Hmm. This is a thought that had occurred to me -- the comparisons to the Valley games, not the one to Drox, particularly.
I don't really see this as an ARPG particularly, although I guess you could class it as that in some ways. The line of reasoning that led us here was as follows:
1. We need a combat minigame. Originally this was side-view 1v1. Kind of vaguely inspired by FTL, though only in the loosest sense.
2. Okay, that got boring fast. After many attempts to fix, let's instead go with our old standby of RTS.
3. Okay, that was promising, but quickly we ran into the problems of "space is empty" and all the related early balance problems.
4. Okay, let's solve that in the way that AI War did with guard posts, etc, in adding the "constellations" of turrets, etc. And let's add some extra direct flagship abilities in there, too, because the player often does not have enough to do. But now the combat is a lot more fiddly.
5. All right, let's strip this WAAAY back and just focus on you and your one ship. This needs to be more streamlined, because the RTS controls of the other mode was just getting extremely cumbersome and time consuming. While we're at this, let's integrate way better with the solar map, as well as having multi-factional battles, etc.
6. All right, that is actually working out really well, but I feel like I am just mostly driving my ship around and very rarely using abilities. There needs to be something more for the player to DO throughout the gameplay experience. Enter the direct guns on the left mouse button.
7. Now we're getting somewhere! But we have a problem with the player ship either feeling underwhelming in an un-fun way, or being way OP. There need to be more enemy ships to compensate, so the unit counts need to go way up. Perfect! Now we feel like Batman in space. I'm having loads of fun.
And that's the story of how we got from point A to point B. If we wanted to make a Paradox-type game, we could just abstract away the combat and not actually show it, etc. But that would be very graphically boring for one thing, as well as I feel a lot less compelled by games like that (Risk and a few others aside). Context-switching in games actually can be super successful in terms of adjusting the pacing of what is going on. The good Final Fantasy games have a mixture of combat, story, exploration, and town/shopping segments. AI War has a mixture of base building, tactical combat, scouting, grand strategy, tower defense, etc.
Context switches are good, which is why I've been so keen to retain a combat element here. And I do feel like the current combat model is very fun. Is it too divorced from the main gameplay, though? That I do worry about some.
The problem with the Valley 2 platforming segments is that they were "let's prove you can do this" pieces. In other words, there were no real decisions to make in a grander scope during those platforming segments. They were fun and tactical if you like that sort of play (which I very much do -- I love Valley 2, actually). But they were basically just a "skill check" in terms of the wider strategic game. The thing I want to avoid in TLF is having that be the same thing. I don't know that we really have that problem at the moment, or that we have a huge amount of that problem, anyway. You aren't just fighting waves of anonymous bad guys, you're actually destroying stuff that is then gone in the larger strategic game. You can make decisions on destroying civilian things, etc, that also affect the larger strategic game.
Is there a missing ingredient? Maybe. My thoughts:
1. Some of the combats may be too long.
2. We may need more in-combat things that provide alternative non-fighting ways of winning.
3. Directly aiming and firing guns and triggering abilities is something that simply may bother a lot of people. I love it, but I can see why those looking for a pure strategy game would be turned off by that. I'm not sure there's anything to be done about that.
In terms of the viability of the Valley games versus AI War, Valley continues to find an audience as well. On Steam last year, the Valley games earned $109.5k. That's not counting any of the bundles they were in off of Steam. By contrast, last year Skyward earned $125k on Steam, and AI War earned somewhere a little north of $200k. Given that AI War is much older, that's obviously a lot more impressive in some ways. But it also has a ton of expansions, etc, and in general has more ways of making money. So there is that.
Valley is very much still being played these days, but it doesn't have a thriving community like AI War I think mainly because it is just something that people play on their own, with no real explanations needed, and then put down. There are a lot of games like that. AI War is more about larger discussion and complexity and sharing crazy stories, etc. My hope is that the larger metagame in TLF will be that same way.
Do we have a problem? I don't know. If TLF sells as well as Valley 1 has over its lifetime, then we will break even. By my conservative calculations, I will have spent $182.7k making TLF by the time we're done. That means we'll need to gross about $365k to break even. We hit something like a third of that on Steam with Valley 1 in the first month-ish of sales. Overall just on Steam to date, Valley 1+2 have grossed $379.6k. Again that doesn't count any other sorts of bundles or whatnot, which jumps that up by another $20k at least.
Is the above math that I love? Not really.
For instance, you can get a game like Bionic Dues that people love, but that just doesn't really take off. I calculate that I spent $58k making that game, meaning that we needed to earn about $138k gross to break even on that one. So far on Steam, it has grossed $75.4k. It's grossed maybe another $10k or something on other bundles, etc. I'm not positive on the exact numbers. So that one is still $50k in the red, roughly. I have confidence that over the course of the next year it will break even, but it's not something that was a smashing success immediately.
So, what to do? That's something I'm mulling a bit. A big part of me says "if this thing is really fun, and clear, then it will be okay." We're known for making really unique things, and that counts for a lot. Keith disagrees, but personally I think that part of the lack of Bionic's success was that it just wasn't unique enough. Obviously marketing, a dark art style, a crappy name, bad timing coming out, and a few other things also were big contributors. This time we have the name and the art style very much covered, and we're working on the marketing and the timing.
In the end, it's possible to rationalize anything. We could make perfectly rational arguments that this game will do horribly because it's too similar to Drox. You could have said that about Minecraft and the other block based mining games, though. You could also make perfectly rational arguments that this will do super well, because it's really unique and the sort of thing that people would be excited to see from us. But there are lots of failed games you could have said that about, too.
From my perspective, it's about minimizing risk. Here are the constraints:
1. We can't sacrifice polish.
2. We can't gut the game so that it's unsatisfying.
3. We can't adjust the release date (no money left!)
4. We can't do something that will make the game incredibly niche (the Covert Action or Valley 2 issue).
#1 above requires time. #2 above requires not making changes that are TOO drastic at this point, such as just cutting combat. #4 requires thought, and possibly careful action or possibly nothing. #3 is just a fact we can't do anything about.
I am open to discussion and suggestions, as always.
