Time to show off some goodies! And by goodies I mean screenshots from my newest game, Spandex Force: Superhero U. I started the project with a single tagline in mind: “A mix between X-Men and Harry Potter, sprinkled with absurd humor á la Spandex Force,” and so far I think that I’m fulfilling most of what I aimed to accomplish.

The title screen in all its glory.

A friendly dispute with the resident mad scientist head of the Eccentric Research department.

Battle harmless weightlifting equipment!

Diffuse nasty bombs!

Defeat weak old supervillains!

And much much more! Spandex Force: Superhero U is scheduled for release by November/December, and I’m this close to having a fully playable first episode (out of six) ready. Many things will probably change from the screenshots above, but it’s starting to look pretty good now.

“What’s going on,” people who stumble onto this blog wonder. “Where did Karja go? Did he quit blogging and developing games and whatnot?” Of course not! But lately I’ve realized something very important:

A one-man game company is an incredibly fragile thing.

“Well, duh,” the observant and cynical reader comments. “That’s obvious!” Yes, indeed it is. But – as with so many other things – it’s very different to know something and to experience it firsthand.

When I was developing Wildhollow I ran into some difficulties. In the spring of 2009 the game lay nigh-on-finished but I couldn’t bring myself to complete it. Personal issues were messing with me (and of course, I went to China for a couple of months over summer too) and the entire project just came to a full stop. Interestingly enough, almost the same thing happened this spring, with Spandex Force: Superhero U. This time I lost the motivation completely; I watched countless hours of TV series instead of working on my li’l hobby project or writing on Cynical Stuff.

I know that I’ll finish my projects (I was planning on an August release for Spandex Force: Superhero U, but I’m going for a Christmas release instead), but sometimes the amount of work involved feels pretty overwhelming. You think making a polished game is just fun and…well…games? In both the case of Wildhollow and Spandex Force: Superhero U I had the main gameplay in place after a couple of months; the rest of the time is spent on spicing up the storylines, writing dialogue, adding effects, polishing the GUI system, etc etc. There’s always a ton of work to do that you (well, maybe not specifically you but people in general) don’t think about. Here’s a quote from Bytten’s Wildhollow review:

This time around [KarjaSoft] expand their catalogue of excellent games with another polished effort. [...] As usual for a KarjaSoft title, the most striking feature of Wildhollow is, without a doubt, the immaculate presentation. From a seamless install, to a seemingly bug free playthrough, and a clean uninstall – everything worked perfectly. It’s hard to find fault with such a professional offering.

This is not just tooting my own horn; I know that there are gameplay issues with all of my games. But I do pride myself on trying to make the best of what I have to work with. That includes making the game as polished as I can with my meager budget and limited art skills that I apply to GUI work and game design features. And that takes time.

But the fun doesn’t stop there! Even when I have a completed game, there are other things to take care of. The game webpage, writing press releases, contacting distributors, setting up the payment system, playing other games to see what the competition is doing (woe is me – such a hard task), planning where to go with my next game(s), thinking of my long term strategy…and worrying about making the games profitable.

It would be incredibly nice to have someone to share the burden with, but at the same time I feel pretty good about accomplishing what I do.

So, what’s the status of Spandex Force: Superhero U? It’s most certainly alive and kicking, and I have some interesting plans for it. Some of my plans have changed, and some things have been improved – but I’ll save that for another blog post in a couple of days. Maybe I’d better take some screenshots as well by then.

If you’re a productive developer/artist/designer with panache and humor, feel free to contact me about game project collaborations. I ain’t found anyone yet, but I’m open for suggestions!

I never realized how much I needed a smartphone until I bought an HTC Desire. This li’l gadget is simply amazing – Internet, games, VNC, FTP, apps for every occasion and much more! It’s hard to imagine that I’m writing this while having a beer in the warm Swedish sun.

One interesting thing is that it supports Flash; guess who’s going to have to make sure Spandex Force 2 runs well on it…

Now maybe I can find the time and will to update the blog more often.

I have an ever-growing file with ideas for various games and applications. A few years ago it contained a few gems like Grabble (Grammar Scrabble) in which you place words instead of letters and have to form grammatically correct sentences, and DoodlePad which was a text editor much like Notepad, but with the possibility to add simple illustrations by drawing with the mouse. Sometimes these ideas result in an actual product, but most of the time they never get further than concept stage…or a few lines in the ideas.txt file.

