Since I started working on my game roughly 8 months ago I have been worried about the fact that almost all other small developers target casual games and very little else. Now after 6 months of fulltime work I have a rough dealine of Q1 next year.

As a genre the game represents sci-fi management simulators. You are managing a Space Station about 2040. Your main tasks are expanding the station amongst a scarcity of resources and technical difficulties. Technically a little 3D (for the outside view) and mostly 2D interfaces.

I have 15 years of programming experience and about 6 years of working as a software professional so I understand that partially the question is about manageability of the project. Many casual games take much less effort, and may thus be more technically attractive as projects (especially firsts).

Are there only casual games because the lack of markets or because of technical aspects? I see the marketing issue as more of a concern. I would love to have you point me to successfull small developers/publishers with sci-fi/management titles.

I think the 'space station management' idea is a great one -- one with a lot of potential that I wish I'd thought of! But I'd suggest you cast it as "Space Station Tycoon." There's a "tycoon" game for just about every situation these days, but not one for space stations so far as I know. It's a well-known and liked genre, and one more or less started by an indie developer too.

As to your main question about casual games, it's hard to say -- and I hope Steve and others will chime in on this too. But a couple of big factors come to mind:

- casual games typically represent smaller projects. This means less complexity of the code, less code to complete, and a lot less content to generate and/or pay for. It also means less ancillary code and UI for tutorials and the like. Increasing the amount and complexity of the code and content for a game dramatically reduces the chances of it actually being completed. So the ones you see completed are those that were of the most reasonable scope -- there are of course a ton of half-finished huge indie games out there.

- the BigGameCos have all their marketing muscle focused on the "core gamer market." They've more or less ignored non-gamers and casual gamers. I cannot tell you how many people in the professional game industry simply do not get -- and thus tend to outright ignore games like The Sims, much less those like Bejeweled. So it's natural that, like either Sun Tzu or small mammals dancing around the feet of dinosaurs (depending which analogy you like :) ), indie developers would be focused on casual games that many not sell more than a few thousand copies.

I'm sure there are other reasons too, but I think these are two of the bigger ones.

Hi Kai,

Your game looks great. Ive checked your page several times (no new screens!) ;) I think there is an untapped market for highly complex games. I dont think retail games ever over complicate themselves as they are aimed more at the dumb 13 year old who wants to 'pick up and play'. I think shareware is a great channel to sell a complex game. I would recommend having very good documentation.

On the topic of space station sims, are there many? The only one I know of is Startopia.

I think the key to creating a successful game lies in the marketing. If you can gain access to the players who will be interested in such a game, you have a good chance of making a hit. Puzzle gamers are relatively easy to find on the internet in large numbers.

Puzzle games also tend to be a lot less work to QA. If we look at an RPG game submission from a previously unpublished developer/team, you can bet we're going to weigh the amount of QA that would be required. QA is our biggest up-front cost in launching a new game, but it's a necessary one. We generally find plenty of bugs during the QA of each game, including games that have been previously released by the developer. Plus we also make many suggestions for tweaks that we feel will improve the game, the interface, the registration rate, etc.

For an indie wanting to release a more hardcore game, the most important factor would be whether or not you have good access to players who'd want to buy such games. As a non-industry example, my wife has been running a vegetarian web site for several years, gradually building up traffic. During the past six months, she wrote a book specifically for that market, and she self-published it, doing an initial print run of 300 copies. She just released the book on Friday and has already made about $1000 in sales, and her marketing is just getting started. Her book would have little chance of selling well in a bookstore or on a general health/diet-oriented web site, but it was a good choice for her because she already knew how to access the core market. In addition to her own site, she personally knows the webmasters of most of the major vegetarian web sites on the net.

Selling indie games is very similar. Marketing comes first. If you can get access to the market, you've got a shot. If you can't reach that market, you probably shouldn't make the game in the first place. The right time to figure out how and where you're going to market a game is before you develop it, not after.

Originally posted by Dexterity
Marketing comes first. If you can get access to the market, you've got a shot. If you can't reach that market, you probably shouldn't make the game in the first place. The right time to figure out how and where you're going to market a game is before you develop it, not after.

Wise words, Steve. And yet the marketing of games is a hit-and-miss proposition even for the big players. And for many of us smaller developers, it's virtually opaque. I've learned a lot in just the last few months about marketing indie software, but I also feel like I've learned less than 1% of what I need to know.

I have to start by saying that I understand that technical limitations are part of the reason for the current domination of casual games. However, I am much more worried about the marketing side of things. Since two years back when starting to chart the independent game developement actively it has more and more dawned on me that technical execution is not a selling proposition. It is just something that is expected of all products.

Deciding on the topic for the game took about four months beginning in January 2002. I started out with a set of alternatives I knew I could make. To make a choice between these I conducted passive market research by studying similar or competing games and gamers. The idea of a non-violent space management game seemed like a niche market with little competition but still large enough to make the game a seller. I choose something I was interested in as well, but the main reason was to have something comercially viable. As a marketing plan I researched a set of specialized channels where pushing the game seemed worthwhile.

The question here is uncertainity. I don't have a site with regular traffic to start from. I don't have a ready "presence" in the marketplace and similarly the market is much smaller than for casual games. I think there is a contrast between marketing for a niche game and casual marketing. With casual games you have to attain a much smaller share of the market to be viable, the risk is different.

My question is essentially: "Is that part of the market empty because it is not explored yet, or because it is barren?". Or even "Is all parts of the market barren except for casual games?". This may be similar to the feeling some of you had with casual games five years back?

I would love to hear about the Olympus RTS project and about the background research for it? Or you other guys who didn't do straight puzzle games? What pros and cons did you find in your respective projects.

I don't think the market for niche games online is barren at all. I think it's largely unexplored territory, within which there could be many diamond mines.

One of the parts of that market that I think has great potential but that is yet untapped is the strategy genre. Retail strategy games seem to be aiming for greater and greater complexity and a great deal less originality than is possible. Although I loved Warcraft II, Command and Conquer, and many other 1990s strategy games, I've found the recent round of releases disappointing. My wife and I joke, for instance, that the Heroes of Might and Magic series is just the same game that gets re-released over and over.

I think there is great potential in taking genres that are considered hardcore and reinventing them to appeal to casual gamers. This is largely what we've been targeting with Olympus, which originally started as a publisher-funded retail game and turned into a self-funded project once the publisher got into financial trouble and had to bail out. In designing the game we decided to forgo a lot of the bells and whistles that make strategy games overly complicated and instead focus on making the game fun, exciting, and accessible to newbies. There's still a great deal of strategic depth to the game, but it's largely hidden from players who don't want to deal with it. Like Dweep, Olympus' level editor is integrated into the game itself, and it's extremely easy to use. You can create a decent level from scratch in about 10 minutes.