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I'm planning on starting a small couple person gaming company focused around simple 2D games. My plan for the company was to first create a nice high level (simple and powerful) and portable 2D gaming engine that does rendering, sprites, IO, etc for you and to make it open source. I then was planning on creating a number of simple games (SMB-like, puzzle, board) as well as some slightly more complex ones (RPGs). Each game would be very cheap to download ($1-$10) and some simple ones (like tetris) would even be free. In each game I would make sure to make a multiplayer aspect that would allow to you play with your friends over your LAN (for free) or through the official server (for a small amount $1-$5/month).
Being that the games would be fairly simple (the graphics would be about the same quality of a SNES) and all of the dirty stuff with be taken care of for you (IO, sprite animation, porting to alternate platforms, rendering, etc), rather than focusing all of our resources on the best cutting edge stuff out there we could focus on gameplay. I want to have a company that focuses on making fun games rather than simply ones that push your GFX card to the max.
As far as where I'm at right now, I have collected together many of the things needed for the engine. So far I have a nice quality 2D graphics rendering engine as well as a portable IO/GFX/Sound library. I next have to bridge the two together and create my sprite renderer and other things on top of it. I will only be working at bits and pieces for a couple of months and won't be able to work at it full time till Feb. 2006. I then don't plan on having a nice suite of games produced till at least 2007.
I'm not posting this here to ask for people to work on this with me as I don't need help yet and won't need any till 2006 rolls around (perhaps around that time I could use some, but time will tell). I am more or less posting this to see what the general opinion is. I want to know if you would be willing to pay $2 for a puzzle game or $7 for a RPG. I want to know if anyone thinks that this will succeed or if I should rethink my plans before I get in too deep.
Being that the games would be fairly simple (the graphics would be about the same quality of a SNES) and all of the dirty stuff with be taken care of for you (IO, sprite animation, porting to alternate platforms, rendering, etc), rather than focusing all of our resources on the best cutting edge stuff out there we could focus on gameplay. I want to have a company that focuses on making fun games rather than simply ones that push your GFX card to the max.
As far as where I'm at right now, I have collected together many of the things needed for the engine. So far I have a nice quality 2D graphics rendering engine as well as a portable IO/GFX/Sound library. I next have to bridge the two together and create my sprite renderer and other things on top of it. I will only be working at bits and pieces for a couple of months and won't be able to work at it full time till Feb. 2006. I then don't plan on having a nice suite of games produced till at least 2007.
I'm not posting this here to ask for people to work on this with me as I don't need help yet and won't need any till 2006 rolls around (perhaps around that time I could use some, but time will tell). I am more or less posting this to see what the general opinion is. I want to know if you would be willing to pay $2 for a puzzle game or $7 for a RPG. I want to know if anyone thinks that this will succeed or if I should rethink my plans before I get in too deep.
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Re: 2D gaming startup
Wed, November 9, 2005 - 10:32 AMWhen I say portable I mean that ALL of the game will natively run on the major platforms out there. I would make sure that BSD, Linux, Windoze, and Mac all work. Being that the tools I'm planing on using work on other OS's such as BeOS, IRIX, Solaris, many variant of UNIX, etc. the games could be runnable on most every multimedia OS out there. -
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A Name
Wed, November 9, 2005 - 10:35 AMI also wanted to ask one thing. What about a name? I am not too good with names and just some ideas for a company name would be helpful. -
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Re: A Name
Wed, November 9, 2005 - 11:01 AMYou should focus on portable devices like phones. That's where the money is. -
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Re: A Name
Wed, November 9, 2005 - 3:08 PMIndeed, its a waste of time if you are not targeting those portables.
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Re: 2D gaming startup
Sat, November 26, 2005 - 4:46 AMBarry -- Portability is not that big a deal, you should not focus on it. It's "easy" in the sense that, if you have a good game for one platform, porting it to another platform is no big deal.
On the other hand, if you start out saying "I am going to build the bitchin'est engine ever", and spend a bunch of time working on that and don't make an actual game, your company will probably fizzle out before you ever get anything done. Tons and tons of new endeavors do this.
Make a good game, and concentrate just on doing that. All else will follow.
Also -- I have to contradict these guys' advice about the mobile market. That market is tightly controlled by the various service providers, and they prefer to deal with large publishers. Therefore you have to go through a publisher, who probably isn't interested in talking to you. This is the same problem you face trying to get a game onto retail shelves.
I recommend instead developing a game for the PC. You can talk to various online publishers (like Valve with Steam, or Greg Costikyan and Johnny Wilson's new venture, or whoever). Once the game is done, you have a good demo to go show to, say, the Xbox 360 Live Arcade guys. Doing that port from the PC would be pretty easy and would bring you a large audience if the game is good. (At the same time though, I don't recommend developing directly to the 360 because then Microsoft is a gatekeeper, all they have to do is say "we're not interested" and now you have nowhere for your game to go. But nobody can stop you from publishing it on the PC, you can always put it up on your own web site and take credit card orders, etc).
-Jonathan.
