So, uh. People said there should be a Desktop Dungeons thread on this forum, so here you go...
Desktop Dungeons was first spotted on the Game.Dev forums in early 2010. It was awesome! The short play sessions through random dungeons with these crazy characters, simple (yet deep) spells and a truly innovative regeneration mechanic meant people got hooked on it from day 1 of the prototype appearing. @Nandrew carried on working on the game and pretty soon @Aequitas and I asked if he wanted to use QCF to turn the game into a finished product... That was over 3 years ago and the game is nearly done, nearly!
Some cool stuff happened during those 3 years:
We plowed QCF's warchest into the game and carried on working on the free version of the game in Game Maker, polishing its systems, cleaning up the UI and adding extras (like gods and challenges). People went crazy over the game and we got a large amount of press, it was even 3rd in Gamasutra's top 10 indie games of 2010. About halfway through that year we started working on an upgraded version of the game in Unity, we felt we understood what the game really was now, so it was time to start working on the version we were going to sell. Derek Yu (who made sprites for the free version - yes, the guy who made Spelunky) put us in contact with an artist called Lurk who helped us define an art-style for the game that we felt would work...
Desktop Dungeons ended up being cloned towards the end of 2010. I'll let Edge and Polygon talk about what happened. I still kinda get annoyed about the sillyness of it... Thankfully that worked out fine for us, mostly because we took the decision to use this to our advantage in any way we could. Note the two articles I linked in some of the biggest game media out there ;)
Almost exactly a year after DD first emerged from @Nandrew's head, we got the news that we'd been double-nominated for the 2011 IGF Awards. Desktop Dungeons was a finalist in both Excellence in Design and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize for best game. We kinda freaked out a little and started making plans to get to San Francisco for the GDC. This was the first time any of us had been to the US. We ended up revealing the Unity version of the game on the GDC show floor at our stand in the IGF pavilion (where Andy Schatz - who has just released Monaco and is a DD superfan - became the first person to die to the new version).
We went on to win Excellence in Design, beating both Minecraft and Super Crate Box somehow. Notch got his own back when Minecraft took the Grand Prize though ;) That remains one of the best nights of my life. Here's a video of the show, we're onstage around the 15 minute mark. We met so many amazing people (ask @Nandrew why Tim Schafer is afraid of him now) and made so many friends at the GDC that we've been back every year since then. At GDC we made contact with Jordan Fehr, who is now doing sound effects for DD (his previous work includes Super Meat Boy, Jamestown, Hotline Miami, the list is loooooong and awesome) we also completed the Super Meat Boy skills steal when Danny Baranowsky started doing music for us. Recently DannyB brought in Grant Kirkhope (Goldeneye N64, Banjo Kazooie, Kingdoms of Amalur) as a sort of crazy tag-team move that's left us stunned and happy ;)
Around May 2011 QCF started running out of money, our warchest was finally hitting bingo game-fuel. We started looking for investors and/or ways to get enough cash to spend the 6 months we thought we'd need to finish the game and get it out there. Right around when we were interviewing serious investors, we got news that DD had been selected for the IndieCade Showcase at E3. We didn't have enough money to go, seeing as we hadn't even paid salaries that month, but my father had airmiles that he bought me a ticket to LA with (coincidentally, he and I ended up passing through Dubai airport at the same time that trip, I left west and he headed east). PayPal had also just started working in SA, so we decided to use the E3 press boost to push pre-orders for the game and see what would happen, we figured we had nothing to lose: If pre-orders didn't work out, we could always go with investment or a loan... So we built a pre-order system that looked a bit like a Kickstarter with multiple tiers of purchase and I climbed on a plane to E3.
