The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians
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Category Archives: Marketing

Post-Mortem

Posted on January 13, 2018 by manutoo

PostMortem [Screenshot by Hexaae]

Post-Mortem [Screenshot by Hexaae]

Here we go, the time has come for a complete Post-Mortem. Sales have started to dry and memory has started to fade… ;-)

We’ll cut it into 2 parts : 1 for the development, 1 for the marketing & long-term support.

Development

What went right ?

Choosing Unity

Although it’s obvious afterward, it wasn’t years back, around 2010, when I decided to give it a try. I can’t see how I could have done the game without using the Unity engine. It has some serious & annoying flaws, but all in all, it has been great to work with, and a huge time saver. I already wrote a complete post about the issues I got with it here .

Use of stock assets

All enemies in DG are from stock assets. Before to do that, I had big doubt about the visual unity of the result : many different styles, would it look silly or even super bad ?

Actually, it didn’t ! Once everything was together inside the same environment with the same lighting, it got a lot smoother and 95% of the enemies looked great. The only real little miss is the 1st boss because he’s too low on poly and his texture is of low quality. Also, although no user complaining about his quality, a few wondered about his style (he’s a bit of a Japanese samurai), but it was more of a background story issue, as they hadn’t read the in-game dialogues. Another little downside is that I die a little bit every time I see another game using the same stock models…  :-P

Use of stock icons was also a good choice, as it’s very expensive to produce original ones, although it has been a challenge to find the correct one for each of the abilities & talents.

Motivation

I have been able to keep a high morale for most of the development. I didn’t work too much every day, but my best & most productive hours almost always went into the game. At end of development, I also worked 6 days per week on DG. However, I have been careful to keep 1 rest day per week to avoid any burning out. It’d have been better if I didn’t have to take care of my customer services for my other games on that day, but they funded DG, so I had to do it… ;-)

Level Design

Although I had never professionally designed levels, the result is very good (a good bunch of players has praised it). However, I had designed for fun many Doom levels and a few ones for Quake 3, in my younger years.

The whole thing could have used a better planning, though. I created level 1 by 1, without thinking much about what was coming next, especially in the 2nd part of the game, and thus it lacks a bit of unity and global goal (which is bad story-wise & motivation-wise for the player).

 

What went wrong ?

Out of Steam, hurry to release

Despite my relatively good handling of my motivation, I ended the development very tired (partly because I had a lot of sleep issues from a noisy environment), and I couldn’t release the game with all the features I wished. Fortunately, I fixed that in the following couple of months.

Also, I spent a good part of the development to lie to myself about the time required to finish the game, in a totally unconscious way. It’s relatively funny to think about it afterward, especially if you know I’m usually pretty good at estimating the time required to do things. For example, in November 2014, I thought I’d have finished the game by February 2015, 3 months later. The game was actually released in November 2015, 12 months of hard & intense work later..!

To achieve that, I completely ignored the time required to do certain tasks (ie: asset integration) despite the fact I already known it was taking much more time than I initially thought : as it was the 1st time I did that, I badly underestimated the huge amount of grunt work it is to get assets (either stock assets or produced ones) ready for the game. I also didn’t put in my planning other tasks that were required to complete the game.

Looking back, I did the right thing : I think I couldn’t have stomached being 1 year from release in November 2014.

On another hand, from 1 year before release, I started to work with mostly the release in mind, instead of taking pleasure in what I was doing at the moment. I was always focusing on finishing what I was on, and wanting to switch to the next task and so on. It helped to release the game in a decent state, but it’d have likely been better to downscale a bit the project at the start, especially when we see the following issue.

Lack of Polishing

The game lacked polishing, especially on game release. After 2 years of tuning, bug fixing and improvements from user feedback, it is pretty neat, but still, now visually it feels instantly less polished than the best Indie titles, especially for the GUI. There, there’s no miracle : I worked mostly alone on a big game with a tiny budget for the freelancers. I’m afraid there was no way to do better without putting more work or money than I could have.

Story

I don’t think DG was ever destined to get a great story, but things even got worst with the release of Legend of Grimrock 2. They did more or less what I originally thought to do for DG : the dungeon master was there to test your skills so you could take his place.

At that time that part of the story was still not in the game, so I changed the end, and it got kinda darker, but more open to a sequel. I also tuned down the ambition for the 2nd part of the game, especially when I realized it was long & costly to build a story into the game (ie: something that’s more than a few notes here & there).

Lack of Beta Testers

With the Indie apocalypse, now there are more games in development than available Beta testers (without counting the hundreds of thousands of games on mobile!), and it’s a real challenge to find some players to intensively test a game and give some useful feedback, especially with no previously released game in the same genre.

I got about 10 people answering my call posted in several dungeon crawler forums, but only 1 really got into the game and gave a lot of very useful feedback. 1 is infinitely better than 0, but it was not enough to represent the tastes of the dungeon crawler fans, and I missed out a few things that could have been fixed during the development. I got most of them in a couple of weeks after release on Steam, but it has been quite stressful.

