Can my dream become a reality? (maybe?)

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Mongrel
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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jul 07, 2016 1:42 pm

No point in selling it so cheap that it does nothing. $2 is functionally nothing anyway, so even that should be the floor.

But it's also worth pointing out that as cheap as gamers are, money suggests quality. If you price it too low it makes people have a lower opinion of it than they might.

Also, nothing wrong with starting high and having room to discount. People loooove getting stuff on sale.
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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby IGNORE ME » Thu Jul 07, 2016 2:42 pm

Kayin just ramrodded a game straight through Greenlight if you want to go hunting for him.

Also yeah assume that the actual long-term Steam price of a game will be 75% off its listed price.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Mongrel » Thu Jul 07, 2016 2:58 pm

Price point is tough, no doubt. The expected price for small indie games IS lower, but like I said, you don't want to underprice and cheapen your game either. Your game is legit and looks good and fun even.

My instinct would be to start it at $6 with a mind to eventually discount it to $1.50 or even $2 over the long-term. But maybe there's more scientific ways to go about figuring out pricing.
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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby IGNORE ME » Thu Jul 07, 2016 5:08 pm

The big secret about economics is that it's much more about psychology than economics.

If you price your game too low, it creates the impression that the game is not worth much; if you price it too high, you'll create an expectation that you might not want to live up to. Basically, you want to set the price based on what you want OTHER PEOPLE to think the game is worth, not what you personally think it's worth. That's an especially important distinction for you, Spram, for obvious reasons.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, whatever price point you pick, you're setting yourself up to be compared directly to <popular game at same price point>. So you want to pick a tier where you feel you'll put up an acceptable showing against that game, if not necessarily win.

Current price matchups seem to look something like this:

$1 Orion
$2 Welcome to the Game
$5 The Room Two
$6 Golf With Your Friends
$7 ShellShock Live
$8 Besiege
$9 Euro Truck Simulator
$10 Garry's Mod
$13 Duck Game
$15 CS: Go
$16 Amazing Frog?
$18 Salt and Sanctuary
$19 Craft the World
$20 Inside
$23 Portal Bundle
$24 Rocket League Deluxe Edition
$25 BeamNG.drive
$30 ARK: Survival Evolved
$35 Arma 3 Apex
$40 Hearts of Iron IV
$50 Megadimension Neptunia VII
$60 Total War: Warhammer

And so on. Obviously there's a lot of timing-based "whose head is up what ass today" involved too (CS: Go should not be outselling Undertale at $10 in this day and age, for example).

If that somehow isn't enough :words: for you, there's a classic article on software pricing whose thesis is basically "$10 or $10,000 depending on what you can get away with". I can't find it right now on my phone but I'm sure somebody else will be kind enough to pull it up for you, cough cough.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Fri Jul 08, 2016 10:20 pm

Thanks everyone!

Brentai wrote:Kayin just ramrodded a game straight through Greenlight if you want to go hunting for him.


Just found the greenlight page for Brave Earth. It got plenty of positive feedback but everyone knows about IWBTG so Kayin is sort of an internet celebrity, I'm not.

Anyway, I'm still going to put mine up soon. I think I just need to set up a website for the game (info and stuff) and so on.

As for the price, the game is not too big. I can beat it in a bit over an hour (but I know where everything is and I skip all conversations, think of it as a speed-run)

I think I should make a demo, but since the game is open-world I don't want to let people wander around too much but also not put up invisible walls. I'll think of something and put the demo here later. (I'm going to make the demo now)

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Fri Jul 08, 2016 11:37 pm

NO DEMO FOR NOW!!

I recommend using a gamepad (I use the xBox one) but if you have to play using the keyboard + mouse, you can adjust the mouse sensitivity by hitting 1 thru 5 (1 is low, 5 is high). The game saves automatically all the time, the save data is stored in ..

On Windows, PlayerPrefs are stored in the registry under HKCU\Software\Spram\ZissisIsland key, where company and product names are the names set up in Project Settings.


That place.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Rico » Sat Jul 09, 2016 12:41 am

The game looks good, but I might make a more focused trailer that shows accomplishing a goal. None of your trailer footage tells me anything about what my incentive is for wandering through the large world.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Grath » Sat Jul 09, 2016 10:22 am

Spram wrote:DEMO

I recommend using a gamepad (I use the xBox one) but if you have to play using the keyboard + mouse, you can adjust the mouse sensitivity by hitting 1 thru 5 (1 is low, 5 is high). The game saves automatically all the time, the save data is stored in ..

On Windows, PlayerPrefs are stored in the registry under HKCU\Software\Spram\ZissisIsland key, where company and product names are the names set up in Project Settings.


That place.

