Wow, lots of activity in the thread today, cool! I want to reply to everyone but I'm exhausted right now, so I'll do the older posts first. Today was supposed to be my resting day after the crazy month and a half of working every single day on the previous release, but bugs were already found, and I attended
Retromadrid too (as a visitor)...
Ok then. I hope to you good luck with the progress.
And after you finish the game, please create first hype and advertisment to have people who want to play the game.
Don't rush releasing the game even if you finish it.
That it my suggestion.
This is very solid advice, and it has been hammered home by a lot of people, so I'll be sure to do that. I guess this video is a small first step, but yeah, a long way to go still.
I'd love to do something like that! Last time I tried it, it killed Flash and hard crashed my computer, so I'll have to figure out a way to load all animations in sequence (maybe a few at a time, and reconnect gifs later), but yeah, that's something I'd like to see :-D
A .gif would probably murder pretty much anything it played on, it would be far more feasible to make a video. I have no clue how hard that would be, though. I guess worst case scenario, you could rig your game to play all the character animations in order on a white background, and simply capture the footage with GeForce Experience or equivalent.
At worst, I'm also thinking of doing flipbooks as rewards for a crowdfunding campaign down the line... hopefully those would be cool as well.
Flipbooks as in actual, physical, paper flipbooks? :O What an
incredible idea! My inner ecologist cringes a bit at the thought, but I guess making them small and limited wouldn't be too impactful. Now I wonder why nobody has done this before (or perhaps they have?).
Yup, I meant Rampage, though as you said, if it's not meant to be faithful, then it's aaall right :-D
The segmented idea would be pretty cool if you can manage to get it working!
Getting it working should not be too hard, the only thing is that it would mean to bin all work on current Jorm... I have a feeling this is one of those ideas that feels drastic on first thought, but letting it grow on me over time will end up pushing me to do it. :D
I've realized one of my strong points is being able to visualize how something is bound to turn out before I even start working on it. This is a very lucky confluence of decades of gaming experience, decades of programming experience, and good intuitive feel for simple math and physics. This saves me a lot of work and trial and error, which is very fortunate as I'm lazy as hell. :D
wow, this looks rad. got a cool and imagination-stoking vibe to it, not sure exactly how to word it..the interesting, sort of mysterious, look of the buildings & world.. world map..all these UI elements. there's a lot going on and it's got a really strong sense of place. the graphics remind me of old Apogee games (this is a compliment) but with the nicer movement/feel/explosions/etc of commercial arcade games. also looks good fun :) inspiring!
Wow, I'm blushing here, thanks a ton for the kind words! Praise is the wind in most of our sails and this is no exceptiing, hearing it praised just makes me want to keep making it better. Thanks!
Incidentally, this just happened:
Me - "I'm blushing from the praise".
The missus - "How much did you pay them?".
:P
Been trying to add more stuff to make the game look more lived in
Looks very nice! I have a lot of trouble getting stuff to look lived on and organic. I'm seeing some visible seams on some tiles still, but they probably won't be noticeable during normal gameplay.
I think that is a great suggestions. I Should have listened to that advice before releasing my first game. Since we are releasing small indie games we do not need a specific date in advance better to focus on creating some buzz instead of rushing to release.
Well, we also have to eat and pay rent... I'm working on this full time so there's a hard cap on how much time I can keep this up. I'm coming to terms with the fact that I will probably have to get a "normal" job before I can actually finish it, which will obviously slow down development.
Actually, I was wondering about the alternatives. I mean, sure, there's kickstarter, but for those of us who have never published a game, it's a tough sell. But I've seen there's at least two more alternatives that fall somewhere in between "self publishing" and "salary work".
One of them is Indie-Fund, its conditions are like this:
- Flexible budget, no milestones – We start out with your best guess for the budget and pay that out in two chunks: one after signing, the other when the first is close to running out. If more funding is required, or if less funding is required, we can adjust the second payment.
- Repayment – Once the game is released, you first pay back the investment and then share 25%of the revenue, until we double the initial investment, or until 2 years after the initial launch date, whichever comes first.
- No long term obligations – If the game did not generate enough revenue to repay the investment within 2 years of release, the agreement expires and you no longer owe Indie Fund anything. Whatever revenue your game generates from that point on is yours to keep. If the game does generate enough revenue to repay the investment the agreement could expire even sooner leaving 100% of the revenue to you.
Giving them 100% of generated revenue until they recover the investment might sound harsh at first, but on second thought, considering this includes your own salary, it't not that bad. At the absolute worst (if the game doesn't sell anything), you keep the investment, which is more than you would if you worked entirely on your own. And if it sells like hotcakes, you keep 75% of all revenue past that investment, and 100% of it after two years. Seems pretty safe if it works as intended... and if someone actually funds your game, of course.
The other would be to seek out estabilished and beloved indie publishers like Devolver Digital or Chucklefish. I have a feeling just being published by them would increase the visibility of your game dramatically, plus you can leverage their marketing expertise and focus on development (a scenario I'm sure most of us would relish).
Thoughts? Experiences?
Got back on the horse today and made some progress... and a fairly satisfying gif of random room layouts
Looking great, very different-looking layouts! Can the main character walk on thin (all blue) paths?
i kinda like it more than the main game actually! because it ramps up super quick so sessions are much shorter
This sounds to me that you might want to tweak the main game. Ramping up action is such a delicate issue (I should know!), but you definitely want to make the game challenging quickly, especially if the player can't select difficulty modes.
