Sanctimonia: Website Refinements and Updates
Kevin Fishburne shot a tweet my way last night, announcing some changes at the Sanctimonia website:
@ultimaaiera A web site update was in order. Every page was touched and some were removed. Here’s the FAQ, for example: eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/fa…
— Kevin Fishburne (@kevinfishburne) December 13, 2012
And indeed, the site has been trimmed up some. The only pages that remain are the main, features, FAQ, and media pages, all of which have been given elegant Latin names.
Also, one addition to the FAQ — at least, I think it’s an addition — concerns the financing of the project:
At the beginning of 2011 my father decided to invest in the project with the wish of seeing my personal vision realized and at least breaking even on his patronage. A prerequisite was providing him with weekly progress reports, which I later negotiated to become monthly reports. The result was essentially a layman’s version of a changelog, all of which are published regularly.
Familial funding of Sanctimonia will terminate at the end of the second quarter of 2013.
I am unsure as to what this will mean for the development of the game into and past the summer of next year, although hopefully by then it will be in a state where testing and some monetization can at least start to occur.
Money and family, oh my.
Heh. In some they go hand in hand, but it is my dad and not some some distant acquaintance. He’s retired and a bit of a nerd with respect to computers, games and software. The games he excels at are Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for Intellivision, Ghosts ‘n’ Goblins for both Genesis and SNES, Castlevania Symphony of the Night for PlayStation and Gran Turismo V (he obsessed over all the earlier iterations as well). He reads my reports, which I discuss with him, and he knows exactly what the game can do and what it will be doing when published.
At this point my main financial concern regards acquiring scale models of trees/plants and archaic representations of furniture, pots, pans, knives, daggers, etc. They’re not cheap, even if I just rent them for on-site photography.
I say awesome ! Good job and hopefully it’ll allow you to add better graphics. In any amateur project, graphics are always the most tricky part, so I say this can only be a good thing 🙂
Thanks. It means at least 6.5 more months of steady development, which is definitely a good thing.
At this point anything I can put on my photography rig I can create as an object, plant or animal in the game by adding a line to a config file. I need more objects to photograph and incorporate.
Some advancements in the display of text: http://youtu.be/_FBC9z90Dnw
Other than for conversation I need to textually render inscriptions from objects like parchment, stone, weapons and armour. Players should be able to “write” on almost anything with time and tool. Hitting the “Search” button while facing something should conversely read and display information describing the area or subject of search. Instead of displaying -32 / -48 it might say “Smells like old fish” or “Acrid sting of ammonia” and if a player was weak might puke or fall down.
Anything like runic circles, floating text, bar and pie stats, artificial frame rate slowdowns during contact and green or blue particles are explicitly disallowed. No cheats, no teleporting, no finding friends via previously-agreed-to privacy violations. No auction house for that matter. Ye die and want to live once more? Ye pay $0.99.
I actually think that’s quite a clever idea, pay-per-life. Has anybody tried that before? It’s much less threatening than a subscription or a big up-front cost but also avoids any of the pitfalls of “free-to-play.”
Also, I’ve just had a look at some of you more recent videos and I was actually quite blown away by how beautiful it is looking – quite simple yet very effective.
I actually had to switch tabs for a second to make sure I didn’t turn into a pile of salt. Thanks; I don’t get too many comments like that!
I struggled with the concept of monetization for a while. At first I thought the subscription model was the best and purest form, but then realized a lot of people would want to try the game without paying since the market is supersaturated. Everything I read about microtransactions wanted to make me puke and betrayed all I knew about game design, and I couldn’t think of an acceptable way to implement them without embarrassment and shame. Out of desperation I came up with what I like to call the “coin-op” model, which means if you really fuck up (die) you may -choose- to pay to play some more. It’s the same model used by the drug dealers society warned you about: first hit’s free, after that, it’s on you.
I ran the idea through the Gamasutra comments a few times and got mixed results. My conclusion was that it hasn’t been tried before in a modern context.
I hope that the beauty, simplicity and effectiveness of the gameplay elements in the videos accurately reflect my design goal of recreating the basic mechanics of human interaction with the environment. I’m really trying to avoid the players being burdened with raw numbers, disbelief-inspiring menus and anything that would disturb their perception of the game world being utterly real. Thus my rant about runic glowing circles and all that. 🙂