Would it work
Would graphics save the game?

As I am really enjoying clash of clans and more I think the more earth could work and if they have 3m plus daily players
Surely we could get back to 10k this way?
I know we aren't going down the fb route but android store?

Sure. But do you have 500k capital to invest?

It'll take about 1.5 years to get get such an app working, along with the network and infrastructure behind it. Say a team of 10 people (4 programmers (network, database, client frontend, graphics, game logic, etc), 4 artists and riggers (animation, 3D characters, environment, UI, promotional videos), 1 designer and 1 to handle business/emails), each taking $3000 salary a month for 1.5 years is 540k dollars.

For any business entity, you also need legal softwares, for eg, buying Microsoft Windows, and Visual Studio, 3D Studio Max/Maya, etc etc, so you can easily throw in another $10k dollars there. This even already assumes everyone works from home, so there is no office rental.

1 year is probably the minimum I see it takes to get a CoC clone up, and that's probably without any beta testing.

Plus you need a way to generate cash to cover running costs (servers, administration whatever). Advertising won't do it.

Can we get sponsors?

I believe there are lots of investors who are willing to fork out 1-2m consider our customer base and history is good...

Nice suggestion though.,

Well, it's not we yylim. The site belongs to Pang and qzjul as I understand it. Certainly they must own copyright in respect of the coding changes they have made.

Xin
Sell the copyright keep a percentage

what xin said.

remember when I used to say that when I win the lottery Earth will be an amazing game? Still haven't won it yet. :p

That being said, qz and I (and martian and h4 and anyone else who was around :p) have been casually discussing how to make an incremental step in direction of other modern games like clash of clans while still making this an easy-to-consume "text based" game at it's core.

Mainly though UI improvements and configurable AI/country running elements (both for NPCs and to automate aspects of your country) we can make it have more appeal to a newer generation of gamers while still keeping it in the hobby/indie game genre. I don't think anyone has a real desire to go for generic mass appeal. I hope we find time to work on it sooner than later :-/

But if anyone has a few million dollars they want to donate to the project ($3000/month?? that's cheap! :p) let me know! :D

Easy to imagine some quite tasty graphics: camera passing over a map style landscape as an attack is launched; jets, troops and tanks shown being mobilised, numbers increasing as the size of the forces expand; graphics for the troops, tanks, jets updating to more modern looking equiptment as the set unfolds; missiles would take care of themselves; slightly different construction scenes for each type of building put into production; industrial scenes for production by a Commy Indie, more bucolic scenes for a farmer.

That would slow down kill runs, but not a bad idea to show graphics on basic land grabs tho. I just think it would be to much change to fast if we add graphics to everything at once.

Yes the real time aspects of the thing woud add a complication. Perhaps the player could choose to have them running or not.

I haven't played Clash of Clans, are there parallels and how does that game deal with fast, co-operative periods of play like a kill run?

It takes a half a mil to make an app? Wow there are folks who make apps that have like sub 500 downloads. Are they just rich guys who are bored and decide to build an app for giggles?

don't do graphics - there's already a hundred clash of clans clones.
Double down on text instead, figure out a way to integrate all of this - boards, chatting, warchats everyhting into the same "portal"

so make the strong point - community - stronger, easier to get immersed in

just easy to use for mobile too - maybe an ingame attack calculator - if you spy the guy it gives you a good enough guestimate (ignoring allies) so the guy playing from his phone doesnt have to switch from broswer to app to calc to browser tab two to.. what can be figured out with pencil and paper can imho be automated
so spy the guy, it says 1mil jet ps - oversend 5, 10, 15% click choice and boom! Mehulled :)

Ah, he had defence allies. Damn.

tulosba made the point i was being a smartass about - an earth empires app would cost no where close to a half million dollars to develop, lol, dunno where you pulled the 500k figure from

earth has never had graphics, i dunno why the fudge we'd need them now

hell, even if there was an earth empire app, you could have push notifications for your country news and all that jazz - it can just basically be the mobile version of the site we have now, but in app form.

For kr s just do it as multiple attacks and how much u lock it depends on how many jets at the end when turns are done

And at trife costs would surely be low
As servers exist
Your assuming an upfront cost of 3 years salary at once also if you incorporate some pay to play structure like gems yes it's an even playing field but limit it so skill would still win overall

And might cost that much but super cell make over a million a day supposedly and zynga is valued in billions for farmville

It depends on what we want from the game and same questions to the current owners

Do the players want growth, community and competition and do the owners want future profit and sustainability

Cause at the moment we have a dwindling player base
Now don't get me wrong I like this game alot but would it be more fun with more ppl sure,

I'm a b grade player but I can win on team so why would I embrace the challenge to put more time or effort in when I can all x a t10 every set

And all servers are dropping players as earth did and jolt did

If you want to do it, well do.

