I've been going through the process of setting up an LLC... let me give you some advice you won't read in most articles:

1. You're going to need a registered agent that will receive business mail. You can't receive certain stuff directly to your business. I chose InCorp services. They are free for the first year but around $70-$80 annually after that. (http://www.incorp.com/)

2. In California, I ended up paying around $200 in filing/paperwork fees to register my LLC business completely

3. Beware of yearly business taxes. I don't know about Texas, but California makes you pay an $800 annual business tax for LLC. This is basically never mentioned in any sort of "how-to" articles and it's kind of important information to know. Check with your state to see if they require you to pay annual taxes.

If you have any questions about filling out the forms, just let me know. I had 2 different forms sent back to me for dumb reasons that I didn't catch.

(one of them was because when I listed my registered agent, I included the address... apparently that is a no-no, you just list the agent name... for some reason they refused my LLC application because I gave TOO much information? It's really kind of silly)

You could have the people sign NDAs before testing... It would at least provide some protection.

Most things in games can't really have copyrights applied to them. I think you are probably wanting trademarks... in which case... well it's kind of a mix. Probably good to try and trademark your game's name.

Lots of indie developers don't trademark anything though... like I can't seem to find "3D Boy" or "Team Meat" as any sort of trademarked name or logo.

Half a year until you run a sale sounds reasonable.

I would say depending on the game, something like 3%-5% off per month from release seems fair.

So two months after release you could possibly do a 10% off, and 6 months you could do 25-30% off. A year later it's 50-75% off.

I'd be pretty annoyed if I bought a game at launch and a month later it's like 50% off.

"Pocketships" could be nice

You might want to look up what a pocket rocket is... and then probably consider changing the name of your game.

Thanks! Glad you like it so far!

Speaking of pickpocketing, I'm going to be posting a new gif soon showing off the pickpocketing portion of the game. Stay tuned.

@Scott

That is a good idea. I'm worried that digging will need to be stripped down to prevent fail states in puzzles. Take this gif for example.



Since you can dig out any green block its very easy to get stuck and break this puzzle. However if I make it so you can only dig blocks that will help you, then theres no puzzle here. Its just poking things until you get the desired result. Thats probably fine for general exploration and movement but eh... it feels limited.

I could just man up and add a restart room button and failstates. :l

Why does digging have to be so freeform? Maybe it could fit better if digging was limited in some way, like only possible with a certain ground type. Then you can control when and where the player can dig and digging becomes a puzzle element to consider

With a block breaking game I was working on, what I did was allowed the player to "collect" the dirt blocks they broke, and then drop them from the top of the screen.

So this way, you give the player the ability to rebuild... say... a staircase to get out of a hole.

You picked a company name that is synonymous with nauseate and disgust?

Good luck, sir. 

The burglaries are kind of laid out like predefined missions (rob this place at night and steal x amount, rob this place during the day and steal x amount) so I'm not sure getting clues for when to rob a place would help much in this case... however, I think it could still be cool to get special clues or hints about stuff by stealing things off of people.

Since the game has a Super Mario World type overworld, there could be stuff like maybe some guy has a little hand scribbled note that marks the location of his buried treasure on the overworld map, and you can then go to that spot and find it.

Speaking of the overworld map, I might be able to get around to showing that off here in a short while... I still want to fill it out a bit more and we need a few additional art assets for it, but soon enough I can show it to give everyone a better understanding as to how you go about getting around the world and picking places to loot.

Thanks for the comments!

Welcome!

You won't move slower from collecting more items. There will be a carry limit but it won't mess with your speed.

I made this decision just based off the fact that I generally dislike becoming slowed down in games. Sure it's realistic but I just feel like it's too great a punishment, especially when your prime objective is to grab lots of stuff and get around quickly. I'm all for freedom of movement.

Will there regular phones in houses too? So you might also have to cut phone lines, as well steal the cellphone.

Never even crossed my mind, but it's an excellent idea! Could definitely have something like that in the more difficult burglaries.

That's cool about the Adult Swim publishing thing...

They reached out to me as well but my game is still in far too early of development for me to be considering publishers right now.

It's great to see them branching out and really giving indies a chance.

Haven't read that, I'll look into it!

Civilians will definitely have different financial situations... Some will appear to be wealthy or poor but I'll make sure that it's not always the case.

Each civilian will be able to carry up to 4 different items. Most everyone will have a cellphone. (who doesn't nowadays?) and then they will have a variety of items such as cash, watches, jewelry... even gum wrappers. 

I've been thinking of some other fun items for them to carry. Maybe some might carry items that reveal information about them... like a lady carrying around a picture of her cat, or a guy carrying a flask or something. I think it could be fun to possibly have certain rare loot appear on people as well, stuff to collect for completionist purposes or for side missions or something.

If anyone has ideas for loot in the game, feel free to share! I have a pretty extensive list but I'm sure there is a lot of stuff I'm missing.

Thanks everyone!

The game is making steady progress. Been busy working on a lot of "behind the scenes" stuff, so no pictures to post today!

