How's it all Add Up?

Lots of people have ideas, lots of people act on them and build games, but almost everyone asks the same question ... "Is my game good enough?". Well, there's a fairly simple way to tell if your game is good enough to attract even a modicum of success. Here's how I decided;

I recently worked on a game with Steve Adamson, and were going to release it soon -- it's in an Alpha stage right now, and we've submitted it as an entry for a game contest (more on this in a later post). While developing this game, I kept thinking to myself ... "This idea isn't new, and we haven't really thrown anything new into the mix ... will it be good enough?". Shortly after we got into the initial alpha stages, where the assets interacted with each other and the game began to take on a sort of life, my son, who is five years old, came over and said, "Daddy, can I play this game when your done?".

Now, for those Indie's with kids, you might hear this regularly ... and, if your anything like me, your answer might be something like "Sure, when it's done ... but I don't know when that will be.". Well, as we were entered into this contest, the game had to progress on quite a tight schedule, and so it did. We managed to meet 90% of our goals for the contest submission, and ... My son got to play the game.

His first reaction? Not quite what I had expected, but not bad either. He was quite opinionated about the game, which I was very glad to hear. He thinks the game is funny, and that some of the things in the game are 'stupid' (yep, he actually told his Dad that it was "stupid" when 'xyz' happened). He also expressed his frustration about how hard certain things were, when he really expected them to be more simplistic and straight forward.

So ... is our game good enough? Can I rely on the input of my five year old son? Yep, I sure can. Why? Because, he's my target audience. The game is being developed with children in mind, but is being done in such a fashion that older audiences can also be entertained. My son may not be a 'test group' and he may not be the 'majority', but if he likes it, I'm almost positive that there's at least a few thousand other kids (out of the millions [billions?]) of kids out there).

Do I think we've met our goal with this idea? Yes, I do. I've had co-workers and friends sit down and try it, and I've sent a video of the game play to those who can't actually play it. Everyone's responded with good feedback. After weeding out the biased aspects of the feedback and getting down to the nitty gritty, I honestly believe that when the game is done, it will be marketable.

Now, does any of this matter? Not sure.

The opinion of me, my family, and friends, does not really add up to any form of monetary success. However, it does instill a small amount of pride in my work, and in the time vested in it. After we uploaded the contest submission to the contest FTP, Steve and I sat on the phone practically giggling ourselves to death because we'd finished our first game project as a team.

What are we going to do next? Well, first we're going to turn our Alpha into a Beta, then we're going to turn our Beta into a Release. Were hoping to possibly find some funding along the way, and maybe a publisher or two whose interested in marketing the game when it's finally done.

Then what? More Games, more ideas, more trial and error.


For those interested, I'll post about the actual game itself after getting feedback on the contest (judging will be held on Sept 24th, so I'll probably post here later that day, or the following day). Why am I waiting for judging? Well, if the game gets ranked, then I'll have something to brag about ... if it doesn't, I'll have something to whine about ... and, Steve can tell you, I like to do both ...