Game Development Startup Question

Heh well before you go jumping down the development line someone has already cloned pox. Maybe you should just Check that out.

It looked damn good about a year ago when I first saw it.

 

It's a me!

http://store.steampowered.com/app/428610/Longsword__Tabletop_Tactics/

I probably put about 18 months of solo dev time in this. Leveraged a lot of off-the-shelf assets. Hired some contractors for custom art. Probably spent about $10k total plus my salary, which I paid myself from previous profits.

I have reached expert-level competency in the Unity Game engine through making this and other games. If you're coming from a place of knowing how to program but not knowing how to use an engine, I don't think that this could be replicated in the same time frame. I probably have 4-5 years of game engine experience under my belt prior to breaking ground on Longsword.

 

you need to advertise more, I spent a good half hour trying to find your game lol

what's your business model anyway? seems you have a full price to buy into it, do you get all the ((inserrt your equivalent to cards/runes)) for that price? will it later be living card game style of buying expansions but get all the cards of that expansion? how many people are actually playing it now? a year ago you seemed to have quite a bit of interest

 

Lol no worries. I'm simply speaking hypothetically here. I haven't written a line of code in almost ten years and I would have to quit either my family or my current line of work to even realistically entertain the idea and that's not happening anytime soon.

I've seen the game before. I wasn't unimpressed with it when I tried it several months back but I thought it needed some more time in the oven before I tried it again.

 

yep, when I last saw it he was just doing his first online tests. so was pretty early on. I may buy nto the early access this weekend, I don't have much confidence that it will ever get to release but I may as well give it a shot.

 

Impressive. How many runes/cards maps etc.?

 

well one of the interesting things he claims is a player used map editor....so infinite i guess on the maps front.

assuming it works you could recreate all of pox's maps with a little effort.

 

Right now I have ~250 cards, 260+ unique skills, 50+ conditions. I only offer the full play set for sale right now. I'm going to be releasing a Free to Play version sooooon. It will be a bit grindy at first while I figure out how to ramp up gold progression in a meaningful way. The full play set will remain available for purchase at any time. Then I will keep releasing new sets (and probably new themes entirely, like WW2 and stuff)

 

legolas versus a panzer tank.

 

...versus a space marine, versus a pirate, versus...you name it. I just want people to have fun. If I can build a real playerbase I will separate out leagues by play sets but just for fun you can bring whatever you have to the table. It will all be balanced around the same power levels.

 

taking a munchkin approach then, well assuming you do that it will be interesting to see how you handle it, I could imagine following the munchkin approach and releasing fantasy 1,2,3,4/ kung fu 1,2,3 etc

then have your x-ray vision powered pirate vampyre wielding a dragon flame sword using the +1 thong of binding.

heh...well munchkin isn't for everyone, some prefer a consistant plot....of course MTG simply wrote the planes into the story line so they can literally do what ever they feel like doing, samurai's one expansion, greek gods the next, then cyber punk artificers after that, then a sprinkling of vampires vs werewolves to keep things fresh lol.

 

How well does it run on low spec?

I want to try it but my laptop is made from driftwood and bakelite.

 

Unfortunately driftwood is probably below-spec. There is a demo though so grab that and see how it runs.

 

I tried it out again for a bit today. It's better than I recalled but I am not a huge fan of the way the sprites/cards/battle or your idea to mix themes up together. Also I really can't call it a Pox clone without the fonts and I missed them already just from the first couple of games I managed to play.

 

Thought it had fonts. I was watching him play a year ago and I swear they were fighting over something like a font

 

Yeah there are fonts. You were probably in the campaign mode, which is a different animal than the MP or AI Skirmish modes.

 

Signed! Stick with expanding a fantasy universe instead of bring up some tanks and try to improve the game style/design with more details ...
Combined with regular expansions it could be something big ...

 

i always though a pox version of shard bound would be ideal. thats kinda what i wanted. upped graphics and map.

 

You are correct. I discovered that about five minutes after I posted that yesterday. It's pretty well done and I'l l give it a recommend (via Steam as well where I know it matters. I'm a curator as well for whatever that's worth). Although I'm not a fan of the aesthetics that's something I'm usually pretty tough on. It's possible they will grow on me with time.

 

It runs great on my desktop which was a custom build from six years ago but it's playable and only slightly slow on my own ancient piece of driftwood that passes for a laptop.