For the past year and a half me and a colleague have been working on our Indie game called Robo’s World: The Zarnok Fortress, an Open World 2D Tactical Action Platformer.
The journey has been thus far filled with obstacles…to the point where it feels like the world has a dark sense of humor. When we started the project in September 2014, my colleagues laptop immediately broke down. Little did we know the fun was just beginning. We had initially planned the game to be released in the summer of 2015. But as we went to conventions to show the game off, the reception wasn’t what we were hoping for. Also our first Greenlight Campaign coincided with our first convention. It proved to be a failure. Trough out the summer we saw the same problem, as we were trying to promote the game. This lackluster performance lead me to completely overhaul the graphics and ascetics this August. Amazingly I was able to do it in 2 months. And as our new Greenlight campaigns shows , it is a huge success as every one has given positive comments on the graphics, with the odd comment of the background stills being a bit busy…which is easily fixed. We also have done some major modifications to the levels, vastly improving gameplay.
Throughout our development we had a big problem floating over our heads, Mighty no. 9! Our direct competitor for the type of gamer our game is aimed at. Our first launch got delayed because of the above mentioned problems, and by some cosmic rule Mighty no. 9 announced its release close to ours…but got delayed till 2016. Of course we were relieved at first, but as I was finishing the new artwork we saw that we wouldn’t be able to finish before Christmas and even if we did we wouldn’t be able to compete on that market. We decided to release on February 2016, as people by that time have recouped from the holidays and it would probably be a “slow news week” for journalists and youtubers. A few days ago my colleague informed me that our big competitor is releasing its game on February 9-th 2016. I didn’t know whether to laugh at the humorous but crappy situation or just go to a corner and “die”.
We do know that there is a lot of negative critique from their community towards Mighty 9, as their new trailer released on 30 of October is getting mostly down voted on YouTube. Main critique being cheap and plasticy graphics. I was generally surprised by the fact. As they did raise $3.8 mln. on Kikcstarter and had some really cool concept art. I’m surprised they didn’t use the hand drawn aesthetic in game and chose to go with a weird 3D look.
But the fact remains…they are on the press and youtober radar, we still need to get there. We are preparing for it, tho we are afraid that Mighty Man will completely overshadow us even if its not what fans expected…as we don’t have fans yet, and no one knows we exist…yet. Tho we are working to fix that.
We also did a Kikstarter where we raised $10,000 and thus far have invested an extra $30,000 into it. As far as budgets go we don’t even compare.
But do we compare some way in quality and satisfaction you get form paling the game?
P.S. We didn’t set out to create a Mega Man clone, to be clear. Our game is an Open World with no bosses (we have 6 types of enemy robots you face throughout the game). The Fortress itself is sort of a boss, similar to Glados in Portal. You navigate the Fortress and sabotage key zones to weaken the Fortress defenses to enable you to mount an attack on the Core. Take the Fortress down to save your home world.
If you have the time check out our Greenlight Campaign and feedback is welcome! Do you think we have a chance, would you play our game? Oh…and check out the demo:
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=561953066
Thank you!