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.
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.
Dungeon generation — from simple to complex
What we should get.
This is a translation of a post from 2020
This is a step-by-step guide to generating dungeons in Python. If you are not a programmer, you may be interested in reading how to design a dungeon [ru].
I spent a few evenings testing the idea of generating space bases.. The space base didn't work out, but the result looks like a good dungeon. Since I went from simple to complex and didn't use rocket science, I converted the code into a tutorial on generating dungeons in Python.
By the end of this tutorial, we will have a dungeon generator with the following features:
- The rooms will be connected by corridors.
- The dungeon will have the shape of a tree. Adding cycles will be elementary, but I'll leave it as homework.
- The number of rooms, their size, and the "branching level" will be configurable.
- The dungeon will be placed on a grid and consist of square cells.
The entire code can be found on github.
There won't be any code in the post — all the approaches used can be easily described in words. At least, I think so.
Each development stage has a corresponding tag in the repository, containing the code at the end of the stage.
The aim of this tutorial is not only to teach how to generate dungeons but to demonstrate that seemingly complex tasks can be simple when properly broken down into subtasks.
«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.
Preferences of strategy players
Looking at the survey data and trying to find something useful.
Recently I've conducted a survey about the preferences of strategy players.
In the previous post, we cleaned up the data, and in this one, we will try to find insights within it.
In this post you will find an interactive dashboard with a bunch of charts, where you can compare two samples of your choice. There are many samples — for every taste and color, so feel free to explore and share the patterns you find on Telegram and Discord.
But be careful with conclusions. There is little data, in some cases very little. For example, the difference between the sample sizes of male and female respondents is about tenfold => you should be very careful in interpreting the differences between them.
In general, do not take this post as a full-fledged study. I'm sure many analysts would have torn my hands off for such a thing. Then sewed them back and torn them off again :-D Use the post as an interface to the data, and make your own conclusions.