By the time I landed in LA, we could afford the trip. I then proceeded to pimp the hell out of the game so hard I somehow twisted my ankle, even when Jenova Chen insisted on breaking our tutorial all the time. On the last day of E3, I managed to make contact with a Steam representative, which was my major mission the entire time. I cannot tell you how relieved I was. Also, the pre-orders were great fun to watch... Our travels for that year weren't finished: Round about the time we released our closed beta to everyone that pre-ordered the game, IndieCade proper had @Aequitas and I flying back to LA for what I consider one of the coolest game festivals I'd ever been to. DD was nominated for their Design category, we didn't win, but had a great time and met even more awesome developers - including being introduced to gelato by John and Brenda Romero.
We've put out an update to the Desktop Dungeons beta almost every friday since then - Desktop Dungeons beta 107 just went up. We set up a forum for our players to discuss the game, log bugs and argue with us about balance decisions. Over 12000 people have pre-ordered the game and will be getting their Steam keys once the full game launches. TotalBiscuit did two videos on Desktop Dungeons, in fact, if you search Youtube for DD you'll find tons of lets plays, previews and people just playing the game.
We're nearly done! The gameplay is smooth, the difficulty progression is working, the game is balanced, the interface is getting fixed up and we're adding little tweaks and touches to the rest of the game as a final layer of polish.
We're nearly done.
And then we start on the iOS/Android build...
Desktop Dungeons has been the most rewarding thing I've ever worked on. It started as a prototype and has grown from there because it's an amazing game idea. It's the epitome of how I feel games can be built to minimise risk in South Africa. Feel free to ask any questions you have about the game, how we're building it, what our plans are and what we've learned along the way :)
Desktop Dungeons was first spotted on the Game.Dev forums in early 2010. It was awesome! The short play sessions through random dungeons with these crazy characters, simple (yet deep) spells and a truly innovative regeneration mechanic meant people got hooked on it from day 1 of the prototype appearing. @Nandrew carried on working on the game and pretty soon @Aequitas and I asked if he wanted to use QCF to turn the game into a finished product... That was over 3 years ago and the game is nearly done, nearly!
Some cool stuff happened during those 3 years:
We plowed QCF's warchest into the game and carried on working on the free version of the game in Game Maker, polishing its systems, cleaning up the UI and adding extras (like gods and challenges). People went crazy over the game and we got a large amount of press, it was even 3rd in Gamasutra's top 10 indie games of 2010. About halfway through that year we started working on an upgraded version of the game in Unity, we felt we understood what the game really was now, so it was time to start working on the version we were going to sell. Derek Yu (who made sprites for the free version - yes, the guy who made Spelunky) put us in contact with an artist called Lurk who helped us define an art-style for the game that we felt would work...
Desktop Dungeons ended up being cloned towards the end of 2010. I'll let Edge and Polygon talk about what happened. I still kinda get annoyed about the sillyness of it... Thankfully that worked out fine for us, mostly because we took the decision to use this to our advantage in any way we could. Note the two articles I linked in some of the biggest game media out there ;)
Almost exactly a year after DD first emerged from @Nandrew's head, we got the news that we'd been double-nominated for the 2011 IGF Awards. Desktop Dungeons was a finalist in both Excellence in Design and the Seamus McNally Grand Prize for best game. We kinda freaked out a little and started making plans to get to San Francisco for the GDC. This was the first time any of us had been to the US. We ended up revealing the Unity version of the game on the GDC show floor at our stand in the IGF pavilion (where Andy Schatz - who has just released Monaco and is a DD superfan - became the first person to die to the new version).
