Davaris said:
Awor Szurkrarz said:
Hello, Davaris. Is your Flash-Gordon style cRPG project with miniatures still alive?
That project ended when I stopped the Omega Syndrome. The art issue was going to be a problem and I was burnt out.
Oh
. It's a shame as I was very fond of the idea of playing a tabletop Role Playing Game on computer
.
Davaris said:
Most of gamers didn't have a chance of tasting the interesting part of your work as people who downloaded the demo would get thrown into a long dungeon crawl.
I also tried releasing larger parts of the game earlier on. The bottom quarter of the world map was open and it made no difference to sales.
But was it possible to get to the open map without doing the Base Gamma mission? Also, was it before or after the game became a Falloutlike? All the versions that I have tried started in Base Gamma.
Davaris said:
Something a successful designer I know said, Some games don't sell no matter what you try. You just have to let them go and make a new game.
That's... quite... depressing
.
Though from what I've seen in old threads on the codex, there was a lot of people liking Omega Syndrome and talking positively about it but almost everyone gave up on it when you have implemented the mandatory iron man.
There's one thing that you're missing here, though. You mentioned here and in the 1.3.24 version thread that it didn't sell no matter what kind of marketing and demo you did.
The thing that you're missing here is that it's impossible to draw any conclusions from this as every time you were selling another product which wildly varied in nature and quality.
You weren't selling one game called Omega Syndrome. You were selling several games under that tittle and each of them would be attractive/unattractive for a different audience.
IIRC It began as a RTwP game, which obviously is attracts another audience than a Falloutlike. There were tons of RTwP games back then, so you were targeting a heavily populated niche with a low-budget game.
Then you have added the turn-based mode, but it still wasn't a Falloutlike. I saw requests for the speech skill in 2005, so I assume it wasn't implemented. Still, being turn-based alone does nothing to allow to target the Fallout's audience.
In 2006 you added the speech skill but also scared away almost all your customers with the forced "hard game" mode. It also had pretty ugly fog of war and poor animations.
During that period you also had the "premium game" ideology basing on which, you set up a price that obviously clashed with quality of your game. So, while you had a product that was a beginning to be a Falloutlike, you made some horribly bad marketing and design decisions that made it unsellable and additionally damaged reputation of your game and company.
In 2007 you removed the forced iron man and the horrible fog of war and added vastly improved animations. Still, the Gamma Base was unreasonably tough (and repetitive and boring) and still made the iron made mode pretty much unplayable, but this was the period when the quality of the game improved enough and the price dropped enough to make me seriously consider buying it.
Actually, it was the point when the game could offer something to the Fallout audience. Still, the whole thing needed more polish.
The only reason I decided to pay the price was that it seemed like Falloutlikes are getting extinct and it's the only one around.
But still, only since then it was a valid product for for someone who desperately wanted a Falloutlike. Not when it was a Baldur's Gate-like, not when it lacked the defining features of Fallout and certainly not in 2006 when it was obscenely expensive and broken by the mandatory Iron Man mode for which the game wasn't balanced.
So, in the end, better marketing, better design and more polish finally changed my position from "no way I'm going to buy THIS" to "it looks somewhat attractive, I'll consider buying it when I'll have some more money" in June, 2007 and finally buying it in July, 2007. The title screen with a game box image helped too. So, these specific changes worked on making me as a desperate Fallout fan buy the game.
Then there was further rebalancing which finally made the Gamma Base passable on average Iron Man playthrough and the game became really fun to play as it was possible to start the game, get through the Base Gamma reasonably quickly and get to the fun part of the game. And then a bit over a month later, you have closed the shop.
So, basically, you had a product that targeted the Fallout fan niche only since 2006 but you made it unsellable and you had the product that would be somewhat attractive for the Fallout audience only for several (or maybe a few?) months in 2007 and only for one month it was actually balanced like Fallout. Basically it needed a bit more polish (the interface!) and doing something with the Gamma Base (as it still would be a major put-off to Fallout fans because of its length and lack of the things that made exploring underground bases fun in Fallout) and time for people to learn about its improvements, existence and to decide to buy it and gather funds for buying it.
The last release was seriously bizarre and looked like it was released without testing or much thought. The interface was uglified with a ginormous HP display and there were ugly numbers flying when someone got hit which couldn't be turned off and was working very slowly on all computers and operating systems that I've tried running it on (a 2003 computer with Win98, a 2007 computer with WinXP and another 2003 computer with Linux).
Which is a shame as the Fallout-style wireframe targeting was a great addition.
Davaris said:
Awor Szurkrarz said:
As for design problems - some people would be willing to do some design for free just for the joy of seeing their ideas implemented.
I have often thought about making a game that people can alter online, the authors get credit and people can vote on what they think are the best changes. It would be an interesting experiment to see if the Internet, is smarter than the better game designers out there. Pity I don't have the technical skills to try something like that.
I think the only way to make something like this is making a project open source. Still it limits the possible designers to programmers. The main part that wannabe designers would be useful for would be proposing and testing various changes, preferably within a closed circle. Even something as banal as a wannabe designer sketching an interface and writing down hot-keys and posting such a proposition on a private designer forum and then wannabe designers perfecting it together would be a huge help and would allow improving the user experience a lot.
Davaris said:
Omega Syndrome was very Sci-Fi-heavy.
I get the SciFi channel here in Australia and right now they are playing Dr Who the Tom Baker years. IMO it is the best Dr Who made and the fans agree, because it is the most requested show SciFi have ever had.
The parts of Dr Who the Tom Baker years, that are most interesting for me, are when he goes to other planets, an original world is created and there are two or three competing factions, with detailed histories and a unique look.
The less interesting shows, are when they return to Earth, be it in the past or the present.
So that is what I mean when I say the genre doesn't work well. Someone suggested it might work better as an FPS. They were probably right.
I remember Roswell-based serials being quite popular.
Anyway, how did you get to make Omega Syndrome? I'm very curious about it as a CS student. It's still the only Fallout-like that I've seen released. What would be your advices to people who want to get into developing such games? I don't mean necessarily selling them, but at least releasing them as it's the part where most of projects seem to fail.
Of course teams can work out beautifully for some projects and I admire it when it does.
. It's still at least one Falloutlike to play and just being able to start with a decent character and get outside the base without 20 attempts made it much more fun to play.
