dont worry about that :/ <==== Dyslexic im still making changes so when i done ill go over it 1000 times to make make sure it all ok and have others do the same
You never really justified the game's existence by explaining what's unique or special about it or why it's good. Right now it appears wholly generic. You need to capture peoples' imaginations -- There's no hook here. There's nothing to grab onto to get excited about. As a result the video is boring and most people will not pay attention. I don't think it'll do well on KS in its current form.
metroidvanias are pretty much always action adventure, so sticking both words in the title is needless. be wary of the web player you're using for any video you make. KS's toolbar completely covers the text, so anybody who accidentally mouses over will miss a lot of what you're written (https://i.imgur.com/pJ70K4u.png) generally, the "I'd rather watch a video" audience is explicitly disinterested in reading, so opening up with dialog boxes is unwelcome. the skill you show as the unlockable is pretty cliche. Wall jumping is great, but it's not very novel or exciting. Same with the the collapsing platform later... it's a staple of the genre for a reason, but not necessarily a selling point why does she just sit at the foot of the glowing pillar for a moment? What are viewers supposed to intuit from that? the dungeon that you show around 0:53 is a good change of pace, and I would have appreciated seeing diversity in world design sooner than that. cutting to parts of the level that are clearly just a short distance from another part in the video, or even has parts that you've already seen on it, it makes the stage look really small. as much as possible, show don't tell. The game "brimming with colourful charm" is self-evident and doesn't need to be stated outright since everyone on the page can already tell that. it's not immediately clear what "unique WEATHER themes" means. I would add something like "unique weather themes... such as Torrent Town, the land of eternal thunderstorms, and Volcano Village, the city of a hundred lava lakes" I don't need an answer, but I'm curious how "new equipment" fits in with the unlockable skills and "outfits for sophie" stretch goal. Does the equipment enable skills? If it's shown graphically, does it change her appearance at all? These are things readers might wonder. the sentence "KICK, PUNCH and SMASH your way through monsters and bosses, expanding your move set even more as you play." is completely redundant to the sentence before it. Maybe just add "new monsters, new bosses" to the previous sentence. most of the information in the Gameplay segment is redundant to the Story and/or Features segments. I would consolidate them. the only part of the story that stands out to me is the weather towns and ancient relics. I would elaborate on who is she up against, or how any of this came to be, or what some of the enemies might be like. Are they enemies because they're feral wildlife between spots of civilization? Are they enemies because they have also been cursed? What's the situation? the story segment keeps changing person. At the top it's second person "join sophie on her [...]", in the middle it's third person, and by the end it's first person "stand in your path". It's probably enough to change the your to her at the end. don't use more words than you need to: Environments that are Interconnected -> Interconnected Environments maintain consistent grammar. Everything in the list is a noun except Unlocking New Skills, so I'd change that to Unlockable Skills the Why Kickstarter segment does not adequately explain why. Are you unable to continue self-funding? Is there a part of development funding that you cannot currently meet? What other attempts to link to future players have you made and where did they fall short, or why are other options invalid? Kickstarter isn't the free advertising it used to be, so positioning it as something that will give you a nice boost to your audience over, say, building a Twitter/Reddit/Imgur following, that feels naive and poorly thought out. the New Location stretch goal is missing crucial context. Approximately how many locations will there have already been? Is this doubling the size of the game or adding another five percent? is there a team name? Is the team "we" or "I"? you suggest that you want to make games for everyone, and then immediately follow by implying that the kind of game you want to make is a personal project that might not sell well. These are conflicting concepts and you need to pick one or the other. the game really isn't that unique, so trying to say that it is makes you look a little out of touch. repeating "I have a passion for video games, I want to make fun and colourful video games," is needlessly redundant. please say a few words about the composer. the Risks and Challenges section doesn't actually confess to any risks or challenges. This is dubious.
Everyone else provided a lot of great feedback (especially like the "show, don't tell" part), but allow me to provide four extra points. - I'm noticing that if you ask for too little more and more people think "this developer doesn't know how much production actually costs", "this is crap and they don't believe in it", or "this is vaporware". If you only need the small amount for license costs and the like, you might be better off saving up from a day job? - 5 platforms. You are promising to push to 5 platforms. PS4/XBox/Switch are still somewhat walled gardens. Even if you get access to the store, porting efforts even with well supported engines like Unity / Unreal should run you more than 10k pounds. Also, those platforms are listed in your KS trailer but I had to scroll down to find out they were stretch goals. Also, with Mac deprecating OpenGL support, how is your plan for Mac support down the line? Moreover, have you released on these platforms before? - Your risks and challenges section reads like "I dunno, the unknown unknown?" rather than address an actual set of risks that you're aware of (e.g. the platform issue). - Not 100% sure no one address this, but your trailer has a fair bit of dead space, e.g. the girl standing by the puzzle door for what felt like 2-3 seconds. If it doesn't serve a purpose, cut it. I don't want to be completely negative. The art looks great so far. Movement seems a touch floaty, but reasonable. It just seems like you have some serious scoping and project management issues you want to get locked down before you bring this KS public.