We went on to win Excellence in Design, beating both Minecraft and Super Crate Box somehow. Notch got his own back when Minecraft took the Grand Prize though ;) That remains one of the best nights of my life. Here's a video of the show, we're onstage around the 15 minute mark. We met so many amazing people (ask @Nandrew why Tim Schafer is afraid of him now) and made so many friends at the GDC that we've been back every year since then. At GDC we made contact with Jordan Fehr, who is now doing sound effects for DD (his previous work includes Super Meat Boy, Jamestown, Hotline Miami, the list is loooooong and awesome) we also completed the Super Meat Boy skills steal when Danny Baranowsky started doing music for us. Recently DannyB brought in Grant Kirkhope (Goldeneye N64, Banjo Kazooie, Kingdoms of Amalur) as a sort of crazy tag-team move that's left us stunned and happy ;)
Around May 2011 QCF started running out of money, our warchest was finally hitting bingo game-fuel. We started looking for investors and/or ways to get enough cash to spend the 6 months we thought we'd need to finish the game and get it out there. Right around when we were interviewing serious investors, we got news that DD had been selected for the IndieCade Showcase at E3. We didn't have enough money to go, seeing as we hadn't even paid salaries that month, but my father had airmiles that he bought me a ticket to LA with (coincidentally, he and I ended up passing through Dubai airport at the same time that trip, I left west and he headed east). PayPal had also just started working in SA, so we decided to use the E3 press boost to push pre-orders for the game and see what would happen, we figured we had nothing to lose: If pre-orders didn't work out, we could always go with investment or a loan... So we built a pre-order system that looked a bit like a Kickstarter with multiple tiers of purchase and I climbed on a plane to E3.
By the time I landed in LA, we could afford the trip. I then proceeded to pimp the hell out of the game so hard I somehow twisted my ankle, even when Jenova Chen insisted on breaking our tutorial all the time. On the last day of E3, I managed to make contact with a Steam representative, which was my major mission the entire time. I cannot tell you how relieved I was. Also, the pre-orders were great fun to watch... Our travels for that year weren't finished: Round about the time we released our closed beta to everyone that pre-ordered the game, IndieCade proper had @Aequitas and I flying back to LA for what I consider one of the coolest game festivals I'd ever been to. DD was nominated for their Design category, we didn't win, but had a great time and met even more awesome developers - including being introduced to gelato by John and Brenda Romero.
We've put out an update to the Desktop Dungeons beta almost every friday since then - Desktop Dungeons beta 107 just went up. We set up a forum for our players to discuss the game, log bugs and argue with us about balance decisions. Over 12000 people have pre-ordered the game and will be getting their Steam keys once the full game launches. TotalBiscuit did two videos on Desktop Dungeons, in fact, if you search Youtube for DD you'll find tons of lets plays, previews and people just playing the game.
We're nearly done! The gameplay is smooth, the difficulty progression is working, the game is balanced, the interface is getting fixed up and we're adding little tweaks and touches to the rest of the game as a final layer of polish.
We're nearly done.
And then we start on the iOS/Android build...
Desktop Dungeons has been the most rewarding thing I've ever worked on. It started as a prototype and has grown from there because it's an amazing game idea. It's the epitome of how I feel games can be built to minimise risk in South Africa. Feel free to ask any questions you have about the game, how we're building it, what our plans are and what we've learned along the way :)
screens_0_15a.png
560 x 400 - 31K
upsell_01.png
800 x 600 - 400K
v_055_01.png
800 x 600 - 471K
desktop-dungeon-igf-gdc.jpg
600 x 357 - 53K
ddmockup copy.png
800 x 600 - 255K
Comments
Could you elaborate on how DD's risk was minimal? Did that come about mainly from the way you got funding from the Alpha stage, or were there other things about the way you guys operated that minimized the risk?
@Manikin Well Dislekcia should really still elaborate. I'd love to hear his thoughts about minimizing-risk-in-game-development. I think it's a multifaceted problem, but to try approach just one facet: I think he meant that creating a proof of concept first, and then investing in the game when, and if, it proves convincingly that the investment will be worthwhile, is a good way of minimizing the risk of developing a game.
This should seem kind of obviously true, but many of us still don't actually do this (and I'm not sure why).
There have been projects in South Africa that have been more like this: First finding investment for a game idea, and then only developing the game once the investment has been found. This is the most risky methodology I can think of. Because the game might be total rubbish despite the idea sounding good and money being thrown at it.