For fun I decided to check what I wrote a year or two ago. These are different game concepts that may or may not result in actual games later:

• TV show production game. Create small game shows and try to get good network ratings.
• Ninja school. That’s all I wrote – I guess it pretty much says it all!
• Game continuity. A game where the player dies but continues with his offspring. Affecting the game world results in changes for the next incarnation too.
• SimCity + Viva Pinata. Prepare environment for citizens to join. E.g. a doctor requires sick people and wealth, and provides health. The player never has active control over the citizens.
• Woggle or Worggle. Word-Boggle. Same idea as Grabble, but make a simple Boggle game where you have to string up sentences from words.
• “Modern fantasy.” A fantasy world that was common fantasy ~1000 years ago but have evolved. How would elves, men and dwarves live in a more modern setting?
• Vampire adventure game. Oh, so many snarky Twilight parodies that could be included…
• “Closed system RPG.” Nothing is ever added to the game world: killing enemies doesn’t give experience points – it gives you the person’s life force. Money is never created, it only shifts hands. The same thing with weapons and armor. Includes autonomous heroes/villains that “level up” just like the player.

Fun fun fun! A few of these might actually end up in real projects, if I only get my game development up to speed. I wonder if I should have a look at the ideas from five years ago too, to see what else I was thinking of…

I recently saw a couple of blog posts discussing the price point of indie games. Here’s a good writeup by Dave Gilbert, author of games like The Shivah and The Blackwell Legacy. Another good piece is the How to Afford that $15 Indie Game comic. Be sure to read the comments there for a variety of opinions.

Like so many other indie developers I’m finding myself on the fence regarding this. $15 and $19.99 is often a lot of money for an indie game, but I think that a price point of below $5 is ridiculous. That’s pocket change. That’s also one of the reasons I’m not considering porting my games to iPhone or iPad or i-whatever – it’s impossible to charge anything worthwhile there, and the amount of sales required to make any kind of money is ridiculously high.

All in all, I think that $15 is a good price for a decently long indie game. Maybe $10, if it’s just a couple of hours’ worth of gameplay. But that means a proper game of course – not just a cute single-screen timewaster with a clever innovative game mechanic. It’s a little like calling the kettle black, but in my own mind there’s a difference between simple flash games and a game that’s crafted to deliver a story or provide a progression of sorts.

“Wait a second,” says the observant reader. “If you’re so bleedin’ keen on selling games for $10-$15, how come your newest game Wildhollow is priced at $19.99?!”

Good question! The answer is that I don’t want to charge $20 for a game, but due to simple economics I’m pretty much forced to do so. My business model dictates that if I want to continue to make games, each game must make more than it costs to produce. This is so that I can afford higher production values for each new game – which in turn (in theory at least) will generate higher profits for the newer games. My ultimate goal is to produce very good games with very good production values.

With Wildhollow I made a couple of bad design decisions, and the end result isn’t perfect by any means. But the game has sold more than it cost to make, which means that it’s good enough for quite a few people to buy at a price of $19.99. My guess, before launching the game, was that the amount of extra people that would have bought the game at $10 or $15 would not have resulted in a higher profit than what I’m getting right now. And I firmly believe that that assessment was correct.

For my next game, working title Spandex Force: Superhero U, I have high hopes for a larger potential customer base which might mean a lower price. However, I’m also increasing the production budget, so nothing is set in stone…

My latest game Wildhollow was released before Christmas, and while I’m still no millionaire it’s selling enough to finance my next project. I’ll do a proper Wildhollow postmortem later, but right now I’m going to babble on about upcoming things. Interestingly enough, when I started working in Wildhollow it was just going to be a quick intermediate game before my next real project, Spandex Force 2. Stuff(TM) got in the way, though, and in the end I got delayed about a year. But now I’m back on track again, and the next game has the working title Spandex Force: Superhero U.

Just a crappy placeholder logo. Artwork and final title is still pending.

I’m pretty excited about this game for a number of reasons. If everything goes as planned, these are some of the highlights:

• More puzzles and more game types
• Battle mechanics innovations
• More customization with skill trees, sidekicks and items
• Wacky superheroes/villains combined with a superhero university setting. “X-Men meets The Tick meets Harry Potter.”
• Larger budget for backgrounds and (hopefully) GUI artwork
• Some voice acting, if the budget allows
• Possibly some online battles…
• And finally, I’m aiming for a release before summer

Another big thing about this game is that I’m trying a new development platform: Actionscript 3/Flash, which opens up a lot of new possibilities… I have some very cool ideas for that, but I need to see if everything is feasible first.

So yeah, this is what I’ve been occupying my time with for a number of weeks now. If nothing unforeseen comes along I think the schedule might hold, but we shall just have to wait and see…