Today I’ve released an updated version of Never Gives Up Her Dead that adds images and hyperlinks for navigation and conversation as well as standalone executables for windows and linux (and a local html version for mac) and a bare gblorb for everything else.
All content outside of images and UX changes is the same as version 3 which is now on IFDB, so if someone can’t afford the game, they can still get the full story in the full free version.
Thanks! And as an additional advertisement, I think that (due to early constraints on game file size) this is the largest commercial parser text adventure of all time in terms of code. The few games I know of that are larger are free (Flexible Survival, Prince Quisborne).
Inform says around 350K words; notepad++ says 400K words.
If it’s not the largest I’ll update my statement above (I haven’t used that in any advertising on other platforms since I wasn’t confident, but I figured people here would know. Every else I say ‘one of the largest’).
Bought it twice, once for the bare gblorb version, once for the full version. I believe Itch uses number of early purchases when deciding what to recommend, so hopefully this helps!
On a side note, I don’t think I’ve measured anything by a line count before, but is there an easy way to get one of an Inform source that ignores comments?
I just wanted to post on here and say thanks to everyone! I wasn’t sure if anyone would buy a copy at all, but there was a nice first day boost. I saw a lot of developers say they made between $30-$100 from Itch and that’s around the range it’s been, which is enough to put it on the ‘best selling’ page (around 50th place). Most games make half or more of their money in the first couple of days, so there’s a good chance this will be the total amount, in which case it’s exceeded my expectations and I am very thankful.
While of course I don’t know the identities of all buyers, stats point to most coming from intfiction and my personal social media, which means most purchasers are my forum friends and acquaintances and my family. Because of that I’ll be sure to try to provide good customer service, so feel free to message me if you need anything related to a purchase!
I don’t really play parser IF but I bought it anyhow as a humble token of appreciation for all the work you’ve put into the IF community, and also since you were one of the first people to comment encouragingly on my first IF game creations back then.
Just updating the numbers up above. This is just because many people have asked over the years about financial viability of selling parser games.
My deluxe version on itch (not advertised outside of the forums) has made around $288.75 since its release. Payments now are very rare, coming only every few months. I appreciate every person that purchased it and that money has definitely proven useful, so thanks to everyone that’s participated. Because I didn’t intend to release the game commercially when I wrote it, the additional funds were wonderful.
Had I intended to make a living off of it, though, this would be less than $1/hr for writing. It seems clear that if money is the main intent of a parser game’s development, it should be incorporated throughout the whole process, such as a kickstarter or getting Steam wishlists.
So I guess it’s kind of like being an adjunct professor. It’s a great deal if you already have a job and just want a little extra, but it’s not a great full-time profession.
Thanks again to anyone who purchased the game or helped in its creation!
Classically, games were developed in secret and finally announced with great fanfare. As you’ve observed, I don’t this is the way anymore, whether monetized or not.
Instead, I’ve recently been wrestling with ideas of making all development public. Subject only to withholding some key story points for the sake of spoilers.
Does it affect the final enjoyably? I don’t know.
People I know tell me they need to see a story or movie ending first! To ensure it’s worth investing the time. Or to check it’s not lame or sad. That surprised me.
jkj, REALLY interesting idea… perhaps can coax fellow adventurers and coders into constructive criticism about bad english (I don’t hide that I’m disappointed from the total lack of feedback from Isekai: preview…)
For money or art, I’d never let the kind of person who immediately reads the last page of a book as the first thing they do when handling the book, or asks of a movie, ‘How does it end?’, when they first encounter it, be a guide for how to make that film or book. It’s tough to express in words how far away they are from every relevant or practical concern. Except their own practical concern. They’re pretty close to that
I totally agree. But it’s interesting. Is this a modern social drift? Is it the product of too many shallow, yet-another-superhero, Hollywood plots? Are more and more people going to be like this? I don’t know.
A lot of recent (ish) movies start with the ending, then flashback to the start of the story. Personally, i find this annoying, but it’s a thing.
Yes, starting with an ending then flashing back to the whole story has definitely become more common as an unnecessary editing/structural tactic. It’s not an illegitimate option, but I feel 90% of the time when I see it done now, it wasn’t necessary and just made the film weaker. I go to the cinema about 60 times a year so I think I’m a good survey source for this trend.
I’ve seen films where the result ended up looking like a student film mistake, because the material that was moved was never intended to be able to function at the head of the film without screwing things up (e.g. if my memory is right, the Gerard Butler thriller ‘Last Seen Alive’)
I know producers exist who mandate it, though this is probably only a small percentage of cases. I remember an interview with someone who directed a ScyFy channel film, who was made to put a flash of mayhew of the monster destroying things to the head of the film, even though that scene was only about 5 minutes into the film anyway. But that was still on TV, where there’s a ‘danger’ viewers will change the channel. Now we’re in a context where young people are dealing with things like TikTok, where they’re pretty much encouraged to flip the channel in about 1 second.
I notice big budget movie trailers, when shown on Youtube, start with a ‘bang’ of stuff to get attention, then they announce ‘TRAILER STARTS NOW’. I understand that they have to do something to draw a border around the trailer, to distinguish it from what might appear immediately before and after on a TikTok, but again, it’s like a microcopic manifestation of the trend.
The core idea is: many games on Itch get 5,000-10,000 lifetime views without even trying. Some of the ones who do that get 10K - 1M lifetime views, mostly on the basis of Itch featuring them. Those games are especially good candidates for turning into Steam games.