Another unnecessarily risky method might be: Starting a game project, and then, without any real testing as to its viability as a finished product, without a solid vertical slice and a ton of feedback, piling on polish and features in the hope that it'll eventually become something fun and be worth the investment. (Which in the worst case scenario amounts to polishing a turd).
So much of game development success is simply having the skills to pull off the thing you're trying to do, and humans don't seem to be very good at evaluating whether they have the skills required or not when it comes to something as complicated as a game (and these can be things like communication skills and time management skills and all the ton of other skills that are needed to make a game). It seems incredibly easy to expect success where you really have no reason to expect that success. So having a working playable product that people already want to pay money for should be the minimum requirement for throwing a full development budget at an idea...
...unless you're okay with taking some terrifically high risks, or have a shit-ton of experience, or can afford to take the loss.
(One of the big advantages Indie development has over AAA development is that we are able to prototype an idea that represents the game in two weeks or even a few days. We should be exploiting that advantage).
I think it's also important that DD got a *large* amount of press early on, and *overwhelmingly* strong evidence that people were enjoying it. I find in my experience, it's sometimes dangerously easy to slip into the "polishing a turd" mentality, because in general players are very positive and reaffirming with their feedback about a prototype. So, even having a small wave of positive feedback can convince a dev that their game is worth continuing and polishing.
I think the real problem with this is that it can make changing the design of the game and taking creative leaps a lot harder. The initial ideas get locked into place, for fear of messing up what's considered to be an air-tight concept. This is why having a large and/or strong reaction from people playing your game early on is a much better indication of the idea's merit.
Anyway, just some thoughts - I don't mean to derail!
Don't try to do more than 1 thing at a time - Learning to code at the same time as learning to design a game, run a company, sell games AND manage a team is stupid. There's a reason QCF could make DD happen when it did.
Don't invest time and money into a game that you're not CERTAIN is going to be awesome - DD exploded when it looked like crap. Then we carried on working on it and it exploded more. If at any time during those first 8 months it had stopped growing in player base, we would have stopped working on it.
Don't trust your own estimation of your game - You will always fool yourself into thinking your time makes something you're working on valuable. Make sure something is actually valuable to other people by having them play regularly.
Don't ignore people saying they want to buy your game - Desktop Dungeons has cost us R1.2M so far, QCF had R400K saved when we started on the game. The rest of that budget has come from people buying the game before it's done.
Don't assume you know how to market your game - Find out what value people see in the game, then market around that, every game is going to be different. If you don't know how to market, learn to do that ON SOMETHING ELSE! I practiced e-marketing with internet dating profile writing. (Also, I met my girlfriend through internet dating)
Don't stay at home when you're invited to conventions and expos - Go. Scrape, beg, borrow and steal if you have to, but go. GO!
Don't sit in the back - Talk about your game. Talk to people and figure out how to be sociable. Then when you go to events, put yourself on the spot and meet people, even if they're legendary game designers, chances are they'll talk to you if you're not creepy.
Don't just build 1 game idea for your entire life - Seriously, DD came out of @Nandrew's head AFTER he'd already built a ton of awesome game prototypes already. @Aequitas and I have other games that did well in competitions that we could have invested in instead. If any of us had decided "No, I will finish this game or else", DD wouldn't exist.
Don't assume you know how people make games - Make your game first, then stop and make it again after you've done everything wrong. DD was built in Game Maker because it was quick to build it in. Then we rebuilt it in Unity from the ground up to let us explore the design space around the game.
Don't have a shit website - Websites are not hard, nor is webhosting expensive. Get an internet presence, even if you just put prototypes up there. It WILL help.
Don't think you can't ask for help - And when you do ask for help, be prepared to explain the problem. Then be prepared to have the help take the form of questioning your actual problem instead of providing a "solution".
Don't ignore data - If you have players, try to track stats. If you have stats, you can test alternate approaches to things and answer questions you would otherwise not be able to. I wish we had better tracking in the earlier versions of DD.
