THENECROMANCER'S PROFILE

Ha, I made those comparisons in passing, but if you wanna focus on them, go ahead. And you really seem to be focusing on when I said back down. Tuomo himself has already backtracked on his opinions of the article as the comments went along, but has not yet updated the article in any way.

But agreeing with this nonsense and not making demos would in fact be a threat to our health as developers. Demos are the lifeblood of what we do, how we learn and improve. It's a driving force to get things completed. If even one person reads this and avoids making a demo, it's too many. This hobby would be void of hope and excitement if we didn't release demos.

Whatever the reason many games never get finished, so demos are the only way to get proper feedback and validation for hours upon hours of work spent. Outside a few devs who makes games for themselves or close friends, we make games for other people to play. Demos can be the only thing that will ever get released. There is nothing else.

rip

If you manage to release something by the end of the event on RMN you'll receive a special badge worth 75 MS!

Seems like it. It's the only reason I'm joining.

Maybe I'll clear the dust of my Zelda project. I miss that damn thing.

Maybe make a thread where people can report possible thefts and list this one. Something more permanent than a status.

author=Tuomo_L
Read my previous posts.

Sigh, ok, let's examine your posts here.

After a few people expressed issues with your article, you didn't respond to any of them.

author=Tuomo_L

author=Link_2112
You should avoid telling people to never do something. You can suggest what shouldn't be done, but I don't like being told I can never do something. Especially when I can think of many ways to do it, and do it well.

I mean honestly, starting with the start tutorial town and dragging the experience down does slow the game down needlessly. Plus, most of the players who will play your RPG Maker demo, will have grasp on these mechanics as is.

Even in quoting my post, you didn't acknowledge what I said. Instead, you chose to double down on your opinion regarding not including the start of the game and tutorials on game mechanics.

author=Tuomo_L
You guys realize that you at first say it's only hobbyist and you're not looking to go into many commercial routes or market the game much but then you say not everyone in here knows the RPG mechanics, when everyone on this website probably knows what Max HP stands for, without the tutorial explaining about it among tons of the other core mechanics that the tutorial towns are exactly all about. It's only when the gameplay concepts and the elements are changed in ways that are out of the ordinary, at least in terms of RPG Maker that you may need to really tell about them. Focusing at start to tell about these things that your playerbase already does know about does nothing but pad out the experience and slows it down before getting to the actual content.

Yes, the concept of hobby vs commercial was mentioned, but that has NOTHING to do with what you are saying here. Nobody here has said anything about a tutorial involving explaining such basic things as Max HP. I really have no idea where you are getting this from. If I had to guess, you have been playing many demos of people's very first RPGs and basing all your opinions on those bad games with their bad tutorials.

Even if a tutorial briefly explained Max HP, because really how much time could that take to explain, it has no bearing on the validity of tutorials/demos. All you can say from that is that there is a wrong way to make tutorials. It sounds more like you are using such a benign, imaginary thing to justify your opinion about demos.

Like I said before, the solution is to make better tutorials and better openings and better games. Please show me examples of games that have such bad tutorials explaining basic elements of RPGs like what Max HP is, because I have never seen one. If I remember correctly, even a game like pokemon explains at some point that if your pokemon loses all it's HP it faints. I've never heard any backlash at the stupidity of pokemon tutorials or outrage at not being able to skip them.

It's very different in commercial market where the exposure to your game is far bigger and your game may literally be the first ever RPG someone picks up. You have to have the tutorials that'll guide the player by hand as much of possible if they need it, but also have the option to skip it if they're scarred RPG veterans already. You guys also keep comparing to commercial games and pointing to demos like Nier while still telling me this is only hobbyist site and not everyone is interested in monetization. But in order for us to have a debate, we have to agree on some common ground on what we'll compare these demos at and from what point of view we'll approach to this discussion, shall we focus on hobbyism or commercial titles? Because Nier nor the demo for it wasn't made by hobbyist and it had a budget of over 10 million. None of us on this website have even close to that sort of budget.

