March 22, 2009 at 2:14 pm
Two months ago I made a post announcing that I moved to Seattle, and since then I've been pretty much silent. Over the next few days I'll be making a series of posts giving updates on what's been going on with me personally, the state of my iPhone projects, my thoughts on iPhone 3.0, and so on.
I decided to get the bad news over with first. I cancelled Crypt. The game was to be about crawling randomly generated dungeons, slaying monsters, getting loot, and leveling up. I posted the teaser when the game was about half done, and I felt I would be ready to start showing it off within a few weeks. Unfortunately, as I continued to flesh it out, several significant problems began to manifest that weren't going away through refinement, further development, and tweaking.
The game didn't look very good. After several passes with the art I found that some early decisions in the technology resulted in the game looking sloppy, regardless of how much I tried to cover it up with progressively better art.
The controls were rather awkward. The game was to be two-dimensional from an overhead perspective. You would place your finger somewhere on the screen and your character would chase your finger. If you've played The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass on the DS, you have a pretty good idea of what I was shooting for. Unfortunately, it turns out that fingers and thumbs are significantly thicker than a stylus, and rather frequently obstruct large parts of the viewable game area.
In addition to this disappointingly unpleasant movement scheme, I was never able to arrive at a method of combat that both supported everything I wanted (you had an action bar of abilities like in an MMO) and was intuitive enough that people were able to just pick it up and start playing. The combat model was supposed to be a fairly straightforward port from an MMO: you tap a monster to target it, then you run up to it, then you start pressing action buttons to attack it. Almost nobody actually tried playing it this way after I handed them the game, even MMO players after I told them, "It's just like World of Warcraft." They would rapidly tap the monster, expecting that to be an attack itself. They would rapidly tap the action buttons, expecting every tap to immediately cause an attack, not realizing there was a cooldown. They would hit ability buttons without first targeting a monster. Etc.
If I ever revisit the basic concept (exploring randomly generated dungeons) in another game, the control scheme is going to be completely different, 'cause a variation of a desktop MMO control scheme just doesn't seem to work out on the iPhone.
Last, but actually most importantly, the game just wasn't fun. This perhaps arose out of a combination of the above listed things. You just never really felt appropriately rewarded for doing the right thing. It all felt and looked the same.
Eventually, I realized it was not going to be something that I would feel good putting my name on. I also could not in good conscience ask people to pay money for it. So we come back to where I started the post, with my decision to cancel it. I still think that the fundamental idea is a good one, and could be really awesome on the iPhone as a pick up and play game (I have ten minutes, I'll go run this dungeon and see if I can get some cool new loot), but this particular game failed in execution on basically every front.
I've moved back to working on the native version of Sunset, which I put on hold because I thought it was taking too long, but in retrospect I should have just stuck with it. I actually enjoy playing Sunset, I think it looks half decent, and it controls pretty well. Most of the game exists in a rough state right now. I'm trying to get enough stuff finalized to show in a trailer, which will hopefully come soonish.