Indieorama Interview with Jon

i notice many laughs were had in the interview and it feels like i'm missing out by not hearing them :'( could you please make a vocaroo of you laughing so i can play it each time a laugh comes up as i read the interview it would really make it special. If you can find the time to do this it would really touch my heart.

yours lovingly,
The Run

 

Those staff cutouts are adorable. More league prizes? I wanna play as Jon and Farbs and Ben!

Spoiler

 

Very interesting interview, thanks! Very worthwhile reading (you can tell the writer is not a native English speaker, though, some parts are pretty garbled).

Some takeouts:

"an indie developer named Farbs. He came with the idea that instead of having a fantasy character to play the game against, you will have actually a supposedly real person that would be your partner and the person who will play the game with you, who turned out to be Gary, who is the main character in the game. And once we have the notion of Gary, Joe, Ben and me developed the idea of the story involving Gary, his brother and the pizza girl, the main three characters in the game, as well as you."

Thanks, Farbs, a great idea!

"we have a lot of people playing the game, probably we have two hundreds and fifty thousand users online, but they come and go"

Wow, that's a lot, I had no idea, wonderful!

So the ratio between SP and MP players seems to be about the same as generally in games. About 70,000 have ever even tried MP once and a small fraction of that play regularly so MP players comprise a few percent of all players. This should give some idea of the relative importance of MP balance concerns.

"we haven’t made enough money out of it to return" ( = we haven't made a profit yet, I think that means)

That's a shame. Hope it keeps improving!

Jon continues directly after the previous quote:
"I think it’s still a game that hasn’t achieved its full potential. I think Card Hunter is a very good game, I’m very happy with it, I think more people would hopefully find that out and play. It would be a big job for me to do in the next year or so to keep working at that."

I wish you great success in your mission!

"when we originally designed the game we thought we would have fifty levels of character progression. But we are at level eighteen, so that’s why we made the map that big. I don’t know if we’ll get there anytime, so we will not fill that anytime soon. (laughs) So, most people who play the game don’t finish it. It’s a long game with a lot of content, so we don’t really think that building until level fifty should be a good use of our time right now. I mean, one day I would hope to do more levels to push to make the game longer and bigger than it is at the moment, but it’s probably not gonna happening any time, you know, in the next month or two." (emphasis mine)

Confirmation of another old game industry adage. We in the forums should realize how exceptional we are both as SP and MP players. We are the fraction of a fraction of all players. We are not typical at all of most players, seems to me.

 

Yep. Being on the forums in general shows an inordinate amount of interest. And from the numbers perspective it seems we aren't the typical breakdown of player types.

I wonder what he means by "never finishes it". I assume it means finishing all free adventures. I assume people stop at the spot where they hit that wall where they need to start building decks specifically for the adventure. Most people just don't think that is necessary, even though I think that is an important part of what makes the game fun and deep. I hit mine around the level 13 and 14 adventures and that's when I came to the forums.

 

There's going to be tons of people who don't even finish the tutorial because it just isn't the sort of game they want. This happens with every game, but happens much more with free games.

 

Unless "return" meant "retire". There are a few words here and there in the interview that look like possible typos. That said, the following paragraph is more in line with your interpretation.

 

If you enjoy these cutouts, you may find them on the not-updated-since-2011-ish Team page. Where Ben Lee's job title may render the "Armor" graphic into a visual pun.

And I liked the interview in general. I didn't realize just how "lonely" Jon is on the job these days. How does he do so much? How? What magic is it that powers him? Is it necromantic in nature, allowing him to act beyond the limits of a fleshy body?

Also, yes, forum members are a special breed. The general conversation on this forum has changed over time: more discussion is on card balance, so understandably it draws more of the people who want that level of engagement.