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About time, huh?

As several people already know, I've spent almost a full year developing a text adventure called Eternal Equinox. And now it's finally getting out of alpha and beta, and being prettied up for its release on May 18th, 2007.

In Eternal Equinox, you assume the role of an island villager living a humble life as a relative unknown in your village. But then the village's High Elder calls a town meeting and you learn that a massive tsunami is lurking off the coast, ready to devour the island in the not-so-distant future. Your people have a magical artifact that can thwart natural disasters, called a Hoto... but someone or something has stolen the Hoto, and now, you've been called on to find this device and save the island from certain destruction.

Edit: I almost forgot to list some of the game's features... my bad!

Features
* The game is MASSIVE... tens of thousands of lines of code went into making it, and that was mostly text. It isn't really a game as much as it's a digital novel
* No complicated parser system to guess your way through, and no long list of commands to learn... just pick your option from a list of choices and you're back to reading
* dozens of puzzles to solve, from cryptic message decoding to mazes to finding buried treasure
* Entire island is rich in detail and has a full history, presented through dialog and books you can find
* Work as a lumberjack, in a lighthouse, or in any of the other special employee locations. You can even make money playing blackjack
* High-quality soundtrack and a simple-but-effective GUI

It all spawned from last year's text adventure competition. I'd made text adventures in the past, but never thought any were worth releasing publically. But I found myself playing a lot of those entries to the competition and saying to myself "wow, with some flashy media I would probably pay for this!" The final nail was driven when someone e-mailed me shortly after the contest was finished, asking if a text adventure could ever be sold commercially. My initial response was a hearty "no," followed by a slight chuckle. But then I ended up thinking about that... why not? Has anyone even tried recently, and I mean given it a serious go? So a year later, here I am planning on the release of Eternal Equinox, my epic text adventure that's more like a digital novel than a PC game.

And yes, it's going to be commercial. Everyone and there mother has advised me against it. They've all said "hah, you won't sell three copies, no one would pay for a text adventure." But hey, trying never hurts anyone, and I haven't yet found an example of someone trying legitimately to sell a text adventure in the past several years and failing. So either this will be a shining example of what can be done with a little trial and error, or it'll be an absolute commercial failure and end up in the freeware bin somewhere down the road. Either way, at least it's an experience. And in the offset chance the game succeeds and sells beyond everyone's expectations, then maybe it could inspire others to make some as well .

We spent a great deal of time trying to figure out who this game could be marketed to, and we've come up with a pretty simple (but pretty smart) marketing plan. We're going to market this game towards two specific groups: Group A are readers, people who aren't that into games but love to read, and group B are "RP'ers," people who role-play in online chat rooms. They don't care for graphics, they don't demand a fancy gui... they just enjoy reading, writing, and making things up as they go along. If we're going to sell this game, those two groups are the only ones we'll have even a remote chance of selling the game to. We know most gamers probably won't go near it, other than the select few who want to support the indie community, but still we'll try to get the word out in select circles.

I'm taking this project very seriously, with a professional approach, and using the whole release as a learning experience. As such, I'm going to monitor the entire release with a forum thread in the game design theory boards. There, I'll mark my progress and shortcomings, and that way, anyone else whose considering a try at this can learn from my successes as well as my mistakes and take them into consideration when they try it.

I already know a lot of you think this game won't sell. I hear that almost every time I mention this game on TGC! But I'm going to give it my absolute best effort and hopefully the lessons I learn along the way will give me (and all of you) some insight into the process of releasing a commercial game, and maybe we'll learn some do's and don't along the way. At the very least, I can say I'm trying!

I've released games in the past as freeware (Cheney Hunter and Pod 9), both getting pretty decent reviews from players across the board. Also, my team has released a number of "private sector games" to companies, mostly trivia games and training applications. So I've already made some money through making games and software, and I have experience with sales and offering support (anyone remember the barrage of tech problems with the first CH release? lol). But this is my first public, commercial release... I'm nervous as heck. I could really use some positive comments if you guys feel like giving some, and some pointers wouldn't hurt either, hehe.

Wow, I'm very interested in what this will look like. I've always been a fan of text adventures, but the demand of 3d games in the market and the lack of interest from the rest of my group has always killed any thoughts of making one (besides my crappy, half-hearted text adventures; the ones everyone makes).

If this turns out to be a really awesome text adventure, I may just buy it. And even better, if you sell enough, I may even consider following your lead; who knows how this will turn out, especially with no example of a fail/successful text adventure within the past few years.

Good luck to you, and I'll keep my eye on this one.

Matt, this sounds very very good. How much are you selling for? I'll buy this. keep it up .

Sounds like your putting a lot of effort and thought into this . I hope it turns out well for you, the story sounds interesting. I'm curious, is their some sort of character creation system? You say you can be several professions? What do those involve and how do they work? Anyways, sounds very good so far, awesome job .

Good luck in your endeavor. It is exciting to sell games, that is for sure.



