Stacking the Cubes. Assignment 2

INTRO


Cubetractor screenshot 4

After penning down my thoughts on Justin Tan’s presentation, I was first daunted by the idea of starting my own Indie game company. But when I put it into perspective, I realized that Justin Tan had actually informed us about the challenges and costs of running such a company making us better able to plan and prepare for it. What better way to start planning for my own Indie game company by doing an extension of Justin Tan’s Case Study.


DETAILS


Justin Tan created the game titled Cube Tractor, a Tower Defense/Puzzle game.

What I aim to do is to create a series building upon his original concept and adding what I feel are improvements to his game.

Doing a little bit of market research these are the statics for what genre of game is the most popular.

genreStatics

From the results here one can clearly see that the Action genre is the most popular.

With regards to Justin Tan’s game I feel that the mechanics has a lot of potential. Having the game be just a Puzzle game seems wasteful.

Cubetractor Hard

Looking at the game play GIF above, I feel that if the player could control where he put those initial tiles it would generate a more action oriented type of game play.

Another point to add is multiplayer.

There is an article regarding this saying by adding competitive multiplayer elements one can potentially increase revenue of the game by 510%.

http://www.gamedonia.com/blog/pvp-increase-game-revenue

To further emphasize my point here are some statics on DOTA 2 the most popular game on the STEAM platform it’s success is mostly due to it’s competitive multiplayer.

dota2_stats

As you can see in the past 48 hours the peak number of players playing concurrently was 11 million. Translating this into revenue for example if I sold my game for $1 and it sees even a tenth of DOTA 2’s success, I would earn a gross revenue of $1.1 million! That is just from players playing concurrently not even the total amount of DOTA 2 users. Which by the way is roughly 56 million.

Lastly is a memorable narrative. From personal experience, what keeps me playing a game is also largely due to it’s narrative. A game can have fantastic game play, but without the direction of a narrative everything would seem pointless.

As of now Cubetractor’s narrative is kind of cute but actually rather interesting. It is about a robot trying to escape to freedom. Making a very engaging experience.

Sadly I am not a great creative writer so this will probably have to be outsourced.


PROPOSAL


For this project what I propose is to create a series of 3 games based off Justin Tan’s Cubetractor and add improvements to the game.

Improvements would include multiplayer, more control over the blocks, more active role in combat.

The time-frame in which i plan to do this is 4 years.

2 years for the 1st game, and 1 year each for the 2nd and 3rd game.

Continued Here