Feeling Like a Failure...But I'll Keep Moving Forward! (Noiramore Academy - Game Devlog #1)
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- čas přidán 11. 06. 2024
- The Fantastic Kitty Rue is available now on Steam:
store.steampowered.com/app/21...
inkroseinc.com/
Patreon: / inkrose
Noiramore Academy Devlog Playlist:
• Noiramore Academy Devlogs
Music used:
Music from "The Fantastic Kitty Rue" by ColorPlanetCrazy:
Kitty Rag
Afternoon Street Aria
Outside the Theatre
Theatre Attic
Music from Envato Elements:
Noir
Magical Mysterious
Let the Mystery Unfold
Magic in the Air - Krátké a kreslené filmy
You can join my Discord server here! discord.gg/mx5kYafxny
I’m glad you’ve continued to push forward despite the adversity your projects have faced! This new project you pitched sounds really interesting and I really love the character designs and bios! I agree that a continuous funding route is the safest bet, and I’d imagine as funding came in to use for the game, there’d be ways to further engage with the audience interested in a way that would slowly bring more eyes in!
I’d love to see this come to fruition!
Oh, hello!! I saw your Amanda animations the other day and liked them! It’s cool to see you here, thank you for your kind words!
You can do it Ink. We believe in you.
Hell yeah!❤❤❤
Hey Ink, I know how hard it is for you right now but don't give up and keep moving forward! Over the years since I followed you when I was a teen I've read your books and seen your games and I know your creativity will find you success. Scott Cawthon faced many failed games until his game Five Nights at Freddy's became a successful franchise. If he can do it so can you. I wish you the best Ink Rose and I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll create next!❤️
bro ive also been watching since i was 10. im now turning 20. your still a part of my life and ill give you support ink!
Exactly! If he could do it, so could Ink! We believe in her!❤
Im sorry that your last projects haven’t been successful but I commend you for not giving up! This looks so good so far! We believe in you and will be here to support you along the way!
How I’ve missed this inspirational creative energy
As a HUGE FAN of the Noir genre, as well as the Spider-Man Noir comics, I hope to have you know that this game sounds like a true treat to me!!! I hope it succeds and becomes famous! ♥
I'm still trying, too, Ink. Working independently is tough, very tough, and there's much we have to deal with to get our names out there. I'm sorry it's been hard for you to get the ball rolling, but I believe in you. I'm not giving up, either.
I’m sorry your past projects haven’t worked out. I wish you the best with Noiramore Academy though. I really like the concept! It reminds me a lot of Wednesday.
On another note, if you’ve had the chance to play Tears of the Kingdom, I hope you enjoyed it!
This is my first video of yours and i'm so sad to hear that things haven't gone smoothly in the past, especially because your ideas are so unqiue and beautiful, you can tell that not only a lot of effort was put into your work, but also so much heart and love and care. Again, I'm so sorry things haven't gone smoothly, but you've won a forever fan in me. I love your art, your story, your ideas, the attention to detail you put into crafting a world, and I love your outlook on disappointments and your resilience. Turning your notifications on so I don't miss any updates. I wish this game so much success. You've got this! We're all rooting for you!
I honestly hope that your projects can succeed. I honestly LOVE the world you created. It’s what drew me to Mariposa and the Galaxy Man in the first place. The world, the style, the lore, everything! I truly hope that you’ll be able to work on your games and stories, Ink. I know you can do it. Don’t let the failures hold you back, rather, learn from how they can be improved upon and try again. Sure it’s not easy and I don’t know a whole lot about video game development in general, but I do know is that you will succeed. Even if it’ll take a bit to get there, I know you will❤
Don't give up you can do it. I know it's hard right now but your dream will come true.❤
It's always great to see you in my sub box. No matter what those who are still subbed and dedicated will support you in all endeavors to the very end.
I do admire your perseverence! Noiramore Academy is looking fantastic, best wishes with its release!
I get it. You want to create a magnum opus and circumstances, sadly not uncommon, they fail. Not because for lack a passion. But the way our greedy world works.
