New Sites, New Strategy, New Games (somewhat)
I've changed the strategy and focus for ZodLogic Games from what it was last year.
The overall goals are the same. Just the way we go about it have changed.
For starters, I'm getting away from providing online games. Particularly Flash games. There are several problems with that model, the biggest of which is that I found myself slippery-sloping into a situation where, from a user's perspective, I was providing Just Another Site With Lots of Free Games. Which is a commodity. And it's a really bad idea to start a business that has commodity economics to it. Secondly, I was trying to monetize it by offering premium passes, rather than the more common approach of hosting advertising. I didn't like the advertising approach for two reasons. You generally have to have a high traffic site, with people who click-through on the ads. I certainly didn't start with that situation, and it's hard to grow into that. Not impossible just hard. Also, I generally dislike forcing people to see advertisements. Advertisements are a necessary evil. Sometimes they are necessary. But they are a form of evil. They often make the world a worse place. Even if just at a cognitive level. That said, any business needs to advertise their own products and services, at least to get the initial word out. So I'm not opposed to buying and placing advertisements promoting my own stuff. I just don't like carrying them for others. Luckily, there's no real moral dilemma here because my own stuff hasn't had high enough of a traffic that it would be attractive for others as a channel, anyway.
Enough rambling.
We're switching to a model where we only provide downloadable computer games. And possibly board/card games. We'll provide free demos, plus, a for-pay premium version. With downloadable games, it reduces load on the servers and simplifies the site architecture and maintenance needs quite a bit. And allows users to play with sporadic or even no Internet access at all.
We're also going to focus on one game at time. Rather than the "shotgun blast" approach I tried earlier -- spending a little time designing and fleshing out several games, in parallel (in round-robin, really). Again, I want to get away from making a "commodity" product, and instead offer something which is unique (relatively) and has personality. Like Dead By Zombie.
Speaking of Dead By Zombie. I evaluated the games on the old site, and decided the one game that had the most potential but also the worst problems, was Dead By Zombie. It also had the most personality. And as they said in Pulp Fiction, personality goes a long way. It's biggest problem of the web-style implementation was the latency on the user request roundtrip. I knew when I made that design decision that it could end up being it's Achilles Heel. And it was, somewhat. Even with a fast server, unloaded, you could just never get a really super snappy input feedback. Not as snappy as you could with a desktop-native, monolithic (as opposed to client/server split) architecture. With curses. Dead By Zombie has the rather weird developmental history that when I first set about making it, from scratch, I knew I wanted to make a game with a Rogue-like UI and engine style. But I wanted to challenge myself, and do it as a web app -- meaning, HTML and HTTP. I thought it would be fun, interesting, challenging -- it just had that geek factor. And it did. It was fun. I learned alot when I was designing it, developing the underlying architecture of the code, figuring out how to support it, how to model everything. And I think I did a decent job at it. But at the end of the day, we still had this situation where a web UI could never be as snappy as a desktop-native-monolithic one. So I knew I had to make the leap. I actually "ported" a Rogue-like from a web-based architecture to curses. It's rather funny if you think about it. And you understand the relationship between Rogue-likes and curses. (Or curses-like libraries, I should say. Curses-likes?)
Free demo.
If you like and want more -- a bigger world, with more game play potential, more places, NPC's, more story, a bigger plot, etc. -- then there is a Premium version upgrade for sale. For a mere $4.99. While supplies last. Get yours now. Ladies, no shoving please!
Dead By Zombie:
http://zodlogic.webfactional.com/deadbyzombie/
The overall goals are the same. Just the way we go about it have changed.
For starters, I'm getting away from providing online games. Particularly Flash games. There are several problems with that model, the biggest of which is that I found myself slippery-sloping into a situation where, from a user's perspective, I was providing Just Another Site With Lots of Free Games. Which is a commodity. And it's a really bad idea to start a business that has commodity economics to it. Secondly, I was trying to monetize it by offering premium passes, rather than the more common approach of hosting advertising. I didn't like the advertising approach for two reasons. You generally have to have a high traffic site, with people who click-through on the ads. I certainly didn't start with that situation, and it's hard to grow into that. Not impossible just hard. Also, I generally dislike forcing people to see advertisements. Advertisements are a necessary evil. Sometimes they are necessary. But they are a form of evil. They often make the world a worse place. Even if just at a cognitive level. That said, any business needs to advertise their own products and services, at least to get the initial word out. So I'm not opposed to buying and placing advertisements promoting my own stuff. I just don't like carrying them for others. Luckily, there's no real moral dilemma here because my own stuff hasn't had high enough of a traffic that it would be attractive for others as a channel, anyway.
Enough rambling.
We're switching to a model where we only provide downloadable computer games. And possibly board/card games. We'll provide free demos, plus, a for-pay premium version. With downloadable games, it reduces load on the servers and simplifies the site architecture and maintenance needs quite a bit. And allows users to play with sporadic or even no Internet access at all.
We're also going to focus on one game at time. Rather than the "shotgun blast" approach I tried earlier -- spending a little time designing and fleshing out several games, in parallel (in round-robin, really). Again, I want to get away from making a "commodity" product, and instead offer something which is unique (relatively) and has personality. Like Dead By Zombie.
Speaking of Dead By Zombie. I evaluated the games on the old site, and decided the one game that had the most potential but also the worst problems, was Dead By Zombie. It also had the most personality. And as they said in Pulp Fiction, personality goes a long way. It's biggest problem of the web-style implementation was the latency on the user request roundtrip. I knew when I made that design decision that it could end up being it's Achilles Heel. And it was, somewhat. Even with a fast server, unloaded, you could just never get a really super snappy input feedback. Not as snappy as you could with a desktop-native, monolithic (as opposed to client/server split) architecture. With curses. Dead By Zombie has the rather weird developmental history that when I first set about making it, from scratch, I knew I wanted to make a game with a Rogue-like UI and engine style. But I wanted to challenge myself, and do it as a web app -- meaning, HTML and HTTP. I thought it would be fun, interesting, challenging -- it just had that geek factor. And it did. It was fun. I learned alot when I was designing it, developing the underlying architecture of the code, figuring out how to support it, how to model everything. And I think I did a decent job at it. But at the end of the day, we still had this situation where a web UI could never be as snappy as a desktop-native-monolithic one. So I knew I had to make the leap. I actually "ported" a Rogue-like from a web-based architecture to curses. It's rather funny if you think about it. And you understand the relationship between Rogue-likes and curses. (Or curses-like libraries, I should say. Curses-likes?)
Free demo.
If you like and want more -- a bigger world, with more game play potential, more places, NPC's, more story, a bigger plot, etc. -- then there is a Premium version upgrade for sale. For a mere $4.99. While supplies last. Get yours now. Ladies, no shoving please!
Dead By Zombie:
http://zodlogic.webfactional.com/deadbyzombie/
posted by Mike Kramlich / ZodLogic at 5:23 PM
0 comments
