What is a better, popular game to make ?
Some are very simple, like pacman or galaga, and some are very complex, like golden sun and warcraft 3…
There is a very wide range, but most people what kind of them prefer ??, Unity is a very good tool and allows you to do whatever you want, basically limited by the development team abilities.
Is a question to see how to target the multitude, the masses… thanks
.ORG
personally all the games my friends and I play are rpg’s. There is huge audience for whatever genre you like though. My advice is to make a game the genre you like to play and if its good the audience will like it (at least thats what I’m hoping 
)
You can’t target everybody. But, if I am correct in assuming that this is about the DOG contest, you should try to target the casual gamer crowd. These are the people who play games like Bejewled, Diner Dash and Orbz.
Probably the best game design is one of the first: Tetris. It appeals to hardcore gamer, casual gamer and non gamer alike. But it is an old and tired concept now after being made and remade for years.
The best games for online play are simple and super easy to get into, with several big and small goals to work towards.
If you are trying to just get everyone’s opinion on what type of games are good, here are some I can think of off the top of my head:
Megapixel
Halo
N
Willem’s “Shooter in the Abstract”
Starcraft
Heli Attack 3
i think it depends on what ‘masses’ you are referring to. the gamer crowd or the casual crowd? - there’s nothing that everyone universally likes. solitare, minsweeper, tetris, WOW, halo, GTA, mario et al have their haters just like everything else - but they definitly have that ‘something’ (other than being fun) that makes them much more popular than others - but again that something is vastly different for WOW than it is for tetris.
but are you asking because you wish to have a business or you just want to have a popular free game? particularly if its a business decision (unless you have 50 talented friends alot of money) i think your time would be best invested your risk lowered by choosing a small or casual game atm. i don’t know if there’s any 10 commandments of casual game design - but just looking over what’s popular you can get a good sense of what works what doesn’t.
if you’re going for tetris-like universal popularity though, IMO the one thing you should always keep in the back of your mind: ‘easy to learn, hard to master’.
my 2c ; )
Thanks hypnotoad, Yoggy and drJones, that is just what im talking about, discussion about games and how to target people, how to think before creating a game.
I really appreciate all of your opinions, it gets me into it.
Waiting for more opinions.
.ORG
i think the most popular are the AAA titles that rack in tons of cash but i think you answered your own question!
basically limited by the development team abilities
the more complex the game, the tougher it is to make. so i’d say judge your own goals, timeline and abilities then decide from there. i agree with hypnotoad too, that there’s a big market for all genres and if a game is fun it will succeed.
AAA titles are pretty hard to compete with though. they’ve got big budgets and generate a lot of hype. that’s tougher to do for the indie crowd (but not impossible). seems indies are finding success in the casual space because it’s a bit easier to enter. that makes it a good place to use for generating cashflow to make more games or support a larger project. [/2cents]
[edit: posted while drj and yog posted. good points there and i’ll also add: go play some games at some of the portals. that will give you a good idea of what’s out there and its complexity.]
Personally I prefer epic adventure games, unfortunately I’ve never had a decent computer to play them on though. Also putting aside the time is an issue too…
My fav would probably be Dark Messiah, and I enjoy the adult humor of the characters in manhunt.
Not having time to play games means I do play the casual minigames that turn up here though. Like shooter in the abstract. But once Ive tested something thats usually that. And having a slow computer means a lot get biffed out that are probably fun on a newer machine.
I also really enjoyed kill monty, which is at freeverse.com I thijnk its a flash production.
See ya
AC
I think it’s better to start with a simple game with 6-8 months of schedule if you work alone.
If you are part of a team you can afford a bigger game, but don’t plan a too complex one because it’s hard to keep a “volunteer” team motivated for months.
Targos, don’t you have good rental/buy schemes over there? I mean a mac pro is only $25 pw and the only reason I went 24" imac instead recently is because I can’t justify spending $10 000 on RAM to use it’s potential and couldn’t justify not if I spent the extra few $$'s.
Once you have bought a few they chase you up with deals and it’s easy going.
