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Indie Developers Show They've Got Game
Thanks to Wired News for their article discussing the continuing rise to prominence of high-quality independent games. The successes are pinpointed: "Determined independents are making it in the game business. Where they're making their mark - and profits - is on the PC, through creative Net-based distribution, and in genres and with audiences that the mainstream game industry typically ignores or has left behind", and the article explains how companies like PopCap Games are actually making money nowadays, with "'deluxe' downloadable versions of their games that... offer additional features, such as additional game modes, better graphics and music, as well as the ability to play offline."
Puzzle games are the best example they could find? What about SOLDAT?
Good eample of a succesful game: 'Combat Mission:Beyond Overlord' Found their demo yeaaaaars ago on a CD with shareware/free games/demostuff. They called it something like 'realtime-turn-based-wargame' Thinking, 'yea right ,another one of those badly written, boring things,' but startded it up anyway.... And lost hours, days, weeks, months of my life playing it (bought the full version on the net of course)
This thing is a real 3-D campaign- turn-based-blahblahblah. You just have to see it to believe it. The setting is WWII Europe, and it's really beautifully implemented, with a lot of attention to historical accurracy.Those guys went into a lot of trouble to make their infantry, tanks, vehicles, terrains as good as they could, and that's nearly perfect. Seen a lot of commercial stuff that can't touch it. Nice thing is, you plot the course of action, but your units react 'intelligent,' for instance if you order them to run through open land, and they get shot at, they scramble for cover, often ignoring your commands to a degree. (They WILL try to continue, but often they search for a more protected course. Sometimes they panic, and then you can't order them around anymore before they get their wits together again...So you have to calculate these kind of things in before you go into action, just like a real commander would.
Later they made a follow-up, 'beyond barbarossa, depicting the germans against the soviet-union'. awesome.
Admittedly the guys are a bit crazy, doing all that work to get every detail right, but that makes it such a deep game. Multiplayer capability, a big crowd of users who make new skins et.c. An operation editor et.c. et.c.
One word : Battlefront.com
PopCap is doing so well because of the types of puzzle games they're making.
Unlike classic PC puzzle games like Sokoban, which there are about 100 different versions available, and even one inside of the Nethack dungeion, the games offer a lot more playability. Sokoban, for example, has each level as a puzzle with, well, really one solution. You either get it right, or you try again. If you can't figure one out, you get stuck.
PopCap games like Bejeweled, Bookworm, and Alchemy don't follow this "one right answer" syndrome. And they don't require any level of hand-eye coordination or reflexes like Tetris. You take as long as you want between making moves, and you have a lot of options for your moves. Some moves are better than others, but you can pick even horrible ones and still play for a bit.
As you play, it gets tougher, and you have to improve to keep going. So you can measure your progress - and as your abilities improve, you can make use of them in the early stages, and progress through them faster. No matter what your skill, the early levels aren't boring, and you can get through them faster.
Bejeweled was cool - Bookworm is even better, I'm still addicted to it. They know what they're doing. These games have GAMEPLAY, which is what everyone talks about games needing.
I'm waiting to see them start offering bundles of their games for sale at the store - $40 for Bejeweled, Bookworm, and a few others would be a great deal, and would likely sell well. And they might even work for consoles, too.
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."