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Something happened to me last night when I was driving home. I had a couple of miles to go. I looked up and saw a glowing orange object in the sky. It was moving irregularly. Suddenly, there was intense light all around. And when I came to, I was home.
What do you think happened to me?
What do you think happened to me?
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10,000
Congrats. For me, the foreign country I get by far the most hits from is Russia. I didn't notice it until I started seeing really bizarre misspellings of character names turning up in Google searches -- such as "oriya" or, even more bizarrely, "theory" for Auria.
By the numbers
post=213004Act I has been out for 2 and a half years now and has gotten a huge surge in downloads every time there's been a subsequent release. The numbers I have are only for the mirrors I manage.
I'm sorry, I don't see how you're getting 600,000+ downloads. I just don't see that happening :( I think each mirror is a duplicate of sorts.
Haha, yeahRun a Google search for vacant sky. Starting on page 2 or 3, a lot of random blogs and sites have picked it up for some reason. I'm not even intentionally advertising outside of the RM community, aside from the official site.
Those number are astronomical, unheard of of any RM game I've ever ran across.
Unless your game is the shit/You are the god of advertising, I honestly don't believe you.
EDIT: The fix for the sound crash in Act I has only ever been mirrored by me and RMN, to my knowledge. On my site, it's gotten around 60,000 downloads, so that's an absolute minimum of how many downloads Act I itself has. You actually have to get 5 minutes into the game to find out if you need the fix, so if you downloaded it, then you've at least played it. This seems more or less consistent with my findings, since roughly 10% of people on RMN who download Act I also download the fix.
By the numbers
New update. It looks like I've underestimated the number of Act III downloads by what might be an order of magnitude. I thought that all of the mirrors were managed by me, but a Google search today shows that hundreds of sites I've never heard of have mirrored it and are advertising it (seriously, who the heck are these people? I didn't submit to any of these sites).
It's one thing if they just start parading around my download link, but they actually went to the trouble of mirroring it themselves. On top of that, a lot of the sites are advertising the game using screenshots they took instead of just copying the ones I used, showing that someone out there is playing and advertising the game. o_O I don't know what's going on.
It's one thing if they just start parading around my download link, but they actually went to the trouble of mirroring it themselves. On top of that, a lot of the sites are advertising the game using screenshots they took instead of just copying the ones I used, showing that someone out there is playing and advertising the game. o_O I don't know what's going on.
Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis Review
post=212929Although that's true in theory, posting a less-than-shining review of a popular title will all but guarantee "revenge reviews" which will doubtlessly be 4.5-5 stars. Sure, the game gets more reviews, and everyone has the right to express their opinion, but I feel that behavior like that is a distortion of the system. People who otherwise might not have reviewed the game will because they feel a title they like a lot has had its score "smeared" and want to bring its score back up to what they feel it should be.
I still think the best thing someone who disagrees with a review can do is write their own review.
EDIT: Sorry if I come across as abrasive. I think your review is very well-written, FG (as are all of your reviews), even if I strongly disagree with your scoring philosophy.
By the numbers
post=212942Other RM sites make up a small part of it. RMN gets the most traffic second to HBGames. Oddly enough, my biggest single referrer is TVTropes. Second to that is the Youtube channel, which makes the most sense to me, since the music is one of the game's biggest selling points. Other than that, there are smaller forums where other people have posted about it.
That's impressive! Where are you advertising?
The vast majority of the traffic I get is from Google searches. There are tons of people who just search "rpg maker vacant sky" or something to that effect. I still haven't figured out where these people are hearing about the game that's causing them to Google search it rather than click a link, since every forum post is usually accompanied by a link.
EDIT: This, of course, only tells me about who goes to the website. I have no way of tracking who's just clicking a download link without going to the site. It's kind of a mystery to me, too.
Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis Review
post=212887Most iPhone games are far worse than the majority of games on RMN.We give lower scores if a game suffers from poor graphic or sound choice, so why is it unrealistic to insist the same be done of engine choice?Brb, I'm knocking all the scores I've given for RM* games down because the developer didn't get a developer license for the iPhone or something...
This is a ridiculous argument
If you honestly think it's "ridiculous" to hold games here to a higher standard than "not bad for an RM game" then we clearly have very different visions of what we can aspire to achieve as developers.
post=212889Nice straw man.
wow another 'everything is better than rm2k3' debate how surprising
Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis Review
post=212881But the engine is a choice of the developer, too. By choosing a limited engine, you're accepting that your game will be limited by the constraints of that engine. By that logic, if AAG were to be released as, say, an XNA game, and be otherwise exactly the same game, it should have a greatly diminished score for not meeting the boundaries of the engine's limitations. What should matter is the final product, the game, and not the development environment.No, by my logic AAG couldn't be the exact same if it were an XNA game because "Enterbrain's lazy coding come into effect". However, this is irrelevant.
