I’m a solo no-name nobody working on what I think will be the greatest game ever (in another couple years that is) because I’m human and we all do it.
I’ve been very secretive about my game though and have not shared any screenshots (albeit very ugly still) or any really meaty details about why this game is new and why I believe it will be successful.
Am I being stupid?
It’s not that I don’t want to share my ideas with other people. I’m very excited to start building a community and take in interested people’s input. It’s mostly that I’m scared my “new ideas” will get swallowed up and churned out but someone/some company and make my “new and amazing” into a “seen that before… clone!”
Am I being paranoid?
My website http://www.solacecrafting.com/ is really just me talking to myself. Ahaha. Should I make a WIP thread and turn my website into a picture filled blog of all my glorious crappiness?? I do already update the forums with my progress almost daily…
The main cause for my fear is that I’m a married, full-time employed, non-professional building this with every second I can find every day to try and make this my living. Now I know a lot of people are quick to shoot down anyone who is looking for “success” in the game industry, but I’m not looking for motivation or anti-motivation. I’m curious what others think about the safety of openly explaining new technologies and ideas before they are fully implemented.
In an ideal world, everybody would share progress, and much better products (and lives) would result from this increased collaboration and no competitiveness. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world…
Some developers have had enormous success by sharing their work early and got away without copycats stealing their profits. Minecraft and Star Citizens are spectacular examples of this, but there are numerous success stories on a smaller scale. Minecraft is an outlier because the concept of the game was so new that it probably looked like something it would never work and nobody would bother to copy it, until suddenly it became big and been growing since. But its success was so swift that Minecraft became a big brand before anyone could quickly copy it out of the market.
Star Citizen, on the other hand, has nothing original about it, but comes from a celebrity game designer that has a proven record on working in this genre, and it tapped into something many people would so much want to play that many have spent thousands of dollars into a game that is still years far away from an alpha. What Star Citizen created so successfully is a fantasy of living a life of space explorer/trader, and it proves that you don’t even need a video game to create this fantasy that so many people yearn for.
I’d say it depends very much on the kind of game you want to make, how big incentives to clone the game are, and how difficult to clone the game is. If you’re making small cool games, you can share and still get away nicely even with clones greatly eating into your profits, such as the case with Vlambeer games or Threes!. They had their games cloned to infinity, but still made great deal of fame and money from them.
If you’re a single developer working on a big ambitious projects, chances are that your idea can be snatched by a bigger team that can be quicker to bring it to the market.
Ideally would be to make some teasers which would generate interest in the game without revealing anything. If it works for your game, the best route would be to raise interest in your game by creating and sharing the fictional universe that the game takes place in, without revealing anything of the actual gameplay.
There’s nothing to gain from being secretive when you’re a nobody. There’s a lot to gain from keeping what you’re doing under wraps as a successful developer, because successful developers are likely to have successful rip offs. Nobody cares about an unknown though.
Successful developers won’t clone anything from you either. It’s too risky since there’s no proof your ideas are commercially viable in the slightest.
Flappy bird wasn’t new. It was however, successful.
Bear in mind minecraft wasn’t suddenly sucessful, it was a long slow growth and he blogged about from day one. Also it started as a clone, he set out to clone another game as an experiment. As his following grew he expandeded it. It was all out in the open and he engaged his players. It is a great example of public development.
People will use others ideas pretty much only once they are proven. No one is going steal your idea until it is a hit. So make sure do a solid game right out of the gate. They will attempt to improve on it, try not to give them a lot to improve on.
That made me want to take a shot at telltale. There’s little to improve on because there isn’t much there to start with. You’d think a company that invented an engine for movie-simulator-2014 would have better graphics since hardly anything is going on in game…
I think telltale got their idea from a broken dvd player that paused the CEO’s movie every 5-15 seconds at random and s/he pulled a shamalan-level twist thinking that would make a great base for interactive games!
Ah, that still feels good for some reason.
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Was their prototype / proof of concept windows media player with a background script to hit the pause button at random?
Dunno really, but you are right a good memorable name that is clear is a huge help. The game he initially cloned was infiniminer, doesn’t really roll of the tongue.
