Since it's been quite a while, I figured I'd spend a little time talking about how things are going and what we've been up to with Battleheart's pseudo-sequel.
In general, Mika Mobile is doing well. We relocated our home and business recently, which was a pretty big distraction, but we're getting back into our comfort zone again. We recently released iPhone 5 resolution updates for our two most popular games (ZV2 and Battleheart) and Apple gave both games some nice featuring back in October as a result, which is always welcome and helps invigorate downloads. It amazes us how people are still discovering/downloading our games, often years after their initial release, and it definitely helps keep our spirits up between releases. In fact, as of this posting ZV2 is back in the top 100 apps again in the US, which is just crazy.
Battleheart "2" is our most ambitious project by a long shot, so its development has naturally been taking longer than any of our previous games. We've been on it close to a year now more or less, and it's definitely starting to feel like forever since we released something! Much like Battleheart before it, this is a big project, so we knew there would be a pretty large gap between releases this time - some of you might recall that OMG Pirates! and Battleheart were separated by more than a year too. There's still plenty left to do, but I'm very confident in where it's going.
Due to the fact that our games are frequent targets of cloning, I'm still not prepared to give a lot of fine detail about the design, and how it differs from the original Battleheart, but I can share a couple things. As I mentioned in a prior blog, we're trying to focus more on exploration, rather than the game simply being a series of static arenas. Towards this end, we decided early on to build the game in 3D, with more of an isometric camera perspective (Think Diablo, any RTS, or old Zelda games), and make this our first game which uses 3D polygonal art/animation so that we can have great variety in characters/animation without having to make a trillion sprites. This doesn't mean our art style has been abandoned - in fact, we've reproduced all of the baddies from Battleheart in glorious 3d and their charming designs made the transition nicely. The aesthetic is definitely different, but I think it's still quite appealing.
Another thing we're pretty stoked about is the new class system. I think one of the things that gave Battleheart a lot of replayability was the potential to try different classes, see what their spells/abilities were like and play with different party combinations. This time around, we wanted to allow more customization beyond simply picking between two mutually exclusive skills here and there. The current design (always subject to change, but its working so far) is to allow you to kinda create your own classes by drawing from a pool of active and passive skills that are designed to complement each other. There will be some requirements/restrictions for this or that, but there's a lot of potential for mixing and matching, ensuring that almost no two players will build their kit exactly the same (hopefully). Hypothetically, you could have a wizard who swings a claymore, or a rogue who can whip out a bow to do some ranged attacks when foes are out of dagger range.
Hopefully we'll be able to share more with you guys soon. In the mean time, enjoy the holidays!
Tuesday, December 18, 2012
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Lessons from Diablo 3
I've played a whole bunch of Diablo 3 since its release, which I partially legitimize as "research". There's a fair amount of gameplay overlap between what they're doing with Diablo, and what I'm hoping to pull off with Battleheart 2.
Like the original Battleheart, our next game is going to involve selecting from a pool of available powers to help you manage the battlefield. We're currently aiming to have nearly 100 different active abilities in Battleheart 2 (up from Battleheart's 50), many of which are coming over from the first game, with a whole slew of new ones too. These all provide different benefits like healing, single target damage, splash damage, defense, mobility, control, etc. Choosing your toolkit, and using that kit to stay alive is the heart of what makes Battleheart fun, and it's pretty much the same concept powering Diablo 3 as well. Across Diablo's five player classes exist an insane variety of powers and "runes" which modify those powers, sometimes into wholly different abilities. As you level up, you gain access to a broader and broader toolkit, and it's pretty fun to experiment with different combinations of offensive and defensive powers.
