SingSong

45 minutes ago, Pear said:

No problem. c: I just want people to succeed, but it's impossible to do so if the art is traced because the artist could lose their credibility. I hope that I said it in more of a constructive way, and not in a rude way..haha

Not rude at all. Games do need to have unique art, and if @DeviousAngel is looking for coders (most likely unpaid partners), they'll want to see original artwork as well.

@Pear Holy cow. Thanks for posting that.

Major cuteness.

As people have already stated, you need to have a really good following to make any worthwhile amount of money from Kickstarter or any other crowdfunding platform. I personally don't think the hassle of setting one up (making banners, a video, coming up with the tiers, etc.) would be worth it for something like $1,000. That's time and effort better used elsewhere.

You don't need to award real-world merchandise. That can be a hit or miss. I've seen Kickstarters have pins/buttons, posters, shirts, bags, and art books, but the art would have to be superb for anyone to care about owning that sort of thing.

You may have better luck focusing on game-specific rewards. The things that seem to bring in money are early beta, beta accounts in general, Kickstarter exclusives (such as a Kickstarter-only breed, wearables, trophy, forum posting style, or forum title), customs, and ability to design NPCs, items, lore, pet species, or pet markings for the game.

However, when creating a Kickstarter, you have to think of two big things.

1. Will your future playerbase or economy be negatively affected by Kickstarter-exclusive items? If no future players can get X breed, would they be bothered by the fact that they have to buy these things for high prices from Kickstarter backers? In five years, how realistic is it going to be for new players to get these rewards from others? Would that turn them off from playing the game?

2. Could you make more money overall by simply putting the same rewards in a cash shop once the game is actually complete? For example, is it worth it to award a rare breed as a Kickstarter-exclusive when only, say, 30 people will end up buying it during the Kickstarter when instead you may sell 100 in the cash shop over the course of two years?

Cosmic horror? Well, that sounds awesome. Keep us updated on how this goes. 

Good luck finding someone. These dragon designs are neat. Do you have ideas about how the adventure portion of the game will work?

Hi, Martyn. Glad to see a familiar person from VPL filling that position. I'm sure you'll do great. 

Those crystal items look really cool, especially the crab and fish. ^-^

I actually attempted some button making myself a few years ago. If you want to make professional-looking buttons on your own, I recommend Tecre. https://www.americanbuttonmachines.com/collections/popular-button-maker-sizes

This machine works really smoothly and takes only a few steps to create a button.

This video shows the process of creating art for the button: (Tecre's website has templates for the different button sizes)

Can't remember how much I paid for mine. I think it was around $140 or $160 on Ebay for a 1.25" button maker with a lot of extra pieces for making buttons. Ebay's probably your best bet in finding a cheap one. The ones on the actual website are closer to $300. You can get spare parts on Ebay, too, for making more buttons. Any button maker under $100 is likely to create buttons of low quality.

If you're serious about making buttons, here are a couple things to consider.

Most button makers are made for one size only (there are some brands that have interchangeable docks but I have read that those button makers produce a worse result). So you have to choose one size. If you want a large size like the size of pins you see at political rallies, 2.25" is about right. 1.25" is the best for the small kind of pins you see on backpacks or people's shirts or hats. 1" is really too small, and I think it's hard to get a good amount of detail to be visible with that size. And there are 3" button makers, but those are pretty enormous, comparably.

You may want to get a circle cutter. This is a tool that will cut a perfect circle around your printed button art so you don't have to use scissors (that can get really time consuming and frustrating after 50+ buttons). This is the one I had:

Tecre has its own circle cutter which is about 10x as expensive but really awesome. I couldn't justify buying it myself though.

Also, be sure that your printer can print out crisp images, otherwise you'll have to take your art to a professional printing place instead. My printer at the time was garbage, so my 1.25" pin art came out like a blurry mess, and I lost interest. I only ended up using the button maker to make buttons from magazine cut-outs. Hah.

Anyway, I hope that helps some. The kind of buttons I like are band buttons, ones with funny/pun sayings, and ones with cool art on them.

Just bought a few pieces of art from @Corsair

She delivered the PSDs quickly, and the transaction went smoothly. A good artist and seller.

They all have PSDs, right? If so, I'll buy the coops and chickens. Send me your paypal address via message, please. Thanks.

Are these still available?

Good idea! This will surely spark some community involvement.

Very nice. I love the way you draw trees, @LIZ

I love the colors. Great job!

Nice stuff. I hope you can find some buyers. 

Good luck to you. I always like to look at your art.

@Anoua I had the same thoughts on the revamp. I didn't see much of an improvement in the revamped art (it was nice beforehand), so it was strange to me that the resources went to doing that instead of other things. I can only imagine how much all of that cost (and to never be used!); yeah, a real shame there.

That's the difficulty in making one of the games that have art as one of the main selling features. You're bound to get players that nitpick the art more than usual. But in all honestly, just about every piece of art can be criticized in some way if you're looking for flaws. At a certain point, as a game designer, you have to just be satisfied with what you have and not let other people's opinions sway you to change what you originally thought was good (or even great).

@Nova That is correct.

I think you may be out of luck on this one.

I haven't posted about this before because it's not my story to tell. I have personally narrowly avoided buying coding from Cybura (I didn't have the funds to pay upfront at the time), however, multiple people have told me about their bad experiences with this programmer. They didn't want to publicize anything for their own reasons, but I'll ask if they'll participate in this thread.

From what I've heard, Cybura pushes back deadlines many times, does not finish projects completely, asks for payment upfront and does not follow through, and conveniently disappears when confronted.

He owes someone else more than $500 from 2 years ago. 

For anyone that hasn't dealt with Cybura yet, please consider one of the many other programmers in this community. (Perhaps PaulSonny or Judda if you want to keep your sanity.)

@chocoshrooms Pretty good! Working on one project in my free time. Trying to spend more time on writing, too.

Someone on Deviantart just asked me, out of the blue, if she could have my Keonai, haha. That poor neglected fella I never did anything with. At least he has a good home now. 

Looks like the winners have been decided.

I'm going to bump this up. Liz is a wonderful person to work with. It's always a joy to see the items she creates based off simple descriptions and broad themes. She is a master at what she does. I recommend her for any item work you need.

...thunder could be heard outside the barn. He looked outside and saw...

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