A month has passed since SpHero was live and the results were quite... disappointing. Was it a failure? Yep! Was the game bad? Not at all.
The feedback received was quite interesting to say the least but the entire failure lies within one singular domain: marketing.

So let's dissect the issues one by one and learn from this failure instead of beating ourselves over the head:
Issue #1: Bad First Impressions
It never occured to me that there were tons of other lesser ball games where you basically just roll around and finish a simple course. These games don't have jumps, power ups or any sort of level theme. They just have test environments you play around.
The issue becomes association. People see the page and go "Oh, it's another one of those games."
I had hoped the visuals in the trailer and the demo could have turned some opinions around but it didn't seem to be the case at all. People walked away before giving it a chance.

Issue #2: Lack of Characters
It turns out characters and mascots are very important to some people and that abstract shapes are simply a turn-off. Why? No idea!
But they kept asking "Why am I doing this? What reason does the ball have?"
And that was a very alien concept to me. Why do you race in Mario Kart? Why do you want to save the princess in Zelda games? It didn't matter since you embodied the protagonist, regardless of who it was.
Super monkey ball had a monkey on top and somehow that had more charm than just the ball itself.
And the idea of customizing the ball also didn't seem to appeal to anyone either, which was a bummer. Turns out a monkey with a different colored shirt is a better selling concept than a 3D shape.

It is a painful conclusion but it seems most people cannot relate to abstract objects. This seems to be an extreme out of the "Characters must be relatable for people to buy it." It is 2024, I thought people were beyond that, but apparently they aren't.
In the future, the games will have a mascot of sorts or a humanoid character.

Issue #3: Platformers Don't Do Well
It struck me quite late in development that platformers don't really do all that well on Steam at all. There is a lot of competition and very few returns, meaning you have to market the price much lower to be competitive and have tons more marketing to stand out.
60 Levels, boss fights, powers, costumes, it didn't matter as long as it wasn't Mario or Sonic.

Issue #4: Simple Visuals Make the Game Look Inferior
That one kind of surprised me since there are tons of folks complaining AAA focuses too much on graphics and not gameplay. So when the reverse is true, the reaction is "Oh, this is a tutorial game or something..."
This probably wasn't the major contributor but it was a feedback I received nontheless.

Issue #5: No Visibility
I tried a few things, including contacting content creators on YT and Twitch to try to have the game showcased. A few came back but their response was similar to issue #1 and #2: "Oh another one of those games." and refused.
I also tried the steam curator program but ironically enough, nobody I sent keys to actually reviewed or recommended it; it was complete strangers that did.
I was approached by a few "content creators" however they all wanted free keys and none seem to have bothered with the demo either, which was disappointing.
In the future, marketing will be pushed forward some more and Flask Games will have a youtube Channel to post progress.
The idea of working with publishers was off the table since they tended to interfere with the creative process. But what good is that process if nobody knows about it...

Issue #6: Steam Is Not a Kids' Platform
The game was made with an E-rating, meaning child-friendly. It again never occured to me that Steam is mainly comprised of teenagers and adults and as such, is not the optimal platform to sell a kids' game.
Nintendo's Switch or the Xbox gamepass however would be more ideal and are future prospects.
In the meantime, future projects will only focuse on a T rating or higher.

So here are the lessons in a nutshell:
1. Check out the competition and the reactions to that competition. Avoid optics you may get affiliated with.
2. Use humanoid characters or something more relatable than abstract shapes.
3. Do market research on competitors and returns; steam publishes this data and should be reviewed.
4. Actually focus on the graphics.
5. Market the game and prepare content before selling it.
6. Don't make a game for kids, make one for teenagers.

Bonus lessons:
- Passcodes can be useful but it isn't a selling point
- Demos don't help sales nor turn off potential scammers

That's it for now.
Onto the next project!

Sonic the Hedgehog released back in 1991 and has since then been pushed through all sorts of games. The issue? Sonic just doesn't work!

We're now in 2024 and Sonic Games are still announced, however it is a premise that simply doesn't work. Yet again, Sonic fans will go "The rest were bad, this is the good one! This time it will be good!" and as time goes, this will prove to be incorrect, yet again!