As far as I am concerned, what you're saying is akin to saying that all the games on RMN have terrible graphics because we choose to go with 16-bit graphics (cf. RPGMaker) when we could've chosen to have HD graphics (cf. coded from scratch) instead. You're being very unrealistic.
post=212881But the engine is a choice of the developer, too. By choosing a limited engine, you're accepting that your game will be limited by the constraints of that engine. By that logic, if AAG were to be released as, say, an XNA game, and be otherwise exactly the same game, it should have a greatly diminished score for not meeting the boundaries of the engine's limitations. What should matter is the final product, the game, and not the development environment.No, by my logic AAG couldn't be the exact same if it were an XNA game because "Enterbrain's lazy coding come into effect". However, this is irrelevant.
As far as I am concerned, what you're saying is akin to saying that all the games on RMN have terrible graphics because we choose to go with 16-bit graphics (cf. RPGMaker) when we could've chosen to have HD graphics (cf. coded from scratch) instead. You're being very unrealistic.
16-bit graphics can look good if done well. There's a difference between graphics and gameplay mechanics. Let me adjust my example, then. If a game was made for XNA with the exact same battle system as AAG, the reaction would be "oh, that's cool" rather than "wow, that's the best you can do with RM2k3." Even if we were to say that expecting professionalism in game development here is unrealistic, AAG could have been far, far better had it been made in XP or VX because of the new avenues the scripting system would be open to it. So the game isn't as good as it could be because there were other, comparable engines it could have been made in without much effort (in fact, probably with far less effort). We give lower scores if a game suffers from poor graphic or sound choice, so why is it unrealistic to insist the same be done of engine choice?
Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis Review
post=212876I suppose you're entitled to your opinion, but it seems we've all lowered our standards if "Wow, this game isn't very bad!" equates to 4.5 and 5 star reviews.For clarification, I hold RM games to the same standards I hold commercial games. Thus, when I write a 2.5/5, I'm not saying a game is "bad" but that it's unremarkable. To hold RM games to a lower standard is to never aspire to go beyond mediocrity.
I genuinely believe that this game gets the absolute best it can out of the engine it was made with, hence it gets the absolute best score that I can give it. The only way this game could be better is if it was coded from the ground up in a completely different engine so that Enterbrain's lazy coding didn't come into effect, but there's hardly anything Neok (or any other RM* user) can do about that.
But the engine is a choice of the developer, too. By choosing a limited engine, you're accepting that your game will be limited by the constraints of that engine. By that logic, if AAG were to be released as, say, an XNA game, and be otherwise exactly the same game, it should have a greatly diminished score for not meeting the boundaries of the engine's limitations. What should matter is the final product, the game, and not the development environment.
Vacant Sky Vol. 1: Contention
post=212853
I completed act 3 and even though it dosn't do anything new I would just like to say it has been the only RMN game that gave me the goosebumps... Beyond brillence imo. :)
I'm glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for playing. Do you have any suggestions for improvement?
Alter A.I.L.A. Genesis Review
The game wasn't half bad, but it wasn't half good either. I suppose you're entitled to your opinion, but it seems we've all lowered our standards if "Wow, this game isn't very bad!" equates to 4.5 and 5 star reviews. What do you do when a genuinely good game comes around and the highest score you can give it puts it on the same level as games which were "surprisingly not bad"?
EDIT: For clarification, I hold RM games to the same standards I hold commercial games. Thus, when I write a 2.5/5, I'm not saying a game is "bad" but that it's unremarkable. To hold RM games to a lower standard is to never aspire to go beyond mediocrity.
EDIT: For clarification, I hold RM games to the same standards I hold commercial games. Thus, when I write a 2.5/5, I'm not saying a game is "bad" but that it's unremarkable. To hold RM games to a lower standard is to never aspire to go beyond mediocrity.
For a RM game to include rampant fanboyism is an achievement all onto itself. I wholeheartedly agree with every thing FG says; this is most likely the best RM out there, by a couple of miles. As he has mentioned, it is hard to criticize something that has so few flaws and so many things that just click and work together, not to mention the absurd amount of polish that went into this game.Other RM games have attracted rampant fanboyism and been pretty terrible. Popularity is not a measure of quality. To say that this is by far the best RM game out there is to claim that you've played every RM game out there.
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