some Red Thumb Games projects

One of the best perks of working at GarageGames is being surrounded by game development all the time. As such you end up learning a lot whether you set out to or not. There's a number of GG'ers who have side projects on their own. Admittedly it's hard to find time, but when you outsource all programming and art it doesn't take much. I released Shelled as freeware because I joined GG and I don't regret releasing it free, Shelled was essentially a prototype or sandbox of the game elements and not a full game experience. But it has nagged me that it didn't turn out to be the game I wanted it to be even after multiple years in development, and it nagged me that I wasn't able to monetize it, so in March I decided to apply what I have learned while working here towards a sequel. Three months later I have enough to show. To be sure, this is a Red Thumb Games blog and not a GarageGames blog as these projects are wholly my own (like Eric Hartman's Blockland or Brian Ramage's Metal Drift).

In retrospect, one failure of Shelled was my complete ignorance of understanding what a casual versus a hardcore player is. Even after I thought I knew and greatly simplified the game to take it in the direction of casual, it ended up being a hardcore game. I truly had no clue.

Another major failure was near-complete-reliance on multiplayer. The game was designed as MP from the very first concept document. MP games are easier to design and program because you get to leverage the intelligence of other players competing against your player to provide the dynamic entertainment. The few matches I played with other players were very fun. The single player game however was not. The servers, save for launch day, have been deserted. Even with a price tag of zero.

Yet another failure was in making the game too complex. I'm often telling developers to ease the player into their game slowly, introducing elements incrementally, not throwing them in all at once. Yet the game did just that. You must learn to aim, learn to fly, learn the HUD elements such as jet fuel meter, learn the radar, and learn defensive strategies -- oh, and what weapons to use and how best to use them -- all at once. It's a wonder anyone even attempted.

A final noteworthy failure was the rushed manner in which I released the game. I just started at GG and wanted to close the chapter on Shelled, so weapons went unbalanced, level design went incomplete, and player feedback (such as allowing firing and flying at the same time) went ignored. And no Mac build when it was ripe for the picking. All of these hurt the game.

Cheerily, all of these can be remedied. And where Shelled became a chore to develop towards the end, the sequel is exploding with fun. I don't care how it ends up because I'm having too much fun making it. That's a feeling I haven't had with the game since its first months in development.

So first of all, let's dispense with the notion that Shelled is a casual game. It's ridiculous. Diner Dash is casual, Bejewelled is casual, TubeTwist is casual. Shelled offers too fine a level of control, too competitive and adreneline inducing of an experience, and has too much in common with hardcore FPS's to be anything close to casual. It may be on the "casual" end of the hardcore spectrum, but it's firmly hardcore nonetheless. As such the graphics don't match it well except for those hardcore players looking for lighter fare both in gameplay and graphic. There's no real solution being offered here, but it's important for me to keep this in mind as the game develops. I'm not making this for housefraus over 40.

Next biggest failure, near total reliance on multiplayer. Shelled 2 will instead offer as its chief value a compelling single player experience where every level is essentially its own little game. The missions are boilerplate and unoriginal, you could write them in your sleep. Shell x number of tanks. Rescue the hostage and return him to home base. Nuke the enemy base. The innovation of the game lies in its firing mechanism -- Scorched Earth meets a FPS, which has never been done before -- so other parts of the game need not be innovative. In fact, other parts of the game need only SUPPORT that innovation. So we have missions designed around exploiting the innovative firing mechanism, rather than everything having to be innovative. Shelled 2 will still offer a MP mode (since it already works in Shelled 1), but this will be an extra rather than the sole game. Mission design is also where we're having the most fun, especially since we know this game inside and out and know how to best exploit it.