And here we have your first attempt to divert the conversation away from the issues raised about your article and how it relates to us amateurs. It doesn't matter if we are talking about hobby vs commercial, or what the budget is, none of that matters at all when we are talking about a player's experience with a game. A hobby game can have an amazing intro, tutorial, and demo, while a commercial game can suck at all of it. Who cares? None of that is a valid argument to wipe demos off the face of the internet. Anything can be done badly, it's not a reason to abolish it.

At this point you have still not addressed a single thing mentioned by the people who posted. Except for the fact that someone mentioned a Neir demo and you seem so focused on using that as an excuse to ignore everything else.

author=Tuomo_L
Still, to have a good and mature discussion about such a topic where I'm sure everyone has their own opinions we need to make a distinct difference in something.

There are varying levels for game development in terms of budget and such, from lowest to biggest they are

Hobbyism
Indie game
Big budget indies
Triple A games

Hobbyists have nothing to lose, in this case at most, a poor demo will just make a person lose interest in the game but since you have probably very little money involved, it's not really any harm, the demo is for YOU for YOUR fans and you will probably find your own fans regardless. Still, you should most likely not start from the start and try and make it as simple and neat as you can. You may get a lot more fans and may find new friends and people who want to help you with your project if you "wow" people. So, while there's nothing to lose you have a lot to GAIN, so you need to think a lot if you really want to put out a demo that doesn't give a good lasting impression on the player.

Actually, we don't need to make a distinction between those levels of game development, but you sure seem to think so.

Your article says nothing of the sort. Here you seem to be bending, ever so slightly, to agree with what people are complaining about while still holding fast to your idea that you shouldn't include the opening. Since hobbyists are 100% of the audience of this article, don't you think that should be the focus? And if it is, that doesn't exclude using commercial games as examples to prove valid and obvious points.

Reading it over, your article contains a lot of "99% of the time" and "the fact is", when you can't say anything like that with certainty because all of this is your opinion. So you've played every game on the site and have kept track of which ones are bad and 99% is the number you came up with? You can use any made up statistic to prove your point, 74% of people know that.

However, for indie game level of development where actual money gets involvevd, you usually have a very limited budget and small team if even that, sometimes you do it alone. Making a demo does take time, it does take resources. The saying "time is money" is very true when you're indie dev and you have to literally make games to pay for your bills and the food you eat. Demos may not be the best course of action in this case when you literally need to use all the time and resources you have to focus on getting your product out.

For big indies, they have larger budgets and large number of people who support them. These people can easily do demos and many do (such as Nier) because they have the manpower and budget to organize their workforce far more than again, anyone on this website.

For triple A's, they could easily do demos but they honestly, don't bother. They don't need to, most of these already will have massive sales and massive marketing campaign as is and demos don't really help contribute to the overall sales at all.

All pointless to RMN's audience.

I'm also a bit curious how you know so much about the internal working of an industry to say so confiendtly the reasons why they don't make demos. When in fact, many big games have demos. When you become a member of PS Plus you have access to many demos of completed games. I think rather than trying to agree on what the audience is, hobby vs commercial, it would better for us to come to an agreement on what a demo actually is. Because everything about your article points to a demo being something released before a game is complete, but is that the case? Many times a demo is a short part of the game you can try before you buy.

On RMN a demo is usually an alpha build for testing and feedback purposes. The very point is that the game isn't complete, is very unpolished, and probably sucks(from new developers, and 82% of them are newbs). This is their main source of feedback. Are they supposed to spend months working on a bad game, only to release it and have countless hours of time shit on? They want feedback early so they can fix the problems they likely didn't know were problems. In what universe is that a bad thing?

Based on what you say in the article, this seems more like a reaction of you not liking the fact that you've played many bad games made in RPG maker. You offer no actual advice here, except to say 'don't do these things that I dislike'. This reads more like a checklist of all the bad things you see from newbie devs. I think the better solution is that you stop playing RPG maker demos from unknown developers, unless you can accept the fact that they will probably suck.

