In the second week Astronaught received a small number of contributions, boosting it up to $167. This results effectively in 110Euro. The following days and weeks didn't bring in any contributions and we're still at that number.
To explain the lack of updates i need to clear something up: I am currently in a difficult situation. I need to get out of my apartment end of this month and find a new one. This implicates to be actually able to pay the rent. Finding a suitable job is not easy either, mainly because i am not sure what i can do. Well, i'm a programmer, i could just get a programming job. The thing is i'm more a creative person than a hard laborer, so working on repetitive and unrewarding tasks is dragging me down both physically and mentally. This is why i chose to be independent. Turns out the term is misleading if you don't have a stable source of income or you're not called Tim Schafer. ;)
Additionally programmer jobs are usually long term and full time day jobs. 2 ways to prevent me from enjoying my personal game development.
So what else could i do? Currently i am clueless.
Regarding gamedev, well, maybe i've been approaching this whole thing from the wrong direction. But i can only learn by doing these mistakes. Overambitious feature-creeped project anyone? Turns out i often cannot settle with games that could effectively be programmed on a computer that is 20 years old. I desire the technical and design challenges my ideas provide me with. While it is entertaining to come up with a solution to a difficult problem it can also aid the learning process and help coming up with solutions for completely different problems. This is what makes game development interesting to me.
So what am i trying to say here? You might have guessed it by now: Astronaught won't be developed.
I want to apologize to everyone who supported and put their faith in me and the game. I received some awesome feedback and i am very glad about all of the comments you made.
Also i want to thank everyone who contributed to the campaign. Your support will help me through this difficult time and i hope i can make up for it with a future project.
Special thanks fly out to Bob Chatman for all his encouragement and his generous contribution.
Sorry i couldn't live up to your expectations.
wzl
Showing posts with label 8bitfunding. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 8bitfunding. Show all posts
Sunday, April 1, 2012
Sunday, March 11, 2012
First week of Astronaught funding passed.
Ok, so it's not exactly one week, but i'd like to make these updates on Sundays.
The campaign has been running since Tuesday, so let me post some info on how it went so far.
Let's start with the Youtube video. It got around 1300 views since then. This is rather amazing, and the highest view count i achieved to get ever in a Youtube video. The analytics on it are interesting to analyze:
The spanish game portal anaitgames.com covered Astronaught with a short article which resulted in the biggest source of views (nearly 300). Thanks for covering it anait!
The second biggest source of views(nearly 200) is indiegamemag.com who first covered my game in a news post, and it seems to origin of all the other (p)reviews on blogs. Thanks Priestman for the great article!
Almost the same amount of views comes from reddit. Thanks @slushy_ to post it there!
The remaining views are spread across several sites, link-portals and of course the 8BitFunding campaign site.
So what else did i do for publicity. I went to different forums i frequent like TIGSource and GPWiki and a few other smaller places. I created a project site on indiedb.com but the news didn't get approved to appear on the front page yet, so the resulting views and feedback are very few.
Lastly i obviously post updates on Twitter and a lot of kind users are retweeting it for more exposure. Thanks a lot guys!
So let's get to the juice!
This weeks earning through the campaign were 65USD by 6 people in total, averaging in around 11USD. This translate to 42EUR after substraction of the 8BitFunding and Paypal fees. Pretty good for a start, but not anywhere close to hit the goal (~0.5%). Judged by the amount of Youtube views (100 / (1300 / 6) = ~0.5%) it extrapolates to the estimation that i need a total of around 300,000 views to get the total amount of funding. Although it obviously doesn't work like that.
TL;DR
While it looks like a good start, it doesn't even get close to the goal given the time and duration (5 out of 56 days).
In the remaining 7 weeks i need to implement and show off more core features the game will include, create new art and get a decent gameplay video up to convince people that it is worth contributing.
You all obviously play a big role in it! The more you can spread this by word of mouth (or typed in that respect) the more likely this game will become realized eventually.
Finally, i want to thank everyone who tweeted, blogged, talked and contributed (!) about it so far. I hope i can do your hopes justice and deliver a great game!