The present owners won't stand in your way. :)

And I'll still play when it is done - gems and all.

I'm waiting for my lottery win too lol

Considering I work in the games industry as a game programmer, those numbers aren't out of my ass. They are real numbers.

Believe me, making EE into an app with push notifications wouldn't make it any more appealing to play. Considering the proliferation of IRC bots for announcing attacks already, it would barely take half a day of work to add Android/iOS push notifications from the same IRC bot. What's the catch? You need to run a server (not an issue if you already run an IRC bot), and then you need to pay Apple $99 per year for developer status, and you only get 100 device slots during app testing (that is, you can only test your app on up to 100 unique test devices - The limit is only for apps in testing, not for apps approved on the app store).

If a game doesn't capture your audience's attention within the first 5 minutes of launch, your game is as good as gone. Nobody wants to sit down for hours reading startup guides, or figuring out what a "casher" is, particularly *mobile* games.



They are people who do it as a hobby to learn how to write programs, this also allows them to add it to their resume for job interviews, as part of their portfolio.

Most of these apps never see the light of day outside of the 500 downloads via a few Facebook posts to friends. If you don't market a game, no one will see it. The ones that do make it rich, like Flappy Bird, basically struck lottery, and that one only because a famous Youtuber happened to play it. There are 12 million apps out there.

The games that you describe, while they obviously take nearly no capital to make, usually also lack _depth_. Games like 2048 obviously are an exception, but if you read back onto what it is a clone of (1024, which is a clone of Threes), you'll realize that even Threes was in development for a whole 1.5 years. That's right. Threes, a game that can be easy cloned in half a week, was in development for 1.5 years because the game mechanics wasn't quite right during all that time. They tried all sorts of sliding mechanics, combining mechanics and over a hundred art styles (tiles).

Not only that, trainboy initially made the comparison to Clash of Clans in his opening post. If that is the triple AAA standard we are talking about that is referenced when making an EE app, then you better cough up the money, because the time needed to make the app is significant.

Would I know any of the games you have worked on Xin?

Probably not, I don't work for a big company like say, Ubisoft.

I am much impressed with the major games that have been produced. They seem to me to be a new art form akin to cinema. The combination of elegant game play with graphics and sound to produce the immersive quality is quite as impressive to me (well, more as I am a gamer) as great architecture, music or film.

The art form is in its infancy but I believe games like Civilisation and Doom and so on will come to be talked of much as films such as Battleship Potemkin are talked of in that genre.

So more power to your elbow, Xin, and your colleagues. :)

I'm not sure this game translates to a mobile audience.

PDM is a case in point. We've branched off into CoC and been successful there. We have, or have had close to a dozen members over there recruited from CoC itself if I recall correctly. However, despite our efforts to recruit any of them to EE we have failed. There is no interest.

I think the problem is that at it's core, it takes a lot of knowledge to get good at this game, which means a lot of time investment to get up and running. As Xinhuan said, if you don't grab a mobile user's attention in the first 5 minutes, they're as good as gone.

Some think we might be able to get an audience if we get new players to think this is primarily a war game with flashy animations of airplanes dropping bombs. Even if we want to recruit these potential suiciders, they still need to learn a lot before they can even have a country up and running in order to do so.

If the only time you have available is an occasional few minutes on a mobile I also doubt Earth is for you.

But existing players would get a benefit and some people who first tried the game through an app would be drawn in. Each of us was drawn in at one time or another. And once you get a taste for the game it certainly stays with you. Most of us have found our way back to it.

While i dont have any programming knowledge, i do have experience in playing another online game in the past that boomed then crashed and closed.. it was called Motor City Online.. it was put out by EA. It was alot like Need For Speed. it almost was titled Need For Speed MCO, well the premise was all about cars obviously but they was all cars from the 70's down to the 32 ford coupe. my point in describing it is this.. it worked for a while oct 2001 till last day of august 2003. in my opinion besides the obvious lack of promotion (alot of money and time went to the SIMS online) they also didnt branch out into a new audience as well.. not alot of young kids who like NFS titles are going to be into the older cars.. not only would we need everything u all said money wise and all that.. we also would need to get something that a BIG majority could get into, and then develop stuff that would draw a new audience to bring in more people that can co-exist with the old

I don't work in the game industry I can tell you that $3000/month is probably not far off just compared to similar investments.
The issue here is not just marketing but the product itself.
The thing is that games are not as you remember them from the 1990s (or as I remember them from the 1980s which were quite different from 1990s gen games). These things have become more and more mainstream which means the nature of the beast has changed (see the evolution of rap for analogous example. The early 1980s rap is very different than the mainstream stuff now).
Mass marketing and lowest common denominator is what takes over. Games are mostly easier because they need to sell more and appeal to more people. Eye candy sells.

