
TumbleSeed Postmortem: what went wrong - dhotson
http://aeiowu.com/writing/tumbleseed/
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cjcenizal
I really appreciated this write-up, and I can 100% empathize with the struggle
of the game designer [1].

I'd like to give the author one piece of feedback: please refine your color
palette to use contrast and hue to make it easier for players to identify the
various game entities! Looking at the screenshots and watching the gameplay
videos, it's really hard for me to pick out the what's important and what's
just background. Everything blends together and just looks like _noise_.

Take a look at other games, e.g. Raptor: Call of the Shadows, which make it
_really easy_ to scan the screen and identify/differentiate background
terrain, power-ups, enemies, and bullets. When it's hard to tell what's going
on, you add an unnecessary barrier to entry.

That said, keep making games!! Seems like you're good at it. :)

[1] [http://www.atomicarmies.com/](http://www.atomicarmies.com/)

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quadrature
As an aside does anyone else find their landing page really poorly designed ?.
It scrolls up instead of down and shows a bunch of static screenshots where I
wasn't entirely certain where the playable character was. it was all quite
confusing until I finally landed on the explanation video which should have
been the first thing they showed.

[http://tumbleseed.com/](http://tumbleseed.com/)

~~~
avarun
Yeah, that landing page is not doing the game any favors. I closed the tab
halfway through scrolling up the page.

~~~
quadrature
I was about to do the same. I think this and their playability issues could
have been caught very early on with simple A/B testing.

~~~
soneca
For a _simple_ AB testing they would need thousands of unique visitors and
players for just one test. Just not possible for an indie game I believe

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jmull
Nice write-up. It's heart-rending to read an article about coming to terms
with the fact that project you poured your soul into didn't work out (I've
certainly been there).

The control system would doom this game for me. Squishy, indirect controls
means a lot of frustration. The fact it is the central idea around which the
entire game is designed doesn't help.

I think that's exacerbated by the visual design. It looks good, but a critical
part of the mechanic is the ball ("seed"), is being rolled up a wall. You
should intuitively see and understand the danger of a hole, the presence of
obstacles, things you can roll up or roll down or over or through. But
everything is flat and has almost uniform visual weight. There are some 3D
cues, but they aren't consistent and don't seem to directly match the
mechanical geometry.

It's tough to read the environment. This makes the indirect unresponsive
controls even more frustrating: even when you can get the ball to roll where
you want, you have a hard to seeing what you want to roll toward or avoid.

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unclesaamm
A crucial element that wasn't mentioned here was the lack of play-testing.
Having a dozen people play the game and give feedback would have informed the
makers that it was too hard, and where.

It ties in with the lack of time and resources too -- if you don't structure
your development to have time to do user testing, you won't magically find
that you have time to do it at the end, either.

~~~
Kapura
My first thoughts too, although my guess is that they _did_ let other people
play the game to find out if it's fun, but there's def a difference between
that and a structured blind playtest with randos. It's super crucial early &
late in development.

~~~
Macsenour
And if they used the same people, they get better at playing the game, it
gives the appearance of a game that is easier than it actually is.

~~~
SeanBoocock
That can be an asset though, and ideally you want to have both "longitudinal"
testing with the same group of testers as well as frequently testing with
people who are fresh to the game. The former can reveal trends that the
development team is otherwise blind to. It can also help to exercise
subtleties of the gameplay that a new player wouldn't discover, or aspects of
the "elder game" if the game has a linear progression that takes significant
time to unlock.

~~~
Macsenour
I agree with the value you're talking about, but they don't help evaluate how
hard a game is.

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vgprice
Decent read. I bought this game on the switch as soon it was release, and
stopped playing probably 60 minutes into it because the difficulty really did
my it less fun. I'll definitely play again once the patch comes out.

Overall the game has an amazing and original design, and I hope the patch
improves sales.

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soneca
Indie game development is pretty cruel compared to starting a business
software company. No mercy, even early adopters are much more demanding and
less forgiving, the launching it is a major part of the success (and it is
much less lean as it is not just a CRUD, but a fully featured software
published on another platform(s)), almost no chance to correct more
fundamental flaws and pivot.

The first version of a SaaS is responsible for 0.0001% of its lifetime
revenue. For an indie game it is what, 50%?

And a new SaaS is compared to your a home made Excel sheet. A new game is
compared to Zelda, Mario and games built by thousands of people with millions
of dollars.

~~~
brianwawok
For sure. The challenges are different but paying the bills with a boring
business SaaS is way easier.

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AcerbicZero
It seems casual styled platform-ish games are a tough thing to sell without
some sort of catch, or interesting premise. I follow a fairly large number of
indie games and looked at TS when it came out, but it was pretty easy to pass
up.

It's a game in the purest sense of the word "game". It doesn't seem to have a
catchy style, and it covers up the lack of fulfilling gameplay with the
"rouge-like" descriptor which is so overused as to be meaningless. If it were
on the phone, or I owned a switch maybe I could give it a try. On the PC, I
expect a little bit more out of the video games I choose to spend time with.

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graphememes
To be honest, the game itself just _looks_ confusing. I can't tell up from
down, where the character is, or anything useful from the website at all.

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binaryorganic
Wow, this article kind of makes we WANT to play it. I had read about it
(before it was released, so didn't see a wall of complaints about difficulty)
and watched the trailer, but the aesthetic and the core game mechanic led to a
false assumption that it was a really simple game. I honestly almost bought it
for my kids (who would probably have found it daunting). I'll pick it up on
Switch when the patch is out.

~~~
on_and_off
I picked it up on switch and was majorly disappointed to discover that the
controls don't take advantage of the joycons at all. It would make the game
even harder but it would be fun to control it by juggling the joycons.

I also gave up pretty quickly because it is pretty hard

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eiopa
Good read, and perfectly captures the things that frustrated me about the
game.

Looking forward to playing the updated version on the Switch!

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hoodoof
Perhaps a dumb question, but in this case, could the core game mechanic have
been testable by external players/users with minimal development to see if it
is fun or not?

And a second question.... if it's too hard why not make it easier and launch
again?

~~~
binaryorganic
Article makes clear they just pushed a big update to Steam

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math0ne
Interestingly in my sphere of critical game review this game did quite well.
Everyone seemed to like it and it surprises me to see a postmortem like this.

They might be throwing in the towel too early, games these days seem to have
long tails.

~~~
rezashirazian
I think this 'throwing the towel' article is more of a PR stunt to get the
word out and inform that a new patch is coming.

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shopoholic
Their website is confusing and doesn't explain the game. The first video from
the article's tweet is awful at explaining the game. Jump cuts every few
seconds, talks about powers that it doesn't explain, gameplay is totally
unexplained.

These guys need a non-artist on the team. No one is limiting them and making
sure they understand that the game is more important than just the art.

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kapauldo
Why not just make it easier instead of all the drama?

