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[jrjellybeans]

The Cherokee Indian is a 2D platforming game inspired by the Harvest Moon series of game.  In it, you will plant Native American crops, hunt and capture animals, and build authentic buildings.

It is a paid game that we are going to sell for 24.30.


Here is a link to the demo download:

The Cherokee Indian Demo

Additional Pictures:
Pic 1

Pic 2

Pic 3

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YouTube videos:









The Cherokee Indian Video 2

The Cherokee Indian Video 3

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If you play the game, please send me your computer information.  In particular, we would like to know:
1.  Your CPU power
2.  Your RAM
3.  We're mostly looking for bug testers.  If you encounter any errors, please save a copy of the exact text and send it to us.

In addition, we are currently looking for people to play the entire game.  The game should take about 15 hours to beat.  If you're interested, please let us know as soon as possible.

Please send us your information to:

jrjellybean [AT] live [DOT] com

[deadeye]

I remember when you were shopping this around for an artist, and were offering pay.

In all honesty, I hope your artist is working for free because those tiles are terrible

I'll give the game a shot though.

[jrjellybeans]

In all honesty, I hope your artist is working for free because those tiles are terrible


What's strange about this is that some of the tile sheets are rather good!  Others aren't as good.

In either case, the game has been updated with slightly different graphics.  I'll be updating the images and video later today.

The game is available for sale at our website.  I'm also going to make a regular announcement post about it.

Jr. Jellybeans The Home of The Cherokee Indian - A Game About Native American History

Any comments or questions in regards to feedback, please send them to [email protected]

Thanks!

[DrDerekDoctors]

Looks genuinely interesting, and reminds me a bit in concept of Grell & Falla (which is a side-on game about killing enemies and growing stuff from 1992 - http://www.ysrnry.co.uk/articles/grellandfalla.htm - it's ace but alas suffers from a shonky framerate) but in all honesty I think you'll have trouble selling it just because it looks properly crap. And I don't say that to be mean at all, simply that people have a certain expectation of stuff they pay for and I think Jeff Vogel is the only guy who gets away with selling stuff which looks shit any more.

Good luck with it, though!

[jrjellybeans]

but in all honesty I think you'll have trouble selling it just because it looks properly crap

What exact parts of the game look like crap?  I'm assuming it's the beginning background, which I can admit does look a bit [not good].

Besides that, could you tell me exactly what parts of the game looked so bad?

(I'm genuinely curious as this sort of helpful criticism has been hard to come by.)

[deadeye]

Okay, I finally had a proper go at the game.  The mouse-controlled platforming is a little hard to get used to at first, but overall it's not a bad control scheme, and the engine seems pretty solid.

The game itself however takes up so much of my computer's resources (especially at fullscreen) that it was a chore to even take the few screenshots I posted below.

Let's break them down one at them one at a time...



What am I even looking at here?  It's a huge swath of plain texture with a bed floating in the middle.  There's no definition to anything except the player, and the textures quite frankly are not very well designed.  Your artist needs to create some assets for this to be a believable home.  It's total crud.



Here's a shot showing all of the major problems with the art.  First, there's a high-res hud and background, but the player, the tree, and the birds are all pixel art.  Never the twain should meet.  You need to have your artist pick one style and stick with it... high res, or pixel art, not both.

Second, the texture (I won't even call it "tiles") for the dirt is terribly plain, and don't even match the top layer of ground.  The texture itself is extremely ugly and doesn't tile well, especially when you see so much of it at once.  Same goes for the grass.

Third, the birds and tree look a little bit like they were appropriated from some other game.  They just don't match the rest of the scene, and the tree is basically sitting on a mound of dirt that's plopped on top of the hideous grass texture.

The different art styles used all over the place just tell me that your artist doesn't know what the hell he's doing.



Here we see another problem.  There is a black outline around the rock and the tree stump, but there is no black outline around anything else.  Again it looks like those pieces were just snagged from some other game.

The tops of your platforms don't match with the bases.  And I count five different shades of green on five different unmatching grass textures.

The animal here is also high-res, and again looks like it was snagged from yet another game.  It doesn't look like it belongs in the game at all.

The mountains in the background are really amateurishly painted as well.


Overall, there is not one element in the artwork of this game that matches up with any other element.  There is no cohesion to the design.  It's almost as if you had a different artist making each tile, each sprite, and each background element without ever seeing what the other artists were doing.  In other words, the artist you got for your game is horrible, horrible, horrible, and I truly hope you haven't paid him a single cent.  You need to get an artist who can create assets that will not only look like they belong together, but who can actually, you know... draw.  And design proper tiles.