Where I think Diablo falls short is in it's difficulty curve, and the way it forces the player to use certain abilities and gear in a specific way. Around level 30 is the game's sweet spot - you have most of your toolkit available to you at that point, and you can freely use most of it without feeling obligated to play in any specific way. But afterwards, it steadily becomes more and more punishing as you approach it's hardest difficulty setting, "inferno" mode. Combat becomes so fast paced and brutal that you are forced to use several of your limited skill selections on defensive buttons and passive buffs. As a barbarian, for example, you simply have no hope of survival without relying on specific tactics - you MUST use a shield, you MUST use a defensive battle shout to raise your stats, and you MUST equip as much health and defense raising equipment as you can find, otherwise you'll be splattered like a fly on a windshield as soon as you run across your first foe.
To me, this totally pisses on what the whole game was building towards. I feel like I have very little freedom in how I build my character, because the enemies simply hit too hard and move too fast for any other tactical options to be available. It's really sad too, because earlier in the game the whole system is in full bloom, and you could freely experiment with different abilities and feel like you were refining your own unique playstyle. It works great, and then gets broken in an entirely avoidable way.
These observations haven't really changed how I'm approaching Battleheart 2, just reaffirmed what I've already been doing. Our combat is much slower than Diablo's, and you're never fighting huge unwieldy groups of 20+. This gives the player the time to parse what's actually happening and make decisions, rather than every engagement being over in the blink of an eye. We also don't have a ludicrous stat curve- in Diablo 3, you might start the game striking enemies for 10 damage, and be hitting for 100,000 damage by the end. A curve that steep will inevitably lead to rough patches where a little bad luck with loot drops will put you miserably far behind, or conversely, a little bit of good luck will trivialize hours of game play because you're doing twice the damage you're supposed to.
Overall, Diablo 3 has glimmers of greatness, where your gear level and the monsters difficulty meet at an ideal level, and your tactical options are at their peak, allowing you to feel powerful, challenged, and a little clever/creative with your character's build. I hope my next game captures some of that too. It just seems to me that Diablo is smothered by a few strange decisions, and held back a bit from its potential as a result.
Like the original Battleheart, our next game is going to involve selecting from a pool of available powers to help you manage the battlefield. We're currently aiming to have nearly 100 different active abilities in Battleheart 2 (up from Battleheart's 50), many of which are coming over from the first game, with a whole slew of new ones too. These all provide different benefits like healing, single target damage, splash damage, defense, mobility, control, etc. Choosing your toolkit, and using that kit to stay alive is the heart of what makes Battleheart fun, and it's pretty much the same concept powering Diablo 3 as well. Across Diablo's five player classes exist an insane variety of powers and "runes" which modify those powers, sometimes into wholly different abilities. As you level up, you gain access to a broader and broader toolkit, and it's pretty fun to experiment with different combinations of offensive and defensive powers.
Where I think Diablo falls short is in it's difficulty curve, and the way it forces the player to use certain abilities and gear in a specific way. Around level 30 is the game's sweet spot - you have most of your toolkit available to you at that point, and you can freely use most of it without feeling obligated to play in any specific way. But afterwards, it steadily becomes more and more punishing as you approach it's hardest difficulty setting, "inferno" mode. Combat becomes so fast paced and brutal that you are forced to use several of your limited skill selections on defensive buttons and passive buffs. As a barbarian, for example, you simply have no hope of survival without relying on specific tactics - you MUST use a shield, you MUST use a defensive battle shout to raise your stats, and you MUST equip as much health and defense raising equipment as you can find, otherwise you'll be splattered like a fly on a windshield as soon as you run across your first foe.
To me, this totally pisses on what the whole game was building towards. I feel like I have very little freedom in how I build my character, because the enemies simply hit too hard and move too fast for any other tactical options to be available. It's really sad too, because earlier in the game the whole system is in full bloom, and you could freely experiment with different abilities and feel like you were refining your own unique playstyle. It works great, and then gets broken in an entirely avoidable way.
These observations haven't really changed how I'm approaching Battleheart 2, just reaffirmed what I've already been doing. Our combat is much slower than Diablo's, and you're never fighting huge unwieldy groups of 20+. This gives the player the time to parse what's actually happening and make decisions, rather than every engagement being over in the blink of an eye. We also don't have a ludicrous stat curve- in Diablo 3, you might start the game striking enemies for 10 damage, and be hitting for 100,000 damage by the end. A curve that steep will inevitably lead to rough patches where a little bad luck with loot drops will put you miserably far behind, or conversely, a little bit of good luck will trivialize hours of game play because you're doing twice the damage you're supposed to.
