The great Japanese animator and famed director of Studio Ghibli: Hayao Miyazaki is said to be retired now, leaving his latest film “The Wind Rises” as his last piece of art. I haven’t seen it yet, but I certainly look forward to seeing it later this month.
Recently, he said in a interview that the anime industry is filled with staff who are “otaku.”
The Kickstarter campaign for “James – Journey of Existence” was a huge success!
We got $312 funded of our $5,000 goal (a little over 6%). 28 backers in total contributed to that. Why do I call this a success?
My Kickstarter for “James – Journey of Existence” (http://kck.st/19wTNSh) has only 25 backers so close to the end, which is a little embarrassing, when the beginning had so much promise. On the other hand, the new IndieDB page for “James – Journey of Existence” (http://www.indiedb.com/games/james-journey-of-existence) already has 4 followers after about 24 hours of being up, so it seems an easy and safe simulation of how a Kickstarter would play, given the growth in community rises at almost the same rate.
There were several things wrong with the Kickstarter campaign. One major one was the current quality of the game itself: the environments were bland, the animations were crude, and the character designs were lacking. Art is in the eye of the beholder and some have truly loved the game’s style so far, but I can’t argue with the masses. And here’s my first step in fixing that: new character designs for James!
A recent keynote presentation with former Uncharted dev Richard Lemarchand had him urge indie gamers to “make experimental games,” even at the risk of failing.
I couldn’t agree more. Indie games are, by nature, both blessed and cursed by having small teams and small budgets to work with. This makes developing large, ambitious games with high quality difficult and entirely dependent on the talent of the team, but also means that making a poor game or making a game that sells poorly isn’t as big of an issue (some indie developers risk their livelihood on their projects doing well, which no one should ever do). This means we can do things that larger companies just can’t afford to do.
Indie games will shape the industry over the next decade. Very few people can argue with this.
My Kickstarter for hand-drawn 3D adventure indie game “James – Journey of Existence” (http://kck.st/19wTNSh) got a couple pledges this week, one of which nearly doubled the pledge count (not difficult, given how low it was a few days ago). Promising.
From the beginning of this Kickstarter, I promised that backers would receive an exclusive demo before the end of the Kickstarter campaign. There were a few reasons behind this: it was a very nice incentive for the $1 tier, and it was like a last-minute demo that might convince backers to increase their pledges a bit (or remove their pledges completely, if they so felt that way). And in the likelihood that the Kickstarter campaign fails, backers would still get something as a sign of thanks for their early support.
After a couple stressful weeks actually making the extra content for the demo, I can say it is completed, and the demo will be made available today to Kickstarter backers.