Now to address the failure of the game to incrementally invite the player into it. Again, this is where mission design is leveraged. Earn your shooting license. Got it down? Great, now let's learn basic flying. Now let's give you a mission where you can make use of a special weapon type to "learn" how to use it. And so forth. This is a major area where programmer Gary Preston has added new code, the ability to script events and customize each level into its own game. No longer will players distinguish between tutorial and game. The first series of levels IS the tutorial AND the game. You'll learn the game without even knowing it.

And finally, there's no rush to release this, so we have plenty of time to appropriately balance the weapons, allow player requested features such as flying and firing, and be satisfied with the level design.

All of this will not a good game make. But we're having fun doing it, we have reasonable cause to believe there will be a positive response, and with some 25,000 copies of Shelled already out there, and some decent indie game media coverage and reviews, there's already enough of a player base for traction to throw a sequel at for a low price ($10) and see what happens.

Here's a few quick screenshots of Gary's new scripted event system:





5 years ago, when I spent $4k on a game that I went straight into development on without prototyping then had to scrap, I learned the lesson the hard way about the value of prototyping.

I had an idea for a Shelled mod and wanted to try it out, so the Sploidz programmer (who also helped on Shelled) threw together a quick prototype of the concept in less than a week. It turned out cool, so we polished and experimented with the prototype until we were satisfied with it as a proof of concept for the design.

The game is tentatively called "GravGolf" and the premise is simple: aim in FPS mode to fire your ball towards the golf hole, then while your ball is still in the air, aim and fire again and again, making successive "jumps" around in the air until you reach the hole. Try to make it to the hole in as few shots as possible.

The prototype was great, but we set it aside because it has that same problem that Shelled did, which is falling in an uncomfortable space between casual and hardcore. Non-sim golf games are typically casual fare, but the FPS style aiming and fairly advanced spatial reasoning and reflexes required put it towards hardcore. Moreover, with Shelled 2 in development, it's difficult to do two 3D projects at once, as 3D games require much more in the way of level design and play balancing than 2D games do.

Here is a quick screenshot of Andreas's work on the GravGolf prototype:



Again I was disappointed that I pinched Sploidz off at the $1k budget mark without it feeling complete, and disappointed I was unable to monetize it. I hadn't planned on selling it from the very beginning -- I know how hard match games are to sell in a market crowded with them -- but then the game turned out more fun and addictive than I had thought it would be, leading to the disappointment in not finishing it proper and selling it.

So we put GravGolf aside and Andreas is now working on turning Sploidz into a complete game experience, complete with "twist" and polish.

Whoever says that there's enough match type games in the world already is not very creative. That's like saying there's enough word games already, or enough FPS games already. It's dismissive and small thinking. Personally I would prefer to see entirely new game genres created at every turn, but there's also nothing wrong with expanding existing genres. If you do nothing to improve or innovate you're wasting time, I agree. But is the genre truly tapped out? I thought I'd seen every word game there was and was sick to death of the genre, and then I ran into a gem called Dungeon Scroll, which mixes word and RPG genres.

Further, those who shun match style games are likely males under 40, which is not the target demographic. 70% of casual gamers are females 40+ years old. If gamers only make games for themselves, which has historically been the case, you end up with a very narrow selection of games available, and you continue to see mainstream culture slight video games as a juvenile medium. Grimm's Hatchery isn't my cup of tea, but it's a smash hit. I'm not a 40 year old woman, but that doesn't mean I can't think like one (as long as I don't dress like one).

So GravGolf will remain a prototype -- and thank god I prototyped it instead of launching right into production -- while I fix Sploidz up into a portal-whoring match game instead. And I'm just as excited about this match game as I am about Shelled 2, in fact a touch moreso. It represents new territory I haven't explored yet, and where there's new territory there's something to learn as you set aside what you think you know. No screenshots on the matchy-match-match game, that would give away the "twist" :) But here's that old familiar shot of Sploidz:



In another 3 months I'll share more on both side projects, in the meantime it's been hard to keep quiet about them these last 3 months and I'm glad to finally share my thoughts.

Cheers and keep indie'ing.

Josh