Cris Game

Hello everyone, James reporting for duty. We have a lot of ground to cover in this week's blog update. Let's get to it! The Rift Has Arrived First I extend enormous gratitude to Darren [ Scr33tch ] , one of our outstanding backers. After reading last week's post about our Oculus situation, Darren informed us in an email that he would trade his already delivered Oculus Dev Kit in exchange for our order number. We gladly took the offer! Considering that it was an international shipment, it was remarkable when the parcel arrived only a few days later.  Get ready to lose your lunch White Lotus was unanimously enchanted by Oculus. Given its relative ease of setup, we first tried out Team Fortress 2, a game familiar to each of us. Simply put, we had a blast. The combination of true stereoscopic 3D vision and head tracking made peering around a corner before running-and-gunning just awesome . Playing as Scout, the fastest player in the online first-person shooter, felt like a rid...

John here: I know, it's been a while since I've made a post! It has now been officially three weeks since we moved to our Arizona office and we are feeling great about where we are with XING,  and the direction we are headed in. We had our first in-house playtest since the release of the sandbox demo yesterday, and received excellent feedback and comments from our testers. I figure I am long over due for a tech breakdown, so here goes. I figure I'll tackle some more developer-oriented stories, so feel free to skip to the bottom of this post if you're looking for the pretty pictures. Development Google. Your best friend, your lifeblood as a developer. I'm going to be honest here- especially as a recent grad, I can say college was great for me and taught me an incredible amount about life. I've had many fantastic teachers at school in all sorts of departments, teaching me things I may never have had the opportunity to learn about and making lifelong friends in th...

Just working away... As always, feel free to leave us comments and let us know what you'd like to see more of! Cheers!

As part of the All Authors Blog Blitz taking place today, I am proud to have my first blog interview with Toni Allen -  tarot reader, astrologer and author. With that, let's launch right into it. Toni can you tell us a little about your background? As a child I was always making up stories in my head, but mainly only wrote them down for school. I studied photography at college and it’s still one of my greatest passions, being able to capture a single moment and show others how I see the world around me. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that I realised that other people don’t relate to the world in quite the same way as myself, and it was only through a long process of self-discovery that I acknowledged the word psychic to explain the many weird and wonderful things that happened around me. As a child I assumed that everyone else had prophetic dreams, saw ghosts and knew what was occurring in other places at the same time. To me this was all normal, a part of who I am. While at co...

Years ago, I read an interview with a musician who described what it felt like the first time he heard one of his songs on the radio.  I can't remember exactly what he said, but the word "surreal" comes to mind.  Regardless, I had a similar experience recently when I received an email from Amazon that contained the following: Hopefully it's not too hard to read, but this is an email from Amazon recommending my own book   Sensation  to me!  How cool is that???!!! (Not to mention, as I said before, surreal.) Naturally, I'm pretty pleased about it (because I assume this means it's being recommended to other people), but I wish I knew how to quantify the effect.  In other words, does this have an effect on book sales?  If so, how much? To what extent does it weigh in a buyer's decision vs. a tweet saying something similar or a reviewer's blog?  Or maybe it doesn't even matter.  After all, I'm getting a lot of positive exposure from...

I feel blessed to have had a rather successful May in terms of book sales.  I had gone through the trouble of making some very nice Excel tables and charts to present the data, because I think they show some interesting trends.  Unfortunately, you can't post Excel charts/tables here (and I'm not sophisticated enough to use other applications), so we'll just have to make do with the raw numbers. Sensation The month started off a little slow; I published  Sensation  on Kindle on May 3, and I had a grand total of 3 sales for the week ending May 11, but things quickly picked up.  Week Sales 5/11/13 3 5/18/13 8 5/25/13 32 6/1/13 87 In essence, I started off selling 3 copies per week on Kindle and ended the month selling more than 30 books per day and ranked #1 in multiple categories.  This, of course, is success at a greater level and far faster pace than I ever anticipated, and I really don't know what factors to attribute it to other than t...

 Hello everyone! We are finally back after being off the grid for the past couple of weeks. To summarize that, we had one week dedicated to all of John and my graduation celebrations. Koriel's Graduation John's Graduation The next two weeks we each went back to our respective families for our vacation time before fully diving head first into the project again. John played games and took care of preparations for our studio in Arizona, James spent his time exercising and going to museums, and I decided to stay home with my family, friends and pets - especially my cat Derp. I also dyed my hair red! New Hair! :) Derp James at Google John and friends Last weekend we all got back together and started off working on the beach level. It took a couple days to settle in, but we made some real headway and are right on schedule. Reunion! The new studio! We had to make due without chairs on the first day  Stocking up for the next few weeks at Costco Koriel's work station James' work...

In a number of my previous posts, I have mentioned the early success that I have been blessed to have with my superhero novel  Sensation , which is currently #1 in a couple of categories.  What's been lost in the shuffle, however, is the fact that my other book,  Warden , is also performing respectably.  In fact, I looked up earlier today and found that it was listed in the Top 100 in one of its categories: 96. Warden (Book 1: Wendigo Fever) by Kevin Hardman 5.0 out of 5 stars       ( 1 ) Kindle Edition $2.99 Amazon Best Sellers Rank:  #35,913 Paid in Kindle Store ( See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store ) #96   in  Books   >   Children's Books   >   Science Fiction & Fantasy   >   Spine-Chilling Horror Frankly speaking, it caught me a little by surprise.  Like any other author, I had been watching the sales that were occurring with both of my books.  However, I was a bad parent, paying more...