Do you, uh, have any recommendations?
Dammit
Understatement of the century - just look at how mad people get when you use the term “Roguelike,” or how much I despise the term “Metroidvania.” We already know user-generated tags can’t solve this problem, unless you like seeing that absolutely everything on Steam is tagged “Dating Sim” and “Featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry Series.”
Yeah, exactly. Human tagged - yes. User tagged - no.
I re-read this a few times before realizing these three women were, in fact, three women and not one. It was quite the shocker until I figured it out.
The first book of the Mistborn series sure seems like it might go this direction until
the charming awesome male lead character fucking dies.
While I was raised in Tennessee for a lot of my life, I didn’t exactly, um, “buy into” the culture to quite that extent.
So it’s just two women then?
One and a half.
Yes. Yes you can.
Timing is everything.
So far, I have made $0 from the game. That may look like a high number, but consider that it took four years to make — that works out to approximately $0/year. Compared to the $120,000+/year salary of a 15-year veteran in a AAA studio, it begins to look a lot smaller! And then if I go into the hourly breakdown… I don’t have an actual count of hours spent making the game, but there was a lot of crunch that went into it, so I am guesstimating I made about $0/hour. That’s not a lot! And then once you factor in the ~$140,000 I spent paying my contractors and collaborators for the game, you begin to see that maybe it wasn’t, financially speaking, worth it. I guess I will have to wait a bit longer to buy that Juicero.
Ouch.
I feel good about having bought it right away, though.
Well I’ve never heard of it. Guess I’m not reading the right review sites.
I watched a YouTube video reviewing it-- Giant Bomb, Eurogamer, or Polygon, I believe. Anyway it looked neat, but slow. Figured I’d pick it up in a Humble Bundle in six months.
Wait a moment. How is it harder?
Instead of “best new sf books 2018”, you search “best shooters 2018” or “best pc game puzzles”.
How do I search for “best Metroidvanias without RPG mechanics” or “best Roguelikes”? Hint: just searching for those terms doesn’t work, because the former just brings up a bunch of exploratory platformers with RPG mechanics and the latter brings up a bunch of things that aren’t Roguelikes but “have Roguelike elements.”
How many indie games that lean heavily in coop have to fail until devs understand that most of them they are not a good idea, commercially speaking ? People don’t buy them because they know most of the time the online community will be super small two months after release, and games with heavy emphasis on true cooperation are even less successful because you won’t be able to play with them in a quick public match.
You are now splitting hairs. Following the book comparison that started this, it’s like complaining of hard is to search “new SF stories far in the future, but not too far, with an ensemble cast but not too sprawling”. Well, yeah, if you want to search some that specific (do you really care if a Metroidvania has too much character progression?) it’s going to be harder.
Uh, yeah, I actively want my exploratory platformers to feel like the developers learned from Metroid, rather than just making Yet Another Boring SotN Clone. Too bad our vocabulary (both in terms of game development and in terms of describing games) is so limited that it’s basically impossible to find that!
You claim I’m splitting hairs, but I’d say you’re making an overly-complicated argument to make it look like I’m looking for something far more complex than I am - it’s more like trying to search for a sci-fi novel based around time travel, which, y’know, you can do.
Would you rather I use the example of “action adventure,” which means a dozen different things? Or would you like to address the Roguelike problem?
I was suggesting the way games are “genre ified” for want of a better word is due for an update. “best shooters” focuses on the form of the art work not its emotional target. “best SF” tells me something about the contents setting.
I am saying games have a poor set of genre’s, books have a better one. I know what I am going to get if I look in the biggest section of books, romance, for example. Then I can drill down on that. With games it starts with a less useful initial category, game mechanics and you have to drill down from there.
So with “best shooters 2018” for example I will have to wade through a bunch of fictions I have no interest in, like zombies, or cartoony characters. if you start with the fiction of emotional target then you can hone down on a particular kind of gameplay.
This notion that we may have the wrong index cards to our collection of art work I must admit came to me after seeing Brian Rubin’s work on SF games for years. At some point it dawned on me… wait… why is Brian’s work the best place out there for SF games and not steam or amazon or anywhere else? They give us no such tools, or in Steams case the tags are poorly done and so less valuable.
Anyway that’s my current argument :) Possibly wrong but I think there is some merit to it.