It’s always fun to see the world change. Most changes of the last decade revolve around the Internet.
It’s hard to imagine the world without the Internet. Where would you be without email? Google? Wikipedia? YouTube? Most students don’t know how to use libraries anymore. If these websites were to suddenly disappear, we’d be screwed.
But there’s the thing. Libraries still exist. If the Internet died, we’d still be able to function, if somewhat inconveniently.
That’s not true with games anymore.
So, you’ve been thinking about that game you want to make. You’ve thought about it for a long time, and you think you know exactly how you would go about doing it. You decide you’ll post your idea on Kickstarter.com so you can get funding to start making the game…
…yeah… don’t do that. Your first step for getting funding to make your game is to make the game.
Doesn’t make sense? Hear me out. Kickstarter projects often succeed on credibility, about how much backers trust that you can make what you promise you can. Also, it’s difficult to understand exactly what the game would be without seeing the game in action. Even if you think you need money to make it, you won’t get any money without making it first. It’s a classic Catch-22 scenario.
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.
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…
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.
