Preparing a business plan for a game on Steam
Earning millions is easier than ever. I'll tell you how :-D
When I posted my final presentation [ru] (slides) for World Builders 2023 (my posts, site), I promised to tell how I made a roadmap and a financial model for the game. So, here they are.
At the end of this post, we will have:
- A brief strategy of our company: what we do, how, and why.
- A table with our beacons — successful games roughly similar to what we want to make. Similar in gameplay, team size, budget, etc.
- A composition of the team we need to assemble.
- A roadmap — a development plan for our game.
- An outline of our marketing strategy.
- A financial model — how much we will spend, how much we will earn.
- A large number of my caveats throughout the post.
- Jokes and
I hopewitty remarks.
All the final documents can be found here.
Grainau: hiking and beer at 3000 meters
How it all looks from the ground.
For her vacation, Yuliya decided to show me the beautiful German mountains and took me for a couple of days to Grainau — it's a piece of Bavaria that's almost like Switzerland. At least, it is similar to the pictures of Switzerland that I've seen :-D
In short, it's a lovely place with a measured pace of life. If you need to catch your breath, calm your nerves, and enjoy nature, then this is the place for you. But if you can't live without parties, you'll get bored quickly.
What's there:
- The highest mountain in Germany plus a couple of glaciers.
- There's skiing in winter. If you really need it, you can find a place to ski in summer, but the descent is short, and the lifts are turned off.
- A large clean lake and a couple of smaller ones.
- A huge number of trails for hiking.
- A huge number of waterfalls, streams, and a couple of mountain rivers.
- Restaurants with beer.
- Beautiful fallen trees in the forests, private property, fences, cows with bells, and "racing tractors" (I don't know how to name this phenomenon better, but tractors are moving fast there :-D).
This is briefly, and now in detail.
Concept document for a space exploration MMO
The expected poster for the game. (c) DALL-E
As a hobby, I write concept documents for games. This is first in English. I have a few more in Russian and will eventually translate them.
One more concept for The Tale 2.0.
Title
Lords Captains MMO
Yep, it's a rip-off from Warhammer 40k and Rogue Trader, but it will do for the concept.
One-liner
Explore the infinite universe on a starship with millions of souls on board, unite and develop abandoned worlds.
Platforms
Browsers, mobile.
Genre
Exploration-driven trade-political MMO PVE sandbox.
Closest analogs
EVE, Sim City, Crusader Kings, 4X games, Rogue Trader.
Computational mechanics & ε- (epsilon) machines
I found a few new concepts for tracking.
Computational mechanics
There is computational mechanics, which deals with numerical modeling of mechanical processes and there is an article about it on the wiki. This post is not about it.
This post is about computational mechanics, which studies abstractions of complex processes: how emergent behavior arises from the sum of the behavior / statistics of low-level processes. For example, why the Big Red Spot on Jupiter is stable, or why the result of a processor calculations does not depend on the properties of each electron in it.
ε- (epsilon) machine
The concept of a device that can exist in a finite set of states and can predict its future state (or state distribution?) based on the current one.
Computational mechanics allows (or should allow) to represent complex systems as a hierarchy of ε-machines. This creates a formal language for describing complex systems and emergent behavior.
For example, our brain can be represented as an ε-machine. Formally, the state of the brain never repeats (voltages on neurons, positions of neurotransmitter molecules, etc), but there are a huge number of situations when we do the same thing in the same conditions.
Here is a popular science explanation: https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-new-math-of-how-large-scale-order-emerges-20240610/
P.S. I will try to dig into scientific articles. I will tell you if I find something interesting and practical. P.P.S. I have long been thinking in the direction of a similar thing. Unfortunately, the twists of life do not allow me to seriously dig into science and mathematics. I am always happy when I encounter the results of other people's digging.
«Slay The Princess» — combinatorial narrative
My favorite version of the Princess.
It's hard to impress me as a player and even harder as a game developer. The last time it happened with Owlcat Games in Pathfinder: Kingmaker, when they added a timer to the game's plot.
But Black Tabby Games managed to do it. And they did it not with some technological complexity but with a visual novel on a standard engine (RenPy), which is cool in itself.
I'll share a couple of thoughts about the game and its narrative structure, while I'm still under the impression. I need to think about how to adapt this approach to my projects.
ATTENTION: SPOILERS!
If you haven't played Slay The Princess yet, I strongly recommend you to catch up — the game takes 3-4 hours. You'll not regret it.