kedaunglandlord

(This is one if those rare wholly positive posts. You heard it here first, folks!) After launching the Greenlight page I knew I could expect some great feedback and ideas from the folks who pledged at Kickstarter. (Everything from survival to crafting has been adjusted based on Greenlight input, and they haven't even played the game yet! Who knows what will happen during beta testing?) What I didn't expect was the wild diversity of professions and perspectives. It could just be an illusion caused by the format but the Greenlight camp always felt like a pretty narrow demographic. In contrast the game's Kickstarter backers have been all over the map, literally & figuratively. Since launching the campaign I've been in touch with not just dozens of artists and musicians and writers but also geologists, linguists, historians and architects, all eager to help me shape the world into something that lives up to their own unique expectations. Not that I ever could - to plea...

Note: This story is biased but it isn't a hatchet job. IndieGoGo may have promised something they couldn't deliver, but e veryone I dealt with was personable & pleasant to work with and  I believe they did what they could to help the campaign succeed within the constraints of the platform. IGG a good platform for a lot of projects - just not gaming projects. Decisions, Decisions The trailer went live and I thought to myself, I believe this game has a chance. Time to crowdfund. The question is which platform? Kickstarter, or IndieGoGo? I knew Kickstarter was the 'default' choice but I'd also contributed to successful gaming campaigns on IGG, like Ghost of a Tale and Darkwood . And I knew FRONTIERS had some global / casual appeal, which could make IGG a good option... hmm, decisions. In one of those weird (not-so) coincidental moments, I got a phone call from IndieGoGo. They'd seen the trailer and wanted to extend a helping hand. They made a pitch that involv...

The one question I get asked more often than Can you build structures in game * is How can you make a game this big by yourself?  Or, if phrased less diplomatically, Dude there's NO WAY you can make a game this big by yourself. Crash and burrrrrrn, that's all I'm sayin! Part of the reason I'm running the crowdfunding campaign is because, frankly, they're right - I need to outsource some art and writing and possibly programming tasks to get this thing done by January. (Thank goodness the game is modular enough to permit this.) But in another sense they're wrong, not because I'm somehow doing the impossible but because the game isn't 'big' like they think it is. Oh the scale of the world is big - I've said so repeatedly - and there's a lot of stuff to find, and I've already talked about the structures, etc. But the game is 'big' in the sense that a basement-sized miniature medieval town made of Legos is big. The size is impos...

...the more different they feel. Ha! Gotcha! Last week was a rude re-awakening to the world of gaming. As I often complain, my day job has kept me out of touch with gaming & gamers for years, so I asked some developers for a little help in getting reconnected. They obliged with an avalanche of websites and videos and articles. And holy crap things have changed since the days of five foot ten packs. Alright I'm not that out of touch. I do the Steam thing like everyone else. But what surprised me was how early indie games show off their barely-alpha gameplay, and how willing online reviewers are to not only play them but treat them with kid gloves. Last past week I absorbed roughly 2,561 hours of YouTube let's play videos and I saw dozens of early, early alpha builds with temp art, no menus, sometimes even no animation. And yet even the snarky, quick-to-judge reviewers were happy to ignore crashes and broken features. Not that this is a bad thing. Just weird. It's clear ...