Lack of impact

So in the nowadays flooded market, the game is too long to get into, as the rules are pretty special (which is also a strength). It’s also too repetitive, especially in the 1st four levels : they are full of skeletons with few other types of enemies, and the environment doesn’t change before the 5th level.

Also, there are no real strong moments to capture the player attention and curiosity once the intro is done.

Moreover, the 1st level was done for the alpha version of the game, to show what the game could do, and then was used for the final version almost without any thoughtful reworking.

So all in all, the game fails to impress some players during the 1st couple of hours. The positive is that the players who stick with the game are rewarded as the game gets better, but many players gave up after a couple of levels so it didn’t help the word of mouth.

Too Long

Initially, I wanted the game to offer about 20 hours of gameplay. I calculated it should take about 1 hour to complete 1 level, so I decided to create 20 levels.

But due to the numerous enemies and the active-pause based combat, for a lot of players, it takes around 2 hours to complete a level. This makes Dungeon Guardians one of the longest dungeon crawlers to beat, and for the average player, it’s clearly too much, as only 3% of the buyers finished the game.

Game value would have likely benefited to have only 15 levels and the saved time could have put to polish the game more before release and build a more captivating story.

However, in my heart, I’m happy the game is that long as it offers a good variety in the level design all along. So for the sequel, I’m thinking to keep the same length, but build the whole world in a more engaging way, with even more different sections to explore, and with a better story to motivate the players to go through the whole adventure.

Unbalance

To complete the Level 1 after its Alpha stage, I added an extra zone to it, before the final boss, and made it optional with its entrance being not obvious. The result is that some players never did that zone and thus didn’t get the required experience to level up before that Boss and the next ones in the following levels..! Thus, some of these players ended thinking the game was unbalanced, as the Boss fights were harder than normal.

With the game rules being hard to apprehend, this leads to a series of negative reviews on Steam.

For the sequel, I’ll give an XP bonus at the start of the 1st Level, so the party members will level around the middle of the level instead of near the end, which will allow having a few optional zones without unbalancing too much the Boss fights.

Legend of Grimrock resemblance

DG 1st environment, the mossy stones, looks a lot like the one from LoG1 on 1st sight (when checking more carefully, they are obviously different, though).

This brought some heat (even hatred?) from some players on game release.

We often say “there’s no bad advertising”, and other dungeon crawlers are very often compared to LoG anyway, so I’m not sure it was a bad thing.

Overall, I’d say the result is 50% positive/50% negative on the players trying the game because it looks like LoG, as some didn’t like it and others said it was just like LoG ; this shows that some players are very strict on what is LoG and some other are more open to the dungeon crawler genre.

Lack of puzzles

On initial release, the 1st true puzzle was on Level 5. There was also a dexterity puzzle on Level 4 that didn’t require much thinking. And some very very simple puzzles on the way.

This was not enough for many fans of the genre who like the grid-based dungeon crawlers for their puzzles. I fixed that after release by adding 1 puzzle in the Level 2 and 1 in the Level 3, which gave a better balance.

It’s still far from being enough for pure puzzle fans, but they are not in the target, as I’m targeting exactly the opposite gamers : the ones who don’t like puzzles much, but don’t mind a break from the combat from time to time… :-)

Too complex level

The 2nd level is one of the hardest levels as it’s a maze on 2 floors. I wanted to show the verticality that offers DG, which is unique in the genre (other DCs have usually only flat levels), but it was a bit too complex for the average gamer. It’d have been better to introduce more gently the challenges brought by the verticality by tuning down a bit the maze aspect.

 

Marketing & Support

What went right ?

Decent Reception

Despite the game offering an unexpected combat system, most players liked it or at least were not too annoyed by it, which lead the game to get a decent 85% positive ratings on Steam.

However 85% is not great as the median score on Steam is 81%, and the game got only 301 reviews at the time of writing.

Overall, as of today, Dungeon Guardians is the 1st-person grid-based dungeon crawler that sold the most units on Steam since Legend of Grimrock 2. (source: Steamspy)

Ok, that sounds cocky, but actually, it’s a not much of a feat, even if it’s better than nothing..! :-P

1st, Starcrawlers likely grossed more than DG, which means either I discounted DG too much, too early, or that DG didn’t attract the players strongly enough and couldn’t sell decently at its price point.

2nd, LoG2 sold about 8 times more units than DG (it’s hard to count exactly now as they did some bundles), which is a huuuuuuge gap.

3rd, this micro-niche genre got less than 10 games after LoG2.

4th, Vaporum seems to be on its way to beat DG within 1 year, as after a weak start (a bit under DG start), it got strong sales during the Winter sales.

Money!

I made enough money to pay me a decent salary for all my work on the game.

In today Indie apocalypse, it is quite a feat. To go on with the comparison with the other games mentioned above, they either got several developers on them and thus are less profitable, or a single developer and sold a lot fewer units and thus are also not much profitable (even if some got shorter development time than DG).

