Now that we have officially announced Kivi's Underworld, I want to say that that the conventional idea about keeping a game under wraps until you announce it, really sucks.  Supposedly, it's better so you can start a nice big marketing push which is important in the retail world where you typically live or die in the first month that your game is on shelves.  In the indie world, I'm not sure it makes as much sense.  For example, we sold more copies last month than we did in our first month (without even including the Mac). 

Besides that part, it severely limits me when talking to our gamers.  I really don't like dodging questions about what we are currently working on or what we are going to work on next.  This is part of the benefit of being an indie, talking directly to the gamers and secrecy just gets in the way. :(

I don't think we are going to do this any more.  I think for the game after Kivi's Underworld, I'm going to unofficially announce it almost immediately so we can talk about it.  At the moment I have no idea what that game is going to be btw.

As an amusing aside, Seth Godin, who has written many marketing books, blogged yesterday about The Myth of launch PR.  He timed that perfectly to match the day we announce a new game. :)

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Apparently, in the upcoming Warhammer Online game the only people that are going to be in the credits are the people that are still at the company when the game ships and that is pissing off a bunch of people.  This is a pretty old controversy and I believe I have even blogged about it before.

The problem, which is true of many controversies, is that they are both essentially correct in their position.  On one hand, the people that stayed through to the end deserve more credit, but on the other hand the other people that worked hard on the game for years also deserve credit.  If you only put people in the credits that were there at the end you piss off the second group.  If you put everyones name in that touched the game ever, you completely dilute the contributions of the people that did most of the work and/or did the hard work at the end.  So either way, you are kind of screwed.

Ideally, what credits should do is give credit where credit is due.  It should emphasize the people that did a majority of the work, but still include those that helped but weren't as critical.  Neither of the above
methods does both of these things. 

Some credit lists do try to fix this by splitting sections into multiple pieces like having lead programmer, programming, and additional programming sections.  This is a decent start.

I'm actually thinking about doing credits for our future games differently.  In Depths of Peril, everyone that had contributions in the game was listed, but the only emphasis was the different sections and Vas got bumped to lead artist.  I'm thinking in our future products I might split it into more sections and ordering the list of names in each section by decreasing amount of contributions.  So basically the more important people would be listed first (important to that project).  Everyone that has contributions in the game would still be listed though.

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Every once in a while bugs are quite funny and a couple days ago I found a good one in our new upcoming game.

We have a powerup called Bedlam.  What it does is it makes all of the monsters go nuts for a short while and they pretty much will randomly attack anything, except the player.  Well I found out that anything really means just about anything.  When I used it the other day, they all decided to attack crystals, torches, and even traps.  In this case, everything except for another monster like they were supposed to.

For some reason, computers take everything so literally.

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Everyone seems to be talking about fellow indie game developer Cliffski and his request for pirates to tell him why they pirate his games and his summary of everything that he learned.  There were a lot of valid issues raised about games (mostly mainstream).  I'd just like to chime in that some of us (and this is fairly common for indie companies) have already tried to take many of these issues into account.  Below are many of the issues raised and how we handle them.

Too expensive: Currently Depths of Peril is selling for $19.99.  Personally I think this is a great value and much better than the typical $50-$60 retail game.  We also have tons of players that have characters with days of playing time.  That's way less than $1 per hour for just one character.

Tech support: We support our games quite a bit through our forums and over email.  Just read a bit of our forums to see how often I post helping people out.  This even includes strategy and mod related stuff, so we try to go further than just tech support.

System requirements: We purposely try to keep our systems requirements reasonable and they are much lower than mainstream retail games.

Too derivative/gameplay issues: We try very hard to release games that are very different.  This is something that I plan on doing for all games that Soldak creates.  For example, Depths of Peril's competing covenants and dynamic world makes it a very different game than the typical action RPG.

Demos too short: Our demo only has a portion of the world and has a level cap, but you can play it as long as you want.  I have heard from many people that have played our demo for 5+ hours.  That's more gameplay than some full games.

DRM: We don't use any real DRM.  The only thing we use at all is a simple activation key on some versions of Depths of Peril.

On top of all of this, we offer a 30 day money back guarantee, so there really isn't any risk of buying a game from us.

If I am missing anything that we should change, free feel to speak up.  I don't always do what people suggest, but I do always listen.

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