Our game actually passes XBLA cert shocker

[Applewood]

Stop the presses. After 7 (yep, that's a seven) months in final certification, our Shogi game just got a clean pass and will soon be on sale over the XBLA service.

Shotest Shogi's main audience is clearly the Japanese, amongst whom the board game is extremely popular, but it's a pretty cool game to learn and play for anyone. It's harder and more subtle than chess and there's nothing specifically Japanese about it (at least in terms of the rules) - we have piece sets that aren't Kanji which is often what puts off westerners.

I'm pretty chuffed about this as it's been a very stressful time getting this game out, hence the slightly premature announcment. Soon we (as in our company, not just me) will be able to join you guys as indies in fact and not just spirit!

(Unless you're one of those from that other thread who somehow thinks self-publishing on Xbox isn't indie enough )

[lakibuk]

Cool,congratulations!
You will be selling the game without publisher? Didn't know this is possible. I guess you are the publisher in this case?

[Jack Norton]

Takes seven months to be certified for XBLA !? crazy... game looks nice, congrats.

[vjvj]

Congrats!

I haven't gone through MS's cert process, but my experience with Sony's process makes me all the less surprised at the 7 months figure.

Looking forward to checking out the game!

[Applewood]

Thanks.

Yep, it was fully self-funded (along with our partners over at AI Factory) and there's no publisher. We do obviously rely on MS to provide our sales channel along similar lines to a PC portal though.

Once the game's been on sale a while, I'm going to put up a fairly exhaustive post-mortem about our experiences from the indie angle, as there were some major downs and major ups that people considering going this route might want to think about.

EDIT: To be fair, about four of those seven months were partly our fault and partly some specifics I can't mention but won't be a general case by a long way.

[Cartman]

That's great news. I can't wait to try it out.

[AlexWeldon]

Awesome. Remind me never to get on XBox Live... a nice Shogi game is something I probably couldn't resist, and I've already lost enough hours of my life getting where I am in Go... addiction to Shogi would just about ruin me.

[lennard]

Congratulations, self-funding makes you indie as far as I'm concerned - hope you make at least enough to roll the dice again.

[Chris Evans]

Congrats!

[Applewood]

and I've already lost enough hours of my life getting where I am in Go...

Hmmmm.... Somebody get this man an xbox...

[ZuluBoy]

Congratulations!!!

[jcottier]

congrats and good luck.

JC

[wazoo]

good to see the perserverence paid off! Great job!

[chanon]

Congrats!
7 months just for certification... I wonder how long the whole project took.

[electronicStar]

Congratulations, I hope it will remove some of that sand.

[Adrian Cummings]

Large portion of congrats and good show!

[darkwudu]

Big Congratulations!

I look forward to reading the post-mortem.

[Applewood]

I wonder how long the whole project took

About 3 man years made up from several people over almost exactly a year of straight dev time (up until final cert)

[simonh]

May I ask when the 3D pool game is due to be released? Really looking forward to that.

[Applewood]

Sore point, that

It'll be out on PC as our next indie title, but it won't be on 360 at least until bankshot gets retired.

Many thanks for the interest though - when we get back on this game I'll let you know if you want to beta test it or something ? It's a pet project of mine so it'll never completely die.

[simonh]

Noooo Bankshot Billiards was the main reason I was looking forward to your game - played it to death (and got to the top of the rankings ), but I prefer a more realistic version of pool. From what I can tell, the two games are chalk and cheese.

Thanks for the beta test offer. Would happily do that.

[Applewood]

Aye, chalk and cheese they definitely are even if I do say so meself. Which is why we'd assumed there'd be no problem, but I guess I can almost see it from Microsofts point of view. When the lights are down and the mood is right.

[cableshaft]

Congratulations on making it through, dude. I'll definitely be picking it up when it comes out on XBLA, and I'll tell a few other people to check it out as well. You had good timing for me, also, as I really got into learning classic strategy board games lately (as did my brother, although his current focus is on Go).

To provide a counterpoint, though, it doesn't have to take 7 months to get through Microsoft's certification process. I believe it only took us a little over 3 weeks, and we had to go back and fix a couple of things. We did hire a QA team that had a lot of prior experience with testing XBLA games, though, who were invaluable in catching a lot of things we would have likely missed otherwise. I think that was key to the process being so smooth for us. That and good timing.

Also, sucks about your pool game not getting approved (although I'm not surprised, due to XBLA already having Bankshot). It looks like your game would be more varied, more realistic, and has some interesting boards.

[Applewood]

Thank for the words, hope you like the game.