So it’s good but not great, because total income is not enough to fund a more ambitious sequel. But it’s enough to fund one similar to DG1, with a big chance to lose money, though, as my guess is that selling an Indie game will just get harder and harder with the time, due to market over-saturation.

Updates with impact

I did a good bunch of updates after release of the game, for almost 2 years, not full time ( obviously ;) ), but it likely took me the equivalent of about 3 months full time of additional work, till the point I could add “Enhanced Edition” to the title of the game, and got better reviews and more happy players (score average on Steam since 1 year is above 90%).

Most updates have been done from user feedback and it has been very nice to see the players enjoying them. The game feels more complete and polished now and as a game author it’s a fulfilling objective..! :)

 

What went wrong ?

Missed a good part of the target

DG is a mix between a tactical combat game and a dungeon crawler, inspired from WoW. At 1st, mostly only dungeon crawler fans bought it. Few WoW fans bought it and even less tactical fans..!

I partially corrected that about 1 year ago by changing the game tags & short description, so it made it clearer it was strategy oriented, with decent results.

However, the game never got any attention from the mass of WoW fans (no news, no forum posts on WoW forum, etc.), although a few WoW fans bought and enjoyed the game.

At this point, I’m really not sure how it could have been better without having a much bigger budget, both for the game production value and the marketing.

Too much hasted negative reviews

This one is really painful. As already explained in this blog, a lot of players gave hasted negative reviews, for various reasons, and it took a toll on my mood and my energy to try to explain the game rules, the options, etc, and sometimes show them that if they had read the game description, they just shouldn’t have bought the game.

All in all, without that work, the game would have been nearly down to 75% positive ratings instead of 85%. So it was important to do it, but I really don’t enjoy that. With some players, it’s ok as they are happy to get the support and the explanations, and pleasantly surprised to meet a developer eager to help the players ; but with some other ones, who are full of negativity or just don’t care about trashing a game, it can get really unnerving.

However, even if in the past I was sure it was extremely important to keep a high total score, I’m not sure it’s totally the case today. The Steam global score is nowadays mostly a bad joke for many reasons (that are out of the scope of this Post Mortem :) ), and it’s possible that more and more users realize it. As a whole, for the game industry, and especially Indies, it’s a bad news as the global score used to be an efficient way to promote a game without a marketing budget.

One last important thing is that as the game is too long with a low completion rate, it’s missing a lot of positive reviews to compensate the negative reviews : there’s a lot of players who usually review the games only once they have beaten them, and thus as they never finish DG, they never review it.

 

Conclusion

We can say that Dungeon Guardians is a decent success, but far from a huge one.

Its development had issues but nothing nightmarish.

The gameplay is good but could use more variety. For my 1st RPG, I couldn’t pretend to much more… :-P

It was nonetheless a great and fulfilling adventure for me and my only hope is to be able to do a sequel offering an even better gameplay, if not a significantly higher production value..! :)

Except in case of a big surprising event about the game, this is my last post on this blog till DG2 development starts within next couple of years (if it ever starts), so thanks for reading it and farewell ; may you explore many huge dungeons, 1 cell at a time ! 8-)

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Afterlife : Updates & Marketing

Posted on July 10, 2017 by manutoo
Teleporters Puzzle (screenshot by Logort)

Teleporters Puzzle (screenshot by Logort)

Here a post to do a recap of what happened to the game after its release, and some words about marketing & sales.

Updates

I just released a few days ago the version 1.0i of the game, which may (or may not) conclude a long series of updates done since the release of the game, mostly based on user feedback, requests & suggestions. And one of the users on Steam suggested I should promote all the things I added to the game since its initial release. Before to do it on Steam, I’m going to do it here with the main points of each update :

  • v1.0 – October 2015 : it was the initial release on Managames.com, without the Rogue class
  • v1.0a – November 6th 2015 : added the Rogue class with its 3 specializations, fixed a bunch of bugs and was the 1st release on Steam
  • v1.0b – January 2016 : added the Treasure Hunt, which is a chained series of riddles, more or less easy, designed mostly to test your memory and your observation skill, and nicely put some goal unity throughout the whole adventure
  • v1.0c – March 2016 : added a puzzle in the Level 3
  • v1.0d – July 2016 : added Soldier difficulty, which was best tuned for though dungeon crawler fans and regular tactical game players and filled the gap between the Adventurer & the Warrior difficulties, respectively for the average dungeon crawler fan and the tough tactical game player ; it also added a more complete custom difficulty that lets you define the damage and health for each type of enemy (normal, Elite, Boss)
  • v1.0e – September 2016 : added destructible barrels, food and drinks that restore health and mana when you’re outside of combat, as well as a new puzzle for the Level 2, and a few additional secrets in the first couple of levels ; this update, coupled with the puzzle added in v1.0c made a more consistent experience puzzle wise for the game ; on release, the 1st noticeable puzzle was on Level 4, which was way too far in the game for puzzle fans
  • v1.0f – December 2016 : added a tooltip when moving the cursor over the damage & healing numbers to show who did those and with what ability ; this is a close equivalent of the requested combat log, and it greatly helps you to figure out who did what and when
  • v1.0g – April 2017 : added the “Low Enemy Density” option which removes about half of the Common enemies, but not the Elites nor the Bosses ; you can enable at any time this option if you think there’s too much combat ; loot and XP will be automatically adjusted so the game plays the same. This one is a game changer for a lot of players who felt the game was too much combat based, by bringing the balance back to the exploration side, close of the average dungeon crawler game
  • v1.0h – June 2017 : added the Mini-map
  • v1.0i – July 2017 : added a Macro system to lower the repetitiveness of the combat, as well as a fully detailed explanation of each character when selecting the characters to create our party at beginning of the game, and a smoother rendering if you play with a refresh rate higher than 60hz

And of course, many other little & bigger features, changes, tuning and bug fixes. You can see a more detailed version of the update history here : http://steamcommunity.com/app/409450/allnews/ and the complete changelog here : http://steamcommunity.com/app/409450/discussions/0/490123727974362306/ .

Goals & Marketing & Sales

So let’s start with the good news : since last March, the game is making profit ! :-)

Ok, this is a totally arbitrary concept, but it means after all expenses, I earned a bit more than the average salary in France, which was the 5th goal in the following list I had written a couple of months before release :

1- make a game that isn’t a tennis game, because I was fed up with tennis since a few years => done !
2- make a game that I enjoy working on and that I’m pride of => done..! :P
3- make a game that at least 1 other person than myself loves to play => done as well !
4- sell 1’000 units : almost insignificant in term of money, but shows the game has some potential
5- sell 10’000 units : at a price point of US$20, 10% discount average, with 30% cut for Steam, it’d pay back my time & money investment, but not the risk taken
6- sell 100’000 units : with a lot of discount sales, maybe it’s reachable, but that would be a big surprise

So the first 3 points had been reached before the release of the game. For the 3rd point, if you wonder who was that person, it’s simple : it was Robert Engstrand, the musician & main Beta tester of the game..! :)

4th point had been reached on Steam release day.

5th point took waaaay longer than that… :P

Especially as I had to discount the game a lot to make decent sales, plus I discovered I had to pay more taxes than expected ( 8-O ), it actually needed about 20’000 sales instead of 10’000 to reach it, but at least we got to it.

Now, for the 6th point, it might be doable if I bundle the game, but money-wise it wouldn’t bring much, and I still hope to get enough earnings to make a bit more ambitious sequel.

And, here the 2nd good news : in last April, Steam updated their Discovery algorithm, which shows the game to potential customers through different means on their platform ; since then, Dungeon Guardians sales have almost doubled..! It means the new algorithm shows the game to the right people, instead of nearly random people like before. And as it does that, it leads to more sales, which encourages it to show it to even more people. And all in all, everybody wins..! :)

At least for now ; maybe it’ll stop soon, maybe not ; only time will tell.

This leads to another important point. In last September, to calculate the game global scores, Steam stopped to count reviews from people who didn’t buy the game on Steam, to avoid abuse and cheating by some shady developers. Because of that, DG dropped from 83% positive reviews to 81%. In the previous 10 months it had already dropped from 92% to 83%. This is a natural process for many games, as when selling more & more, they start to sell outside their target to people who are actually not that interested in that kind of games, and thus are more likely to put a negative review. For DG, it has been likely a bit more bad than for other games, as explained in the previous post, but nothing extraordinary either.

Anyway, since last September, the game slightly crawled back to 83%, while still having decent sales, especially since last April (thanks to new Steam Discovery).

Now, let’s speculate about the reasons behind that.

I guess one of the 1st point is that all the new features, new options and polishing done since the release have paid off. People do enjoy the game a bit more in a general way.

The 2nd point is that at beginning of the year, I slightly redefined the marketing of the game. This was actually very simple : I added the tag “Strategy” on the Steam page, so now the visible tags on the page are “RPG, Dungeon Crawler, Strategy, Indie”, which perfectly describe my game and lead to less people surprised to find tactical combat in a dungeon crawler. The other tuning has been to change the introduction of the game, which was quite generic for a dungeon crawler, and instead opening with “In this tactical combat & dungeon crawler mash-up” and ending up with “with your tank, healer & damage dealers party“, so again, now people know better what to expect.

The 3rd and last point is that the game got 2 additional translations : Russian & Japanese. As it’s harder to enjoy the game without a decent understanding of the game rules, these new localizations might help, especially Japanese, as I saw a recrudescence of posted screenshots from people with Japanese nicknames… :)

 

Anyway, now I think I could try to write a regular postmortem, before I forget everything… I’ll try to get to it soon enough. Meanwhile, have a nice one ! :)

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Gameplay Post Mortem : Meet the Idiots

Posted on September 3, 2016 by manutoo
Skeletons & Fireball

Skeletons & Fireball

After a lot of thinking, chatting with people liking the game and a few ones not liking the game, I’m finally able to understand what’s right and wrong in Dungeon Guardians in terms of gameplay.

