Blog | Adrian Gaudebert - Comments

3 years of intense learning - The Dawnmaker Post-mortem - HexaGun81

HexaGun81 — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 19:20:09 +0100

Improve visual appeal of the game by 10% by removing the colored "hex borders" when an adjacent border is the same color.
Improve visual appeal of the game by another 10% by stylizing the hex borders. I would describe the current style as "utterly non-existent". I suggest some sort of highlighting, at least a minimal bloom/glow/aura/bevel.
Improve visual appeal of the game by another 10% by very slightly increasing overall saturation and/or contrast.
Improve visual appeal of the game by another 10% by stylizing the cards. Some cards are literally ****90% BLANK****. That's really really bad. I suggest outter/inner shadow at the minimum. Increase the height of the title. Add a subtle background pattern with low opacity.

Make a new trailer on Steam once that's done.

There, 5 to 10% more sales for you. If not 15%. For a dozen of hours of effort.

3 years of intense learning - The Dawnmaker Post-mortem - Szeth-son-son-Vallano

Szeth-son-son-Vallano — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 15:09:04 +0100

Bravo pour cette aventure, et bravo pour ce post-mortem. Toutes ces leçons apprises sont bien plus précieuses que les k€ récoltés dans la vente du jeu :)

Good luck pour la prochaine étape, hâte de tester un proto simple ;)

L'état de l'Adrian 2024 - Szeth-son-son-Vallano

Szeth-son-son-Vallano — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 10:47:59 +0100

"Un jeu dont je suis très fier." Ça, ça fait plaisir à lire !

GG de continuer les debriefs par écrit.

Force à toi pour Le Grand Oeuvre !

L'état de l'Adrian 2023 - rkueny

rkueny — Thu, 08 Feb 2024 09:49:33 +0100

Je viens de retomber sur ton blog, le temps a passé depuis l'époque "jeuweb" !
Agréablement surpris de te voir toujours dans le monde du jeu, hâte de voir ce que va donner Dawnmaker.
Merci pour le partage.

L'état de l'Adrian 2023 - Daydreel

Daydreel — Mon, 22 Jan 2024 14:48:36 +0100

Courage et vaillance !

L'état de l'Adrian 2023 - loudo

loudo — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 18:46:06 +0100

Merci de partager tout ça ! Je trouve tes posts de "début d'année" intéressants, et j'imagine utiles pour bien te mettre en jambe pour la nouvelle année ! J'avais déjà lu et apprécié le précédent. Si j'ai le courage, j'essaierai d'en faire un similaire sur mon blog. On espère avoir de bonne nouvelles de votre projet prochainement. Bonne continuation !

How much does it cost to make a game like Dawnmaker? - Thomas Ruffier

Thomas Ruffier — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 13:52:32 +0200

Très intéressant, merci pour ton retour !

How I did my market research on Steam - Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 19:08:33 +0100

Thanks for your comments Kaldrin, all very relevant!

My goal with this market research was first and foremost to estimate how much money we could make with our game idea. So I indeed looked mostly to the past, to get sales numbers and get a rough estimate of what they earned. I did look to the future as well, but did not mention it here because I wanted to focus on that first question.

I believe it is impossible to make a perfect market research, but the more time you spend on it, the more precise it would be. So yes, one can look at holes in the market, future games, marketing spending, or just gather data about a much higher number of games. But that takes time, and I feel like there's no stopping if you go down that road. I could spend countless hours on this research. I stopped where I felt was enough for us today: we're small, we have little experience, and we just want to make sure we're not obviously going into a wall.

Here's an example of a much deeper market research (funnily enough, on the deckbuilder market, that came in handy! ) done by Metagether and publicly released very recently: https://tavrox.medium.com/deckbuilding-market-analysis-for-lovecrafting-345a5f96dd26

Finally, regarding the impact of marketing, I deeply believe that yes, it is a key differentiator in game success. I have no idea how to estimate it though? All I know is that we plan on investing into marketing, because we don't just want to make games, we want to make a living out of it. :-)

How I did my market research on Steam - Kaldrin

Kaldrin — Fri, 11 Mar 2022 18:18:58 +0100

Hey there thanks for this article! I'm curious though, you seem to base your business plan on the fact that other similar games worked in the past, but I suppose there are other ways to make such a thing, like seeing if there's no other game like yours? Or if there's a niche to fill? Also if there are similar games that are working well can't it mean that players might play them over your game? Also the revenues you estimated didn't take into account the marketing power / budget of the studios who made the game, I feel like it's very important but hard to estimate too I guess, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, 'cause maybe with the same marketing "multiplier" as the top-performing games the least performing ones would have made even more money?

Four Months of Horizontal Game Production - Philippe

Philippe — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 17:37:33 +0200

Sometimes going solo is easier, faster and less frustrating. Don't think you need others to be a real company.

