Future of GoldGun: Production discontinued
Hello dear friends.
We have some news to share, but unfortunately this time they are bad for us, and specially very sad for me. I don't know if it is normal to open it like that, but I know some of you liked the project, so I wanted to open this thing a little bit.
We have decided to stop the production of GoldGun for an undefined period of time. The reasons are several, and when all of them get combined, it is difficult to keep the boat floating. I summarize some of the reasons:
1- production of each episode is too expensive for us at this time, if we need to reach the quality that many players demand.
2- difficulty to get the return of investment. Difficulty to estimate the number of downloads for next payable episode.
3- too many negative critics around what we did, and sorry to be honest, too many what we HAVE to do (not what we could try to do). We never tried to be offensive, neither go into stereotypes. But we did, and some might not give us a second chance. To some of the team members, it has been hard to read all, specially when we did it with quite much love. To me it was okay, I'm hard as a stone.
4- difficulties to get competent voice actors from our neighborhood with such low budget
5- need to work harder on the audio quality before anything else can be released
6- other projects we want also to do, e.g. music maze and audio wizards, before we can decide what is the type of games we want to do.
7- stress and tiredness on some of us
So yeah, if you played the game, you are one of the lucky ones (who played that sh#t). We will not make any more publicity of it, but it will stay available for at least one more month on app stores. I would like to take it out from there, but it is part of my learning, and I need to follow for some weeks its evolution.
However, we are also kind of proud of what we did. We know many indie game companies that delay and delay the launch because they never think they are ready and are too scared of the critics. I think the critics in here were very hard, but we also learned a lot. We did a huge open betatesting, and 1400 persons have downloaded the game in 10 days. We got our game on the app stores, and that nobody will takes it away. We also know that cancelling projects on game companies is quite of common, and before we loose all the money and go bankrupt, we prefer to change the topic.
I don't want to end this message with saying special thanks to all the people that liked the project, and send to us kind words to continue. Sure not everything was negative criticism. There was constructive criticism too, which was very valuable and which will help us to make a better second episode if we ever do it. We know many people liked the concept and the story behind GoldGun. That is perhaps the most bitter thing, because the next episode was already written, it had four quite complete minigames, and so on. It would have also included a revision of Episode 1, so new players would not have to play that one, and could jump straight to the second.
All in all: Stopping in here was not an easy decision, but actually quite logic based on all the facts.
Before I end up: many players offered themselves as voice actors. We really considered that option, but we were afraid of how would affect to the sound quality if different actors record on different spaces with different acoustic characteristics. I think it could have worked out, but on my team they were not really sure with that. Nevertheless, if somebody in there would like to co-ordinate the voice acting, like recruitment, directing, recording and editing, we would be quite ok with outsourcing this part. That actually could simplify some things and help us to take the project back to work. We would also love that all voice actors are from the blind community, not only on GoldGun, but all future games. If you have any ideas, write us to gold...@mytruesound.com
And last words: We are not dead. We will come back with Audio Wizards and Music Maze. We love this forum, so we will post news from time to time. If you want to keep up to date, remember for visit from time to time our website. Best regards, david
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