fx: cunning self-hype: (The full background to this post is at the XAP development diary (http://www.javagaming.org/cgi-bin/JGOForums/YaBB.cgi?board=volunteer;action=display;num=1039105813)

Right on the last page I've gone into a little detail about return on investment with a couple of features I'm thinking about putting into the game. In particular it goes along the lines of "It'll take a month to put in eight bosses but they might not actually increase the registration incentive enough to cover the cost of development".

If you've got just a minute I'd really love to hear from you whether you'd want to see bosses in the game or whether you think it's a waste of time.

Cas :)

What about releasing the game with only a couple bosses, and then add more later?

That way, you don't have to invest a lot of time on them now, and, if people seem to really like them, you could release new bosses as free downloads every month. This would also keep people coming to the page to see something new.

And if they hate the bosses, you can just stop making them and not waste a lot of development time.

That's quite an interesting idea but slightly difficult to pull off. I was planning on natively compiling my code down to binaries which would effectively mean downloading the whole application again (or a whole lot of head-scratching) just to get some new bosses - and of course you only need new bosses in the middle of a game so it's a bit late by then...

...but then again if I left the code in Java form it would be almost trivial to download new patches and features. Hm.

This is only my first game so this might be overkill :)

Cas :)

Originally posted by princec
f "It'll take a month to put in eight bosses but they might not actually increase the registration incentive enough to cover the cost of development"

Why risk it then? What's the upside that releasing a 1.1 with bosses won't cover?

I had several thoughts like yours during the development of my game. Without going into great detail, I basically had to ask myself "Is what I have finished now 1.0-worthy?" as soon as that answer was Yes, then I stopped adding features and concentrated on bug-fixing and releasing the game. I believe being able to make a decision like that objectively is a key to success. I have been thinking about writing up more about that; perhaps I will.


And, I don't think it is too big of a problem to have 1.5 with more bosses, or a 2.0 with more bosses and other stuff. If your 1.0 has fans they'll download the game just to get the new bosses.

~Hanford

Oh Hanford,
you just hit a sore spot. I currently have a long list of features with a big horizontal bar labeled 1.0. I wrestle daily with deciding who gets to be in 1.0 and who is postponed .. Uhmpf .. ;)

Sorry to hit a sore spot.

One thing I did was divide my list into 2 sections: Must-haves and nice-to-haves. If you do this, it is extremely important the criteria you use is cut-and-dried, and not arbitrary. A person unfamiliar with the game should be able to make the same choices you do, more or less.

A quit button in a must-have, becuase, well, you NEED a way to quit the game. A high-score table is NOT. Now matter how nice or it would be to have a high-score table, it's not NEEDED. If there is any way you could ship the game without it, then it's a nice-to-have.

Once I had this together it did a number of things: One is it showed me the ABSOLUTE minimum I had to do before I could ship the game (the must-haves). I knew I could add all the nice-to-haves I wanted, but I still couldn't ship it until I had finished all the must-haves.

Another thing it did was prioritize my motivate my development. I worked mostly on the must-haves until the list was almost complete (altough as I went on, I would find new stuff I had to add to the must-haves). I would, from time to time, work on nice-to-haves, but often I'd just want to get the must-haves complete.

Then, when all the must-haves were complete I put the game into heavy testing with friends. Only at this point did I ask myself "is this worthy of a 1.0 release?" and from there I would work on the nice-to-haves. Bugs aside, I felt like at any point from here on out I could call it done.

At this point I was excited to be on the home stretch. I knew I was out of the dreaming phase and into the reality phase, so I really didn't want to add too much more than what was needed to make 1.0. In the end, I did manage to get most of the nice-to-haves in, but the ones I didn't are still in the list and waiting for 1.5 or 2.0. It seemed to double as a brainstorming list.

I've seen too many projects linger in eternal beta because they simply couldn't close up the loose ends and call it done, and I didn't want that to happen to me. Several high-profile games (anyone remember how late hearts-of-darkness and Dai Katana were?) were stuck in that phase.

I recommend to anyone serious about it to try this out and see how it works for you.

~Hanford