That was an excellent post mortem, thank you for sharing.
I think the difficulty curve may be problematic, but at the same time if it kept increasing, restarting again and again would become an issue. I’m very comfortable with the “die a few times until you get the hang of it, and then just avoid death from then on” curve (although I had a very close call last night, stupid engine catching fire…).
Re difficulty and griefing: I can’t accept that logic at all. Have you ever played EVE?
[quote=Captain Ancalagon]
Re difficulty and griefing: I can’t accept that logic at all. Have you ever played EVE?[/quote]
Or Dark Souls.
I played the Demo of EVE for a couple hours, but not enough to really know anything about the community. Havne’t played Dark Souls at all. I will take the mention of these games to mean "they’re difficult and still have griefers" and take that as counter-example to my EQ/WoW examples.
If this is the case I would probably propose the hypothesis that there is much more incentive for competitiveness in those games (I would think at least in Eve, not knowing enough about Dark Souls to comment on it) whereas there’s just less incentive to powergame/maxout/compete, and as such grief, in Sunless Sea.
But when I say "propose as a hypothesis" I really do mean that as "my fancy guess is…" So if I were to try and formulate it into a theory of griefing in gaming I would probably try to figure out if it’s solely an incentive for competitiveness that’s required, or whether a lack of difficulty plays in at all. It just seemed like as WoW geared itself less and less towards difficult PVE styles of play and more towards PVP styles of play with PVE difficulty being drastically reduced at the same time, the game took an overall turn towards griefyness.
But there might be some very significant variables I’m not factoring in that are the root causes for that tendency, and I suppose there’s plenty of people who were playing WoW that just plain disagree about the direction the community went in later expansions, so how accurate my assessment is will certainly be up for debate, and how relevant it is to Sunless Sea or any other game is surely debatable.
Being competitive =/= griefing. You don’t call a school bully "competitive", nor do you call a student who plagiarize for higher marks "a bully". Obviously that’s a terrible analogy but I hope you get what I mean.
Also EVE is all about virtual corporate intrigue and griefing apparently or some such, and Dark Souls is designed with mechanics for players to invade other players’ game and cause trouble. I think the designers of these game encourage griefing.
I think your phrasing is really unfortunate - you are basically saying that if players aren’t dedicated, then they are morally lacking on the same level as those who actively ruins the enjoyment of others. It is also one thing to say "the game is not for everyone" and quite an another thing to "weed out people by making the game unnecessarily esoteric".
Going by your words Sunless Sea would be the most influential games ever if players have to pony up billions of dollars beforehand because it weeds out all the people not capable of extraordinary economic expertise. I am sure that’s not what you mean, though. Also "unnecessarily difficult" sounds kind of terrible.
On an unrelated note English is such a difficult language and I feel so embarrassed about my vocabulary trying to post this thing sobs
The game doesn’t attract griefers because griefing is impossible within the game. I suppose there could be some out of game griefing, but no more than any other game/community. I think it’s no more complicated than that :)
I’ll agree with that, and didn’t mean to equate the two as being one and the same. I believe that sports and games that emphasize competitive behavior tend to be more appealing to people with a more aggressive attitude, though this is certainly not always the case.
And if I implied that I think people are morally lacking if they are not dedicated, then yes, that was very unfortunate phrasing on my part, and I apologize if I offended or gave the wrong impression with my wording. I understand that the game may not appeal to everyone, and that the simple fact that a game doesn’t appeal to a person does not imply a moral deficit. I prefer Free Cell to Solitaire. The fact that Solitaire does not appeal to me (hopefully) does not imply a moral deficit :)
But I would argue that if you were to look at the community that forms around a game like Sunless Sea, or other games that require a lot of reading/studying/learning to succeed, compared to a game like Halo or Call Of Duty, I think you’ll find the number of aggressive persons/posts/trolling/griefing (basically ALL manner of inter-community aggression) will be higher among the COD crowd than the SS crowd.
Obviously there will be outliers, not everyone who likes COD is a jerk, and not everyone who will like SS is a saint.
And again, I’m not a sociologist, so my analysis is probably overly simplistic, but I think there’s grounds for thinking that increased difficulty, emphasis on reading/learning, and decreased competitive appeal, result in a less aggressive user base. Maybe that’s incorrect, but ultimately it would probably require statistical studies to prove either way. Thought experiments will only get us so far in determining the truth in the matter.
[quote=KhzDonut]
And again, I’m not a sociologist, so my analysis is probably overly simplistic, but I think there’s grounds for thinking that increased difficulty, emphasis on reading/learning, and decreased competitive appeal, result in a less aggressive user base. Maybe that’s incorrect, but ultimately it would probably require statistical studies to prove either way. Thought experiments will only get us so far in determining the truth in the matter.[/quote]
…I think you need to stand back and look at this in a simpler light.
