Open letter to devs part II

[MegaManV]

I think it should all be screenshots that tell a story in the same way that a child that can't read will imagine what a story is about when they look in a kids book at the pictures. For an example, if it were Space Invaders the first image should show the invader shooting at you with more than one frame in the image to show the path of the shot about to hit you, the second image should be you dodging and the explosion next to you, the third image should show a path like the first of your shot going up to an invader, the fourth should show the invader shot, etc. Then each screenshot should label the actions like "Space Invaders are attacking planet Earth!", "Dodge their lethal attacks!", "Blast them out of the sky!", etc. So, it would have a picture is worth a thousands words story mixed with the actual word story. It would show the gameplay with a story but since Space Invaders is simplistic the story in the screenshots would set you up for the game by giving you a story about you saving the planet so that not only a high score is your objective.

This is exactly how games used to be packaged back in the day, starting with the Atari 2600!

This is the way I view browsing games on Discover: 'Ouya game tile'(ie the icon that represents your game in the store /on Play) = front of digital box. Whatever image you use here becomes the boxart for your Ouya title.

Details= back of the box. Whatever you put on here is extremely important, as it needs to spark that 'why not/ and or this looks interesting' that hooks them and prompts them to give a it download. Also the video could be thought as equalvilent to a videogame tv ad.


It should flow like this: Customer walks into store(Discover) and starts browsing the shelves for this weekend's game, suddenly one of the games catches their eyes and they grab it off the shelf(highlighting the icon). They take a moment to soak in the nifty cover art crafted by a talented artist. Intrigued, they flip over to the back of the box(Details) and their eyes begin scanning it from top to bottom- the gears in their head turning. Something in the screenshots or 'back story'(Description) clicks w/ them-their curiosity piqued, they take the game down to the check out(Download).

[zeha]

By the way, now that I see your username, I think your Ouya controller graphic will be in my (soon to be published) game!

Cool which game are you working on?

[Foppy]

Cool which game are you working on?

Thunder Desert GP, I think I will publish it today.

[Jon_TWR]

Thunder Desert GP, I think I will publish it today.

DAMN! I was hoping for Foppy Beard!

[zeha]

Wow I just checked a video, it reminds me very much of Super Cycle very nice! Hope to play it soon

edit: played it ;-) really cool, and you even credited me :-D

[spinal]

The main thing that bugs me about screenshots on the OUYA, is that people insist on using old Android screenshots that show on screen controls. This imho should be against OUYAs rules. The whole point of OUYA, is that we have a real controller and no touch screen. This is just laziness on the part of the developers and spits in the face of OUYA.

[Schizophretard]

This is exactly how games used to be packaged back in the day, starting with the Atari 2600!

This is the way I view browsing games on Discover: 'Ouya game tile'(ie the icon that represents your game in the store /on Play) = front of digital box. Whatever image you use here becomes the boxart for your Ouya title.

Details= back of the box. Whatever you put on here is extremely important, as it needs to spark that 'why not/ and or this looks interesting' that hooks them and prompts them to give a it download. Also the video could be thought as equalvilent to a videogame tv ad.


It should flow like this: Customer walks into store(Discover) and starts browsing the shelves for this weekend's game, suddenly one of the games catches their eyes and they grab it off the shelf(highlighting the icon). They take a moment to soak in the nifty cover art crafted by a talented artist. Intrigued, they flip over to the back of the box(Details) and their eyes begin scanning it from top to bottom- the gears in their head turning. Something in the screenshots or 'back story'(Description) clicks w/ them-their curiosity piqued, they take the game down to the check out(Download).

Yep. Another thing that was a cool hook for Atari 2600 was that it was right after dedicated Pong consoles with very little game variations but before option menus. You had to use the select button for all the combinations of options like easy with 5 lives, easy with 9 lives, hard with bigger ship and 3 lives, etc. So, they would give huge numbers of game variations that would make one game sound like a lot of them which it technically is because it changes gameplay. The Atari Video Computer System is 20 cartridges with 1300 game variations you play on your own TV set. Don't watch television tonight. Play it. :



I think it would be cool if some OUYA developers calculated all the different combinations of variations in their option menus to give huge numbers like that in their details as a tribute to all these options that we take for granted today. It would be cool if OUYA did a parody commercial like that too: The OUYA is a new kind of open video game console with hundreds of games with millions of game variations to open up your TV to almost unlimited gameplay because every OUYA is a dev kit made for gamers and by gamers. Don't just play on your TV tonight. Open it.

