Tell me about your story

[enothehippie]

I wanted to ask the community here about their successes and failures marketing an RPG maker title. Obviously we have success stories like To The Moon, but I'm sure there are tons of half done, never finished attempts, full fledged successes, and full fledged failures among the developers here.

I suppose my question is to ask maybe some who have attempted this before, and how well they succeeded or failed, and why. 

 

[Indinera]

I've got as many stories as I've got games ^^ but for the time being my most successful one would have to be the first Millennium (a 5-game series), a game that eventually made it to retail stores and Steam (via Greenlight), after a stop on several other portals. It took a bit more than one month to make

 

[phoenix_rossy]

It took a bit more than one month to make

Did I read that right? Or is my sun-frazzled brain playing tricks on me again?

 

[whitesphere]

A month does seem awfully short to create an entire game, as many of us found in the IGMC.

 

[Indinera]

Was about 40 days for Millennium 1. I'm a fast developer, in my breakthrough year (2009), I released 5 (very successful) commercial games they all made a lot of money without crowdfunding and Steam

 

[seita]

You'll have to tell us your secret Indinera! That's like an hour of content every 2 days.

For my story, I have a well documented postmortem of my kickstarter in my sig.

 

[Indinera]

I think some natural predispositions (as long as I can find a way to stay focused) as well as making many games over time. The more you make games, the "easier" it somewhat becomes.

 

[Solo]

The more you make games, the "easier" it somewhat becomes.

Good news

 

[Indinera]

Well you sure gain a lot of time when you know by heart where is everything bear in mind i've been using XP for most of my career, I might be the dev with the most XP games under my belt lol

 

[Solo]

Well you sure gain a lot of time when you know by heart where is everything bear in mind i've been using XP for most of my career, I might be the dev with the most XP games under my belt lol

I switched to Ace for my current project, and the mapping is utterly atrocious compared to XP. Oh, the luxury of THREE WHOLE map layers, SMART layer priority (with numbered levels, even!). *sigh*... How I miss it.  Ace doesn't even let you edit layers individually anymore (beyond the initial placement of upper-layer objects); it's like the map is "flattened" every time you place something, and if you want to redo anything on a specific layer, you basically have to redo it all! Autotiles are a mess as well; you've got less room to work with and everything tends to come out more "boxy" as a result.

The features in Ace that XP doesn't have are nice, though... and God bless that Yanfly!

 

[phoenix_rossy]

 and God bless that Yanfly!

I second that.

As for me, I stuck my hobby project up on Kickstarter to see if people would pay for it (and to help me pay for a composer). Turns out that they would! And so, the Data Hacker series was born! I've just that first game onto Steam, which is pretty cool. This is one of those careers that gets better & better as your brand becomes more and more well-known.

I also teach fundamental game development to home ed kids a couple of times per week, which helps to supplement the income from developing my own games. Besides which, I love doing it. 

I ALSO take on the business/publishing/marketing side of another indie title, using my contacts to try and boost the brand awareness more significantly than the developer could on their own. Besides, some people just want to make games and get paid for it - what I do allows for that. Once I've proved that this is the case, I'll start fishing for more clients I publish with heart, you see.

So in summary, I really try to dip my hands in different aspects of the industry to keep things exciting and fresh.

 

[Kes]

... and God bless that Yanfly!

I couldn't agree more!  Sure, there are lots of good scripters around, but Yanfly is the cream.

 

[Clord]

Let's not forget Moghunter either. Those who bother actually use his battle systems instead of just Yanfly's are on treat. Especially if you have the art to go with it.

 

[Kes]

However, although I accept that scripts have a big impact (see my post above on Yanfly), I do think that there's a bit of a danger in relying too heavily on them to make the difference to the game.  Take the Millennium series that was mentioned above (truly excellent games, and I recommend them to anyone thinking of developing a bigger game with lots of side quests to play.  You'll learn a lot, trust me) which being in XP has a far narrower range of scripts available.  Yet it won RPG Game of the year, and has been a very big seller.  What really makes the difference isn't the scripts, it's what you do with them.  If you've got the talent of an Indinera, then limited scripts don't stop you.  If you haven't got the talent, then you can have the best scripts in the world, and your game will still only be average.

