RevoGlide

Having some fun with loops.. :)

Comments

  • edited
    Trying out a free tutorial offered by Unity. Just messing with on some "environment" updates.



    Added a different craft. Added fog and improved on the lighting.

    Just having fun. I seem to waste soooo much time on playing around with the "look-and-feel" of a game - so many options. :(
  • edited
    That's looking really solid!

    Just a question, sorry if this is a bit agressive, is there an audience for indie Wipe-Out type games at the moment? (Like are there a lot of players out there who are starved for Wipe-Out type games).

    I ask, because it does seem to me that there are people who are excited about games that let them move fast and games that let them dodge things, but I haven't seen an audience gravitate towards a Wipe-Out-like in a while. It seems to me to be a space where it's pretty difficult to beat Wipe-Out itself, and Wipe-Out still exists, and Wipe-Out is much less popular today than the more based-in-realiity racing games (where in the past Wipe-Out was competing with them).

    Like this game for instance has 100,000 owners and a 97% rating on Steam, it's less a racing experience than an ambient going fast and maneuvering experience (arguably taking some of what was rad about Wipe-Out and removing the bits that other games did better).


    And Thumper is another game about going fast, which imagined it more as a journey filled with obstacles than a race:


    That said, I haven't been studying this space, so maybe I'm missing something.

    And also I don't know what your goals are here. If you're just trying to make a rad Wipe-Out-like then you're heading in the right direction :)
  • I've been interested in this space for a while (i.e. I've literally made some basic prototypes about this because of my interest) though I haven't been keeping a close eye on it, so I could be wrong:

    - Wipeout exists (i.e. it's been made in the past), but its iterations have been Sony exclusives, which means that it's never made its way to Steam or any other PC platform. Then the studio that made them, Psyonix, got closed down, leading PC gamers to believe there'd never be a PC Wipeout without an emulator.

    - You should do the research yourself of course, but afaik two of the noteworthy Wipeout "clones" to look at are Formula Fusion (which largely seems to have failed for various reasons, despite running a Kickstarter claiming that they had ex-Wipeout staff on board), and BallisticNG, which is still in Early Access and seems to be doing quite well (and is apparently a literal Wipeout clone). This one looks like the one to beat at the moment.
  • If i had to guess - there is no "real" money (for a modern audience) to be made in a wipe-out clone. It would need to be supplemented with some new and super interesting hook. Thereby giving it more depth and added personal enrichment.

    But - yeck - i enjoy this genre space for its relative simplicity.
  • edited
    Another anti-gravity racer that launched recently on all platforms is RedOut by 34BigThings. Haven't picked it up myself, but it looks like it fills the gap left by Wipeout. Looks gorgeous and super fast!

    Thanked by 2Elyaradine roguecode
  • Yeah - that a cool looking game (Redout)...

    Will check it out more.
  • edited
    Elyyaradine said:
    You should do the research yourself of course, but afaik two of the noteworthy Wipeout "clones" to look at are Formula Fusion (which largely seems to have failed for various reasons
    I'm curious why you consider this failed? It's a really enjoyable and gorgeous WipeOut-alike, and had its official launch mid 2017 (after a very productive early access).
    pieter said:
    Another anti-gravity racer that launched recently on all platforms is RedOut by 34BigThings.
    Yesssss! Another one on my steam list to get, but only once I've done FF justice.

    BTW random thing, unlike many others that got into gamedev because of some great game with amazing design, it was WipeOut's amazing tech wrangling that bit me (it had great design too, but I got drawn in by the tech)
  • edited
    @Elyaradine BallisticNG looks like it made fewer sales than Formala Fusion (about a quarter of the sales). And Formula Fusion is at about 7,000 sales after 9 months of sales. Formula Fusion doesn't look that expensive, so maybe those sales were enough?

    Your point about PC players not having a good WipeOut game is true. And RedOut seems to be doing really well (at 112,000 owners). One of the big differences between RedOut and the previous two examples is online multiplayer.

    Though, if 110,000 is the peak of this genre, and the peak without online multiplayer is at 7000, this means it is a bit of a low potential market (though less dismal than I first suggested).

