ELDER71'S PROFILE

author=lianderson
I noticed while playing it years ago that the battle system had terrible framerate. (mainly due to my mediocre computer at the time) This, tbh, was a little disappointing and ruined the combat for me. So much so, that it solidified my choice in keeping my own game front view.

But there´s two easy answers to this. 1, computers are better now, so the average person will now have good enough hardware to compensate for it. And 2, if you compress your battle sprites and animations with those free online picture compressors, the lag will literally be cut in half so no one will ever experience it, and yes, the pictures will still look exactly the same. It´s a win win. (according to a couple scripters I know, VX Ace doesn't use caches, so it has to constantly reload stuff all the time, hence the lag and why everyone should compress their stuff)

That, and I think the puppet switch puzzle being a little too hard for a early game area are the only constructive criticisms I have on the demo. Everything else was solid, and that looking out of the window part was cool af. (also, I remember some faceset needing work. I think it was the random guy)

I´m glad you´re putting more time into this, and I hope you put it on Steam, even Early Access if you have to. Kickstarter was just one route to making Omnis successful, and every game has different routes to get to success. Kickstarter was just not yours. But you honestly don´t require it. You don´t need to hire a pixel artist, because you are one! Yes, you´ll still have to work at your job or whatever it is that you do, so progress will be slow, but some progress is better than none. So take this game off hiatus goddamnit!

The tough puppet puzzle was an example of me trying to cram too much into the demo. That would have been better as a later in the game puzzle, you're right.

Our kickstarter campaign and the demo itself got absolutely torn apart on reddit when we promoted it there, so I've got a lot of (very valid, though I was devastated at the time) feedback to work on from there too before moving forward.

author=lianderson
Your skillset is more than fine. You have the rare ability of creating awesome pixel art, as well as a great story. A 100,000+ copy commercial game is well within your grasp. You could make the next To The Moon or Lisa if you just pushed yourself again.

That - now that means a lot man, thank you. I do try and maintain that kind of confidence moving forwards, though it's very rarely easy.

I think the thing with Kickstarter, for me, was that Omnis stopped being about love for a story and characters and a game world and became about budgets and twitter analytics and promotion deals and sending out mass press emails. Ultimately, that all took a massive toll on my passion and really muddied the waters when it came to my motivation.

For anyone else reading who's interested in the state of the Omnis project, here are some areas where I feel Omnis needs to be improved before its ready to go again:

Uno: Animation.
I've put a lot of practice in with static pixel art, but I'm only forcing myself to learn better animation techniques recently. I'm also trying hard to get a better grip of colour palettes, smear frames and more interesting/expressive animations in general.

Zwei: Story.
The demo was too long and took far too much time to get across a few basic plot points. This is an issue of needing both tighter writing and much more focused level design (quite a few people got lost and frustrated in the first area, which can only be because the layout wasn't clear enough).

Trois: Mechanics.
I'm a story person, and a lot of Omnis' proposed 'custom mechanics' were shoe-horned in after the fact. When the time comes, I'll be redoing the demo and redesigning everything with those mechanics at the core, rather than stuck on to the periphery like dung beetles on s**t.

IV: Fanbase
I stubbornly insisted on launching our Kickstarter before we were ready. I did this for reasons related to my personal situation, and freely admit that I refused to acknowledge the obvious warning signs:
< 100 likes on Facebook and most of our 700ish Twitter followers were just other devs looking for publicity of their own.
When we launched our Kickstarter, we did it "silently" (as one ezine put it) and never really had any hope.

(At the risk of sounding a bit sycophantic, I'd here like to repeat my gratitude and appreciation for everyone who did back us, as well as for everyone who's offered feedback, reviews, criticism and everyone who enjoyed the demo despite its bloated size)

What I learned is that a really polished project page, lowish fundraising goal and a demo with a lot of provisos and promises attached does not a successful KS campaign make.

author=Blindmind
Just saw one of this game's (many) astonishing screenshots on the front-page. Still such a disappoint how it all turned out :(

Any plans to potentially give it another go with the Kickstarter?

I don't think I'll go the Kickstarter route again. I didn't like how it turned me into an accountant/marketing executive rather than a designer/story teller.

I also learned that I have a long way to go in terms of developing my skillsets before I can make Omnis the way I want it - so it's probably for the best that our KS failed so miserably.

Maybe, just maybe, when we've got a big enough fan base and I'm not so naive, maybe then we'll give it another crack. But for now I just want to dev for the love.

author=Dragnfly
I can also recommend putting an "unused resources" folder near your project folder and move unused resources to it immediately when you decide you're not using it anymore. Similar to what you mentioned, I was on a project once and we quartered the game's size by pruning old unused resources.

Absolutely sound advice, but I know for a fact that I'm not an organised-enough person to keep up a system like that :)

I think using tilesets over parallax mapping has two concrete benefits in TAD's case. First, it keeps the file size down and second it condenses development time from years to months.

To be honest, I'm still in the script-writing phase.

The difficulty is that I have three or four ideas that I'm totally wedded to but they don't gel together and I can't quite decide which ones to change or cut. But work's ongoing, I continue to assure you all :)

I'm digging around trying to find the real copy of this document now and can't seem to. I've got that many "Allison Door1" and "Allison Door2" named docs all over this computer that it's impossible to find anything.