There piles of unpassionate, money grubby trash out there that sadly buries passionate projects. But Your work is definitely a diamond in the rough. And while I know success is not guaranteed, I also hope you're satisfied with the journey.
Never give up. Cause you'll be an inspiration for those who truly appreciate your work and they'll last forever
Your work has a super strong aesthetic. I hope you can find the audience you deserve!
Hi, just discovered your channel! First off, I've gotta say that the characters and art design are super cute and polished, and the concepts for the game seem really unique and interesting. I can't wait to see what will come of this project and what you end up creating! 💜
I'm looking forward to what the future holds for you! I'm very excited about the premise of this upcoming game, and I hope you can figure out how to get the funding needed!
i’ve just rediscovered your channel by looking for that video you made on celestia and luna’s lore !!! i’m quite invested in your endeavors now and will do what i can to support :))
I’m honestly kind of moved by your determination. You absolutely have the right attitude for success. Keep reworking your ideas and experimenting and just keep trying! Noiramore clearly has real creativity and inspiration behind it as do all your ideas. Super exciting! :)
Congrats, your attitude is inspiring!
You got this!
Thank you!
I'm always so happy yo see you in my a subscription feed.
The aesthetic of your new game idea sounds gorgeous.
I think one thing that would help with your reach would be posting mre frequently both on here and on instagram. im sure that lots of people myself included would be interested in videos about how to go about wroting or character design and those kinds of topics would be easy to slip some self promo into. I also think vodeos about your process when working on different projects could be really cool, i know youve done dev-logs before, but i think longer videos with voice over might be more engaging. Austin Kleon's book "Show Your Work" goes into this a bit.
I know it's probably hard to balance, but i think posting more consistently would help your work get more attention.
hey inkrose, i’m sorry you’ve been facing hardships in putting your work out there, i’ve always admire your tenacity and creativity, ever since i first saw your old mlp headcanon videos. hang in there, we’re all here to support you
I found an audition for one o& the characters on Backstage. Might audition! ❤❤❤
Can i just say thank you so much! I know the feeling of not being good enough and facing constant rejection from every turn very well and it has affected my motivation to create. So seeing you continue to create and persevere is amazing and provides me with allot of comfort ! You simply doing this has given me the will to continue creating^^
The fact that you've managed to create what you have already, despite setbacks, speaks volumes of your immense talent, ambition, and will. Keep moving forward, I am confident you'll achieve what you strive for!
For funding, the best thing I can suggest is to cultivate your CZcams channel, maybe by doing something that can be done on a regular basis like Lets Plays or Reactions, or maybe do an audiobook like what you did with Dragon Queen....perhaps an anthology series regarding the many backstories of the Mariposa Universe? All the while, advertising your Patreon or taking sponsorships for products?
Stay safe and sane!
Just stumbled to the channel. I hope you and your fellow developers are doing well.
Ms. Rose, I have to give you alot of credit for not giving up.
You're amazing and don't never give up, cause you're so creative.
I do wish you the best of luck with this new project and I'll do my part as a fan to back you up as much as I can. ^w^
You can do it Ink! I am a big fan of your work and look forward to whatever comes next. You are a very talented artist and I love how you put so much effort into everything you do. Remember to take care of yourself 😊
Sorry to hear about the adversities you faced but glad that you are still going, your art looks great!
As long time viewer who also went into game development, I think I have some useful critiques and advice to offer. I don't wish to come across as harsh but I do want to offer genuinely useful advice, so I will try my best to point out what I think you could do to achieve more success with this new project and what I feel went wrong with the other ones in a productive manner.
Overall I think the main issue you have is that the games you are trying to make are too hard for your level of experience and finances. Making 3D games, even with an engine like Unreal can be very hard, especially if you want them to *feel* good and unique. I noticed in multiple videos from you that there were small details which reflected the fact that this might be an issue for you. Also your description of the game near the end of the video was rather worrying to me, you said you want to make a 3D third person (open world?) exploration puzzle game, with many puzzles in each room, quests, a day cycle system, AIs with custom schedules, and a relationship system. While all of these ideas sound great, I think that sadly to attempt such a project given your context would be very unlikely to succeed. Even if the scope is more limited than what I understood, I still got the feeling that it's just too much and thus risks being unpolished in the end.
