Take my game! Please!

Thomas Tong — 2007-07-01T19:56:00+00:00

About a month or so back, I along with a few friends decided to make a multiplayer top-down shooter. A "Tribes as a top down shooter" if you will.

Our time frame was to get something almost completely functional within four weeks and then iterate on it with plenty of user testing. Build the game, play test it, and play test it again and really ensure we're addressing the "fun" factor before we worry too much about the graphical glitz or spend time on features that don't "matter".

A few weeks later and here we are and at the first major hitch. The problem of real people to play test the game. You know when you're trying to make a 6v6 game your network of suitable testers dries up pretty fast, especially when you need them to be online at the same time.

Now if we're having this problem now, and I assume when we do a full release that this is going to be a huge problem.

If you build a great fun game, people will come, but for multi-player game the fun doesn't seem to start until you get 4-5 people in there. At this initial point , I don't for see getting more than 100-200 downloads a day to start. Most of players will start the game, see that there are 0 people on the servers and promptly walk... actually no run away, even before they've even shot their weapon.

I'm sure there are others out there building multiplayer games, how do you attract an early audience without begging? Using? Or just plain spamming people? Granted we don't have a fully polish product available, but from our play tests (where we bribe our friends) it's a pretty darned fun. Not perfect, not crack cocaine addictive, but certainly worthy of some gaming love.

I've just spent a few weeks putting something together, I can't imagine how it is for developers of MMO's or other multiplayer developers that have put months if not years of the development in to their game and find themselves without the marketing muscle to attract people to play their game. Sometimes you can't even give it away!

If you look at all the older but still decent multi-player, many of the servers sit empty because you simply can't get that critical mass to be playing at the same time. Is this simply the nature of the beast? Should we include a free keychain with that? I'm not sure.

Required screen-shot and link below.

If you too would like to stare at an empty server, here's how. :)

www.cratered.com

Link

Cratered v2

Thomas Tong — 2007-06-28T22:03:17+00:00

This may possibly be the longest time between profile posts on the same game (well kind of the same game). The last one was in 2001, and I wasn't using torque, and the game was about boats on water.
www.garagegames.com/blogs/1488/745. I'm even more surprised GG still has it in storage. :)

Fast forward 6 years, (and lots of other things in between) I finally got back in to it and realized it would fairly easy to put together the kind of top down CTF game I wanted with an engine like Torque. I figured it's ideally suited for a CTF shooter, even though it would be completely top down. Getting it top down and the aiming to work well was a bit of a pain in the ass. The rest was pretty straight forward.

Rather than do a long development cycle. I'm opting for a fast turn around, continuously playable game. Players may not like it that it's things change on them, but I think for these kind of games it's pretty important to get player feedback early on. This way if we're going down the wrong track we'll know right away.

So things are always working. So far the server isn't very busy but at least it hasn't crashed which is always nice. :)

The critical part is that the game includes an auto-updater. Any changes made are downloaded by the player on startup which makes things useful for an online title, even a small one. I don't think I could ever go back to the classic installer mechanism.

Enough talk, want to try it out? Download it here. www.cratered.com Just announced so it's kind of quiet, tell all your friends, family, enemies, your pets etc. You get the idea.

Right now, Kork's still in there but we have a new character in the wings. Mandatory eye candy continue.

Blog for Thomas Tong at GarageGames.com

Take my game! Please!

Cratered v2