I said already that half of that time wasn't Microsofts fault, but I bet you couldn't get anything through cert in three weeks now regardless of who does your QA - it's become *very* tight and a few of the items on our failure report would make your head spin.
Having a 3rd party QA lab involved would've been helpful and it was definitely a mistake for us not to do this. At the time we didn't think we could afford it, but we were wrong - it cost us more by not doing so in the end.

[tolik]

Congratulations!

Everybody should understand that a platform with more than 10m players (that's targeted players, not just someone crawling through web) has it's "perfect quality bar".
If you were reading XBLA news, you could've heard that many titles had launch timeframe problems (e.g. Sensible Soccer, Mr. Driller, etc) and had to be pulled out. Tens thousands of players get angry and demand a rebate and that costs more money in support tickets and lost revenue/profits than being held for few more weeks.
Although we've never failed Cert and worked on launch titles for the platform, I feel your pain if you had to go through 20 hour GOLD build marathons so many times. Just recently we had another one of these (and it was Saturday!) and are keeping our fingers crossed. You are really lucky that your game doesn't have features like 4 player LIVE realtime multiplayer.

We definetely have our own issues that appeared much later in lifetime of released games and thus had to release patches, but making a good patch is a really painful process, especially when it ranges from "pain in the-s achievement" to "the game stopped working for hundreds of players after they played it for more than 100 hours due to overfilled save". Diagnosing such problem takes dozens of mail threads and making a patch that would recover saves for these people and make it work again is not trivial as well. This is very unusual task for QA and test case scenarios for such things are so weird, that it takes several developers instead of QA to verify how it works.

You should understand that a release of a broken game angers entire hardcore platform community as well as players who decided to purchase the game and would less likely buy another one from entire platform and the same developer...

[Applewood]

Good luck with the build, I know they're not easy.

We ported Novadrome for stainless which had 8 way realtime multiplayer in it and didn't have too many problems tbh. I've been doing networking stuff for years (both my own and porting other peoples).

I think the defining difficulty bar is the difference between having it at all and not, which looks like it's now become a required feature anyway. Which is stopping otherwise excellent games that just wouldn't work MP coming to the platform. Which in turn is both a shame and a different debate.

[cableshaft]

Originally Posted by Applewood

...but I bet you couldn't get anything through cert in three weeks now regardless of who does your QA - it's become *very* tight and a few of the items on our failure report would make your head spin. Not very indie-friendly I have to say.

Um, we went through cert two months ago :P. Our game is going to be released at the end of this month.

We're a full publisher, though, not an Indie dev, so that may have made some difference, but we're still relatively new (here in America, at least), and we didn't have any prior experience with XBLA beyond playing the hell out of a lot of its games on our own (I myself own around 50 titles). But we hired VMC as our testers, who basically live right down the street from Microsoft, and have QA'd lots of XBLA games in the past, and I was in charge of keeping an eye on the bug reports, and there was a ton of things they caught that I never would have even considered testing for on my own (and hadn't).

But our experience seems to be a bit unusual and most developers without prior experience on the platform seem run into problems getting the game through cert quickly, according to an interview with some Microsoft dude I read on... I want to say Gamasutra a few months ago (I can't really remember, I read 2 game industry interviews a day on average).

[Applewood]

It's not about experience. I've put three titles through cert now. In other circles that might make me an expert, but the reverse is proven here. Each of those three times was completely different so the only fact I can rely on for a fourth try is not to make any assumptions based on the previous 3!

What you got so very and right and us so very wrong was hiring VMC. I wasn't even aware you could do so until it was too late - I thought they were just an MS internal team. They are indeed in the same building which added to that bad assumption.

Ah well, live and learn. If only it was reuseable....

[raigan]

Originally Posted by Applewood

What you got so very and right and us so very wrong was hiring VMC. I wasn't even aware you could do so until it was too late - I thought they were just an MS internal team. They are indeed in the same building which added to that bad assumption.

That's weird -- I didn't realize that not hiring VMC was an option!! We were basically told "if you don't hire VMC, you're going to fail cert", with some anecdotal evidence concerning the fate of teams who hadn't heeded this advice.

Also, concerning MS covering localization vs royalties: this is a terrible argument. The costs that Microsoft might cover (VMC, localization, devkits) are fixed, and are worth maybe $50k. Disregarding the fact that many of these costs don't exist for them (i.e it doesn't cost them anything to fail cert 10 times, and I'm sure devkits don't cost that much to make), it's nowhere near enough to make up for the loss of 30% of your royalties.

[Matt2East]

Congratulations!