Thanks for the feedback.
Here is what I think about it (sorry for my english):
It is good that you mentioned football, and pong, because you could say that football is only interesting when having the social part of it, when 22 people play it in real life. But there are lots of computer football games, and they sell very well. Why are people playing football games on the computer? (You could also ask why are people watching it in the television instead of playing it, but it is another story.) I don't want to answer this question, because it is a complicated psychological territory, but in my opinion there are two independent key factors:
- the feeling. This is an emotional thing, in case of football partly it is that football is 'cool', somehow football became socially 'important'. At least it is cool to lead a professional football team (with David Beckam) in a crowded stadion, even if it is all virtual.
- the challenge (this is an abstract thing, basically it is about the balanced game design)
As for the emotional thing:
Certainly fewer people find foosball 'cool' than football. There are football stars, but there are not foosball stars. (Although there are exceptions, as there are some foosball fans on this planet.) Electronic Arts will probably never create a foosball game, but it is good news for a small indie like me, because this way I don't have to compete with them
As for the challenge: Pong is a good example. I think this game is at least as challenging and fun as a pong game. Think about this game as a pong with a twist. (Although I admint that it is a bit harder than the average pong, but after some practice it is more fun.) Pong games sold well, but there are tons of the clones now, so I didn't want to create yet another pong game. There are some foosball games as well, but most of them are bad, all the foosball games I tried made something wrong at least for my taste. So I thought I will create my own.
Currently my main concern is that I don't have enough marketing exposure: very few people actually know about the existence of this game. I wanted to sell this game as an indie, and didn't want to sell it through a 'casual game portal', but if there will be no choice, I will probably have to deal with them.
If anyone wants to write a review of this game at a place where lots of people are reading it, then please contact me, and I will happily send you a free reg-key. Also I am thinking about how to motivate reasonably experienced players to create cool ingame youtube-videos and insert them into their blogs or something, but I don't have a good idea yet how to motivate them.
Ragnar:
The default settings are 'rod selection: auto', 'assist: on'. So just using the mouse, without touching the keyboard it is possible to play the game on a quite high level (I played it this way in the video), although it is true that if you want to reach a very high level, then already it is better to use the keyboard also.
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