princec

Ultratron works fine with a controller. Droid Assault is most definitely not a twin-stick shooter.

We deliberately make our games easy because they sell more. The easier they are, the more they sell. Simple formula.

The target audience is me. I am a child of the 70s, grew up in the arcades and playing on C64s. The games of that era are shit. They weren't shit then, but they are now. What I do is take old game ideas and make them not shit, and I think I do pretty well at that. One of the biggest components of not-shitness is making sure that most players can see most of the game before it gets too hard for them.

FWIW I've never completed any of my own games, I'm that rubbish.

both buttons exit the game immediately. See the one on the left? The one that's always there?

I know what it looks like, I coded it. Both buttons exit the game immediately.

This :D

Because that's what Valve tell us to sell them for....

I've met Terry personally, and I didn't knock Super Hexagon. I've just said it how it is: Super Hexagon (and VVVVVV for that matter) are examples of how to make games on the cheap.

We don't do that, though. We put AAA polish and content into every title.

Nope, it's just you, I think.

Indeed, if it weren't for people like us, there wouldn't be most of the games that people love playing today. There'd be no Minecraft, no FTL, no Terraria, no Binding of Isaac.

By selling a lot of copies AND putting barely anything into it. Super Hexagon is bereft of actual content and actually has very little actual game in it. It is a perfect example of how to make money from not much work.

That does not make Robotron good.

Ah my mistake, I was referring to the 360 release of Geometry Wars (I've never actually played it, mostly coz I've never owned a console!)

The original was 10 years ago now. Think about that for a moment! Some of the people who are actually old enough to buy a game with their own credit card now were only 8 years old when Geometry Wars first appeared. Crazy.

Strange, there's an exit button right there in front of me straight away on my demo version.

We knew there was no huge demand for Ultratron. Although, Binding of Isaac.

Our original blog post was about how much it costs to make such a game, and how much money such a game earns typically, not about whether it's a failure or success.

What are you talking about? Just hit the button to close the game.

There are a few detractors from Ultratron in here - and that's fine, I know it's absolutely not everyone's cup of tea - but often the reason given for not "liking" (for want of a better word) the game are specious.

I can summarise some of the perplexity that arise with five words: Explain the Binding of Isaac.

When we were making Ultratron for Steam we knew that it wasn't ever going to actually sell much, but that was not the point of the article. The point of the blog post I wrote was simply to say, it takes this long and this much money to make a game like this, and it earns about this much money, so we're not going to do them any more. I think it's a shame because it scratches an itch that just isn't scratched anywhere else. And that's what Jeff was getting at, indirectly; it's a shame that these kinds of games aren't really all that viable to make. I don't want to play endless zombie games and man-shooters. I want to play games like Ultratron, and almost nobody is making them any more, which is why we've made it.

Er, I think you meant to compare http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6gmgExmJbM

It would seem that the niche we chose is a bit shite :) But that's why we're abandoning it.

And that publisher is... Steam. The trouble is even with the might of all those well-targeted customers there's still only a few thousand sales to be made - and thanks to the sudden change in the pricing of games in the last 5 years or so, you can now only make 1/10th of the money from a sale that you could before.

In my original posting I wasn't really trying to complain about the situation; just showing the facts and figures, and the ultimate conclusion of course, which is that we're not making any more of them. Probably. It is quite fun.

Ultratron actually came out originally before Geometry Wars.

Aye that's me.

Total failure of a product which did almost everything just exactly wrong. Wasted a year of my life on it before I realised it was a total flop.

Alien Flux. Thrice cursed. Mention it not.

hello everyone! This is Cas from Puppygames. It's been very interesting reading this thread (thanks ewj for posting!)

A few straight from the horses mouth facts:

I sat down and worked out what our revenues are, and they work out as $750/month over the last 7 years. Out of that, we pay for hosting, advertising, accountancy, and tax, leaving about $400/month and then Chaz and I split the remainder. Chaz just about scrapes a meagre existence in Spain. I live in the UK though so I have to keep on doing a day job (I've got a family to support). So up till now Puppygames has always been part-time! It'd be nice to do it full time.

If you're wondering why we bother at all, well, it's because it's actually a monumental pain in the arse to release two versions of every game - a demo and a full version. It's loads easier just to do a full version which can be unlocked. That's all our "DRM" is, really - just a really simple way of doing unlockable demos which won't go wrong and is practically impossible to not understand.

Also, anyone who thinks that it was a "lot of work" developing the system should probably know... it wasn't. It's really trivial stuff, and most of the hard bits are built in to Java anyway like the public/private key encryption. We're already working our little fingers off making the game, can't afford to spend any more time on unlocking schemes!

It really is utterly trivial for anyone with half a brain to defeat, and even crack and release. It's Java - any fool with JAD and Eclipse can rip it out. But what we're getting at here is... what's the point? The demos are lengthy, the games are cheap, the rights we give you along with the games are exactly the rights you would expect to have and want. They're exactly the rights I expect and want from things I buy, anyway.

Lots of piratey types give all sorts of feeble excuses as to why they get dodgy copies of things but at the end of the day we basically addressed every single one of them except one which is that the games cost too much and you wanted them anyway! Which we're figuring out how to address right now. We tried in the past reducing the prices of the games but discovered they made even less money.

Any suggestions?