Double Dare

[Weeble]

Last year I was in a team trying to get into the Dare to be Digital contest. Sadly, it didn't happen - we didn't get to the interview. However, this year I'm in a different team and we've now gotten to the interview stage. (Weirdly enough I was recruited days from the submission deadline at the party of somebody I barely know. They couldn't find enough artists.) The interview is on Wednesday. Then they'll have to pick four out of (I think) twelve Scottish teams to go through.

I'm looking forward to it. I think our only real problem is that most of the team is very young; apart from myself, everybody is in their second year of uni. Hopefully we can convince them that we will be able to make this game. I'll talk about the game soon if people are interested, but before that I'm wondering if there's anybody here who's aged 14-17? Icarus, are you? We could do with some people in that age-group to fill in questionnaires.

Weeble.

[Fost]

Cool! good luck!

[James]

Good luck. A friend of mine was on the winning team a few years back. They're currently running Gumshoe Online which is based in part on their Dare to be Digital project.

[Weeble]

One of our team members has drawn up a questionnaire to do some (admittedly crude) market research. I was hoping that any young folk here (well, 14 to 25 year-olds, I think) could maybe fill it in. It's really quite short, and I'd be ever so grateful. Thanks!

[Fost]

Bah! Age discrimination etc etc....

[Weeble]

By the way, we're a bit shakey on our business strategy. I know they'll help us with this, but we'd like to show that we're trying our best for the interview. Our game will be Flash-based, and I'm not sure how easy it is to persuade people to actually buy them. Can somebody point to examples of Flash games sold in this way? We also reckoned that it would make a good game to sell to a soft-drinks company (or something similar) in order for them to put it on their website as an attraction. I know Barr (they make Irn Bru) have Flash games and stuff on their website, although I'm not really sure how much a company like that would be willing to pay for a Flash game. It might not be feasible for something developed by a 6-person team, simply because of the costs. Any advice you kind Moonpod Devs have would be gratefully accepted.

[Hamish]

I filled it in. It says you're going to add a strategy element to your game, but there's no strategy option for what games I play? Most of the online games I play are RTS games, after FPS and MMORPG I think they're the most popular online game genre, excluding casual and browser games.

[Fost]

The trouble with flash, is not inherently that it's bad - but that it has preconceptions because it's used to do almost all free web games.

That said, there are some people who make it work.

'Battalion' by urbansquall manages to sell access to it's 'community' rather than a downloadable game. The fact that it is a multiplayer game definitely helps here.

Alien Hominid started life as a flash game that then got a publisher for consoles (not a great example, because they basically got great feedback on the flash game, and went on to make a more commercial version of it, got a publishing deal etc..)

There's more, but their names escape my sieve like brain right now.



The 'advertising game' market is also a bit of a nightmare from the angle you are looking at it. Irn Bru almost definitely don't buy off the shelf flash - it's more likely they pay a marketing company, who comes up with an idea for a flash game or flash based promotion. The marketing company then contracts in someone to do a custom flash game. the best you could hope really is for it to be a good online cv for your services that someone might pick up on (i.e. not a particularly good route to take if you want to make any money)

[James]

[Weeble]

I was recruited onto the team quite late, so I didn't get any say in it being a Flash game. I understand what you mean about it being better as a CV thing, but we've still got to justify to them why they'll pay us (minimum wage + free accomodation, I believe) for 10 weeks. It is the thing that worries me most. I think the concept (which I'll probably explain properly after the interview) is itself good, but I just don't know enough about the business side of things. That it has to be done with a 6 person team really seems to make the whole thing very expensive.

[icarus]

[Fost]

[Weeble]

Ho hum. Didn't get through. Still, it was fun and challenging just to put together the presentation. I think our game simply wasn't ground-breaking enough.

When I was recruited we were going to do a top-down networked Flash racing game, but I felt this fell far short of the mark for originality that they would require, so I persuaded the team to make this a bit different by doing an objective-based pinball-style game. The players would be controlled a lot like the marble in marble madness, and they'd compete to complete the kind of objectives you get in a pinball table - hit drop-targets, bumpers, roll-over targets and stuff. We figured out an arctic theme to lay on top of this, and called it Polar Pandemonium. Still, it was fundamentally a competitive arcade game, and all it really did was combine existing ideas in new ways. I strongly suspect that the teams that got in will have wierder and more exciting concepts. :(

[Fost]

You know - if we start making more money - I'd love to run a competition like this; would be great to give new developers some help.


Moonpod's 'Game Stars - the rivals' - two teams compete to make a game and then battle it out to win an exclusive publishing contract, each week the teams vote off the person doing the least work...




Anyway - sorry you didn't get through, don't be disheartened - you are meant for greater things

[Galleon]

As a future entrant for the D2D compo, I'd be damned if I lost to a racing-game created in Flash. No offense though. lol
From what I've heard and read about, getting to the interview stage itself is pretty tough, so congrats on that part.

Like Fost said, don't let it get you down! I assume that the reason you're entering this compo anyway is to get noticed - that's why I'm entering. I mean who *really* wants all that money, right?