Archive for March, 2012
It’s with great pleasure, exhaustion, joy and relief that I announce the end to this four year chapter of my life.
LONE SURVIVOR is here.
It’s done. It’s finished. It’s complete. It’s available to buy.
It has every drop of my heart and soul in it.
It’s taken its toll on my health and family life…
But most importantly it’s here.
Thanks for supporting me along the way, and I hope you enjoy the game!
Or visit www.lonesurvivor.co.uk to purchase the game.
Just a very quick post to say all’s going well for launch.
The video’s done (but not live yet), www.lonesurvivor.co.uk is done and now live, as the title of this post suggests. You’ll be able to buy the game there next Tuesday.
The enormous mountain of press and promotion emails is getting smaller slowly. I just re-submitted to Steam.
I’m going to start the demo later on, or tomorrow. I hope I can get it done on time!
Sort of flying at the moment, I don’t know if it’s excitement or delirium. I’m glad to mostly done with the promotional material though, it’s not the part of the job I enjoy the most!
It gives me great pleasure to finally announce that LONE SURVIVOR will be debuting on PC & Mac on Tuesday, 27.3.2012 (that’s 3.27.2012 in American or 2012.3.27 in Japanese.)
The price of this piece of interactive entertainment will be ten American dollars ($10.) This will be for the Standard Edition (which includes DRM-free updates for life, and access to both Mac & PC versions.)
There will also be available a ‘First Aid Edition’ which is partly intended to help support future freeware development. If I could, I’d make all my games for free, but unfortunately my wife, my child and even I need feeding. Any funds I make from this edition will go into paying myself a survival salary while making these games. The First Aid Edition will be priced at a ludicrous $50, but will also include the Lone Survivor OST, as well as an exclusive short game to be finished afterwards (LS3D – a side adventure to Lone Survivor,) as well as a couple of mystery gifts, such as scans of designs and artwork from the game, to be decided.
On the subject of future updates, there are still two more secret endings I’d like to add to the game. While the game is fine and complete without them, I think it would be fun to have a couple more to explore on a second playthrough, and one of them I actually have something quite silly planned for.
This does depend on whether the game makes enough money for me to continue my indie career, but if it does, rest assured you’ll get a free Special Endings Edition when the time comes!
In addition, as thanks for early support, the first 1200 buyers will receive a copy of the Soul Brother OST, normally priced at $5.
I’m actually assembling the final build of the game tomorrow, fixing the last 15 minor bugs or so, and removing cheat modes I put in for testing. It feels like I’ve been making this game forever, and I’m still sort of in shock I can’t find much more to add or fix. It really is finished. And, I have to say, it’s one of the rare things I’ve made that I’m kind of proud of, in 15 years of making things for a living!
It will launch initially through my website only (a new site for the game itself, which is under construction at the moment.) You’ll be able to download or play the demo in your browser, to see if you’d like to purchase it. There will be a nice new launch trailer (I’ve already 99% finished it, but I’m saving it for just before launch.)
More than anything, I hope you all get something out of playing it. Heartfelt thanks to you all, for sharing the long journey with me, and supporting a game which tries humbly to do something a little different.
Jasper
A few weeks from now, I’ll be able to get some, at last.
A couple of days after IGF, I’ll be announcing the launch date and the price, and more importantly the game will be 100% complete! The reason I’ve barely written about this last period of development is simply that it’s been bit of a living hell I’d rather not share with you. I’ve smoked altogether too much, ate bad food, not slept well, seen no-one and done nothing but work from dawn ’till dusk, mostly on the horrible tasks I’d stockpiled for the end of the game. Things like the map were a very difficult and fiddly challenge to get right (took about two solid weeks to rework following some excellent feedback by Terry Cavanagh.)
Thankfully all that nastiness is out the way now! My wife and daughter are back from their time in Japan, where they were visiting family. For the sake of getting Lone Survivor finished, and partly due to dwindling funds, I had to stay behind … which was pretty tough. But they’re back now, and I’m really glad I’ll have their support over this final hurdle.
The tiredness is still mounting up with the last few tasks to do: last bits of content to finish, the website to launch, payment systems to figure out, press to contact, demo to make, video to record, soundtrack to prepare. These are all fairly nice tasks in comparison to the map, though.
So it won’t be long at all now, and I hope you might be pleasantly surprised by the launch date I’m shooting for!