Adventure Gamers - Forums

Stuart - 06 August 2013 02:26 PM

Really impressive. How much did this game cost to make if you didn’t Kickstart it? Makes me wonder just how much money some of these projects NEED to finish a game when this appears to be a fun and polished looking game made at low cost(?).

To date, Heroine’s Quest has cost:
- $15 for a sketch of the heroine portrait
- $5 for a font.

Just to iterate, as we have had many questions about whether the game will be Kickstarted or when it will be out for purchase - the game will be free to download and play. There will be no Kickstarter, and you will not have to spend a single cent on it.

If you wish to support us regardless, we do have a Paypal link on the website: http://www.crystalshard.net/hq.htm.

The core team is essentially five people. We do this in our spare time aside from full time jobs/study as a hobby. I joined last year, and to date, I would have spent hundreds of hours working on this game, and I believe it is a game that deserves to be made just for the sake of it.

That aside, and this is my opinion only, Kickstarter is a useful tool for projects which need some starting out capital to gather the manpower and resources they need to create something and get it out there. Many people are not able to spend so many unpaid hours on something free, especially if they have families to look after and feed, and having funds to pay them is one way to allow them to put aside some time for a project. It also enables resources to be produced at a faster rate than otherwise.

Heroine’s Quest: The Herald of Ragnarok itself is a totally different game to the originally announced Heroine’s Quest: The Legend of Fair Spring. All the art and story are new and nothing was reused from the original concept (though a few elements may have been reworked; but few and far between). I believe development began in late 2009 on HQ: THOR, and has made steady progress ever since.

Why the change in project direction?  I’m genuinely curious—I haven’t followed HQ all that closely over the years.

Corby (the lead artist) joined up with Crystal Shard in late 2009 and wanted to revitalize the HQ project. He wanted to do winter themed art and thought that Norse mythology was very rich in content to draw from. Plus, he had also moved to a very cold area with lots of ice, Northern lights etc, and he found his new surroundings inspirational . Radiant ran with the theme and developed the story and puzzles. Essentially, it was a new team and new project at this stage.

It’s awesome that you guys are giving away the game for free, but I just don’t get /why/. If you have a quality product, then why not charge for it, if even just a little bit?

Crystal Shard is purposefully freeware. We enjoy making games, we enjoy the development process of seeing ideas come to fruition. And we want people to be able to play and enjoy it. If we charged for it, a whole lot of people wouldn’t end up playing the game.

On top of that, managing a commercial game has its own challenges - budgeting, schedule, marketing it effectively so that people know about it and are interested… It is additional work on top of the game design work that we do.

It is not to say that we don’t get anything at all out of making games for free - personally speaking, it is a very nice addition to resumes, and even some of the art skills I have picked up from working on these sorts of projects have proved useful in my real job which isn’t art related at all!

Finally, we get the pleasure of seeing people enjoy our work; a good amount of feedback which we get from people who play our games is usually reward in itself.

Well, beta testing is going very well and a lot of bugs are being fixed as we speak

Just providing an update here with a little contest we’re running, in case anyone is interested in having a cameo in game. At the very least, if you do participate, you’ll end up with some physical goods to add to your games collection, of your own making!

Join the Heroine’s Quest box contest, and win a cameo in the game!

(1) Download the box art for the game from http://crystalshard.net/dls/hq_boxart.zip
(2) Print one of the box art images, and use it to make a DVD case, CD case, or actual game box for HQ.
(3) Take a picture of it in suitable surroundings. What is fitting is up to you; you could find a snowy landscape to place it in, or cosplay as a troll holding the case, or create some fan art and place the case to the side, or anything else you can think of. Be creative!
(4) Post the picture in the AGS forums in this thread. Otherwise, if you have Facebook, please put it in our FB group, and link to it from your own Facebook timeline or wall.

The deadline is October 16th (23:59 GMT). After that, the Crystal Shard team will act as judges to determine the three best entries. The three winners will get a cameo in the game: describe what your character should look like and we will place it in Heroine’s Quest. One cameo is alive and well, one is imprisoned, and the last one is dead (because hey, the game is about Ragnarok). The cameos are not hidden; a player is likely to come across them in a normal playthrough.

The first price gets first pick and an animated cameo; the other two are static. Your character must be suitable to the environment, so e.g. robots or ninjas are not an option; and note that this is
a cameo, not a moving or speaking role. By submitting a picture, you give us permission to use it as promotional material on e.g. our website; we’ll include your name if we use it. Crystal Shard retains full rights to the game, including the sprites used for the cameo.

Hi everyone!

Heroine’s Quest now has a page on IndieDB, and I have posted a little write up about who’s who on the team, and some things you can expect to see in the game.

http://www.indiedb.com/games/heroines-quest

Enjoy

Here is a preview of a couple of monsters you will see in game, as well as the combat and interfaces:

http://www.indiedb.com/games/heroines-quest/news/heroines-quest-monsters-combat-and-interfaces

And a new update, about how the game began and was developed:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/heroines-quest/news/the-making-of-heroines-quest-the-herald-of-ragnarok

Also, our writer/programmer, Radiant, is planning to be at AdventureX in London on 7th/8th December! Admission is free, so if you’re in the area, you can meet him and check out a pre-release version of the game. For more info about AdventureX, visit http://www.screen7.co.uk/adventurex/index.html.

I’m covering the event for the site, so I will try to catch up with him.