But why is that?

Sonic, inherently, is a flawed gameplay concept. Or at least, its application is flawed.

You want to go fast! You want to rush it! But the main point of the game is platforming. Where you need precise jumping and choosing paths. The camera is also limited to the screenspace and you are limited as a human to reactions. Other games had the same ideas, like the Metroid series and the speed booster, but the intention wasn't platforming but using speed to unlock spaces or move fast between linear points, not the entire gameplay. With Sonic, it tries to get the Mario feel and apply speed to it. The problem is two-fold:

1. If you speed through the level, then the gameplay per level is quite limited. So you need to either stretch the level a lot or pad it out with slow sections.

2. Horizontality is everything while verticality is the enemy. You cannot have the player do vertical platforming at all otherwise you slow them down.

In both cases, the game becomes punishing. You are punished for going too fast and you are punished for going too slow. So you have to go at a reasonable pace, which isn't fun. Look at Sonic 3: first zone, go fast, run run run. All good, right? Hydrozone, you are immediately thrown into verticality and slowing down. It's not that bad yet since there are long stretches of running. In zone 3, you start at the top left (bottom left and wrap around technically), you go down, down down, if you miss the first jump, you now have to go up and notice how the level has very few continuous corridors, it's jagged, meaning that if you didn't jump right, you stopped. You have to speed up again. That and the hidden spikes that can nuke your run.

But so what? You can still make it! Time right! Right?

Let's look at Sonic 3's most infamous enemies, the carnival night zone barrel:

If you thought stopping was bad, how about stopping, having the gate closed on you, no further instructions and a bouncing barrel that can also kill you if you time it wrong? What happened to going fast? And that's the identity crisis Sonic is facing: it tries to promote speed but then puts these hurdles to slow you down.

Even then, when it was ported to 3d with Sonic Adventure, there were segments that needed speed and others that didn't. If you weren't fast enough, you died! If you went too fast, you could miss the platform entirely. Worst yet, Sonic's true enemy is turning. First stage of SA2B: you miss a turn and you are now crawling. It becomes quite clear the only thing that carried it was the story and the mascot.

So a big question remains: why are there still Sonic games and can they ever improve? The why is easy: mascots sell and this is a good one. Will they ever improve? Never. It was flawed from the beginning and now that expectations are set, it cannot get any better.

So what is a good fast-paced game? Take Wario Land 4. It has 2 components to each stage: an exploration step where you explore and try to get missing pieces while also learning the level layout; the second part is the escape which is a fast paced and timed sequence where you have to run for it. In this gameplay, speed is actually viable: you already saw the level, you already went through it, you just need to get out!

Another example are racing games. If sonic was about racing from the beginning, it would have made sense. It unfortunately didn't and this is where we are now.

But why bring this up now? Well, there are more and more companies trying to "recreate" the success of previous products. What they don't understand is that it was marketing and ignorance that pushed these things forward. If you never played a Sonic game, you wouldn't have known about these limitations or hurdles. Once you did, why buy another sequel? Some game concepts do not work and maybe you can trick players into trying it and buying it, but you won't have much success a second time. 

In earlier games, passcodes (or passwords, or whatever you want to call it) used to be a thing to recover data, travel to levels and unlock things.

After save files became a thing, passcodes didn't entirely disappear but their functionality changed. Instead of restoring data or moving to specific levels, you could basically enable "cheats". I say "cheats" because in some cases, these codes would give you more ammo or something innocuous.

As time went on and the industry progressed, passcodes started to go away. With online games becoming more and more popular, we had cases of passcodes only working on offline games or even an online/offline duality like Diablo 2 used to have. And that made sense! You wanted even playing fields without cheats mucking it up and also games became more and more complex where achievements became all the more challenging. Cheats would just skip all that and with a flip of a switch, it would just be unlocked.

There were a few games that still used the passcode system and managed to make it charming enough to be worth it like Banjo Kazooie and Banjo Tooie. Those were the last few games I recall doing it just right.

Nowadays, a lot of these passcode systems have been relegated to... the command prompt... So the codes exist! But not officially. And there is nothing more jarring and off-putting that having to go in the game's backend to unlock something. Maybe the industry got lazy?

