“Chaos Galaxy 2” is my third independent game work on Steam. Not long ago, after half a year, EA turned into an official version. During the process, it has been intensively discussing game content, giving feedback and confirming bugs with players in the Steam community, QQ group, and Discord. I won’t discuss the game itself any more here, but let’s talk about some impressive things during the two years of development.
With the increase of experience in developing stand-alone games over the past few years, I have also accumulated a set of process methodology for making games, and conducted a practice in Chaos Galaxy 2:
The first stage is to collect and organize inspirations of pure document nature, and finally form descriptions of each system and tables of various data.
The second stage is to collect art references, determine the art style, and draw each interface in the game directly according to the final state, as a game concept map.
The third stage is program design, which lists the data of the game from beginning to end-“status-” shows the complete structure and the name and function of each class.
The fourth stage is based on the scene and the interface. While writing the code, the art resources are removed from the game concept map and connected to the game. until the game can run through.
The fifth stage is to replenish art resources in batches and refine game codes.
All in all, it was a year-and-a-half-long waterfall development plan, and I was pretty much on schedule.
After the second phase was basically completed, around the spring of 21, I set up a store on Steam and uploaded a few game concept maps. Since the previous game Chaos Galaxy 1 gained some old player base, more than 3,000 wish lists have been accumulated within a week. At that time, I saw the sharing of Teacher Ye Qianluo from Gamera, as long as there are about 6,000 wish lists, you can enter the wish list list and get huge traffic before going online. I still have about a year to go, and it is relatively easy to reach the goal of 6000. I plan to complete the Demo in about half a year to participate in the Steam New Product Festival in the summer, and then officially launch EA in a year.
However, at this time, I miscalculated the difficulty of development. Because I modified the algorithm of the large map grid, the entire pathfinding system could not continue to use the code of the first generation. After the summer new product festival started, I was still desperately staying up late to modify and test. Facial paralysis due to excessive stress and long hours of work (up to 40 hours in a row), and even from being blown by the wind when weak. I had no choice but to apply to Steam customer service to withdraw from this new product festival. The customer service was very nice to operate in the background and advised me to rest more.
In short, I realized that manpower is still invincible, so I took a rest for about a month, and went for a walk in the sea of summer flowers and read books every day, and the uncomfortable facial paralysis gradually recovered. In the next two months, I only worked six hours a day, and smoothly completed the remaining problems of the Demo, and even completed a new set of combat animation expressions. Next, I participated in Steam’s Autumn New Product Festival in October.
The performance of the new product festival this time is still very successful. During the two hours of my live demo game, there were at most 800 viewers watching online at the same time. After the first day, the total number of wish lists exceeded 6000, and it successfully entered the Steam wish list list. .
After that, I spent more than half a year laying out the art, and finally completed the EA content at the end of July 22.
At this time, Chaos Galaxy 2 already had about 10,000 wishlists, and the game successfully entered the Steam new product expectation list four days before its launch. By the time it went online, the wish list had reached more than 20,000. In the first week of EA, I felt as if I had been beaten to death. I worked more than ten hours a day, and I would update 20 or 30 content revisions and bug fixes every day. Enthusiastic players give me suggestions and bug reports from various channels such as Steam community, QQ group, and Discord. A week later, the version finally stabilized.
Unlike most domestic games, the users of the Chaos Galaxy series are very international. The number of American players even reaches more than 40%, and the revenue accounts for more than 50%. There are also a large number of players from other English-speaking countries and some European countries. The number of Chinese users is about 20%, and the income accounts for about 10%. In the previous Chaos Universe and Chaos Galaxy 1 generation, this was a very unexpected experience for me. Now I think it might be because East Asian players play a lot of old games such as Kilian’s Ambition and Galactic Warring States Heroes, which are the same cosmic turn-based grand strategy as Chaos Galaxy, so they are very picky and have a low preference for pixel style. However, these games were rarely localized in Europe and the United States back then, so European and American players have a sense of novelty and do not reject pixel-style graphics, so they are more willing to pay and give good reviews. So even with the relatively low number of Steam reviews, the actual income of the Chaos Galaxy series is comparable to that of other domestic games with 5-10 times the number of reviews. As I mentioned before in Zhihu Ideas, $20 for 10,000 sets = 30 RMB for 50,000 sets. Although it is incomparable with the huge profits of making mobile games, as an individual independent developer, I have confirmed that I can stand up and earn money like a decent art creator without crying poor and selling miserably.
In the half-year EA, if I maintain the tight state of on-call like the first week, I can’t produce larger content, and I’m afraid my body will have problems again. Therefore, I try to combine work and rest, take a vacation every time I complete a big content, and tell the players friends frankly. It is a very fresh experience for me to enjoy the process of continuously adding new content throughout the game with the players. Therefore, during the six months of EA time, my pressure has never been too great, and I have also completed large-scale new functions such as custom characters and custom forces that have never been done before. It also gave me more confidence in the future of the game.
In the process of making commercial games many years ago, I either quickly changed the skin of a medium-sized project with dozens of people, or repeatedly tossed and tossed a large-scale project with hundreds of people, and fell into the quagmire of office politics greater than the development itself. For me, a project with clear planning at the early stage of project approval, waterfall development completed as planned, and harmonious interaction with players through the operation period is almost an ideal land that cannot be obtained in dreams. In my fifteenth year of making games and the fifth year of doing independent games, I finally realized this ideal state. In addition to personal wishes, I am afraid it is more from the support and help of the Steam platform and these players on the platform. Besides deep thanks, what more redundant nonsense can I say?
Source: Zhihu www.zhihu.com
Author: Han Zhiyu
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