Take a look at those games. Commercial quality and are damn fun. 
No offense to the authors but looking at the screenshots of the two games on the front page hardly makes me jump for a ācommerical qualityā. However, a post earlier on this thread makes the point:
Kev
I think they look commercial quality. As in, something that would sell. You donāt need 3D and pixel shaders to make something of commercial quality; just good design.
Cas
Whoa, spiderweb are still going? Exile 2 was amazingly addictive, yet I didnāt have the cash to fork out and buy it at the time, maybe Iāll see what theyāve got to offer now
They might not have wonderful graphics but theres a consistant style (and if Exile is anything to judge by theyāll be very polished and huge plot & places to explore )
Yeah, I totally agree, and I wasnāt really having a go at the lack of 3D/pixel shaders. I meant it doesnāt actually appear to have that āpolishā associated with professional artists.
Not to pick a special case, but if you look at screenshots of the menu/ingame in AF the graphics are obviously very polished, sorta smooth. The games on that page donāt appear to have that quality to the GUI or the face and inventory shots.
Kev
It is amazing what antialiasing and transparency can do for a professional look, isnāt it?
So I wonder why after all these years the l&fs in Swing still donāt render antialiased 
Cas
Donāt forget that Ultima games looked like those two a few years ago! I wouldnāt call them AAA games by 2004 standards, I donāt expect the big publishers are dying to get hold of them, but they definitely sell and from what I hear are very good games.
Edit: Oh, and the RPG world is a lot more forgiving than the arcade world! Most CRPG players really do value story over graphics.
Exactly. If I were a proper RPG fan Iād be wetting my pants over that screenshot.
Cas
[quote]http://www.spidweb.com/
Take a look at those games. Commercial quality and are damn fun.
[/quote]
Arggh! Number. One. Amateur. Mistake. ā¦ āignore screen resolutionā. I literally need a magnifying glass to see the charactersā¦
Runescape made the same damn mistake years ago, and I kept pestering the author to spend the 30 seconds required (an exaggeration, but the 3D engine definitely wasnāt hard-coded to that sizeā¦the author just didnāt think anyone needed it any bigger) to make a new version of the applet that worked at a different resolution.
Classic, stereotypical, āIām a developer, making games for myself, I donāt need to try hard to understand what players needā mentality. Hereās hoping Exile3 on other platforms can change resolution (although I have a sinking feeling about thisā¦).
EDIT: āGeneforgeā on that site is excellent (niggle with resolutions aside). Great user-interface, and fun new game ideasā¦
I donāt think one man can write a good game anymoreā¦
But perhaps one woman canā¦
Old habits die hard huh? 
[quote]I donāt think one man can write a good game anymoreā¦
But perhaps one woman canā¦
Old habits die hard huh?
[/quote]
Depends; how many man-months are there in a woman-month? According to the women in my life, the answerās quite a few : but I reckon thatās cheating.
I still think one man can create a commercially successful game, Iām banking on it and Iām about set to find out if Iām right. I donāt think a single person is going to be able to compete with some of the major commercial games, but tetris, one of the most successful games of all time, couldnāt possibly have been more than a few people involved in the game itselfā¦ sometimes simple is perfection.
Isnāt the point that games market has changed since tetris was released, the market as a whole didnāt expect much then. Now, there is a whole bunch of demanding punters out there who want more. more. more. Should you release tetris now (or similar simple game) the moola it would bring it probably wouldnāt make it a ācommercial successā.
Not that I think one man canāt do it, just that Tetris isnāt a great example.
Ramblingā¦
Although I suppose it all depends on what you consider a success. Most business folks would sayā¦
good profit = success
so if you do produce a game that does sell (a fair number) and its only one person producing the game I guess your initial costs were lower (only one salary for one) so the success is going to be easier to obtain.
Strangeā¦ we seem to have had a few posts like this where it all depends on defining clearly what the question is
Kev
FWIW, one man can still write a good MMOG and make hundreds of thousands out of it (I believe, also, millions, but I donāt know of any that have managed to go that high).
The key is really that an MMOG can be (and, if you know about the industry models, must be ) upgraded continuously over time. One man gets it going, makes enough money to hire more staff, it continues to grow, etc. Eventually he owns probably 90-95% of a multi-million-dollar business (assuming 5-10% goes to employee stock program, which is roughly normal).
For a more detailed look at individuals building MMOGās in particular, see:
[quote]The key is really that an MMOG can be (and, if you know about the industry models, must be ) upgraded continuously over time.
[/quote]
This is actually a key best practice for success as an indie developer. Using my own development as an example, Iāve spent about 6 months continuously tweaking Alien Flux in order to maximise its potential over the long run. At its release, Alien Flux had a conversion rate of less than 0.1% - ie. for every 1,000 people who downloaded it, we got 1 sale. Alien Flux will remain on sale for several more years - 4 or 5 maybe - and in that time it might expect to get 100,000 downloads. At 0.1% conversion rate weād have had a mere 100 sales in all that time, for our 6 months development effort.
