ArchMage

#1 That's looking pretty nifty!

Always wanted to see a fantasy scroller in TGB.

#2 Yay, shiny! Looks realy cool :)

#3 Looks great! I look forward to seeing the 2D and 3D in motion. :)

#4 Nice. If that UI is any indication of the attention to detail in the rest of the game, this will be a beauty.

#5 It's nice to hear, that you like it. I hope that it is much better if you see it in action - the big dragon with moving wings ;)

#6 This is looking good just like your previous work has.

I hope that this project isn't a race to the finish line like the last one.

No offense, just a pattern that I'm noticing, is that you enjoy boasting quick development times (such as the last project taking 2 months, this one 2 weeks, 'our third project this year') instead of focusing on producing a quality game.

I hope that your team is capable of turning one of these into an emmersive game enjoyed by many. You've sold me on the game style, now can you get my 20 bucks with gameplay?

The last game sold me on graphics, though the rush to the finish shined through as the game lacked proper polish to be commercially viable.

#7 You should give a tutorial, or a tdn article or something on creating ui's because you obviously know how to do it...well

#8 Gellyware: It is not a boasting. We are a very small team (on one game works 1 or maximum 2 team members). I wrote about quick develepment time as my appology, that the games are not perfect. Our developing budget for one game is very small - Styrateg 6000 USD, Phantasia only 1200 USD and Archmage about 3000 USD (but maybe we will raise it).

So f.e. we had to cut all animations from the game Styrateg, because we had no time to create them. I had only one month to finish the game Phantasia, I programmed it and do 80% of graphic, I had no time (becasuse I had to do my job :) so the graphic is terrible (you can see it in the demo ;)
We try to save money for some bigger project next year and I hope its quality will be much bigger.


Anthony: We have big experience (f.e. I try to develope games for about 20 years) and I would like to post some articles, but my English is very bad. I have written only this post 25 minutes. I wrote a lot of tutorials about game developing and game distribution, but they are only in the Czech language :|

I can release the sources of the games, but problem is, that they are terrible ;)

#9 And a comment - why we sell the games for 20 USD? We wanted to sell our games for about 10-12 USD, max 15. But when we raise the price from 12 to 20 USD, the games started be sold 2x more then before! :)

#10 Pavel - There was a little bit of research done by some people on the indiegamer.com forum about pricing. There appears to be some sort of mental barrier for customers around the $19.95 price, and if they see a price lower than that, then they automatically think that the game is of low quality and not worth their time. That would explain what you're seeing.

btw - This game is looking great! Tell your team to keep up the great work!

#11 @Pavel: Just a side perspective--I fully understand budgeting and project constraints, and love the work your company/team does, but in my opinion just a bit more "production polish" and your games will do even better than they already are!

Gamers have so many choiced out there now, but most of them aren't quite the AA/AAA level--if you can somehow figure out how to go that extra distance, I think it would be good for you in the long run!

And I LOVE the idea of playing a dragon against hordes of medieval characters--awesome!

#12 I understand Pavel. I am a one man team right now too. The bottom line is, if the game(s) do not reach a polished state then they will not reach their full potential in sales. A polished game could mean a lot of sales (thousands to tens of thousands of USD) verses a non-polished game (zero-hundreds).

I've experienced this first hand with my first game Sudoku Maya Gold which is now on Real Arcade. I 'finished' the game in a 5 month time span (May 2006) but it wasn't polished enough and lacked some standard casual game features. The game went from selling 'nothing' on my original website for the three months (while I was working on polishing it), to reaching #15 on Real during the second week of release (released August 30th 2006). Was it worth adding 3 more months development time, working 15-18 hour days? Definately.

I haven't been very impressed with the general presentation/game quality of most game developers and I see potential in your designs. All I am getting at is that if you go the extra mile and invest either more time or money in those projects, you'll end up reaping a greater reward which will help fund even bigger and better projects. I think that would be a much better approach than trying to develop the project quick on a small budget and hoping for the best. If you put that 10k into one game and the same amount of time from all three games into one game, that one game would be one heck of a game.

In the end, it's you business. I just see potential in your work and I don't like seeing potential falling short of reaching a fortunate conclusion :P

#13 Gellyware says it much better than I!

What I was trying to get at is exactly that--your games have outstanding potential, but aren't -quite- perfect, and we're both guessing that it's just needing time to polish I think.

#14 Yes, I understand and we know it. I'm planning to publish Phantasia 2, ArchMage and editor + new mission for Styrateg. I think that the ArchMage will be the best from these games. And we would like to work on bigger projects in the next year. I think that the first our work will be a new version of Styrateg - 3D models, changed dameplay etc., so I hope this game has a potential.

But I must say, that the bigger project is the bigger gamble. F.e. our game Troll (http://troll.rakeingrass.com/ss/sshot6.jpg) is one of our most fun smaller games. My workmate worked on it about 6 months (2 developers), but it is one of our least sold games. Phantasia (5 weeks, 1 developer) make 2x more money in one month as the game in 2 years (Phantasia has made 2x more money then Styrateg too :). So we make the most money from the smallest "stupid" one-two month games :|

#15 Interesting business model.


Where do most of your customers come from? What form of advertising do you do?

#16 I'm afraid that we don't use advertising for the most of our games :| I only used download.com 99USD/month program, tried to use google adwords and paid a lot of money to some external services to advertise our games, but the efect was 0, I only lost the money :)

Stephen: I'm sorry, that I try to ask you here, but - I talked with Benjamin B. about a distribution of some of our games or some games in the future. We talked about it two months, but then our connection was lost. I tried to send emails to him and tried to contact your team some different ways (f.e. by support form), but I have not get any answer for all of my emails and the support question for about 2 months, I only get mails from GG forum. I'm afraid that there could be same spam filter problem or something similar (I don't trust that GG ignored me ;). Is it possible to contact him? I can call him, but my English is really poor for speaking ;)

#17 Styrateg and Trickball are on our list of games that we are looking into.

We haven't forgotten.

#18 Pavel, it has been nearly a week, you should be finished the game by now. Where is the demo?

#19 Gellyware: We are working on the game the third week now and I think I wrote that we wanted to work on it about 2 months (the screenshot you can see was taken after 2 weeks of developing). But it looks that the game has a potential, so maybe we will extend the time of the developing. But we must solve a lot of problems with TGB too. It is not ideal for 3D ;) So I will inform you about news as soon as we have any.

#20 I love the way this looks!