Cris Game

Sales at the moment are nothing to brag about.  Nevertheless, I was super-excited to see my rank at something like 92,000 after the first paperback copy of " Sensation " was bought on Amazon a few weeks back.  Of course, it fell rather quickly (I was back in six figures within a matter of hours), but it was still a blast to have some digits attached to my work.  I'm still hoping to get the Kindle edition uploaded this week, although a few purchases has brought my current rank for the paperback to roughly 94,000. As to " Warden ," the Kindle edition has sold a couple of copies and rose as high as about 81,000 but has now retreated to around 177,000.  The paperback version is currently sitting around #260,000.  Also, I've enrolled Warden as part of the KDP Select program, so I've got to settle on some dates for my free promotion. All in all, I'm pleased with the progress I've made thus far. 

We had a great time yesterday at UC Irvine for the Annual IEEE GameSig student showcase. This will be more of a photo post  - since we took quite a few! Overall, the event was very successful.  Setting up The XING: The Land Beyond booth  Our first players of the day were the volunteers! We got lots of positive reactions, and people lining up to play. The Floor Even our younger audience was having a good time! Two thumbs up! Alright! Photo with one of our amazing professors  People played up until the very end of the event.  Team photo before the teardown.

Finally, I think I've got this blog in halfway decent form.  Now I can start talking about things that matter - like writing. Right now I just finished publishing the first book in my " Warden " series on Createspace.  I published my superhero novel " Sensation " there a few weeks ago.  I expect to have the ebook version of both up within a week.  In fact, I'm tempted to load them on every available platform and see how they do.  At the same time, however, I keep hearing great things about KDP Select, and I'd like to let these two books dip their toes in those waters.   I suppose I could try the other platforms for a week or two in order to get a feel for how the books are received, and maybe switch to Select after that.  Anyway, it's all still very much in the air, but it will be interesting to experiment with a lot of this in an effort to find the sweet spot.

Okay, I'm not really a pimp (although it felt good to work the name of an Oscar-winning song into the title of my first post). I'm just a regular schmoe trying to establish himself as a novelist - but I'm having trouble right out the gate.  No, not with writing - with trying to get this blog up to up and running.  Every time I think I've got my arms around this thing, something else wriggles loose.  If it's not the template, it's the layout; if it's not the layout, it's the background; if it's not the background, it's the widgets, and so on... Anyway, I guess it's a lot like writing in that sometimes you just have to keep tweaking things until you're satisfied.  I'm about 95% of the way there; there's just one thing at the moment that's driving me batty, but I'm hoping to sort it out soon. Wish me luck!

This was posted yesterday on the Gamereactor.tv youtube channel. Check it out!

Hello everyone, I'm James Steininger. This is my first appearance on the dev blog! I'd like the begin by extending thanks to the Kickstarter community and our friends and family for making XING possible. We've really come quite a ways since November.  Rainforest Environment Design Immediately following the campaign, we spent considerable effort toward finalizing a development strategy as well as a game design doc. We decided to test out the new pipeline on the Rainforest Kickstarter stretch goal environment. John immediately got started working on foliage meshes and I started working on the architecture. I had hoped that I would be able to post these shots sooner, but I couldn't help myself from going back in for more layers of moss and ivy. Here one of my concept scenes of what we are aiming to achieve with the rainforest: Environment Concept Design This is another concept shot, where I showcase the stellar waterfall particle effect John made. We also thank John for al...

John here, ready to update on the technical side for those who are interested. Before we dive in, I'd like to let you all know we are going to be showcasing the game at UC Irvine in Irvine, Califronia this Saturday at 4:00 PM (the 6th floor of Bren Hall) for the annual IEEE GameSIG competition we entered last year. We are simply presenting the game on the floor this year, so if you are in the area stop on by and say hello! In the weeks following kickstarter (and after a long rest period - whew) we have really stepped up our production and have made plans to take us all the way into the rest of development. Organization has been a huge focus for us these past few weeks. Many of you probably already know or have heard this, but I'll say it again - Organize your work, especially if you are working with others! I wouldn't say we were too terribly unorganized prior to our cleanup this week, but every mislabeled asset adds up, and it is extremely frustr...

Time for our first Dev Blog Sunday! It has been 3 weeks since our Kickstarter ended, and we’ve been delving deeper into development ever since. Since it has been 2 weeks since our last post, I feel like that merits a longer-than-normal post School vs. Summer Just a little heads up for the next month:  All 3 of us are actually still in school at the moment, so this next month will be a bit slower than the summer months to come (due to schoolwork + gearing up for John and my graduation). So far we've worked very well alongside our schoolwork, but we understand that the month before graduation can be more time-consuming than we are used to. That being said, we still plan to do as much on XING as possible for the next month, i.e. continuing to spend pretty much all of our "spare" time working on it. Working on the new XING World Map I've taken on the task of designing the World Map over the last couple of weeks. It will be the glue the holds together all of the levels we ...

Hey everyone! First of all, I'd like to announce that starting this weekend we will be making posts every Sunday . This will be our weekly catch-up day, in case we don't end up making other posts during the week.  What We've Been Up To We've been taking the past week to organize our development schedule after reaching our Stretch Goals on Kickstarter. We have exciting plans in the works, including some awesome new map designs for the game. We are also still in the process of now organizing all of our files and production pipeline, in order to be more efficient as we head into the summer.