Let me suggest that if you do a sequel or another text game, you take the text out of the code, write a proper text-based game engine that reads description files, scripts, and other such stuff. Then you can pump out new adventures much more quickly in the future.

We had long-winded discussions about the price and used Dumbo & Cool as an example of what a low price can do to a high quality game. It's only a text adventure so I didn't want to charge too much, but if we charged too low no one would have gone near it, so we set the price to $7.99. We *might* drop it a bit, but I think $7.99 (USD) is pretty well set in stone at the moment. Do you guys think that's too much? If we set it lower would it kill our sales?


That's what I'm hoping for, that maybe this game will sell a fair amount of copies and inspire others to try as well. What I'm really hoping for is that this game sells enough copies to create that inspiration at or near the end of the Text Adventure Competition, so it has the most positive effect for the community as a whole. There's no harm in one person's game benefiting everyone


To keep things as simple and "retro" as possible, we kept the character creation system fairly minimized. You can enter your name, and then choose a "study interest," sort of like a major in college, and that education major will play a pivotal role in several missions, puzzles, and even the jobs you take. If this game sells enough units to warrant a sequel, the character files will carry over into the next game and we'll have a more involved character creation process, adding on to the basics we have now.

In terms of working and earning money, we played around with dozens of concepts for puzzles to effect your job performance, but ultimately dropped most of them because they were proving to be more difficult than it was worth . So now, you go to work and mostly just read, but with randomized stats that effect your performance based on what you've purchased in shops and what your study interest is. Study interests will effect your work performance in different ways... some jobs will be made easier by your choices, and some will be made dramatically harder.


Hehe we're already a step ahead of you on this one . At first this was going to be a relatively small game, so it's flooded with print commands. Somewhere around line 10,000 or 15,000, I said "yeah, the sequel needs a proper engine," lol. For the sequel we'll have an engine that sorts out massively long string variables, breaking them up into sentences and paragraphs, and using Cloggy's text DLL (thanks Jess!), we'll have the text anti-aliased and justified to make it look better. And we're planning on using a lot more media in the sequel as well, but I don't want to say too much more about that... after all, if this game doesn't sell, we can't make a sequel, and if everyone holds out for the sequel we'll create a catch-22 .

Thank you for all of the positive comments guys! I can't wait to show off the demo, I'm really hoping everyone digs it. The testers had positive comments for the most part and seemed to genuinely like the game across the board, so I'm in pretty high spirits... still extremely nervous but eh, what can be done, hehe. If you guys have any more questions about Eternal Equinox I'll be happy to answer them!

How are you going about selling this, ie are you selling it by your own means or is a publisher of some sort selling it? It'll be good to see how you do it and how others should do it in the future.

Sounds great! It'd be cool if you made a demo

While I can't say I'll buy this, I definitely want to try out the demo.

I'd also really like to see the gui.

Yes, I wouldnt mind seeing the GUI either. I would also enjoy seeing a demo.

Cheers,

-db

We're selling the game "in-house" via our website (www.misoftstudios.com) using Paypal. This is the first thing I've ever sold online (not even through e-bay!) but it seems pretty straight-forward... I'm just hoping it's as easy as it looks, hehe. Thankfully, Jess T helped me with some website questions so purchasing your registration code should be as easy as possible, but hopefully anyone who encounters problems while buying the game will report them so I can not only fix any errors, but also talk about them in the Game Design Theory thread about the release process.


There's already a demo for the game, but it won't be released until the 18th (I'll explain why in a second). The demo will show you the very opening of the game, and you'll get to explore the first village on the island, and also you'll see some of the most basic elements of the game, like how dialog is carried out and how to make your choices. All-in-all it's a really simple demo but should provide the typical reader with about one hour of playing time.

The free demo will be included in the game file, so you won't have to download the demo and the full game seperately (I took that idea from the TGC software setup, hehe). This way you can download the game and play the demo for free, and if you like what you see, you can navigate to the internet from within the game, buy your registration code, and register the game without needing to download anything additional. But I'm still fixing minor aesthetic bugs and getting the installer wrapped up so this won't be available until the launch . But on May 18th the demo and the full version will be available.


Sure thing The picture I've included here is just the basic gui with none of the text displayed (I've been having trouble with my screenshot utility , for some reason it isn't taking pictures inside DBP programs). In the full game, the text is displayed in the upper "sandy" area. The coin with the infinity symbol on it (which we're more than likely changing before release) will have text written beside it to tell you how many coins you're carrying. The other blue area on the right side of the divider lists your goals and sub-goals for mini-quests. Once I get my screenshot utility working I'll be taking proper screenshots so you can see everything appearing as it will in-game.



Like I said, it's simple-but-effective. I didn't want to get too crazy with the GUI design and make it stunning because I reserved the "stunning" qualities for the actual text of the game . Or at least I hope I did, lol. Originally this gui was going to be done in ASCII, but when people told me they hated that idea, I opted for a more colorful one instead.