Four Months of Horizontal Game Production - Bastien

Bastien — Tue, 28 Sep 2021 18:02:26 +0200

Merci pour ce post-mortem

Je me rend compte de la quantité astronomique de choses qu'on ne fait pas correctement mais c'est juste trop dur de les faire bien :cc

Gérer un projet / le planning / la simultanéité et l'efficacité de toutes les tâches et du marketing je trouve que c'est vraiment le plus dur, faire le jeu c'est "facile" pour ainsi dire x)

Sans parler de rajouter à ça la fondation d'une entreprise en même temps...

History of a genre, part 2: 2017 - 2020 - JustADude

JustADude — Mon, 15 Mar 2021 22:03:38 +0100

I just want to give a shoutout to Teppen, who gives a middle finger the turn based structure of card games by making it a real time game.

History of a genre, part 1: 2002 - 2016 - Adrian

Adrian — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 22:30:28 +0100

Hi R, thank you for your comment.

Pokémon TCG falls into the category of paper-first CCGs that I decided not to include in my study, with the exception of Magic. The same goes for Yu-Gi-Oh. I am not saying these are not interesting, simply that I had to set a line somewhere and that's the one I chose.

I also did not intend to make this an exhaustive list of all the digital CCGs that ever existed. It would have been both extremely long (look at the list on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_digital_collectible_card_games ) and quite boring to read. The ones I chose are the ones I played, so I could speak about them, and the ones I think brought something new to the genre.

I am, however, always interested to read about games that I do not know, to discover what they did differently, etc. So if you have such games you'd like to talk about, please do so! :)

History of a genre, part 1: 2002 - 2016 - R

Thu, 25 Feb 2021 00:29:10 +0100

This doesn't seem like much of a 'history of the genre' and more a history of a handful of games you personally played.

Like it's cool you talked about Scrolls but you forgot about a ton of other games. For example, Pokemon (PTCGO) which was released in 2012. PTCGO also has trading, and although no real world value is tied to the virtual cards, in basically every physical PTCG product you get a code card for a matching digital product. So it's a two for one value, which is unique to the genre although MTCG is experimenting with this in a limited way now. Also it's completely free to play with no in-game micro-transactions, unless you count buying the code cards off other people (but that's not in-game).

And I know the other big ass popular real world TCG, Yu-Gi-Oh, has had a number of online versions too. So even just forgetting about the smaller TCGs that don't have 20+ year old physical versions you missed some big obvious properties.

State of the Adrian 2020 - Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres — Wed, 23 Dec 2020 22:22:45 +0100

GG dude :)

Journey before destination

t'aurais pu mentionner que t'as vaincu Hades une paire de fois quand même... 0:-)

Un studio pour les coopérer tous - Anis Mezdari

Anis Mezdari — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 18:55:25 +0100

Bonjour Adrien,

Les valeurs de votre projets se rapproche beaucoup des miennes, sa serait avec plaisir qu'on se voit pour en discuter,

Je suit un Développeur de jeu qui débute, je travail sur un jeu actuellement et j'aimerai beaucoup discuter avec vous de votre future projet de studio coopérative :)

Anis Mezdari

Un studio pour les coopérer tous - James

James — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 11:34:22 +0100

Tu connais ma position, quand tu veux pour une jam !

On connait les dark patterns, mais je me demande si quelqu'un s'est penché sur des light patterns ? Des techniques pour favoriser un comportement vertueux pour la communauté et une consommation responsable de son jeu peut être intéressant à rechercher...

Bref, ton article m'a inspiré pour ma prochaine recherche ! :)

react-content-marker Released – Marking Content with React - Benjamin B.

Benjamin B. — Thu, 16 May 2019 21:14:51 +0200

Quel homme !

Rethinking Socorro's Web App - Robert Kaiser

Robert Kaiser — Thu, 11 Jun 2015 13:48:52 +0200

I really love the idea here and I really think we should go in that direction. If I understand things right, we are at or getting to the state where the Socorro webapp is only one possible endpoint, so we could build up such a new and flexible UI at the side. I think it would be awesome if I could mark pieces of a report (say, a section of a new Signature Summary) to require a certain permission flag (out of the ones I have myself, otherwise I can't see the data and build the report in the first place). The dashboard part is to be taken with a grain of salt. The way you describe it, it's prone to get very noisy and therefore very useless pretty fast. That said, I think this option should exist, and it may even power the entry point to the website - but the usual rule for making useful visualizations/dashboard is to distill things down into the fewest possible amount of indicators but to create the possibility to drill down into detailed data to understand those indicators.

Quelques idées à exploiter ? - mimi

mimi — Wed, 15 Apr 2015 21:36:53 +0200

Bonjour!

Depuis 2009, est ce que ce site a vu le jour? :) J'ai toujours eu la tête farcie d'idées, parfois très mauvaises, parfois bonnes, mais une vie déjà un peu trop remplie. Et si un de mes projets pouvaient être réalisé par quelqu'un d'autre, j'en serai ravie et non pas déçue de ne pas en être la bénéficiaire. Ton idée est belle. Bonne continuation, Amélie