Another Indie Game Night

I made the mistake of letting Peter talk to people, so now I've got more work to do on Siphon Spirit.  I'm working on making it so that the energy that you pull from different orbs will start out as the enemy color, but purify itself and turn white as it gets closer to you.  It also works the other way.  If you get too close to a heart that's bigger than you your white energy will turn red as it takes the energy away from you.  My favorite  orb for this is the Demonic Orb, since it turns the energy black, signifying that you will never see it again.

Peter's been showing me the art for the next cutscene, and it's looking really good.  I'm hoping we can get a demo sometime next month.  Then we'll start up the kickstarter campaign to pay for the music, voice acting, and maybe a custom font.

I got to show off the Japanese game during Indie Game Night as well, but since I don't have any real lessons and the battle system isn't in yet there wasn't a whole lot to show.  It was more like a tech demo than anything else.

But, looking back, I started with pretty much nothing just two months ago, and I spent a good chunk of time on March to the Moon, so I feel fairly comfortable claiming that I can get it all fully working within the next two months.  Not full of all the content, but fully working.  Wish me luck!

Let's Learn Japanese

Okay, I've been talking about March to the Moon a lot recently.  I think that's starting to wind down.  I'm still waiting to hear from Desura about what I will need to do in order to get it up on there.  I got a nice mention from a good friend of mine, Jay at RampantGames. Out of Eight PC Game Reviews gave me a review and did a video with it!  This was the first review I got that wasn't glowing.  He complained about the difficulty and the fact that the levels were the same each time that they got played.  He seemed to like the game overall but thought it was too difficult.  I'll have to see what I can do with the sequel.

I'm getting right back into the Japanese game now.  I've finished getting the dictionaries to work (even though there's not a ton in them yet).  I'm starting on the newly redesigned lessons tonight, so I'm really hoping to have them done, as well as the flashcard stuff so I can at least show that I'm back where I started come Indie Game Night next week.

March to the Moon Review and a New Version

March to the Moon has gotten some very good reviews!  I mentioned and quoted OtakuDante last week.  Since then I got reviewed by The XBLIG and Dannie Kitten.  They both really liked it and recommended that their readers should buy it, so I'm pretty happy about that!  If you've got the time please head in and read their reviews.  I also got and "XBLIG Pick" from Indie Games the Weblog.  None of this really seems to have increased my sales, but at least I know that people liked it.  It's also inspired me to get a little more done.


On that note, Version 1.1 is now available!  Hopefully this will be the one that gets me into Indie City.  I am also making one more try at Desura through my IndieDB page.  I'm hoping to have a mod out by the end of the week.

Sorry for the late and short post.  Staying super busy over here.

March to the Moon for sale!

Well, it's been a long wait, but March to the Moon is finally up for sale!  You can get it at March to the Moon's site or on XBox LIVE Indie Games.  We've already got a lengthy review from OtakuDante.  Definitely my favorite line in the review is "It's nothing short of brilliant."  Haha, I wish I could just take that out of context and pretend he was talking about the entire game :)  He was referring to the Skillset system, where you can match different skillsets to get a nice blend of abilities.  I wish I could take all the credit for it, but I did get the idea from Titan's Quest.  He also made mention of the simplistic graphics, "...even though this game features some of the simplest graphics I've seen in an indie game it still has enough features to make it noteworthy."  The mention on the graphics really hit home since he referred to the sewer stage as "a desert wasteland littered with dying fish".  Good thing I leveled up my graphics skills during and after that game.  My next solo game will look better, I promise!



Now, as an indie, it apparently is illegal to NOT talk about Steam's Greenlight right now.  I'm going to keep it short since I need to leave very soon.  Personally, I'm having a great time with it.  I've got three pages of games that I'm interested in getting (out of 26 total pages), so it's been a lot of fun to find new projects.  I was considering putting March to the Moon on there simply so I could get more people to look at it.  I seriously doubt that it would be able to get on Steam.  Then they put the $100 entry barrier to keep the riff-raff out.  Well, it worked.  I'm going to hold off on putting anything into Greenlight until Siphon Spirit is finished.  If we can't make $100 off Siphon Spirit then we've been doing something horribly horribly wrong.

I hope we haven't been doing anything horribly horribly wrong.