Ghostfire Games - WiiWare - Helix - Developer Walkthrough

[ghostfire]

Hi all,

Just thought I'd let everyone know about our upcoming title for WiiWare.

Austin, Texas based Ghostfire Games will be releasing a rhythm game title for WiiWare. Our new game, Helix, challenges players to follow the movements of a robot avatar over 3 difficulties and a selection of 26 songs. The music we've gathered for this game comes from independent musicians across the United States and Europe. We expect an August release pending final approval from Nintendo.

Our second trailer has gone up on YouTube.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MiauopktNQI

In this video, producer and CEO of Ghostfire Games, Ed Roman, discusses various gameplay and production aspects of our upcoming WiiWare title, Helix.

Please visit our website for more information:

http://www.ghostfiregames.com/helix

Please leave feedback! It is appreciated.

[Breaker]

Very cool idea. I especially like how you and your team came up with the idea for 2 player mode using seperate Wiimotes.

[Darth Marsden]

Sounds cool. I'll look into it.

On a side note - did you sign up just to tell us about this? You low post count kinda implies it.

[ZTC]

Looks to be quite interesting and fun. I hope does well.
Maybe he saw that thread in GED, joined to explain a few things, and then wanted to tell us about Helix as an added bonus. :shrug:

[ghostfire]

I'll admit I signed up to post about the game, but I think I'll be sticking around anyway for discussion purposes.

Someone who develops for WiiWare had to lay the smack down on Joe Cracker anyway...

http://www.armageddongames.net/forums/showthread.php?p=1188292

[Pineconn]

On a side note - did you sign up just to tell us about this? You low post count kinda implies it.

Actually, no. Ghostfire signed up to explain to a certain member that making a WiiWare game takes money and time. AGN has no money, and no one would be willing to do such a thing over an Internet forum.

[Matteo]

Good luck Ghostfire... I greatly appreciate indie developers such as you guys... hope the game sells well!

[Vagla]

To be honest, I didn't have all that much interest in this game until I saw the most recent video (with Ed's commentary). I like the direction that was taken with regard to the soundtrack, and it does indeed look like the game could be a pretty entertaining rhythm game. That the team isn't sick of it after a long development cycle is definitely a good sign, too. :) It's great to see software like this coming from small developers, and I hope it succeeds in the marketplace.

WiiWare has definitely caught my attention as a potential medium. I'm curious about the game's development and developer, and I've several questions. How long has this game been worked on? How big was the team? How was the company started? What kind of hoops do you have to jump through to make a product for WiiWare, and what's it take to become a licensee in order to make games for the platform?

Additionally, and rather unrelated, what possessed you to come to this forum, of all places, to promote the game? This is far from a bustling, important online destination. I only found such a post by you on one other forum, so it's clear you're not simply going around spamming forums about the game. :D

Thanks.

[ghostfire]

In a funny way you can actually thank Joe Cracker for getting me here. Google's spider bot picked on him, so when I did a search in Google for "Wiiware + forum", I found this forum. :)

Our core team consisted of our CEO, 2 programmers, and 2 level designers. Everything else was contracted out (art, sound, etc...). We started the game at the beginning of this year. Ghostfire Games was founded by our CEO Ed Roman to follow his dream of making video games. I was brought on in April to do level design, but my role has since expanded. As far as development hoops to go through, there are more than you could ever imagine. Everything from getting through Nintendo's QA department to paying $1k to each of the various ratings boards out there (USA, Europe, Germany, and Australia) to negotiating music license fees. Be prepared to do a lot of work you never expected to do when making a commercial game. And whatever amount of money you had in mind to spend, give yourself a 25% overhead buffer.

[AtmaWeapon]

What's up Austin buddy? :)

It doesn't look like my cup of tea, but it does look like a fun game. I always get on fire about rhythm games then after a while I just give up :(

[ghostfire]

Keep Austin weird.

Or something like that.

[Beldaran]

I live in Waco. I moved here from Austin, where I lived for 2 years. I love Texas. =D

[AtmaWeapon]

I'm thinking about trying it out but I'm really lazy so you'll have to answer the following two questions to sell me a video game:

1) Do I need 2 wiimotes? It looks like I do, but it seems like a wiimote + nunchuck combo could be possible?

2) When's it released? FF IV DS and Diablo II has kept my Wii unpowered for a while so I don't know what's on WiiWare.

[Beldaran]

Diablo II has kept my Wii unpowered for a while

How are things back in the 90's?

[Vagla]

AtmaWeapon: You can't play with a single remote and nunchuck for the single reason that this game requires flailing yours arms around in various directions; unless you have really short arms, the cord between the two won't be long enough and you'll be damaging the cord or pulling controllers out of your hands. In order to have the unrestricted range of motion necessary, you'd need a wireless nunchuck, which isn't officially supported by Nintendo.

I'm going to assume the release date is very soon, what with the trailers, ghostfire posting about it. Perhaps even tomorrow, going alongside Mega Man 1 (best game ever).


ghostfire: If one were doing a game for the DS or Wii (ie on physical media), is it possible to go through a third party publisher and not have to deal with Nintendo and its restrictions on things like libraries, in-house product testing (which I imagine is rather expensive), and the like? I know there are some developers that get very far on a game without having a publisher (High Voltage comes to mind with The Conduit); are their development tools and libraries necessarily from Nintendo or could they be completely in-house? I'm curious how much independence from Nintendo is possible when working on a game.

