It is well known that being comfortable is often an impediment to success. If necessity is the mother of all invention, then comfort is the mother of procrastination. To accomplish things that you can be proud of you will almost always have to push yourself (or be pushed) outside of your comfort zone.
This principle also applies when it comes to designing successful games. Most games developers will have grown up with a high exposure to gaming culture and we will be familiar and comfortable with all the classic gaming genres. The problem comes when we write games inspired by the ones we love and feel comfortable with. When it comes to releasing our game we find that the app store is full of similar games. As game developers, we all want to write our own interpretation of our favourite game genre, be it a first person shooter, a platform game or a rogue-like dungeon crawler.
I've recently experienced this when releasing Plasma Duel. I believe it is a very original game, but despite being an original hybrid game, the ideas upon which it is based are very comfortable to all gamers. It is not surprising that it is buried in the masses of air hockey games on the Google Play store. I have no regrets about developing Plasma Duel, it still gets 20-30 downloads a day (I have no idea how people find it) and could get better exposure in the future. My point is that I didn't set myself up for success when I chose that genre.
Contrast that with the slot machine games that I have developed. They are well outside of the interest of your average "gamer". The only reason I am familiar enough with fruit machines to write my own is that I used to live in a seaside holiday resort when as a child and I was teaching myself to program. Cherry Chaser slot machine and Super Snake slot machine have now a combined total of nearly two million downloads between them. The reason they were so successful is that nobody else was writing European style fruit machine games and I was lucky enough to feel comfortable writing one of my own.
The crux of this post is that if you are comfortable writing something that very few other people are willing to develop, you have a head start to success. Your idea for a dungeon crawler or platform game is unlikely to get noticed unless you get lucky or have some really clever hook. The best route to success may be to move out of your comfort zone and develop a game that isn't for yourself, but for a very specific target demographic outside of the conventional gaming market.
This principle also applies when it comes to designing successful games. Most games developers will have grown up with a high exposure to gaming culture and we will be familiar and comfortable with all the classic gaming genres. The problem comes when we write games inspired by the ones we love and feel comfortable with. When it comes to releasing our game we find that the app store is full of similar games. As game developers, we all want to write our own interpretation of our favourite game genre, be it a first person shooter, a platform game or a rogue-like dungeon crawler.
I've recently experienced this when releasing Plasma Duel. I believe it is a very original game, but despite being an original hybrid game, the ideas upon which it is based are very comfortable to all gamers. It is not surprising that it is buried in the masses of air hockey games on the Google Play store. I have no regrets about developing Plasma Duel, it still gets 20-30 downloads a day (I have no idea how people find it) and could get better exposure in the future. My point is that I didn't set myself up for success when I chose that genre.
Contrast that with the slot machine games that I have developed. They are well outside of the interest of your average "gamer". The only reason I am familiar enough with fruit machines to write my own is that I used to live in a seaside holiday resort when as a child and I was teaching myself to program. Cherry Chaser slot machine and Super Snake slot machine have now a combined total of nearly two million downloads between them. The reason they were so successful is that nobody else was writing European style fruit machine games and I was lucky enough to feel comfortable writing one of my own.
The crux of this post is that if you are comfortable writing something that very few other people are willing to develop, you have a head start to success. Your idea for a dungeon crawler or platform game is unlikely to get noticed unless you get lucky or have some really clever hook. The best route to success may be to move out of your comfort zone and develop a game that isn't for yourself, but for a very specific target demographic outside of the conventional gaming market.
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