Maybe I Need a Little More Room

Game Dev: Maybe I Need a Little More Room

I think I'm getting a little tired of developing for the WOWCube.

Don't get me wrong. It's a fun little device, and I've had a lot of fun figuring out what I can make it do.

But lately I keep running into the same conversation with myself.

"That would be cool."

Nope. Too many limitations.

"What if I add this image?"

Nope. Too much memory.

"How about this feature?"

Maybe... if I rewrite three other things, remove something else, sacrifice a goat and somehow save another twelve bytes.

There comes a point where working within limitations stops feeling like an interesting technical challenge and starts feeling like the hardware is deciding what kind of game I'm allowed to make.

I think I'm reaching that point.

I'm Not Abandoning the Cube

That doesn't mean I'm throwing everything away.

Just One Floor Deeper is still getting finished.

We've put way too much work into JOFD, it's way too close to being done, and I still really like what we've built.

I'm also still interested in seeing where Secret Life of Aliens goes. SLOA fits the Cube in some really interesting ways, so there's a good chance I'll continue developing that as well.

But do I see the WOWCube becoming a major future direction for SquigglyFrog Studios?

Probably not.

It's a fun piece of hardware to experiment with.

I just don't know that I want every future game idea to begin with a list of things I'm not allowed to do.

I Miss Being Able to Just Build Things

Working on the Cube has reminded me of something I really miss about developing for more conventional hardware.

Freedom.

Have an idea?

Build it.

Want a fancy visual effect?

Child's play.

Want to add another image?

Go ahead.

Want to save an Adventurer who's been playing for three years, has accumulated a ridiculous inventory of collected junk, and is somehow exploring Dungeon Floor 11,792?

Sure.

Save the whole thing.

Need a complicated UI?

Build one.

Want animations, larger maps, more sounds, more graphics, more data?

Fine.

Those things are child's play on modern Android hardware.

After spending so much time worrying about memory, package size, save space and squeezing everything into the Cube's limitations, that sounds really nice right now.

There's also one other thing.

I hate C++.

There. I said it.

It's the de facto standard for WOWCube development. I've dealt with it, and I can continue dealing with it.

But I don't have to like it.

The Best — and Worst — Thing About the Infinity Game Table

Of course, moving back toward Android means giving up something I really loved about developing for the Infinity Game Table.

The IGT had something that Google Play and Apple's App Store simply don't give a small developer:

An isolated, curated marketplace.

And honestly, that was both one of the best and one of the worst things about developing for it.

On the good side, the IGT had a captive audience of people who had already bought the hardware and were actively looking for new things to play.

They wanted new content.

And when a new game was released, it got noticed.

A game would have its own launch date. It would get full-screen advertising and prominent placement right on the dashboard.

You weren't dropping your game into an ocean containing millions of other apps and hoping somebody happened to find it.

When your game launched, people using the table knew about it.

For a small studio, that kind of visibility was absolutely huge.

But there was a pretty significant downside to having someone standing at the gate.

They could decide not to open it.

There was an audience of people who had already bought these tables and were starving for new content, while developers could spend months working on games that ultimately never made it into the store.

You could spend six months building something, testing it, polishing it and getting it ready...

And someone else could still decide that nobody was going to get to play it.

I had one game passed over by an executive who, as far as I know, hadn't actually played it.

The decision appeared to have been made from screenshots because visually it looked too similar to another game already on the platform that hadn't performed particularly well.

The problem?

The gameplay was radically different.

A few minutes actually playing the game would have made that obvious.

That's the other side of a curated marketplace.

Curation can keep the quality bar high.

It can prevent the store from being flooded with unfinished games, low-effort clones and mountains of junk.

It can give the games that do make it through dramatically better visibility.

As a developer, I loved that.

As a player, I loved it too.

If I bought something from the IGT store, there was at least some expectation that somebody had looked at it and decided it was worth selling.

But curation also puts an enormous amount of power in the hands of a relatively small number of people deciding what players will and won't get to see.

And sometimes they're going to get that decision wrong.

The Other Extreme Isn't Great Either

Now swing all the way over to the other side.

Google Play is certainly not an isolated little marketplace.

There isn't necessarily going to be a giant "HEY! CHECK OUT THIS NEW SQUIGGLYFROG GAME!" sitting in front of everyone when they turn on their phone or tablet.

You release something into an enormous marketplace and then have to figure out how to get anyone to notice it.

Discovery becomes a completely different problem.

And the lack of that tight curation brings problems of its own.

There are an incredible number of games competing for attention, including clones, clones of clones, unfinished projects, and games that feel like somebody generated them over a weekend and immediately hit Publish.

And to be clear, there's nothing inherently wrong with vibe coding.

I use AI heavily in development myself.

The tools aren't the problem.

The finished product is what matters.

If you're going to release a game, make a proper game.

Test it.

Fix the bugs.

Finish the content.

Make sure the systems actually work.

Don't let somebody reach Level 50 only to discover that Level 51 is still "coming soon."

That's the part of the giant mobile marketplaces that frustrates me.

There's an incredible amount of good stuff there.

There's also an incredible amount of crap to dig through to find it.

But there is one very appealing difference when I'm sitting on the developer side of that equation.

If I spend six months building a game, I get to decide whether it gets released.

There's something pretty nice about that too.

And That's Why EverBoard Has Me Excited

All of this is part of why I'm watching EverBoard so closely.

I look at EverBoard and see the possibility of another relatively unexplored piece of ground.

Another dedicated gaming device.

Another audience buying hardware specifically because they want to play games on it.

And hopefully, if they eventually open the platform to independent developers, another opportunity for smaller studios to build things that don't immediately disappear into an ocean of millions of apps.

I'd love to see a platform that finds the right balance.

Quality instead of quantity, without making the gate so restrictive that good games never reach the people who bought the hardware to play them.

Of course, right now that's entirely hope on my part.

There are still a very important collection of "ifs" attached to EverBoard.

If EverBoard launches and lives up to its potential.

If I buy one.

And most importantly, if they eventually open the platform to third-party developers.

We don't know what that ecosystem will ultimately look like.

But I'm certainly hoping they open the doors.

So... Back to Android

In the meantime, my frustration with the Cube has given me the itch to start messing around with Android development again.

And there's potentially a nice side effect to doing that now.

Instead of sitting around waiting to find out whether EverBoard will eventually support independent developers, I can start building games again.

New ideas.

Old ideas.

Maybe some unfinished ideas that deserve another chance.

I get to work without constantly asking whether I have enough memory, enough save space, or enough room left in the package for one more image.

I can concentrate more on "Would this be fun?" and less on "Can I physically squeeze this into the hardware?"

And if EverBoard eventually does open development?

Hopefully SquigglyFrog Studios will already have a new assortment of finished games ready to go, with relatively minor porting and interface changes needed to adapt them to a tabletop platform.

Instead of starting from zero, we'll have something to bring with us.

Different Hardware, Same Problem

Of course, there's one small flaw in this plan.

I now have JOFD to finish.

SLOA sitting there tempting me.

Android ideas starting to pile up again.

Old projects I could resurrect.

And EverBoard sitting somewhere on the horizon.

So apparently changing platforms doesn't actually solve my biggest development limitation.

Me starting too many games.

At least Android has enough memory for all of them.

Oh well.

Back to work!