TheHermit Posted September 16, 2013 Share Posted September 16, 2013 We've just released our first commercial game, Travelogue. It had a kind of a break-neck 3-month development schedule - I basically wanted to test the waters before deciding to focus on game-making as a career but before my current job ended and I had to start sending out applications. All three of us were basically doing this on the side of full-time jobs. Here's our trailer; the awesomely over-the-top voice-over is thanks to Whiskeyninja.There's also browser-based demo you can play We're selling the game both at our site, and on itch.io. There's quite a bit I would have done differently in retrospect - its a pretty niche game for a first offering, and the interface could stand to be much more polished and dynamic.The web demo has also been a source of a lot of trouble, with sound incompatibilities under IE, then the fix to those breaking Chromium, then the fix to that breaking Opera, and so on. I really need to find 'the right way' to do sound in HTML5/JS because this has been ridiculous (doubling up the download size just to include mp3 and ogg versions for different browsers meant I could barely fit the demo onto Kongregate).The other thing that was a big risk with this project is that its basically a Javascript/HTML5 game, but we're trying to sell it at a $10 price point. It was pretty clear that, regardless of what the game was, we'd be fighting the 'its a browser game, it should be free' expectation, so we packaged the game with Node-Webkit and turned it into a native application for Windows and Linux, installer and all. Even the web demo being browser-based seems to trigger this reaction somewhat, though I think its probably worth the traffic that the demo generates for us.So all in all this has been a learning experience that reminds me of that one Go proverb 'lose your first 100 games as quickly as possible'. austin 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
botman Posted September 17, 2013 Share Posted September 17, 2013 Looks really interesting, just played for a couple of minutes and liked it. I don't have much time to play right now, but definitely plan to give it a proper look later. Keen to follow along and see how you get on, as I'm in a similar situation: working on my first proper game (about to release the alpha in a day or two) which is really a desktop sim game rather than casual. I've been considering bundling it with Node-Webkit for the exact same reason as you have. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rich Posted September 17, 2013 Share Posted September 17, 2013 Looks great! Thank you for going into a bit more detail about the build process too, it's always interesting and everyone here likes to read about how games go (especially sales of them). Good luck! Maybe a post-mortem in 6 months? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
touch_the_sky Posted September 17, 2013 Share Posted September 17, 2013 I thought it's about some Travelodge in West Midlands at first:) Tried the web demo, not bad - a bit like HOMM meets Roguelike / Talisman, lots of potential there. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TheHermit Posted September 17, 2013 Author Share Posted September 17, 2013 Thanks for the comments, I'd be happy to do a post-mortem later on. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Autarc Posted September 21, 2013 Share Posted September 21, 2013 Kudos for the exposure on RPS Just tried the demo so far and it was quite good - especially as it reminded me on the old-school Realms of Arkania series. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Join the conversation
You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.