And as time went on, it even became a DLC feature where you have to pay money to unlock it. At this point, it's just greedy. It's a game, for goodness sake! But I digress.

So what does that have to do with SpHero?

Well, we added that passcode system!

Currently there are two progression systems and means of acquiring costumes and powers: collect currency in each levels or unlock achievements that grant you currency. The currency system is also split into 2: red coins for super powers and yellow coins for costumes. So the player thus has an easy way to acquire whatever they want.

However, there are two situations that can disappoint a player and make the game unfun. Let's say you want to try out the Bomb super power. So you farm it and you just earned enough coins to get it. You buy it. And you try it out... and it's not what you thought it would be. So now you have this sour taste in your mouth where you worked hard and the reward wasn't as good as you thought it was. That's one situation.

The other is that you start a new game or your save file disappears and you would like to play the game again and you are faced with... having to farm the entire game all over again.

It's truly a hurdle worth considering fixing. Enter passcodes! You can enter specific passcodes to unlock specific content.

In the next few devlogs, I will put some clues or passcodes in order to help unlock these things.

The first tip: if you want a specific country flag, enter the capital of the country (at least the first few characters that fit, some countries' capitals had way too many characters to fit in).

Happy Gaming!

For some reason, this has been a hot topic recently, the big companies are suing people left and right under the pretense that piracy is "stealing" away at their sales. The dishonest take is to ask "Is piracy wrong?". That's because there are more than one circumstances for piracy. Let's first see how the "piracy is theft" is a complete fool's fallacy.

So according to corporate suits, if someone buys a game, they get revenue. If someone pirates the game (makes a copy), the company "loses" money. The underlying assumption is that if piracy wasn't there, the person would need to buy it. Ergo piracy has stolen potential revenue.

By that same logic, reversing the course of action should mean that they make money, right? So if I pirate a copy, they lose money. If I delete a copy, they make money... right? Wrong! The "potential" sale is imaginary. It doesn't exist. Money hasn't been transferred anywhere. So there cannot be a loss of revenue. Conversely, downloading more than one copy should mean more sales loss, but it doesn't. That's because copying a game doesn't touch the bottom line.

Reselling for cheap would! If I buy a game for 60$, play it and resell it for 30$ to someone else, the company lost that 60$ sale and the 2 people managed to get it at 50% off.

Or selling illegal copies would! Make copies and redistribute it but ask for money for it thus diverting money away from the seller. This, by all means, should be illegal and sued against.

But what really hurts the bottom line? Returns! If you buy a copy of a game, you gave me 60$. If you ask for a refund, now I have to give back that 60$, that money is going away from my pockets. That's a real loss.

So what can companies do to actually mitigate piracy? There's a few ways.

1. DRM. Make it so that your game cannot be played without a proof of purchase. For regular folks, this is actually quite alright. It doesn't mean anything to them. You buy the game on steam, it installs and links to your steam account and as long as you have that account, the game is playable. If you pirate it, you cannot play it since it won't link up with Steam. A classic example of this is linking your save progress to steam achievements. 

2. DLC. Spread the content over several media and make it more painful to pirate than to own it on a platform.

3. Constant Online presence. Make the game playable only online. Offline play can be limited and an incomplete experience.

I could list a few more but what's the trend here? Make piracy more painful than ownership. Make ownership as streamlined and pleasant as possible whereas lack of ownership is painful.

But what's a really good solution that many studios simply do not use anymore? A way to entice players to want to buy a product and make it an easy "This is a good game, I want to buy it?" situation?

Demos! We used to be able to demo games and for the longest time even Nintendo used to let you demo their new titles to try to get you to buy it. And I believe it works! It lets customers try it out for free, they can give you feedback on it and it's a free point of access for those that otherwise wouldn't bother getting the game.

Nowadays, people have to try a game out for less than 2 hours on steam and ask for a refund. So instead of making a 2h demo for free, studios instead pad out the game for 2+ hours with junk. I particularly remember my disdain at games like Nier Automata and Furi where a lot of the padding came in the form of useless transitions like endlessly climbing stairs (Nier Automata) and unskippable yet repeatable custscenes (Furi). And so, in order to protect customers, a new demon appears.