    But it does look like it'd be possible to compete with RedOut on an indie budget at least, assuming you can program online multiplayer, and if you cannot do online multiplayer then you're competing with BallisticNG, and 3000-7,000 sales can be fine for a small team.

    Distance is an interesting indie racing game. Not a Wipe-Out game. It's a bit more about crashing and it's sold 130,000 (though still in Early Access, I recall it was started by a group of students).

    The game GRIP, interestingly, looks like it's cloned the classic game RollCage and done quite well (at about 30,000 sales). It has online multiplayer, looks really polished, but has sold worse than RedOut (so maybe Wipe-Out is more fondly remembered than RollCage?)

  • edited
    @EvanGreenwood: Uh... I may be interpreting the data wrong, but it looks to me that Formula Fusion has approximately 6k owners (and a 75% Steam user score), while BallisticNG has over 178k (and a 92% Steam user score)...? Am I wrong?

    (Both 6,000 sales and the 75% user score seem very low to me, hence my assuming its failure.)
    Thanked by 1mattbenic
  • edited
    @Elyaradine Short answer, you're not wrong, but I think you're effectively wrong (for the purposes of this discussion).

    If you look at BallisticNG's owners to players ratio, you can see that only just over half the people who own the game have played it. This means the game has been bundled pretty heavily. And they probably made a couple cents for each of those bundle sales, and there's a good chance that people buying the bundle weren't buying it for BallisticNG (so for the purposes of figuring out whether there is a demand for a game like BallisticNG those sales count a lot less).

    95% of the people who own Formula Fusion have played it, Which is higher than Broforce's figures, which probably means the game hasn't done discounts as deeply as Broforce to achieve those sales.

    Another data point is that while BallisticNG has 16 times the players, it has about a quarter of the reviews on Steam. So despite BallisticNG having 16 times the number of people who opened up the game, when compared to Formula Fusion, 25% the number of people cared enough about BallisticNG to write a review. It's very difficult to figure out how many people bought a bundled game on purpose, but in the case of BallisticNG it is going to be less than a quarter of the people who bought Formula Fusion on purpose.

    And Formula Fusion is a $20 game compared to $5 for BallisticNG. BallisticNG probably made $5000 - $15000 from that bundle, and that's equivalent to about 375 - 1125 sales of Formula Fusion (assuming those sales are at full price and Steam takes 30%). Even generously assuming BallisticNG made a quarter of the sales of Formula Fusion outside of the bundle, the price tag of BallisticNG is a quarter that of Formula Fusion.

    So in pure monetary terms, Formula Fusion certainly made a LOT more money than BallisticNG, though it definitely was more expensive to make (it has online multiplayer by the look of it, and the art looks more expensive).

    At the same time, the Formula Fusion user score of 75% is pretty dismal (that is less than the median user score on Steam)... It seems like they sold the game as a worthy successor to WipeOut and players felt they didn't deliver on the hype they built. (Although even RedOut only sits at only 86%, and is disliked for similar reasons ... so it looks like WipeOut fans are either very brutal, or none of these games are nearly as loved as WipeOut).
  • edited
    As a WipeOut fan myself (yeah, a data size of 1) I'd agree that the brutal fan thing is very likely. All the WipeOut games were incredibly polished and they have a couple of years of rose coloured memory glasses affecting peoples' view of them. So I think peoples' expectations for FF were very high, especially on the hype of having some Psygnosis/Sony Liverpool vets on the team.

    On the finances, they also made almost GBP80k in their original kickstarter. Some of that would obviously already reflect in the sales, but there were a decent number of high tier backers as well.

    Two other interesting things:

    I see there were console specific tiers for the kickstarter, and they've yet to actually release those (PS4/XBOne). Those backers specifically paid for a console version and have yet to get what they paid for, I don't know if they were compensated with PC versions instead.

    Their official launch was around the time that Sony released the official WipeOut remaster. That could either have helped their sales if there were enough WipeOut fans no longer on Sony platforms or really hurt them because they were competing with a "real" WipeOut
    Thanked by 1EvanGreenwood
Sign In or Register to comment.