So, as you can see, in the case of game development for demos it is like this

Hobbyist- Can make a demo (But probably should consider if they can make it look GOOD)
Indie developer - Can't in most cases, it takes too much time and focus from other projects and the game itself. Plus, if you release a bad demo, you'll run the risk of losing more sales and since you're small, you need EVERY single sale you can get. The only other alternative is to focus a lot of time and effort into making a great demo, really polish and hone it to like a fine diamond but that will take a lot of time and money, something most indie developers literally don't have.
Big indies - They can and often will release demos.
Triple A - Totally could but most often don't, because they don't honestly benefit from them that much.

Again, you didn't say anything like this in the article, and you haven't updated it to include it. Now all of a sudden it's ok for a hobbyist to make a demo, but only if it's good. Which is only coming up after we mentioned it.

And again, everything beyond that is pointless to RMN and pure conjecture on your part. Plus it's so wishy washy, "totally could, but most don't, probably maybe could have might have...."

And yet again, you state your ever changing opinion as if it were fact.

The most likely reason why these upper level devs don't release demos/alphas to the public is because they bring in people for that. They either get the employees themselves to play it, they have specific game testers, or get focus groups or whatever other means. It sounds like you are applying RMN style logic to the entire game industry. A demo isn't one thing - an early version of a game released to the world for all to see.

None of us are in Bid Indies. I made this post on RPG maker net, not on Steam Developers discussion board. You need to understand that most of us are on tier 1 or tier 2 at most. You guys can point to Nier all you want and how great demo they made, but unless you have similar levels of budget and teams, I don't think that's a good comparision to draw from.

Here you are again trying to deflect criticism by, from what I can tell, suggesting that you need a big budget to make a good game/tutorial/opening/demo. All bullshit. And all because one person cited AAA games as good examples of something you have stated in no uncertain terms CANNOT BE DONE AND SHOULD NEVER BE DONE.

author=the article
NEVER BEGIN THE DEMO WITH A TUTORIAL TOWN OR LONG STORY AND CUTSCENES!!!!

The publishers don't care if the game is totally broken, if the deadline is set and the company doesn't meet the deadline, the company will be blamed for the delays. We've seen this time and time and time again. The company who made the game will lose a lot of money and may have a hard time working with big time publishers after that. It's silly to think that the triple A industry that's so focused on stuff like lootboxes, pre orders and DLC, would actually care for a demo of any sort. It wouldn't even matter to them since games like Mass Effect Andromeda was a sales success despite all the backlash, it still made over 111 million dollars.

Again, something that has no bearing on the article, the feedback given by us, or RMN.

So that brings me to this:

author=Tuomo_L
Read my previous posts.

What part of your previous posts is supposed to offer any kind of rebuttal to my post, or ANY of the other posts here?

Also you state:

author=Tuomo_L
That's all for now! If you have thoughts or suggestions or want to share your own thoughts, you're more than welcome to as I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on this subject matter!

Are you sure about that? Because so far you haven't addressed a single persons thoughts or comments, except to deflect criticism and focus on unrelated stuff.

author=OldPat
I think you can disable your subscription to this article, Link.

Anyway, everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If Tuomo doesn't want to... back down, then it's not our problem. We can debate and share our view on the matter, but we can't and should not force people to adjust to our own opinions.

You can't disable it for articles like this. At least not that I'm aware of. If you can show me how, that would be great. I'm still getting notices on the "New to RMN" article :/

And I wouldn't have such a problem here if he didn't pass off his opinion so objectively as fact, when he is just sooooo demonstrably WRONG. Opinions can be dangerous, especially when there is so much evidence to prove otherwise. If someone wrote an article saying the Earth is flat or vaccines cause Austism, when there is tons of scientific proof to say otherwise(or at the very least no proof it's true), do you think it's ok to let it slide? I mean, I'm not going to force anyone to change their opinion, and nothing I've done so far should suggest as much. If it came across that way, I apologize. But I can still debate it with enthusiasm, if only to persuade anybody reading this article to think twice about accepting such terrible advice.

LONG LIVE DEMOS!!!!!