My friend who first introduced me to notgames is currently working on a title with the notgames spirit and even though it's going to be freeware, he still wants people to take some effort obtaining it.  The problem with digital downloads is that there is no culture of scarcity (which we actually like since it makes things seem more precious!).

We were thinking about customizing builds so that each copy is personalized.  Or alternatively the limited runs concept mentioned by chineseroom... but how does one do this in a digital context?  Copies that self-destruct?

Sometimes I wonder why I ever entered the world of digital art.  Unlike traditional medium, you can't exactly sell one work to a rich patron for one million dollars, and that patron will consider it an investment with value increasing over time.  And unlike performance art, I can't capitalize on live appearances.  Digital art, especially games, require more interdisciplinary skills -- sometimes more expensive skills and tools -- and they're the most prone to never recouping their costs.

I usually get addicted to open-world games for a few weeks, then after I exhaust all the situations in my head (e.g. lining up 20 cars and making them blow up through chain reaction, or trying to see all the animations of the npcs) that's when I'm done with the game and dare not go back unlike more linear games.

Have any of you used procedural generation?  I haven't played Endless Forest but I thought The Path seemed to have the locations somewhat random.

Having a perpetually endlessly procedural environment will just be pointless since even though it's random, the experience is as fresh as when you encounter a heightmap -- yeah, very fresh (/sarcasm) or unless you can chip away to create your own structure like in Minecraft.

It's the lovingly crafted nooks and crannies that make me fond of a virtual world, that's why for my current game I crafted set pieces for these nooks and crannies, before procedurally placing them into the world at random.

There was an article in Gamasutra where one blogger described Fallout and how it was ideal in that you have a towering "Point of Interest" which just beckons you to explore it... and you can have many of those placed randomly in a world as long as it doesn't take too long to travel from one point of interest to another.

The goal could simply be exploring that point of interest and marking it on your map.  And also have an exit strategy so the player has a goal to follow before boredom sets in.

I see, Steam is the key... without it I'd probably struggle with 1000...

Then again, I'm using Frictional's approach with a minimum conventional game mechanic at the very least (It came about because my programmer was questioning the lack of goals and suggested that a portal opens up when we collect all items... I go "Fine, whatever" since I know exactly the aspects I want to concentrate on).

Regarding keeping games inexpensive to make, ideally I would love to handcraft everything but that would be cost-prohibitive so it's natural to resort to procedurally-generated environment elements.  Then as long as you have custom character models for less than $1000 have about 3 or 4 of them and it's sorta enough to create a situation.  Well, that's how I'm going about it. 

The communities I frequent won't even touch 3D since it's hard to make then look non-amateur without spending a lot of money (and they're right) but there no one has ever gotten on Steam (it's said you 'made it' as an indie if you manage to be accepted) and I'm hoping with a 3D game (which has elements which really require a 3D presentation -- I'm making a 2D game as well by the way) my chances will be better.  If not, I hear IndieCity's coming out and hope to be one of the first 'artgames' there.

Alright, I'm about to cross the $5000 threshold in expenditures (my cap is $10K).  I'm thinking of just charging $6.99 since that's the standard set by BigFishGames (although where I'm from the devs still hold out on the $19.99 price tag).  I can drop down to $5.99 (PS1 Classics which were the major source of inspiration for me) or even $4.99 sales.  I can't maximize ARPU like the other devs since I come from freeware and mainstream hardcore gaming so I know the amount of value that can be gotten on sub-$10 games, and I want to be perfectly honest that my game can never stand up to even some of the $9.99 games out there.

Of course, now according to my calculations I have to make 2000 sales to break even.  I've read horror stories of many games barely making tens of copies.  I'm wondering if Dinner Date broke that number (since it's the most non-gamey game I can think of and has approximately the same amount of assets as my game -- even Fatale has more production value).  I understand NDAs, etc... but just an estimate of ballpark sales for the typical non-game can help me budget and build to a price (I'm considering allocating more budget for extra characters, for instance).

I know, I know, this is a not-game forum, and unlike other gamedev forums "How to make money" is not foremost in our minds... but finances are the reality of the situation and if I can successfully make that break without relying on art or university grants than it can only make the scene better.

I only read about that today.  Although I already have a programmer to do the heavy lifting.  Maybe I'll just tell him after our game is finished that he can sell his toolset on the asset store.  He himself said that you can make more money selling tools to game developers than selling games to gamers.

Well we'll only know the answer once we've gotten an angel or a spirit to be the game designer.

Maybe first we should have games where we play the roles of non-human but familiar creatures ... like a pet or an insect.

