I’m slowly starting to think about game ideas again. My baby is less than 3 months old, so this is probably insane. However, *fingers crossed* she sleeps really well (unlike our first child), and it almost seems like I might start to have some time to work on games again. So I’ve been thinking about game ideas.
As I’d mentioned in an earlier post, I realize that I need to attempt something that’s reasonably small in scope. I had thought that I should forget about platformers for a while, and focus on simpler projects like small puzzle games. But then I realized something last night. I spent about 9 months working on Neil Rajah, and the bulk of that was essentially spent on building a platformer engine. Right now, I could probably create a generic platformer game with less effort than it would take me to create a puzzle game of any kind. So that’s got me thinking about platformers again.
Of course, it will have to be limited in scope. There are a few things I tried with Neil Rajah that didn’t really pay off. Online stores, virtual currency, leaderboards. Which isn’t to say those won’t work with a platformer – I’ve seen it done very well, but it has to be designed in from the start. And that takes some fairly careful balancing of making it frustrating enough to make the player want to pay to get ahead, but not so frustrating that they give up and walk away.
It’s also pretty clear that I should try to think of something different, whatever that means. I know my games aren’t going to stand out based on their level of polish and style 
So I need to think of something else that will help it stand out from the crowd. I’ll probably do a traditional platformer in the sense of giving the user movement controls. Bus Jumper and Neil Rajah were both auto-running games, and I want to do something else.
I had one silly idea of making the player have hiccups – make the character randomly jump around, while the player controls left/right movement and shooting. Sounds kinda lame, or maybe it could work with the right kind of level design, especially if I make the levels silly and funny too. Don’t know. If you have any ideas along these lines, platformers with something new or different, please share them so I can steal your ideas
Given that you have the infrastructure for an auto-runner, how about turning it into an auto-bouncer, in which the character bounces around with its horizontal direction under your control. Kind of like Jumper / Doodle Jump / Abduction, but not always scrolling up.
That’s an awesome idea!
Hey Ziggy
Nice to see you getting back into development. Here is my experience and it may help you, i’ve made about 7 games and most of them rarely get any downloads then i made a fan app, basically just pictures of justin bieber that you slide around the arrange the pieces. That app is my most downloaded highest rated longest payed app. It beats everything else (7 apps ) combined!
That tells me that people on mobile really dont want what we as developers might think they want. Sure we can develop a 50 hour rpg but very few people on mobile will play that, although the people who like those types of games would be willing to buy it. I think if your doing games like that it would be best to target the high end android tablets.
As for game ideas, your right things with limited scope would work best, simple games that you can play for 30 seconds to 3 minutes without it feeling repetitive OR you can have games that are longer but they need to handle saving in a very seamless way. Say your playing a level and you quit, game needs to auto save for you and the next time you start have it so it brings you right back to where you were in the level.
I realize that developing for mobile a lot of us indie guys bring the triple A mentality but I dont think that works “right now” it will start to work later this year and next year when android really start to push sales of these high end tablets. *the friday game review guys said so*
So while I can’t give you ideas on what to make per se, i hope my experiences may be of some help to you and good luck!
Those are all good points. Thanks for the feedback.
I got Neil Rajah on the list for one of the early Friday game reviews, mostly thanks to Rod (above) who suggested that to me. I think that project has grown very quickly. It seems very popular now, they’re doing themed games / apps, and I’m not sure how easy it is to get on the list at this point. I haven’t watched it in a while, but it also looks like their production values have been getting better.
yea i actually start watching it quite often and its pretty cool, they drop a lot of good tips and then from my own experiences i think that I have a good idea of how to develop for the android platform now but of course you gotta keep developing and stuff like that.
The themed thing makes it kinda hard for a indie, we can’t just make a game that fits and they may not choose a theme that you have something in but either way its good to watch what they tell most games to fix, usually its the same things and there aren’t that many.
Good luck!
Can you use justin b photos freely. What abt copyrights ?
I have to be careful how much “advise” I give you here, since I’m another “bedroom indie” like you, in a similar family+time/life situation, with the added caveat that I haven’t released any of my projects yet. So, certainly take everything I say with a grain of salt.
Your point of recycling your engine tech is a very valid one; you avoided middle ware to begin with, and have invested a large amount of your time in developing that system. So, think like a business and consider the return on investment.
Regarding the monetization issues, this is a tricky one. I’m an iOS ecosphere kinda guy, so anything I know about android comes from indie blogs and the like, so I won’t say I “know” it’s difficult to make money on the platform. However, one thing I know from keeping my ears open is that devs and hardcore gamers tend to passionately loathe all variations of the F2P/Freemium model, but get particularly violent when it turns to an abusive model; ie the game effectively punishes you for not paying up, or intentionally cripples the core game mechanic unless you buy some moderately priced buff. This being said, companies that do Freemium right have customer numbers and conversion rates that seem to disprove what the “auteurs” are saying. So, I guess I’m saying “Do no evil but Don’t be naieve either”. Use the metrics you record, and start asking consumers more questions about what they want to see, less about what other devs want to make
Lastly, and this is probably the most difficult to achieve. Use your platform and embrace the quirks and control model. NR could’ve had the most gorgeous visuals, beautiful menu system and music, but at heart it’s another runner/platform. I can’t critique the game since I can’t play it. I would if I could! But, there are lots of those type of games. You could stimulate it by adding achievements or buffs or treasure items that make the player push that extra little bit, and may work towards Point 2. Where you see the greatest success in this space though are the games with a novel control scheme. For example look at early Nintendo DS vs more recent. At first you saw a great deal of GB Advance games with some kind of afterthought touch-panel hack bolted on.
Summary, your probably best to stick with the runner/platformer base, add some kind of attack or special move that uses a touch gesture and tweak your monetization to work with the controls.
You raise some very good points here. A long time back I’d put some thought into “what makes a game interesting on a touch screen / mobile device”, but obviously I haven’t incorporated that into any of my games. Well, Drippy uses the accelerometer, so I guess I’ve used some mobile-specific interaction once. I’ll have to think about that, adding some gesture-based controls sounds like a good idea.
To be honest I doubt that there is much interest in platformers out there. There are just too many of them. So you got to turn the focus on something else, for example on strategic quests or physics quests. Avoiding obstacles and collect points is too boring for the fast moving mobile game scene. This is my personal opinion, which I can’t proove of cause.
What defenitly is good, is to build in ingame-purchase. As far as I have read studies and so on, it is really booming at the moment. But i doubt Swarm is the choice here. How did your ingame-purchase perform? In my opinion it was a bit too easy to get the items by just playing. Therefore there was no need for me. However I would have not purchase through swarm. There might be no reasonable argument for that, but it is my honest opinion. So you got 1 more feedback from one of your customers
Maybe try GooglePlay-Ingame-Purchase.
Going back to the actual question, do you know the game “The Lost Vikings”? It is a 90s game when they tried to put some quests into platformers. Maybe this is an inspiration for you
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lost_Vikings
Best greetings
Swarm has been pretty disappointing. Once I made it optional, only a small number of people even bother to sign up. I looked at Google IAP, but stayed away because it seemed somewhat complex to implement. I’ve recently found an open-source library that does all the hard work for you. In my next game, I’ll probably go with that.
You make a good point about needing something different to stand out among all the other platformers.