Regarding Nintendo's QA department, I have experience with it and have a very good idea of how irritating (and helpful) that process must be for developers. Some of the things testers have to watch for are pretty petty and ridiculous.

Much of my interest here stems from my desire to be in your CEO's position when I finish up my degrees in a year and a half (if not sooner). I've got a lot of respect for people like him. :)

[ghostfire]

You do not need two Wii Remotes to play Helix, although for the full experience we recommend having two.

The game should be out sometime this month pending approval from Nintendo.

Going through WiiWare requires dealing with Nintendo directly. Going through a physical medium still requires dealing with Nintendo, although the restrictions are less. (In spite of this, your publisher may turn out to be worse than Nintendo)

[Vagla]

So you can play with remote and nunchuck? I was under the impression from the video that that wasn't implemented due to the cord length.

Regarding publishers, that sounds like such a pain. I find it bothersome that releasing a game for a platform has to be made so difficult. Are there any publishers that are reputably good with regard to independent developers?

[AtmaWeapon]

How are things back in the 90's?Pretty awesome actually. I never bought the stupid game because I was busy playing other things but now I wish I'd bought it back when it was newer.

Vagla I'm thinking that publishing video games is probably similar to publishing books, only with the owner of the console as a gatekeeper. If you want a game to be sold in retail stores (and possibly be played without modding), you have to get it licensed by the console maker. Particularly when the console is sold at a loss (PS3, XBox 360), the console maker has to recoup their losses via licensing fees, overcharging for memory cards, and slowly increasing the size of hard drive peripherals. It's going to hurt the wallet to go through this process.

If you go through a publisher, I'm sure they'll be all rainbows and unicorns before they get your signature on a contract, but keep in mind that they have to pay Nintendo and at the same time pay for their own employees, so you'll be giving them a big cut of the money and they'll be giving Nintendo a cut of that.

If it's like book publishing, then a publisher probably sucks; I read a blog article detailing the process and I'll try and find it again so I can link it for sources, but I know that Charles Petzold (http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/blog.xml) (a legendary Windows programming author) has gotten so fed up with it he's sworn to never write another programming book again unless it's just for fun. A paraphrase of the article I read (which was titled something like "10 things I wish I knew about book publishing before I wrote a book") goes like this: you pay the publisher to put their name on the book, then you get to call retailers and convince them to buy your book. If you're lucky, they'll believe in the book and put it on prominent shelf space and advertise it. If not, they'll spine it on the top shelf in a rarely-visited corner of your section. You don't get paid for some period agreed to in your contract because if they don't sell it, the book store will send your book back to the publisher for credit. Your final cut comes maybe a year later; by this time the bookstore has their cut, the distributor has their cut, the publisher has their cut, and you get what's left over. I hear rumors that for a $30 book (not uncommon for programming books; indeed they tend to run $40-$50) the author sees maybe $1-$3 per purchase.

I'd imagine video game publishing is similar, though the concept of "prominent shelf space" is kind of moot in WiiWare since new games get pretty equal treatment. If you're going to have to promote the product yourself, why let some big guy get a cut of your profits?

The book analogy does fall apart because plenty of people self-publish; this reduces the fat cats that get a cut and if you're in with your demographic the advertising is pretty much done for you. (A good example is why the lucky stiff's Nobody Knows Shoes (http://hackety.org/press/) about the Shoes UI library for Ruby; I knew about this when it was a day old because why is quite famous in the Ruby crowd and wrote the excellent Poignant Guide to Ruby.) I suppose the only analogy to self-publishing when it comes to video games is to write your games for the PC: so far it doesn't look like any of the consoles are friendly to the low-budget homebrew crowd. At least you can download the XBox 360 SDK and use it for free/cheap.

I'm just kind of killing time about a topic of which I only have anecdotal knowledge though.

[ghostfire]

So you can play with remote and nunchuck? I was under the impression from the video that that wasn't implemented due to the cord length.

Regarding publishers, that sounds like such a pain. I find it bothersome that releasing a game for a platform has to be made so difficult. Are there any publishers that are reputably good with regard to independent developers?

No, we do not support the nunchuck.

There is a one Wii Remote mode for the game.

[Darth Marsden]

Actually, no. Ghostfire signed up to explain to a certain member that making a WiiWare game takes money and time. AGN has no money, and no one would be willing to do such a thing over an Internet forum.
Well,what do I know? I barely post here any more anyways.

Looking more into your game and seeing the videos makes me very interested in this. And it's always cool to have a real-live programmer type hanging around. Y'know, for once. ;)

[Vagla]

AtmaWeapon: I was under the impression that the hardware companies charge for the manufacturing of the game discs and packaging. Perhaps this is wrong, but that would seem a good way to do it for them because then their revenue from third party games is based on the number ordered and not the number sold, which could be less. The cost of getting all the tools and such for developing the game seems to me like it'd be more for covering the cost of developing those tools than making a profit, since I don't see how they can profit much from that considering the prices they charge and the number of developers.

I have an author friend and know a decent amount about the horrors of book publishing. He's done some pretty awesome novels, yet not a single one has been published yet. He's gotten rejection after rejection, with several of the rejections even praising his writing and the story. The anecdote you cite is pretty awful. My opinion of publishers in general continues to fall every time I read more things like this. There was a posting about High Voltage's search for a publisher for The Conduit where a publisher said that they didn't know what audience High Voltage was aiming for with their FPS and that they could maybe slap a $20 price tag on it and "crap it out" for Christmas. Clearly they have faith in the quality of games they publish. :rolleyes: