Give Me Fuel -> Switch from F2P to Premium, temporarily $2.99 instead of $4.99

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/give-me-fuel-turn-based-card/id944089927?mt=8

This is kinda backwards from normal, but we're making Give Me Fuel a paid app instead of a F2P app. We realized that the way we wanted to tune the game and the way that F2P would have required us to tune the game didn't match, and that a lot of the potential audience - gamers like us - automatically don't consider F2P games because they don't want the pressure & frustration that come with most F2P games.

There are still IAP items, because pulling them out isn't trivial - but the game's been tuned that you'll never need any of those. I realize this is a pretty weird "deal", but the default price is gonna be $5, and it's currently $3, so it is on sale.

Thanks for checking it out, and if you've got any questions, I'm happy to answer anything I can!

 

Hey, iOSgamer1980 - obviously, I'm sorry to hear that. I do want to clarify, though, that this wasn't a change made "at the drop of a hat". I've been making games for 15 years, now. I started working at Sega, on Seaman. After that, I went to Maxis, and worked on The Sims. From there, I worked at Backbone Entertainment on a few smaller games (a fighting game & a "dating simulator"), then went to Factor 5 to work on some of their post-Lair projects. After F5, I co-founded Self Aware Games, and after that, Wonderspark.

In all that time, I've worked on exactly one game with "guns" - Fleck - and in that case, the violence was "lighthearted" and cartoony. You shot cartoon zombies. It's been a conscious decision on my part, consistent through 15 years of working on games, that I didn't want to make a game where you were shooting people. As I said in the other forum post, I *play* tons of those games. But deciding to play something and deciding to *make* something are quite different.

Originally, our game had guns. It felt abstract, because the characters were in these robot suits, and the violence was relatively "sanitized". What San Bernadino crystallized for *me* was that pointing a gun at someone and pulling the trigger and then *not* having them die was a really weird, and really disturbing thing to do. Normalizing and sanitizing the action of shooting people wasn't any better than having explicit gore and violence as a result of shooting people - in some ways, it was worse. You take an action that has massive consequence in the real world, and then neuter it and make it "clean" in the fantasy world without stripping the action of its power.

I also have two small kids. I wondered about how I'd describe things to them. "Gun violence is bad." "Don't you make games where you shoot people?" "Yes, but it's different." "Different how?"

There are plenty of people who can make arguments that they are different. I used to be firmly on the side that fantasy violence and real-world violence were very separate things, and I still think that for *most* people, they are... mostly. But we have a culture that normalizes gun violence - no, more than that - glamorizes gun violence. Look at virtually every action movie. Look at most games. Have a problem? Shoot it.

Our game wasn't about murdering other people. Our game was about trying to find resources and needing to fight to survive. In the world we were talking about, people weren't being killed *anyway*, so changing the visual from point gun & shoot to something different made sense.

Again, I'm not saying, "If you like games with guns you're wrong/bad/whatever." I like playing games with guns. I like shooting bad guys. I'm also 100% confident I will never, ever shoot anyone in my life. I *don't* feel that way about all of our potential *players*, and I don't want to make something that contributes directly to that glamorization. So it's not a decision made at the drop of a hat. It's a decision made around a particular event that forced me (and the whole team) to really think about what we were doing, and after significant discussion, it's a decision we made (and stand by) together.

 

Odd - sorry if this is a dupe, but a previous response seems to have gotten lost.

imdakine1 - there is a timer for "free Fuel" on the main menu that is basically irrelevant. It's unlikely that you'll lack for Fuel with the way the game's tuned. The only other "timer" is that in Adventure Mode, you can "catch up to now" and have nothing else to do (other than jump into multiplayer).

To explain - Adventure Mode is tied to your real-world activity. When you log in, it jumps back in time to your last login (or yesterday morning, whichever is more recent), and you play from there forwards through time until you catch up with the present.

Right now, it uses pedometer (step-tracking) data to influence your events, but we're working on location-based events that will make the link to your real life way, way clearer. Hope that helps.