Thorware.org

Hey guys, love your game, best purchase I've made in a while.

I'm working on an XNA game now, and I have a few questions.

Firstly, what (if any) compression techniques did you use? To get the game priced at 200 MSP, you'd need it to be 50MB or less, but this game seems like it'd be pretty massive (there are a lot of sprites, portraits, songs, backgrounds... etc.). I'm making a fairly large-scale (sprite-based) game and the 150MB limit seemed worrying to me at first, so I'm just trying to research the best methods of compression.

Secondly, did you use multi-threading extensively, if at all? I noticed your game runs smoothly, even during loading sections, whereas everytime I try to load resources or create instances of certain objects there's a subtle but noticeable lag.

Finally (for now), what kind of sales are you looking at (if you don't mind me asking)? I've not noticed much advertisement for the game, I didn't know it existed until I saw a video by "XNA Roundup." I was hoping that XNA development would bring in a little extra spending money (since I still work, but I'd be programming in my free time either way).

Thanks for any feedback you give, and I hope you keep making awesome games.

Hi ClydeArgyle, thanks for playing our game! I'm happy to answer your questions.

In XNA, there is an option in the properties of any image you have loaded in the content pipeline to set the compression method to "DxtCompressed." This requires the image dimensions are multiples of 4, but squishes things quite nicely. All the artwork in the game was pretty small, I think it was around 10 MB. The music was huge however, we had 20 songs that were stereo and around 1-2 minutes each. There is a compression setting in XACT that we used. It's not the best sounding compression like MP3 but it works ok. I think I set it to around 97/100 and that shrunk the music files just enough to make the game fit in the 50MB.

Yes, we used multi-threading to silently load assets in the background. Sometimes there is a very slight stutter on the 360 where you might notice a 30FPS frame instead of a 60FPS one, but overall it worked pretty well. We also pre-load the next zone while you're playing so there are no loading screens (except when you first load a game without waiting for pre-loading on the title screen). Contrary to popular belief, the black screens with the clock are NOT loading screens, they are intended to communicate to the player that time is passing. The assets for the next area are already loaded. Reducing stalls related to loading was a priority for me after experiencing the nightmare that is the XNA RPG starter kit.

So far we have sold about 1,200 copies. In order to break even on our living expenses, we would need to sell 13,000 copies: more than ten times current sales! That will almost certainly not happen. Advertising is expensive, especially on popular sites. If I remember correctly, IGN told me their minimum advertisement package costs $4000. So Light's End relies on word of mouth and good reviews. The bottom line: If you want to make money, don't make a high-content game on XNA. If money is your aim, you might have luck making a gimmick ap that only takes a few weeks to program, but I'm not interested in going that route and I hope you're not either! Apparently iPhone programming is more lucrative.

Hope that helped. Glad you enjoyed our game =D

Thor,

Thank you for answering my questions. I'll definitely tell everyone I know to buy your game. Not much, but the best I can do. I'm sad that when an amazing game like this comes out it gets out-sold by massage apps and image galleries. People complain about the low ratio of quality games to crap, but the quality games that get made don't sell, while the crap does. It's a catch 22.

That said, I'm still going to forgo more casual BS in favor of quality games. I'll be sure to let you know when my first game releases.

P.S. With the new pricing scheme for "Indie" games (80, 240, 400) are you going to leave Light's End at the lowest price point (80 MSP) or bring it up to 240 MSP?

As much as I hate to raise the price, I will probably set it to 240 MS points. 200 was already a lowered price from our original plan of 400. If we sold it for just 80 points, we'd have to sell 3 times as much to make the same amount. I don't think that the lowest price will make that happen, so we'll be better off at 240. Besides, if it's available for only 80 points, that may lead people to make assumptions about the quality of our game that are not true. I'd like to pretend that I'm going to keep at least a shred of dignity in our price: We made a game that's worth buying.

It's really dumb that Microsoft won't just let us keep it at 200 points. If I could, I would just leave it how it is. Nobody likes a price increase (even if it's just 50 cents), but Microsoft isn't giving us much of a choice.