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.

Okay, for real this time!

I should have known that nothing would be as easy as I had hoped it would be.  I finally got everything set up so I can sell stuff on my own site and got it activated and everything.  It took a few days longer than I had hoped, which makes me a bit sad.  On the bright side, I'll finally be able to sell March to the Moon!  I'm aiming for Friday morning so I can have a chance to send out information and keys to gaming news sites and hopefully I'll be able to get some attention.

March to the Moon will be available on CaliferGames.com and on the XBox on Friday morning.  I'm hoping to release on IndieCity soon as well, but they haven't been approving any games for some time.  Wait, I just checked and they've approved some today!  Glad to see that they're back on track again.  Hope it won't take too long for them to go over March to the Moon again, but I'm sure they've built up a backlog by now.

In the Siphon Spirit realm, Peter is being secretive.  He's working on a big piece of art and won't show it to me.  He hasn't even had time to get into the game to see if the extra stuff I added to make it more clear that you are not supposed to run into stuff looks right.  Once all the cutscene stuff is finished we should be able to get the alpha demo out the door in no time.

March to the Moon release upcoming

Thanks to Pixel Prospector I now have an idea of how I can sell March to the Moon on the Califer Games site without losing half of the profits.  So I'm aiming at a Saturday release.  I've been holding off on the Xbox release until IndieCity okays me (though you can still get the game in their underground store), but I haven't gotten a response from them for a while now so I'm going to push the Xbox version out on Saturday as well.

There's a bit of a difference with all the different versions.  The Xbox version has a longer load time, the Indie City version has some simple DRM and achievements, and the Califer Games version is DRM free.  It'll be good to finally get it all finished so I'm no longer working on three different games!


In Siphon Spirit land Peter's cleaning things up more to try to make it more obvious what you can and can't absorb and that it's bad to touch the enemies even if you're bigger.  The demo is coming, but we need to work out a few kinks first.


Califer's Japanese Class (again, temporary name) has been keeping me busy as well.  I've got the first screen finished, and added something that will handle menu navigation for me so hopefully the next few screens will be done in no time at all.  I also have about half of the hiragana fully animated now, so that shouldn't hold me back too much.  My main concern right now is getting the game fully operational again, with the screens that I wasn't able to finish last time and get the basics of the RPG battle stuff in by the next Indie Game Night that I'm assuming will be at the end of September, probably just a few days after my birthday.

I've also been doing planning for two other games that I plan on making soon.  Every time I finish a session of planning stuff out I just feel like smacking myself for not having enough self control.  Surely three concurrent projects should be enough for any sane person!

Back From Vacation!

I mean, I am.  Peter left on vacation earlier this week.  Maybe we should have just gone on vacation together.  Peter's got some art in the first level to help people see what they are supposed to do now.  Take a look below!  It still needs a little work, like having the heart shoot a little less often, but I think we're just about there now.

I've been tightening up the graphics.  For some reason there have been some graphical glitches so I'm working on cleaning up the content managers and reworking my texture manager to work a little better.  I also set things up so that if the game does crash the game would send me an email with the crash log so I don't need to rely on the user finding the crash log, getting my email and emailing it to me.  That would probably never happen outside of testing.

It took me a little longer than I had planned to get all the achievements in for the Indie City version of the game.  Then I sent it in and apparently it crashes in the Indie City DLL after about 10 minutes of play.  I think I got it fixed last night, but I only had 15 minutes to test it.  One thing I do know is that my Spirit-Paladin is pretty awesome with a double boost to holy damage and plenty of opportunities to heal myself.  Even after working on it for a year I still have fun playing March to the Moon :)