Don't think that famous people won't work with you - If you've built a game that other people find valuable, they'll offer their services/advice. A good game will build its own team, provided you build it in the open.
Don't assume that a team will just run itself - You don't have to be an asshole boss and shout at people, but deadlines and knowing what you should all be doing next is a big deal.
Don't throw good time after bad - I think this is really important. Don't end up getting stuck doing things that make you feel like you're having an impact, but are actually just busy-work. How do you tell? If you're making a difference, people will want to help you do it. Or they'll try to copy you. If you keep doing the same thing expecting different results, change course. Even a small course change is better...
I'd suggest that you haven't placed much emphasis on the openness of the development of DD, and the fact that players were playing the game right at the outset. It's implied heavily here, I think a lot of the points you've made aren't viable in a closed development, but there's no "develop in the open" point. And I think developing in the open is something that watching DD's development taught me.
And that's fine if you're just working on something as a passion project, but in that case then your goal is probably to get better at something, which is also best achieved through critical feedback. Which also implies open development/production in some form. So yeah, open development is the flip-side of inaccurate valuation of your game. Especially if you have plans to sell something somewhere down the line - you're selling a product to people that are hoping to enjoy it, not your ego.
I'm never really sure if I should be as blunt with projects here as I am "at the office" - there are quite a few advanced projects here at MakeGames that I simply feel would never have gotten as far along as they are now if they'd been developed at QCF. But because they started out closed, I feel like a lot of my feedback might be unfair because it's too late to have much impact and will just sound like me being an asshole :(
Maybe being an asshole is better at teaching than being quiet? Don't know.
On a different topic: you guys made the game in GameMaker first and then went over to a UNITY build. Would you guys suggest this as a viable option for beginner devs? Or would you rather suggest that one starts learning UNITY from the start. The reason i'm asking is that I am a total Noob at game development. I learned some C# coding from a book and now want to try my hand at game development. Following advise I got from this forum, I then downloaded Game Maker and finished some of the official tutorials. But reading this thread I was wondering if it will not be easier to start learning how to use Unity right now and not waste time with GM? What was your reason for deciding to go the UNITY route now?
I don't think you'd ever be wasting your time with Game Maker, to be dead honest. A lot of the reasons we switched to Unity are now moot anyway: GM can do iOS and Android now too. I'm pretty sure that we could be doing the current art-style in GM as well, it wouldn't be crazy difficult. The only real big outstanding reason I'd be a bit hesitant to work on a GM game in a large team is the way GM handles version control, which was a tad buggy when we tested it out during the Global Game Jam this year. But that's really not an issue if you're a lone developer ;)
If we'd started DD's development 2 years later, we probably would have stayed in Game Maker and just used Studio. That might even have resulted in faster development, although we'd definitely have had to rebuild the game anyway.
I still feel like I can build a prototype to test something much faster in GM, but that could just be my own level of skill in Unity (I still feel like I'm fighting against some of its choices sometimes). The bottom line is that you need to be making as many games as possible in order to get better at game design and game execution in general - that's the real skill behind game development, being able to program is relatively incidental. I wish people didn't get so hung up on it.
Put a week into GM tutorials, see what you end up making, then put a week into Unity tutorials and work with whatever feels most freeing!
One of the cool things about prototyping in one engine (say, GM) and then moving across to another (say, Unity) when you're sure (based on player feedback) that you've got something worth committing to, is that your prototype can truly be a prototype. You can write messy code, make a complete disaster, because you're 100% certain you'll be re-writing everything more elegantly later on (because you have to, going from GML to C# or whatever). It's always easier to organise and plan code structure when you know what you're aiming for anyway. In a prototype, I'm don't think you always know what the goal is. :) And by using a different engine for the prototype to the one you'll finally be using, you avoid the possibility of being lazy and copy-pasting badly-written stuff that could screw you over later down the line.