Overall, Diablo 3 has glimmers of greatness, where your gear level and the monsters difficulty meet at an ideal level, and your tactical options are at their peak, allowing you to feel powerful, challenged, and a little clever/creative with your character's build. I hope my next game captures some of that too. It just seems to me that Diablo is smothered by a few strange decisions, and held back a bit from its potential as a result.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Battleheart "2" (sort of)
We've been working on a new game for a while - it began life in early 2010 as a sci-fi themed game, back before we started Battleheart, and was shelved after a couple months of pre-production. Now it's back, and it's changed quite a bit since then - while initially we thought we'd keep with the spaceships and laser guns (some folks might recall me tweeting about a space game earlier this year), as we got into it, we found ourselves just wanting to do more fantasy stuff. I love swords and magic and monsters, and the game is going to share a lot in common with Battleheart anyway, so why not just call it another entry in the series? A "spiritual successor" perhaps?
So that's what we've been going with for the last few weeks, and making big progress. It's still a long ways from release, so don't get too excited yet - the original Battleheart took almost a year to develop, and this game is likely to be bigger in every way. That said, we're getting better at this stuff all the time, so hopefully it will see release before we're old and grey.
Why have I hesitated to just call it "Battleheart 2" though? Well, it's going to share a lot of gameplay ideas with Battleheart, but a lot is changing too. I don't want to go into intense detail yet, but I can share some of our objectives. Battleheart was (as the name implies) all about combat - tricking out your party with a collection of powers and equipment that complement each other, using powers at the right time on the right bad guy... that's the core of the game, and we're keeping and building on that. But it lacked in two major areas - it had basically no plot, and no exploration. Our goal with this new game is to maintain the feel of Battleheart's combat, but take it from a simple series of arenas and put it in a more fully formed world to romp around. It's a little ambitious, but I feel like we're well on our way.
So that's what we've been going with for the last few weeks, and making big progress. It's still a long ways from release, so don't get too excited yet - the original Battleheart took almost a year to develop, and this game is likely to be bigger in every way. That said, we're getting better at this stuff all the time, so hopefully it will see release before we're old and grey.
Why have I hesitated to just call it "Battleheart 2" though? Well, it's going to share a lot of gameplay ideas with Battleheart, but a lot is changing too. I don't want to go into intense detail yet, but I can share some of our objectives. Battleheart was (as the name implies) all about combat - tricking out your party with a collection of powers and equipment that complement each other, using powers at the right time on the right bad guy... that's the core of the game, and we're keeping and building on that. But it lacked in two major areas - it had basically no plot, and no exploration. Our goal with this new game is to maintain the feel of Battleheart's combat, but take it from a simple series of arenas and put it in a more fully formed world to romp around. It's a little ambitious, but I feel like we're well on our way.
Friday, March 9, 2012
Our Future with Android
Some folks recently sent us news that the 50mb limit of Google's market has been lifted. Here's the info straight from the horse's mouth:
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/03/android-apps-break-50mb-barrier.html
Unfortunately, the same app size limit still exists. It's still going to require the same technique developers have been using to circumvent the limit for quite some time. The .apk will need to be under 50mb, but can download further data after the fact. The improvement here is that Google is now offering to host up to 4GB of extra data, and that any secondary download is more tightly integrated with the market itself. These are welcome improvements, but due to the way Battleheart is built, it would require a significant amount of time to implement.
As near as I can tell, a complete removal of any size limits is never going to happen due to the way the android market must download apps into a finite download cache (somewhere between 30-50mb depending on the device) which must exist on the device's internal storage. Many devices don't have much internal storage, and the exact amount can vary wildly, so if the cache has to stay, it would have been great to be optionally placed on the device's roomy SD card as needed, and its size greatly increased. This seems like a better solution to me, but I'm not privy to the inner workings of the Android market. I'm sure there are reasons why they chose the approach they did.
