Based in Texas, Triple.B.Titles is a studio run by family. After working on their first game after five years of development and succeeding with their Kickstarter campaign, they were able to release Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages. Now they are working on their second game Popup Dungeon. E. C. Dryere talks about the lessons learned from Ring Runner and Popup Dungeon’s development in this article.
You’ve got to learn a lot before creating your first game, but the real education doesn’t begin until you release. Here’s a short list of things we learned about the industry through the successes and failures of our first game, Ring Runner: Flight of the Sages, and how we’ll be applying what we learned to improving our next project, Popup Dungeon.
Don’t Hide Your Depth
Take a million gallons of water and pour it into a pool that’s half a foot deep and you get a lake about 517 feet across, front to back and side to side. Pour the same amount of water into a pool that’s a little over 25 miles deep, and you get a one foot by one foot puddle of water, which few will ever plumb. In either case, the volume is the same.
Ring Runner may not have been an unfathomable column of water, but let’s just say it was a really deep pool – great for folks who lug around their own SCUBA gear, but not as appealing to those who are looking to dip a toe and wade when weather permits. This was due to our greatest design error of not making Ring Runner’s depth more immediately evident to players. We wanted to give players a lot of bang for their buck without overwhelming them. To this end, archetypes, customization options, game modes, and hundreds of abilities were completely hidden from the player, being slowly revealed as they played through the 20-30 hour long campaign.
That is why we decided to go with a rogue-like game for our next project. One of the greatest strengths of a rogue-like game is that it places the possibility for depth right in front of players from the start. They get to see a large portion of the game’s features and assets in a single play-through, arranged procedurally. They are invited to consider what it would be like to play again as a different character or spec, and the procedural generation allows things to become familiar without getting too predictable or stale. Popup Dungeon will implement these principles.
Be Kind to the Media
Reviewers, Youtubers, journalists, and Streamers are busy people, and the rate at which games are being thrown at them continues to increase. It’s downright selfish to ask for more than a handful of hours of their time to make a fair appraisal of your game, considering the amount of time it takes to create a respectable video or article in response.
To get an impression of Ring Runner’s full depth takes no less than 20 hours, an amount of time that is far more than most folks’ schedules will permit, regardless of diligence and generosity. We definitely wanted to make it easier in our next game. Our goal is to give players a clear idea of Popup Dungeon’s depth and direction within their first game – roughly 40 minutes to an hour.
An Established Audience
One of the greatest aspects of being an indie dev is the freedom to take wild risks and commit to niche projects. But there’s a reason bigger studios can’t rationalize these passion projects to their investors. It’s not because folks with money have a cabalistic desire to see Madden and Call of Duty on every gamer’s screen. Simply stated, the more esoteric and unfamiliar you make your game, the less of an established audience it will have. A smaller audience means more heavy lifting for what might be the weakest arm of the indie studio: marketing and advertising.
In other terms, creating the world’s most delicious sea urchin flavored bubble gum may not be as lucrative as a mediocre mint. Our goal with Popup Dungeon is to make less of a gourmet game and more of a darn tasty hot dog.
Inclusive Controls
Creating a control scheme that favors experts rather than inviting beginners was another swing of the axe that cut down our prospective player base for Ring Runner. Our intent was to create something of a sport. If you lace up skates for the first time and wobble into the rink, hockey may be the last thing on your mind. Repeatedly icing your keister isn’t a very rewarding experience. Yet the gradual process of improving your skills until your skating circles around other players can be quite satisfying. People push through initial barriers because there is a perceived value to the skills they’re gaining.
But most players reported that the hardest part of Ring Runner was simply wrapping their brains around the control scheme and physics. Like driving a manual transmission car, things become natural once you figure out the clutch. The primary hurdles are placed right at the start. This is particularly problematic for an indie title, because the skills acquired have very little intrinsic value – not many people will list their Ring Runner skills in their résumé. The incentive to push beyond initial barriers is fairly low.
Popup Dungeon’s difficulty won’t come from being able to click on a target or manipulate the camera; it’ll come from increasingly complex strategic decisions. This allows us to place the biggest hurdles towards the end of the experience rather than the beginning.
Immediacy and Familiarity
Immediacy may be one of the greatest determining factors of financial success, but there are many ways to achieve it. I define immediacy as the amount of time it takes for a potential player to become excited about your game – not understand, become good at, or complete, but simply become excited about.
You could create an awesome game, but if its qualities aren’t immediately obvious, few will ever know. It’s not easy to unseat the opinions people form upon the first impression. Going back to the water metaphor, how impressive might the 25-mile deep puddle seem at first glance? Remember that your audience has very limited information about your game. They don’t know the fun secrets you’ve hidden throughout the campaign or the hard work you put into making abilities sync over a network. It would take quite a clever trailer to cover every quality of a game.
So what are some of the easiest ways to improve immediacy? Familiarity, presentation, and grand promises work well. If you can convince players that your game is like an old favorite of theirs with some new quality, you’re sure to spark interest. Naturally, pretty graphics can directly tickle our brainstems. And if you can convince folks that you’re selling deeds to the moon, you’ll find quite a few buyers, queuing with quills in hand.
Familiarity may be the broadest and most important of methods to establish immediacy. It runs the gamut from nostalgia and sequels to crossovers and favorite developers/studios. The goal is to grab your audience by their collars and say, “Look! There’s stuff you like in here!” Then, hopefully, they’ll give you the chance to make good on your promises.
The goal of immediacy is not to deceive or make a quick buck of a shameless clone. It’s simply to build a diving board, to coax players into your pool regardless of its dimensions, so that they can explore its merits with interest and appetite.
Popup Dungeon will allow folks to play as any character they can imagine and invite them to create their favorites. In this way, players may come to see how Sherlock Holmes fares against a slobbering goblin, but stay for the game’s other qualities.
You can support Popup Dungeon on Kickstarter and get involved in Triple.B.Titles’ development process. They would love to hear all feedback and suggestions. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter.
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