Monthly Archives: January 2014

The Importance Of Communication…

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Over the last few weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of communicating with different people, both supporters and nay-sayers about my hand-drawn indie game “James – Journey of Existence.” Both with Kickstarter and this blog, among other social media sites, I’ve tried to post updates and respond to everyone. However, it has happened often with both sides that they would completely miss important information I’ve posted when writing a comment.

This has quickly become my biggest pet-peeve: making a comment before actually reading an article. This is very common, especially on video game news sites where the fanbase is as “passionate” as they are. I don’t mind too much if the comment is nice, where I would then kindly repeat what I’ve said elsewhere. But more than once, people have poo-pooed “James – Journey of Existence” and used examples to help back their claim.

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So You Want To Make An Indie Game… Don’t Get Ahead Of Yourself

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My Kickstarter page for “James – Journey of Existence” (http://kck.st/19wTNSh) is doing lousy, and probably won’t succeed unless a mob of backers comes in during the last week. But I did get some attention, especially from Russian indie gamers on youtube. I also got a lot of interested people hoping I would hire them onto the project (see previous posts). One interesting person making his own indie game contacted me, which is what inspired this post…

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The Importance of Controversy…

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So, yeah. My Kickstarter page for “James – Journey of Existence” isn’t doing so well, despite the press I was able to snag for it. Unless it somehow gets a wave of backers in the last week, there isn’t much hope for it succeeding…

But I did get a lot of feedback, especially from sites like Reddit and Steam’s Greenlight Concept page, where gamers hang and aren’t afraid to downvote a post. Of the people who have seen the game, I’d estimate that roughly 91% don’t give a damn, 4% like the art style a lot, 3% hate the art style a lot, and 2% like the game’s concept but not the art in its current state. The interesting thing is, those last three groups are (almost) identical in size. Of course, that’s a huge estimate that could be way off, but that’s my interpretation based on comments.

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New “SD” Demo For “James – Journey of Existence”

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Have you tried the free demo yet of hand-drawn, hand-animated 3D adventure “James – Journey of Existence?” Were you able to run the game without it crashing?

As I’ve mentioned, the hardware requirements for having HD frames for animating the characters is demanding. A couple gamers have already complained that it would crash instantly. This is almost entirely due to the RAM, which requires almost 3.5 GB of FREE, UNUSED RAM: that means not in use by the operating system or other software. That comes out to requiring 5-6 GB of RAM on most standard computers. The processor, video card and hard drive requirements are manageable by comparison, but the game will crash if not enough RAM is available.

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“James – Journey of Existence” (Not) on Steam Greenlight!

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Ok, I want to put “James – Journey of Existence” on Steam’s Greenlight program, but it’s so early in development that I feel a little uncomfortable about that.

Instead, I noticed Steam has another option, to upload “Concepts,” which is similar to uploading a project to Greenlight, except that it doesn’t at all effect the game’s chances to getting published on Steam regardless of popularity. It’s a little unnecessary, but I figured the good gamers on Steam would be able to give an opinion.

You can find the game profile on Steam here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=214380982  http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=214922280

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