A little over a year ago, we released our second game, called Bluebones’ Curse on the Xbox Indies platform. It was total failure commercially, with just a total of 282 sales to date. We were expecting to do quite a bit better than that.
The game had a number of things going against it.
- Xbox Indies Platform
Bluebones is a 2d run and jump platformer, a genre completely overrun on XBLIG. Many developers struggle to turn a profit, and releasing a basic platformer might not be wisest choice, if profit is a consideration.
- Timing
We had planned Bluebones to come out in time to possibly score a tie in with the Halloween Xbox 360 dashboard event that they run every year. Unfortunately, by the time the game launched, I was informed that the promotion selections had already been decided. Now, that doesn’t mean we would have been included, but we obviously made a mistake with the timing.
- It isn’t very good
Duh. This took me a really long time to come to terms with. The graphics and animation look great, and I’ve gotten lots of great comments on my intentionally cheesy voice recordings, but the game itself isn’t all that memorable. It’s not bad, it’s just doesn’t bring anything special to the table. Obviously, while it’s worth noting the other problems, this is the one that really matters.
Now that Hypership is out and Kris has taken over the responsibility for future updates (I’m still willing to help with bug fixes, of course), it’s time to turn my attention to the next project. Mollie (my wife and artist) and I are really excited to return to working on Hero In Training. We love the concept, and have a lot of content ready to go. Plus, we have some fun ideas on how to freshen it up. (For starters, it’s no longer going to be a standard action-combat platformer.)
But before I get to work, I feel I owe it myself to take another look at Bluebones and see if I can do better. In addition to redeeming myself, I have two specific goals in mind. First, I want to experiment with platformer controls on mobile devices. Few games have done a good job there (virtual d-pads are an abomination!), and I’d like to see what I can come up with. Additionally, I want to really kick the tires on my code and make sure that it can handle releasing on all of the platforms I want to target in the future. (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.)