CORDIAL MINUET ENSEMBLE

Sierra is sandboxing you.  Try this to fix it:

Drag CORDIAL MINUET out of its game folder and drop it somewhere (desktop), then drag it back into its game folder.

Now double-click to launch it as usual.  That seems to overcome the sandboxing.

Yes, absolutely.  This game is going to require extensive player testing before we get it right.  On top of that, it's a great candidate for incremental content roll-out, where we can release a new bundle of stuff for the game each week.

I'm sure this was covered in another thread, but I've thought about this more since then, and I've played A LOT more poker since then (we now have a weekly "home game" in town which I regularly win money at.... I've been practicing and getting better and better, and have played in 9 different real poker rooms).

I've also played heads poker up live once (at a home game where no one else showed up), and I could see how it doesn't really work.

I mean, the game of poker works just fine with two people.  It functions.  The decisions are rich and interesting (maybe even more so than with a 6 or 9-person game).  But my opponent and I were reasonably matched.  I actually can't say who is better.  He took my money for a while, and I bought in a bunch ($20 buy-ins) to replenish my stack.  At some point, I had bought in for $160---7 re-buys---without realizing it.  Then I finally "got his number" and felted him, taking his initial $20 buy-in.  So at that point, I had $180 or so.  Then he bought in again for $40, my play worsened (I had a huge stack, maybe tilted a bit), and he whittled me back down to $70 or so.  I left at 3am, down quite a bit.  There was no rake, so he came out way ahead (he left with $150 for his $60 buy-in).

We played hundreds and hundreds of hands over the course of 8 solid hours.  Who won seemed to be mostly chance, because we were evenly matched (he got better hands than me for most of the night, I'd say).

It was one of the most excruciating poker experiences of my life, and I find heads up online to be similar.

So what's the difference here?  I talked about it before, but I'll say it again:  50% of the people who enter a heads up game of poker are going to lose money.  There is no way for less people than that to lose money.  It was me or him.  It kinda feels hopeless and futile, even without a rake to make things worse.

At a 9-person poker table, all you know for sure is that 11.1% of the players are going to lose money.  It is possible for the other 89% of them to walk away a winner.  If you don't know who the sucker is at the table, you're the sucker (Rounders).  There's always hope that there's some player at the table worse than you.  No one thinks they're the worst of nine, even if they are.  Even if you lose every night, there's still hope for you tomorrow night.  You come back and try again.

At our home poker game, I've watched one guy lose at least $70 every night ($20 buy-in) before leaving.  He still comes back every week.

But heads up, if you're on a losing streak, you start to wonder, right away, if you're outmatched.  There's nowhere to hide.  You can't watch the other players go at it and wait for your perfect chance.

And at the home game, when the chance of playing heads up is suggested (as the game is about to break, when people start going home), NO ONE wants to play heads up.  "No way, I'm not playing heads up!"

There's just too much on the line.  The play is more complex, you can't just wait for really good hands (which is much easier), and reading your opponent becomes crucial.

I guess it's like the difference between a battle and a duel.  In a battle, you know that lots of people are going to die, but you can kinda hide in the fray, even if you're not a very good fighter.  Maybe it won't be you.  But in a duel... it's really on the line, and there's no way to fool yourself about that fact.  I'm going to die, or the other person is going to die.

I didn't understand this, sadly, when I designed this game.  I thought I'd make it easier on myself (no collusion problems!) by making a two-player game.

But that kind of direct confrontation is too much for almost everyone.

So, all the fixes to the buy-ins, and the tournament structure, and even the game itself (making it more fun or more interesting) won't fix its fundamental 2-player nature.  We've talked about multiplayer extensions to the game, but of course it would be better to design a multiplayer game from scratch rather than tape this one into that other shape.

Unfortunately, I need to focus on making a game that is much more likely to bring in income for my family, so working on another real-money game, which is an uncertain business model no matter what, is not possible for me right now.

When I asked Steam about a play money version of CM, I'm pretty sure they said NO.  Regardless, even attention from Steam won't change the 2-player nature of this game.

Also, there may even be something deeper, which is that simultaneous decisions (rock-paper-scissors family) aren't fundamentally THAT interesting for people.  How many really successful games use that mechanism in a big way?

And that cuts to the core of the whole design problem:  how can you make a truly skill-based game that people would actually be willing to bet money on?  Simultaneous decisions is one way that works (no randomness, but still plenty of uncertainty)----but I don't think the result is a terribly compelling game.

It's not interesting to try to simulate a random number generator in your head.

Cullman, the imagery there is rather astounding.

Yeah, so I did think of this.  If you join the game when no one else is playing, you don't wait to be born.  You are the next "Eve" and are "lightning-bolted" into existence as a young adult, fully capable of survival.  You will likely find yourself in the decaying ruins of the last civilization (unless you're the very first person to play the game, in which case you will be in the wilderness).