Then like mentioned, play the role of an alien... with tentacles

Most games we already play as God, though... being totally omnipotent and omniscient (as far as quick access to all the statistics a particular world offers).

I honestly think if they made the movements of the mecha more graceful and less "Oh look I'm spectating on a multiplayer deathmatch" the jarring effect might have been mitigated.

Especially when they had these scenes of the lone warrior perched on top of a building -- that's just such an iconic cut that's been used in sci-fi and anime where it means 'I'm a cut above the rest'.

If I were the devs I'd make all the mechas take on female curves like Zone of the Enders, seriously.  I mean, the whole industrial Asian megalopolis feel is taken right out of Ghost in the Shell.

IGF

Especially Thomas

Yes

(Hides)

Mainly because I tend to be unsophisticated with regards to UI design, I'm actually in the camp that favors no UI or HUD if one can get away from it.

Most UI is used to display gamey elements, such as achievements and scores.  I tend to play games that have neither.

Having an HUD in a 3rd person 3D game often breaks my immersion.  It's better to just map actions to standardized or reconfigurable controls or just have them be context-dependent.

In a 2D game having minimal UI works to an extent as well, unless if the entire game was about managing stats.  That's why I just can't get into the most hardcore of strategy and simulation games -- they look like gazillions of stats, and they confuse the heck out of me.  Some people recommend taking the abstaction away from those stats and going back to what those stats represent, namely information obtained from exploring yourself and asking people.  This puts you back from 'God Mode' back into 'Human Mode' where instead of presiding over an abstract representation over a world you go down and step into it.  I never really got into these God simulation games.

On the other hand I'm still jealous of game designers who can make pretty menus.

In my experience, the second part of your sentence does not automatically follow from the first. It's not because a game is free that it will reach its maximum audience. For one because a lot of people ignore things that are free. For another because other people who can help you reach a much larger audience than you can even dream of, require that the game has a price (because they are commercial distributors, e.g.).

Initially I wanted the option to pay for advertising which only makes sense for commercial games.  But since I don't feel that anything more than feedback posts or word-of-mouth will be necessary, I was starting to have some doubts... until I realized many gamers don't bother to wade through the 'sea of mediocrity' that is XBLIG or any site that has tons of user-created content, arbitrarily picking a quality threshold for their attention which starts as -- you said it, paid games.

Yes, iOS is an option except my game requires high poly characters (I will not be satisfied otherwise).  I may attempt to release something with desktop specs but at iOS prices, but I don't want to set a trend of desktop price erosion -- it's already happening on the Mac App store.

This topic will feel different in a notgames context.  I know ideally, I would want to release all my games for free and expose as many people as possible with what I have to say.  However, to gain traction and even just a bit of attention, you need professional quality assets, which don't come cheap.  Some countries have art funds and grants.  But I'm funding everything from my own personal savings.

The reason this is even an issue to me is the risk that some content aggregator out there will rip my game and profit from it (even just by ads).  If there's somebody earning money, it should only be me, the creator -- and only so that I won't feel so bad about spending a big chunk of life savings.  Also, by placing a price tag on something you increase it's perceived value.  All of a sudden it's worth pirating on torrent sites, which increases the number of people who will take a look at it.  I want also to be part of the upper echelon of games that only consist of the most popular freeware, and commercial games. (That's what I noticed to be featured on Kotaku, for instance).  I already know there's no way my game is ever going to be that popular as freeware, so commercialware is the only choice.

But, my game will be short. So short that it won't make sense to make a demo.  I don't recall any works made by the people here even having a demo?  The entire situation takes place in only one level... since only one level is needed to elaborate on the situation!  In fact, I won't even be sure it will last more than 30 minutes.  Kongregate would be the perfect place for it (the portal for Flash and now Unity games), if only I didn't have an aversion to ad-supported gaming in general... as well as an aversion to the audience who considers these games as mere time-wasters.  Maybe I should just charge $3?

The worst thing about all this is that it's even influencing my design.  I'm already maximizing and squeezing the assets I have for all their worth.

Thanks for the feedback.  I know exactly the atmosphere / feeling I want to portray, even though I don't really have much of a clue (or much care, really) for the mechanics.  Although I enlisted the help of a coder who has several toolsets to make things easier.  I consider myself more of a Director than an Artist (since I can't exactly make a beautiful 3D model or a painting on my own).  Nevertheless  I'm inspired a bit by the work of some teens who are able to collate free resources off the web and come up with something that transcends the sum of the parts -- in my case it's custom art and models which I would gladly pay for even if I weren't making a 'game'.