Absolutely agree with all the above, actually my long post completely missed the point that it is absolutely a MUST to share/market the game that is in development (unless you have a couple of million $ to throw into marketing).
So the questions I wanted to poise is not whether to share or not, but what kind of material is best shared.
Great point, and one of the main reasons Ridiculous Fishing got the credit it deserves while no one will remember Ninja Fishing.
I know these awful games all exist xP But the problem is that they were super commonplace some years ago, but now that stuff just doesn’t fly anymore. Or shouldn’t. I hope one day youtube celebrates/ pranks telltale by having videos pause at random and prompt the user to press a key to continue.
Hmm… I guess that depends on the value of each. Art is nothing by itself, but anyone can create cubes / basic shapes that scripts can use. Artists can make models and animations. What is the value of each? Which is more valuable?
No, you’re being extremely smart. As we all (should) know, the first impression is absolutely crucial.
As someone who subscribed to the Unity engine on IndieDB, I tell you one thing:
There’s no faster way to completely ruin your first impression and make people write you off than by revealing your game to the public without having anything to show.
I see this every single time when I check out my feed on IndieDB. 50 new games, 48 of them not even worth a second of my time. Typically it’s the ideas guys who have no experience, content or team. Another thing you see very often is “developers” who only have a piece of concept art or two to show.
Yes, you are.
The typical response to ideas guys or people who are thinking like this is “Ideas aren’t worth a damn, everyone has them.”
So, somebody “stole your idea”, what now?
If they churn out a shitty version of your game, they are no competition to you so they might as well not exist. Granted, you won’t be remembered as “the first one who did it”, but still “the one who did it right”. If it’s your ego you’re trying to satisfy, that should suffice.
If their version is serious competition, all I can say is that competition is what breeds excellence.
I wouldn’t. There’s a reason why artists only select their few best pieces for their portfolio. It’s there to show people what you’re capable of and not how you got there.
Furthermore, I think the best way to handle it is to use the WYSIWYG principle. If you remember the huge backlash against games like Watch Dogs and Aliens Colonial Marines, you’ll remember that violating this principle was part of the problem.
Don’t lie to your players. Don’t show, carefully rendered images or videos of your models/scenes since they aren’t representative of the final product.
If everything you show them are screenshots being taken in the engine, they’ll know what to expect and they’ll be grateful for it.
As I said earlier, I think you ultimately did the right thing.
Speaking for myself, I’m handling it pretty much exactly as you do. Despite working on my game for slightly over a year already, I haven’t revealed it yet. Not because I’m afraid that people will steal my ideas. It’s also not because I think that the systems I’ve programmed aren’t good. It’s because I don’t want to show them off in crappy looking test environments full of placeholders.
When I create a profile for my game on IndieDB, when I create a post in the WIP board here on the forums, there’s a short time window where people will see it for sure. That’s guaranteed exposure. And I want to make that count.
I don’t want anyone to see my game and dismiss it as something by a delusional hack biting off more than he can chew. I want them to look at my game, the same way I looked at Distance on Steam.
When I saw this game I’ve never heard of before, my first thought wasn’t “Oh look, another crappy looking Early Access game where the developer wants 20 bucks despite being unable to guarantee whether the finished product (if it ever reaches this state) will justify that price.” Instead I thought “Man, this game looks AMAZING!”
This developer has done Early Access marketing right, by not doing what most of devs on Early Access do (i.e. promising the world), but by making sure that what they already have is an absolute eye-catcher.
WIP can also be good for personal motivation and bouncing ideas… even with a WIP you don’t have to give away the farm in details and you don’t have to even really talk about your mechanics if they are unique and you don’t want people to know about them… however if you have some decent progress and you find yourself hitting a plateau where you either aren’t sure where to go next or you feel like you’re losing motivation just from the sheer length of time it takes to develop your game, the WIP thread can be a good place to get that mojo back.
You’ll get feedback generally equal to the amount of effort you put forth in creating the thread… and it might not be all positive feedback, but even when people aren’t signing your praises there are generally great nuggets you can learn from those comments. And you don’t have to agree with all of them, everyone has their own taste.
