i have yet to see an indie game that was "overpolished" and took too long to develope therefore failed to recoup the initial investment. Usualy its the lack of polish or rather the lack of skills to polish properly that results in what gets released. Imho most indie devs should polish the hell out of their new "gems" just to learn how and what to polish. Without "wasting" time into polish in the first place its hard to learn how to efficiently do that. I find often the small details can shift the perception of an product from ok to awesome. One of the best example that comes to mind is the UI of Hearthstone. There are so many small things in their very toyfull ui that it just oozes quality and charm. The interaction on the "table" is completly useless but its just nice to toy with it. The animated cards themself look awesome and one might say that it would do without it. Compare that to another big card battler, magic the gathering its clear that this product feels extremly static in comparision and does not feel like it is of the same quality. Of course for a small outfit this is always a matter of harsh reality = money. The time invested need to recoup and the chances for most indies are slim to begin with but it won't help to start from the "wrong side of quality" i agree you need to release to recoup. thats a fact and some funky particle effects can be patched into a later version if the game sells well enough. But featurecreep is usualy not whats missing from flappy bird clone 274. --- as a sidenote which is not meant to be offensive, i think FM games could need quite some polish in the ui department, i always found the grey in grey ui very ugly and by faar of lower quality than the usualy rest of your games offering.
I think you misunderstand me a bit I never said overpolishing a game can lead to its failure! I said, if a game fails (which any game has a good chance of in such a volatile market), having overpolished it will just make that failure that much harder to swallow. And just to be clear, I think a lot of your examples are just regular polish... imo "overpolish" is by definition the point where most players won't recognize the difference if its not there. Which is again, one of my points... its important to know where to draw the line between a very polished game, and an overpolished game. If a game dev doesn't know where that line is, I would agree to err on the side of making sure the thing is darn polished. In regards to Hearthstone, again, a lot of that stuff imo is regular polish. And I'm just speaking from our personal experience... if a game does well, overpolish is a great thing. If a game flops, its a terrible thing. In an industry where you have no guarantees, and a lot of what makes a game successful is out of your control, its important to find an appropriate line. It all comes down to time investment in a volatile mobile market - every aspect of game dev has a line, including polish. I'm not saying don't polish a game - polish is a very important aspect of development - I'm saying its important to know where to draw the line. And I'm not talking about Flappy Bird clones... I'm not talking about developers who don't spend time polishing their games at all. I'm talking about serious indie developers trying to put out original, quality content. I'm talking about the guys who spend years making a game, only to be heavily dismayed and quit when it gets 0 sales. I just hear too many peoples' advice to indies be: "Make a super great game, polish it up as much as you can, and hope for the best!" No... we've been there, done that. It doesn't work (for most) if you're trying to seriously come from nowhere and do this full time. You have to realize that to stay in business and keep making games, you will have to make business decisions. And that includes time management (which includes polish level). Again, if you're making Flappy Bird clones, you've got bigger fish to fry. As for our UI's, haha - sounds like you're referring to our second game ever, Bug Heroes (like, 3-4 years old now?) - can't think of any other gray themed UI's of ours Heroes and Castles had a terrible UI, I'll give you that But check out Sky Gnomes (probably our best UI, imo), Food Ninja, Puzzle to the Center of the Earth, Bug Heroes 2, etc for more indicative examples of our work. And to that point, Sky Gnomes was our second worst performing game, despite probably having some of the most polish time in it (full 3D menus, a much more in-depth daily tournament multiplayer setup, etc), and Heroes and Castles is our second best performing game, despite an ugly UI... which is my point. Sky Gnomes failed for a variety of reasons (too steep a learning curve, not getting featured, etc) - it didn't fail because it was too polished, lol, but obviously being super polish didn't do squat for it, and just made its failure that much more difficult to handle. On the flip side, Heroes and Castles admittedly lacked polish in some areas (we were just coming off of our biggest flop and about to go out of business, so we admittedly cut some corners to try to get that game out and try and save our business), and I don't think we've gotten one comment or review ever that has said anything about the ugly UI, for ex - and I still think its a really good, awesome game! Clearly any lack of polish didn't prevent its success. Looking back, I'm glad we spent more time on the gameplay than we did polishing up the UI. Again, I just want to be clear I am not saying don't polish your game! I'm just saying if you're a serious small time indie and you want to take this seriously and be full time, you have to be weary of time management in all aspects of development, considering the mobile market and its uncertainty.
