Grow the game

Everything about Illarion that fits nowhere else. / Alles über Illarion was inhaltlich in kein anderes Board passt.

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Hew Keenaxe
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Joined: Sat Jul 23, 2011 8:47 am

Grow the game

Post by Hew Keenaxe »

I can't express enough how great this game has become. But it has two very glaring faults, and one is tied to the other.
Player count
Magic system
Lets be honest. Online PC games are dying in general. Most gamers now think of gaming as Candy Crush or Farmville. Tablet/phone games.
They are not our player base, though you may enjoy them too. We need to reach out to the fantasy/ D&D world. Players that visualize the game in their head. Players that see RP, and not in a Sims city way.
You have already done all that can be expected to providing a vibrant world. The map is great, the world works near perfectly. The background is better defined than most games.
What we need are players.
And a magic system. I cant stress that enough. Though I have never wanted to play a mage, they are vital to the game. It is all part of that medieval, fantasy world. Bilbo is great, but the story doesnt work without Gandalf.
Please spend huge amounts of effort and time to developing a magic system, the rest of the game can wait.
Then, devote all our resources to promotion. The game will live on the work you have already done.
Buy an add. Ask for us to "Donate" for promotion costs.
If the player base does not come up, it will fail just because of that. If someone new logs in and is the only, or one of five to be on, it doesnt suggest they should stay.
More players, mean new players.
No one wants to play a RP game alone.
Necral
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2012 9:22 pm

Re: Grow the game

Post by Necral »

I agree that these two aspects are issues, but they aren't necessarily linked IMO. The magic system would sure bring back some older players and satisfy the current players, but the magic system alone isn't going to bring this game players.

In order to get new players, the Dev's/community would have to do something like this:

- Keeping a regular news article on their IndieDB page with updates and cool video examples of what's up.
It let's potential players first of all find out about the game. Secondly, it let's them know what's going on and where you're at.

- Tirelessly push for a feature(s) on websites such as pcgamer, rockpapershotgun, gamespot or even smaller sites like rpgfan to name but a few (and then put on a spectacular (cool) event when they do have a look at this game).
Unless you are truly dedicated to finding something like Illarion, trust me, you won't find it otherwise.

- Whoever is in control on the illarion twitter needs to network more ie start following like-minded projects/dev's and get friendly with reviewers. There is a chance they will return the favor. Tag reviewers and get on board the #screenshotsaturday bandwagon.
Utilising social media is by far the best way to advertise in the current climate for indies.

- Have somebody do regular or atleast a few let's plays on Youtube showing off cool features and events (find a popular youtuber or if you keep up with the IndieDB page you might get a youtube gamer do it anyway).
A lot of gamers don't read online game magazines or keep up to date with sites like IndieDB, so let's players on Youtube who like to let people know what's happening in the indie gaming scene, as well as networking on social media are Illarion's strongest options at this point.

And that is only a few ways to get Illarion more players. I could think of plenty more but this is pretty much the ABC's of getting your media (*independent media that doesn't have a publisher) out there. If you try hard enough, it's a given. I've had experience in this area and have found it to work quite well. But I'm not looking to patronise anybody, only hope my little list gives the promoters some ideas.

On a final note, I'd sure like to see magic back, too (but hopefully not too overpowered like last time). But promotion is the more important thing here at this point. If new players is what you want.
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Estralis Seborian
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Re: Grow the game

Post by Estralis Seborian »

A very helpful and precise post. Thanks a lot for the input!

As manpower is limited, we gave the individual development tasks a certain order, defined in the development milestones: http://illarion.org/development/us_progress.php Those who foster the twitter account or did the main promotion work in the past are also those persons who do the main technical development. The basic strategy currently is first to have a stable state of the game that can stand every reviewer for at least an hour without any major technical issues such as crashes or broken animations. It is integral part of this milestone to derive proper promotion strategies and your post helps a lot in this. In the past, we had to face complaints of players that Illarion should not be promoted at all or just on hand picked sites about roleplaying. This is of course an improper strategy, not followed by us, but promotion was very limited in the recent past, see http://illarion.org/community/forums/viewforum.php?f=77. By no mean, it is "forbidden" or "wrong" to promote Illarion right now. But if I have to choose which task to complete first, I personally go for stabilising the game these days. There are sadly no "others" who focus on promotion. We started to put the indie aspect on the agenda and it is my personal goal to make it easy to find Illarion and to make it look "active and alive". Please support me in this!

The second milestone focusses on crafting. You might wonder why magic, what also have a high priority, is not rated higher than crafting. The answer is once again a manpower issue - improvement on crafting can be done by many more persons than the development of magic which has to start basically from scratch. The latter requires immense server and client work. We have just two persons in the team you can do this work. So it is very likely that we will finish the work on crafting long before we can finish magic - it has high priority but the expected time of arrival is simply later. The later milestones will improve the game further and further. Especially milestone V could turn Illarion into a real treasure among indie games. But this is nothing we can tackle this year.
Necral
Posts: 54
Joined: Sat Mar 17, 2012 9:22 pm

Re: Grow the game

Post by Necral »

It's a pretty solid plan and it's good to have a look at the development progress laid out there. Would also be cool to see the team do game footage with developer commentry(on your IndieDB news feed... wink, wink). You guys really do have a great and unique product that can go as far as you push it. As I see it, Illarion has been around for years, sure, but with the update it's like a fresh new game. It is a new game! So it's easy to understand that it's very much in the teething stage ATM. Exciting times for any developer. Even if players get a bit impatient, eh?

Once the milestone is met and it's time to start another wave of promotion I'd be happy to hop onboard the idea train.

Anyway, you guys can and will pull it off. keep the confidence. Viva la Illarion 8)
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