Posts Tagged ‘ release

Oh, what a week!

I have no idea how to word this post. I’m almost out of words, to be honest. I must have typed two million of the things this week, between support emails, promotional emails, emails of thanks, emails of apology, interviews, comments, texts, tweets and posts.

But what a week it’s been! The reviews have been remarkably warm about the game (RPS and Destructoid being a couple of my highlights.)  I can’t find one that hated it, anyway!  And the kind emails and comments you’ve all sent me have honestly made me feel like I’m floating for most of the week.

Sales have gone surprisingly alright – it’s still not recouped its costs, but unlike Soul Brother I keep my IP (intellectual property as opposed to web address.) So if the game continues to sell, it still could!

The bad news was mainly down to one issue – the Black Screen Of Death which started appearing on random users’ Macs (PC’s were unaffected.) This caused an absolute support nightmare, and I’ve spent most of this week writing support emails to people who’ve suffered the issue. Once again I’d like to apologise to anyone this has affected. It’s a problem with Adobe AIR, and it seems like it’s out of my control to fix right now. The ‘Flash projector’ version, which I’ve been supplying customers with as an alternative, has been fine for all users except one so far – he fell victim of the ‘reset browser killing Flash saved games’ issue which caused me to use Adobe AIR in the first place (it provides a way of directly writing and reading files from the system like a ‘real’ application.)  Anyway, the upshot of this is that I’m still looking into it, and I’m going to do some thorough testing on a machine I know doesn’t work pretty soon (‘unfortunately’ it works on mine so it’s hard to test.)

Anyway, things have calmed down to the point I was able to assemble the 19-track OST, and make an album sleeve for it especially. And it gives me great pleasure to announce that it’s NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE on Bandcamp for $6.99! Yay!

Click this pic to go the shop:

Anyway, once again, thankyou so much for your support, kind emails, help and friendship along the way.  I honestly could never have imagined it would go so well, despite the technical problems.

I’m really happy to have made something that’s interesting to you guys, and I’ll keep trying to do the same thing in future!

Metamorphosis

The world has changed enormously in the past couple of weeks.

For me, the city is now the most exciting part, it brings together all the mechanics in new combinations, and requires a lot of improvisation to get through.  There are also more choices as to where to look for supplies, so each playthrough will have quite a different feel.

The art and atmosphere are very different, it’s lonely and bleak, instead of cramped, putrid and claustophobic.  Hopefully it’ll provide a well-needed change in pace when the player arrives.

My good friend, Stephen ‘increpare‘ Lavelle came round yesterday (you should but his new game, English Country Tune, because it’s beautiful), and was the first person to test it yesterday.  It took about an hour, even though I gave a lot of prompts – partly because things needed polish in the level design and AI, but also because we just wanted to get through it quicker.  It would probably take longer without me backseat-playing, and that’s without even going into the sidequests.  I’m surprised and pleased about this because I was concerned the game wasn’t long enough… But it’s looking like it’ll be at least 2/3 the size of game like Silent Hill 2, if the player explores some of the optional stuff.

So, what else?  A lot of new items, puzzles fully implemented in the city, most of the sidequests, improvements to monster AI, meat-handling etc, adding of coloured text (which you can see above.)

Besides that, I’ve spent a lot of time on the climax of the city area, a very cool boss encounter and the final scene which leads to the final environment (which I’m going to start midway through next week.)

Also, I know I said I was going to do a dev-diary – well I have the video camera now, I’m just trying to get the right tripod / setup to do it, but it shouldn’t be long.  Will have to be soon, though, as I might actually finish game itself within a month or so, with beta phase / polish early next year as planned…

We’re nearly there folks…  Keep the fingers crossed everything goes smoothly and I’ll have a nice psychological survival adventure for you early next year!  I genuinely can’t wait to share it with you.