Now What?

Human Subject released on August 17, 2012.  That was about two weeks later than I would have liked because I printed several Human Subject t-shirts and handed them out to random people at the Chicago Comicon and it would have been nice to have a game available for download to give out as well.  Regardless, it was a good time and I even got to hook up with the social media guys from Wizard World and they gave away some of my shirts throughout the weekend.

One thing that shocked me about releasing a game is that reviews immediately started popping up around the interwebs.  I sent a few emails out to XBLIG sites but it was a very strange feeling to have people actually spending the time to write articles about something I created.  Regardless of how good or bad they may have thought it was, I was really flattered that they had anything to say at all.  Here's a list of the ones I could find while writing this article:

• http://indiegamerchick.com/tag/human-subject-xbox/ (be sure to also read part 2)
• http://indiegamerchick.com/2012/08/20/a-quick-apology-from-indie-gamer-chick/
• http://www.gamebreaker.tv/indie-games/indie-for-breakfast-human-subject/
• http://thexblig.com/2012/08/29/review-human-subject/
• http://www.pixelatedsausage.com/home/pixelated-playtime-human-subject-xblig.html
• http://signedin.libsyn.com/episode-99-darksiders-ii-sleeping-dogs-dust-an-elysian-tail-kung-fu-strike-the-expendables-2

For the most part I felt pretty good about what the reviews had to say.  The biggest complaint is that the graphics were bland and the atmosphere is trying to be too much like Portal.  I can't disagree with those comments so I'll just focus on what I thought was the most positive comment throughout which was that it had fairly solid platforming level design.

From a sales perspective, Human Subject has been a bit of a downer.  I released MathFlash in 2010 and almost 3 years after its release its selling about 4x what Human Subject is selling.  I've come up with a few theories as to why that is, but I'm not sure I'll ever know for certain.  My main thought is that the platformer genre is much more competitive than the educational genre and therefore there's just many more games available that are of at least a similar or higher level of quality and fun.  Poor sales or no, I feel pretty good about coming up with a concept and seeing it through to implementation.

What's Next?

Microsoft has announced they will no longer be supporting XNA.  As a reaction to this I let my subscription lapse.  I still think there's plenty of opportunity on XBLIG but I'm starting to look forward to other platforms and development tools.  I also think monogame is interesting and could be a way that I could use my XNA skills on other platforms. 

I recently picked up and Lenovo Win8 touchscreen laptop and I really like it.  I'm excited about the Win8 platform so I'm planning to release a few apps there and test the waters. 

I've also started playing with Unity and I have to say that it may be the coolest piece of software I've ever used.  From a game development perspective it removes so much of the required plumbing work that all you really need to focus on is gameplay.  It's a bit confusing because I normally coming up with gameplay concepts while I'm doing the plumbing stuff so I'll have to change how I approach projects if I want to publish something .  And, Unity opens the door for publishing to just about any platform you want so that's also really exciting. 

What ever I end up doing and where ever it gets published I'll be sure to post an update here.

Thanks for stopping by…