SLASH'S PROFILE

If you design your game around a system like hunger/thirst you can create an exciting experience - but tacking it at the end makes it feel like more of a hassle or chore instead of a mechanic that adds to the experience.

If your game is about survival, hunger/thirst adds a ton to the experience. Say you're on a desert island and you have no equipment, no survival skills, no idea where to start looking, and you see a slowly ticking hunger/thirst meter. You're going to panic a little - which is the entire point. Later on when you're King of the Jungle eating roast boar legs and loaded with a campsite, weapons and food, you can look back at that health meter and laugh, because you conquered the jungle. Bam, the game has successfully given you a sincere feeling of accomplishment. Minecraft pulled this off well enough, and I'm pretty sure the new Don't Starve game is based around this idea.

In fact, one of my best MC experiences was using a world-seed that dropped you on an island in the middle of the ocean on a small island with only a tree and a few bushes and no animals/mobs. It was a blast to desperately work the land to grow food before I starved and eventually I made an enormous garden and finally set off for mainland :)

But just imagine tacking on those same meters on another game, say Skyrim. Let's say you had to eat food and drink water to stay alive. Skyrim isn't really about survival, it's about becoming a hero. You can get well-equipped pretty quickly in Skyrim, food is just lying around waiting to be stolen or looted and water is plentiful enough with all the rivers. After that initial period of being underfed, you'd have to deal with food/water for the rest of the game, during dungeon crawls and fights, and it would feel irritating, rather than fun or important. Once it's no longer a challenge, a system feels like a chore. If you heavily redesigned Skyrim, you could make hunger/thirst fun, but it would change the core of the game from "Becoming a Hero" to "Surviving in the World".

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Anyway to sum it up, if your game is about struggle and survival, a hunger/thirst meter can add a lot to the experience. Otherwise you gotta take a careful look because tacking it on carelessly would be a huge mistake.

I'll throw this out there - there are people who like to play incomplete games, for a myriad of reasons. Hell, they will always serve as a good reminder that creators have to be careful not to lose sight of scope and time. If possible, we should keep these games around.

Still, I could see an archive section for a game profile for non-complete games that haven't been touched for a certain amount of time... X months/years, for example. It would always be possible for the creator to un-archive the game, but if they haven't touched the project in 5 years and they've left RM forever, it would be favorable to keep those games for a purely historical reason.

I don't think the games list is particularly cluttered now, especially since you can sort to find completed games.

I honestly think the recent trend of indie games = tons of money is a phase that's going to pass soon. It came from a lot of different places:

• the first smash indie games like Audiosurf and Braid
• the growing technology & ease of making a game (better indie engines & tools)
• the growing ease to sell a game, via Steam, the App Store, etc.
• Indie Game: The Movie, which showcased games that were huge indie successes (and didn't show failure
• Minecraft, which on its own made so much money that EVERYONE noticed
• Kickstarter, which allows people to beg for money on a global scale, coupled with public investors who don't know real potential from promises

This is only theoretical, but these things lead me to believe there's an influx of indies who desire fame and success, and don't enjoy or appreciate the process of making a game... but of course everyone here knows games are not easy to make. I'll throw down a fortune-teller prediction here and say that in the long run, a large percentage of these new indies drop out when they realize that fame and fortune aren't just around the corner - those things exist, but unless you're making games because you love to make games, your motivation is going to die before the money arrives.

To tie this back into the original discussion... maybe we would have to deal with people who just wanna cash-in on indie games. But over time these people will fade away, and the ones who stick it out and keep making games because they just love making games, despite only selling a few copies or making mediocre sponsorships, will be the ones who get better and better, and hopefully, eventually make some truly great stuff. I'd like to support people like that if possible.

I agree that some of Dyhalto's points are pretty valid; for example, players getting confused which games are free and which aren't. I'd hate to drive people away.

I guess I haven't thought about it until recently, but what if a project isn't originally planned to be commercial but it turns out to have the quality of a commercial title and the creator decides to take that route? I assume with the current system the project would get removed, right?

I definitely don't think RM needs any built-in commercial support or that games should be sold directly from the site. I'd be too afraid that it turns into a marketing machine. But, if commercial games are truly treated the same way as every other project in terms of reviews, user feedback, front-page screenshots, etc. (if the focus remains on the game and it's quality, rather than potential revenue) I see no particular problem.

SO MANY QUESTIONS

With the system you outlined in place, I'd say yea. I know the majority of this community is hobbyist so someone like me is out of place, but I do make money off of game-dev sometimes, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't want to make more. I hope that most people don't see a commercial option and think, "Oh, I should charge money for my game!" because realistically it's a very difficult process and it may change a person's approach to gamedev. Still, I don't think this would result in an over-influx of new games. There are already a lot of demo-only/hiatus projects.

I treat RM as a great source of communication - to talk about game design, to test and judge each other work and learn from one another, to motivate one another - and as long as that remains, I personally will enjoy coming to the site :)

A couple of questions:

1) Are there any rules against commercial products now? Ex. is a game project allowed to be posted demo-only, with a link to the full / paid version?

2) This is specific to me and Love Has Eight Legs but if someone gets their game sponsored (and relevant ad/sponsor logo added) but remains free, would that be acceptable?

I know I'll personally use the site with commercial stuff or not, but if I could provide free partial versions of commercial games in the future in order to receive RMNer feedback on them, it'd be really great!