Special thanks fly out to Jourdan Cameron who made a good effort of advertising the campaign on several blogs and forums!
http://blackmannrobin.com/2012/03/08/8-bit-outer-space-horror-meet-astronaught/
http://bitmob.com/articles/8-bit-space-horror-and-why-the-industry-needs-to-take-bigger-risks
Thanks man, it is much appreciated!
The campaign has been running since Tuesday, so let me post some info on how it went so far.
Let's start with the Youtube video. It got around 1300 views since then. This is rather amazing, and the highest view count i achieved to get ever in a Youtube video. The analytics on it are interesting to analyze:
The spanish game portal anaitgames.com covered Astronaught with a short article which resulted in the biggest source of views (nearly 300). Thanks for covering it anait!
The second biggest source of views(nearly 200) is indiegamemag.com who first covered my game in a news post, and it seems to origin of all the other (p)reviews on blogs. Thanks Priestman for the great article!
Almost the same amount of views comes from reddit. Thanks @slushy_ to post it there!
The remaining views are spread across several sites, link-portals and of course the 8BitFunding campaign site.
So what else did i do for publicity. I went to different forums i frequent like TIGSource and GPWiki and a few other smaller places. I created a project site on indiedb.com but the news didn't get approved to appear on the front page yet, so the resulting views and feedback are very few.
Lastly i obviously post updates on Twitter and a lot of kind users are retweeting it for more exposure. Thanks a lot guys!
So let's get to the juice!
This weeks earning through the campaign were 65USD by 6 people in total, averaging in around 11USD. This translate to 42EUR after substraction of the 8BitFunding and Paypal fees. Pretty good for a start, but not anywhere close to hit the goal (~0.5%). Judged by the amount of Youtube views (100 / (1300 / 6) = ~0.5%) it extrapolates to the estimation that i need a total of around 300,000 views to get the total amount of funding. Although it obviously doesn't work like that.
TL;DR
While it looks like a good start, it doesn't even get close to the goal given the time and duration (5 out of 56 days).
In the remaining 7 weeks i need to implement and show off more core features the game will include, create new art and get a decent gameplay video up to convince people that it is worth contributing.
You all obviously play a big role in it! The more you can spread this by word of mouth (or typed in that respect) the more likely this game will become realized eventually.
Finally, i want to thank everyone who tweeted, blogged, talked and contributed (!) about it so far. I hope i can do your hopes justice and deliver a great game!
Special thanks fly out to Jourdan Cameron who made a good effort of advertising the campaign on several blogs and forums!
http://blackmannrobin.com/2012/03/08/8-bit-outer-space-horror-meet-astronaught/
http://bitmob.com/articles/8-bit-space-horror-and-why-the-industry-needs-to-take-bigger-risks
Thanks man, it is much appreciated!
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Astronaught went public
Around 3 weeks ago i had a blurry recollection of something that might have been a dream after waking up. The image in my head was a little pixel astronaught running around in a space station. I am not actually sure why i dream in 8bit, but i sure liked the impression.
I started drafting first sketches of the character and a walking and jumping animation. The day after i started a mapeditor with some placeholder tiles and basic box2d collisions.
The coming days i improved on each the tileset, the mapeditor and the game mechanics and went ahead to build the lighting shader. For now it is simply raycasting with a fall-off value to get some nice light rays. So this is the current state development in a nutshell.
So yesterday i started the 8BitFunding campaign and got a really nice review over at the Indie Game Mag. I will dedicate the next few days on some more promotion of the campaign before i can concentrate on the project again. More info on future plans will also follow in the coming days.
I started drafting first sketches of the character and a walking and jumping animation. The day after i started a mapeditor with some placeholder tiles and basic box2d collisions.
The coming days i improved on each the tileset, the mapeditor and the game mechanics and went ahead to build the lighting shader. For now it is simply raycasting with a fall-off value to get some nice light rays. So this is the current state development in a nutshell.
So yesterday i started the 8BitFunding campaign and got a really nice review over at the Indie Game Mag. I will dedicate the next few days on some more promotion of the campaign before i can concentrate on the project again. More info on future plans will also follow in the coming days.
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