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Hi, the creator here! :) You have many good points, and the main point I want to address is: why let people buy it already? I have thought quite a lot about tha

by haeric 13y ago

Hi, the creator here! :) You have many good points, and the main point I want to address is: why let people buy it already? I have thought quite a lot about that, so here are some of my reasons for releasing early: - Why not sell it? What do I lose? :) Many people might not buy it now, but some actually have, and that's great! I think this post might also have been an inspiration: https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/your-minimum-viable-product-is-processing-credit-cards/ https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/your-minimum-viable-prod... - I had been working on it as a side project for quite some time, and the feedback of friends can only go so far. Getting honest feedback from strangers, both good and bad, is a great motivator to spend even more time on Skycraft. But even more so, the best feedback and motivator is having people actually buy your game. It is incredibly motivating to have someone else than your mom buy your product because they like what they're seeing, and it pushes me to spend more time, knowing I have customers I cannot let down. - The possibility of doing Skycraft as my summer job. By releasing before summer I could check to see if there was enough interest that I could possibly spend my summer working on Skycraft instead of my usual tech consultancy internship. And there was definitely enough interest! It's not like I've even made enough money to cover even one week of consultancy pay, but the response I have gotten on Skycraft has made this two of the coolest weeks I have ever had, so it was a no-brainer to spend my summer on it. As for the point about Minecraft's progress vs Skycraft: Notch is a very experienced game programmer, and he has a lot of "tricks up his sleeves". If I remember correctly from his blog, he already had some NPC's from an unfinished game that he could sort of dump in there. And the same is might be true for a lot of other stuff, like collision detection and networking. As for me: I'm first and foremost a web developer, who has a passion for games, and recently started making them :) So there should really be no surprise Notch was faster, in fact, it would be a real shame if he wasn't! Oh, and I've had exams for the last two weeks, with the last one finishing today. Expect a lot more coming in the following weeks! :)

itafroma 13y ago
Ah, naturally: the part I didn't expand enough on and probably should've just left out! :P I think those are all fair points, and I appreciate you explaining your business model here. If I may make one suggestion: play this up a bit more on the sales page. Knowing that you're a student the funding is going towards being able to let you take a summer off to explore this further significantly changes things: it's less preordering a game (the impression I got when I saw this) and more seed money. And about the part about no work being done in two weeks: I didn't meant to imply that Notch was the baseline and that you were slacking off, but that Notch is a speed demon in the early stages of game development and can build out whole v.1 systems in a few hours or a few days. So there's some danger in comparing Minecraft at X point in its development and a similar game at a similar point in its development: "Minecraft had these N features 6 months later, so that means this other game is going to be in a similar state in 6 months as well" isn't very likely to turn out to be accurate. At any rate, what you have here is still cool notwithstanding my negativity, and like I said in my original comment, best of luck to you: can't wait to see where you go with it!

by haeric 13y ago

itafroma 13y ago

Ah, naturally: the part I didn't expand enough on and probably should've just left out! :P I think those are all fair points, and I appreciate you explaining your business model here. If I may make one suggestion: play this up a bit more on the sales page. Knowing that you're a student the funding is going towards being able to let you take a summer off to explore this further significantly changes things: it's less preordering a game (the impression I got when I saw this) and more seed money. And about the part about no work being done in two weeks: I didn't meant to imply that Notch was the baseline and that you were slacking off, but that Notch is a speed demon in the early stages of game development and can build out whole v.1 systems in a few hours or a few days. So there's some danger in comparing Minecraft at X point in its development and a similar game at a similar point in its development: "Minecraft had these N features 6 months later, so that means this other game is going to be in a similar state in 6 months as well" isn't very likely to turn out to be accurate. At any rate, what you have here is still cool notwithstanding my negativity, and like I said in my original comment, best of luck to you: can't wait to see where you go with it!