Online is still the plan, though it's still up in the air a bit how exactly it'll be accomplished.

Thanks for the insight guys. I'll put plenty of thought into this. It's not exactly certain I'll go with this scheme, or just go more traditional, or pull something unique out of my ass (I thought of Farbs' registration thing, and how interesting it is, though I'd probably do it differently than he does, or did. Been a while since I checked it out).

On another note, you should think about player psychology if you want to pay your bills. To me, pay $1 to extend gameplay is not good, I feel like I am being fleeced before I even start playing. But pay for a new character is A-OK. Perceived value is important.

Mmm, could you elaborate?

Ivaaaaaaaaaaaaaan

While I want to be successful financially, I don't want it to be at the cost of the game's design. While just making a game with the intent of selling any part of it already changes your mentality toward its development, I want to limit it to "make it polished and balanced so people will actually want to pay money for it and not just download it as a curiosity", and not have it extend much beyond that.

That suggestion kinda reminds me of how free mmo's tend to work. I've read about them, and how the design works in there. It's entirely built around profit, built around exploiting logical fallacies, emotions and social interactions to get the most people in the game and as many of them spending as possible.

I'm not saying that this is what you're suggesting I do. I'm just saying that I don't want to have anything close to that mentality. Doing so would go against everything that made me love this medium in the first place.

The focus of the game is still in the multiplayer, one player as the boss and the other as the hero. Bosses are planned to all be fairly elaborate. Buying the boss would give you the ability to play both with it and against it. I'll have to make sure that's very obvious in whatever marketing I do, since I feel that kinda doubles the value of the boss.

The plan is also to go all mega man up in this and have the hero being able to collect abilities from defeated bosses. So buying a boss also buys you a new ability for the hero.

'Try before you buy' can work, and I agree it's a good idea to give people a chance to see if they'd really like to have a new specific boss. Not entirely sure how I'd accomplish that, but it's something to keep in mind.

I honestly don't like the idea that all the bosses are unlockable, but can also be instantly bought. First, I hate repetitive grinding. It's an artificial way to extend a game's lifetime, it has you trade too much of your precious time for in-game stuff instead of skill, and have that time not advance anything else. Second, I don't like the idea that you can either buy something to get it instantly but you can also get it for free with some work. If I make people work for getting something, I'll feel compelled to make that work worthwhile. If I let people also cheat their way through with money, I'm undermining my own effort and design, and they're undermining the experience they could have with the game.

Stil working on it~ I'll show things to you all when I have soemthing nice. I wanna wow people a little more.

However, the main reason for this post is to ask a question.

I've been wanting to make games for a living for a while, and my plan for Guardian Soul was always for it to eventually have a more complete and polished version for sale someday after the compo (a more polished and blanced version of whatever I posted at the compo would eventually become the demo for it).

That's still the plan, but I'm thinking of doing something a little different. The game itself, with 1 or 2 bosses, is completely free. Then I'll be making new bosses after that, and you can download them for small prices (one dollar each is the plan right now).

I was wondering what you guys think of that idea. I know it would be cooler for everything of it to be totally free of charge, but like I said, I don't want to suffer through a boring dayjob to pay my bills, I want to spend all that time making awesome games, and I have to start somewhere.

I'm also thinking of changing the name to Guardian Spirit, because I found out there's already an iOS game named Guardian Soul.

I'll see. You'll probably have a bigger share of the soundtrack to do this time. But I'm planning on this game being profitable somehow, now that it won't be for the compo.

I'm going to keep working on this:



Will update this thread until the voting is over, then I'll link to a devlog.

A torrent could be a good idea, but it's probably best to wait until voting starts.

Very well then. But I surely hope you can exibit the same work ethic from now on and we can see this game in its glorious completed form. I can understand it would be hard though. Competitions are great as a dopamine fix.

I agree that you should have submitted the alpha. Hell, for soemthing like this you could still sneak it in and I doubt anyone would complain.

And a question about the rules: Am I allowed to update the game now, post deadline? More specifically, I'd like to upload a Mac version with the same content, but with some tweaks to controls and sound to make it work better on Macs.

I don't see any problem with that.

I don't know if I'm going forward with GS. I'll need to think about it carefully. In the end, it was my own fault, again, that made it fail.

This has become a tradition of mine in competitions. A tradition, and an aspect of myself, I deeply hate.

I need to rethink some stuff.

Props to shojin for still going forward and making the song despite my lack of progress. I can recommend his work to anyone interested.

That's probably up to Derek, as he's going to assemble the entries and all that jazz.

Interesting stuff. We'll have to try and find some people to play this with.

Nice work everyone. Lots of interesting stuff on the completion thread. I myself don't know when exactly the competition should end, but you guys should probably hurry at this point.

Derek will probably announce the exact moment the competition ends. Regardless, it tends to be a pretty fuzzy line.

What you do with the game past the compo is completely up to you. Even during voting there isn't much problem with bug fixes and balance tweaks, as long as you don't add new content to the game, which would be a little unfair to the other participants.

After the voting, though, it's completely up to you. You can also keep working on another version of the game separate from the one you submitted to the compo even during voting, but it won't be judged.

Cubic environments are the new cel-shading.

hugs to all canadians