The thought of letting a month go by without an Illumination is really sad.
No, that isn't going to happen--not on my watch! Let me give you the quick rundown of what's going on. I'm going to follow the Good News, Bad News format because it adds a lot of drama.
Bad News - Mike Rimer Gets a Day Job
Mike started a new job, and this cuts waaaay down on the amount of time he can spend on DROD development tasks. We're trying to get a patch out with various important bug fixes. We don't want to start promoting
DROD: The City Beneath until we've got this patch in place, because it may make a bad impression on new players and press contacts. Also, we have to hold up on CD printing, because we don't want major bugs burned onto discs.
Good News - The City Beneath Much More Popular than Predicted
I decided a while back not to give specific sales figures, but still, I can hint a little bit. Last year we made a conservative projection on how much money we'd make from sales of
The City Beneath over its lifetime. Let's say my prediction was 10,000 greckles.
In the last few months we've made no effort to promote TCB. In fact, I have turned down people who wanted to review TCB, sell TCB from their site, or sell TCB through retail outlets. Mike and I didn't think it was ready. And as many of you know, we obfuscated the location of the demo in April so that only the most determined people would find the game. This was all part of the "
community release"
strategy, or as the more cynical would put it--"
public beta test"
strategy. We are still getting ready for the general release.
Yet despite us being completely unfocused on selling copies of
The City Beneath, in just two months, we made about 7,500 greckles. I think we will probably surpass the 10,000 greckle goal this summer instead of in 2009 like I thought before. So grecklewise, we are doing great--way better than expected.
Ah, but more important than the greckles is that people are loving TCB. We knew if we built it, they would come. But we didn't know if they'd actually like it. Now that the dust has settled, I think we really put out a solid game that is fun to play.
Bad News - Reach of my Voice Greatly Diminished
Bulk e-mail is still not working. That means this Illumination wasn't mailed out to 3000 people that voluntarily signed up to receive the Illumination. That means that people aren't getting notifications when posts are made on the forum. I'm working with Jamie Jones to set up a mail server for bulk mailing. We are doing this very carefully so that there is no way our critical CaravelNet services, website, and eCommerce can be shut down as a result of some hamfisted proclamation that our teeming masses of outbound e-mail messages are spam.
Can I take a moment to scream something at every system administrator working for a hosting provider in the entire world?
"
Just because we are sending lots of e-mail messages doesn't mean we are spamming!"
Good News - The Return of Cramp
Matthew Cramp, former webmaster, but ever-present force of Crampitude, has joined the Caravel team wearing two hats--support technician and marketing assistant.
A number of people may have noticed how poor I am at answering support requests in a timely manner. It got so bad that I started directing nearly all of the support requests to Mike. That was good for a while, but then he got his day job and things were bad again. We decided we needed some help, so Matt's going to be answering a lot of the requests that come in. It will help a lot and free Mike and I to work on getting the next game out.
Also, Matt is going to be doing everything he can to get our games publicity and recognition. He'll be contacting magazines and websites to pitch them on DROD. I wanted Danforth Strout to do this, but he's currently busy handling the TCB exit screen.
Bad News - No Topic Picks Again
I'm running out of time again. This always takes me about an hour to do, so I end up skipping it when I'm short on time.
Good News - Topic Picks in the Future
I'm going to find another person to help me with them. I really like topic picks and they serve the purpose of enticing players onto the forum. And they
should be enticed. Our forum is awesome!
Bad News - I Gotta Go to the Bathroom
Another reason for cutting this Illumination short.
Good News - Meeting With Publisher to Discuss Next Game
I have been talking to a publisher who is interested in funding development of our next game if we do a few things to give them a distribution advantage. To be honest, Mike and I are capable of funding our own games and we don't need to hook up with a publisher, but there is a possible deal here that will make our next game get done much faster and have some extra bells and whistles. I'm meeting with the publisher next week. I'll let you know what happens!
Bad News - I Really Gotta Go to the Bathroom
Okay, I'm leaving now.
-Erik
____________________________
The Godkiller - Chapter 1 available now on Steam. It's a DROD-like puzzle adventure game.
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[Last edited by mrimer at 05-31-2007 03:26 AM]
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community. I applaud you all. 
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