Here’s your homework: analysis how aggressive the userbase will become upon the decrease of difficulty and discouragement of reading in
a) Cooking Mama
b) a sewing circle for elderly ladies
c) Fallen London-themed Constipation Salon Charade
(Don’t actually do that)
The last thing I want to do is get knitting-needle-stabbed by some elderly-griefer-ladies, so I think I will have to pass on that particular study for now.
edited by KhzDonut on 3/23/2015
When I have a bit more time (not standing at the computer, shoes on, car running out front with friends screaming obscenities) I’ll read this full article, but what caught me was the beginning right off. Alexis Kennedy is male? I thought he was female? Is this an in-joke with Gamasutra? Or is Alexis like Tiresias, switching genders every seven years?
As far as I know Alexis has always been male.
Yep, Alexis is a cis chap - though you’re not the first to make that mistake. In fact, he’s mentioned in interviews that it happens often enough that it’s part of the reason Fallen London has a "none of the above" gender option!
Completely off-topic edit: This is my 2000th post! Neat! Thank you all for putting up with 2000 posts’ worth of my nonsense.
edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 3/25/2015
[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]Yep, Alexis is a cis chap - though you’re not the first to make that mistake. In fact, he’s mentioned in interviews that it happens often enough that it’s part of the reason Fallen London has a "none of the above" gender option!
Completely off-topic edit: This is my 2000th post! Neat! Thank you all for putting up with 2000 posts’ worth of my nonsense.
edited by Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook on 3/25/2015[/quote]
Ah, I see! Well, I don’t wish to offend. bows
Also, grats on the post count, Sir Frederick. I’ll do a victory lap around your island in celebration!
To get back on topic… it was implied that there would be some more info on how well the game did, sales wise. I know an exact number is probably not wise, but I am very curious to see how well it sold :)
Have you seen the latest blog posts? So far, we’ve had Sunless Sea Sales and Funding Deep Dive, Part I: Kickstarter and Sunless Sea Sales and Funding Deep Dive, Part II: Greenlight, and early access/post-launch figures are next to come!
Doh - obviously I had not. Thanks for the link :)
they published just today the third part (with total sales, for the curious), again another pretty interesting read!
And of course, congratulations to Failbetter, that is what I call a success! :)
I’m very happy to see that you’ve doubled your “big success” number. I think we can all agree that the game isn’t perfect - but overall it’s very good, and the strong parts are extremely so. I’m very happy I stumbled upon this game and chose to purchase it, and I am looking forward to more content from your team - whether more Sunless Sea, or some other project :)
This seems like the best place to put this. First time poster here, folks. Hello!
Excellent postmortem! I agree with a lot of its assessments and wanted to make a couple quick comments.
[quote=Roshirai]
There is a soft death penalty in the game currently - you can manually save and reload whenever you want. Those that want to a softer death penalty can choose to take advantage of it, and those that want a hard core experience can play with it on. I’ve been surprised to find myself playing with it on - I’m not usually one for "hardcore" mode, but for whatever reason, I can’t get myself to use the manual saves.
@Alexis
Back on the topic of the post mortem though, yes I thoroughly enjoyed the article, and quite frankly am very impressed at the decisions that you’d made along the way. It reminds me a lot about what I read in Erik Bethke’s book Game Development and Production (http://www.amazon.com/Development-Production-Wordware-Developers-Library/dp/1556229518), and how he said a key to making a successful game is to focus on the core experience, even if it means the game doesn’t contain as many features as you’d originally envisioned. He talks about the importance of how Warcraft focused on just a main core set, and then Blizzard was able to further polish and expand the features in the next game once they’d produced a quality and polished game. So far, to me at least, I can see the payoff in your decision to focus on and polish that core experience. And all of the "it’s almost a classic" comments, again to me, seem to show that this is your Warcraft - the initial foray that whets people’s appetites so you can build off the lessons and deliver an even better game the next time around.
As for the tooling, I personally think you chose the lesser of two evils. Sure, in retrospect you can see that a little more time spent on the tooling up front would have saved time later, but it’s difficult to find that balance until you’ve gone through the full process once. If you’re going to spend too much time on one area, better to spend too much time on the game than on the tool.
I say this from my own experiences in college - my senior capstone we spent two trimesters (basically six months) developing a game that we presented to local game company CEOs. As one of the main coders, I decided to spend a lot of time up front on developing a flexible hit box system that could double as an event triggering mechanism. My professor kept warning me focusing more on the game than the tools to make the game, but I was convinced that I was saving myself later. At the end of the capstone, I had a decently polished hitbox system, but a rather mediocre game. It felt clunky and lacking in polish. The other two teams, on the other hand, created something that looked and felt extremely promising.
So, in conclusion, I’ll be keeping a much closer eye out on your future projects. You’ve definitely proven that not only can you deliver a high quality game, but it’s clear from your post mortem that you don’t get stuck too much on sunk costs, and are willing to adapt to whatever is necessary to deliver a high quality game.
I had forgotten all about that! I, too, just play the default "hardcore" mode.
I think that’s a pretty good argument for the game to default to manual + autosaves instead. :)
edited by Roshirai on 3/29/2015