How to make your game not sell:

http://www.holybadman.com/

1. Name it “Holy Invasion of Privacy, Badman! What Did I Do To Deserve This?” No, seriously. That’s the name of this game. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that it basically has absolutely nothing to do with the gameplay itself.

2. Put it on the PSP, which has approximately zero marketshare outside of pirated games and DVD rips.

3. Don’t even bother to sell it in stores, make it only available through download via PSN, which requires 100 steps to activate on your PSP if you even realize it exists in the first place.

4. Make the gameplay really hard to grasp – emergent and mystifying and indirect, and also really punishingly hard.

5. Give it all a retro 8-bit look that has nothing to do with the rest of the game in any way.

I literally have a hard time imagining how you could make this game sell FEWER copies other than not making it in the first place.

Which is all kind of a shame because it’s one of the most original and inventive and addictive games I’ve played in quite a while. Basically you are carving a dungeon maze out underground, and as a result of where you dig you release certain monsters. Those monsters then form an ecology where they redistribute nutrients around and can form a food chain of higher level monsters eating lower level ones. Then heroes invade your dungeon and you have to hope your maze was confusing enough and monsters tough enough to defeat them.

I’m not sure if it has long term legs but it’s incredible compelling to me to just try and figure out the ecology and watch it all play out. One of the better “small” games I’ve played.

Between this, Plants vs Zombies, Magic: Planeswalkers, and Battlefield 1943 it’s been an amazing year for smaller downloadable games.