When to change horses?

[dsheroh]

(Posted under Game Management because that seemed the least-inappropriate place for this.  Mods, feel free to move it if you think it belongs elsewhere.)

At what point do you step away from an incomplete game and go off to start work on a different one?

I do still intend to come back to Psi Rangers and finish it at some point, but I'm finding that it was a much more ambitious project than I'd initially thought.  Not only was it a very big concept from the start (players start as free traders and eventually go on to manage interplanetary economies) and not only has core gameplay evolved into completely different directions more than once, but the core concept is one that takes players time to truly engage with (there's a reason WoW has a zillion times more active players than EVE Online) and some of the things I want to do with it are things that I haven't seen done before (e.g., an actual reputation economy rather than a cash economy where the currency happens to be named "reputation"), so I'm starting to feel like I should make something simpler - and more accessible to a wider range of players - first while letting Psi Rangers continue to ferment in the back of my mind and maybe solidify a bit more while I'm doing that.

On the flip side, though, I don't particularly want to just go along, drifting from idea to idea, and leaving a trail of half-finished games in my wake and it feels like changing projects at this point would be a(nother) step in that direction and, in a few months, the idea I'm excited about today will seem just as drab and I'll just switch up again.

How do you decide whether to keep going with a game that seems to be stalling out or to start in on a new one?

Also, tangentially related, for those of you who have developed/are developing multiple games, how do you manage the allocation of time across them?  Do you focus on one for X amount of time, do a release, then focus on another and round-robin across them?  Do you release a game, then call it "done" and never touch it again aside from bug fixes?  Or do you have some other strategy?

[Harkins]

I set Athenge down when I realized I was going to spend much more time (coding, balancing) and money (on art) than I would with my current project and I would actually have a lower chance of success.

I'm also trying very hard to only work on one game at a time until I have the first one launched. :p

[Chris]

Do you have one playable game already? The answer depends on this. There are 2 types of devs, wannabe before having their first game and the true game devs that are after their first game released (not necessarily fully finished, just playable and released). I'm not talking about other people recognition or anything like that, just your state of mind, only yours. Once you made one game everything changes. Everything. It is absolutely crucial to make past the first game. I don't know how to achieve this and I don't know if you should cancel projects or change them before making the first one. I just know it is very important.

Personal advice: give yourself one week to make one/two features for PSI Rangers, just so it feel complete and a bit playable. Make an announcement you are putting the dev of it on hold but keep it online, visit your players on the forum, etc. Not sure if it is a good advice, but I would probably do it if I were you.


Eveything below assumes you made your first playable game, if you don't the advice my differ.

I don't put much weight on the project cancellation, in my lifetime 98% of projects were unfinished/cancelled, after my first game became completed I go 50% failure ratio. To my experience the truly good games were developed smoothly and fast. I never got even one instance of a game that was dragging a long time and with difficulties and then turned out to be a gem. After first month (or first 2 weeks) of development the gama must be nice and I must feel like working on it. If these are not accomplished within that time frame the game will be bad/poor/average at most. Nowadays I just tend to cancel games that can not make into any roughtly beautiful shape within one month. It just doesn't make sense to finish them (these are my numbers of course, yours might differ).

I do regret cancelling prematurely projects in the past, but these were before I made my first playable game. After the first game I usually regretted not cancelling them often enough

To cancel a project I check these conditions:
- how long has it been developed (no alpha within 1 month usually = cancel)
- if the game is released how players perceive it (yes, game being good is not enough, the final verdict is by player. I also have one instance of a poor game that is liked by some players, so I haven't cancelled it and even sometimes work on it (low priority) even though I think it sux and I see no future for it).
- if not enough potencial players visit the domain and what keywords they use, especially when the domain is highly ranked (for example there is not enough players looking for WildWest genre)
- if I don't feel like working on it (controversial, not sure if it is a good one...)
- how many sentences I used in the design doc to describe it (if it has more than 3 sentences (or even worse half page of description of the core features) and is dragging I cancel it without hesitation).

Me working on multiple games:
The *always* are 3 stages (strange why 3 and that it is always, I never planned this...), first early development & alpha where the game is coded, then beta testing fixes & polishing ending with official release to the public, the last one are smaller updates for years to come when the game is online.
First & second stage use a lot of time and effort. The first stage is 1 month, second 1-2 months. The third stage is everlasting and require not much effort.

