Plan for Phil Carlisle

How strange things are.

I've been working on DSL for quite a while now. Its my "pet project" in that I'm not doing it as a commercial project so much as something I'd like to play.

But I do have to think about the longer term aspects, so I've been developing some other projects to start my indie "casual game" developments off.

I've got a great great design, which is pretty certain to be very fun and moreso, I think has a lot of commercial potential (not stellar, but indie wise pretty good).

I've decided to pay for a commercial developer to make my website and a few other promotional items, but thats a ways off (need to get some games completed first right?).

Now, last week I can to thinking about something that affects my direction with this casual game (of which I'll post some shots as they get closer to completed).

The main crux of it, is that this game would work equally well in 2D or 3D, given that its a "sims" style game. So initially I was thinking just make it completely 2D. But then last week, I had this thought pop into my head "would it be better sense commercially to make it 3D?".

My thinking is that basically, it makes no difference development wise, the content would be 3D anyway. If anything, I'd expect to use a little bit less space, but a little bit more processing power. So I figure this is a marketing decision over anything else.

See, most of the "sims" style games, i..e all the "theme park" style games, all transitioned from 2D to 3D over the last 5-6 years. This marks a trend for most publishers to require thier games to be 3D, even the low end ones.

So am I cutting myself off retail deals if I go with a 2D only game? Would it hurt to do a 3D version??

So thats the dilemma for this week. In terms of development, its all pretty much agnostic (the gameplay all takes place on a 2D plane).

Anyway, just thought I'd throw that out in my plan, because overall, its not an obvious decision, even though it seemed like it initially.