So with 20k copies looking very far away indeed right now it seems like a good time for a look back at Waves to see what went right and what went wrong.

First up some statistics without any context:

• Units sold to date: 15,238
• Percentage sold direct: 3.7%
• Percentage sold on Steam: 96.2%
• Percentage sold in Steam bundles: 53%
• Percentage sold during Daily Deal: 15%
• Metacritic Score: 82
• Steam Demo Downloads: 25,985
• Steam Demo Conversion Rate: 6.8%
• Average Time Played: 2 Hours 44 Minutes
• Average Play Session: 22 Minutes
• Percentage of Players who played more than 20 hours: 1%
• Percentage of Players who reached the Score Cap: 0.4%

If you are a website looking for a story feel free to pick a headline out of those numbers although by now I don’t think there is anything that surprising about them as we all know that Steam is a pretty big deal these days.

As you can see the majority of sales have not been at the full asking price of $10. In fact the average price paid per unit is significantly south of that and I’m yet to reach the point where I have to pay Epic any royalties for my UDK license. In short I’m not rich but I’m not starving (I am however still living with my parents which helps even though it is embarrassing as a 30 year old man). Now on the assumption that the inevitable Summer and Winter Sales for this year bring in about half as much as the first Winter sale did I should be able to fund myself for the next year. Those same numbers however say that I won’t be able to afford to pay for lots of art or other content for my next game which sucks.

Why Am I not Rich?

Everybody knows all indie developers that make it onto Steam are minted and have no money problems so why am I not sitting at a gold plated desk smoking money cigars while wearing a money hat (aside from my not smoking and looking daft in hats). Read on to find out why…

Piracy

It is not because of Pirates. Waves has been pirated a lot in places like Russia and China (which you would expect) but seems to have avoided any kind of rampant piracy elsewhere. I’m sure it has been pirated outside of those countries but it’s not a huge epidemic of lost money. This is oddly an indication of a bigger problem: Nobody knows about the game to want to pirate it – If your game is being pirated up the wazoo then congratulations that is success of a sort.

Advertising

Waves is a critically acclaimed award winning best-in-breed game with lots of polish, great graphics an amazing soundtrack and addictive gameplay – that nobody has heard of. This is the problem sitting on top of my big pile of reasons why Waves hasn’t bought me a new Bentley.

I can’t afford advertising. It cost a little under £9k to do a site take over on Rock Paper Shotgun for a week (last time I checked anyway) and that is actually one of the cheaper options when it comes to advertising (plus RPS readers actually buy stuff and are amazing) but I’m at a point where I cannot put that kind of money into something speculative. I have no idea if spending that 9k on advertising will make the money back never mind make a profit and I need that money right now not 90 days from now when it manages to migrate back into my bank account. While this may be the best way to build awareness if it doesn’t make a profit then it has the potential to bankrupt me very quickly.

Adwords do not work. You’ll spend £100 to make £7. I tried it. I cannot imagine a scenario in which adwords will cause me to make a profit but they do drive traffic. Traffic that doesn’t actually want to buy anything.

Press

Waves has had some excellent press both around release, during sales and at other times. You’d think the readers of RPS, Indiegames, DIYGamer and a few other PC Gaming sites are sick of hearing about Waves by now. Except I don’t think they are. Each time it gets mentioned I see comments along the lines of “Why haven’t I heard about this before?” and this is because not everybody reads these sites every hour of every day and things rotate off the front page quite quickly. If you want to leverage these sites you have to get mentioned on them at least once a month which means giving them reasons to write about you which means updates, DLC, Controversy, Sales, Videos etc. This is not something that is easy to do as a solo developer and especially not if you want to work on something new. I want to work on new things not be stuck adding new hats to Waves just so I can grab a headline each month.

The IGN and Eurogamer reviews of Waves have barely any comments on them and I would suspect have very low page views. Nobody actually wants to read about something they’ve never heard of. This is the biggest problem facing a new IP from ANY source (not just indies). This is why advertising is again so important. You have to tell people that they should be interested in the game BEFORE the reviews are out so that they then read the review and see that it’s actually worth buying. Good reviews are worthless if nobody is reading them.

