Best to Announce First or Deliver First?

[+Gemintronic]

How do people feel about works in progress topics? If you announce first people more excited by hearing the progress but risk appointment if the developer fails to produce. If you announce when version 1 comes out one must keep tight lipped and not share the joy. I personally find myself feeding off of community support and excitement during development. But, I also understand failing to deliver makes one look like an arse bandit.

 

Any thoughts fellas?

 

UPDATE: Don't want to hijack the newest topic with a bump. I'll just say thanks for the input so far. Seems announce close to release is the way to go. You get feedback. It gets finished. You just have to suck it up when changes effect a whole lotta other stuff.

Edited July 29, 2010 by theloon

[Dan Iacovelli]

I announced laserman in stages before the final version came out

[+5-11under]

I've got a couple of unfinished games that were publicized... but I couldn't get the gameplay the way I envisioned... so fom now on, if I announce something, it's a lot closer to being completed.

 

5-11under

[KevinMos3]

I say don't announce until you have something solid to show for it and then once it's announced, for goodness sake complete it. Otherwise, I and probably others reserve the right to chase you down with sticks.

[+Nathan Strum]

I think the best results tend to happen when the basic fundamentals of the gameplay are in place, then the developer seeks feedback from the forums. This can really help polish a game, and uncover deficiencies before the coding is too far along to address them. The trick is being able to sift through all of the suggestions, picking out the best, and discarding ones that don't forward your vision for the game.

 

Homebrew games almost always improve to some degree from feedback. There are a number of games that were developed in private or were overlooked during development that really didn't get the sort of fine-tuning they needed. And sometimes it doesn't take much.

[polyex]

Unless you really need advice on gameplay etc, that you can't possibly get from anyone close to you, I would not announce anything until its done.

[+CyranoJ]

I wouldn't announce anything until it is done - especially if it is for the Jaguar.

[ls650]

Never announce anything unless and until you have a solid release to show.

[youki]

I would say also don't announce if you don't have something concrete you are sure to be able to deliver.

 

If you need feed back, provide beta version at a selected , restricted and trusted bunch of beta tester.

 

Then release.

 

You can do a WIP , if you need help or motivation , on first projects you do. But don't "announce".

[+GroovyBee]

I don't have a fixed way of doing it. I only announce games when there is an actual "game" going. There are a couple of my games I haven't released binaries for because it doesn't feel quite "there" to me. With hindsight Tempest was probably released too early. However, if I'm aiming for an event like CGE then its all under wraps until the big day.

 

No matter what game you do definitely get yourself a good bunch of beta testers for your development platform of choice.

[beoran]

Once I've started a game projects on another other forums where hundreds of people weighed in with comments, but the amount of people actually willing to contribute in a meaningful way dwindled quickly to one (me), so the project withered away. Such communal project tend to be unsucessful because too many cooks spoil the broth, and those with the most difficult to implement ideas are also those who are least willing to actually help you out.

 

It's my experience that for a game project, it's best to wait until you have something playable. Ideally, you should even wait until you you think the game is almost completely done. Which probably means you're about halfway there in reality, due to all the bug fixes and fine-tuning you'll still have to do. I released my Atari 2600 game Ature when I thought it was almost finished, which turned out to still need quite a bit of improvement from the feedback I got.

 

The main reason I think it's best to do it like that is that it's difficult to see whether a game will be fun or not just by looking at it's ideas, until you actually implement (most of) it. If you just launch an idea, or a game that is barely playable, you'll get a lot of unhelpful comments. As I said before, too many cooks spoil the broth, certainly for home brew games!

 

Finally, I think it's very annoying to announce you are "working" on a game, but not give us anything to play with! We're here to make games, or play games, but not to be your personal cheer leaders. If you are unsure about your ideas or approach before the game is anywhere near completion, it might be best to ask a few people if they care to be individual beta testers for you.

[+SpiceWare]

Announce your WIP when you have something to show. The feedback I received for Medieval Mayhem was fundamental in how well it turned out. I showed the WIP in 2 places: my blog and in the forums. The blog tended to have more technical contributions while the forum had more gameplay feedback. Both had suggests I hadn't thought of, like the brick texture in the castle walls and the flash when the bricks were hit (the arcade version didn't have it, so I wasn't planning to implement it), that added a lot to the polish of the final version.

