Controls play-test drive

Version 1.08 of Weapon of Choice has just entered the "Playtest" phase in the XNA pipeline. In this case it means the finished update should be out for gamers to play in a few short weeks.

If you're an XNA developer (such as this Short-fused group) please consider giving the game a spin while it's in Playtest! I'd love to hear comments about the new changes (in the Playtest forums of course, but you can also share thoughts here). There are new control schemes, new difficulty settings, and several other fancy options to try out.

I'll do a post shortly detailing the various new changes to Weapon of Choice once it's available on the Indie Games channel.
And in related news, Weapon of Choice is now only 240 MS points! Yes, just three US bucks will get you more alien guts than you can stir with a jet engine, so go give it a try today! (And just think you'll be getting even more cool stuff in Weapon of Choice version 1.08 soon!)

Illusions of Control

I've been working on a new update to the original Weapon of Choice, which doesn't sound as fun as working on something new like Grapple Buggy, but I think it's necessary. Weapon of Choice is currently still in the Top Rated list, but as other new, fun things become available it might lose footing (rate WoC high if you haven't already, thanks!). To make the most of the higher exposure, I'd like to do as much as possible to continue to refine the demo experience and the game in general.

One area that could use broader support is the controls. I've heard various podcasts, seen forum posts, and gotten emails that wished the controller layout were different. Weapon of Choice uses a modern take on the side-scrolling, "Contra-style" genre in which the left stick controls the character and the right stick controls where he shoots. Since your thumbs are on the sticks, you can't reasonably operate the face buttons for jumping or switching which are moved to the shoulder buttons.

Throughout the post here, I'll show each of the three current layouts planned. I'm certainly open to hearing feedback in the comments on these new layouts.

For me, and thankfully the majority of gamers, this is a perfectly natural extension of the Contra-style genre and works with modern controllers. But since the genre itself is old, some gamers have expected and requested face button controls for jumping and shooting. I'm working on an update that should be available shortly, with these new control schemes.

But why would I have not allowed for such configuration from the start? It seems obvious in hind-sight. The main issue is, I couldn't imagine it any other way! Oh, and probably a dollop of hubris. Yes, some of that too. But in general I think I was standing too close to the painting for too long. To light-heartedly pick on the very snazzy developer Halfbrick, their recent game Halfbrick Rocket Racing seems to have suffered from a similar control issue also, as is evident in these reflections from XNPlay. Though they already did offer several control layouts, it looks like from the comments some people still couldn't find the best fit.

With more time and thought, Weapon of Choice will shortly have more control options, and some new difficulty modes (especially for the masochists out there!)

The lesson here is, if you're pushing a new control scheme, at least offer the original, expected layout somewhere in the game (even if it's buried) to temper the delivery somewhat. Otherwise, you'll end up looking like this.

10,000 sales

Weapon of Choice recently passed the 10,000 sales mark, selling at 400 MS points! While I could have picked 9,837 sales as our arbitrary milestone, I thought 10k had a better ring to it. We're very happy and grateful to all the fans that have supported the game along the way. We know you have lots of gaming choices and it's a honor that you've picked our game to have and to hold and to use to kill disgusting aliens.

Originally we had higher expectations for the service. Since then we've recalibrated our estimates and believe 10k is a solid achievement, as it places Weapon of Choice in the Top Ten best-selling Indie Games to date*. And to better convey the size, I've compiled a small list of relative concepts that 10k copies of Weapon of Choice represents:

• 47,823,213 gallons of alien blood spilled.
• 919,534 brushes with Death. Under similar circumstances, Death would have stolen player's lives in other action games.
• 423,525 references by gamers to Wilford Brimley, followed by 173,189 trips to his wiki page.
• 276,207 frowns turned upside-down as the Vengeance Missile did its job.
• 184,622 WTF's when encountering the various ungodly alien invaders throughout the game.

(All statistics discretely recorded by PARMAbots tele-imported from the year 2188.)

On a serious note, when possible I like to share information about our business's inner workings with the hopes of helping other developers in some way down the road. I want reveal information about Weapon of Choice's sales to encourage others to share more information about their sales more frequently. Xbox Indie Games is not even a year old and has shown it is different from the other digital stores. The more information developers have, the better decisions they can make in the future.

Weapon of Choice from November 19, 2008 to September 21, 2009:
Total sales : 10,010
Total trial downloads: 160,000+
Approximate conversion rate: 6.25%

SALES

This is a graph of the running total for sales.
(Click to zoom!)

And this shows the daily totals for sales.

TRIAL DOWNLOADS

Here is the running total for trial downloads.

And here is the daily trial downloads.

In addition to on-going game development posts, I also plan to release each month's new sales of Weapon of Choice on the dev log here for all to see.
(*Source: Xbox 360 dashboard->Game Marketplace->Indie Games->Browse All->All->Sort by Best Selling)

OTAKU is forever

When we heard that Indie Games would be available in Japan we started work immediately on translating a press release and contacting the Japanese press to help promote Weapon of Choice. We hired a friend of a friend who speaks Japanese to help us translate our materials to make the extra effort when dealing with the press there. The sad news is I don't know if any of that helped. We haven't been contacted by anyone that we think was influenced by what we sent.
BUT the extra cool hyper super jet mode news is--Famitsu contacted us! Yes, that Famitsu, and out of the blue I received an email from a writer who was interested in an interview.
We received a copy of the magazine recently and wanted to share it with everyone. We're in the Otaku section, but guess what--I don't mind! In fact, that section is almost as big as the rest of the magazine covering "proper" games, so I think it's all pretty good. Sure, I haven't had the text translated, but I'm just hoping for the best that everything reads pretty well.

I'll take a quick business detour and show how the Famitsu article impacted downloads for Weapon of Choice.

(Click for more detail)

On the 9th and 10th of September Weapon of Choice had 40 and 56 trial downloads respectively, up from 12 on the previous day, so I imagine the magazine hit newsstands around the 9th. (Do they still have newsstands in Japan?) Sadly sales didn't really spike with the trials, though at least they continued to hop around between 1 to 2 sales a day in Japan.

Even after skimming around the web about how Otaku is perceived in Japan I'm fairly confused. Since it's not definitive I just hope for the positive side of things, that when Japanese kids see Weapon of Choice in that section they find the screenshots intriguing. How about you? Do you think Otaku a pejorative term or not?

Box Art of Choice

Along with a minor update (demo level changes to hopefully draw in more people) to Weapon of Choice, I'll also be changing the box art. There's a poll running over at xboxindies.com acting as my "Ask the Audience Lifeline" for box art selection. I'm trying to find the one that piques people's interest the most.

I've made the image annoyingly small in order to simulate how small an area the image takes up on your TV when you're searching games on your Xbox 360.

Please detail in the comments below what you liked or didn't like and about whatever images strike your fancy.
For instance,

1. Does the girl need that "European look" made famous in MGS2?
2. Does the blueprint need more mauve?
3. Is the monster a giant spider thing, or a pile of Skittles on the ground?
4. Have the millions of dollars I've spent on brand marketing made the original box the only art you could ever love?