MoD isn't CJ

If I was a gamer interested in Concerned Joe, observing this from the “outside” I would think “Wow, those developers are trying to milk their game that isn’t even released yet, what a bunch of assholes”

After working for almost 2 years on “Concerned Joe”, splitting it into a separate game and putting Joe on the side in order to prioritize a new title was the LAST thing we would do… It wouldn’t make any sense and yet after thinking about it, it was the best/most logical decision.

This is my train of thought regarding the “Move or Die” split from “Concerned Joe”.

Mini Games are not remembered

Do you remember the card capturing game from Final Fantasy? You probably didn’t think about it until I mentioned it. It was a very good small game within Final Fantasy and yet it’s not really remembered as much as it should be, because that’s not what Final Fantasy was about. Concerned Joe isn’t about local/online competitive multiplayer, it’s about puzzle solving and story telling, and if we were to combine these 2 completely different play styles, it would end up in a stew of game types fighting each other to see which one is better.

Having them both in the same game means that “Party Mode” would remain a mini game with Joe’s story being the main focus, however after showcasing party mode at conventions, people were super excited about it and we felt like it needed to be treated as a separate game

The ability to grow on it’s own

If the “Party Mode” would be left within “Concerned Joe”, it wouldn’t be able to grow as big as it would on it’s own. Joe’s puzzle solving story would be the focus and “Party Mode” would be just a side mini-game for when you are bored or when you finished the story. “Party Mode” could be so much more than that with online multiplayer, multiple characters, soundtrack of it’s own, AI Bots and many many other things. So having it separated from Joe in order to be able to grow on it’s own into a full stand alone game makes perfect sense and results in both games being as good as they can possibly be without being overshadowed by their counter parts.

Testing out what it means to release a game

Joe is our biggest project to date and will become our first major release, we only worked on small flash games before, so this is the first title that would get on steam and be considered a “real game”. With such a big project and so much pressure we really REALLY don’t wanna screw this up, so I figured the best way to learn how to release a game properly is to … release a game! 😀 That’s exactly what Move or Die allows us to do, we get to treat it as a full game all on it’s own, upload it to greenlight and do our best to make it succeed. By doing so, we’ll know what can go wrong when we’ll release Concerned Joe a few months later and we’ll know how to avoid certain mistakes. Think of it as a trail run.

 – Mid post break to remind you to vote the game on Greenlight –

(Click on image below)

Greenlight Vote

Releasing early

People like Party Mode, it’s fun and they want to play it, however we have to tell them to wait until we finish Joe’s single player campaign before they get to play it. That makes no sense, why would they have to wait for something that has nothing to do with Party Mode in order to play it? Having it as “Move or Die” allows us to release it way faster than Concerned Joe, allowing the players who want to play strictly Party Mode, do so in the shortest time period.

Buy Choice

I personally don’t think it’s normal to pay for something in order to get something else that you want. For example if I want to play Call of Duty Single Player, why am I forced to pay for the Multiplayer as well? (People might say it’s because you don’t know how good the counter part is and by being forced to get them both you’ll get to try the other game and maybe end up liking it… we don’t wanna go that way) I think it’s better to have the choice between Move or Die and Concerned Joe, being able to get them separately opposed to a big bundle with both games crammed into a single .exe where they can’t really be as awesome as they could on their own. You won’t be forced to pay for Joe if you get Move or Die and vice versa.

Investment

We are 2 guys working on these games from our living rooms in our spare time when we don’t have to go to college or have a social life. We don’t have a budget, we work with pocket money and we rely on awesome people willing to help us for free. Releasing Move or Die in the near future, assuming it sells, it would bring us some revenue that we can invest in Concerned Joe to finish it even quicker.

Concerned Joe will not be “dumbed down” because of Move or Die, on the contrary, it will have cleaner code because there is no party mode code bloating it, and it would become an even higher quality game because of the investment, hiring people and get things done better and faster.

By buying “Move or Die” you would get the multiplayer competitive game instantly and you would also invest in Joe’s puzzle solving story telling development to get it done and released even faster!

Conlcusion

So those are my thoughts when it comes to Move or Die being separate from Concerned Joe. It still feels like a very risky decision but I think it’s for the best. Everybody gets to benefit from this and it sounds like a really exciting thing to work on!

There were other problems that I haven’t mentioned in this post, such as naming the Party Mode… We didn’t want to go the subtitle route and name it “Concerned Joe: Party Mode” because that would make Concerned Joe seem like an afterthought/expansion pack/dlc later on when it would be released… We couldn’t name it something completely different either because after all, it’s Joe’s art style, so it couldn’t be too far from Joe’s universe. “Move or Die” seemed like the best option seeing how it’s the perfect balance between Joe’s universe and something new that doesn’t contain the words “Concerned” or “Joe” and yet explains the main life mechanic perfectly.

Hope this clarified some confusions 🙂

~Xelu

By in , | March 13, 2014

9 Comments

  • You shouldn’t even explain this. I think we all get it, bro. Keep up the good work, we’re waiting for them games.

  • Totally acceptable and, like you said, I think it will be better for Joe in a lot of ways.

    And we’ll also have one more cool game to play! 😀

  • One Foot Ollie says:
    June 22, 2014 at 9:50 pm

    How much do you think it will cost. I’m only willing to pay about 5 dollars for the full version.

  • Not sure you’re saying what I think you’re saying but if you’re saying that you’re removing that co-op and level-editor/lpb-ripoff, I’m all for it. Main reason this spoke to me year back was it’s meta story ‘game developer vs in-game character’ fun and mystery and it’s “OMG this reminds me of classic portal, with great puzzles and impending story twists at the end” artificial-nostalgia. Pretty much all I ever want in an indie game. LIMBO didn’t need any of co-op bull.
    Nice to know smart guys are making smart decisions.

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