So, you’re creating a game to make your childhood dreams come true? You’ve got tons of ideas, and you might have already started? “That’s great!”, says Fabrice Breton, the creator of Demetrios - The BIG Cynical Adventure, as he shares its story.
As I’m developing my first commercial game on my own, a point & click adventure game named Demetrios - The BIG Cynical Adventure, I don’t promise to have all the answers - but I’ve gathered some advice that might help you!
The power of suggestion
When it comes to making a game, there will always be that one aspect that will take most of your time. It will vary depending on the type of game you’re making. For my adventure game, it’s clearly the graphics! Drawing and coloring high resolution handcrafted art is very time consuming, especially considering that I’m not an artist.
Yet, graphics are crucial : this is the first thing players will experience in your game! Yes, most people judge a book by its cover and will make an opinion about your game based on its screenshots alone. You need great graphics!
So, in order to save up doing a ton of art and be able to release it someday, I needed to be clever.
I’ve noticed that visual novels, such as the Ace Attorney series, actually don’t use that much art. Yet they’re very long and constantly stay fresh to keep the player’s attention!
They’re using one powerful tool for that: dialogs! Text doesn’t require much time to create. But it can do a lot!
Here’s one example. In the beginning of my game, the player can choose to… pee on a plant in the police department. (the game is very interactive and has stupid choices like that!)
This scene is entirely described through the dialog between the main character and the policeman.
All of it is suggested! Which is also much better for the humor side - no one wants to see the character actually peeing…
Implementing this scene in the game only took me half an hour, yet this kind of interactivity defines my game and most people love and remember it.
You don’t have to show everything! Keeping a part of it in the player’s imagination not only saves development time, but also makes a better game in the end!
It’s one big advantage of books over the video game medium. One that keeps being forgotten by the industry, and which is one of the reasons retrogaming is so strong nowadays, and indie games become more and more popular.
Of course, you’ve got to keep the correct balance! Too little graphics or animations, and many people will get bored and turn away.
For example, in a narrative game, using cutscenes to showcase the story progress is important and will be considered as a reward by the player.
Simple emotions!
The previous advice applies to various types of games! Roleplaying games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy 6 are considered some of the best ever made, with very engaging characters - despite being animated with only a few sprites!
Each character in these games is given several key expressions, and yet they convey much more emotion than the characters in modern RPGs like Final Fantasy 13.
Why? Because the emotion is passed through a combination of these key expressions, the text, and the player’s imagination.
This is all you need to experience a great story. Real-time 3D graphics have never made the characters more engaging - it’s often quite the opposite!
A perfect modern example would be the indie game To the Moon by Freebird Games, a visual novel with simple graphics similar to a RPG. Simple graphics but characters and the story that makes everyone cry!
Music is crucial
Modern games always have voiceover dialogs, and to me this is a huge mistake. Because this makes the music a background element.
Music in a video game should not be treated the same way as in movies! You can convey so much more emotion by putting your music in foreground.
Some people say that good music is the music you won’t pay attention to, and I couldn’t disagree more with that!
Sure, some people get annoyed, especially if there’s a repetitive tune - but guess what? Everyone still remembers the Super Mario theme, yet you can’t remember one bit of the allegedly awesome orchestral soundtrack from that latest AAA game you’ve just played!
I don’t mean it’s impossible to get both a voiceover and great music at the same time. (It requires to be very careful with the timing and still letting the music in foreground for key scenes.)
But for a narrative game, you’ll be spending months of efforts recording and editing speeches, not even mentioning having to pay actors and risk getting your game heavily criticized for having “poor voice acting”!
Use placeholders
All game projects take more time to make than planned. Indie games being released without being pushed back at least once are a rarity!
Why is that? Because it’s so complex to evaluate the time needed to finish the project! Most of the time, you’ll never get a whole vision of your project but you’ll be working on a very tiny portion of it. One solution is to use placeholders. Pictures you can find on a search engine or draw very quickly, that you can use in place of more refined art.
For my game, this was quite easy : this is a remake of a game I did 15 years ago, so I had already programmed all of it, albeit with dull art!
But this dull art has proven very useful : I have used it as placeholders so I could program most of the game and have a clear view of how I’m progressing. And, guess what! By doing that, I’m still on track with the planning I had set at the beginning of the year!
Now I see light at the end of the tunnel. This allowed me to give a vague release date to the interested players, and hopefully soon, a precise release date!
Prototype before production
Making a prototype is also highly recommended. Create a playable build, with everything being how you want the final game to look, but only a very short portion of it. (one or two screens)
Not only this will give you an idea of how much time you’ll need to make the whole game, but you’ll also be able to get early opinions, and - why not - sell your idea/game to publishers!
It’s very important that your prototype has near-final art, though. Most people don’t do it and show “programmer’s art” to their players, which is a mistake in my opinion. The first impression is often the lasting one!
Make the important choices and stick to them!
In the same range of idea, you’ve got to make choices on what are the most important aspects of your game from the very start, and restrict yourself to them. After that, you can focus your efforts to develop it well!
Feedback from the players is very important, and you should listen to it - to some extent.
Don’t change everything each time someone doesn’t like it. There will always be people who won’t like that type of game. You need to take the important decisions yourself - this is your game, your vision!
However, you can use the players feedback to refine things (especially if most people are annoyed by the same thing) and, obviously, to correct bugs.
So, decide what defines your game from the very start, and stick to it. Improve later in development, based on the feedback!
Be prepared!
Maybe I should have started with this. It’s obvious, but being a game developer implies hard things on your personal life. Making games might be one of the most complex artistic jobs, as it involves so many aspects at the same time: programming, art, sounds, music, writing, translating, marketing…
Some of you may create a game as a hobby, and it’s fine from a financial side - you have your day job to live from. But in that case, you’ll barely have time to spend on your project. It may take years to finish up your game, if you ever finish it!
If you’ve decided to quit your job and make games for a living like me, expect some hard times. To make a high quality game, you’ll need to live with the bare necessities and work on it almost 100% of the time, 12 hours a day. And even dedicating that much time might not be enough!
Do not get yourself in this if you don’t have personal funds ready in case of trouble! You’ll need to spare every bit of money you can to reduce the costs.
Finally, you’ve got to stay realistic with your goals. It’s very tempting to add tons of new ideas to your game and implement them immediately, but you should refrain from doing that. (I often find myself doing it, I admit, though for little things that don’t take too much time)
Otherwise, you’ll get into development hell, or worse - you may never finish it because you’ll run out of money!
And if it does come out someday, you’ll probably never be able to make a profit out of it because you’ll have spent so much.
First commercial game experience
Demetrios is my first commercial game project (I’ve made games in the past, but none were publicly released). I can’t affirm I’m 100% right about everything, that my game will be a big success and becomes profitable. It’s still a matter of point of view, and I know some of you may disagree with some of the tips I have given.
But I’ve gathered here some experience I’ve learnt myself, or read from other game devs interviews and postmortems.
So far, so good : my game seems to be on the right track! I’m still on schedule, I haven’t spent a lot of (personal) money on it, despite Demetrios being a very ambitious, long and high-quality game (for a one-man company).
And I’ve got countless great feedback from everyone who played it and who can’t wait for the release!
If you’d like to try Demetrios, a demo is available here. You can help the project even more by voting for this game on Steam Greenlight.
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