Liam Fratturo and I had a few things to discuss at the Dangen Entertainment booth. Like Squidly an I we met through a private OpenFL forum for Haxe developers crating Nintendo Switch ports for their games. Liam’s been working on his game with a couple of other devs right out of college(same as me), but their gameplay gimmick in this 8-player brawler is that you can play the game with almost any usb controller on the market! Read more about it on Gamasutra.
The crew over at Jelly Team have partnered up with a publisher in an effort to release their game on switch, a very similar situation to Renaine in our previous interview, in fact they share the same publisher! As a result I have a lot less new information to share in this article, however it is interesting to note that Jelly Team’s game currently has no singleplayer mode. As a game with a minimum requirement of two players we start to realize an issue when it comes to pricing their title: how can you justify a medium to large price-point on a game only played on special occasion. Party games suffer from this issue a lot, but in most cases the team will scrape together a special mode with CPUs to compensate and justify the cost of the game. These guys are no different and plan to do the same but it does ask a good question.
Can we derive the game’s worth in its content and quality of content? Game such as Nintendo’s flagship Mario Party does just fine in the market at a sixty dollar price-point and people still buy it. Is it name recognition that a team needs to earn? How can they go about getting the faith of their target consumers? o they just need to build up trust over years of releasing more traditional games or in this age of Kickstarters can they crowdfund the experience from like-minded players demanding game like Super Slime Arena be created?