So in short, almost nothing is wrong.

Like already hinted in my Review of Reviews, people not liking the game and vocal about it are usually just mighty idiots (with a few exceptions).

Cons

But let’s put them aside for a while and check what people who liked the game had to said about its shortcomings :

  • Enemy abilities lack a bit of variety. This is likely the biggest issue with the game, as it means the combat lacks variety, and thus is less engaging and more repetitive than what it could have been. For the possible sequel, a big objective will be to emphasize different new enemy abilities which will bring new tactics and strategies during the adventure.
  • Combat system is hard to get into (it was also explained in Review of Reviews), and not understanding it makes you think it’s too much Random Number Generator (RNG) based. This is one is tough to fix because it’s the flip side of the strong point of the game : its combat system is unique, although it’s strongly derived from MMORPG and more especially from World of Warcraft one ; but in Dungeon Guardians you control 4 characters, not only one, and it changes a lot of things. For WoW fans, it’s not too hard to get into it, but for the average Dungeon Crawler fan, it’s a lot to take, but it’s doable if they take the time to read the in-game tutorial and the different ability descriptions. So for this point, I don’t see any solution to fix it except maybe reworking a bit the tutorial to make it more clear.
  • Story & Lore are too basic. Although not directly influencing the gameplay, a stronger story and lore is always more engaging for the player and can help motivate him to stick with the game when things are hard on start-up (and even later on ;-) ). Dungeon Guardians is in par with the average Dungeon Crawler in this area, but it’s true that compared to full-scale RPGs, it’s thin. There, the main issue is the lack of budget. As explained in “Story Done !“, it’s very time-consuming to build lore & story into the game, and it often requires special assets and thus increases the cost of the game. For the possible sequel, I’ll see what I can do, which will be hopefully more if I can get a bigger budget… :P

Add that’s all for the shortcomings..! When browsing positive reviews on the Steam Store page of the game, most players have none or very few complaints about the game.

But the game has only a 83% positive rating ; ok, it’s really not bad, but when you read the positive reviews, you might wonder why it’s not higher.

Pros

Let’s do a quick recap of the strong points of the game (still from the positive reviews, but also from comments in the forum and reviews from specialists) :

  • Unique combat system, based on Tank/Healer/Dps with Threat & Aggro management
  • Solid level design (even great at times)
  • Visual are good (or great for an Indie game), including the numerous FX during the battles
  • 20 Boss Fights, each with an unique strategy and setup
  • Puzzles not too hard and optional while still being creative and fun to solve
  • A bunch of little things that I won’t list because it’d be too long and not really meaningful one by one ; but their presence shows that a lot of care and thoughts has been put into crafting the game

So now, let’s have a look at our bunch of idiots, why don’t they like the game if it’s so awesome ?

First, let’s put aside 2 categories of players who don’t like the game but are not idiots :

  • Impulse buyers, or people who don’t check in detail the game before buying it, or just want to check it out “just in case” ; once they play it they figure out it’s not a bad game but it’s just not for them and get a refund. I have n0 issue with these people, I’m glad they gave the game a chance and I’m glad they got refunded.
  • Players who get bored after a few levels while playing a challenging difficulty level. As noted above, the strategies to beat the enemies lack a bit of variety, and it’s not possible to know before playing the game if it’ll have enough variety for your taste or not. (quick tip: you can respec your Characters to deeply change the gameplay if you really need to get more variety during your adventure :) )

Actually, I have only a grudge with about 2 third of the players who post negative reviews on Steam (ie: “Not Recommended”).

So now let’s examine the different reasons given by the simpletons to justify their negative reviews on Steam. There are actually only a couple dozen of them out of thousands and thousands of sales, but I have to let off some steam and I think it’s actually interesting to see this process and see what we can learn from it :

  • Players who refuse to learn how the combat system works (by not reading the tutorial, nor asking for help in the Forum) and conclude it’s a bad combat system, often adding it’s too much RNG based. In bonus, they’ll also say sometimes the Talents bring nothing, while if they were playing in a challenging difficulty level, almost each Talent could be the difference between life and death. Some also say the game is unbalanced. Basically, they didn’t understand anything and pretend the opposite. This is the main reason I call them idiots, because this attitude it’s the main characteristic of an imbecile : not knowing he doesn’t know.
  • Players who say the combat is too difficult (or too easy) and refuse to change the difficulty setting because usually they play other games on “Normal” and thus they should play “Dungeon Guardians” on “Normal” difficulty as well (although the game doesn’t have any difficulty level labeled as “Normal” :-? ). These ones are utter complete idiots, nothing can be done about them.
  • Players who say the combat is basic, and refuse to acknowledge it’ll get more varied and deeper once they get the tons of abilities & talents they can see when they level up but still didn’t obtain. Again, hopeless imbeciles.
  • Players who say a Boss fight is too hard and refuse to temporally lower the difficulty level or read some tips to beat the Boss. Again & again… :-|
  • Players who say that Dungeon Crawlers should be full of puzzles. This is a matter of taste, it doesn’t make a game good or bad to have tons or very few puzzles, it’s just a style. They do not understand that. Plus the store page advertises the game as having only a few easy mandatory puzzles (harder ones are optional).  They’re idiots. :roll:
  • Players who say they want a turn-based game. 1) Why they buy a real-time-with-pause game if they want a turn-based game ? 2) The game features actually a bunch of auto-pauses and an option to slow down the time during the fights. Yet, they refuse to check them. And yup, you already know what I think of them… ;)
  • Players who wants to have square-dancing based combat. The store page specifically says the game doesn’t require square dancing.
  • Players who don’t think MMO combat is good in a Dungeon Crawler. Again, it’s strongly outlined in the game description, videos & screenshots ; why did they buy the game if they didn’t like it even before launching it ?