Why would you have it save to registry? That seems like a terrible design to me.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Sat Jul 09, 2016 1:46 pm

Grath wrote:Why would you have it save to registry? That seems like a terrible design to me.


I'm ashamed to admit I don't know what the big deal with saving to registry is a bad idea.

Is it because of something trivial like the data not being encrypted? or something serious like ruining your computer or something?

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Grath » Sat Jul 09, 2016 2:15 pm

Spram wrote:
Grath wrote:Why would you have it save to registry? That seems like a terrible design to me.


I'm ashamed to admit I don't know what the big deal with saving to registry is a bad idea.

Is it because of something trivial like the data not being encrypted? or something serious like ruining your computer or something?

Registry makes it difficult to:
Track changes
Backup configuration for re-install/migration
Manually edit configuration

Trying to do things like backups and manual config edits CAN seriously ruin your computer, and the registry ends up bloated and slow because of too many programs using it.

.NET framework programs actually don't store things in the registry - when Microsoft stops drinking their own kool-aid, it's probably time to move on. I'm pretty sure current convention is XML configuration files in %APPDATA%

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Mon Jul 11, 2016 1:57 am

I've been busy with changing the saving system. When I'm done I'll re-upload the demo.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Tue Jul 12, 2016 12:15 am

DEMO HERE

After 3 days of suffering you can now play a demo with a different way to save files. Now they're in users/yourusername/AppData/LocalLow/Spram/ZissisIsland/playerInfo.dat

The demo blocks a large part of the world and since it's an "open world" game that's pretty sad. I'm sorry.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Mongrel » Tue Jul 12, 2016 12:21 am

No, it's a demo so that makes perfect sense.
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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby François » Thu Jul 14, 2016 8:08 am

Welp, I dig it. I really like how the terrain of each area is unique enough that I could make a mental map of the place and find my way around very quickly. And I can tell the Hint Haus is a good idea, even if only to serve as a reminder of what you were doing if you don't play for a few days. At one point I thought to myself "it would be nice if running was mapped to a shoulder button too", and then I pushed RB and it was. Glorious!

I must admit I giggled for like 30 seconds at the one NPC asking if I could guess what his favorite thing was. I am in third grade.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Wheels » Thu Jul 14, 2016 1:05 pm

Thoughts after a very quick playthrough:

- Oh god please give me a volume slider and make it load the volume setting on boot
- I use dual monitors, making using fullscreen and a mouse + keyboard very irritating to play with, since the mouse is not locked to the game I click out of the game all the time. However, it alt tabs beautifully, so ++
- The way of demonstrating why water is so deadly without an upgrade is great, instead of just giving her super drowning powers
- I was initially confused; the initial cutscene implied that pearls would just be literally lying on the beach and I should pick them up to make the necklace, like the first quest in the chain. The progression from tomato > Boots > whatever is unexplained and unclear aside from the Hint Haus and while the items are individually useful, the lack of internal logic linking the progression killed immersion for me. I think it would help to explain more clearly how I was supposed to think "well I need to get pearls, so obviously I should get a tomato first"
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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Fri Jul 15, 2016 12:48 am

Thanks François!
- I haven't updated the control screen to include the RB button yet, at least you found out.

Defenestration:
- Volume slider. I'll think of it. If it's easy I might do it (do you mean an individual one for music and sound effects or for everything?)
- The dual monitors thing is pretty common in Unity games. I'll try but since I don't have dual monitors I won't be able to test it.
- About the pearls? I never thought about it that way, I'll see what I can do. Thanks for the feedback!

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Wheels » Fri Jul 15, 2016 11:56 pm

No, I just mean a master volume slider. The game was ear explodingly loud through a headset. This is to be expected in PC gaming, but I am still irritated when I have to use windows volume settings to fix it.
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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Sat Jul 16, 2016 12:58 am

Defenestration wrote:No, I just mean a master volume slider. The game was ear explodingly loud through a headset. This is to be expected in PC gaming, but I am still irritated when I have to use windows volume settings to fix it.


Oh ok, thanks!

Anyway, I already paid the $100 for the Greenlight thing and wrote the description and included the videos and images, all I have to do is "publish" it. Once I do that there is no going back, if my presentation isn't good enough, I just wasted my money. I'm so nervous.

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Spram » Sat Jul 16, 2016 7:18 pm

oh shit, here it is: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =725244803

Vote yes if you want to. You don't have to do it if you don't want to. It's not like I have a gun to your head (that's because I can't. I would totally do it).

EDIT: Someone asked for a demo but I'm afraid the demo is too empty and by being only like a tenth of the island it would just feel shitty. Maybe I should have made a 2D platformer. :(

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Re: Can my dream become a reality? (no)

Postby Wheels » Sat Jul 16, 2016 9:16 pm

I'm a little surprised you opted to do that before you had a demo up... not sure about that. But voted for you.
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