pdyxs

Just to put this advice in context: I'm working on indie game Particulars, which has done fairly well marketing-wise (we got through greenlight), but hasn't exactly hit marketing gold. I feel like we've learnt more of what not to do than what to do so far. In general, you only get a few specific opportunities to make a big splash: announce and various launches (and announce is pretty dicey unless you have something really meaty). It's not a good idea to go for press if you don't have something important to say, coz you only really get a few shots at press. Having said that, I don't think it can ever be too early to start blogging and talking about what you're doing on social media. Social media is driven on open communication, and that takes time to build.

I agree with a lot of people that F2P can definitely corrupt a design, though I do think that it is possible to make a game that works with F2P. The biggest issue is, as Nachimir puts it, that you're encouraged to make something "fun, but not too much fun". To make a F2P work, you really need the game's initial design and concept to come from the F2P system. Ideally, F2P is a great way to allow true patronage of games: a developer provides a game, and players pay what they actually think it's worth. For some players, this is nothing, while for others it's a lot. Players are recognised for contributing, but not in a way that affects the game's core purpose. Unfortunately, microtransactions are really not well designed to do this: you need to have a good indicator of what a player has paid so far (so that the player knows how much value they've placed on the game), to signpost that a payment for value is what they're actually doing, and allow players to pay more in a lump sum (rather than these small payments designed to slowly suck a player dry). And players are trained to undervalue the games themselves, meaning that the whole idea of them paying for the value they've gotten becomes kind of meaningless. So yes, to make a F2P truly work well with the craft of gaming seems pretty damned hard.

This isn't really answering the question properly, but the mechanic I'd most like to see gone is the dialogue tree. Clearly this isn't feasible, and there's lots of games being made right now that are better with dialogue trees than the alternative. The fact is, however, that the dialogue tree is fundamentally flawed: you're giving the player the impression of being able to choose from the entire english language, before taking all those options away to give them 2-5 choices. The weird thing is that giving the player the entire english language isn't the solution - it just leads to the player being paralysed by choice. There must be options between the two that actually solves the problem, but while the dialogue tree is as easy to implement and effective as it is, we won't see anything better come along. So in my dream fantasy world of elegant design, we'd banish dialogue trees so that we'd be forced to find a better option.

Hey all, been following Idle Thumbs for a few months and so thought I'd say hi. I'm the producer/lead designer for a games studio called SeeThrough Studios, we're currently working on a game called Particulars. In my off time, I'm slowly but surely working on a board game about gladiatorial combat with time travel (which will *hopefully* be kickstarted later this year, if we figure out how the hell to manufacture a board game).