So what can we learn from all this ? Is there some possible fix to avoid the negative reviews they leave on the game ? Is there anything to do so some of them could actually enjoy Dungeon Guardians ?

The short answer is a double-no. :-?

As you may have noticed, a good bunch of these players do not read the game description, nor check the game videos & screenshots, or just ignore them, and even don’t check (or believe ?) the existing negative reviews before buying the game.

Moreover, they seem to seldom check the game options, and thus adding stuff especially for them seem to have little to no effect, as they are either not aware the options are there, or refuse to use them.

So why so much idiots ?

Dungeon Guardians attract them more than other games because visually it looks like other 1st person view Dungeon Crawlers, and all have more or less the same gameplay. Bringing something really different ought to make some people unhappy (especially if they don’t read the game description).

Moreover, the Threat & Aggro concepts are pretty abstract, which means some players are going to be intellectually challenged to understand what’s going on. Some will like that, some others will just lower the difficulty setting and enjoy the exploration and the explosions, and some others will hate the game for showing them their limits.

Personally, I’m always very pissed-off every time I get a negative review (as you may have guessed by now ;) ). Most of times, I find them unfair, superficial and just plain idiotic. But I guess it’s the price to pay to make something different, unique and relatively smart.

Note : I have the same issue with my tennis game, but to a lesser extent as it’s really outdated visually, so most idiots are repulsed at 1st sight. :P

Conclusion

Based on my 2 games on Steam, my advice to my fellow experienced Indie developers is to mostly ignore negative reviews ; most brings little to nothing. Instead be very attentive to people who like your game but outline its shortcomings ; these ones will be very pleased to see you improving your game from their comments, while the unhappy ones will never acknowledge any amelioration.

Although, in case you’re very inexperienced and actually create a less-than-good game, check the negative reviews, you may still have a few things to learn from them… ;)

PS: From all the questions and issues exposed from the refund notes, the reviews and the comments in the Forum, I created a FAQ for the game. It’s still too early to know if it’ll help with the negative reviews, but it might lower the rate of questions in the Steam Forum… :)

Addendum, July 2017

Of course, some people were a bit shocked by this post, and likely rightful so. Although, I think I’d rather be honest, even if a bit borderline, and show you what the average Indie developer feels & thinks (I have discussed this kind of issue with other Steam developers, and hum, let’s say I’m not alone in that case :P ).

However, since last September, I have been lead to chat with several new negative reviewers, including some who had posted what I consider some harsh and unfair reviews. And it turned out that when engaged decently, they were almost all nice people, or at least nice enough. :P  (although many negative reviewers never answer me, so I can’t vouch for all of them ;) )

So I’d like to redefine a bit what I meant by idiot by starting to say that I could easily include myself in that league, if I didn’t know that posting hasted, superficial & venting negative reviews was actually hurting other human beings.

The thing is lately I have less time to play (I became a daddy 1 year ago), and often when I play a game now, I want it to be awesome, and right away like I expect it to be, and don’t want to dig too much if it’s not. And when it’s not, I might get rather frustrated. I guess it might be what happens with many of the negative reviewers of my games, as they can get rather tough to get into.

Thus said, I still wish that some of these players would ask for my help and check the options I designed for them, rather than post a negative review and never touch the game again… ;)

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Review of Reviews

Posted on December 21, 2015 by manutoo
Stairs in Middle of Lava (screenshot by Logort)

Highway to Hell ! (screenshot by Logort)

I did nearly nothing last week, so no weekly update today, but instead, let’s plunge into some overall analysis. And more precisely, let’s review the reviews of the game ! :mrgreen:

At heart, I’m a game designer, mostly because I love video games, play them & analyze them.

What I do best is find something I like, see what’s wrong, and make it better. For my taste.

I learned since a long time that my taste is different from many other people’s taste. And thus, if I want to say to someone that something is great, it’s better to explain why it’s great, instead of only saying “it’s great”. It works same when it’s bad. Because my great and my bad can actually be the bad and great of someone else.

