Indie Hardships

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For those of you who don't already know... Indie game developers are the ones who make good games without any money on their side.

The reason this is so hard is that it means you don't have any money on your side (by definition) but there are luckily some new place coming up around the internet where indie developers can try to get some funding. Currently, for development on AST we are looking into:

indie-fund.com

Kickstarter.com

Indie Fund is founded by Indie developers who have managed to make some money, and would now like to fund the games of other aspiring indie developers. We are hoping to get about $40k which according to them is a very small size, and we believe it should work well.

Kick Starter is a place where fans of an idea can donate money. It is a little more than just that, but it is also a good place and we want to try to raise $5-10k there as well.

But money is not the only problem the Indie team faces. I haven't been able to be in touch with the team yesterday, or most of today (I found time to sneak in this little post, lucky me). Since being on the team is not strictly a job, many other aspects of life take up a lot of time.

It's not all terrible though. We have made progress. Tyler has given me a current build of the engine which I have been testing while out of contact. Me and Connor have discussed a very friendly business model that keeps AST going while not putting too much of a tax on our players. And we have, as always, been ironing out mechanics for the game.

If we haven't shared it with you, we made a bit of a "mission statement" if you will for AST and I will now share it with you:
"We want A Shapians Tale to be a game where every player will have their own unique experience, and become a unique character in Shapia."
Sorry that was paraphrased I cannot remember the exact wording. My point is AST is, unlike some games which are built around one or two mechanics, built around a specific experience we want to give the player. We make mechanics that are capable of that.

That's all I have for you this time. I hope that you don't notice how quickly I digressed... but oh well! I liked it, so just chill out princess.
-Allenhttp://indie-fund.com/

Inhale.....Exhale.....

Hey guys!

The team has been busy with A Shapian's Tale, as we are pushing for a tech demo by March. As you may have noticed, we have been posting videos on our progress with the game, and our expectations that will follow. On the right of the blog, you can find our video bar, which is updated every time a new video is added. So make sure you check those out, and tell us what you think!

As for AST itself, we are making significant progress. Although somewhat slow, it is indeed significant. The Graphics department has made some concept art, depicting the style of the gameplay, and its environment. Below is an example:

You should see mostly final graphics in the demo by March, but we will have future videos and posts showing off these graphics as we get further in development. As for the programming department, Allen and Jacob have been working on getting the networking set up for the demo, and from the looks of it, it's no stretch for a demo including networking up and running by the deadline.

I know this is so much to take in at once, so i suggest you take your time, we don't want our fans to over react before March :P

Make sure you take deep breaths,

-Connor

New Name - New Blog

So the Bandit Games team is gone. We are now called "OverReact". We changed our name for several reasons:

1. We felt like the name Bandit Games is tied to our old noobish game making past. We've made some dumb mistakes in the past.

2. With the new members of the team, the old ways of Bandit Games (2 or 3 people determined to not sleep and finish a game) is now over....except the "determined to not sleep and finish a game" part.

3. Finally we always wanted a name without the word Games in it.

Posts about the team, and the game will come soon.

Keep your temper down, till next time.
-Allen