ke_mechial wrote:I just meant to say the color of the car does not matter.
Understood, didn't mean to come of harsh/jumpy or lecturing if I did. But just to run with the car metaphor a little more, if the theme/theater is to the game, what paint is to a car, I feel like no matter how good the car is. If we paint the cars in polka-dots we're going to have a difficult time getting people excited to buy our cars.
I guess that gets to a concern I have. Today thanks to digital distribution and more powerful development tools, small teams and even individuals can make games. Don't get me wrong I think this is a good thing, but it does mean games and their makers must work hard to A) Get noticed in the crowd of games, and B) Actually catch peoples interest.
The first part I feel Shaun already has a step up on already. The fact that he makes one post here on CSO saying he's going to make a game and then
Rock Paper Shotgun writes about it says something. If I did the same I know for a fact that it wouldn't get mentioned on a game news website. So with hard work I'm confident word about the game can be spread.
I feel the second part, getting people interested in the game will be the difficult part. My concern with the western front is that the game will be immediately dismissed as just another WWII strategy game about Americans shooting Nazis.
Many games have moved away from the WWII western front, I believe for just this reason. Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Battlefield, and Company of Heros are all major game series that got started on the WWII western front that have all shifted away from it, and in the case of the first three even dropped the WWII setting in favor of other war settings. Even the Wolfenstein series which doggedly sticks to the WWII Americans fighting Nazi's theme tries to change it up by re-inventing it's Nazis by playing up things like the occult and sci-fi elements.
I realize the games I mentioned above are all major AAA game series and in a market a tad different from what The Tactical Art of Combat will probably be aiming at, but I do believe that where their is smoke their is fire, and if major studios/publishers were/are having a hard time marketing the WWII western front setting to most gamers, smaller studios will probably have a similar difficulty.
Again its not that the WWII western front is bad, I just firmly believe that at this point in time it will be more difficult to hold peoples attention with that setting.
And while on the topic of markets and marketing, I really think the names "The Tactical Art of Combat" or the "The Tactical Art of Close Combat" are both very very wordy (as in too long, and confusing to the uninitiated). In this day and age when things like twitter with its 140 character limit are king, and newspapers are reporting that many people only have the vocabulary of a high schooler, a shorter and more telling name might be good thing to consider.