CHeers!
M
PS. I mean they’re as cheep as “chups” these days: I bought a
4mb HD SE in 1990 for $5000, a PPC 133 mhz/100mb HD Desktop for $13000 in 1995.
I was going to say also; Starcraft kicked **** with “Staredit”. Bugger, it’s not going to make it onto Rosetta. Diablo 2 too.
Luckily I still have Classic on my old imac, not the same though.
M
I’ve always loved racing games … even N64 Mario Kart was an old fav of mine. I think when it gets too real it’s a bit lost on me tho … I’m 32 now (doh!) and I’d play Mario kart if it was just released … wouldn’t we all :?
Cheers,
Jared.
Sorry- the 133 (can’t recall what OS it was then -but at that time it shat all over PC’s) also had a book/laptop/bloody thing, which sort of worked and a high end printer attached too.
Well, we were earning decent money then.
m
Not quite Yoggy. Yes, the Top DOG contest is all about online casual games but you are unnecessarily and slightly incorrectly limiting the scope of what “casual games” involves. Casual games online can definitely be more action based (driver games, shoot 'em ups, etc) and in fact we’ve heard from portal reps that action games do better online than non-action games (why is there always a driving game in the top-10 on shockwave.com? 
). We don’t want anyone to limit their Top DOG efforts to puzzle clones and whatnot.
As far as what will appeal to people, boy howdy that’s a wide open topic. You can create games for the younger female crowd (as in 8-14 year old girls), the teen male crowd, or the adult crowd, all of which will be very different from each other. So in making such decisions you’ll have to either (a) decide on a target audience and think of appropriate content for that group, or (b) decide on a game idea/mechanic and tweak it for the audience(s) that play such games. At least those seem like sound ideas to start from…
It is true that the games I mentioned are not real great online games and none of them are action games, but I couldn’t think of any famous online action games. Now that I think about it more there is Alien Homind, and probably others.
One easy example is Redline Rumble, it’s been done in a few variations but for at least a couple of years now it’s been a consistent top-played game on shockwave.com (in fact it’s there in 5th and 11th place on their top online games list right now). I will agree that it’s the likes of Bejeweled and Diner Dash that have had mega-success because the available audience for those games is quite a bit larger (and FYI, Diner Dash achieved most of its success as a downloadable exe and not as an online game), but that still doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot of success to be had by making action games. As such our contest is not using game genre as a judging criteria/category.
Well yes. If you compare eg. online racing games with console racing games. The games that are available in a web browser are quite a bit worse.
The good side of it is of course that competing in this market is so much easier.
Also the market for it certainly exists.
The thing is just that until Unity came along, making a great looking 3D game in a web player was just limited by the available technology. But that is not a problem anymore.
So, which would do better in the DOG contest ? a very simple game or a very complex game (both targeting very good visuals effects). Lets say for example, a pac-man or galaga like is best suited instead of some very complex Final fantasy like battle system ??
I know some simple one would do good on web browsers for online casual gaming, but the contest doesnt seem to have a criteria on “Popularity” and the judges are OTEE staff only. That is why i posted the first question in the first place, my idea is a very complex battle system (easy to learn though), but it seem like aim and shoot, or run and jump kind of games are more successful in online casual gaming.
Maybe simple or complex is not even a point to take into account in the search for the game idea for this contest.
.ORG
You’ve answered your own question. Notice that there is nothing in the judging criteria about complex or not, but there is for gameplay (“Is the game fun to play, engage the user and offer repeated playability?”). So instead of worrying about complexity itself, worry about whether or not the game is fun to play as a whole. In doing that you can use game complexity as another design tool: complex enough to offer the right amount of challenge but not so complex as to chase folks away.
i can’t speak for OTEE but my guess would be simple / complex has nothing to do with it - the judging criteria all seem to point to one thing: fit finish. polished, well put together completed games big or small. if you could accomplish something like that in that time frame more power to ya ; )
but i would imagine all other things being equal the more original idea would have a better shot at winning.