We won't be doing any underhanded tactics since what we want is to make games. Sure money is great! It helps us make more games and makes our lives easier! But we aren't going to spend 50% of our budget and time on combating piracy when instead we could just be making more and better games. You want to pirate our games? We won't encourage it but we won't stop you. We would ask you help promote it shamelessly.

We're currently working with Steam to release our Steam pages for both the game and the demo which will contain 1/3 of the game for free. 

It's been a week in so far since the Pal World early access launch and there has been tons of drama and sales!

Admittedly, this is encouraging news! The developers of Pal World basically did exactly what we want to do: experiment, mix and match and improve! Not only that but the interview with them was also refreshing. They wanted to make a game that people would like, and they did! They completely ignored the journos, the media, twitter and other platforms where a vocal minority are telling others what needs to be done to make a game.

Though there were allegations of AI use, the customer didn't care.

Though there were accusations of assets flipping or copying, the customer didn't care!

In the end it just goes to show that people just want to play good games and have a good overall experience!

And we will beat that dead horse every time: experiment, mix, innovate and target the player's expectations, not the social media elite nor the journos.

Hopefully, the AAA industry will learn something from this... maybe...

When the development started, we tried initially didn't even think about a life system or a health system.

It was simple: you make to the finish line and don't fall out of bounds, drown or pop on spikes.

And with enough practice, it was a fine mechanic. There were a lot of moments where you were at the edge of your seat because the ball was almost rolling off a slope but you managed to save it with a jump or enough torque.

However, when asking others to playtest it, it became painfully obvious that this was causing more frustration than anything else. Imagine traversing so many obstacles (looking at you world 1-4), and barely missing a cloud and have to repeat the whole thing again. It just felt like you were cheated. It was unfair!

It reminded me of a typical indie dev pitfall: you are good at the game you make and therefore you completely overestimate how newcomers will play it.

I had worked really hard on the controls to make them feel good, to learn the timings, to fix the amount of torque, restitution, friction and so on. When designing the levels, we had already figured out from start to finish how to go about it. Newcomers go in blind in each level!

It was reminiscent of Donkey Kong Country games where you weren't sure what in the world the level was going to be until you got into and and then slowly learned the mechanics and how to overcome it. The difference though was that in DKC, you had a life system in your buddy. You get hit as Donkey? Diddy will take over! Well... except for pits and there were a lot of those later in the game.

So after a while, we implemented the 3 heart health system similar to Cuphead. We also introduced an invisible actor that followed you around and would track your last point of contact to the ground while you were not jumping every few seconds. The reason was two fold: to give you a chance to "save" before doing something risky and also to let more skilled players abuse the mechanic when needed.

Why 3 hearts? Because it's a nice number. It's arbitrary! Also coding half-hearts was too much of a pain. Why not give it energy bars like Mega Man or numbers like is Super Metroid at that point? 3 hearts! Take it or leave it.

With health came other caveats. How do you recover it? Should you recover it? I remember playing Cuphead's levels and it was painfully annoying to try to run a course perfectly yet getting nipped once and never recover. So we added a few recovery items here and there and the passive "Life Steal" that allows you to recover health when you kill enemies. There were also the cheap +1 heart saving you from drowning or the more expensive +1 heart.

An interesting bug we had to fix was when you died, you were still vulnerable and sometimes, you would fall and be transported back to where you died only to hit spikes on the way back and pop midway. Funny but annoying.

Another issue was that sometimes, it wasn't clear why you died.

Starting with the Halloween themed levels, traps were introduced. However, when they popped you, they retracted and the death screen was hiding them. So it wasn't really obvious what the cause of death was.

So we added that too: a cause of death flag to tell you why you died and hopefully hinting at you how to avoid it next time.

Finally came a decision on level scoring: do we want to make health that important? Like Cuphead! And the answer was no.

Remember the original pain point was that death was frustrating, so we fixed that. If we were to make "health matters", now we add a new dimension to the game that can be unfun and lead to people having to be paranoid or reset their levels in frustration to chase that perfect score.