We could re-engineer how Battleheart accesses its data to work with this new system. This isn't an impossible task, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to dedicate resources to it. For one, we're in the middle of production on another game, and can't simply drop everything to implement this because Google finally delivered on a year-old promise. And secondly, as I mentioned on Twitter, our Android apps aren't making money. A few people took offense to the bluntness of this statement, so I'll clarify in more delicate terms. There's a big difference between generating revenue, and "making money" - It's not that they haven't generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded. Where did your dollar go? We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.
From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps, and the new features of the market do nothing to change this. While this news may be disappointing, I hope people can accept that we've done everything we can reasonably do to bring our apps to as many potential players as possible, despite the obstacles.
Thanks for reading, and for your understanding.
Edit: I'm seeing this post linked in various places, and I want to make one thing clear if you're arriving here from a blog having a slow news day: my comments here are simply my experience. It is not a condemnation of the android platform as a whole. It is not a proclamation that things will never improve. It is also not a weapon to be swung in the never-ending holy war between fans of one platform or another. This is simply a message to our players, who are wondering what we're up to. And if you feel the urge to criticize our decision, ask yourself: are you an authority on the value of our time? You don't have to like our decision, but you must accept that we are the only ones equipped to make it.
http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2012/03/android-apps-break-50mb-barrier.html
Unfortunately, the same app size limit still exists. It's still going to require the same technique developers have been using to circumvent the limit for quite some time. The .apk will need to be under 50mb, but can download further data after the fact. The improvement here is that Google is now offering to host up to 4GB of extra data, and that any secondary download is more tightly integrated with the market itself. These are welcome improvements, but due to the way Battleheart is built, it would require a significant amount of time to implement.
As near as I can tell, a complete removal of any size limits is never going to happen due to the way the android market must download apps into a finite download cache (somewhere between 30-50mb depending on the device) which must exist on the device's internal storage. Many devices don't have much internal storage, and the exact amount can vary wildly, so if the cache has to stay, it would have been great to be optionally placed on the device's roomy SD card as needed, and its size greatly increased. This seems like a better solution to me, but I'm not privy to the inner workings of the Android market. I'm sure there are reasons why they chose the approach they did.
We could re-engineer how Battleheart accesses its data to work with this new system. This isn't an impossible task, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to dedicate resources to it. For one, we're in the middle of production on another game, and can't simply drop everything to implement this because Google finally delivered on a year-old promise. And secondly, as I mentioned on Twitter, our Android apps aren't making money. A few people took offense to the bluntness of this statement, so I'll clarify in more delicate terms. There's a big difference between generating revenue, and "making money" - It's not that they haven't generated income, but that income is offset by the additional support costs the platform has demanded. Where did your dollar go? We spent about 20% of our total man-hours last year dealing with Android in one way or another - porting, platform specific bug fixes, customer service, etc. I would have preferred spending that time on more content for you, but instead I was thanklessly modifying shaders and texture formats to work on different GPUs, or pushing out patches to support new devices without crashing, or walking someone through how to fix an installation that wouldn't go through. We spent thousands on various test hardware. These are the unsung necessities of offering our apps on Android. Meanwhile, Android sales amounted to around 5% of our revenue for the year, and continues to shrink. Needless to say, this ratio is unsustainable.
From a purely economic perspective, I can no longer legitimize spending time on Android apps, and the new features of the market do nothing to change this. While this news may be disappointing, I hope people can accept that we've done everything we can reasonably do to bring our apps to as many potential players as possible, despite the obstacles.
Thanks for reading, and for your understanding.
