Super Toaster X: Learn Japanese

This week has mostly been about setting up the code for the game to make it more efficient to work with. Maybe Jeff will explain it in better words than I can as this is more of what's under the hood.

On my side, I'm working quite a few things at the same time but mostly working on the Cardsmith:



Drawing the logo, designing the character, making the logos, the animation. The idea of Whole Bread Will is "two faced" inspired" (from Batman). He's actually half whole. I didn't want to include "half-whole" as his name because it sounds like asshole.

"buy" allows you to buy vocabulary cards.
"sell" allows you to sell cards. This is especially useful when you've learned a card (mastered it for skill points). It's a good way to get cash back.

"forge" is the crafting aspect of the game. I want a system where you can basically combine vocabulary cards to get new, unique ones. The new cards should also combine the individual abilities of the cards used in the crafting. This is still the embryo of an idea and something I'll need to discuss with Jeff to see how much is doable code-wise. We usually come up with good ideas when we chat together so we'll keep you updated about this aspect of the game.

I've also reworked the boxing ring arena and I'm working on another hub location, the Bread Cave (another Batman reference of course). I want this place to be where the player gets to check information about discovered cards, enemies, abilities and things like that as well as bounties to claim.


Greenlight

Here's the new stats for the greenlight situation since last Thursday:



So we've had 15 more "yes" votes as opposed to 2 more "no" votes. Judging from this, we can make the assumption that the tide is slowly turning in our favor. We had 861 visitors on the 1st vs 895 today, on the 6th. So there's no doubt that visitors have dropped to a crawl. That's a problem.

The problem we are facing right now is the lack of exposure. People will tweet and retweet but nobody goes to vote for the game (or people who are interested have already voted). When I say "nobody" I literally mean 0 people.

So the issue here is getting a constant stream of visitors. I'm sitting on the fence on this one. I feel like I'll have to start getting into the gist of marketing, the dark side of indie development. Annoying people with constant reminders to vote on greenlight, bugging youtubers to try the game to get more exposure, transforming into this super extrovert, luring people with prizes to get retweets and vote. The whole thing makes me dizzy. I've started to read about marketing and it pretty much sums up to pretty hardcore manipulation which goes against my personal ethics. I certainly wasn't born to be a salesman.

Anyways, the next step is contacting youtubers. So this is the point where you need to decide when the game is good enough to send as a build, no simple question.

Basically, I'll keep precise statistics on youtubers. I'll let you know who I've contacted, which one replied and which one made a video about the game. I think this is information other indie dev would be interested by; i.e., which youtuber is open to testing unknown indie games and how my interactions went with said youtuber.

Anyways, the game will get greenlit even if I have to contact every single youtuber there is out there.