In my view, for a successful indie game you should optimize for your skills in order to create something **highly polished and highly visually attractive**. You need to be very careful about your limitations, scope creep and focus on what you can do best. I think artstyle-wise for Mariposa and Kitty Rue you have a bunch of issues, from animations feeling weird, to the world seeming too flat and mechanics feeling uninteresting that made them feel unattractive.
HOWEVER for Noiramore Academy I think your artstyle works super well, much better than for the other 2 games you pitched. The ideas you presented, the shader effects, the radio wave elements, it all looked incredibly polished and high quality! This really excites me about the potential you have with this project but I think that you might hit issues again if you try to also work on a lot of animations for and state machines for them. Environment wise I noticed that the same level of polished is not there yet. While the models are great, it all feels very static and it doesn't pop or impress enough, at least not as much as the characters. I think this is more so an issue that is again caused by time constraints. Truly, there is just a lot of art required for this kind of project, that either costs a lot of money or time.
Therefore, maybe instead of making a Persona type exploration 3D platformer, settle for something that is smaller in scope but that you can make a highly polished version of!
For example, given you are very into storytelling, why not make an Ace Attorney style visual-novel adventure type game, in which the characters have few animations mostly depicting their emotions as they speak, but those few animations can be very very polished. Same goes for the environments. Instead of making an open world that looks great and is packed with details in every angle and is likely very costly and unrealistic given your current context, you can focus on fewer areas, viewed only from a couple of angles and with fewer but more polished and meaningful details and interactions. Gameplay wise this could also simplify things. Making a truly polished day cycle, relationship mechanic and AI schedules that feel meaningful is very hard and generally the kinds of games that try to do this involve hundreds of people working on them. Making an Ace-Attorney-like conversation or court system and various puzzles is much easier tho and can enable for more localized polishing! Instead of spreading yourself thin over complex features, you can instead focus on highly polishing seemingly simpler ones.
You should consider is adding as much style and life to your game. Have the UIs and interactions feel very enjoyable. Add tiny details that players will find charming and so on. Persona game for example are very good at this. Limiting your scope here is once again very useful. For the game you described, in order to add this level of polish given the expected size of the game, you would need an army of people. But for something smaller, 2 people or so can be enough.
Another aspect you could explore is also making the game for mobile rather than PC and Consoles. If you dont have console dev kits already this is even more of an argument in favor of this approach. While Unreal does present some issues with that as it's more optimized for PC and Consoles, it can still work on phones and a highly polished game with your art can stand out even better on mobile. Additionally, mobile enables more monetization routes, which while not necessarily ideal artistically speaking, they can be empowering financially and thus help you develop future games on PC and Consoles. You can make the game free to download, thus attracting a lot of people, and then lock additional content over paywalls or create a microtransaction system that you feel works well and is hopefully not exploitative.
I know it can be a bit of a bummer and I do not wish to come across as a harsh critic here, I think your art is very impressive, but I do think these are the most valuable observations I can give you as a fellow game dev. I think it's important to identify your limitations and figure out not what is the most you can do quantity wise but quality wise, and focus on that. Afterwards you can scale your games, even a small game that you sell for $2-10 can make enough to fund a future game that you can sell for $15-30. If it may also help, Id be glad to chat with you guys to share more of my views. I hope you are successful and keep going with this, will try to keep an extra eye on your channel for updates. Keep on!
Hey! Thank you so much for the thoughtful comment! In-depth advice and critique like this is super helpful and gets me to think deeper about my project.
