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A look at what EBF4 did right, and a bunch of stuff that went terribly wrong.
A Postmortem of “Epic Battle Fantasy
4”
• I'm Matt Roszak, aka kupo707.• I'm a Flash Game developer, who mostly works by himself.• Been animating in Flash for 10 years,
making games for 5 years.• I've made games in a bunch of different
genres.• Games include Adventure Story, Bullet
Heaven, and the Epic Battle Fantasy series.
Who I Am
• A traditional JRPG, similar to early Final Fantasy, or Golden Sun.• Took around one year to make.• Contains 60,000 lines of code, • Takes 20 hours to play through.
Epic Battle Fantasy 4
• EBF4 launched without any serious bugs or other issues.
• Player reception was very good.• Premium content sold well and didn't
bother most players.• Made a decent amount of money overall.
What Went Right
• Open beta testing ensured that the game was bug free and balanced.
• Lots of data was collected about what players did in-game.
• Open development meant lots of player feedback and hype.
• No major issues with the game itself at launch.
Testing & Launch
Player Reception
• EBF4 built on the previous games, and fixed everything that was wrong with them.• Very few complaints about the game itself, and most players loved it.• Was the top rated game on Kongregate and Newgrounds for a few months.
• Included a pack of Equips and Skills for $7.50.
• Sold 5803 of them, which apparently is a lot for a single-player game.
• Premium pack itself was done sensitively; Didn't offer unfair advantages or make the
free game feel incomplete.
Premium Pack
Total RevenueKongregate sponsorship: $30K+ Premium sales: $28K+ Sitelocked licenses: $4K+ Ads: $4K+ Competition prizes: $2K___________________________________= Total: $68K = Eh, can't complain.
• Sponsorship deal could have been better.• Browsers deleted lots of saved games.• Data mining was a disaster.• Not sure if translations were worth it.• Steam Greenlight release was planned
badly.
What Went Wrong
• Picked a performance based deal from Kongregate, which worked well for previous games.
• But EBF4 did not distribute very well; Shrinking market, large filesize, premium
content, and some compatibility issues.• Had a very high fixed offer that I turned
down.• Luckily sorted out sponsorship deal quite
early.
Sponsorship
• Tons of users lost saved games due to browsers and cleaning tools deleting cookies.
• Kongregate doesn't have an API for cloud saving, like some other sponsors do.
• Problem gradually lowered the game's rating.
• A Kongregate site update even deleted saved games for a day.
Lost Saves
• Used Playtomic for collecting tons of cool data.
• They went out of business shortly after the game's release; had no backup plan.
• I should have known how unreliable these services are from previous experience.
Data Mining
• Added a month to development time.• No way of knowing how many people
found them useful.• Distribution was crap, so they probably
didn't help much there.• Was still an interesting experience.
Translations
• EBF4 may have been better off as a Steam game, rather than a free web game.
• Should have focused on Steam first.• Didn't really understand how Greenlight
works. Felt that the web release would help get votes.
• Turns out players don't want to pay for a game that is already mostly available for free. (derp)
• Got 13k votes. Probably needed around 50k.
Steam Greenlight
• Treat your players well and include them in the development process.
• Make backup plans; conditions can change.
• Don't trust outsiders; web browsers, data tracking services, etc.
• Don't stick to the same strategy just because it worked well in the past.
Conclusions