The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians has now got quite a few reviews, and unfortunately some reviewers mistake their taste for an objective truth. These reviews didn’t make their way in the Review page I just linked, though… ;)

The particularity of Dungeon Guardians is its Tactical Combat system. It’s unmatched in solo video games, so it requires some serious learning if you never played any MMORPG before. It means you have to read 5-10 minutes of explanations during the tutorial, and then read the descriptions of your Toon abilities, and then do some thinking to understand how everything work & fit together, and finally experiment all this and see how to optimize your damage, your healing, your aggro, and your damage mitigation during the numerous fights of the game.

This is passionating if you’re into this kind of game, but it’s a lot to take for the average Dungeon Crawler fan where the combats are usually pretty basic (ie: strafe, turn, wait for the grayed buttons to not be gray then hit ; repeat over & over again). Fortunately, you can easily lower the difficulty of Dungeon Guardians at any time, but if it’s too low, it means you can do anything and you won’t die, or if you really didn’t understand anything, you will still die and rage quit, usually blaming the game for being unbalanced instead of recognizing you didn’t make the required efforts to understand what was going on.

What I wrote in these last 2 paragraphs, you won’t find it in any review of the game (you’ll find parts here & here though, but not as a whole). It’s ok, a review & a gameplay analysis aren’t the same thing. But the reviewers should have that in mind when writing their review, but a few of them didn’t.

So basically, the reviews the game got belong to one of these 3 groups :

  • positive reviews, where the reviewers understood how the combat system worked ; about 30% of the total reviews
  • positive reviews, where the reviewers didn’t understand how the combat system worked, but they outlined the other positive points of the game (exploration, character building, the dynamism of the fights, etc…) ; about 45% of the total reviews
  • negative reviews, where the reviewers didn’t understand how the combat system worked and disliked the game for that ; about 25% of the total reviews

I guess the most professional reviewers are the 2nd group : they didn’t totally get into the game, but considered other people would be able to do so.

The 1st group usually didn’t point out it could be hard to get into the game, so they might be just too smart… :-P

At you might have guessed, my grudge is with the 3rd group. These people (they probably don’t deserve the title of reviewers) seem to not see the difference between a review and an opinion ; they don’t feel entitled to understand how a game works to make a judgment call on its quality. Worst, they assume the game is broken when there are dozen of positive reviews from users on its Steam store page. They can’t challenge their own view when everything points out they are wrong. They probably even don’t look for other people opinions to check if they have missed anything.

The result is that their “review” are worth less than the average user review, if you actually want to form your own opinion on the game.

Thus said, they are very unlikely professional reviewers (ie: they are probably not paid for that or just a little bit, they have another job or are just students), so in the end, it’s not that much surprising they’re only able to express their opinion and not get much objective work in their “review”. And in that light, they may likely actually reflect better what the average gamer might see when playing the game (the ones that still didn’t buy the game, coz the ones who did usually like it :-P ).

It confirmed me that Dungeon Guardians is a game that can be hard to get into, and that it can be easy to pass through its major appeal. This is very important for me to understand the exact how and the why of this, and maybe it’ll be the topic for another post. :idea:

Meanwhile, have a nice Xmas, or anything else you may be celebrating or enjoying during this week..! :)

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49th Weekly Update : Steam Release !

Posted on November 11, 2015 by manutoo
It's done !

It’s done !

Pfffffff… (for the last time ?)

If you follow this blog, you know that normally I publish the weekly update on Sunday or Monday.

Today is Wednesday. That says it all, no ?

No ? Ok, so let me explain..! :mrgreen:

Last Friday I released The Fall of the Dungeon Guardians on Steam, like this :

Naively, like I always am, I thought it’d be a bit rough, with a few little bugs & fixes to do here and there, but it’d settle within 24 hours.

How wrong I was ! It took me almost 4 days to fight bugs and integrate in emergency popular requested features into the game, so everybody could enjoy the adventure nicely.

I think with the last update of this morning, it should be (nearly) ok. And I will be able to finally get some rest, before doing a bit more bug hunting (text input doesn’t work on Linux coz of an Unity3D engine bug :roll: ), and then switch to Modding support (SDK + Steam Workshops) and getting the game published in other Stores (GOG, Humble Store, Mac AppStore).

In term of sales, the game did an ok start, but nothing fancy, I’m still not on my way to buy a Porsche (or more important, fund a more ambitious sequel). But within 6 months or 1 year, I may be able to get my investment in money and time paid back.

Hopefully, it’ll catch on with Christmas season, with the help of the additional stores and maybe a bit of marketing (if I get some ideas or get lucky :) ).

That’s all for now, cya soon for the next weekly update !

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Posted in Development Diary, Marketing, Milestone, Weekly Update | 3 Comments |

45th Weekly Update : 1.0 Baby !

Posted on October 12, 2015 by manutoo
It's Christmas before Christmas ! :-p

It’s Christmas before Christmas ! :-p

Wohoho !

