What are the chances of selling a text game?

shihonage

shihonage

Made in USSR
Honestly now. DoomRL is free. Dwarf Fortress is free.

What delusional train of thought makes me think that Monsterland is going to be sellable (for a few bucks) at all?

It's a textmode game based on Doom sensibilities and has coop play. But is that enough to be commercially viable?

I have a strong feeling that I'm deluding myself.

Agree/disagree?
 
On computer? Doubtful. Some app for a phone I don't have? Pretty sure it could work.
 
Mland's original code dates to Turbo Pascal 7.0. Now in Free Pascal and SDL, it remains not-really-phone-portable.

I'm stuck in a stupid position.

Shelter seemed like a commercial dead-end in October 2010, because of reliance on FO:T graphics.

So my cousin had the idea - resurrect Monsterland, our dream game from 1996. And try to sell it! And resurrect it we did.

Then he withdrew from the project. Then came back. Then withdrew again, in January.

And a month ago or so, I had the realization that using Reiner's graphics would put Shelter back on commercial viability map, and a sobering notion came over me - Monsterland isn't actually all that viable... or inspiring, to me.

Shelter's got 184 watchers on IndieDB, Mland got 35.

Monsterland was my dream game in 1996, but I grew up, and Fallout's gameplay concepts shook my world in 1997. So in 2006 Shelter officially became my new dream game.

It's hard to go back.

At this point I intend to pump out Monsterland maps as fast as possible, abandon the new features that aren't finished, and then I don't know what the hell.

All I know is that Shelter is where the heart lies.
 
Hmm, I think I agree with Lexx, the audience for such small games lies in the handheld/phone app market these days. On PC, it's more like a curiosity, and it'd be hard to get a lot of sales, if that's what you're aiming for. There used to be a market for games like that (see Crimsonland), though I'm not really sure if it's there anymore.

Maybe make it free and try to make money off ads? No idea whether that's actually a viable marketing strategy or not.
 
Thanks, but a Pascal app can't be converted into Flash. It's actually quite a beast underneath, unlike these simplistic Flash games you see around.

It's more like Hexen but without the 3D renderer.
 
Yeah that'd be the biggest problem - it doesn't look like much so it's automatically associated with flash games and phone apps, despite the actual complexity.

I tried to learn a bit of Pascal when I was in high school, and I shudder to think how much work and how many lines of code it took to pull together a game like that using it.
 
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