I don't have an exact timeline, just an orientational one. 1-2 weeks before the game reset I allocate the time to make some fixes improvements (I have staff to remind me of this and there is a topic with reset schedule for helpers to see also they organise intense gathering of ideas from players just before that). Of course security fixes comes first and without queue During "normal time" (no resets nearby) I slowly work on secondary features of some games that do not involve changing gameplay too much. I also allocate some time for the tools requested by moderators and admins (they rarely use up their alloted coding time quota ).

I usuall keep 1 new game on development + unlimited number of older games on upgrade development.

[JGadrow]

Well... I'm king of getting involved in a game process and then abandoning it. Usually it's because I simply don't have enough time and hope that I have time to circle back around to it. Other times, I realize a flaw in the base system and decide that a proper re-write would be "from scratch" and I end up discarding the project. For the time being, I have stopped working on games. I have an idea for one that I really like but I'm not even going to start working on it until I have my base framework completed. I'm tired of cobbling systems together and have decided I need a solid, extendable base framework (and not just for my gaming projects, I make a living off business applications).

But, I'm probably not really qualified to advise you. lol I don't have a playable game out there and I also dabble in so many projects: art, writing, music, programming that my interests are kinda watered-down. My advice to you is if you find that you don't enjoy working on the game, it's time to set it aside.

[dsheroh]

I set Athenge down when I realized I was going to spend much more time (coding, balancing) and money (on art) than I would with my current project and I would actually have a lower chance of success.

Those are much like my reasons for thinking about setting Psi Rangers aside, really.  It's a big, complex design and one which would tend to get very few (albeit very involved) players after completion.  I'm starting to feel like I should start with something simpler and with a broader appeal instead.

Do you have one playable game already? The answer depends on this. There are 2 types of devs, wannabe before having their first game and the true game devs that are after their first game released (not necessarily fully finished, just playable and released). I'm not talking about other people recognition or anything like that, just your state of mind, only yours. Once you made one game everything changes. Everything. It is absolutely crucial to make past the first game.

I do, for some value of "playable".  Psi Rangers has movement/trade/combat completed, if only in rather rough form and with a questionable interface, as you've seen previously.  A few years back, I put one out called "Fnews", which was sort of a stock-simulator-meets-the-Bible-Code-type thing, which I completed all core functionality on, but it ended up not being particularly fun, mostly because I didn't know stock simulators well enough to do a good job with that side of it.  Both definitely can be played to a meaningful extent, but I can't say that either one, in their current forms, holds up to continued play for long and neither has ever had more than about three active players at any given time.

I've also completed some non-browser-based games in the more distant past, a couple of which I was very happy with and got more widely distributed/played.

Personal advice: give yourself one week to make one/two features for PSI Rangers, just so it feel complete and a bit playable. Make an announcement you are putting the dev of it on hold but keep it online, visit your players on the forum, etc. Not sure if it is a good advice, but I would probably do it if I were you.

Yes, you would do it if you were me.    Since the last public release of Psi Rangers, I've ripped out the combat system on my dev box and gotten about a third of the way through implementing a new one which removes the "kill 'em and take their stuff", plus I've also implemented a limited-knowledge system for viewing other players' stats.  If I set Psi Rangers aside (and, at this point, I'm thinking I probably will), I intend to finish up the combat rewrite and push out that update first.

After first month (or first 2 weeks) of development the gama must be nice and I must feel like working on it. If these are not accomplished within that time frame the game will be bad/poor/average at most. Nowadays I just tend to cancel games that can not make into any roughtly beautiful shape within one month. It just doesn't make sense to finish them (these are my numbers of course, yours might differ).

Definitely.  Given that I need to keep client projects going for income until I start making money on games, I don't have the kind of time to spend on getting things done that quickly, however much I might want to finish them at that rate.

I'm tired of cobbling systems together and have decided I need a solid, extendable base framework (and not just for my gaming projects, I make a living off business applications).

I hear you there...  I do general freelance development (mostly, but not entirely, web apps) for a living and a good, extensible framework to start from is key.  I actually went back to square one and rewrote mine in the early stages of building Psi Rangers and one part of the appeal for me in starting a new game is that it will let me see how well the revised framework holds up outside of its original context. 

[JGadrow]

lol Yeah, that's why I'm writing mine with the initial assumption that it will be useful for a game or a practical web app (blog / news / brochure style sites mainly). I'm still in infant stages though because I keep getting bogged down in work.

I really want to finish it because I want to roll it out for my own business purposes. I'm getting tired of manually creating invoice e-mails! lol