Making games for people who care

I just read a great article from Jeff Vogel - "Principles of an Indie Game Bottom Feeder" (2012). It's fascinating to note that Vogel has made a living for along time selling games to a very specific niche audience who want to play them and pay for them. Some people are willing to pay a lot more for one of his games than they will for Angry Birds. And yet a common metric of success is total number of plays/downloads/sales, which is inherently biased toward casual, mass-appeal, cheap games. Angry Birds has made a hell of a lot more money than any turn-based indie RPG I'm aware of.

I recently got a review of GOTO WAR - I was happy with the review, and its scores were all high except "intuitiveness" which was pretty low. I was surprised at this because it's something I paid a fair amount of attention to. Players who gave me feedback during the GBJAM never failed to mention the control scheme as a positive thing. That's because they were expecting a Game Boy-style game, and, importantly, they read the instructions to figure out which buttons did what. To quote today's review: "players don't read instructions." You should be able to just click on anything on the screen and it should be immediately obvious how to play the game without ever bothering to read or think about it.

Now the review was very helpful, and the reviewer knows the audience (gamers on Flash portals) so they make a very important and valid point. I'm going to follow their advice and make everything in the game clickable. It just makes me a little sad. I just spent some time and effort - not very much, it was a game jam, but still - on a game and I'm marketing it to people who can't be bothered to read the instructions! They don't care about me or my game, and if I can keep them engaged for more than a few minutes and get them to click on an ad I'll have served my purpose.

In the Seedling post-mortem, Connor Ullmann had a similar complaint - people gave the game negative feedback because they couldn't figure the puzzles out. They assume that if they can't figure something out, the game is broken!

Hopefully when I have a few more published games under my belt I can go the Vogel route and try to create deeper, more meaningful experiences for a smaller group of players who will value them and who will enjoy being challenged. Selling to Flash gamers is a little demoralizing.