The other problem with press is that most of them don’t know what’s worth covering in the PC indie space. Most sites play it safe and ignore indie games entirely unless somebody else posts about them. If you want your Indie game to sell well on PC then get it released on a console first. When you have Sony or Microsoft sending out press releases about your game everybody will write about it because they legitimize you. Even if you go on to sell only 3 copies on a console the press will pay more attention to the PC version of a failed console release than a complete unknown. Rock Paper Shotgun and IndieGames are the clear exception to this.

Youtube

The highest result on YouTube for Waves is Total Biscuits WTF is… of the Waves demo. Which he didn’t like. This screwed me quite badly because that’s basically 150,000 people who will now never try the game because Total Biscuit doesn’t like Score-Attack shooters. It’s also annoying because some of the complaints levelled in that same video are fixed in the full game because of his feedback. If you want your indie game to do well make sure Total Biscuit likes it because he can send a few hundred thousand people straight to your Steam page to give you money.

The second biggest result is the official trailer. The trailer is made up of game play footage with a good soundtrack. It’s impressive but it’s not effective advertising. I made a fatal error with the trailer. It doesn’t tell you why Waves is one of the best Arena Shooters on PC. The trailer tells you that the game involves killing geometric shapes in a top-down point of view and there are some inexplicable explosions and bullet time going on. Waves is unfortunately a game where the depth doesn’t become apparent until around your third go at which point you start to see that there is a lot more to it than just holding the left mouse button down and making pretty explosions. How you get that across in a trailer is beyond me. I understand now why game development has gone down the route of Content over Mechanics. Content is a lot easier to sell to people.

I’ve Already Played Geometry Wars…

…and I suck at these kind of games. I hear this one a lot. Geometry Wars occurred at an important time. A time in which Geometry Wars did not already exist. Twin Stick shooters were very rare and the majority of people playing games at that point in time had never played one. It had novelty because to a lot of people who had never played Robotron it was new and the vast majority of people who bought it were absolutely awful at it. Arena Shooters are hard games. They are not games that are completed by bashing your head off 200 levels of content until you’ve seen everything they have to offer.

Arena Shooters give you a set of skills that you must master in a limited context and are not just hard but hard and unforgiving. Lots of people found out that they may never be able to drag themselves out of the bottom third of the leaderboards no matter how many hours of practice they put in. Waves is actually very easy to learn and the adaptive difficulty present in the game works really well. The problem exists that people assume they are going to be bad at the game and would rather spend money on something they think they will be good at or at least isn’t going to constantly remind them that they are at best average. People want to think they are better at a game than they really are and in a way leaderboards undo this and remind them that they are a bit rubbish.

This brings me on to my next point: Nobody wants arcade games at the moment. The trend is towards games that are geared for “Completer Finishers” which means lots of unlocks, content, achievements and story. This is because people still measure the value they get from a game in how many hours of their life it was able to distract them from their inevitable death. As grizzly as this may be a big reason we need to entertain ourselves is because if we have too much spare time and not enough to fill it we’ll start to think about things we really don’t enjoy thinking about. Most people would rather buy something that will give them 20 hours of pink fuzzy feelings rather than 2 hours of intense neon sensory workout. There are clearly exceptions to this and I’m massively oversimplifying to make a point but the phrase “Content is King” is still very true.

Waves also looks like Geometry Wars. This isn’t because I ripped off Geometry Wars it’s because Cakebread and I had the same problem: We’re programmers not artists. Abstract Polygonal shapes are easy for us to knock up quickly and we both clearly like Tron and played games in the Eighties. Sharing an aesthetic makes people assume the game plays exactly like Geometry Wars which it doesn’t. However if you’re the kind of person who assumes two games play the same because of their art style and camera position you’re probably also the kind of person who doesn’t know how to farm a black hole in Geometry Wars so the differences would probably be lost on you anyway.

The above is all slightly ironic because before Waves was released I had lots of people telling me I had “The next Geometry Wars” on my hands and telling me I’d be a huge success as a result. Being “The next Geometry Wars” did nothing but hurt me I think.

What Went Wrong

Time to look at some of the technical and design things that I wish I could change if I was doing this all again.

The Score Cap

From a technical point of view the existence of a Score Cap is one of my biggest regrets. During beta testing nobody got anywhere near it and I thought nobody ever would. I was proved very wrong very quickly once the game was released.

