Below is a song done by the composer who has produced all the music for pretty much every game I’ve ever made. It’s made on his new toy, the monome. It’s a hand built, highly customisable crazy music machine. Enjoy the clip, Canon in :D.

So the game has been out for just over a week now. It’s getting good press and the reviews on Armor Games have been good if not all too often incoherent.

I have to admit, I loathe the first few days after a release. I’m generally exhausted having been up until 5am a few nights in the week prior, only to be confronted with thousands of people filling my comments pages with bugs and ‘glitches’ (I hate that word). Then follows the week of fixing, more late nights, the constant urge to keep checking the score, plays, comments.

As it stands though, the rating is 9.2 and it’s had over 1 million plays during this first week, but it’s raised a few concerns about the future. Why? Well there’s a few reasons…

Expectation.
It’s a curse. A lot of initial reactions were that the first game was better, too many bugs, didn’t live up to what was shown off. I’m not really sure how to handle expectation at the moment, especially with a third Last Stand game on the horizon. In Warfare’s case I think that it had a bit of an impact because it was only a sidestep from the original, so the two were comparable but not identical.

Complexity.
Really, Warfare 1944 is pretty basic as far as Real Time Strategy goes, but it seems it went waaaaay over the heads of a lot of people. I’ll admit there is a fair chunk of assumed knowledge in there, short of delaying the play of someone for 10 minutes while you explain it all, I’m not sure how much more I could have laid it out.

On top of that, the game does force you to actually play it though, unlike 1917 and it’s passive sit back and spam away tactics. It’s more challenging and makes you think, unlike 1917 where you didn’t have to consider resources or micromanage units. As far as I can tell from the polar nature of internet comments, some enjoyed it, some hated / were confused by it.

What I’ve learned.
I need to address all of my audience and cater to them. Some of them are a hell of a lot younger than I had counted on. I think I can safely say that a majority of my future games will have difficulty settings, different play modes and other functionality to broaden the play opportunities for everyone.

- Con

With my fourth game out there now, I’d have thought that over time that things might’ve changed. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining here but it seems that whenever I put a game out there’s INSTANTLY calls for a sequel. It’s flattering, yes. On the other hand, it seems I don’t get stuff right the first time around.

It really comes down to how I work I guess. I’m one of those people that struggles to have great conceptual ideas right off the bat. My games tend to start with a small idea (like shooting zombies) and evolve slowly over time and all the way through development.

Early mockup of Sin Mark

Sin Mark is one of those evolutions, it started with the idea from Dan at Armor that we should produce a bow shooting game. I’d come up with the idea of mixing potions to make spells orginally and it was going to be a straight defence game where you defended a castle. That idea got pretty old pretty fast, so I started playing with the character movement and eventually it became the roaming adventure it is now.

So the core idea was there in the beginning but the evolution of it might’ve gone in the wrong direction. I dunno, Last Stand needed a sequel to add features I’d left out due to lack of technical knowledge at the time, Warfare 1917 suffered from that too. Sin Mark needs a melee attack, something that was suggested to me by a friend during the development, but I left it out because I’d wanted to get the game done. There’s a bunch of different reasons I leave things out or don’t implement obvious features, but it generally comes down to the fact that I’m writing different types of code for the first time and it’s hard to get right.

I’m working on a sequel to Warfare at the moment and adding a lot of the stuff that’s been requested, hopefully I can get it “right” this time. Will post more on it and my other new game (which I’m developing at the same time) soon.

- Con