How About a Trilogy
July 18th, 2010 - filed under Development News, Input Requested, Status UpdatesThis project has evolved a lot from the beginning. In case you haven’t kept up, this went from being a very different Jetpack 2, to being a small retrofit of Jetpack 1, to being a very enhanced retrofit somewhere between Jetpack 1 & Jetpack 2. Now we’re close to release and I’m making another change to fit my current circumstances: Jetpack will be released as a trilogy.
I’m excited about this decision, and the logic behind it is simple:
- Get a product out the door asap.
- Take a few months to finish graphics and add some gameplay enhancements I’ve wanted, for episodes 2 & 3.
- Hopefully build up more loyal fans while each release is being worked on.
- Lower price barrier for a single product.
- Offer a discount for buying the whole trilogy in advance = advance funding.
Here’s the tenative description of each episode:
Episode 1: Our hero arrives at the entrance to the maze, where he becomes trapped. The themes are dark original brick/cave, and (easier) colorful outdoor nature. You choose a path to start – you can reach the end via either path but you can only unlock all the bonuses by completing both paths.
Episode 2: A time machine in the maze transports our hero to the distant past, where you can choose to follow the easier path into a castle fortress, or the dark path into the jungle with ancient tribes and ruins.
Episode 3: A time machine in the maze transports our hero to the future, where you can choose to battle through a high tech space station, or travel to an (easier) alien planet, with strange vegetation and structures. At the end our hero finally discovers the secret of the maze and who is behind it.
Each episode will have its own new gameplay additions, and bonus areas which contain specially themed levels. There should be about 50-70 levels per episode.
Pricing
There’s a big concern in the indie community about the $6.95 price point some big companies are offering. That’s a price point that makes it hard to compete if you’re an indie with relatively few sales (thousands, not hundreds of thousands). I’ve considered that pricing model, but from the very helpful comments from other indie authors on indiegamer.com, in our market that can greatly decrease the perceived value of your game. Several people have actually reported higher sales when they raised the price of their game. So setting a price that doesn’t undervalue the game but is fair for the value offered is a tricky thing.
I’m considering pricing around $12-$20 per episode, and $30-$50 to buy all 3 in advance. It’s a big range .. what do you think?
What’s Done
I’ve entered Jetpack into the 2010 IndieCade festival/contest! It’s not really one of those artsy games that seem to win much of the time, but hopefully gameplay will be a bigger factor in their decision making.
Getting ready for the contest got a lot of things done, but burned me out a bit.
What’s mostly done:
- Gameplay
- Steel ball / EyeBall / Peppermint
- Flitzer
- Spring
- Industrial/Cave theme (short on graphics for the nature theme)
- Candy world & devilish themes (for bonus levels)
- Main menu functionality
Coming Soonish
- Editor
- Achievements
- The rest of the enemies, and AI
Editor
I’m working on getting the editor done, it’s going to be really cool. I hope to release it in 2 weeks. If you have levels going in the final game, you’ll have access to them automatically, so you can add any of the new features to your levels, switch themes, and add scenery.
Here are some of the features of the editor so far:
- All levels are saved to your JetpackHQ account. In the future, your personal levels will show up on your profile page.
- Levels can be organized into folders. The last 100 revisions/deleted levels are kept in your ‘revisions’ folder.
- A screenshot & thumbnail are automatically generated on save.
- Undo/redo
- You can import old levels, however you might want to wait for the mass zip upload tool.
Since the response to the scrolling was good, I’m also considering allowing differently sized levels, like short but 2 screens wide, or narrow but 2 screens tall, or even double size (52×36 tiles).








































