Next Steps
August 13th, 2011
My last posts might have given the impression that I’ve been sitting on my thumbs for the past two months, moping about the tragic failure of Swordfall. Fortunately, that’s not quite the case. In fact, about two weeks ago I finished a new flash game, another one of my ‘Rise of the’ defense games. It was approximately a five week project and I ended up landing a sponsorship for a bit less than Rise of the Tower’s five grand deal. Pretty typical as far as my sponsorship experience goes, but I’m pretty happy with that result. It’s a very welcome cash infusion after two big games that haven’t produced anywhere near a decent wage for all the work that went into them.
Also, now I once again feel like I know what I’m doing. Sure, I got stuck for a while there on some over-ambitious, hugely flawed visions, but I’ve learned my lessons and now it’s time to move on to smaller and better things. So yeah, looks like I don’t need to go out hunting for a real job after all. While I do plan to return to strategy, I’m going back into it from a much more casual and goal-oriented angle. I’ve been working the past few weeks on some interesting ideas in that direction, keeping the iPhone as my main target platform. It brings back many of the battle mechanics from Swordfall and Scrap Metal Heroes, but with escalation and deployment mechanics that should keep it all from turning into one long cycle of attrition. Also in my mind are some elements of collectible card games that have intriguing possibilities. Deck building and card drawing, to be specific. I played MTG for a few years back in the day, so I know full well how addicting deck customization can be. The trouble is I have yet to see any decent attempt to translate that concept into a computer game. The likes of PoxNora just have no appeal to me. I feel like they’re all aiming for a needlessly exact translation of card games, with apparently no one interested in re-examining the genre’s structure in light of a digital platform. For me the biggest turn off in these digital CCGs is the turn-based battles, which I got tired of back in the Age of Wonders days. Another is the typically lackluster graphics, and a major third peeve is the genre’s obstinate refusal to budge from the micro-transaction model. As soon as you require people to buy cards with real money, the whole affair turns into pay-2-win. This goes hand in hand with the card rarity spectrum that everyone just has to use, which neatly breaks your game into tiers of crap cards, decent cards and good cards. Back in my MTG days easily 80% of my card collection was useless filler material that no serious player would ever touch. In some cases there are good cards that give you the exact same thing as a crap card, but for half the cost. Any RTS with that kind of balancing would be laughed out of the room.
I’m hoping I can topple some of these old standbys, at least in whatever limited way my resources will allow. And naturally, it won’t be anywhere near the complexity of a traditional CCG like Magic. With a casual target, the mechanics have to be pretty simple and the card count reasonably low. Now, this is all early days still of course. I don’t even own a Mac yet, so any plans for iPhone development are little more than whispers in the wind. I’m pretty confident though that this game will happen eventually. I like the concept and I’m having a lot of fun right now with the fantasy setting. It’s such a refreshing change of pace to just come up with whatever the hell I want, instead of hunting through history articles on Wikipedia. I’m actually working on a little flash side-scroller on the side as well, which I’ll probably finish before I get serious with this fantasy strategy thing. I’ll try and keep this blog up to date on any major developments.
– Peace and fair trades
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