I GOT A REPLY!
"Hi Hadrian,
Thank you for the detailed response, and also from Patrick. I am late in responding as we have been very busy with new title submissions.
Some of what you says rings very true, we have had a lot of people say the character moves too fast – I think we may have over played it internally and as we found it easier to play the speed crept up! Control is a very subjective issue, the Wii controller is not instant – except at slow speeds, the controller has to have moved before it registers a force, so there is always a lag, the swipe has to happen before you detect it has moved. So the controller has a lag but it does swipe whenever you make the action.
The game was targeted at a younger age group who when tested they were happy with the swiping, admittedly they we less accurate and tended to swipe constantly, so we added a power up for a three hit combo, we even spent time trying to detect a left or right swipe, and show this direction but this was not accurate. We are currently working on a hack N slash adventure, which we are working on a far better control method.
The jumping does work, but it is required a lot – so we added the option of the button – this is surely a good flexible choice – not something we should be knocked for? We give you the choice – knock us if we didn’t use the controller, or if didn’t give the button option?
The business side is always the hardest to justify to the public – you just want the game, but we also have to pay the programmers, artists, testers, translators, animators, musicians, pay the rent, pay for equipment, pay a hell of a lot of money to get even the simplest game out. The exact amounts that retail, VAT, distribution and Nintendo take we are not allowed to tell, but we get the least of all the companies involved, You would be shocked at how little money we make on each title, our only option is to sell a lot of units. You suggestion that we have more levels, well more levels would always be nice but honestly we have tried this and it doesn’t work! If we had all 4 platform games combined together with 12 levels, and a price of £30 then the public would not pay £30 for an unknown brand title, infact the retail shops would not accept the games on the shelf – they would prefer to have a branded film license taking up the same spot – as the licensed titlet would sell better. The only way we can get non licensed titles into the shops is by doing the lowest possible price – and to pay for this we have to cut the content, but that’s fair – lower price = less game! We could have done 4 Ninjabreadman games and saved the cost of the new graphics, but we worked hard doing new graphics for each platform title. We also added re-playability with different ways of playing the games. The surveys of game playing show that 80% of game players don’t play more than the first few levels of a game, they browse – playing a few levels of multiple games, the majority of the games market –especially on the Wii are casual players – they play for a very short time compared to PC or PS2, so they found more levels would be wasted. Instead we have different ways of playing the same levels – collecting different amount of collectibles – hidden collectibles etc.
I agree the menus are simple – we did this deliberately – we preferred to spend the time on the levels rather than doing a unique menu for each game – it’s a menu it works! Who wants to pay an extra £2 to get a different looking menu!
Re: Endless ocean is only £19.99 – do you think it would be only £19.99 if we had not released all our titles at this low price already? – what price did Nintendo release their previous games at? We have now managed to reduce our games to 2 for £25 and soon we aim to go to £9.99 the low prices you the customer gets are due to the publishers encouraging a low retail price. We are constantly ensuring you get the best value for money.
I hope this explains some of what we do and why – but please remember we are a small independent development team, working without a bug budget trying to get original characters such as ‘ninjabreadman’ published , everyone is still learning what the Wii can do, and we have used these games to build our knowledge, or engines are faster and our routines are constantly being improved, Each new title is better than the last, in detail and content – for instance we are just about to release a crazy golf game with 72 levels, we have more detailed animations and effects, We have our own customizable characters – which are higher resolution and more detailed with more options than the Mii’s the routines for the Wii controllers are more responsive and flexible than Wii sports Golf, this is where we are going, it is sad that small companies get ripped apart by the press. We don’t have the millions to spend on big projects, we are like a small local theatre group being compared to a block buster Hollywood film, so they rate us as 1/10 but without us starting here we can’t learn and grow to become leading actors of the future. These first titles were helping to establish the Wii software catalogue, now we are improving upon it.
Patrick - Good luck with your game – if you manage to raise enough money to publish the title, I hope the press appreciate the work, time and effort everyone will have put in to make your game and the risks you have taken to get it published, I hope they see it as a step towards the designer you are aiming to be.
Stewart Green
Data Design Interactive
Email:
[email protected]
Tel:+44 (0)138 444 79 00"
Kinda has a point with some things but still if they spent some of their budget making LESS games than a shitload than the won't have had as much crap thrown at them. He seems to believe in his products anyway and seems to want his company to get better which is a start.
To us we think that the developers work for peanuts so they won't put much effort in and then the publisher just releases it no matter how broken the game is but it sounds like they believe that their products are worth releasing. Seems like they are quite hurt with how the press rate the games, I would give sympathy if they weren't so damn right but I really don't think that these reviewers rate a game so low just because they are from a small company, look at how well Puzzle Quest got rated.
Big respect with actually replying with some length and not going "ah well we sell games so nah nah not listening" or with some smarmy comment like Majesco did when they got a 6/10 rating for their Cooking Mama 2 game.
Also...who is Patrick?
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