I originally discovered the fiendishly addictive Tower Defense as a multiplayer game modification for Warcraft III. It's a cooperative game mode where you, and a few other players, are presented with a simple maze. A group of monsters appear at the entrance and trudge methodically toward the exit. Your goal is to destroy the monsters before they reach the exit by constructing attack towers along the borders of the maze. As you kill monsters, you gain cash, which you use to purchase more powerful attack towers and upgrades for your existing towers. The monsters keep increasing in power each wave, but if you're clever, you might be able to survive all the waves and reach the end.
To give Paul credit, his implementation is really clever. Thereās an easy to use global scoreboard, and the game shows the specific playfield configuration each player used to achieve that high score, too:
The Warcraft III madness is truly viralā¦I spent 3 hours on a perfectly pointless game of X Hero Siege where you buff up your heroes to ridiculous (atleast by The Frozen Throne {TFT} standards) power levels and beat the crap out of everyone. No strategy, no brainwork just the silly pleasure of watching your hero attain power levels which are totally mindboggling (again, to a standard TFT player).
Itās interesting how the skill level has been gradually decreasing with the huge variety of multiplayer games available on the TFT platforms. First was Footmen Frenzy where you had to command huge armies (again, compared to TFT) with heroes who reached huge levels (25! cmp to Level 6 of TFT). Lol, once you reached such levels the game was merely an exercise in genocide!
Then DotA came along with only 1 Hero control and the skill lay in finding the right items to bolster your heroā¦no armies, TFT became an RPG. And after DotA we have all the other games like TD and XHS.
Is it a wonder that these games appeal to the public when most of the insane skill of TFT isnāt required?
but, with this new casual games development some consoles are betting on it (xbox live market place or something like that, and the soon coming wii virtual console for home made games).
Hm, I forgot, you can actually make a shareware program and get tons of money. Admuncher is a good example, but again, a good shareware program usually is written in assembly.
Iāve play a lot to warcarf III tower defense. It has started with the original blizzard map at four players. For the first time of my life, i have play a LAN game with my wife with no need to play against her. That game mode changes of the usual āNo! Do not attacks now! Please let me five minutes.ā
The team winning was a good time. I regret that collaborative games are not usual. Look at āDesktop tower defenseā, itās fun but honestly i havenāt play more than 3 hours to it (Oups, no more than 5 minutes boss). Ok, it is not a very good exemple, DTD is just a one man conceptual game. Compare World of Warcraft and Diablo 2, the interest is the same: kill mobs, gain xp, go kill bigger monster. On the two games you have a multiplayer mode. But why WOW players never stop? Because WOW is a team game, you can not win if you play alone. Same as Warcraft III Tower Defense. At my opinion, thatās the real cooperative part that make this games so addictives.
The fact that the programmers of āDesktop tower defenseā earns monney is more annecdotic. How many peopple here have code their games? How many have earn monney with that? Coders do not play lotorry when coding. They programs because they like it, for the pleasure of coding, not for the money.
Well, about making big bucks as a single programmer, I still have reservations. Yes, there are examples of people that made it, but there arenāt many. Letās just say it isnāt a safe bet.
Tower Defense was, yes, originally from Starcraft. It wasnāt called Tower Defense back thenā¦ Starcraft didnāt have towers. They had missile defense, maze defense, and so on. The most common one was missile defense, where players would scoot around with their SCVs madly building missile turrets.
Thatās still one of the best games of the genre though you didnāt win by purely defending which you could say is just a minor variation, not something truly original.
Roller Coaster Tycoon being written in assembly language is a red herring. Chris Sawyer is a damn good programmer, and heād be a good programmer regardless of language. But heās also more proficient in tools from old-school game development, hence the use of assembly language (remember that up until the mid-1990s, games written in assembly language were common).
āNo selling his soul to a publisher, no middlemen, just pure income, controlled directly by him.ā
Actually, Iād like to point out that the income is NOT controlled directly by him. Itās controlled by the company doing the advertising, and can be taken away by them at any time for any kind of TOS violation. This income stream is a side effect of the popularity of this particular game and the (relatively recent) ability to make money selling advertising.
Iām just saying that there IS a middleman. Have you seen Googleās profit margins lately? So maybe the split is a bit closer to 50/50 than 15/85 like the railroad tycoon author (which is also very close to a recording artist royalty rate, btw), but itās not a physical product either, with the additional overhead of printing, shipping and selling shrinkwrap at retail.
When that popularity goes away (as it almost surely will eventually) so does the revenue, and having one hit is no guarantee of having a second hit. Fortunately, he (the programmer) is aware of this, and he mentions in the interview that heād probably have to make one new game a month to continue to make a full time living at it. But how many original (or even unoriginal but executed well) concepts can you come up with before burning out? 10? 20? I think the lack of graphical sophistication works for this particular game but will undoubtedly be a disadvantage for any others he might make.
Anyway, I donāt see it as a business opportunity at all, really. Building it and hoping they will come is not a business model that I want to rely on. Nobody is going to quit their day job to make money doing this unless they can already afford to not work for a few years. Itās a way to make some money from a hobby. Only after you get a hit, THEN just maybe you can have the confidence and financial cushion to get more serious about it. Thatās just my opinion though.
I also have a serious issue with the fact that the only business model available to individual developers involves doing something that attracts enough attention to sell advertising. Maybe I donāt want to make a living facilitating that! Is there any way to achieve independent success WITHOUT resorting to advertising? That is a more interesting topic to me.
If many (if not all) IT companies are innefective, with many unproductives expensives and still are profitable then one-men-army company can obtain a high success without much trouble. This game is a example of it.
The risk is that a programmer can spend a lot of time in a un-profitable project.
There are plenty of 1-man software companies making a decent living selling software direct to buyers on the Internet. I know, because I run one of them. Personally I wouldnāt recommend writing games (or development tools) if you want to maximise your chances of a good return. The fact that a very successful game is āonlyā making $100k per year rather reinforces this.
Itās not surprise that āone manā coded a big game. Not even in assembly language. There are tools that make assembly language as painfull (or not) as C++. On the other side, during āthe old daysā most coders coded alone, with just a guy for gfx and sound.
