New articles about Godus mobile development

Odd, I put the links in there... I'll fix it.

EDIT: All fixed. It seems if you have a www. at the beginning of the link text it overrides the actual embedded link. Weird.

Wait a sec. How does one realize that players will burn through years worth of development in a day, but not realize they'll do exactly the same with only, let's say, a year's worth of development? This man makes no sense, but then, that's Molyneux for you.

Okay, next Q&A session, we have got to ask what on earth he thought people would be doing in this game instead of sculpting and instead of, I don't know, playing it, because these are some of the most confusing things ever from him. You made a game where the only thing to do is to sculpt but you didn't expect people to sculpt and you made a game to play but you didn't expect people to play it so much...What is going through his head?

He underestimated both the intelligence and devotion that a "casual" mobile player would put into playing a game.
Thinking that someone who only plays "5~15 minutes at a time" can't ever compete when you compare it to a PC gamer that plays 2~3 hours or more.

Thinking that this casual player, because they're not as invested would go through the content slower.
And because they don't play as much would last much much longer.

It always surprises me when any developer goes "Wow part of the player base burned through all our content in a week and is now screaming for more." I guess having played MMOs log enough and following the forums to me it is a no brainier. In any kind of game that you want to have any amount of life you have to have some form of fun repeatable repeatable content or I guess like for angry birds, be able to quickly and easily crank out levels with cut and paste assets.

But yea looking back I can see now how his Zen comments and changes to sculpting were not how good the game is or how to make the game better but ideas to slow people down. I still do not understand why they pulled the little extra content they had, but guess most of it was really cosmetic so did not help keep people busy.

None of this would make me angry if it wasn't for the fact that I feel like I've been attacked and/or belittled every time I tried to point out some of these obvious points.

The only reason mobile is in such a crunch is because they have been able to come up with a way of pushing out a demo of the game and develop the rest of the content later. That 50% complete number is all anyone needs to see why mobile is such a challenge to them. If this was a decade ago, Godus would yet to be in the hands of the players because it's barely functional. It's not so much that mobile players are blowing through content faster than expected, but that they pretended to have a finished product and haven't been able to hide the fact that it isn't.

Godus was released before the developers even knew what they were making. It's a sandbox game without a sandbox, a board game without an objective. The Steam excuse has been that they've spent most of their time building the basics and the content comes last in development. Every time someone brings up "Early Access" they're pointing this out. However, 22Cans is pretending like the mobile and pc versions are different games. It's amazing to me that anyone could believe that the content important to pc gamers wouldn't be equally important to mobile gamers, regardless of how fast they blow through that content.

For Godus to succeed, 22Cans needs to figure out how to make the game's content worth playing more than a few minutes. The biggest reason I have fought for a raise land feature is that it allows for long term sculpting play. Only having a lower or leveling functionality means that sculpting can only be relied on to occupy players for a limited time. It goes with large chunks of the game. Any god power that gets added to the game needs to be useful more than one or two times in the entire time the game is played. Powers like Swamp and Beautify need to fade away over time. A power that destroys a specific terrain feature (Comet for instance) is only useful as long as that feature continues to exist. It's benefit to the overall game is limited to how often a player CAN use it rather than whether or not they WILL use it.

This isn't a new concept. We've seen it over and over again in power building games. The worst games are where a player only gets to use the really cool feature of a game during the final mission. If you implement a gun/magic attack/super power, it needs to have enough content associated with it to justify the effort put into including it into the game.

Godus is chock full of features without a purpose. Large swaths of development time have gone into features that barely, if ever, get used. All of it springs from a lack of overall planning and a general apathy on 22Cans' part to decide what they wanted to do with their land sculpting prototype. Rather than "aim for the second star to the right and straight on 'til morning", Godus meanders around in iterative circles with no land in sight. The sculpting prototype could be made into something quite fun. Unfortunately, Godus isn't it...

I'm just gonna put this here...



*NSFW language*

Damned mobile version: they should have done like Minecraft worked. Make a good pc game first, realease a light version for mobile worth half price.

Also... from the pocketgamer.biz article... anyone notice this little gem?


"They played 6 weeks of content in 6 days. It's a massive challenge for content led games."
Currently only available on iOS, the game is updated every three weeks.
"The team will likely explode when we go to Android," Molyneux added.

I realise it's a mobile gaming site, but whoever told pocketgamer Godus is only available on iOS is what some people might call, a fibber.

If your design servers your monetization, then F2P definitely applies some constraints.
If on the other hand your monetization serves your design, then you can be quite creative.

As you can layer honest and ethical monetization around most good titles and concepts.

Hat Fortress? Dota 2? League of Legends? And there are plenty of others that do not apply abusive models.
What I think is amusing is the concept that "mobile players do not want to pay for their games".
Seems that the opposite is quite true, mobile gamers are MORE than willing to pay for a good game - they just want to be sure its a good game before they reach for their wallet.
Since the mobile market is flooded with ad-paid shite and clickbait.