There are three groups of people I really hate: Grammar Nazis, Password Nazis, and actual Nazis.
If your website is full of assholes, it’s your fault
“Our communities are defined by the worst things that we permit to happen. What we allow tells the world who we are.”
I took a statistics class in college, but I didn’t pay much attention due to never seeing a need for the knowledge. Much of my education is like this: “Why the hell would I ever need this”, only to find out years later that I desperately needed it (yeah, I’m talking to you, high school algebra).
Thimbleweed Park is out on seven different digital stores and each of them has a completely different way of reporting sales. It’s time-consuming and frustrating to download each sales report once a month and hand massage the data into a useable format.
I spent the last few days writing a python script to take all the data and move it into a single SQL database so I could quickly query tons of useful information.
@@pre@@ SELECT countries.country, SUM(sales.units_sold) AS units_sold FROM sales JOIN countries ON sales.country_code = countries.country_code WHERE units_sold > 0 GROUP BY sales.country_code ORDER BY units_sold DESC @@pre@@
One thing I want to know is an “average” units/day for each store, so I can keep an eye on long-term trends. Sounds easy, except for sales and promotions happening all-to-often, and they produce huge spikes in the data that I don’t care about. I just want to see an average for average non-sale days and I don’t want to go in and remove the sale ranges as sometimes they happen without my knowledge.
I’m looking for a way to take an average that removes spikes that are well above the average. This doesn’t have to be in SQL, that computation will most likely happen in a spreadsheet, or could happen in the report generation if it’s too complex.
Maybe this isn’t possible, but I figured I’d ask.
Here is a breakdown of Thimbleweed Park sales by store for 2017. This is based on dollars, not units, so mobile numbers will be smaller due to price. You can see how strong Switch is given it only had a few months of sales.
The iOS and Mac App Store numbers are combined due to Apple lumping them together for payments. 75% of the money from Apple comes from iOS.
Typically, GOG sales are 5%-10% of Steam sales, but we’re doing much better than that.
Android sales are lower than expected, but not by much. Paid Android apps have always been a struggle.
The thin green slice at the top is the Humble store.
The biggest disappointment is PS4 sales. We could never get them to feature us, so we’ve haven’t been on the dashboard. PS4 and Switch came out close to the same time, so I figure Switch sales have cannibalized PS4 to some extent, but it doesn’t fully explain it. Given the large installed base of PS4, it’s a tad confusing. The argument that players don’t want to play point-and-click on a console doesn’t hold water given how well we did on Xbox.
For indie devs that don’t have money to advertise, you’re at the mercy of the platforms, and this goes for Steam, GOG and the others. 90% of your attention comes from being on the front page or dashboard, and if you can’t get them to feature you (or aren’t naturally in the top lists), you have a problem.
All-in-all, I can’t complain. Thimbleweed Park has done well. Nobody is getting rich, and it’s not enough to turn around and make another point-and-click adventure without substantial risk, but by the end of 2017 I had made just enough to just dig myself out of the financial hole the game put me in.
The best way to train a neural network is with a combination of reward and punishment.
In all seriousness, I hope the rumors are true. I might actually see a Star Trek movie again.
Yay, it’s time for the answers to last Friday’s Questions. I’m posting them a little early because I’m going skiing tomorrow. Yay! Skiing!
Let’s get moving before global warming melts all the snow.
Romulus: What your programming environment looks like? Headphones and music while doing? How you divide your time between making games and living “real life” ?
I work on a Mac exclusively. When I need to compile a Windows or Linux build, I start up a VM. I can’t listen to music while I program, I need complete quiet. When I write, music is helpful. Dividing my life between making games and real life is a struggle. I need to leave the house to fully disconnect. In the winters, I go skiing. I’m off skiing today.
Giorgio Novelli: Why did you leave Lucasfilm? I never found a satisfying answer on the internet and it still kind of haunts and confuses me.
I had worked at Lucasfilm for 8 years and learned a lot, not just about game design and programming, but also marketing, PR, and production and I felt like I needed to try it all for myself. I also had the idea of making adventure games for kids. I floated it by Lucasfilm Games and they weren’t interested. It feels like the confusing thing for a lot of people about me leaving comes from them thinking I was leaving an amazingly successful franchise and why would I do that? That’s because, at the time, Monkey Island wasn’t. It sold well, but not amazingly well. Sierra Online was selling 10x the copies we were and it’s was only 20 years later that Monkey Island has taken on this almost mythic nature in people’s memories. That wasn’t true back then.
** PiecesOfKate: Considering the potential benefits of social media (such as Twitter) for promoting a game, versus your personal dislike of those channels - if you were to make another game would you rejoin, or avoid it? For clarity I’m referring to a personal Ron Gilbert presence, not the game brand.**
I’ve thought about this a lot. If I was just releasing a new game, I don’t think I would need to come back, but if I was doing a Kickstarter, it would be really hard to not leverage social media.
Gustavo: Hi Ron. I have always wondered about the “Extra 5 USD for Guilt Absolution” tier on the Kickstarter campaign that I and 3047 other people choose. Where did that idea come from? Did you expect to have so many people voluntarily choose to pay 5 USD more than the “standard” tier?
I don’t remember who came up with this, but we knew it was going to be popular, and if not popular, then funny.
Nathan: Given the engine and assets of TWP, would a sequel be significantly cheaper / quicker to produce?