The score cap exists as a result of a specific restriction in the Unreal Development Kit: The Steam integration only accepts a 32bit signed Integer when submitting scores to leaderboards. This is because this is the only kind of integer available in Unrealscript. Regardless of whether the Steam database can store larger numbers this is your only option when it comes to vanilla UDK.

I realised far too long after the game had released that I could have probably stored your score as a float locally and dropped the last two digits when submitting it to the leaderboards as these aren’t going to be significant when you’re talking about scores in the billions. As it stands less than 1% of all players have ever hit the score cap so it’s not a huge problem for the majority of people but it’s something I wish had never been a problem in the first place.

The Friends Leaderboard

It’s very slow to download. This is something that is a result of the version of the UDK I was using and I was constantly hoping would be fixed before I released the game. It was unfortunately something I had no control over as it wasn’t in my code but in the C++ that you don’t get as a UDK licensee. The Steam integration hadn’t been updated since February of 2011 and the actual fix for this problem didn’t hit until this year and would have completely invalidated every single leaderboard. Wiping leaderboards and steam stats is not something you do if you don’t want to piss off all your loyal fans so I’m afraid everybody is stuck with the slow download times for friends scores.

This only came about because I needed to release Waves when I did. The game had been “finished” for weeks by the time it came out and I was mostly waiting to see if the next UDK update would have the fix I was waiting for. I know that it gets trotted out but I had to release the game when I did not to hit some marketing dictated deadline but because if I didn’t I would not have been “Mostly broke” but “Actually genuinely broke”. As it was the ATM was starting to laugh at me when I went to get money out and my bank balance basically read as “Very No”. It was either release with slow leaderboards or not release due to having no internet access.

What Went Right

I made a great game on my own (mostly) released it and over 15k people bought it. I’m putting that in the “Win” column. However there are some specific things that I’m quite happy with.

Post-Game Support

Patches and updates. I haz em.

I like to think that I did a good job responding to bugs and feature requests post-release with a lot of usability requests (like being able to toggle the aim line and extra graphics options) being implemented very quickly. The month after the game was released it had a lot of updates that improved usability, frame rates and fixed a bunch of bugs that only show up when you have a thousand people hammering your game for hours. I also managed to sneak in an entire game mode. The competitive nature of the Waves leaderboards means I don’t want to just add new features or change the existing game modes a lot because it would invalidate the old scores people worked hard to get but I’m glad it got a sixth game mode.

Graphics

Considering I’m not a 3D artist I’m bloody happy with how the game looks. You can fix everything with particle effects and pixel shaders. I fell arse first into a visual style that is distinct enough that you can look at a screenshot of the game and recognise it instantly. A lot of manshoots can’t claim that.

Rob Fearon

Out-sourcing (hah!) the challenge mode to Rob was a brilliant decision that essentially prevented the game mode from being cut. I’m terrible at making scripted content like this (I’m a procedural kinda guy) and Rob is excellent at it. You can see his account of how that all went here.

User Interface

A universal truth among games developers is that we all hate coding the GUI for games. It is the least fun part of the job and something that feels like it takes forever and never gets any of the glory yet without one the game completely fails to be a game. It is for this reason that so many indie game trailers include the UI. It’s boring and nobody wants to see it in a trailer but goddamn we spent weeks working on that and you’re bloody well going to see it!

I wrote my own UI for Waves because it was easier for me than learning how to use flash because I’m not an artist and flash seems to be designed for artists. As a result I am bloody proud of my UI and it is far swisher than it actually needed to be. That little ripple/distortion effect you see on the menus? That took ages and caused huge amounts of problems but I had a vision for the UI and I nailed it. It’s not often that happens so I am stupidly proud of how it turned out.

Did I mention it was a bastard and took forever?

Conclusion

I’m very happy with Waves. It’s turned out to be one of the best Arena Shooter on PC according to the reviews and that’s quite the thing considering it started out as a crappy physics puzzler.

Right now I am not in the position of having to flip burgers to make a living but I am also not in a position where I can make any game I want next. Art costs a lot of money and I can just about afford to keep myself employed so an incredibly content heavy game is probably a bad idea right now. It’s a shame that the game I want to make next is a content heavy turn based co-op RPG.