 

Conversely Stay Frosty, in Stella's Stocking was only shown to an extremely small group and lacks polish, such as in the uneven progression of difficulty as you work thru the levels. It's still a fun game, but could easily have been pushed to the next level. Of course the small group may have been acceptable if there weren't 7 projects(5 games, menu and the new 64K board) in the 2-3 month timeframe we had.

 

As Nathan mentions, it's important to make sure you use the suggestions that follow your vision as your game is not a communal project.

 

One other thing I noticed is the suggestions will fly fast and furious at the end of development. That's not an issue if you don't have a deadline(such as wanting to release at CGE), but I was planning to give copies of MM to family members for Christmas so some ideas for MM that would have been interesting to implement I was unable to. If those ideas had been suggested a few weeks sooner they might have made it into the finished version.

 

If you have ROM space it's also nice to acknowledge those who helped be it with code, ideas you used and/or gameplay feedback, as I did with the Dancing Dragon easter egg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5huVcpYPzs

Edited August 13, 2010 by SpiceWare

[+Gemintronic]

Wow. This topic is solid gold for anyone getting into homebrew. Thanks for the input! So far I've been able to avoid annoying people (too much) by posting %99.99 complete games. I think for longer games It'll be ramblings in my blog and builds with solid progress in a topic elsewhere.

[Kiwi]

 

If you have ROM space it's also nice to acknowledge those who helped be it with code, ideas you used and/or gameplay feedback, as I did with the Dancing Dragon easter egg.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5huVcpYPzs

 

This Dragon Dance Easter egg have been stuck in my mind all day at work. I only seen screen shot of this game before seeing this video. I'm very impress how the dragon animates so fluidly on the Atari 2600. I thought it just that one dragon sprite. Making such sprite on the Atari 2600 is no easy task. The dragon sprite must have taken a long time to make since you're working with 2 sprites. It would have to be line up properly, and double resolution part of the way when it needed to be bigger. Very awesome job.

 

To add to the topic, I prefer wait til the project is done. I have a bad habit of stopping a project in the middle. I either delay that project for a long time until I am in a mood to continue working on it. I have a lot of project that I done in my free time that aren't done. Some projects I did, did get done, were ones that would take about 5-6 hours to do.

Edited August 20, 2010 by Kiwi

[Devin]

UPDATE: Don't want to hijack the newest topic with a bump. I'll just say thanks for the input so far. Seems announce close to release is the way to go. You get feedback. It gets finished. You just have to suck it up when changes effect a whole lotta other stuff.

 

I'm in favor of announcing early - as long as you have some sort of binary that they can look at. It is a great opportunity to get feedback and suggestions that can incorporated as you design the game.

 

I released a very early, preliminary, version of my boxing game. The feedback and suggestions from the AtariAgers (AtariAgians?) was invaluable. When I was working on the boxing game, it was almost like a team effort.

 

So, take advantage of the AtariAgese (AtariAgolinos?).

Edited August 20, 2010 by Devin

[+SpiceWare]

I'm very impress how the dragon animates so fluidly on the Atari 2600. I thought it just that one dragon sprite. Making such sprite on the Atari 2600 is no easy task. The dragon sprite must have taken a long time to make since you're working with 2 sprites. It would have to be line up properly, and double resolution part of the way when it needed to be bigger. Very awesome job.

Thanks! Espire8 made 32 images in all for the dragon, 27 for in-game use and an additional 5 for the easter egg. He also choreographed all the animation sequences (took us a bit of back & forth to get that correctly done). You can see prelimary frames in this reply of the Medieval Mayhem topic.

 

The sprite is double resolution on all lines - it individually shifts each sprite left/right on every scanline to make the overall sprite wider than 8 pixels. I figured out how to do it after playing Dolphin (post 4 and post 9). I wrote a converter tool that you can try out. Just copy/paste one of the test URLs into the GIF URL box, click LOAD IMAGE, make sure the 2 colors values are the red and yellow numbers then click SHOW RESULTS.

[Cliff Friedel]

I personally don't mind announcing before you build if you are looking for ideas and want input before you begin. If you have an idea and are working though, then I would say wait until you have at least a preliminary release that people can try out. Having something tangible lets people test it and get involved and that pushes the project forward, at least in my experience.