Also, when you initially have an idea, you usually have no concept of where the resulting game is going to play best, just like you don't know if the idea is even going to be fun... So it's best to just try and build it in something and see what it ends up feeling like it needs. If the prototype turns out to be fun, but you know that you could do well with in a browser, port the thing to Flash. If it'll play better on console, examine your options and figure out which console to aim for.
I think the major thing that everyone here keeps saying is that once you can program, exactly what you're programming in is largely irrelevant. The issue is that once you can program, you tend to lose sight of the overall goal of building a bloody game and get stuck in largely useless technical bullshit.
Also, had to complain to the editor about the preview on the next page being changed to a review and getting a fabricated score. The original writer knew it was a preview (the game's not finished yet) but somehow they decided that should change. They just slapped an 80 on the game as well, with no actual playing experience in the person who did the scoring. They've since apologised to us and will be printing a correction. The editor was nice about it and took responsibility for the mess up.
Huge thanks to Edmund! +10 points for spotting the reference ;)
Definitely part of that first screenshot up there tho...
One of our longest-running beta players just started getting the PQI sending him to the tutorial dungeons, which are inaccessible once you've completed them the first time... So his PQI had literally nowhere else to send him. Nowhere out of 28 dungeons, with 19 classes and 10 badges to combo those with. (There are extra badges and classes, but the PQI doesn't use them because that wouldn't be fair)
That's kinda terrifyingly awesome that he's played that much... Also, epic bug to find :)
Have you also thought of building added pre-made challenges where you can change mechanics? (Or even take the same PQI and give it the power to start changing mechanics slightly for single runs?) Things like giving enemies slightly more health, or a never-before-seen-ability that they dont usually have? (Like calling for help, though bear in mind I havent played DD for a while even though I have bought it. Trying to get work done doesn't work when there are too many awesome games to play :( )
@trainwreck: I never hugged Tim Schafer, that was @Nandrew.
We're working on EVERYTHING OMG ARGH! And one of the everything is the game's logo. Logos are hard to make, but I think we finally found a concept that really works for the game:
The goat awakens...
Still needs refinement and polish, but we're getting there.
It's an @ - because the main characters in roguelikes with no graphics are traditionally represented by @ signs. I think we've been staring at that font too much. Ideas to get that across better?
Heck whack all three in if you can then :P @Dd :P
Nah I think simplify into something people can understand... And should be clear if it were pointed out.
Some suggestions regarding the @:
1) Try designing it so that it looks like a sprite in the game (i.e. compact and inside a square). This may emphasise the "main characters in roguelikes".
2) Instead of a goat, modify the serpent (from 3rd screen shot in your first post) to look like @, with its head in the middle. (Although the goat is a cooler idea.)
3) If the @ design does not work then scrap it.
Is your goal to make the logo look and feel like the game?
If so, here's some suggestions:
1) Currently feels too complex. (All other images in the game are instantly clear.)
2) Add some colour, so we can get a sense of its feel. (Game is colourful.)
3) Consider using one of the more popular sprites as the logo, and possibly creating a hi-res version of it (e.g. Anoobis looks cool).
4) Place the logo next to some screenshots of the game and compare them.
General logo design suggestions:
1) Take a screenshot of an iTunes/Google Play page containing a bunch of game icons. Then replace one of the icons with your logo and see if it stands out enough.
2) Scale the logo down to a small size and see if it is still recognisable (e.g. 50x50 pixels).
You're probably already aware of the last 3 suggestions. Thought I'd mention it for anyone else thinking of creating a logo for their game.
I still think components of DD makes more sense, unless the @ is REALLY obvious. Like FedEx's arrow kind of obvious. Like OBVIOUS. Otherwise it's too stretchy.
And yes, we've experimented with the text a lot.
Goats have the creepiest-looking eyes...
*Thumbs up* :)
2 weeks, AHHHHHHHH!