You need to go back to the drawing board and start all over from scratch with a new artist.  The art you have here is just plain not worth paying money for, and in all honesty I think you might have trouble getting people to play this for free.


As for the game itself, I didn't really play all that much.  I'm not sure what the grunting pig noise is supposed to be when you click a menu item.  And, coming from a Native American, the "crying indian" animation when the game closes is laughably cliche.  I would get rid of that entirely if I were you

There were a bunch of other things that bugged me as well, but I'm going to have to continue this later because I have a terrible headache right now (no, not becasue of your game ).

[DrDerekDoctors]

Deadeye has rather saved me the trouble - I agree with everything he's put. It's just uncohesive, plain, tiley, inorganic and ugly on almost every level. Which is a pity as it seems quite pacey (which is something easy to overlook in a sorta' strategy platformer) and looks like it might have some depth and interest to the play. I genuinely think the graphics would require a re-do-from-start by a competant artist. Given the setting, image size and resolution someone like Daydream'd (http://spriteattack.cator.de/) probably be good at producing art in a timely manner and to a very nice standard.

[Melly]

It's pretty damn obvious that artist didn't create most of those assets. I mean, no artist manages to create such crazily different assets in such different styles and levels of skill, unless he tries to.

My bet is that your 'artist' either only made some of those assets and lifted all the rest from other sources at the last minute, I'd imagine either due to not giving a shit or procrastinating, or lifted everything from somewhere else altogether. Basically, he did a Limbo of the Lost there on you.

Of course, these are my assumptions. I might be wrong. But I could bet money I'm right on this one.

[DrDerekDoctors]

It's pretty damn obvious that artist didn't create most of those assets. I mean, no artist manages to create such crazily different assets in such different styles and levels of skill, unless he tries to.

I feel you're unfairly discounting the possibility that his artist has multiple personality disorder.

But yeah, if I were asked "who did those graphics?" I'd have to ask "which particular ones?" before giving an answer.

[Balrog]

Is this a spiritual sequel to Whomp 'Em?

[Kren]

It's pretty damn obvious that artist didn't create most of those assets. I mean, no artist manages to create such crazily different assets in such different styles and levels of skill, unless he tries to.

My bet is that your 'artist' either only made some of those assets and lifted all the rest from other sources at the last minute, I'd imagine either due to not giving a shit or procrastinating, or lifted everything from somewhere else altogether. Basically, he did a Limbo of the Lost there on you.

Of course, these are my assumptions. I might be wrong. But I could bet money I'm right on this one.

I would go with the theory of multiple artist .

[jrjellybeans]

AT deadeye:

These are the exact sort of comments that we could have used.  Thanks a bunch!

The fact is, we had a huge rage of artists (I think about 5-6) in total.  There was just a ton of art in the game.

**********************

In addition, we started off by tasking all the art to a single person (he was working too slow).  Then we moved on to a team (they just decided to stop working on the art).

In other words, finding art for this game was a real b***h.

There's nothing more that I'd like to do than redo all of the art (in fact, we'd probably redo the entire engine to make everything larger).  We've already spent a lot of money on the art already (and there's the time constraint as well).

Which is a pity as it seems quite pacey (which is something easy to overlook in a sorta' strategy platformer) and looks like it might have some depth and interest to the play.

It's funny you should mention this, we were going to write a blog about this later:

Depth was exactly what we were going for.  We were trying to make this casual / hardcore game with a great story.

http://playthisthing.com/ just did an article about this game (which is awesome).  But, he called the game "Pleasant enough, and suitable for the kids."  If anyone's played until the end, they'd learn that the story takes a strange twist.  It's nothing disturbing but we thought... unique.

All in all, we don't really know if this is a success or fail.  People who seem to play it like it, but think the art is terrible.  We think it's an interesting game with a well told story.  Sales have been a bit slow...

Maybe we'll do a complete redo of the game AFTER we finish our next one

Thanks for the comments all!

[Radix]

If you've already spent a bunch of money on graphics (you got gypped), that's probably even more reason to take care of the most obvious barrier to reaching your sales potential, before interest fades and people stop giving a shit.

[jrjellybeans]

If you've already spent a bunch of money on graphics (you got gypped), that's probably even more reason to take care of the most obvious barrier to reaching your sales potential, before interest fades and people stop giving a shit.

I wouldn't say we got gypped.  Personally, I think the majority of the art is rather good.  I agree that it doesn't BLEND well, but I wouldn't say it looks decent enough to me.

Either way, that's something we've been thinking about.  However, again, redoing the art by one person would take too long and it would just be too costly.

It's actually cheaper for us to push forward with our next game (which will be WAY simpler).

