I have been reading with interest twitter comments and also a number of reviews of some recent games released into the Xblig service. I have also tried several (but not all) of these games on my Xbox.
A Group of Devs decided to upgrade the Xblig service and give it a much needed publicity and quality Boost. However the games chosen and are live now, have not quite had the impact that this group had hoped.
This group enabled devs to submit their game entries with a selection process, to enable the most qualified games to be a part of this promotion. Then there is a selection process to decide who gets into the final list of games. I LOVE the idea.
Or should i say... Loved the idea.
Me moaning...
Was all the decision and voting based on the look of the games? a short video stream demo of some of the gameplay. Certainly seems like it. In fact i love Xblig and Xna and my Xbox. I love the fact that some individuals are putting a lot of time and effort into trying to grow a brand or two, or just plain promote Xblig as a good place to go check out some cool games.
Well i had the chance to vote on the numerous title submissions, but i never did vote. I just couldn't. As I believe not in graphics or select video, but in gameplay itself(ahh i used the now outlawed gameplay word, smacks self (sic)). Ok, so i love the feel of a game, the way the platform jumping has a nice arc to it, or the way when you die you know why and know you can do better. The feel of a game is the most important thing to me, after that comes graphics and sound and stuff. So not being able to check out these games was something that made me abstain from voting. Now i must also add that i have nowhere near enough time to even play half of these games (which i find disappointing).
So then after the finalists are set, they MUST get their games done and into Xblig release by a certain time. OUCH, this is bad news, as some games take longer to develop than others, and anyone who has created games knows that they are always hard to finish, especially on a deadline. Usually i find that feel in a game is lost in favour of putting all the stuff we have designed and drawn into the game. (this btw, has happeend to me several times).
Ok, i have moaned enough about the fact i LOVE the idea of Devs getting together and doing a great promotion on several games that should knock ya socks off, and in the end they have come out and been mediocre to play. This i hope does not put all these wonderful people off trying again. Hopefully next time the vetting process can be refined a bit and we can actually get a set of Super Duper games to play. We all ned more good games.. right ?
IGSU i loved your concept.. I hope to Love it again next time.
Till then, keep on trying, cos the only way to fail is to give up.
Da Voodoochief
ps. I was no help in this promotion whatsoever and I am sad that i was absent.
Friday, September 9, 2011
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Good ideas are never abandoned, even if the people who came up with them abandon the project someone will pick it up and try to take it further, to make it work.
ReplyDeleteSomeone has to, right?
We started with about 70 titles in the IGSU, most with descriptions, video, and screen shots. From there we went down to 25 titles. Those 25 were primarily chosen based on those supplied assets, as it was realistically too much work to playtest 70 games for all the developers we wanted involved in selecting the games. The cutting down to 25 was done by myself and 3 others.
ReplyDeleteFrom those 25 games, we went down to 8. This was a process we involved all XBLIG developers to be involved in. Most of the games did have playtest versions available though not all did. Ideally developers would have played each game and placed their votes based on that. Did they? I don't know for sure. Also of note, at this point many of these games were not done so you couldn't really fully judge what the final product would be like.
The final 2 votes were done by fans. This again was based on the available media and descriptions (plus also the developer's ability to promote their game with fans).
One of the big complaints I heard from the Winter Uprising was that other developers didn't feel like they were involved enough in the process. This time we went out of our way to involve everyone. Was that the best way to go? Were there other better games left out? It's hard to say. We definitely found some games in this list that turned out really good but a few gamers overall seem to find questionable too. Should we do another Uprising like event, all these issues and everything we learned will need to be considered.
Thank you for detailing the process you took for IGSU Kris. I really did not want my post to overly negative. I really think this wa s agood try and hopefully next time it can reach more to it's true potential (i see it being HUGE!!!).
ReplyDeleteHere is a link to a recent wrap up that @Kriswd40 (twitter) posted.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-09-download-games-roundup-review