I’ve been dying to share more info on my current project, but I’m holding off until I’ll have a shot at making a great first impression. It’s one thing to share an idea of something, and quite another thing to share something that looks like it’s well underway. Unfortunately, I just haven’t had the time recently to invest in my game, so it may be quite some time until I can share.
At that point, I don’t think I’d want to hold anything back, unless there was a specific value in not revealing it (surprises in the story and such). When you’re really close to something, it can be hard to see the flaws. Or more accurately, you look past them because you know everything is early stage. Others can point out issues you may otherwise have overlooked.
Really, though, don’t show until you’re ready. If all you’re going to be doing is withholding info out of worry, or obsessing and freaking out over negative impressions, the sharing experience won’t be a positive one for you.
Share early. Share often. Build buzz in the open, so there will be a ready audience for your game when it is done. Do not use secrecy to hide your game out of fear that somebody will steal your idea. Everybody who has enough skills to steal your idea is already busy working on their own ideas.
Having said that, it is usually a good idea to wait to share until you have something cool to show. A short paragraph of text is no substitute for good YouTube videos of a working game demo. Once you have some cool YouTube videos made of your game, it is definitely time to share. Start by showing your video to friends and family. Improve based on the early feedback. Then expand by posting in the WIP section of the forum. Take that feedback and implement more improvements. Then expand by posting in more places online. Keep a detailed blog of your progress complete with screenshots and videos.
Yes! I think it was the last multi-CD talkie I played just before the point and click dry spell of the early 2000’s. I played it with my girlfriend and we had a great time puzzling out the different challenges. It still gets brought up occasionally 10+ years later.
I enjoyed the adventure game genre as a social experience, I grew up playing the first Kings Quest with my mum young enough to need help with spelling for the parser. I played the Larrys, Space Quests, Monkey Islands, Gabriel Knight, Day of the Tentacle, Broken Swords, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango, Beneath a Steal Sky, Kyrandias, etc with friends and family. They made for a great time where we would spend the night talking about and enjoying a common narrative, discussing what we thought would happen if we did this thing or what the NPCs would do if we did the other thing. The standalone games were large enough to present detailed and nuanced worlds and if we got stock for a little then we would just solve some other puzzles in a different area while we turned it over in the back of our mind.
I think that might be what is missing in the modern episodic format. The reduced scope and limited exploration leaves them feeling like a closed room puzzle, and if you can’t solve the current puzzle there are not enough other branches to explore. As a result they can feel like an interactive cut scene where you are just applying the half dozen items in your inventory to the two dozen hotspots in the environment it progress the dialogue.
The two best modernish takes on the genre that I’ve played were The Walking Dead (damn we felt bad when clementine gave us that judging look) and Zack and Wiki (great tool based puzzles, and cute enough to trigger laughter). The next one I plan on playing when we have time is The Cave it looks like fun tool based puzzles in a comedic platformer environment.
If you feel that Tell Tale is doing it wrong, is there anyone that you feel is doing it right?
There are about ten posts on this forum a week by people with a new great idea that hasn’t been tried yet. So far they have all gone nowhere. So yeah, I’m not going to be stealing anything from here anytime soon.
Nobody develops in secrecy. Generating buzz is important. Even the big guys working on massive projects with big marketing budgets generate buzz early. They shout very loudly “We are making a new secret game! Don’t try an guess what it is”. As soon as the internet stops talking about it a screen shot is leaked to the press. “We can neither confirm not deny that this is what we are working on”. Sure, there is plenty of work that goes into managing buzz. You need your biggest hype at launch time. But no one does it by keeping this secret.
Can you imagine Blizzard coming out tomorrow saying “By the way here is Warcraft 4, we’ve been working on it for three years, I hope you like it”.
I would say don’t bother talking about it till you need folks to test your beta (not your alpha). Better to spend your time working on it than talking about it.
Or as Elton John once sang, “The less I say the more my work gets done.”
(Note to self: Quit spending so much time on the Unity forums!)
