Greeting fellas

Since I'm joining GDTV jam 2024, I won't make a long post because I'll need to work on my game jam project.

But this is a vacuum time for me, so I can write for a bit.

My game project "Arcane Horde" is already reached a conceptual build. While it's functional and playable in terms of mechanic, it's lacking in the pacing which will represent in the finall game. One of reasons is because I didn't work on VFX and integrate them into the skills which player and enemies will use. The next is the numerical balance, this part is the hardest of any action games with complex calculations. Despite the game being a casual action, there are a lot of things going on under the hood and it's hard for me to just make it right.

Essentially right now if you play perfectly, you'll be able to beat the boss within 3 big hits. But the boss along with a bunch of minions would be able to kill you even before that if you don't cull the minions from time to time. Well I think it's fine if the player will die rather fast when doing the wrong strategy. Though it's actually not that fast since I made the player rather tanky. The problem is the boss can kill you in 10 hits while a minion can kill you in 100 hits. But there could be upto 10 minions when enter the boss phase, so it's like you'll have 2 bosses at the same time.

This is not taking into account that there will be more variety of minions and more skills for the boss which will deal damage differently and could essentially deal much higher damage than this skill in exchange for them easier to evade. Also I'm still considering about making the boss even tankier. Right now it's too fast to kill the boss, though it's because I've got 17 upgrade points into maximizing my DPS. But even without the upgrades, the boss would still die rather fast when play correctly.

There are many things I could do to polish the game before it's reaching vertical slice version. For example, barrier need indicator to see how much HP of the barrier available. It's supposed to be in conceptual build, but I somehow forgot it and the time for game jam is here.

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Well let's talk about another matter which I wanted to mention, and it's also the original purpose for this blog post.

Epic sent an email to me regarding the publishing in Korea. Epic is willing to help game developers publish their games in Korea while I don't know if Steam is gonna do it.

This put me in dilemma. Epic has policies of game developers and game publishers centric. So it'd be more beneficial for me and fellow indie devs to ride the train.

But they're kinda ignored the gamer's side. The launcher is still suck for being a game store. I mean even GOG is far better than this. Itch is even better than GOG if we're talking about the flexibilities for the developers, but I think the gamer's side is also good. Maybe not as good as Steam because Steam has the "Game recommendation" function which serving similar to scrolling news feed in facebook or X.

Just "Game recommendation" alone is already give gamers enough reasons to not use anything else. They're "curated" for them according to someone on YT.

From my personal experience, I don't think this thing could be called as "curated". More like randomly promoting already successful games. Those games which already got a lot of purchases or wishlists would be promoted through this. Not to mention the idea of players can add tags to the game, which made some games changed their names into something more accurated to the gameplay they offered.

Steam would be able to recommend more accurate games if they're not bias toward successful games and allowed players to add tags. Some niche games need to have special tags and the players will be able to find them despite the success. This way even the worst possible game would be able to exposed to the gamers interest in that genre.

Now let's get back to the matter at hands. Why does this put me into dilemma?

First of all, I'm using Unreal Engine. This fact alone should already motivated me to publish my games on Epic store, since I don't need to pay royalty fees once I got over $1 million. I only need to pay 15% for every purchase, which Steam take 30%. I don't know about GOG though.

As for itch, I have the freedom to distribute the profit, so I set 5% to itch which is the default value. I think 5% to the storefront is already good considering it's digital copy. But even digital copy need some maintenance, so maybe 15% is something they deserved. If I publish on itch, the most I'd give is 10% because I have to pay another 5% to Epic in case I got more than $1 million.

Anyway, the royalty fee is something far away. But it's worth mentioning that if I exclusively publish on Epic store, I don't need to work on accounting for the royalty fee my entire life.

Well at the end I'd still publish on Steam for the sake of having my own steam page. Because it's like the glorious dream of any game developers to have their own games on Steam. It's like a badge of glory. It's giving us dignity and goal to pursue. Thanks to Steam Direct, any bozo can make something stupid and pay $100 fee to publish their games. But the thing is we gotta preserve our pride as game developers to only make quality games.

So I'll at least publish on Steam once, just to see what it's like to be  on steam. Then I'll consider if I wanted to continued publish on Steam or allowed myself to be free from any worries and exclusively publish on Epic store.

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Anyways, let's end it here. I said it's not gonna be long but it's already longer than I expected.

Have fun developing games and gaming. I vouched for gaming society.