By tweaking and measuring (the measuring part is critical), weāve managed to deduce what makes things sell better. We now have a conversion rate of around 1%, which will in turn net us around 1,000 sales over the lifetime of the product. I admit thatās pretty poor really but one of the lessons weāve learned is that if you aim for a niche market you get niche sales (Weāre instead going to hike the price a bit and see how that does)
There is further tweaking weād still like to do to Alien Flux. My ultimate aim is to get it converting at around 3% - a tiny increase in percentages but a tripling in sales.
We can take the lessons weāve learned with Alien Flux and incorporate them directly into the next game, saving us months of tweaking and experimentation. The main lessons weāve learned are:
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Aim for broader appeal straight away. Defender is a niche game design in the first place.
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The whole game buying process is targeted directly at impulse buying. Weāve removed every barrier we could to just buying the game immediately. These barriers are:
[]Having to leave the application and surf somewhere
[]Having to pay too much money
[]Having to pay too little money (ānot worth getting my credit card out forā)
[]Having to download the full game separately to the demo
[]Being able to play the game indefinitely - why bother paying if you can still play the demo?
[]Not being confronted with the opportunity to buy the game wherever possible - if your application isnāt going to remind the user to buy it, who is?
The built-in online payment screens were a great success, leading directly to a doubling in conversion rate.
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Time limit your demo. Always. But donāt feature limit it if you can help it.
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The Mac market is enormous and lucrative. The Linux market is still a total waste of time.
So what Iām saying is - writing a game and then just throwing it at download.com and waiting for the sales to roll in is a sure recipe for financial failure. Without constant tweaking and subsequent measuring of success to check that the tweaks worked, youāll get nowhere - in any game. But as you learn the repertoire of tweaks that work you can make any game sell - even a niche weirdass game like AF - and become more and more successful at it. (The trick is, uh, unlike me, not to run out of money before you start making a profit )
Hm, big ramble - am I making sense?
Cas
Thanks, Cas. I was being lazy when I said āthe trick isā¦ā above :). I should really have also said āā¦and MMOGās, being a service, can earn money from the first day of inception, rather than waiting for a product to be completeā.
Services have sellable value when immature - itās less value, sure, but itās still significan. Products need to be completed before they have value :).
Itās a gross generalization, sure, but any one skilled developer can make enough money from an MMOG to live off after 6 months work if they pursue the right business model; at the moment, not enough people are using that business model in the MMOG market (the article I cited touches on thisā¦). As Damion Schubert put it, the secret is not to āthink bigā but to āthink smallā, and see how much profit you can make - and how easily - from an MMOG whilst itās still small.
[quote]4. The Mac market is enormous and lucrative. The Linux market is still a total waste of time.
[/quote]
Itās what I speculated several months ago, Iām glad to see it confirmed. As a recent Mac āswitcherā I canāt find ANY Mac games on the shelf of the local storesā¦ (Of course now even PC games make up only a tiny section in the local chain store for video games -EB)
Even if you go to an Apple dealer the pickings are slim. Iāve always wanted to try āThe Simsā since it seemed to get decent reviews and i figured the price would have come down a bit nowā¦ I know it is out there for the Mac, but it is hard to find in a storeā¦ all I see are expansion packs, never the main game. Other titles are old (Tomb Raider). There are a few select titles available, mainly online directly from the publisher or Apple.
I donāt actually buy many games, but Iāve grabbed Bugdom II - purchased online/downloaded. (Which is very nice and my nieces and nephews love it. Many wished they could get it for PC - if only it was developed with Java ). Iām thinking about getting Ottomatic. I bought āEnigmoā online/download as well - itās a nice puzzle game similar in concept to āThe Incredible Machineāā¦ Alien Flux of course (but I got that on PC before the Mac verision was available). But these account for a large percentage of the (decent looking) games Iāve even seen available for the Mac. The pickings are slim but there are some gems among them. And they seem to be made by relatively small companies. All of them could be done today using Java (like AF) & they would have the PC market to sell to as well. I know I could sell a few PC versions just to the people that watched me play them on my Mac. Maybe Tribal Trouble will be my next purchaseā¦ It looks interesting and I really canāt wait to try it out. Being able to play it on my Mac laptop, or my Windows desktops is a plus.
Overall I think it is very interesting that with Mac having such a low market share it accounts for such a large percentage of the Alien Flux sales. For indies it seems that doing a Mac version is worth it - which is not what you would first expect at all given the market size. The key factor is that the Mac is mostly ignored by the big guys, leaving a void for the indies to fill.