In conclusion, this is why we implemented a health system: in order to promote fun.

As much as we all like to be hardcore, you can still do it with 3 hearts, but at least you won't ragequit due to a bad jump.

When I started working on SpHero, the intent was simple:

- 100 hand crafted levels

- Physics based movements

- Platformer oriented game play

- Compatible with as many platforms as possible

- Optimized performance

- Add in super powers and costumes to make it fun and exciting

- No multiplayer

And so, the first part was to determine what the protagonist was supposed to be. Since we're on a budget with limited time and resources, designing a novel mascot to compete with the rest was out of the question. I'm not saying they are bad but it's a huge risk to make and then comes the rest of what it entails: merch, art, etc. It was simply too much. So we opted for a sphere since it had the most physical properties folks can relate to: it bounces, it rolls and it squishes.

The question then becomes, how can people relate to a ball? Well, the same way people related to Pac-man: you give it human-like features. The one feature I insisted on the most was the squishiness. If you bump into a wall at a certain angle and speed, our SpHero will complain, adding charm to it. I noticed a lot of games have heroes that are simply blocks. No reactions, no ego, just a puppet with strings.

The same could have been said about a pawn on top of a ball, rolling it. However, you get into other issues such as having to deal with a second level of a height.

And so started the first few chain of arbitrary choices made during production: the hero is a ball!

The basic control scheme at the time was: move around, jump and use a power.

That's right, a single power! How far we have come!

Moving was a bit challenging since it was physics based: use force or torque? Force unfortunately didn't use friction the way I wanted while torque did. The problem was getting the numbers. You need to be in the millions to get even a small amount of movement. The jump was easy but then started coming the issue: controlling a physics based object is difficult to control and very unfun to play with. Especially in a platformer!

So a few tweaks were added:

- Jumping looks at how long you hold down on the jump button to determine how high you jump

-- This was a major change because otherwise you were locked to a certain height and would easily jump over things accidentally. 

- A ground pound was added to stop your jump mid-air and clear momentum

-- Coincidentally, it was also very boring if you accidentally jumped and now you had to wait for the ball to drop. Not anymore, just ground pound!

- You have some in-air control to make sure that you don't lose momentum mid jump or to make ledge jumps

-- It was pathetically bad when you couldn't make a jump over a ledge because you didn't have the momentum.

 And with that, we had a ball hero that could roll, jump and ground pound!

There was one unintended "advanced movement": rebounding.

If you jump and land naturally, you will bounce slightly off the ground. If you jump mid bounce back you will then jump way higher because forces add up.

So now you have a rebound move if you time your jumps well. This was an unintended breakthrough for something we secretly wanted: make it more fun the more skilled you are. So now gamers that are aiming at speedrunning or using their skills to beat the game, they now had a way to do it.

Finally, the powers.

It was easy to get a few of them going but it became more and more difficult to add more.

We started with:

Speed boost

If you ever played Sonic, this is pretty obvious. Gotta go fast!

Magnet ball

This came from 2 inspirations: warframe's vacuum pickup (because I am lazy) and a classic magnet cheat in other games where you infinite jump. Yes, infinite jumping with magnets is actually intended and encouraged. Have fun!

Fireball

At first you were supposed to catch on fire but it was quickly not fun to have to trudge around. Instead you fired it and we had to fix the camera since you stared at the ground most of the time. 

Sink ball

You sink underwater instead of drowning... This was scrapped entirely since it required us to create a second level in each level with underwater content, effectively doubling the target to 200 levels. Additionally, you wouldn't be doing much since you wouldn't be finishing the level.

Phase ball

You phase out and can go through certain phased blocks and all enemies. This was intended to be given to players that needed a bit of time to get used to the game and ignore enemies.

Bomb ball

You go boom! This was another way to break down obstacles and kill enemies however it was difficult to balance. At this point, why use the fireball? So the range was toned down.

Hover ball

This idea was inspired by the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time where using the hover boots let you levitate slightly. This again was intended to be given to players that needed help playing.

That's all for now folks!

After the new year, expect more devlogs and an insight on the evolution of the game!