March to the Moon Passed!

March to the Moon has passed the XBox LIVE Indie Games review process!  All I need to do now is publish it and put it out.  But I'm going to hold off for a little longer.  I'm going on vacation very soon and I'd rather be around to check and see how things are going.  I also don't want to spend my vacation worrying about how the game is doing.  Even after getting it out, the work isn't over.  I'll be getting some activation keys and will want to hand them out to people that do reviews of games to try and get the word out.

Now I'm just doing some final coding to make March to the Moon work with Indie City's SDK so that players can get achievements.  After that's done I'm going to finally be able to dive into my next project, a game for learning Japanese!  I was never really happy with My Japanese Coach.  I think I can do something more useful.  I'll have some screenshots for you next week, since I've already started it up.  I actually am going to be re-writing it because it's currently using FlatRedBall.  After fighting with FRB to get things loaded up smoothly on the Xbox for March to the Moon I've rather soured on it and would rather just go it alone.  I had started rewriting March to the Moon from scratch so that it would load faster, but in the end, since it passed I decided that was way more work than it was worth.

I also learned something very important from trying to contact the press and trying to sell March to the Moon.  It's a good game, but unless things are top-notch or really stick out they're not going to get very far.  My sum total of two sales on Indievania (which I will never see any cash from) speaks to that.  I'm going to be making some changes to my original design for the Japanese game.

March From the Moon

Peter's been putting in double time on the first boss fight in Siphon Spirit and it looks great!  I can't wait to have a demo up for you all to play.

Things have been crazy busy for me the last few weeks and I haven't gotten a whole lot done.  Without any real work to get to, I've been planning for March From the Moon.  Even though I have another game that I want to make first.  This is why I can't count the planning as any real work.  It is not what I should be working on.

In any case, March From the Moon is going to be radically different from March to the Moon.  I'm looking at side quests, power ups, items, crafting, unlockables, a more involved story, completely redone UI, good music, better art and much much more.  But that's a lot of work so we'll just have to see what I actually do in the end.

Screenshot Saturday

 Miranda get tutored by Rennon.

A pitched battle between a Summoner's Fire Wisps and some Tiny UFOs.

Siphon Spirit Alpha Demo Looming

That's right, it's Siphon Spirit time again!  Peter's been having a tough time with his tablet.  He sent it in for repairs and when he got it back they had fixed the wrong darn thing!  He's sent it back in again, so he's been slowed down a bit while he waits to be able to work on the bus again.  I've joked with him before about changing our name to "Public Transit Games" since we do most of our development on the ride to and from our day jobs.  In any case, we're hoping to have a demo up for download soon.  It would still be an alpha demo, and the game is still a little ways off.  You won't be seeing the nasty piece of work up in the screenshot up there during the demo, but we've got other demons and undead for you to fight!

Hello Indievania!

March to the Moon is now available for purchase at Indievania!  Get it while it's hot!  I'm very excited for it to finally be finished and up for sale in at least once place.  I had it up again for review on Xbox LIVE Indie Games, but it was shot down because of nit-picky things that I've gotten fixed but can't send it back out until later.

Hoping to get it out on XBLIG next week, and then work on the integration with IndieCity and try to get it up at a few more places.  Wish me luck!