I don’t think it would. The engine didn’t add that much to the development time and cost. Maybe 20%, but saving 20% isn’t significant and that savings would get eaten up in engine enhancements and me wanting to do more artistically with the presentation. Holding true to the spirit of Maniac Mansion (dollhouse view, no close-ups or cinematic presentation (think about the difference between Maniac Mansion and DotT)) saved us a lot. We could make a new game cheaper if it had the same look and feel, but that isn’t creatively interesting for me. If I do another point-and-click, I want to push what a point-and-click can be, but still staying true to the form.
LostTrainDude: Where do you think improvement and evolution lie in the future of adventure games, considering their heavily-scripted nature? Is it in technology or in better design? What is it that you would like to see in an adventure game and didn’t yet? This discussion rises from my curiosity in Chris Crawford’s work on Interactive Storytelling (which you may be familiar with as well).
The future of interactive narrative is in true AI. I don’t think AI will ever be able to tell compelling stories on its own (stories are compelling because they are soulful depictions of the human experience), but there is so much “filling” that goes on in an interactive story that AI would be perfect for. It’s probably a couple of (human) generations away.
Zak Phoenix McKracken: Which are the most bizarre things you had to sign, to please your fans?
Some dude’s breast.
MK8bit: Do you think Thimbleweed Park would make a good novel too and what are your opinions on TP fan fiction and its publishing (fair use okay, but make-a-dime-with-em and be cease and desist’ed)?
I don’t think Thimbleweed Park would make a good novel. The whole story is about it’s medium and just telling you about it (in novel form) removes you from the whole point. I’m fine with fan fiction and long as it stays “fan”. It’s not so much about making money as not turning it into an industry. There is a lot of Thimbleweed Park fan art (and even people selling it), and I don’t have a problem as long as 1) You can’t use our trademarks, 2) it’s not confused with official/licensed merchandise, 3) you’re not making too much. It’s a big grey area and I’ll know it when I see it.
Nikita Sokolov: Thanks for our childhood! And my question is - who is your character in World of Warcraft? Is it an elf? Or an orc? Or a pandaren may be?)) And what is your class? A Mage?
Depending on my role in the raid I will play a (Horde) Warlock, Death Knight or Shaman. That said, I haven’t played in over 3 years. Blizzard locked my account due to someone trying to hack it and it hasn’t been worth the effort to unlocked it. Thimbleweed Park was probably the better for it.
Erik: Would you consider going back in the direction of Humongous Entertainment by creating games that are solely aimed at kids rather than “grown ups”? Do you ever think about that segment of games?
The kids market has changed a lot in the last 15 years and I don’t find it interesting anymore. It’s all about licensed games, quick disposable mobile games, or these odd social website type games. What I loved about making games at Humongous Entertainment was telling stories as adventure games. I don’t think there is a big market for that anymore.
Dryade: If you never manage to make Monkey Island 3, which would be a tragedy, will you divulge the secret of Monkey Island or will it just vanish with you and keep us all forever in anguish?
Here is the deal with the “secret” of Monkey Island: It’s just not that interesting now (it was back then). But over the last 25 years, it’s grown to almost mythic proportions. If I told you the secret, you’d go “Oh… that’s kind of dumb”. If I was ever to do Monkey Island 3a, the trick would be to take the core of the secret and build it into something that lived up to the hype. I would never create a new or different secret (that’s unfair), rather, it would be about making it more meaningful, relevant, and build on the mythology. I have an idea on how to do that, but it’s not fully formed and sorry to disappoint everyone, but I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it these days.
Lancelot’s Hangover: After beta testing, what do you do if you realize a series of puzzles doesn’t work. Do you cut off the whole series of the puzzles (meaning wasting time/art/effort)? Do you try to make those puzzles easier by giving more explicit hints through dialogs and hotspot/object descriptions? Do you keep most art and animations but rebuild the whole series of puzzle in a different way?
I assume you mean “playtesting” since we don’t do beta testing. But, at any point in development, from playtesters, bug testers, or us playing the game, we’re constantly finding puzzles that don’t work. That’s a normal part of the design process. Most of the time it’s a simple tweak like adding or changing a line of dialog or moving a clue. Other times we’ve had to take the entire puzzle chain and move it to a different part of the game (we did this with the Pigeons in Thimbleweed Park) and this can involve doing new art or animation. There are other times where the core of the puzzle just doesn’t work, so you just cut it and never look back. Ideally, your production process is such that most of this happens when you’re still in a pre-production and making large changes doesn’t cost that much, but occasionally, you’re making big puzzle edits late in the process and you just take the hit. I’d rather throw out good work than leave it in and diminish the experience. I can’t think of a single large puzzle we cut in Thimbleweed Park once we got out of pre-production.
If you have any riveting questions for next week, put them in the comments. Make sure you start it with Q:
I was in the middle of writing a post about how to start a better online game store than Steam when Lars Doucet posted his, which is a much much better than mine was going to be, so I deleted it. There was also about an hour of pouting, but that’s over now.
This sucks. The Awl was one of my favorite sites.
In my relentless pursuit of ditching shithole social media and re-powering my RSS feeds, last week I asked for readers favorite Programming Blogs, this week I’d like to ask for favorite Game Dev blogs.
Currently, I follow:
- Fortress of Doors
- game design aspect of the month
- INTELLIGENT ARTIFICE
- Lost Garden
- Raph Koster
- The Ludologist
- Zen of Design
- Sir Tap Tap
- Critical Distance
Feels like Game Dev blogs aren’t updated as much as programming blogs. Not sure what that means, so let’s go with game designers are lazy. Like any good scientist, I’ll make the data fit.