Edit: I'm seeing this post linked in various places, and I want to make one thing clear if you're arriving here from a blog having a slow news day: my comments here are simply my experience. It is not a condemnation of the android platform as a whole. It is not a proclamation that things will never improve. It is also not a weapon to be swung in the never-ending holy war between fans of one platform or another. This is simply a message to our players, who are wondering what we're up to. And if you feel the urge to criticize our decision, ask yourself: are you an authority on the value of our time? You don't have to like our decision, but you must accept that we are the only ones equipped to make it.
Friday, February 24, 2012
Depth vs. Accessibility
I've been spending a lot of time thinking about this subject. It's the same thing the industry has been talking about for the last several years, only with different terms. The popular adjectives are "casual" and "core", which describe both games and gamers alike, but in very broad, unspecific terms. Casual is usually synonymous with Farmville, Bejeweled, and other mindless time-killers that require little skill or commitment from the player. Meanwhile, the other end of the spectrum demands twitch reflexes, and a high tolerance for violence, as most "core" games are male power fantasies that usually involve guns, cars, and you being a hero. In either case, most publishers and developers are thinking in terms of demographics: which subset of the gaming population are we trying to appeal to, what's the revenue potential of "A+B+C", etc.
If you ask me, too much energy is spent thinking about games and gamers in these broad terms, rather than getting to the heart of why people have these different tastes. It really comes down to accessibility. There are a lot of ingredients that collide to determine how accessible your game is. Is it stylistically grotesque, or cute? Is it incredibly complicated, or mindlessly easy? How long is a typical play session? It's no secret that most of the big hits on the App Store tend to be very simple - they take about 5 seconds to learn how to play, and very slowly ramp up their difficulty and mechanical complexity, they're usually pretty cute, and you can play them for as little or as much time as you like.
But its not necessary that every game has to be incredibly simple in order to lure people in successfully - depth and accessibility aren't mutually exclusive, because not everyone's taste falls perfectly into one category or another. I've seen my own tastes shift as I've gotten older - I used to forgive a lot of tedious bullshit that games would present me with, but I'd muscle through it. These days, I'm a lot less forgiving. The goal is to simply avoid putting unnecessary obstacles in the way of people's fun. Don't bombard them with information too fast, don't subject them to badly written soap opera cut-scenes or huge amounts of travel time, keep the visuals appealing, don't have ridiculous loading times, and keep your input super responsive. It seems obvious, but you still see these mistakes being made today by huge, multi-million dollar budget games.
There does come a point, however, when some players will get turned away by too little complexity. For lots of us, a game has to offer some resistance, or we don't feel like we're accomplishing anything. Some of my favorite games present challenges so overwhelming that they repel most people, but that in turn adds to the payoff if/when you surmount those challenges. There's also a certain joy to be had in simply exploring and learning about a game's rules from experience, rather than being handed all the information you need to succeed, but that's asking a greater level of mental commitment from the player.
So this is the real question for a developer - where does your game live on this spectrum? How much will your game suffer in terms of fun and depth if you choose to make it too accessible? When you omit something, are you compromising the product, or just trimming the fat?
I think I've walked this line with mixed success over the years, with Battleheart being the one I'm most proud of. I feel like it has a pretty good amount of tactical depth, without being overwhelming when you first start. It requires some decent reflexes, but it's no "Ninja Gaiden". You get to kill things and kick ass, but its still cute and kid-friendly. For my next game, I'm aiming to push things a little further towards the "depth" side of the spectrum and see how things go. Mobile app consumers represent a huge and diverse group of people, so there's no question that there's an appetite for something a little more involved and complex.
Monday, November 28, 2011
Amazon?
I recently asked on Twitter what people's thoughts were about releasing an Android version of Zombieville 2 exclusively through Amazon's app store, rather than Google's android market.
The reason I was considering this is simple - the official android market is a hassle. I talked about this earlier this year, and it hasn't gotten any better. The market continues to be plagued by random technical problems, such as orders failing to execute, downloads failing for no reason, bogus error messages about insufficient space to install, or invalid package signing, and so on. I also have the pleasure of having to process refunds for people who want to transfer their purchase to a different google account, or had their phone stolen and misused, or had their 4-year-old buy a game accidentally, and so on.
