Stock Ticker Classic is my very first video board game and it won't be my last. There's nothing ground-breaking or remarkable about it. In fact, anyone with even moderate programming skills could easily implement their own version. It took me about five days to get the beta running, and I've spent five months working on what has been called the last ten percent.
I took the phrase from a chapter in Developing Games in Java by David Brackeen, et al. The book is about seven years old, and not especially helpful. Check it out from the library, if you can, but I don't recommend buying it. If I'd bothered to actually read the chapter, and not just glance over the table of contents, I probably would have learned that the last ten percent is the most tedious, but perhaps most important part of getting a game ready for market. Stock Ticker Classic in its current form is totally playable and true to the original board game, but it lacks a lot of the bells and whistles people have come to expect in their games (and software in general). If a game designer doesn't meet those expectations, no one but supportive friends and family members will give the game any attention.
Bells and whistles can mean many different things. Here, of course, I'm referring to visual and auditory feedback, but I'm also including game deployment in the mix. It's the visual and auditory cues that are going to get people hooked. I don't have any quantifiable evidence, but judging from the traffic on the Stock Ticker Classic site, I'd say you have about thirty seconds to grab a player's attention or he'll just bugger off. As for deployment, I've already stressed its importance in a previous article... make it easy and give the user every assurance that the software is safe to run, which it usually is anyway when loaded as an applet in a browser. FYI, some of that JNLP stuff is kind of weird. I'm not sure real-world users will appreciate its security benefits, especially when the whole installation procedure looks fishy in and of itself.
Finishing the last ten percent is an onerous task, indeed. Right now I want nothing more to move on to a new project. It's taken a lot of restraint to stay focused on what's currently on my plate. Given my vague commercial aspirations, I suspect the discipline I've gained from this experience will pay off in the long run.
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