The real winner though in this story is that I was able to make a game on my own and release it to the public where they could spend money on it. Up until a few years ago this is a thing I would never have been able to do but thanks to the convergence of UDK and Steam and the PC being an open platform I’ve been able to achieve a dream: Start a games company before I turned 30 and make a living from it.

I have experience mostly with DnD and Games Workshops games and to be honest I always felt that both of them are lacking in opposite areas.

DnD (4e specifically) is as you hopefully know a D20 based game where your normal skill check is to roll a D20, add your modifiers to it and see if you beat the  target skill. This results in some very large numbers being thrown around which can get a little confusing and having double the skill not always meaning you’re twice as likely to succeed.

GW games on the other hand prefer stats that only tend to range between 0 and 10 with 3′s being considered “average”. Most skill checks with their systems depend on looking up the two stats involved and finding a target value for a D6 roll. Normally if the two stats are equal then this would be a 4+ (50%) if your is 1 more than your opponents it’s a 3+ (66%) and if it’s more than double it’s a 2+ (83%).

I like the small stats of GW games but not the probability distribution. If I have double the weapon skill of my opponent I should be twice as likely to hit them (75%)  and if I have triple their skill I should be twice as likely again (88%).

These values only come up when dealing with re-rolls though. A 4+ on one D6 with a Re-roll is a 75% chance of success (and with 2 re-rolls it’s 88%). So I could say that having double the skill of the target lets you reroll a failure and triple lets you reroll two failures. This sounds great but it makes having a slight 1 or 2 point advantage useless.

So I ask the tabletop playing public who have no doubt done the maths on this already: Is there a dice system that would give me the distribution I crave with the granularity needed?

Waves is now 50% off for the next week from this site only.

You get a steam key and everything.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to go and practice grumbling about the youth of today and how things were better when I was young. Yesterday.

I am of course talking about my new project “Blue Fire Dawn” and you would be forgiven for thinking that making a Turn Based game multiplayer would be easier than a real time one. It isn’t. With a real time game you can be quite sloppy – it doesn’t matter if you drop a couple of packets because there are so many small updates being sent every second that another one will be along any moment now. Turn based games on the other hand are all about synchronization. When a player tells the server that they want to do something they are usually sending a big long list of commands all at once which have the potential to arrive out of order at the server which has to put them into the right order. Then the server has to make sure what the client sent it is even legal before executing it, rolling dice and sending the results back to all the clients.  There is a lot of waiting and validating going on that real time games don’t need to care about.

During an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun the Firaxis guy said that making XCOM was a huge scary project. This is a sentiment recently shared by the makers of Xenonauts. Now consider this: With what I’m working on now I could potentially make either of those games and I’m trying to make it work in Multiplayer. I’m clearly insane.

Here is the thing: It is working in multiplayer. About 3 weeks ago I had a rubbish prototype that worked in single player. Since then I have a rubbish prototype that works in multiplayer (with the exception of the revamped abilities system which I’ll get to). I’ve had to do lots of very boring things like login procedures, replication, lobbies and handling reconnecting clients (If you drop from a game and reconnect within 5 minutes then it’s as if nothing happened. Take longer than 5 minutes and your characters will disappear and everybody can continue playing) but the important thing is that it works. Levels are procedurally generated and match up between clients and everything updates correctly as things move around the world. It’s awesome.

I clearly haven’t hit the actual hard part of this game yet then. In fact I think I’ve just now run face first into it.

Firaxis and I have managed to independently come up with the same ability system for our games. Alternatively we have both managed to independently “borrow” ideas from 4th edition DnD (it’s this one – shhh). Your characters get a number of Action Points to spend each turn on abilities. Moving normally is an ability and costs 1AP. Shooting at a target is an ability and costs 1AP. Going on Overwatch is an ability and costs 1AP etc. You can do these in any order you want and so long as the ability doesn’t have a cooldown or use limit you can do them multiple times in the same turn.

It’s a bit like time units in UFO but instead of an ability being something tiny like turning 45 degrees or moving a grenade from your belt to your hand they encompass a goal or idea rather than the minutiae of how to achieve it. You’d think this would be easier to implement than Time Units but in reality it really isn’t. Time Units are probably the easiest method to make a Turn Based game entirely because they are so discrete.

Take my current head scratcher: The Charge ability.