I've been working mostly on the AI for the citizens in the game. I made some changes to their movement behavior... mainly, they will never make a 180 degree rotation. Since I want the player to be able to sneak around behind people, it makes it feel really cheap if the citizen just instantly turns around completely and catches you. So a simple fix was to just make sure they can only turn at 90 degree angles. Since the random movement has the citizen idling for at least 1 second per direction, this means the player has a moment to stay behind the citizen at all times.

Essentially if you manage to sneak up behind a citizen, you should be able to successfully stalk them for as long as you want (as long as you are in sneak mode and keep moving behind them as they turn)

Other than being fun to sneak behind them undetected, it also serves a purpose. If you can sneak behind a citizen close enough, you can pick-pocket them. There is a great little pick-pocketing mini-game that I've been mocking up which will allow you to sneakily steal items off of citizens. Like stealing their house keys to unlock any door in their house instantly, or stealing their cellphone. So even if they spot you, they can't call police.

Aside from that little fix, I've been spending a chunk of time adding in various AI behaviors such as sleeping, panicking, calling 9-1-1, and setting up the systems for pathfinding when needed. I've also been extensively working on the cone of sight and line of sight stuff, as that's a pretty integral part of the gameplay.

I've actually come up with a solution for avoiding the permadeath thing too, but I'll discuss that later maybe.

Step 1: Create a game starring your character that revitalizes the game industry.

Step 2: Slowly update your character design through decades of iteration

Step 3: Place that character as the star of nearly every major launch title game for the new consoles you release

Step 4: Then place that character in dozens of various game genres like golfing, basketball, tennis, kart racing, rpgs, soccer, baseball, etc.

Step 5: Market that character tirelessly. Make cartoons starring the character... t-shirts, hats, backpacks, toys, posters, stickers, cereal, lunchboxes, bad live action movies, etc.

Boom, your character is more recognizable than Mickey Mouse. (no joke)

Also some additional tips:

- The character should either not talk at all, or be super positive with almost a naive child-like quality about them. The child-like aspect works well to reach a massive audience and helps make the character endearing and likable. (Mario, Link (the non-animated series versions), Mickey Mouse, Spongebob, Pikachu, etc) Conversely, you could give them some "attitude" but this tends to limit your audience down to mostly boys or younger people only (Sonic, Conker, Donkey Kong, Link (the animated series version), Ratchet & Clank, Crash Bandicoot, Earthworm Jim, etc)

Note that the more attitude you give the character, the less likely they are to reach "Mario" status. The more extreme you push one aspect of a character's personality, the more you isolate the audience.

I feel like this is why Sony has never had a breakout mascot that really represented the company throughout the years. Pretty much all their characters have serious 'tude, and it causes a disconnect with a lot of people. I guess Spyro is like a halfway between Mario and a 'tude character, which is why he's been mildly successful but still hurting because they give him the stupid eyebrows:


("Look at this raised eyebrow! DO YOU SEE HOW MUCH ATTITUDE I HAVE?!")

Oh, if you want your character design to never reach mass popularity, give them the stupid raised eyebrow as their signature look. Guaranteed to stay mediocre.

Also sunglasses... stay away from sunglasses...


(Even generic dino side-kick disapproves)

In fact, stay away from any clothing that is currently "in". Plenty of early 90's characters with the backwards hats and jeans and sneakers and sunglasses who are now just jokes.

Thanks for the well thought out and lengthy reply.

I'm always curious about having low initial goals and then having stretch goals that are like 30x more than the initial goal. What made you decide to set up your funding this way?

Does this typically work well for KS? I haven't really seen any examples of it working well. Usually the KS ends up getting slightly over or maybe double their initial goal, but it's a long way off from 30x the initial goal.

I figured it would make more sense to start somewhere more realistic for a full game... like at least 30k. It feels more like you're going to make "Game: Lite" instead of "Game", unless you hit a bunch of stretch goals. Is it the fear of not hitting higher goals?

It kind of worries me seeing kickstarters like this, or especially kickstarters that are like "help us reach $5k to fund our tileset, and then help us reach $2k more to fund some sprites, and then $3k more in another KS to hit our music funding", etc.

To me I feel like if your initial game isn't the "full" thing, then it shouldn't really be kickstarted. "Stretch goals" should literally be adding more polish or maybe for advertisement or something. I see you've listed "polish the game" but it's at the 100k stretch goal... Which means... basically unless your game reaches $100k funding then we'd be getting a "lite" unpolished version of the game?

Also just curious as to what would happen if you actually hit $300k. Would the game still be released by October 2014? That's an absolute ton of features and work to add on to the game by that point in time. So I would assume you'd probably have to delay the full release of the game for many more months... which isn't really being fair to people who were expecting it in October. Especially because in order to reach that goal, you'd have to get a TON of people donating, and that just means a TON of disappointed people when the inevitable release delay occurs.

Sorry if this seems really negative but I'm genuinely curious as to why people set up their Kickstarters like this. Is it just generally a fear of not getting funded by asking for "too much"?

DEM MMF COUNTERS

This is looking really great! 

Cool looking game and congrats on your success so far!  

But... I just wanted to let you know that you are breaking pretty much rule #1 on this forum by having your first posts be advertisement for your game and not first posting in the introduction thread.

Just seems a bit spammy.

Twitter in my signature.

Our followers are the coolest followers that ever followed.

I am in disbelief that a human being on a game development forum has not played Pokemon.