Hey people, after speaking to one of the heads of my University's Incubator Program that I mentioned in my last post, I've been doing a lot of thinking about the ALWAYS HUNTING - Jacob's Story Prototype and wondering if taking it into Incubator is the best course of action.
Basically one of the questions I had was whether building a small part of a larger game and having a few levels built by the end of the year would be okay. His answer was that there's no problem with it but they generally recommend building a smaller experience, something that can be sold, and what I wanted was for the UE4 Prototype for AH-JS to be free and use it to get popularity for the full version fundraiser when that launches. However if I am to take the AH-JS Prototype into Incubator then I will either have to:
A. Sell it, which means that I'll have to take it off GameJolt and lose a host for downloading because it will no longer be a free game and it also means I have to go back on my word that the UE4 Prototype would be free.
B. Take it into Incubator and put it up for free as originally intended, and not be able to pay anyone who goes into Incubator with me, which is something I hadn't thought about. This would be bad because they're basically paying around $16,000 to put in a lot of hard work on it and may not even get anything out of it, which I don't think would be fair to them since they'll need to cover living expenses.
So that's the problem, but is there a solution? My answer is King of Shadows, which is another project that I have been doing bits and pieces of planning for over the past month or so and have recently gone full-force into in the last couple of weeks.
King of Shadows is set to be an episodic narrative-driven, third-person action-adventure title that follows the story of Aryn Lux, who discovers that she is the last of a race known as the Lumin; a people known for wielding light energy that were eradicated, with only her mother escaping the genocide while bearing Aryn.
Soon after learning of her heritage, the one responsible for the slaughter – the mysterious entity known as the Shadow King – begins to advance his plot to conquer the world and plunge it into darkness.
Thrust into a situation bigger than herself, Aryn is given the mission of uniting the races to stand against the Shadow People and destroying the Shadow King. To do that, she must learn to use and control her power of light.
In the face of an impending darkness, a small ray of hope remains, but will it be enough?
I am in the process of creating the Game Design Document and the Trello board. To learn more about the project, be sure to check out the blog on my online portfolio, which I am committing to updating weekly.
Thewalshinatorslair.wordpress.com
As much as I dislike the idea of pushing AH-JS even further back, at this point it seems like the best course of action. It doesn't mean that AH-JS will be cancelled forever, but rather on the shelf until we can find another approach towards developing it.
I'm sorry if this disappoints anyone, and I promise I'll put my best effort into making King of Shadows a success, because the way I see it if it is successful and sells well then it means we can have a budget to put towards projects such as AH-JS. Plus the way I'm going right now I have a lot of good stuff planned for King of Shadows and I'm not planning to slack off, because I will have people to spam me with messages if I'm not keeping up with my weekly updates.
I hope that this new project will be received just as well ALWAYS HUNTING - Jacob's Story, if not better, where you will see real progress being made.
Cheers,
Daniel "TheWalshinator" Walsh
