6 replies to this topic

[GreenhornGames]

whats better: release a demo and work on full release or make a game with campaigns,then release one campagin after another in a kind of updates? i prefer the second one, but i cant decide yet

[zabo]

Finish full release then work on demo.

[tecno40]

It depends how much motivation you need. If you find yourself working slowly, and caring less about the game than when you started I would suggest releasing a demo, and getting support from other developers and fans. If you are still working hard on the game, and dont need extra motivation finish it first.

[kburkhart84]

I would release a few demos, but not as something you publish, rather as something you use to have people test your game. It also (in theory anyway) forces you to actually finish the game because if you tell people about it, they can get interested in the rest of it, especially having seen early versions. But, you have to have something actually playable first. Bugs are fine, as well as programmer art, but they have to actually be able to play a level or two so they can test, and maybe get excited.

About episodes...ID did that pretty well a la Commander Keen. I don't think there is anything wrong with that, but with there has to be enough content per episode to pretty much warrant a single game. You can't (successfully anyway) make an episode with 5 minutes of gameplay, and expect people to be happy to pay for that, and upcoming episodes. If you are going the episode route, you can get away with not doing too much improvements to the gameplay, rather adding contents and of course another game's worth of levels. But you DO have to add enough to keep the players interested.

[daniel_lemke]

I think a combination of the two would actually be better. Release a demo to drum up support for you game while you work on finishing the first campaign. Then you should be able to just release the episodes without demos as your fans will still have the previous episode to play.

Edited by daniel_lemke, 06 December 2011 - 04:53 AM.

[chaz13]

I'd suggest a demo and a full game that is already completeld- episodic content sounds nice, but for hobbyists like yourself it's a stressful system and won't necessarily ever get finished, potentially leaving a number of fans disappointed.

[lmbarns]

Not to mention if it's actually good someone with more experience will make a bigger version, faster.

Happened with Minecraft, being based off a multiplayer game "Infiniminer" where the single developer was struggling with multiplayer hacking issues and slowed development. The guy who went on to start minecraft played infiniminer, thought it was a cool concept, released a more polished version in an indie developer contest and won, which funded the full release of minecraft.

I'd say once you have a large amount of content that someone couldn't reproduce faster than your next roll-out of content/update/completion.