The next video I am working on goes deeper into the proposed systems and gameplay that I have planned for the game, which I think will help relieve some of the worries you have listed here, especially concerning:
-AI (The game is not planned to have AI, as the characters 'changing locations' will be preset locations that they'll 'teleport' to when the day changes. There is no day/night cycle, it will work more like Persona where doing certain things auto-changes the day to the next day, it won't be a smooth gradient of day to night like in Skyrim or similar games.)
-The Open World (This game is not planned to be open-world, it is more like Resident Evil 1 or Resident Evil 2 Remake! A confined location with locked doors. Some can be opened, some cannot.)
-Relationship system (I don't quite have one planned. It's more that as the main story continues, you can see the development of the characters and their friendships as a base part of the story)
-The simple Ace-Attourney style game is basically what our goal was for Kitty Rue, and I think we were able to achieve it. We are also about to release a small platformer game that will be on the cheap price range, which we hope will help with funding as well.
-Tiny Details (I love these!! Rest assured I plan to have these in, just like I added with the Mariposa demo and Kitty Rue)
-For environment art, we plan to reuse many assets when we can, which is thankfully great with a school environment. Desks, chairs, walls, chalkboards, pencils, shelves, etc, are easy to reuse.
-One of the main uses of potential crowdfunding/publisher money is to hire on a few more people to our team, like a dedicated environment artist and animator. Here's to hoping!
-I'd really like to make a mobile port of Kitty Rue if possible.
-I'm glad you're liking the artsyle of Noiramore! I will add that I'm planning on experimenting more with shaders and lighting to make the world pop more. I want to try crosshatch-inking like shading and lineart on the characters once I've ported my art test into Unreal 5.
Thanks again! I appreciate your concerns and I will be planning carefully so as to make this game concept more achievable with our means.
Good luck!
Revisiting this first devlog makes me proud of the progress you've made so far! I believe in you, Ink!
Question, what's that website you used to show off the references and music selection for your game?
It’s called Milanote!
Never give up!!
Just got to keep at it, most people have to fail many times first before they get there first success
We will pray for you. I’m sure you will find a publisher keep going after all you’re the queen of head cannon never forget that
Dang, sorry to hear that "The Fantastic Kitty Rue" didn't do well selling wise. But fear not! For though I'm not a major Twitch Streamer like many others, I just bought it and plan to play/stream it in the very near future! Also, you're concept for your newest game sounds very intriguing. And not just because I'm a fan of mystery stories like Sherlock Holmes and Nancy Drew. Either way, I look forward to see your progress for this venture. :D
My kickstarter for my game also didn't work. I look back at it and cringe hard. Lol
I'll keep trying tho. It's good to keep learning from past failures.
What I learned from my collaboration with others is that nobody works for free so the issue for me is always the right devs and funding. Houston feels dry when it comes to games and I found it super hard to get hired by AAA companies. Now, I mostly just make art and write stories. I'm saving up my money to pay off student loans, build my investment-dividend portfolio, and save to make my own indie-studio in Houston or Spring. I'll probably make a studio pitch video soon and see what Houston's game dev community with IGDA think of it.
Sorry to hear you're having issues Ink. Creating original content is tough. I wish I could help financially, but I am poor myself and needs come before wants. Best I can do is spread the word. Whatever funding you decide to do go with, I'll try promoting it again. Have you reached out to those from the Brony community you used to be a part of, see if they can help spread the word too?
Good luck, hopefully someone big will stumble upon one of your projects soon.
I don't want to come off as flippant so I'll put this next bit here....
I think you might have some more luck if you made a horror game set in the Mariposa universe. Markiplier has a series exclusively for short indie horror games. and The Game Theory guys love making stuff about creepy lore in games.
It might be a good idea to make a short(less than an hour of content) horror game with multiple endings(not a branching story). also difficulty is a nice way to get people to invest more time than they otherwise would, so maybe lock the creepiest ending behind some crazy difficult requirement(keep the main game easy enough though so people can still get a taste without feeling like you're just stalling for the refund window).
All that being said; if you do try this path and it does work out, the internet will inevitably take your universe and fill it with creepy non-canon "Lor" and dead kids😨...
