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Personal posts of Steven Halls (creator of the Moose), have been moved to this new personal blog on halls.ca
Marketing software – useful weblinks
Someday, this moose is going to be finished, and it will need to be marketed. I had some free time this weekend, and I googled the topic, and here are some notes from that. Web links and miscellaneous notes.
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I just gave the Moose, my daughter’s eyes
Using photos of my daughter’s actual left eye, I’ve put her Iris onto the Talking Moose.
Not much different compared to the post below? Check out the close-ups.
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Posted in 3D Moose graphics
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The eyes are doing eye-contact now
A big step forward in coding happened. The Moose’s eye will now track the user, as if making eye-contact, then he’ll look away for a while. Here’s a YouTube clip showing eye movements, and see the dimple too. There are problems of course, things that need improvements, particularly needing the upper eyelids to track the top of the irises, and not show white above the irises when the moose looks down.
Posted in 3D Moose graphics
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Animation update
It’s been a while since I had anything to post about, but there is a little bit of good news progress now. I made a poor-quality cellphone video of the new Moose, moving on my computer. Good news is that a lot of the movements that I envisioned, are working and looking reasonably good. Ears, Eyebrows, Nose, Smiling, head motions. There are problems with jerky movements occasionally that we haven’t solved yet. He’s lacking his shadow and bowtie and eye gaze control, and he doesn’t talk yet.
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Cell shading. Should I?
On a whim today, I used a photoshop filter on one of my moose pictures, to simulate the effect of a cell shading algorithm. ( used photoshop’s Poster Edges filter). I probably won’t pursue it, but it might help lessen that uncanny valley experience that some people get.
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New code running
My coder Ivan took quite a while to re-write the C++ app, to gain a lot of speed. Now we’re starting to re-create lighting settings that we used to have. It’s been a while since I had anything to post, but here’s a little picture of the Moose today.
I can see that it has lost something. Previous pictures seemed to have better lighting, and better contrast on the Moose’s skin. Looks like we have more work to do. But what is different, is we have precise and separate control over eyes and tongue glossiness, which we never had before. So now we can make the eyes and tongue look a lot wetter. (By the way, I made that spotlight and shadow in photoshop, too quickly today. The new code doesn’t do shadows yet. )
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Steam, compared to lesser alternatives
From a Gamasutra article “Where can I sell my Indie PC game?“, are some incredible statistics. Steam has 178,500 daily visitors. Compared to steam, the next competitor Desura has 13,440 daily visitors (7.5%), IndieCity has 1029 (0.6%), IndieVania, LittleIndie, GamersGate, Awomo, ImpluseDriven, BeamDog, GameHouse, Green Man Gaming, WildTangentGames, Good Old Games, Rain Digital Games, Get Games Go, GameTap, GameStreamer. A commenter suggested that Good Old Games was going to gain strength.
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Fastspring eCommerce
Sept 26, 2012. From a gamasutra article today on A self-publishing PC adventure, comes a recommendation to consider using FastSpring as an eCommerce provider. Although the Moose will be free, I DO need to monitize something, to gradually earn back my input costs, by selling upgrades, add-ons, etc. Apparently Fastspring.com makes multi-language eCommerce very painless to set up. Alternatives: BMTMicro or Plimus. I also found website Indiebits.com to return to read in the future.
Oct 15, 2012 update. Somewhat different, is Highwinds.com and its Game Delivery Network, that looks after downloads, updates and patches. They can apparently do a big launch event. They can keep track of usage credits for the user, to incentivize monetization, and they say they “offer walls and other e-commerce integrations available”. But they may not be as internationally-capable as I want, yet.
Nov 13, 2012 update. A company Flurry.com does analytics, but I haven’t had time to look at them in detail. ( But if I can collect data myself, I can analyse it myself better than a lot of people can.) But the ‘data-collection as a service’, if inexpensive, might be worth looking at.
March 16, 2013 update. I read a gamasutra article that mentioned the importance of having a Time Gate, meaning the user shouldn’t be able to listen to all the Moose’s jokes in one session. It’s better for set a limit, giving more reason to return on a future date.
March 22, 2013 update. MyCommerce.com has Share-it or SWREG as some e-commerce and download providers. A musical Reason Refill vendor recommended them. They have a lot of languages and handle a lot of different currencies.
Posted in Monetization
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Localization company- Language Automation Inc.
Sept 10, 2012. From Gamasutra, an article about the prospects in Spanish, Chinese and Arabic markets, from a big successful localization company Language Automation Inc. I made this post so I can revisit them, and maybe use their services, when the time arrives to translate content into a bunch of languages.
Nov 6, 2012 update. The company Yodo1 is converting Western games for the Chinese market.
Posted in Features / Abilities
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