In this mode, the game becomes a kind of one-person survival/building game a bit like Don't Starve crossed with Minecraft (albeit a variant where your buildings and craftings have functional survival value).  Of course, some time in your lifetime as Eve, one or more babies could be born to you.  But if not, you'll just live out your hour long life, surviving on your own, and building whatever you manage to build before you die.  Later Eve's will potentially stumble across the ruins of whatever you build, so the trans-generational connection part of the game isn't totally lost.

Yeah, I "did DIY PR" to get that Sac Bee article in order to promote CM, but the took so long to get it together that I had already started working on the new game by the time they interviewed me.

Anyway, they didn't want to focus on Cordial Minuet regardless, they just wanted to profile me as a buisnessperson (it was for the Sunday Business section).

Also, since then, I've decided to drop the whole dollar-per-hour thing and just have a flat, one-time membership cost just like The Castle Doctrine ($15 or whatever).  I'm in no position to be conducting commercial experiments with untested business models, and I've realized that the design problem I was trying to solve with the $1/life thing (making life precious and preventing spam respawning) is mostly solved anyway by other aspects of the game (the fact that you have to survive through infanthood through the goodwill/care of another player means suicide or careless death is still a slog.... you can't just pop back up in your nearby sleeping bag like you can in Rust).

Yeah, regarding survival games and MMOs being mostly lame... but this is going to be nothing like any of those, and nothing like anything you've ever played or even dreamed of playing.

I mean, TCD and CM were both technically MMOs as well (in that they are played online with loads of other people), but they aren't Everquest clones.  So there will be no flying mounts, leveling up, quests, NPC shops, etc. etc. in this game.  There will be 32 different flavors of pie, however, assuming that you've already built the grain mill, the stew pot, the mixing bowl, the rolling pin, the pie plate, and the oven.  And you'll probably want to make some pie, because them babies gonna be hungry.

Yeah, it doesn't look like PF is going to claim it at this point.  Any suggestions for what I should do here?  I could just keep moving down the list on that contest day.

Yeah, you're right about all of this.

Separate from the anonymity, there are also fundamental things about the structure of the game that thwart community-building.  People pair up into matches and separate into very tense, me-vs-you games.  There's no sense of "sitting around the table" with a group of people.  That's part of what the regular tournaments were supposed to help with, but it still didn't really create a "poker table" feeling.  Note that 2-player poker isn't that popular.

The game itself is pretty dry, in part because there's no randomness.  Of course, there can't be randomness for legal reasons, but that means you'll never have the thrill of secretly being dealt AA in poker.  The "holy crap, this is it!" moment that keeps people coming back to Poker.  Granted, there's probably a strong dose of pure gambling juice in that cocktail, but so be it.  There's gambling in Isaac, Spelunky, FTL, etc., and that's part of their widespread appeal.  My next run in Spelunky could be THE run where I finally get the shotgun, climbing gloves, jetpack, and Wadjet Eye.  Or it could be a run where I get the dark level followed by the spider level.

Each game is a learning experience for me as a designer.  I wanted to make a game like this regardless of its commercial potential, simply because nothing like it existed.  However, it still makes a good case study about why some things take off and others do not.  How could a gambling game not take off?  Well, here's how.

But its also very easy to misjudge the cause of this or that negative symptom.  I've had a few people tell me that the anonymity is the problem in CM or TCD.  That if I just added chat, the games would have both become the next Rust or Minecraft.  But I think the problems run way deeper than that.  Adding chat (as an example) would muck with the aesthetic purity of the experiences while not really addressing the true obstacles standing in the way of larger, sustained audiences.

Both games are dangerous games that can really beat you down, and the only way to experience triumph is by beating someone else down.  For artistic reasons, I wanted extreme consequences to be in place (they could actually take your real money in CM, or actually take your hard-earned game-stuff in TCD).  This has a way of shrinking the initially-interested audience really quick.

I can compare these games to Hearthstone and Rust, which both are highly competitive, brutal games (no co-op mode).  Hearthstone softens it with no real consequences for loss (they can't win your cards from you, for example, just push you down in rank) AND the sheer randomness of the card draws (sometimes a bad deck/player can win).  Rust softens it with the possibility of getting lucky for a while and hiding out of harm's way (maybe they won't find my house way up on this mountaintop) AND cooperating with your friends (safety in numbers).

Anyway, for games like this that are unabashedly brutal, with no softener adde, some business models are better than others.  TCD made a lot of money, relatively speaking, while CM lost money.

Holy crap, that tineye thing is pretty amazing.  I just searched for my stamp and found this:

https://www.tineye.com/search/7b670da73 … c7da6cbb7/

Just found out about this list of places to promote stuff:

http://promotehour.com/