 

[Solo]

However, although I accept that scripts have a big impact (see my post above on Yanfly), I do think that there's a bit of a danger in relying too heavily on them to make the difference to the game.  Take the Millennium series that was mentioned above (truly excellent games, and I recommend them to anyone thinking of developing a bigger game with lots of side quests to play.  You'll learn a lot, trust me) which being in XP has a far narrower range of scripts available.  Yet it won RPG Game of the year, and has been a very big seller.  What really makes the difference isn't the scripts, it's what you do with them.  If you've got the talent of an Indinera, then limited scripts don't stop you.  If you haven't got the talent, then you can have the best scripts in the world, and your game will still only be average.

Elements: Soul of Fire uses absolutely no custom scripts

The only things I personally altered were to make Evasion a visible stat in the menus and to fancy up the main menu/quit screen backgrounds.

 

[Indinera]

It's not really about scripts, but the story is close enough to be interesting. I'd decided to design 'Moonchild' only using RTP elements (save the title screen and the ending pics iirc), as I was interested to see how it would do. The game performed pretty well, close to other games with fancier resources. Goes to show the RTP is not such a big barrier as people make it to be. I then upgraded the game with original artworks for characters, as I try as much as possible to always feature original characters, but kept the rest.

 

[Simon D. Aelsi]

I'd like to talk about my epic failure, Princess of Peril. (You can still find a link somewhere if you want to torture yourself.) It was to be a fantasy survival game with a lot of puzzles, steath, and strategy. A few good silly scares once in a while, too.

In the end, it was a complete disaster. Players would get frustrated and ragequit. Mapping was alright in my opinion, of course not everyone thought so.

Th sprites were so badly made some people thought one half were mack and one half thought they were  XP.  Nope. Both were from mack bases. =/

The writing took a HUGE dive after the intro and--as a writer--that was a devastating blow.

The only saving graces for this project were its music and the unique mechanics.

After plenty of scathing reviews and some very helpful feedback, I'm remaking that into the game I know it can be.  I'm hoping for first releases near Christmastime.

 

[VicWhite]

I second that.

As for me, I stuck my hobby project up on Kickstarter to see if people would pay for it (and to help me pay for a composer). Turns out that they would! And so, the Data Hacker series was born! I've just that first game onto Steam, which is pretty cool. This is one of those careers that gets better & better as your brand becomes more and more well-known.

I also teach fundamental game development to home ed kids a couple of times per week, which helps to supplement the income from developing my own games. Besides which, I love doing it. 

I ALSO take on the business/publishing/marketing side of another indie title, using my contacts to try and boost the brand awareness more significantly than the developer could on their own. Besides, some people just want to make games and get paid for it - what I do allows for that. Once I've proved that this is the case, I'll start fishing for more clients I publish with heart, you see.

So in summary, I really try to dip my hands in different aspects of the industry to keep things exciting and fresh.

Congrats!!

 

[VicWhite]

Was about 40 days for Millennium 1. I'm a fast developer, in my breakthrough year (2009), I released 5 (very successful) commercial games they all made a lot of money without crowdfunding and Steam

Are you searching for a trainee? I can help you on you knew project in order to learn from you. I am a writer. I mean a professional writer willing to write games. If interested, PM me!

Thanks

 

[SomaelCK]

For me, my first commercial project Vision Spire Infini, a Persona 3 style JRPG/Dungeon Crawler, met an abrupt halt, due to my unrealistically over ambitious attempt to make 50+ hour JRPG with a lot of custom materials, arts, side-quests, mini-games(waiter, chef, farmer, and more) and animated video for major cutscenes. It's too big for me to carry on with my limited budget.

And I cannot use the crowd-funding sites such as Kickstarter effectively due to my country of origin. I have to make a hard decision from this hard learned lesson and halt the project. I wouldn't call it a complete failure tho. I learned a lot from it. I will come back to it once I have enough resources. You can check about it in my sig.

After VSI, I know my limit very well. So me and my artist decided to make a complete commercial game, with a realistic goal, and focus on what we are good at. It's called DarkEnd. Within a few months, the game got noticed on non-RM communities and finally got a publisher and finally ended up getting on Steam. The game is set to release in coming October on Steam and other gaming portals.

It's still to early to call it a "Success Story" tho. I dunno my game will do well or not, since I modeled it after a niche genre, a rouge-like dungeon crawler type. But for a total noob like me, everything is better than expected.