Charging is conceptually simple – You can make a move for your full movement speed but it must end adjacent to an enemy who you will then attack in melee combat. In comparison to a regular Move or Melee Attack ability this is a tough one because it combines both of them into one. Add to this the fact that I don’t want to have to code every single ability in the game and have a lofty ideal of being able to assemble them as data and things become so very complicated.

I am also trying to decide whether to let players execute abilities one move at a time or if they have to send the entire plan in one go to the server. I know some people will really want to be able to agonise over each square moved just in case the next move reveals an enemy but there is a lot to be said for having to commit to a plan up front (with seeing an enemy allowing you to abort mid-move or continue – either way your action point is gone) and whatever I decide here can have a significant impact on how I design the abilities system and how it works in multiplayer.

In conclusion: Multiplayer is hard but not as hard as having to design an infinitely flexible system that has to account for an infinite number of unknown variables.

It’s probably a good job then that I’m terrible at marketing.

My policy has always been to make the games that I want to play and right now I don’t want to play Waves 2: the Wavening. Nope right now I want to play a turn based RPG with online co-op and procedurally generated dungeons so that’s what I’m making.

With this in mind I have spent the last couple of weeks working on a prototype of such a game. You saw the first stage with the “Blue Fire Dawn” tech demo that had a ball rolling around a procedurally generated maze. Well this has taken it a step further and now there are Space Marines Vs Angry Robots in a turn-based fight to the death.

Interested? More below the cut…

The prototype in that video is already being scrapped so don’t ask me for the code! It’s a mess because it’s a prototype and looking at the code may turn you to stone. The point of it was to answer one question: Can you make a procedurally generated world and do A* path finding in Unrealscript? The answer I’m glad to say is a resounding YES! The next stage is redesigning all of the technology knowing what I now know and making it work on-line. Once I have an on-line version of the above tech demo I’ll start to worry about actual game design things, rules and content.

The one thing I do know for sure is that this project will need art. Lots and lots of art. If you are an artist (either Concept, Character or Environment) and are freelance then drop me an email with a link to your portfolio and your rates and I’ll get in touch. I’ll also need somebody for UI duty on this game as it’s going to be quite UI heavy.

Those of you who are not using the Steam version will have to a wait a little bit because updating the old fashioned way is much trickier and Unreal has revealed that not everything is as straightforward as I’d like it to be. If you are using the non-steam version of Waves and want the update then my advice right now is to send me an email to rob [at] squidinabox [dot] com with the subject “Non-Steam Waves Update” and your order number. I’ll try and sort you out asap.

Chase is simple:
10: Touch a Red Pad and get 5 seconds on the clock. A new pad will appear somewhere on screen;
20: Touch the new pad within 5 seconds or lose a life;
30: Goto 10;

That’s it. I’ve nicknamed it “The Speed Metal of Shooters” because your first game will probably be very short lived. So far the beta testers have been very positive about it and this mode may need to carry a health warning for those with a weak heart.

There are also just under 30 new achievements coming most of which have been suggested by the community and some of which are my own devious creations.

Hopefully the update will be done before the 22nd. If it isn’t then it won’t appear until the second week of January as I’ll be away for the holidays.

Cheerio!

There was apparently much drinking and One Life Left was there and Rock Paper Shotgun and Indiegames and lots of Indie Devs who all won awards.

However the most important award of the show was clearly the one I won!

Waves is Rock Paper Shotguns “Best use of The Unreal Engine” in 2011.

So to celebrate I’m throwing an impromptu sale with Waves being 50% off until midnight tomorrow (GMT) so you have about 30 hoursish to take advantage of this deal before it goes away!

Quick Click this link!

As always buying from this site gets you a code you can register on Steam if that’s the kind of thing you want.

There are two things I’m working on now – A Waves Update and Game 2. I’m splitting my time roughly 50/50 between the two and today is the first day of working on the Waves update (as opposed to just thinking about it).

The Waves update is going to consist of two parts. A big boat load of new achievements and at least one new game mode. Most of the new achievements have been suggested by the community over on the Steam forums and if you want to suggest some more then go ahead.

The new game mode is as yet undecided. This is because I’m actually going to be prototyping a bunch of new game modes and picking the one that’s actually any fun. So far there are three candidates and I expect this to increase over the next few weeks.

