Article

Published May 28, 2007
Advertisement
An article related to my Flash game angst of a couple of days ago. It does give a bit of insight as to the workings behind an uber-popular Flash game.

Reading it, though, I wonder if the business model of "write a new popular game once a month" will go. As someone who's worked at that pace in the past (and occasionally now), I can confirm that the well of great ideas will run dry. You can't just throw away designs when you're working on such a schedule. If you're 85% done with a game and it's only moderately interesting, then your only choices are to do some minor tweaks with the hopes that it'll get marginally better, or dump the idea and move on.

Of course, if you had several teams (perhaps three) each working on a game, you'd have a little buffer and some more "tweak time" to make a somewhat-fun game into a really-fun game. Of course, making your company into something that can support three teams requires a lot of cash. You have to have a good eye.

Desktop Tower Defense, though, is a pretty good idea. It's got appeal to the RPG-wargame crowd, but it's uninvolving enough that it can be played casually.
0 likes 2 comments

Comments

Trapper Zoid
I'm trying the "write a new game idea every fortnight" approach to see how it goes. I'm afraid it will end up with mostly duds or rehashes of old ideas, but it's a fun way to experiment with a variety of different game types. However I don't know how well it would go to base your whole business of that approach; it's fine for a hobbyist, but if you need some of those ideas to be putting food on your table then it's a whole different ballgame.

I'd like to try a tower defense game myself though eventually; it's got a lot of potential to be a great little game that can be taken in a number of different ways to make it unique.
May 28, 2007 09:31 PM
kumikana
I can tell you from experience that doing one successful game each month is no easy task. With one person it might be even impossible. But I hope he manages to pull it off.
May 29, 2007 03:34 AM
You must log in to join the conversation.
Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!
Advertisement