As a small developer, I'd rather be spending my time making cool games, instead of explaining to the 1000th person that their order failed because of a bug in the google market. For most android users these issues never crop up - it only seems to represent a small percentage of our buyers, but its enough to generate a part time job's worth of e-mail.
Like Apple's store, Amazon handles all technical and billing issues, which made me think "hey, why not just release on Amazon, and punt that responsibility?" Well, there's a pretty serious downside to that proposition. To put it bluntly, Amazon App Store sales have thus far represented a meaningless percentage of our revenue - less than 1% of our income for this year. This is no doubt due to the fact that their store requires a separate download, isn't pre-installed on any devices besides the Kindle Fire (as far as I know), or available internationally. And the release of the Kindle Fire hasn't exactly... set our sales on fire? Since the introduction of the device, sales of Battleheart on Amazon haven't improved appreciably. Combine this with a great deal of "nooooo!" from Twitter and, well, it seems unlikely we'll go that route.
The reason I was considering this is simple - the official android market is a hassle. I talked about this earlier this year, and it hasn't gotten any better. The market continues to be plagued by random technical problems, such as orders failing to execute, downloads failing for no reason, bogus error messages about insufficient space to install, or invalid package signing, and so on. I also have the pleasure of having to process refunds for people who want to transfer their purchase to a different google account, or had their phone stolen and misused, or had their 4-year-old buy a game accidentally, and so on.
As a small developer, I'd rather be spending my time making cool games, instead of explaining to the 1000th person that their order failed because of a bug in the google market. For most android users these issues never crop up - it only seems to represent a small percentage of our buyers, but its enough to generate a part time job's worth of e-mail.
Like Apple's store, Amazon handles all technical and billing issues, which made me think "hey, why not just release on Amazon, and punt that responsibility?" Well, there's a pretty serious downside to that proposition. To put it bluntly, Amazon App Store sales have thus far represented a meaningless percentage of our revenue - less than 1% of our income for this year. This is no doubt due to the fact that their store requires a separate download, isn't pre-installed on any devices besides the Kindle Fire (as far as I know), or available internationally. And the release of the Kindle Fire hasn't exactly... set our sales on fire? Since the introduction of the device, sales of Battleheart on Amazon haven't improved appreciably. Combine this with a great deal of "nooooo!" from Twitter and, well, it seems unlikely we'll go that route.
Friday, October 28, 2011
Cintiq 24HD
I've been using Wacom tablets for many years. I started off with a first generation Intuos back in high school, and got acclimated to the unique style of drawing "remotely" that such things demand as I used it through college. In fact, the art for the original Zombieville USA was all done on the same ancient first generation Intuos I'd been hauling around for nearly a decade.
After the success of Zombieville, I decided it was time to upgrade, so I picked up a Cintiq 12wx. I firmly believe in the adage "it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools", but I really felt the speed and ease with which I could generate art for my games improve dramatically by being able to draw directly on screen. And honestly, if you look at OMG Pirates and Battleheart next to Zombieville USA... there's a stark improvement there, and partly that improvement is thanks to better tools.
After a couple years of squeezing the most out of the 12 inch model, I decided to upgrade yet again and get the beastly 24HD model which wacom just released. This thing is the Ferrari of graphics tablets. In fact, that's a perfect analogy, because like a Ferrari, its prohibitively expensive, and not necessarily all that practical at times. Here's the gist of it.
Display Quality
This was the main reason I was interested in the 24HD - the 12 inch model is great, but the LCD in it is not. The color leaves quite a bit to be desired, so I would often find myself doing hue/value touchups on my main monitor after doing a drawing on the 12. No amount of calibration can make it an acceptable monitor for checking final art.
The 24HD boasts a much improved display over the 21 cintiq (which is itself superior to the 12) and is finally up to the task of being a primary monitor. In fact, it's a damn good thing that's true, because the thing is roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. You may not fully grasp when you see it in pictures, but a 24 inch monitor with a HUGE bezel for extra buttons and room to lay your elbow is going to engulf just about any desk, leaving little room for another adjacent display. You really have to construct your entire workspace around the 24HD. But that's not to say this thing can't move, which brings me to...