I'm still doing more magic stuff. Some of the fire effects I did this week: The magma seam was a "fun" challenge because the graphic on the bottom has to match the slope of the terrain with nearish fidelity, as well as crop its length if it would otherwise run into a wall or drop off a cliff. This involved a mesh rigged with a dozen points using a raycast at each one and interpolating the interim. The other particles and stuff is pretty vanilla but I think it comes together well.
Hi all! m0dus and I often lurk the thread, but I think this might be my first post here in the indie thread on ERA. Pleasure to meet y'all/see some of y'all again as the case may be :D. We announced this game in 2017 at PAX South, but we've only just finally gotten around to showing some gameplay footage, so I wanted to come share it here too and see what you all think. Announcement trailer here: Lil summary blurb first: Akash: Path of the Five is an otome set in a fantasy world. Players will assume the role of Aurora, a member of a magical race known as the “Al’wan,” or elementals. For nearly a millenia, the number of elemental girls born has dwindled, forcing them to interbreed with humans to save their race from extinction. As the first elemental girl the village of Akash has seen in over 200 years, all eyes are on Aurora while she prepares for her Coming of Age Ceremony. Tensions between her home village and a neighboring village of humans boil over, threatening an all-out war. Players will have the opportunity to cultivate a romance with one of her five classmates, navigate the conflict between the two races, and plan the greatest Coming of Age Ceremony the village of Akash has seen in two centuries. ----- In the time since I started writing this a few years ago I have seen SO many other indie otome pop up, so I'm starting to feel the crunch a little bit. Tumblr seems especially rife with them, though not all of them seem like viable projects since they're sort of free in people's spare time type deals. At any rate, we're doing our best to sort of stand out but also lean into our own POV and strengths, so we went for a more western painted style. I decided to share the first two scenes in their entirety with our Tumblr audience, and then the wider internet later. If anyone's interested I'm happy to post the first scene as well, but for now I'll stick with this one as it introduces the boys. Feedback is welcome. :D We'd love impressions as this is a work in progress--that said we waited this long to show it because we wanted to polish things as best we could first. I hope y'all enjoy! ;3;
I've been lurking this thread for quite some time now and you guys are really a great source of inspiration. For the last few weeks, I've used my free time to learn how to get things done in Unreal Engine 4. I've used the sequencer to make these two videos but I'm starting to work on some gameplay now. And man, it is hard.
its not live it was just a first draft and it clear that i need to go into way more details about what i was planning for the full game
Made a robot sentry. They patrol around the levels on set paths until they find you. If you get out of their range for enough time, they will resume their patrol. If you kill them with the weaker firearms, their upper half will try to crawl towards you and beat you down. Gibbing them will obliterate them outright. Not captured, but there are also computer consoles that if you activate them, the sentries will actually turn friendly and start seeking out enemies for you!
Drone saturday. Because you know you've always wanted to have a floating firebreathing medusa head as a companion.
Sorry my reply took so long: CN is not specifically inspired from one certain Castlevania, but really the earlier games(especially ones with 8 way attacks) as a whole. One of the things that I have loved hearing so far has been which specific game each player considers the inspiration. I'm am also happy to say that our demo has passed 500 downloads, something we would not have thought possible with how little we promoted it. The feedback and response thus far has exceeded our expectations! Edit: Also, there are so many impressive games in this thread...
UGH, spent a lot of time messing with skinned animation stuff for my voxel models and I realized late that it totally messes up my visuals XD As you can see in the arm here, the coloring of each segment looks WAY different from the others... now I have to decide if I want to do frame-based animation (which preserves the "grid" of voxels, which purist assholes prefer anyway ;) ) or whether I abandon the visual thing I'm doing and just let the voxels be boxy. ugh
So as sales start to trail off on Jack B. Nimble, it's probably time for me to start writing a post mortem. I'm curious what people would be interested in knowing about the experience I've had making the game, what would you expect to see in a post mortem? Any ideas would be super appreciated! Here's something I enjoyed making in development:
Looking forward to a post mortem! Would love to hear more about how you balanced having a full time job and making the game. Did you ever feel limited by using an engine without a traditional scripting language? Your experience exporting to ios vs steam. And anything on the art side is always appreciated :) Great looking game BTW!