I also believe Xin's comments regarding the first 5 minutes things since it's an industry where the barrier to entry is extremely low which is a good thing for an industry as a whole, but can make things very painful for someone without resources and backing.


Regarding recruiting into EE,
when I played with MD and WoG in Astroempires we experienced the same thing.
Heck even with ogame (long ago) we experienced the same thing.

As an aside: for me to invest $3K/month into something my required ROI is at *least* 10%. Probably higher for something involving this much risk. Without a DBPP I'm not going to play games with my retirement planning:P. Stock market, ETF's and covered calls is where I draw normally draw the line and over the long run it's hard to get to 10% already with this lousy rate environment.

This isn't and probably will never be of the clash of clans magnitude.

Costs would only be that high if you find someone foolish enough to fund it. You could recruit devs and designers as a startup, give 1.5-2 year vesting for work done. Just need to cover costs of incorporating (if it isn't already) and legal fees for the vesting docs.
Just to note also, if you're paying someone 3k/month, it'll cost you closer to 5k after benefits & taxes, at least in California.

Could also fork out the extra 200 for an enterprise license and not have to deal with the app store.

Surly there are other models to launch. How do any startups work if not? Just curious?

My game profile number is over 22 000, I found numbers over 24 000 working. That means in the 1.8 years since I joined we've had over 2k signups

plus the 22 000 as a base

imho the game doesnt need 5 minutes of fame, it needs to be good enough to be able to invite a good enough portion of all of those sign ups to come back - easy to play text game via mobile app - could work.
Say we have 600 unique players now, and barely covers costs - $5 bucks says it'd be closer to generating a decent profit if there were 2600 unique players per month. I think thats doable in terms of a semi-conservative guestimate (mass mail to all 24k signed ups that now its on the app store.)
10% conversion rate is high but.. I'm a glass half-full guy.

what if by some fluke we get to 5 000 unique players? Game would be a hell of a lot more fun..

Well you don't have to "pay" an employee for a startup. You can all become partners in a business and raise the money through equity and agree in advance how any future profits/salary will be shared/disbursed. The cost of incorporating (should you go that route) can't be avoided but one could almost make the business a partnership (not necessarily equal shares) to begin with and then change that later.
There are multiple options on how either would work and they vary by country.

Clash of clans advertise on TV in the UK.
I play earth 90% of the time on my mobile and to be honest it's not great. The side menu more often than not appears over the text of the main windows meaning I have to zoom in and move the page to be able to click on what I need to. Sometimes I log in and I can't get past the congratulations you have received 6 turns blah blah blah.

Things like this will put new people off instantly.

it's never going to compete with the Supercell or Zinga games that have really mature and dedicated app dev groups. It's to put together a nice indie game that enough people enjoy so that it doesn't cost money to run and can be grown from there. We're in a good place right now to keep things going based on existing revenue but I agree that the game isn't as fun with a smaller user base.

But all of that doesn't mean that there isn't room to move toward a more modern direction, especially on the mobile UI

I'm not 100% on this small number of players = not so much fun idea.

I played at the end of the last millenium when numbers were at their peak and sure, it was fun for a while. But the cheats undermined the game for an honest player and I quit.

I have played one set in 1a this time round and quite a few sets in tourney and express. With no cheats and mostly fellow vets to play with I'm having a ball.

Bigger numbers will make policing MUCH harder and will, I suspect, bring back the cheating children.

If we continue as we are I, for one, will be enjoying my game.

Maybe 1a has to lose the shadow of the past. But that is self righting. If the old clans make things boring for their members new clans and new loyalties will emerge. And then. It is kind of fun to watch the way the past imacts on the present. A bit like quite a few science fiction stories. :)

Everything EA touches is complete fluff.

I bought a second hand Commodore for my daughter with a whole bunch of early games. They were sort of OK and I played a few for a while.

The thing broke and, having realised pcs were a good thing I next bought a more modern (for the time) one and it came bundled with half a dozen games including Sim City.

I was bowled over and have played computer games ever since.

Maybe they have not subsequently come up with anything quite of that calibre but they stand well with me for that title alone