Cris Game

John here! We'd like to give you all a little progress report of our development. Level Design It's difficult to pinpoint on how complete the level design of XING is as it is constantly evolving with each iteration of our build. I can say that we have finalized the general layout of all of our levels and have hit "picture lock" on the scope of the game, meaning we have all of the levels of our game placed in editor , and while puzzle and environment details may be changed, the scope of the levels is set. Koriel in particular has been spending a lot of time in the map editor crafting and refining these worlds in order to maximize their storytelling and entertainment. Gameplay Mechanics We've spent a tremendous amount of time since our last public showing developing new and improving existing mechanics. Understandably, how players interact with the game is very important to the experience we are looking to create, so mechanics have been a priority . In addition to t...

This year E3 was about preparing for the future of XING, and taking some time off from development to have a bit of fun! Since James and I both live in California, we decided to go to meet with contacts, make new friends and try out the latest games! We put the latest alpha build on some flash drives for some of the contacts we would be meeting with....and I added XING stickers to make them look nicer :) Day 1 Since we didn't have any meetings in the morning, the first thing we decided to do was explore. This resulted in some Star Wars photos! Trying out the Omni: James and I both got to try the Virtuix Omni. I went into it with an open mind, try to think of how this could be applied to XING (naturally), and I actually came away impressed. At first it felt clunky, having to waer the belt and feeling the plastic bowl under the special shoes - but once I got into the game I didn't focus too much on where I physically was in real life - but rather I focused on where I was in the d...

At some juncture last year, I came across the following clip (entitled "Pay the Writer") from a film about sci-fi icon Harlan Ellison:  In it, as suggested by the title, Ellison talks about writers getting paid for what they do. Despite being only a few minutes long, the clip is laugh-out-loud funny in certain areas.  However, one of the the things that struck me is Ellison's statement that writers should get paid for everything they do.  (For instance, the clip starts off with Ellison providing an anecdote of someone wanting to use an interview he did for the television show Babylon 5.  However, they want to use the interview for free; Ellison insists on being paid.)  Ellison states that it's the amateurs out there doing everything for free that make it so hard for the professionals, who understand that they shouldn't be doing anything without getting paid. Ellison's comment puts me in mind of the current state of indie publishing, wherein many authors will...

As almost everyone knows by now, Amazon is now offering a revamped version of it's all-you-can-read buffet known as Kindle Unlimited.  Affectionately known as KU 2.0, this new offering is the same on the reader side of the equation ($9.99/month), but represents what could be a seismic shift on the author side. I previously wrote about how the original KU offered tons of opportunities for unscrupulous behavior . However, for the purposes of this article, I will disregard the presence of scammers, con artists and the like and assume that every author with books in KU is honest.   Basically, in its first iteration, authors in the program were paid whenever someone borrowed their books and read and least 10% of them.  Moreover, it didn't matter if your book was 10 pages in length or 10,000 - each borrow paid the same.  In other words, every author got the same buck-thirty (or whatever the monthly payout was) for each borrow, regardless of book length.  Great if you'...