half of its staff, go.

Before closing its doors permanently, 38 Studios was working on a project named Copernicus, an MMO based in the world they had established with their first title. It was another just another reason why they slid into bankruptcy.

While there is some serious money to be made in this genre, there is also an inherit danger. Developers are not just building games, they are creating worlds.

Heres a little song I wrote

Been working on this little prototype for about two days now and was looking for some feedback. Its a simple word game designed to make the brain work a little. All you have to do is find the word that connects the two that are displayed. For example: Glass and Black, What two things connect to these two words? One of the possible answers is sand. Glass is made from melted sand and there are black sand beaches. Its a bit abstract sometimes and completely random, so sometimes the two words can surprise you.

Before you say anything, know that it only knows words that i have put into its database, and that is where you come in. If you think that there is a good connecting word that doesnt seem to work, post on facebook, send me an email, or if i get the comments working, leave a comment.

You can just keep hitting next for a better word, so if your stuck, move on.

Valve Stepping Up

While I have had criticism of Greenlight and how it has been handled thus far, I continue to have respect for Valve. When announced Greenlight felt as if would change the lives of independent developers forever, it offered hope of reaching a larger audience and keeping the lights on. And while the cold reality of it is far from the truth, Valve has stepped up to address concerns from the community and press.

This morning that added a pay wall, it now costs $100 to submit your game. Thank goodness, this will hopefully drastically reduce the number of fake submissions that all the actual games had to fight against for the user’s attention.

And yesterday they launched a new UI skin for Greenlight which removed a key piece that drove the negative feedback loop, the Yes/No rating system.

Instead it has been replaced by similar buttons, yes I would buy this game on Steam, or No/Not interested. And while that may not seem like a major change, it also hides how well a game is doing from the user view!

From our perspective looking at how Loc has been treated, along with several other games, this is a great move. The amenity granted by the internet allowed Steam Users to act as bullies, beating up on some of the more casual games. If a user saw that something already had a low score, they were pressured into rating it lower than it necessarily deserved.

And I am not only talking about our experience, the number of negative comments is still frustratingly large and out of a misplaced sense of respect I have not deleted them, but when I looked at the other games we added into the Puzzle collection we had created, there were games that frankly looked far more professional than ours, but had a lower rating and some really destructive comments.

While the system very much needs work, like being able to share ownership of a submitted game, easier navigation though submitted entries, additional genre’s, and being able to link users from steam to the developers homepage, this is one small step towards a greenlight that could really be worth something.

 

Play to your Strengths

After last week and coming away from green light with a terrible taste I began to scour the  internet for articles to see what the professional industry has to say about this whole green light debacle. And I was surprised to see that they reacted in the same way we, as developers did, they thought that the system only helped to promote a negative feedback loop.

The Green light repository of games has become a giant hay stack. Users have to slog through literally hundreds of games to find a gem. "Discovery is non-existent", Gamasutra posted, and that is completely true. The best way to get traffic to your game is through external marketing, having people who have already played the game or are already invested, otherwise your going to get those angry people who post horrible comments.

I now understand why developers hate game forums. The internet is too easy to hide behind and you feel gross when you pull yourself out.

Another good point that one of the articles pointed out was that the average steam user did recognize that this service for to help promote independent developers. They wanted their triple-A games, which for whatever reason weren’t on steam, to become available. We felt retaliation because our game “appeared” to be an iOS product, one of the few platforms which indie’s actually have been foot hold in. The steam uses who posted didn’t want to pay for a “crappy PC port”

So what do we do? Crawl back to Apple because they at least accepted our game on their market place?

Well, sadly the answer is yes. We won’t take the green light submission down, no need to throw in the preverbal towel. I for one am just not going to look at it anymore, it just a cesspool of negative energy that ruined my weekend.

We can at least stand by the fact that our game plays well with touch controls and hope that over the course of the next week, we generate enough small interest that we make a few sales on the iPad.

Out of all of the professional articles written, gamasutra, as always, had the best. You can go ahead and read it here if your are interested. But Kotaku also wrote a convincing article pointing out the major flaws of greenlight.