Newsgroups: rec.arts.int-fiction
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From: jacobw@tucson.Princeton.EDU (Jacob Solomon Weinstein)
Subject: Re: IF Business venture?
Message-ID: <1994Apr13.004303.28143@Princeton.EDU>
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References: <2oc2hl$tu4@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu> <1994Apr12.010648.19824@Princeton.EDU> <Co5x8G.482@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz>
Date: Wed, 13 Apr 1994 00:43:03 GMT
Lines: 36

Brendon Wyber <cctr120@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
>Jacob Solomon Weinstein (jacobw@tucson.Princeton.EDU) wrote:
>
>> Based on my experience, I would advise you not to get your hopes up. I
>> released Save Princeton about a year and a half ago, and, in that time,
>> I've gotten about $250 in shareware fees. Admittedly, the Princeton
>> setting of the game probably turns some people off, since they
>                                     ^^^^
>I would say most instead of some. To be honest, the moment I loaded it up
>and saw that the starting locations contained real people and the Disk refered
>to TADS and mentioned lots of in-jokes I immeadiately dismissed it as yet
>another game-based-on-my-life-type-thingies which are sort of down on my
>literary scale in the same catergory of amatuer what-if-the-BattleStar-
>Gallatica-meet-the-Enterprise-and-the-Death-Star stories.

Alas, your reaction is probably typical. The fact is, the game did start
off as a "based-on-my-life-type" thingy; it was originally a three-room
test of my ability to program in TADS. It occurred to me that it would
be easy to expand it into a full-fledged adventure game. I didn't
realize that this easy task would take me a year and a half. If I had
known how much work was going to go into it, and how much damage those
three opening rooms would do to people's willingness to play, I would
have started the game rather differently.

A free bit of advice to folks writing games: learn from my mistake.
People who have played Save Princeton through have really enjoyed it,
but I've lost a lot of potential players by having the weaker part of
the game right up front. Start off with something great, and you'll be
in good shape.

(And those of you who gave up on Save Princeton early--give it another
try. You may be pleasantly surprised.)




