Slip Space Developer’s Journal – Installment Four
Exclusive Hands-On Preview | Additional Screenshots In the opening cut scene from my game Slip Space: The Burma-Shave Analogy, a character offers the observation “In our line of work, you never know what you are until you become it.” This could easily become the motto of bad planners and wishful thinkers everywhere. It certainly applies to me. Apparently, I have become an independent developer in the service of the “cognitive gamer”. It’s as if I’m the virtual younger brother of Knut Mueller, the developer of Rhem. Note: I’m probably older than Knut. Put simply, a cognitive gamer is one who likes puzzles that are challenging but ultimately solvable because they are logical. It’s not that my game is like Rhem, but those who enjoy Rhem-like game play will likely enjoy Slip Space. Adventure games are appealing for more than just the puzzles. Atmosphere and story also rank high. If one merely seeks a puzzle-fix, they can work through a book of sudoku or logic puzzles. The appeal of a good adventure-game puzzle is that it exists within an immersive 3D environment and solving it forwards a story line. Designing puzzles is at least as fun as solving them. As one would expect, inspiration comes from the story and the environment, but I also credit unusual circumstances and strange conversations from my own life. Years ago, a fellow came into my office with what he thought was a great idea for a rescue device. As a product for the real world, it was absolutely silly. However, the elements of his design rattled around in my head and morphed into the puzzle in my game that I refer to as the balloon trap. For another puzzle, I built a clay model to test both the possible predicaments the gamer would fall into and to validate the solution. My game has been available via download for several weeks. Up to now, I have marketed it very timidly in order to test the reliability of its delivery and to have the opportunity to work very closely with a manageable number of gamers. From this process, I isolated a problem regarding download authorization and fixed it. Delivery via download is now reliable. The buyer gets the instant gratification of immediate access to the download after purchasing the game through PayPal. It is still possible that an instant authorization will not occur if the customer fails to follow the provided link from PayPal back to the download page. In that hopefully rare case, authorization will need to be set manually causing a slight delay. Nevertheless, the process is 100 percent reliable thanks to the method PayPal uses to document the sale. It has been over a year since I started promoting this game. I started early because I thought I would need to attract a publisher to physically distribute it. However, none were willing to take the risk. I’m not complaining. It forced me to explore other options. I selected distribution via digital download. Clearly, I expect the number of those willing to download the game is less than the number of those who would be willing to buy a boxed version. Thus, sales of my game will come from the intersection of the universe of cognitive gamers with the universe of those comfortable with downloading. Hopefully, that number will be large enough to make this game a success. In which case there will be another. For those needing a bit more convincing that Slip Space is for them, there is a downloadable demo available on the official website. |
