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Indie Postmortem: What Went Wrong 1. Three engines. Oasis was originally built on a DirectX 9 framework. That seemed a safe bet because we hadn’t considered signing with a publisher that might require a lesser version. When we did sign with our first publisher, we had to migrate over to their DirectX 7 technology, which took a considerable amount of time. When we moved on to our final publisher, we had to strip out all of the previous technology and start from scratch. This was made considerably easier by the fact that Mind Control Software’s own DirectX 7-based Orbital technology had gone through two ship cycles. There were certain benefits to using three engines, but overall, we spent more time on technology than was desirable. Going with DirectX 7 from the start, which was an industry standard for small games, would have been a better idea. 2. Learning Oasis. In creating Oasis, we were faced with the challenge of teaching the game to new players. This proved more difficult than we had imagined, as 1) There were more ideas that had to be understood than we realized, 2) We already knew the rules, and were a bit desensitized to a newcomer’s frustrations, and 3) Oasis breaks with convention in some of its rules, betraying some of our target customer’s expectations. The game’s tutorial was extremely well crafted for its purpose. Each important idea was presented in the form of a level in the tutorial. The player would have to master a concept before they could progress to the next level. One downside to this approach is that expert players, those who need little hand-holding, did not have a straightforward rule set to learn from. Worse, the tutorial is extremely easy to play, creating the impression that levels can be won trivially. Some of these issues remain unresolved, but we did create multiple entry points into the tutorial so that players can refresh their knowledge of important rules immediately, without having to replay the whole tutorial from the start. Our insensitivity to the frustrations of newcomers was probably predictable. Long development cycles tend to increase the divergence of spirit between game creators and their audience. Some of the focus test results seemed impossible to imagine, though video-taped evidence and careful observation confirmed them. The feedback that players receive in Oasis is quite different than that of a traditional mass-market ultra-casual game. Players may ponder why a city didn’t fight as well as expected and draw invalid conclusions. That’s rarely the case in a bubble-popper game.
Where Oasis breaks rule conventions for strategy games, it does so cruelly and deliberately. For example, the fields surrounding each city contain the lowest numbers of followers found in the playfield. Clicking on a field yields only one follower. However, games of this ilk generally reward players for finding and controlling all agricultural land. This created a valuable point of tension in the design: people in the surrounding land have taken refuge in the city; thus, deducing where a city is in the minimum number of clicks is advantageous. If we had gone with convention, it would have encouraged sloppy play. A tutorial level might have helped address this point of confusion. 3. Women and the war-game. Depending upon one’s definition, Oasis is either a war-game or an empire simulator. The player builds an empire and defends it against invaders. However, unlike most games of this type, there is no micro-management, levels are played in minutes instead of hours, resolution is dramatic and fast, and the game emphasizes discovery and building more than any other element. Thus, even though Oasis plays like a beautiful game of discovery and exploration, it looks like a war-game. Well, the war-game market is not dominated by women, and Oasis is distributed through web portals that typically cater to women in their late 30s and 40s. The development team was at peace with this conclusion. There didn’t seem to be much that could be done to make Oasis more appealing to the actual market of potential female players. What we didn’t know was that many women who self-identified as hating war-games actually loved Oasis. Their claims that the game was incredibly addictive and satisfied their desire to explore and build came as a shock to us. We lost faith in targeting the female audience after listening to many women’s initial reactions to our little war-game. In retrospect, we should have worked harder to identify and fix what was causing such a strongly negative reaction. 4. Difficulty Ramp. When players migrate from Easy to Normal difficulty the game seems just as friendly because the first levels of Normal really are like the last levels of Easy. However, about halfway through a game of Normal players notice for the first time that there are mistakes that can cost them the level, and even the game. Typically, these are mistakes that they’ve been allowed to get away with while playing on Easy. Perhaps the game has trained them to play sloppily up to this point, and now they get their comeuppance. The difficulty ramp in Oasis isn’t really that different than other games, but Oasis players express more shock and disbelief when their cities fall than, say, a player who loses in chess or a real-time strategy game. In fact, players have described the game as “betraying” them when multiple hordes of barbarians arrive on the playfield. What’s interesting is that multiple hordes are almost always preferable to a single, larger horde. Again, it is the shock that is so notable. It is as if the game creates a sense of comfort and contentment in its players that is betrayed on higher levels of difficulty. Some players quit when they reach this point. Others push through by tightening up their play. Generally, the shock and horror of seeing one’s cities burn can be averted with very simple tactics: 1) Find mines early and place ten followers in each, 2) Find cities early and connect them so that populations will grow, 3) Find or deduce the barbarian entry point(s), 4) Search cities closest to the entry points for treasures, 5) Reinforce the cities closest to the entry points that have the strongest weapons. 6) Don’t waste turns clicking on fields because they only contain one follower each. These tactics may be easy enough to accomplish, but it appears that the game might emphasize certain rewards that throw players off of these goals. In particular, the Oasis is a beautiful blue region that makes pretty sounds when discovered, and turns a brighter color when fully explored. That enticement alone is enough to distract players the moment they find the Oasis. The discipline required to resist is one of the game’s strengths, but evidently, it may teach players to play for immediate gratification that does not promote survival. Oddly enough, the inclusion of advisors, like the Engineer and the General, can make Oasis more challenging to some players. When advisors were first implemented and I reported this finding to Marc, his response was, “That’s impossible. Advisors do nothing but make the game easier to win. Period.” My response was indicative of side effects we have witnessed, “When an advisor is available, I want to earn it so badly that I play poorly.” Enter the world of a game that rewards players to their deaths. This is a wonderful strength to those who stick with the game, but not for the initiates. 5. Insufficient early platform testing. The inclusion of both 2D and 3D modes in Oasis significantly increased the difficulty of the development and QA process. Oddball graphics cards misreport their feature sets and capriciously violate standards. This tale of woe is mentioned frequently in the What Went Wrong portion of postmortems, so we were warned, but our initial success with the graphics cards we had on hand was good enough that we didn’t start testing the less common cards until late in QA. In an attempt to fix some very obscure problems, we ended up introducing some quirks on some less problematic chipsets. Conclusion Seeing Oasis ship was the culmination of a dream that started more than two years ago. We have experienced the joy of both seeing it win the IGF’s Game of the Year and Innovation in Game Design awards in 2004, and seeing it in the hands of the public. The difficulty in bringing this product to the market can not be understated. The resources that it consumed could have just as easily been spent on creating several less sophisticated and less fulfilling games. Only with the support and hard work of many people could such a game reach the market. Hopefully Oasis will usher in a new era of light strategy games that can be played at a leisurely pace. There are limitless directions left unexplored, and if we have inspired others to take a crack at this space, it will all have been worthwhile.
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