Been awhile since I’ve seen a video, so hope your doing well and things get better ❤️
Honestly it's wonderful to see that despite all the curveballs life has thrown your way you still haven't given up too many people these days are just to eager to give up when things get difficult using the whole well gave it the old college try excuse when they could have easily just tried a little harder
Bats!
Apparently games with less than 10 reviews on Steam get hurt by the algorithm.
You can try lowering the price until enough Steam reviews show up, and then re increase the price afterwards.
Maybe for marketing the game you could make some animations for youtube shorts, and maybe tik tok,and this animations could have a little backstory for the characters
Keep it up friend
Im surprise Mariposa didn’t succeed like other 3d platform sometimes would. Like hat in time, and yooka layeee I mean hat in time is weird to me. Maybe team 17 can help you back on feat. The things is though I think you should try make games with love and passion as well money so you can come to your old projects and finish it. Hopefully in future you can gets funds to more bigger projects.
Hey is a a distribution deal needed because I looked it up and it’s like 50K and I’m still a minor and I don’t have the money to distribute it. I can barely get the money to trademark, and get my games onto epic and steam but I don’t have 50K. So is that needed to put on steam and epic or is that something I need.
I probably have quite a bit more disposable income than the vast majority of gamers, especially considering many are teens, and I'm not stingy either, and yet for me to even consider buying a 2h game for 16.99 (USD I assume), I'd have to both be a hardcore fan of your channel *and* have really high hopes for the game. Even $11.99 is still a(n almost outrageously) high price for that amount of content, regardless of quality. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find *any* 2h game that sold well at that price point. Most people will simply dismiss it based on price alone.
I don't know how you specifically made that decision. But I notice many devs price their games based on effort put in, which it doesn't have anything to do with.
Gross revenue = Unit price x units sold
It's the revenue that needs to match the efforts in the end, not the unit price. The unit price needs to match consumer expectations. A higher unit price does not mean higher revenue.
I'm talking about games in general here. I do not intend to offend you or your game. I think you have the potential to create something that sells well.
But, in my opinion, if you want to achieve that, you have to price your future games a bit more in line with consumer expectations. Otherwise you'd shoot yourself in the foot.
Thanks for the comment! We based the price range on games like Little Misfortune ($19.99 for 3 hours), Later Alligator ($17.99 for 2.5 hours), which are games of similar length with similar adventure game and story-based elements. Even when we had Kitty Rue on sale for around 45% off, we still did not see much of an increase in sales.
@@InkRose Interesting. I didn't know about those two games. I stand corrected about that part of my comment. Thanks for providing a contrasting point of view!
fr
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm."
Often attributed to Winston Churchill (he never actually said it), it's totally true. It's tough to have talent and passion, yet the world hasn't fully recognized you for it. I've spent the last two years building myself up for a career I know I could succeed in, without having a breakthrough. Yet just this week I got a call that may have given me the opportunity to finally make it. Try, try, try, try. If you have to, shoot for something simpler and build yourself up. What you've created thus far is magnificent and you're a one of a kind person who is destined to do great things.
If you need inspiration, may I suggest a very particular anime called dragon quest I think it’ll give you some new ideas to be honest it’s very similar to your story and certain ways And check out also tears of the Kingdom I think it’ll help you get inspired even for the and for your book God bless you Jesus love you
16$ for this? are you serious? and it's a 2hr game?
Girl, it's a 5$ game at most. Probably like 2$.
Thanks for the comment! We based the price range on games like Little Misfortune ($19.99 for 3 hours), Later Alligator ($17.99 for 2.5 hours), which are games of similar length with similar adventure game and story-based elements.
Game development is incredibly expansive and we tried the best we could for a small team.
Steam also takes 30% of what we sell the game for, so if I sold it for $2, as you say it is worth, we would only get $1.20 per sale, and if you ask me, the game is worth far more than that. Would you say that a 2hour movie is only worth $2? Most people pay around $15 for a 2-hour movie experience.
