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Weekly Update - Tutorials, Familiarity, and MARDEK vs Atonal Dreams

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,253 words

Another productive week! I'm almost at the point where I can update the game for a new test run; I just need to tidy up a few bugs and things now. I have some questions related to MARDEK and games dev in general that I'd like to hear your thoughts about this time!

First, a quick summary of what I did this week:



I changed the colour of the grass from yellowish green to teal. A fairly small thing, but I've been wanting to use a reduced colour palette for a while, focused on shades of teal, orange, and purple. Takes some getting used to if the old version's familiar!



I spent most of the week writing the tutorial scenes I mentioned in the previous post. There's a lot more dialogue, and I'm fairly happy with how most of it's turned out... though some needs a bit more tweaking.



Each scene has the characters talk a bit about some mechanic, then one or more of these popups comes up at the end, summarising the mechanic with a little block of text and either a 3-second-or-so video clip or a static image.

Here's one for runes, for example:



And elements:



Things like this sound fairly simple as a concept, but I had to actually write out all the text and make all the images/videos, which ate up a lot of time!

I was hoping to be done with all these changes by Friday and to run another round of testing this weekend, but that was annoyingly interrupted when I got a text message on Thursday night telling me I had to get my second COVID vaccine on Friday. First I'd heard about it! I ended up getting godawful side effects (flu-like, fever, sore all over, couldn't sleep, etc) - like the first one I had - though thankfully they'd faded by Saturday night. I might be able to finish off everything I wanted to in another day or so, but there are a bunch of other little things I'd like to fix too, so I might spend the next week on those and do another test on the weekend. We'll see!!!

Thoughts Wanted: MARDEK & Familiarity

I wrote ∞ a post about how much money I'm making from this games thing ∞ the other day, and there were some interesting comments on that which - together with some other thoughts I had recently - made me want to hear people's thoughts on some things.



Again, MARDEK came up: I'd be wealthier had I stuck with that, there's pretty much no chance of ever replicating that success with my new 'passion projects', why don't I just work on a MARDEK continuation as my main thing and do the other stuff on the side?

I gave up on MARDEK because it took so long to make and earned so little, at the time. There wasn't any money in free-to-play Flash games. Plus running a fairly toxic community (Fig Hunter) was worsening the mental health issues I already had, and I basically just had a breakdown and tried to get away from it all because I couldn't cope.

I spent years just trying to get out of the house, understand and maybe overcome my mental issues, make some friends... with mixed results. I couldn't focus on the games thing. It would have been a very different story had I worked on that from a place of stability!

I thought I'd given up being a games developer, and went to study Psychology at university. There, I found out that I had brain cancer, and had to be treated for that. I could at least do games dev from home while recovering, so that's why I got back into it.



I made Memody: Sindrel Song - a memory game - because the surgery I'd had could potentially disrupt my memory, and I'd read that training the memory could help avoid this. I came up with the lore surrounding sindrels while studying Evolutionary Psychology as part of that course, so I suppose I made use of it because it was conveniently on hand and near the top of my mind.

I was very naive when I released it. For one thing, I just assumed it'd be like the Flash days: I'd just finish it, upload it, and then millions of views would pour in with no effort on my part. Ha!

I also believed it'd do better than okay because it was quite original. I mean, would you agree that culturally we're raised to believe that coming up with original ideas is how you succeed? It seems to be an idea in my head, at least.

It's only recently that I've learned how people are far more interested in familiarity, at least once they reach a certain development stage.

It seems that as children and teens, still learning about the world, everything's new so we don't really have a choice about what we absorb. But once we've constructed a framework for our reality, anything that doesn't fit within it is warily regarded and usually discarded. It's tough to push through that.

Pretty much everyone who approaches me due to fondness for MARDEK found it during their impressionable younger years, and want more because it's what they know and understand. This means I might have an existing audience who'd pay for a continuation now that they're older and have money, but I feel like it'd only appeal to that limited audience, most of whom have moved on. I'm also a very different person to who I was back then, so whatever approach I took would be different.



So I've been hoping that a newer project with enough similarities to MARDEK - but without being restricted to its audience - might appeal to them and to a new audience... but would that ever be the case? Would I have to target children during that impressionable phase?



There are apparently some people who follow my work due to fondness for my old stuff, but who aren't interested in what I'm making now. So I have some questions:

Questions

1. If you liked my old stuff but not the new stuff, why? What does the old stuff have that the new stuff is lacking, or vice versa?

2. Do you think MARDEK is superior to Atonal Dreams? If so, why, specifically?

3. If I did make a continuation of MARDEK, how much of it would have to be the same for it to be acceptable to you? Would all the cast and gameplay mechanics need to be the ones you remember? Would it have to be 2D and (half) pixelated?



I'm not interested in running some huge series. Far too much stress! But other indie devs - many of whom have never released a game before - are doing fine by raising funds on Kickstarter, so if I can too, then I might be able to continue doing this. Doing one for every project would become easier - probably - once I'd figured everything out with my first one. And a big marketing push is necessary regardless of what I make, it seems, so that's a good way to force focusing on it.

I'll talk more about Kickstarter at some point in the coming weeks, after looking into it a bit more.