I’ve always had an open development philosophy with Waves and I plan to keep that going so here are the potential new game modes:

Outbreak – This mode was planned for the full game before the combo system and bombs appeared. It got ditched as a result of those mechanics making it completely trivial and very boring. Essentially this is based entirely around the self-replicating Virus enemy giving you a single life and a mission to stay alive as long as you can. This mode is NOT going to work as it stands because it’s missing a whole bunch of stuff that makes the rest of the game work (Virus kills don’t give XP for example). However it’s on the list for being brought back if I can find a way to make it work.

Chase – This mode has a time limit of 5 seconds. It could be the shortest mode ever. It is the speed metal of game modes. It’s a little like Bombing Run and a little like Rush. The mode is based around rolling over timer pads as quickly as possible in order to keep resetting the timer. You will be fully armed in this mode but with a 5 second time limit you’re going to find your route around the arena determined entirely by where the pads spawn.

EDIT: I’ve been messing about with Chase all day and it’s definitely going into the update. It is absolutely insane.

Hold – (Yeah I suck at names) This one is inspired by what a whole bunch of people did at the Eurogamer Expo: Not move. There will be an area roughly 25%-33% the area of the arena in the middle. Stay inside this area and all is well. If you move outside it for more than a few seconds though you’ll explode. Normally the edge of the arena is the safest place to be. This mode turns that around by forcing you to stay in the middle.

Those are the 3 modes I’m going to be prototyping up first and if it turns out that all 3 of them are fun then all 3 of them will appear in the game.

Now on to other business.

If you happen to be awesome with video editing software and interested in making a new snazzy trailer for Waves for no payment then I definitely want to hear from you because I suck at it. Also if you happen to be a marketing guru willing to work for compliments then I have a job for you as well.

There was an interview with me at True PC Gaming and some reviews of Waves here and here.

To end the post here are some statistics from Steam:

So Waves was released a week ago and since then there have been 2 patches on Steam and a third that will hopefully go live tonight (EDIT: It has gone live already). That’s more patches than Skyrim has had and I’ve definitely fixed more things than I’ve broken.

Generally the only bugs have been with Achievements and that’s largely because achievements are hard to debug until you can actually see the stats for them which I couldn’t during the beta. Everything else has been adding little feature requests like being able to pick a Random announcer each game or turning off the Aim Line.

Since release several people have said some very nice things about Waves in what are known as “Reviews” I shall share the ones I know about below along with some of my favourite quotes:

DealSpwn ”Prepare for hectic unforgiving splendour and retinal titilation of the highest order.”
The72Pins ”If you’re looking for a game to take the place of the never to be seen Geometry Wars 3, then this is it.”
Kotaku ”Waves is the most addictive little twin-stick shooter I’ve played since Geometry Wars.”
IndieGamesMag ”Waves is a hard hitting, spunk-filled fireworks display.”
ElectronDance “1 min of its edge-of-seat bullet ballet = the handstrain of 6 self-love sessions.”
DIYGamer ”it’s a lot bloody good.”

Some other things that have happened since release is the Survival leaderboards have seen 4 players break the 1 billion barrier with one player managing to hit the score cap I had to implement because Steam Leaderboards and UDK don’t support 64bit integers.

The current top score for the Challenge mode was actually caught on camera and is on Youtube as well which was quite lucky.

I shall now address the things that people ask me (aside from “Can I have a review copy?”):

Q: Can we have more music?

A: Music is expensive. Really expensive. Waves has not yet made enough that I can afford to pay SMILETRON to make some new tracks. So at the moment no.

Q: Will the soundtrack be released?

A: We’re working on it. SMILETRON is mastering the ingame tracks into an album friendly format at the moment. When it’s closer to happening I’ll post about it.

Q: The Friends leaderboard is a bit slow isn’t it?

A: Yep it is. This is unfortunately a UDK issue and one I was hoping would be fixed with the October update. It wasn’t. This is one of those bugs that I can’t do anything about. The November UDK update may fix it but I’m not promising anything.

Q: Is there going to be a Mac, XBLA, PSN, iThing version?

A: XBLA and PSN isn’t going to happen unless the game makes a huge amount of money. The UDK licence doesn’t cover those platforms so I’d need a full Unreal licence. That’s assuming I got a slot which I think is incredibly unlikely. A Mac or iThing version may happen further down the line but it requires that I have a Mac and iThing to test on which I can’t afford right now.