@@InkRose It's hard for everyone, yet people and whole studios release legendary games for less than 15$
Terraria, Hollow Knight, Don't Starve, Potion Craft, The binding of Isaac are all under it.
Event[0] and Oxenfree are small 3-4hr games priced below 10$. Vampire Survivor is like 3$ and made the creator a millionaire.
Also you can snatch most of the games on Steam for that price, when they are on a discount.
I mean, you got to understand, that you are competing with the whole Steam, not just 2 similar games.
And you are releasing an unknown ip, that failed the playtests into the wild, with no community around it (because as far as I can tell, your 100k subs are based on your 10 year old videos about another ip and it does not translate to views and interest at all)
But don't listen to some random comments on youtube! 4 reviews are good enough, am I right?
(and answering to your question: no, I don't think 2 hour movie, created by couple of people with no experience and no budget is worth 2$ a ticket. I would not pay that money for it. Don't compare yourself with a huge industry, budget in the millions of dollars and thousands of highly experienced people working on one product for multiple years)
@@someonewithsomenameOkay, with this additional context of your opinion, I definitely see your point. 😮
It is incredibly difficult to price art, and as someone who comes more from the world of art commissioning, where it’s common for pieces that take 3-hours or so of work to cost $80 or more, I suppose that coming in with that mindset was what may have altered my perceptions. So to was the fact that a lot of my art that I sell, such as art prints and my books, sell for about $15-$20 online and at conventions, where I normally promote my work. These prices ranges are normal at conventions, especially due to how much it costs to secure a table, hotel, flight, etc. So this was kind of the mindset I was in when pricing my game, because to me, when I wanted to sell codes of my game at my convention booth, it needed to be at around a standard price range of my books and prints, because to me, the game took infinitely more hours to create than my prints, and about the same amount of time but with WAY more budget then my books. So to a convention consumer, I thought they might find it weird for a whole 2-hour mini game with tons of art in it to cost $5, meanwhile an art print of an anime character costing $15.
The obvious difference there, of course, is that one is physical, and the other is just a code for a Steam game, but I did make nice gold-embossed cards to put the game codes on so that you would also get something physical with it and make it feel more worth it.
The game actually sold quite well at cons, but because of Steam’s rules the code-bought games also don’t count toward the total review score. This is doubled with the fact that I haven’t been able to go to many cons, maybe 2 small ones, since the game released, since marketing the game completely drained my business savings.
But at you have pointed out, Steam is really its own marketplace. And because of that has its own ecosystem and standards of pricing. But i was coming into it with convention-table mindset, and comparing it to two specific games in the genre, which I shouldn’t have. There was also this idea that I had heard from some Steam-tubers that lower priced games (under 10) aren’t seen as ‘good’ or that they are viewed as ‘shovelware ’ by users, but now I’m thinking that was probably wrong.
@@InkRose Well that it's a bit different to be approached by someone to make a one of product and you are selling a ready made product for lots of people. It's not buyer asking you to sell, it's a seller asking buyers to buy.
Also, there's nothing wrong with pricing your game higher, than the market. But you have to have a dedicated fanbase of your work, if you want to do that. As in at least 10k people that are ready to buy the game before it is launched. Or the amount of buyers you need to make some profit and continue to maintain the game after launch.
Steam differs from conventions in a key area - there are much more people in there! You have potential to bring in millions of new people to the game. And it's much cheaper for you to sell the game through Steam and don't worry about building and maintaining your own store and try to convince people to buy from you. So it should not be viewed as disadvantage really, it's not a huge cut if you think about it.
Regarding thee convention price - nothing wrong with it either! Just sell deluxe edition there. Some physical item (like you do already) + game + art and soundtrack. If you want to make the experience for your convention buyers super premium make some small one of fan art for them and sign it as an additional bonus. Most of the people would love it and don't worry seeing that the base game is worth less money on Steam, because they are getting something that no one has other than them. Especially, if you are transparent about it.
Anyway, good luck with your next project! It looks interesting, just don't price yourself out of success next time. And remember, community is a key.
Cheers!