I need to remember to do occasional write ups on the development of the game engine for the continuation of the PHP game series that I started years ago. However, I’m stuck relearning OpenGL for OpenGL ES 2.0.
Decision: Open Source
I was debating this internally for a while. Well, the game was always going to be open source, but the decision was whether to charge for the initial product. I’ve decided that the market for the game engine is small, so either I would have to charge a lot and spend a lot on marketing and advertising, or charge a little and hope that the market is a bit bigger than I thought.
My motivation came down to support and lack of market. I believe there are quite a few people who are interested in developing a WebGL game engine web application. I’m kind of hoping that those people gravitate to my project instead of Three.js or another complete product game engine. There are already paid game engines based off of Canvas and WebGL. I’m kind of hoping that if I can get a working product out before the end of the year that I can make something that others probably have already started to develop.
Well, the point is, is that the more people whom are able to support the product and do support the product, the less I have to support. I’m also hoping that smarter people join the project, so that I don’t have to spend months researching and developing prototypes and then ultimately developing something that sucks.
Summary
- I’m lazy and hope others help out with the project, thus giving me more motivation to commit to the project.
- Less support I’ll ultimately have to provide for fixing bugs and extending the project with new features outside the scope of my games in development.
- More people using the project providing marketing and name recognition.
- Mainly this is an educational project and when you start charging, it stops progressing for learning and starts progressing for money. I hate that type of worry.
Goals
By the end of the year, I plan on meeting or exceeding these goals.
- 1000 active players a month (shoot for weekly) for Farmer Sim (tentative name).
- $500 a month in revenue from Farmer Sim game.
- 3 active developers working on the base game engine. Myself included. I know a few people that might be interested in a working project, but not at this stage.
I think that if I can have the graphics component finished by this Summer, then I should be able to have a playable version of the game by the Fall or Winter. It is my believe that given the scope and playable features I might have in the game that quite a few people will be interested in playing the game. Experience has shown that at least 100 people will sign up for a new game without entirely even knowing what the game is about or if it sounds cool.
Farmer Sim, I believe is an interesting concept that I believe should have a lot of players. Given the almost infinite land scope, it will beat out anything Flash that matches the genre. If implemented correctly and with the features, it is possible to be bigger than anything current on the market. There is a slight problem. The game is not meant to have a lot of players. It will not scale well without a crap-ton of servers. Which is not to say that it is impossible. It is to say that given the start-up status of the game development, I will be unable to afford the hardware that would be able to support 100k active players.
A bit of a problem certainly, however, I think that if I do sell the source for Farmer Sim (or give it away), it is possible to extend the landmass by allowing multiple server instances to combine and create a wider complete landscape. However, the payment system and logistics for that would be difficult, not the mention the implementation security and cheating problems.
I still do not know the full extent of the storage problem. It might be less than what I fear and in which case the total amount of players could be higher. Also, as the game brings in more money, more and better servers will be possible, extending the capabilities further. Not that the processing power is of significant concern, mainly storage at this point. Storage will always be a problem, given the implementation of the landscape.
However, I’m not concerned with having a 100k active player base. I want no more than 5k active player base. I feel that it is hard to interact with the players and I really do want to interact with a small player base. Also, 100k is unreasonable, the game won’t ever reach that point. My goal should be to allow for 5k players or 10k and limit to 5k just so that everyone is happy and enough land and resources are available for everyone.
The problem will be capturing 500 players with as what might be only a month or two at best case and a few weeks at worse case to reach this goal. It is possible to have a working version in 3 months, if I worked on it every day as if it were a full time job. The problem so far is that I don’t know enough of the graphics component to really haul ass. By the time I get off of work, my mental capacity is spent and it is really difficult to comprehend what I need to comprehend to make it work. Not impossible, just frustrating.
Once the graphics component is moving along, the game graphics will progress quickly and I might just be able to work on it as if it were a full time job (devoting 5 to 6 hours on the weekday). I’m going to set this month to finish the graphics component and have experimental storage and API support. If I can do that, then I’ll have another 3 months to decide between Python and PHP and figure out the umpteen other features. oAuth and OpenID seems to be a hassle to develop, except maybe not as hard as what I think. I believe that once I start working on OpenID and OAuth, I’ll find it is fairly easy and should have a library working in 3 to 4 weeks. Which gives 2 to 3 months working on game features and administration.
My other goal is statistics. I want to sort of be data mining players for the purpose of finding what works, what doesn’t work. I like statistics and sort of get into UI and play testing. I would love to develop reports on how many players have multiple accounts and how many people are signing up daily, weekly, monthly. How players develop their farms, cities, strategies that players develop. Exploits that players find. It is all very fascinating. It’ll also be interesting to try out different payment models and see which one works out.
I don’t want to make a lot of money, and I doubt I will anyway. I simply want to see what the difference is between subscription vs in-game cash vs free game and advertising. It’ll also be interesting to see how people respond to other types. Such as a sort of donation model, where once a given number of players have paid a given amount of money for that month, everyone receives premium features. It really depends. I do hope to make some money given the amount of time I’ll be spending and have a little something something left over. It is simply that I don’t want to give myself hope of something that may never happen.
Possibly Related Posts:
- Plans for Base CMS
- Project Plans
- Calibre Improvements Part 2
- Usability Testing Software Development
- Motivations for Programming