I did it, the game is finally in a state where it can be seen as complete ! :mrgreen:

Last week hasn’t been exactly easy with Greenlight and everything (see the previous posts in the blog), but I managed to do a little bunch of things in addition of the Arcanist specialization for the Mage. Mostly I added a few abilities for the Mobs so they have more varied sounds & visual FX and the result is impressive ! I hope it’s not too much..! :-P

The Arcanist is a new beast to tame so it seems it’s different enough. I didn’t give him any AoE spells, but instead he got the best solo Crowd Control spell of the game.

I polished & fixed a few bad bugs reported by the first customers, and now the game should be in a solid state and left with a minimal list of bugs (I guess there are still a few ones hidden here and there but I’ll squeeze them soon enough!).

Anyway, I’m nearly dead, really need to catch some sleep.

Hopefully, rhythm is going to calm down now.

This week, the main goal is to get the game on the Steam platform, so I’ll be able to give Beta Steam Keys to possible reviewers : it seems more convenient than using my own system, as reviewers are short on time and are more used to Steam, they might be more willing to give it a try if they receive a Steam Key.

I’m thinking about releasing the game on Steam around end of next week, so after that I might be working on the Steam Achievements. In that case, the Rogue class would come as a bonus update a few weeks later.

Cya soon for more news ! :)

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Greenlit in 1 week !

Posted on October 9, 2015 by manutoo
Knights walking in the Imperial Palace

Knights walking in the Imperial Palace

Thanks to everybody who voted, the game got Greenlit in 1 week, yippee ! :mrgreen:

You can buy the game from here : http://www.managames.com/DungeonGuardians/buy-the-game/

Or wait a few weeks to buy it on Steam.

Me, I get back to work, I have some specializations to finish ! ;-)

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5% Grimrock

Posted on October 6, 2015 by manutoo
 Which one is from Grimrock ?2015-10 - Env Grimrock
2015-10 - Env Old Dungeon 2015-10 - Env Evil Crypt
2015-10 - Env Mines 2015-10 - Env Abandonned Palace

 

Ok, so the game got a lot of comments about looking too much like Grimrock, even Juho, one of the Grimrock’s creators came to comment on the Greenlight page.

Both games get their main inspiration from Dungeon Master and its grid-based movement, so they ought to look similar.
But I also played Grimrock when it was 1st released back in early 2012 and I really liked its mossy dungeon and asked my environment artist to create an old mossy stone wall set. I didn’t ask him to copy Grimrock’s one, though. If you look in details, you’ll see that nothing is same, but despite that the general impression is similar.

How it came to this result ?

It (almost) started with that :

1st version ever of the Old Mossy Dungeon

2nd version of the Old Mossy Dungeon (I don’t have any screenshot of the 1st one! >_< )

For me, it was looking good without being too similar from Grimrock.

Notice how the column, the ceiling and the floor are different from the final version as shown on the 2nd screenshot at top of this post.

The artist refined and changed a few things, little step by little step and delivered the assets. I checked them 1 by 1. Every asset looked different from Grimrock : different shapes for models & textures, different saturations, different colors, different contrasts ; all was good.

Then I set up everything and put all pieces together in the game, and here : “oh jeez!”. It felt similar to Grimrock. I was a bit annoyed, so I went back playing Grimrock, and once in-game, I knew in less than 1 second I wasn’t in mine : although it looked similar, it still didn’t feel the same when playing, so for me it was ok. And it had to, because I was on a super tight budget and couldn’t afford to drop 1 environment.

Moreover, the Old Mossy Dungeon is only 1 environment out of 4, so that’s 25%, and actually even less if you count the little variations (each environment has 2 or 3 variations), so more like 20%. Then you add all the creatures, the visual FX and the GUI, and that’s only 10% of the whole visual a bit too close of Grimrock. You add the gameplay & the controls, and you’re left with 5% of the whole game a bit too similar to Grimrock.

So please stop to complain because I wanted to have green moss on my walls and try to see the game past that..! :-)

I mean except if you think no one should ever be allowed again to do stone walls with moss in a video game, of course ! :-P

 

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Greenlight’s up !

Posted on October 2, 2015 by manutoo
Light'em up !

Light’em up !

Game is on Greenlight : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=489556661 !

It started pretty well, but I’m not sure how fast the flow of votes will lower, so please go there and vote up for the game if you want it to get on Steam and get more exposure ! :-)

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Official Trailer !

Posted on October 1, 2015 by manutoo

The Official Trailer is done..!

So the gates of Steam Greenlight are finally open ! :mrgreen:

However, I’m going to delay a little bit the publishing on Greenlight, because I want the game to be ready to be purchased once the Greenlight page will have visitors, hopefully starting to make a few sales.

So right now, it just needs :

  • the Race bonuses
  • a bit of testing to be sure there’s no bug
  • a gameplay video with the final version
  • finishing the payment process

All that should keep me busy for a couple of days, so the Greenlight release should be for tomorrow or Saturday.

The game will then only miss :

  • the Rogue class (and its 3 specializations)
  • the last specialization of the Mage class (there are already 2 done)

They’ll be added during October.

Stay tuned ! :)

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