So I went through the Unity tutorials.  I have a couple of human models modelled in Blender with walk and attack animations.  I import them in Unity and their animations work.  Then my brain stops.  What the heck do I do now?  This is my first time trying to make something in 3D.  These models were previously used as prerenders for my current main 2D project.

I don't mean what to do in a technical sense (there's plenty of Unity tutorials out there), but what do I do as far as making something simple but meaningful as a good first 3D attempt?

If we were talking about conventional game genres, this would mean I'll attempt to make something that's not an RPG, nor requires extensive simulation physics.  Maybe a simple virtual world to walk through.  But since I already have attack animations, I was thinking of a simple beat-em-up/brawler.

But what if I wanted to make a notgame?  Do notgames even have genres?  I was thinking of just having them walk around and talk to each other (One of my favorite past times is just to observe the patrol routes of NPCs in RPGs).  But then what?

What's the simplest type of notgame genre that I can create as practice?  Works such as The Path and Fatale seem heavily scripted to me (at least that was my impression).  I don't want to end up doing machinima (using a 3D engine to create a short film) either.

I wonder what would happen if the designers on this forum each made a small hidden object game with a subject of their choice. It would make a nice bundle! What would a bunch of artistic hidden object games look like, when the designers are not interested in mass appeal?

Uh, hidden object games are a dime a dozen, and to stand out you need to have crazy polished graphics that are expensive to make.

I didn't like the emphasis on production values that's why I flocked to indie games (and most casual games, though made by indie teams, target a mainstream audience).  On the other hand, many games on the current indie scene are too particular on hard / ridiculous mechanics.

A non-mass-appeal hidden object game, to me, is a hidden object game with 8 bit graphics.  Neither the casual market nor the indie market would care (the former because of lack of polish;  the latter because of disdain for the genre).  I don't know if I'll be enthusastic about spot-the-pixel games.

I'm a casual player of hardcore games... since I usually enjoy just admiring the really detailed fictional worlds (without having to achieve all trophies/achievements by collecting every artifact/killing all enemies in the hardest setting, etc.)

I think 'Simulation' is the perfect term to describe what we are trying to achieve.  To me, games are no different than books, media I consume whenever I don't have the budget to go out and travel to different countries around the world (Also, I think studying abroad in a foreign school is likewise a worthwhile experience.)  Plus, they are so far the only medium to truly explore futuristic concepts which are yet impossible to achieve in real life.

I especially love games with advanced NPC AI companions... they're the best ambassadors of their worlds to yours.  They don't break the fourth wall like real human players in MMOs do.  They're like the no-name actors you see in movies that perform their part so well, you only know them for the role they played (unlike Superstar actors which break your immersion because you know their 'real' personalities).

Sorry if it's been discussed already (I'm trying to refresh), if I understand it correctly, goals set in stone, and an addiction-cycle-mechanic to achieve them are the main features of a game today.  Stuff like:  Collect X items to achieve reward;  clear level of all monsters;  reach destination in under X minutes.  Something that can be rewarded with either a score, a trophy/achievement, or both.  Then the way the addiction cycle works is that a new stage or level will have bigger challenges or harsher limits, ad infinitum.  In other words, this is typical arcade design to get players to push more tokens into the machine.  It's pretty ironic that arcade design is the most popular type of game design in indie circles today, since trying to get players to push more tokens was the earliest form of micro addiction mechanic that modern social games like Zynga use today.

I'm glad I was born when home consoles were around, so I don't feel so nostalgic about the arcade era.  What I loved about home consoles was the ability to return as many times as you want to a game without having to pay any more than the upfront purchase cost.  It's only the recent online subscription model that reversed that.  When game developers recently announced yet another 'death of the single-player game (and that the single-player game was an anomaly between the arcade/board game eras and the modern connected console era), I interpreted it to mean that it was only single-player games and books that offered the true 'unlimited replay' experience after you bought the item once.  But with everything else, you have to shell out money every time you want to experience something, even if you experienced it before.  Even with online Flash games, you have to redownload some new ads which is equivalent to a 'new purchase cost'.

Home consoles also introduced save points in games, making them more linear in progress like books.  I used to care about beating my high score in Pacman, but with the new JRPGs I didn't care about high scores; I just wanted to explore and continue the story.  I think save points still have a role to play even as mere bookmarks, even if it's not important to me what other statistics get saved as well.

Now if most of those statistics are derived from keeping track of the results of goal-oriented addiction-mechanics, if I make a true 'notgame' that does away with these statistics, that means I don't really need anything to save at all!  I'll only need a bookmark feature at best.

I'm starting first with describing a world and taking the audience through it's paces (my current game), but I do plan to have a game entirely run by AI simulated characters eventually.