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Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Wrapping Up Wonderful Wednesdays

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Looking back at promoting The Wonderful 1237...

Exactly seven months ago to the nearest Wednesday, we started our Wonderful Wednesday series discussing Pocket Card Jockey as inspirational background to KoopaTV's biggest videogame ever, The Wonderful 1237.

Play The Wonderful 1237 right on KoopaTV on Flash-enabled web browsers!

We describe The Wonderful 1237 as a satirical simulation strategy game where you play as a Republican primary candidate, making decisions about how to ultimately win 1237 delegates so you can become the Republican Party's presidential nominee. In your way are the 17 Republican presidential candidates in the 2015–2016 season! Each character in the game has their own statistics (Beauty, Cool, Cute, Smart, and Tough — the same as the Pokémon Super Contests) that develop as the primary season went on, and you can choose whether to develop your own stats or target an opponent's.
 
PLUS, once a candidate drops out of the race, you can win the delegates they accumulated via each candidate's unique endorsement minigame! Covering those minigames made up the bulk of our Wonderful Wednesday coverage.

It wasn't every Wednesday, but for most of the Wednesdays over the past over-half a year we covered a topic relating to The Wonderful 1237. These range from discussions about how the game was designed, to strategy guides and demos of the seventeen minigames in The Wonderful 1237. It recently ended with a video that has 15 minutes of voice-acting and sound effects in it.

For the full list of Wonderful Wednesday articles (and some preceding it), click here.

Some (such as other KoopaTV staffers) have questioned why I dedicated so much time and website space to promoting The Wonderful 1237

Well, for one, that's what game developers do. Developing the game is just one part of a videogame's lifecycle. You need to develop it, and then you need to market the heck out of it so you actually get people talking about and playing the game that you just invested a ton of time (and a ton of money if your game was made on any kind of budget, which ours aren't) into. An increasing number of game developers are also now employing game-as-a-service models where they keep adding to the game after it's released. That changes the lifecycle dramatically — The Wonderful 1237 isn't a service, though. It was a finished game at launch.

For two, I think it is very valuable for our audience (that's you) to get some insight into how game development works. Not everyone has that opportunity to get first-hand game development experience. (Correction: Everyone reading this site has that opportunity, but I would say most people can't stick with one project for long enough to see it through completion.) For pretty much every article in Wonderful Wednesday, you got some insight into game design thinking or some aspect of the process.

Rather than what KoopaTV does, which is commentate from the backseat on what other people do, we walked the walk. That makes us better than our competitors, right?

At this point, however, we have nothing left about the game to really talk about. Unless you want me to just publish a text dump of all of the game's dialogue (which might be the best part of the whole game, if I do say so myself), there is not any content left we can get from The Wonderful 1237 that would not just invalidate playing it to begin with. I mean, there is such a thing as too much content. The point of all of this is to get you to play. Too much content will make you feel like you've gotten everything out of the game before playing it.

Believe me, even though we've consistently been covering The Wonderful 1237 for the past seven months, there is still more to get out of it if you play it than if you just read about it. The Wonderful 1237 is packed to the max with content. It's relatively lengthy, and you will have to play it through many times to see everything there is to see.

I guess, to conclude, I'll miss Wonderful Wednesdays. It was really nice to have locked-in article content once a week on the KoopaTV publishing schedule. Now I'll have to be 25% more creative every week. Sucks! Also, The Wonderful 1237 will now be taken off KoopaTV's top navigation following this article's publishing.

Real last point: I would like to formally announce that KoopaTV is developing its next videogame, due for release at the end of 2017. As usual, we refuse to announce any further details until the day it is released. We read your feedback you submitted for KoopaTV Feedback Form Part IX when we asked if you were okay with a non-digital game. The majority opinion didn't care either way, so... Yeah, it's another digital game.


Ludwig wonders if not bothering to put any images in this article was a mistake. What won't be a mistake is if you spend a bit of time playing The Wonderful 1237, which you can do here!


As promised, KoopaTV's 2017 game was released, and three months later. It's a digital game!

2 comments :

  1. I cannot believe it's already been half a year since the series began. I will miss reading these each week, but as they say all good things most come to an end.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's hard for me to believe it's been half a year, too.

      Also, holy shit I'm dumb I think that September is exactly six months after February.

      Delete

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