Ergonomics
You might have seen the promo video Wacom released of this thing. The stand (which is built like a tank to counterweight the display) is designed to allow the display to be positioned in a variety of different ways. The highlight, for me, is being able to pull the thing down over the edge of my desk so that it's basically hanging in my lap. This is far and away the most comfortable drawing position I've used with any tablet - I'm used to curling up with the 12 inch model in my lap, but this really almost feels like cheating by comparison. If you prefer, it can be laid flat, or locked into just about any angle you can ask for.
The Little Things
A better display, larger size, and better ergonomics were not unexpected, but I've noticed a few other things which took me by surprise. I didn't realize just accustomed I'd become to the 12 inch models screwy pen behavior - it has diminished accuracy at the edges of the screen, so the center area is where you do all of your work. The 24 is rock solid all around, no cursor warble, every stroke is as steady as can be. Other details that stand out are a convenient on-screen keyboard, for quickly naming a layer or saving a file while the screen hovers in your lap and obscures your access to the keyboard.
Honestly, the 12 has been a great ally for the last couple years, but the 24 just makes it look like a toy by comparison.
After the success of Zombieville, I decided it was time to upgrade, so I picked up a Cintiq 12wx. I firmly believe in the adage "it is a poor craftsman who blames his tools", but I really felt the speed and ease with which I could generate art for my games improve dramatically by being able to draw directly on screen. And honestly, if you look at OMG Pirates and Battleheart next to Zombieville USA... there's a stark improvement there, and partly that improvement is thanks to better tools.
After a couple years of squeezing the most out of the 12 inch model, I decided to upgrade yet again and get the beastly 24HD model which wacom just released. This thing is the Ferrari of graphics tablets. In fact, that's a perfect analogy, because like a Ferrari, its prohibitively expensive, and not necessarily all that practical at times. Here's the gist of it.
Display Quality
This was the main reason I was interested in the 24HD - the 12 inch model is great, but the LCD in it is not. The color leaves quite a bit to be desired, so I would often find myself doing hue/value touchups on my main monitor after doing a drawing on the 12. No amount of calibration can make it an acceptable monitor for checking final art.
The 24HD boasts a much improved display over the 21 cintiq (which is itself superior to the 12) and is finally up to the task of being a primary monitor. In fact, it's a damn good thing that's true, because the thing is roughly the size of an aircraft carrier. You may not fully grasp when you see it in pictures, but a 24 inch monitor with a HUGE bezel for extra buttons and room to lay your elbow is going to engulf just about any desk, leaving little room for another adjacent display. You really have to construct your entire workspace around the 24HD. But that's not to say this thing can't move, which brings me to...
Ergonomics
You might have seen the promo video Wacom released of this thing. The stand (which is built like a tank to counterweight the display) is designed to allow the display to be positioned in a variety of different ways. The highlight, for me, is being able to pull the thing down over the edge of my desk so that it's basically hanging in my lap. This is far and away the most comfortable drawing position I've used with any tablet - I'm used to curling up with the 12 inch model in my lap, but this really almost feels like cheating by comparison. If you prefer, it can be laid flat, or locked into just about any angle you can ask for.
The Little Things
A better display, larger size, and better ergonomics were not unexpected, but I've noticed a few other things which took me by surprise. I didn't realize just accustomed I'd become to the 12 inch models screwy pen behavior - it has diminished accuracy at the edges of the screen, so the center area is where you do all of your work. The 24 is rock solid all around, no cursor warble, every stroke is as steady as can be. Other details that stand out are a convenient on-screen keyboard, for quickly naming a layer or saving a file while the screen hovers in your lap and obscures your access to the keyboard.
Honestly, the 12 has been a great ally for the last couple years, but the 24 just makes it look like a toy by comparison.
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