GameDevBlog

Brett Douville has created an art-game answer to Rod Humble's *The Marriage* - it is called *My Divorce*, and it is available here:

http://www.brettdouville.com/MyDivorce.html

Brett has done something important here. I could go on about it, but it's something you should experience for yourself.

So I was going to show my solidarity with the "game length" bloggers today by re-posting an old post that I thought was entitled "Shorter Games Please!" but...I can't find it.

I suck.

I found this instead - http://www.gamedevblog.com/2005/04/finish.html - an article that mentions only 54% of players surveyed actually finished Spider-Man 2.

Honestly, 54% is huge for games - although at the time I was bummed in my own casual conversations with people, I've never met anybody who's finished the game. That 54% must be a survey of hardcore gamers, the sorts of people who actually sign up to be surveyed by Activision.

So - yeah - that's like hearing nobody finished reading your novel. And Spider-Man 2 isn't the only one, it's common for games.

Schizoid has the same problem - after we shipped, we looked at the leaderboards to see how far people got. We didn't expect a lot of people to finish - Schizoid has no story, and we expected people to play until they hit their plateau and stop. What we didn't expect was how quickly so many of them stopped - maybe half of them stopped 10% through the game.

Why'd we make a game so hard, that stiff-armed our players so early on?

We were afraid.

We were afraid they'd play through the game too quickly and be disappointed by the length.

We were wrong!

Don't be afraid to make a short game! Make games like Limbo and Portal that give people one of those brief but transcendent moments that makes our lives worthwhile!

And here's the other game length "size doesn't matter" bloggers:

Jonathan Blow of Number None

http://the-witness.net/news

Ron Carmel of 2DBoy

http://2dboy.com/2010/08/12/too-short/

Chris DeLeon

http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/short-videogame-design/

Dave Gilbert of Wadjet Eye Games

http://nygamedev.blogspot.com/2010/08/coming-up-short.html

Mike Gilgenbach of 24 Caret Games

http://24caretgames.com/2010/08/16/does-game-length-matter/

Eitan Glinert of Fire Hose Games

http://www.firehosegames.com/2010/08/how-much-is-enough/

Cliff Harris of Positech Games

www.cliffski.com

Chris Hecker of Spy Party

http://spyparty.com/2010/08/16/size-doesnt-matter-day/

Scott Macmillan of Macguffin Games

http://macguffingames.com/2010/if-size-doesnt-matter-where-do-you-get-the-virtual-goods

Noel Llopis

http://gamesfromwithin.com/size-matters

Peter Jones of Retro Affect

http://retroaffect.com/blog/160/Size_Doesn_t_Matter_Day/

Lau Korsgaard

http://www.copenhagengamecollective.org/2010/08/17/size-does-matter/

Martin Pichlmair of Broken Rules

http://brokenrul.es/blog

Greg Wohlwend of Intution Games

http://mile222.com/2010/08/a-haiku-about-game-length/

Jeffrey Rosen of Wolfire

http://blog.wolfire.com/

Torpex Is An Even Realer Company

Although we made the change from being a distributed company (i.e. working out of our homes) to a company with an actual office a good while ago, I didn't quite feel like we were a "real" company until now...

Now we have company health insurance! Does it get any realer than that?

Some of my friends might take umbrage to the idea that being a distributed studio is somehow not "real" - I am just kidding, we were always real. But there is a stigma attached to being distributed - we have lost deals because of it.

There's probably no stigma attached to not having health insurance, though, so I'm not sure why I bring it up.