We did lower the price to try to gather up sales faster.  I'll post an update on how things go.

[deadeye]

Personally, I think the majority of the art is rather good.

Then I would say you shouldn't trust your own judgment.  Listen to the criticism people are giving you.  It's not meant to be nasty, it's meant to help you make a better product.  The response to the artwork has been pretty unanimous in this thread, so to say "I think it's rather good" is a huge mistake.

Your customer base is going to be really small if you release this game as-is.  You're doing yourself a disservice by laying crap art on top of the game engine you've worked so long and hard on.  It's pretty much a waste of a decent game engine, and that's a real shame.

Here's a piece of advice for your next project:  Gather together a few examples of various potential artist's work, and post a thread in Art asking people's opinions on which is best, since you seem unable to judge for yourself.  "Good enough" just isn't good enough if you expect to sell your game, especially if this is your idea of good enough.

Also, if you're paying someone for art, then look at other projects that they've worked on.  Were they able to follow through on the whole thing?  If not, don't bother with them, no matter how good their art looks.

[null & void]

It's pretty damn obvious that artist didn't create most of those assets. I mean, no artist manages to create such crazily different assets in such different styles and levels of skill, unless he tries to.

My bet is that your 'artist' either only made some of those assets and lifted all the rest from other sources at the last minute, I'd imagine either due to not giving a shit or procrastinating, or lifted everything from somewhere else altogether. Basically, he did a Limbo of the Lost there on you.

Of course, these are my assumptions. I might be wrong. But I could bet money I'm right on this one.

This. Sorry to say.

i recognize at least half of those as belonging to other, commercial games. Worst of all, though, I recognize the HUD elements as belonging to one of the Gamecube Harvest Moon games.

Get new art, or you will probably have legal trouble, especially because you're getting money out of this. Your artist saddled you wih assets that belong to other people, people in charge of big companies who can afford lawyers who will blame it on you and get away with it. I haven't played the game, but I don't need to -- the screenshots I've seen show enough stolen art to get a man executed.

[Gryphon]

It's pretty damn obvious that artist didn't create most of those assets. I mean, no artist manages to create such crazily different assets in such different styles and levels of skill, unless he tries to.

My bet is that your 'artist' either only made some of those assets and lifted all the rest from other sources at the last minute, I'd imagine either due to not giving a shit or procrastinating, or lifted everything from somewhere else altogether. Basically, he did a Limbo of the Lost there on you.

Of course, these are my assumptions. I might be wrong. But I could bet money I'm right on this one.

This. Sorry to say.

i recognize at least half of those as belonging to other, commercial games. Worst of all, though, I recognize the HUD elements as belonging to one of the Gamecube Harvest Moon games.

Get new art, or you will probably have legal trouble, especially because you're getting money out of this. Your artist saddled you wih assets that belong to other people, people in charge of big companies who can afford lawyers who will blame it on you and get away with it. I haven't played the game, but I don't need to -- the screenshots I've seen show enough stolen art to get a man executed.

Wow. That's kinda sad. Seriously, people like that really piss me off...

[Gainsworthy]

As a disclaimer, I, like everyone else in this thread, is posting to confirm that yes: the game needs to be reworked. I don't mean to be insulting or mean. Sorry.


That said

...I agree that it doesn't BLEND well...

Is the exact problem. I mean, for example, I saw a video, the Brave sprite looks good enough, and indeed, in a game with the same art style, would fit right in. Howver, in this game, he clashes with everything he interacts with. This goes doubly for say, that pre-rendered Wolf sprite, or the Tree sprite. It doesn't matter how nice an individual object looks. It must work as a whole. At the moment it's like combining caramel and anchovies and sponge cake and cummin and soy sauce.

And the backgrounds seal the deal. I fear they wouldn't fit in any game, period.


On a final note: To be honest, if it wasn't for this thread I wouldn't have touched the game. I mean, it makes me see that you're comitted, and you've put a whole heap of work into it. I'm downloading the demo as I type this. Will play soon. However, I fear most folk will not have the bonus of reading through your thoughts whilst considering the game.

Again, apologies for the harsh words. But a decent sample size is important. I wish you all the best with the game!

[deadeye]

i recognize at least half of those as belonging to other, commercial games.

WHOA.

If this is true, then yeah... you really can't sell this game legally.  You're asking for trouble.

[falsion]

For one thing, the hill background in the original screen shot looks like the default landscape from Terragen (a program which generates 3D renders of scenery), which is only free for non commercial use (unless you buy a license). That alone could potentially get you into some trouble.

Some of the other graphics do look like I've seen them somewhere else before, but I can't exactly place where I've seen them.