[Paul Laimal-Convoy]

If I can talk not only about Ouya here, but about Google Play games, too., then here are the things almost guaranteed to lose my interest:

- Incorrect English.
I couldn't care less if the dev team is just "two guys in Hong Kong who are passionate for games". If they can't check their spelling and grammar, how can I trust them to check the code for bugs and the gameplay for glitches?

- Cluttered Screenshots
Concept/promotional art all over the screenshots, multiple screenshots in one picture (often at " whacky" angles), all reduce what I can see and make me believe you're hiding something.

- No technical capabilities.
I'm not interested in "smooth gameplay". I'm interested in terms like " touch controls ", " virtual joystick ", " Google Play/in-house online play", "Moga support", etc. I want to know what your game can DO (as much as what it can't).

- Freemium
You're already starting with a handicap if I smell " free to play". If I see no evidence of a "premium" or equivalent version (or iap that does the same trick), then you're losing me.

- No demo/trial
What's that? You expect me to buy your game without a demo, with only screenshots and a video to base my purchase on? Would you pay over 15 dollars to see a 3D movie based solely on radio commercials? Yeah, me neither.

- Big Publishers
Hiding your game behind publishers like Bulkypix, Gamesoft, EA and other big names might seem like a great idea, but those self-same publishers are also infamous for hardly replying to or helping customers who've had iap's not work (no refunds!), giving little or no technical support and in many cases giving no email address to contact them at Google Play in the first place. If you publish the game yourself, then you will be able to respond to and hopefully help customers a lot faster (or at all) than big, ambivalent publishers, which can create customer loyalty.

- Geo-Restrictions
What's this? Tying language and location together to either restrict the language of the version available in that region and/or removing the game or service from that country? We all thought that practice died when DVDs did. Even better is when countries get butchered localised versions (because the Chinese just LOVED that lovely China-only version of "Plants vs Zombies 2", right? Right?).

- Vague Update information.
" Bug fixes " doesn't help me. Be honest; tell me what you've done to improve the game.

- Poor contact information.
If I can't see an email address to contact you at Google Play, this reduces my interest. It infers that you are not interested in and thus don't care about your customers. Other related aspects of this include email addresses with auto-replies telling me to visit a forum or site (Why not just put the link at Google Play, or better yet, just write "F@ck you" in the auto reply instead?), giving only a link to a forum or site at Google Play (often to a site that ISN'T MOBILE BROWSER COMPATIBLE) or expecting me to join a new service just to send you a message you're not going to read anyway (ie: Firemonkeys).

- No hardware controller support.
Obviously, games like Angry Birds don't need hardware controls (even though Angry Birds DOES support mouse controls), but if you're making a genre of game traditionally associated with hardware controls, then it's common sense to include such controls these days for mobile. Even if it's going to come out soon after the "casual" version is released as an update, then please state this in the description.

[zeha]

What also annoys me are most of the videos in the Discover store. Yes, if you make a cool trailer, then you probably want to have your company logo in the beginning, and create tension and bla. You can do that. But not for the Discover store. When I'm in Discover, I browse about 5-10 games, and install a few of them, and then go to Play to try them. And what I want to see immediately is GAMEPLAY. But for most games, the first thing I see is (after a few seconds of blackness, because the video takes a while to load already) some stupid "blabla software presents.... babaaam... the greatest game of all times... behold...." stuff which actually makes me skip the video and just look at the screenshots instead. If I like what I see, I might come back to the video and sit through the intro until I finally see some gamplay.

I don't know if other people here also feel like that. But for my case, when I'm browsing through Discover, I'm really not in the mood for long video intros, I just want to see what the gameplay looks like, immediately. What do you think?

[Magnesus]

Good point. It would be wiser to show gameplay, then logo and then more gameplay.