Another New Enemy Approaches!

Would you like to mess with an Ogre? This dude’s pretty buff. Actually, make that massively buff! Comparing the ogre with other imposing enemy sprites we’ve seen so far…

…the ogre has the greatest power and the greatest durability out of all of them, with only the Grisly Bear being within 25% of the immediate threat level of an Ogre. But that’s no big deal, you might think. All you have to do is blast an ogre with magic, right? Wrong! Ogres are at least twice as resistant to magic as any enemy currently on the Art Assets page!

They may not be the biggest creatures around in terms of physical dimensions, but ogres are up at the top of the charts for “ordinary” monsters that you really don’t want to mess with—and if their raw might isn’t enough, wait until you experience their combat techniques.

Do they have any weakness? Hmm… maybe you’ll have to discover that for yourself in the future.

Delayed Update

Speaking of ogres, the reason this week’s update is a couple days late is because an “ogre” also known as the tax man started bearing down on me for two years ago, which is another round of unexpected and time-consuming fun. A group that I was working with (not working for) at the time had a software malfunction that sent out an incorrect report of the financial transactions between us.

That company was rather poor with documentation and has since gone out of business, so I’ve been figuring out how to prove that I reported all transactions that year correctly (and yes, based on bank statements alone I absolutely did get it correct).

I’m sure that’s horrifically boring and meaningless to all of you, though, so let me bring this back on topic…

Kickstarter Timeline

Considering everything that’s happened these past couple months—house emergencies that were narrowly averted, house emergencies that weren’t averted, family members suddenly needing some money, paying for and preparing for family-related travel in December (and I’ll probably lose 8-10-ish days on that, by the way), and now this tax situation that will hopefully be averted—I’ve come to realize that it was probably too optimistic to assume that I could delay and delay and delay heading off to Kickstarter until I finally got into the exact situation I wanted so I could get a perfect storm of a launch.

So my new goal is to launch on Kickstarter in February or March 2016. No matter where I’m at by then—will I have a playable demo or not, a composer, sound effects, UI skins, or anything else I’m missing—at some point I just have to bite the bullet.

I’d guess that I’ve put in $22,000-ish (I haven’t crunched those numbers for a while) which is enormous when it’s only one person paying out—and I’m not involved in any relationships, by the way, so when I say one person I really mean one person. The bottom line is that the more I think about this…

I wonder if it's primarily pride, reason, or ethics telling me that I will *not* go to Kickstarter before I have a playable demo.

— Jelly Paladin (@JellyPaladin) April 17, 2015

…the more I think the answer was and has always been “pride”—and I don’t mean the good kind of it. Even if I can’t put out a 2-hour-long fully-featured demo (and I’d still like to), would that be a huge shame or fault on my part that I couldn’t pull it off by myself? Is it really as unacceptable as I’ve made it out to be in my mind? Maybe I could be faulted for too much ambition; that’s a perfectly legitimate criticism that I’d hear out. But I’ve finally reached a point that it seems fine to ask for money after putting in as much of my own money—and my time, and stress, and fixing bugs, and opportunity cost of not making money, and everything else.

Besides, the worst-case scenario is that I fail on Kickstarter and come back with more experience.

So… whether the result is glorious or blows up in my face, I’d rather know that one way or another than continue on with as much uncertainty as I’ve been living with.

Early 2016 is go time.