Working on new website design

[Rendezvous]

Oh my. It seems I have some reading to do. What a lovely surprise!

Where is that buy button, palaslet?

[Kaesho]

Oh my. It seems I have some reading to do. What a lovely surprise!

Where is that buy button, palaslet?

Bottom of the page. I keep clicking it constantly but it always tells me to come visit the forums and say hi.

[Astra]

"Hi!"

I clicked the buy button, as well. The forum is nice, but I would've preferred a game (smile). I found the "historical excerpts" on the characters interesting. The artwork for the characters was very alluring. The Salvation character has a very mysterious look to her. You casted her voice well in your video. The android character, Wyr? also seemed like an interesting science fiction concept, especially with the human DNA aspect. The game is very multifaceteted. I will be very interested to see how it all comes together. The genre is primarily action? Is there dialog?

Thank you,
*Astra*

[Jabberwocky]

Hey Kaesho, Palaset.
And welcome, Astra.

Whoops! Sorry for the buy button tease. I renamed the "buy now" button on the main menu, but I guess I missed the text link on the bottom.

I found the "historical excerpts" on the characters interesting.

Thanks! Some folks love that stuff, others skip it completely. But I like having a backstory of events, and explaining the tensions between the various factions. It makes the world richer, even if the lore is largely a background part of the game.

I also enjoyed comics when I was younger, and there's nothing quite as much fun as a good origin story.

The genre is primarily action? Is there dialog?

I have trouble categorizing the game. Maybe it's an "action rpg space sim". But yes, action is a key element.

There is dialog. Much of it is general - accepting missions, requesting docking, and that sort of thing. It goes a little deeper in the parts of the game dealing with the Prophecy. It's an interactive thing, where you will often have several responses to choose from. There is some voice acting, but the game isn't fully voice acted.

Thank you,
*Astra*

You're welcome!

[loath]

hey jabberwocky...

have you considered sending review copies to game sites/mags for buzz/feedback? the rps guy seems really curious.

the new site is awesome. i'm looking forward to purchasing salvation prophecy. my first pc game growing up was 'starflight' and i loved the wing commander series later on.

i found your site through the ogre forums... most of my queries for ogre assistance turned up posts written by you... especially the phyx - terrain - tessellation stuff.

i can't thank you enough for the fantastic write-ups, source code examples, etc. at some point i started searching for any posts authored by you as an educational exercise. i happened to mention this to a coworker and oddly enough... he claims to know you. ben f. says you used to play soul caliber until the wee hours.
small world - go figure.

anyway... best of luck,
cread

[Jabberwocky]

Hey loath,

Small world! Yeah, at Turbine we had many late night Soul Caliber 2 sessions. The competition was intense, but I think it would be fair to say I held my own.

That's cool that my posts over at the Ogre3D forums helped you out. For those of you unfamiliar with Ogre3D, it's a free, open source graphics engine. The authors of Ogre3D put in a huge amount of effort writing and maintaining it, then gave it away for free. They are really, really awesome guys. I try to help out on the forums as a way of giving back.

Starflight, huh? I was just chatting with Brian from over at http://www.spacegamejunkie.com - he said the same thing. Mine was the original Elite. I wasn't just playing a space game. I was in space, piloting my ship while I played that game.

have you considered sending review copies to game sites/mags for buzz/feedback? the rps guy seems really curious.

Definitely.
I'm going to hold off a short while until the distribution deal is more solid. I think it's best to have the game reviewed close to or at release, so people can buy it if they like the review. Getting a distro deal finished has my full attention now, and I intend to move quickly.

[loath]

another thought... you might consider including your game in the win8 app store when it comes out. (june? oct?)
some devs on the ogre forums are pretty far along building a win8rt plugin.

here are the business details:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... 94084.aspx

blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/ar ... store.aspx

obviously you'd still have to port non-ogre code to win8rt and windows-on-arm which isn't free but probably not terribly hard.

the big advantage i see here is there will hardly be any games on the win8 store at release. it might be advantageous to be 1 of 3 epic sci-fi games instead of 1 of 1000s on steam \ ios \ etc.

finally, you'd be able to sell to windows tablets *and* desktops at the same time.

[Jabberwocky]

Hey Loath,

It will be interesting to see how the windows store does. I'm kind of surprised it took Microsoft so long to jump into the app/distribution game. Do you know if there are any more graphically demanding games being sold there yet? Salvation Prophecy wouldn't run on a tablet or a non-gaming machine with an integrated graphics card.

I think my first porting target would be to look at either mac, because it's a big popular platform, or linux, just because I think linux is cool. But if the windows store becomes a good place to sell more hardcore games, maybe it would be something to look into as well. Thanks for the links.

[loath]

nvidia and qualcomm are building some of the win8 on arm tablets so graphics should be like this year's nvidia tegra 3+. i've heard there were tons of developers at build (the win8 conference) who already have ports ready to go.

microsoft appears to be aligning everything under a single api: win8, phone8, xbox 720, win8 arm, etc.

and since win7 sold over a half billion licenses … i just can't imagine win8 not doing really well. (of course i agree with your statements on the other platforms as well -- especially at mac... all the kids here have them at the coffee shops - although i don't think they're particularly powerful 3d wise)

[Jabberwocky]

Thanks - I haven't been keeping up with the latest win8 stuff, so now I at least know a bit.

I'm sure win8 will be backwards compatible, so there's still some advantage to tackle other operating systems first. But moving forward with new projects it would be really cool to have code that ports onto any windows device.

The 15- and 17-inch macbook pros have some pretty beefy video cards.
http://www.apple.com/why-mac/compare/notebooks.html

I would guess most hardcore mac gamers have a laptop or desktop with something better than an integrated video card. Steam releases some great user hardware surveys. I haven't looked at a mac one yet (just pc) but it'll be interesting to check that out.

- edit -
And here it is: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=mac