Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Originality is a Curse

...That's probably why most games companies still churn out mostly FPS's and endless sequels to those FPS's.

I've written a game called Nuclear Graveyard which (IMHO) has a bit of originality: it's what I call pseudo-realtime. This means that rather than be proper realtime, it uses action points (e.g. walking forwards costs 1AP) but unlike most games that use APs, the player's APs are replenished automatically as both sides use them up.



Unfortunately, when most people play it, they don't seem to read the instructions, and assume that it's either a normal FPS ("why can't I move?") or a normal turn-based game ("How do I end my turn?"). I can't blame people for not reading instructions - who does? - but I've tried my best to make it self-explanatory, and included a tutorial, but to no avail. What do I do?

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