Post by PaulsGames in No-one cares about my game

Viewing post in No-one cares about my game

Yes, it's absolutely true that it's hard to get any interest. I think I've made a few fun games, but they're all spectacular failures in terms of promotion and getting attention. If you're not constantly promoting, the plays dry up - I think that only a tiny fraction of all games on itch.io get natural, sustained attention (from word of mouth, being featured on the front page or being on top of the "most popular" search lists). Even if people play your game, there's only a small fraction of them that will leave a comment, rating or review...

If you have fancy graphics or a unique, catchy gimmick as main selling point, you might have a chance with your promotion efforts, but if your main selling point is deep and interesting gameplay... well good luck with that.

What's worse: you made a multiplayer-only game. That's just not feasible as an indie. Make sure your game can at least be tried in single player mode, for instance by adding AI (it doesn't matter whether it's truly smart).

All my games here except one are multiplayer (local or online), but I've been trying to make sure they're (nearly) all playable in single player mode, even if that's a lot less fun: either by adding AI opponents (competitive games), or by allowing players to control multiple characters (coop games). For the online multiplayer games, I have no illusions; I'm not even hosting a server. If you want to play them, you need to run your own server. I mainly made those games to play with my friends during lockdown. :-)

That said, your game looks quite interesting. I just haven't been able to play it yet (because of the multiplayer). Make sure to market this to board game fans, like the people who play on www.yucata.de or en.boardgamearena.com - that's quite a different audience than typical video game players, especially here on itch.io (it seems horror, visual novel and simple arcade games dominate here).

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Nulisar1 year ago

Thanks for the comments. Yeah, I had already considered the mutliplayer-only aspect as problematic and thought of adding an AI months ago, but just haven't got round to it yet because AIs are pretty difficult (even dumb ones). I actually looked into reinforcement machine learning as a way of building a decent AI but it's very complex and difficult and basically requires using Python for everything, which I'm not that familiar with either. I'd love to get help from someone with AI building experience but I'm guessing those people don't tend to volunteer their time and it'd probably take a large salary to hire them :-)

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PaulsGames1 year ago

I noticed that for some board games, simple Monte Carlo Tree Search is surprisingly powerful. Very shortly (and badly) summarized: just simulate a lot of randomly played games starting from the current position, and pick the move that led to the highest percentage of wins.

Depending on how the game logic is implemented (with clear model/view separation), programming such an AI might be doable, though it works best for finite games, and your game definitely looks more complex than the simple games I tried it for.

Also, doing such a brute force approach might take a lot of CPU power, so doing it server side may become expensive. Anyway, it's just an idea that you might find useful...

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Nulisar1 year ago

Yeah given the tree of possible moves with my game that would turn into a virtually infinite number of games very quickly. Some kind of directed A* search is probably needed, and that is gonna be tough. Either that or hand-craft some AI behaviours that make some sense, but probably aren't all that hard to beat. As I said, ideally I'd have some kind of reinforcement ML expertise on my team and the AI could be trained to make good moves through the whole reinforcement neural net magic. :-)

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Rush At Games1 year ago

Hey, if you are ready to get into Unreal, there's a built in AI support for NPCs.. I've used in my game Roxroria. You may check more on Unreal documentation. Pls ignore, if this doesn't help your situation.

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Nulisar1 year ago

Oh, just thought I'd say this for the record: I tried to post about my game on the forum of boardgamearena.com and got a moderation warning for "advertising". So yeah, they apparently don't want their members to know about board games that aren't hosted on their site.

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redonihunter1 year ago

Rightly so. While you might be able to sneak something in on their offtopic boards, they are about board games, real physical board games, you can buy in a store.

Your game is not a board game. It is a computer game. They do not allow computer games on their platform, why should they want to talk about computer games, lest allow advertising for such.

And as I mentioned below, your competion is triplea. Axis & Allies with AI and available custom scenarious, including popular stuff like LotR and whatever you find in the community. I did not check out your game, but maybe your ruleset and units could even be adjusted to be a module in that open source game. So yeah, no one cares about your game, as it is not a popular existing board game. Or is it? Try finding a community for online computer board games maybe.

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Nulisar1 year ago

It was recommended on this board that I mention the game on there.

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redonihunter1 year ago

Do not trust random strangers on the internet (scnr).

I had a quick look at that site, and after a minute it was clear, that you could not host your game on there, even if you tried, because they only do real board games. If there forum has a promotion corner, it would have been a good idea, I admit that. And that is why I recommended to finda place where people talk about computer board games (and allow promotion ;-)

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Nulisar1 year ago

Not really. In the context of the internet, "board games" obviously includes electronic board games. Do they have to "look like" a physical board game, do they have to render some physical dice being thrown? That seems a bit limited. A "board game" in an online context pretty much means a turn-based strategy game IMHO. Which my game is.

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redonihunter1 year ago

Just because your game has a 2d map and is turn based multiplayer, it is not a board game. Is the civilisation series a board game?

You could tag it as board game on itch. Just like card games are tagged card, even though you have no real cards. But that is tagging and not real attributes of games. And depending on your game, the tag might even be wrong. Just look at the games that do have this tag.

Could your game mechanic be replicated in Tabletop Simulator? And that stuff can replicate the heavy board games like Twilight Imperium...

If so, I would be more inclined to believe your statement, that your game would be a board game. But your definition includes stuff like civ. Turn based strategy games are turn based strategy games and not board games. In the context of computer games you would tag turn based strategy . And yes, you would tag board, if you try to create the look and feel of a physical game. Imagine chess. That is a board game. But would you tag a computer chess game as board game? I do not think so.

(Oh, and electronic board game does not mean what you think it means. Google it ;-)

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Nulisar1 year ago

Frankly, who cares. People interested in board games are likely to have a large overlap with people interested in turn-based strategy anyway. Board games are basically a subset of turn-based strategy.

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