For the ones curious what Wildhollow is all about, here are two reviews:

http://jayisgames.com/archives/2009/11/wildhollow.php

http://www.gamertell.com/gaming/comment/gamertell-review-wildhollow-for-pc-and-mac/

Also, I’m constantly googling “Wildhollow” to see what people are saying about the game. One thing I noted this weekend is that a cracked version of Wildhollow has popped up on various file networks. Trembling with fury and sorrow and trepidation and other things I downloaded one of these files to see if it was a bona fide copy of the game. Were people downloading my precious little game and playing it for free? Were people ignoring my hard work for a moment’s instant gratification?

It turns out that the answer is no.

If anyone feels tempted to download the “Wildhollow RIP” that’s circulating on warez sites you should be aware that it’s technically cracked but you won’t be able to play further than Steinheim Keep. You see, for the trial version I made two modifications: I added a time limit of 60 minutes, and I content-limited the game so that nothing from beyond that point is included. The warez version available only removes the time limit but – obviously – cannot add the missing content.

I guess that it’s just a matter of time before a real version pops up, but I feel pretty happy that for now loads of people are going to play the game an hour or two until they realize that they’re playing a trial version after all!

Get Ready for Adventure! KarjaSoft Releases Wildhollow

Sweden, November 27, 2009 — Independent game developer KarjaSoft proudly announces the release of tongue-in-cheek adventure/pet raising game Wildhollow for Windows and Mac.

Wildhollow introduces the story of a young boy or girl returning home to find his or her parents missing under mysterious circumstances. The player is tasked with solving quests and ultimately discovering the fate of his/her missing parents, while also restoring the titular Wildhollow ranch to full glory. The game features an original mix of dialogue driven adventure gameplay and pet simulation elements in which animals can be raised and crossbred. A wide variety of breeds can be discovered, and varied food gathering minigames spice things up even further.

The game world is filled with colorful characters and humorous dialogue, and provides many hours of open-ended entertainment. The player encounters inept adventurers, cowardly dragons, greedy merchants, dwarf lords in love and much more as the story progresses.

“If you enjoy funny dialogue, adorable pets to raise and clever jabs at common fantasy cliches you’re going to love Wildhollow,” says Miro Karjalainen, owner of KarjaSoft, not at all deterred by the fact that his opinion might be slightly biased.

Wildhollow is available for Windows and Mac at the price of $19.99. More information, screenshots and trial downloads can be found on the official webpage:

http://www.wildhollow.com

Features:

- Loads of wacky characters to interact with
- Adorable animals to breed
- Tongue-in-cheek humor poking fun at fantasy cliches
- A colorful fantasy world to explore
- Hours of adventurous quests
- And much more…

System requirements:

1 GHz CPU, 512 MB RAM. Windows 2000 or higher, or Mac OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

About KarjaSoft

Founded by Miro Karjalainen in 2006, KarjaSoft has previously released the fluffy arcade game Sheeplings in 2007 followed by superhero puzzle/RPG Spandex Force in 2008. KarjaSoft focuses on developing casual indie games with a twist, including lots of humor and genre blending. Visit KarjaSoft online at http://www.karjasoft.com

Contact:

Miro Karjalainen
www.karjasoft.com
info@karjasoft.com

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The adventure/simulation game Wildhollow is about to be released November 27, and I’m trying my best to arrange everything for tomorrow. Full version and trial builds for Windows and Mac, press release, webpage touch-ups, ordering system setup, and on and on and on… The time is now 10 PM and I’m starting to question how much sleep I’ll get tonight.

Stay tuned for a press release posting tomorrow…

In my previous two versions I was using…well…Flash, but now I’ve experimented with Flex and lately with flixel, a game framework compatible with Flex. Things are progressing much more smoothly now that I can focus on writing the ActionScript code instead of mucking about with learning basic Flash concepts. This is as far as I’ve come right now:

I’m starting to figure out the different game states, and I’ve added stages as well as a simple scoring system. By the way, if you get past level 5 the game will crash. Just so you know. It’s far from finished – but the main idea is beginning to crystalize.

Things left on the todo list:

• More stages with different animals
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Sound and music
• Better loading screen
• One-screen tutorial
• General design issues – improve the look of the game
• Try out small things like should the food items start bouncing instead of just moving forward, etc
• Misc things like KarjaSoft logo, link to the Wildhollow homepage, optimize the game for size, etc…

Time to get some work done if I want to finish this before the Wildhollow release…

One thing struck me in particular, though: obscurity is major problem for indie developers. Of course I’m well aware of that but for some reason I still don’t do anything about it. Wildhollow is soon to be released and I haven’t made a single press release about the game yet. I don’t even have a public beta download on the homepage!

It’s probably a mix between fear of receiving negative feedback, and bad experiences from previous games. Sheeplings was featured on Kotaku and it generated a lot of attention…but the game wasn’t polished enough to benefit from the traffic. For Spandex Force I tried an awesome publicity stunt: a superhero photo contest. Alas, it generated no entries. So for Wildhollow I’m trying to find the right balance when to send out information about the game; the game has to be good enough so that I can keep the momentum going, and I must push out info about the game gradually so that I don’t end up in the Spandex Force situation. (“Here’s a competition for a completely unknown game! Wanna send in a pic?”)

I’ll probably send a press release any day now, and who knows – maybe I’ll even make the beta version of the game public on the homepage. Another thing I’m going to do is start twittering about the game. I’ve been very sceptical about Twitter, facebook marketing and all of these things, but today I saw a major benefit with using Twitter as a marketing tool for Wildhollow: I can show the latest twitters on the game homepage; this can serve as a small news column that I can update quite easily. Yay!

Maybe I should ponder if facebook can be used for something good as well… Possibly to give hints to people playing the game later, when they get stuck in my (not very) fiendishly difficult quests and puzzles.

• More eye candy for the minigames
• More eye candy when tending animals
• Additional dialogues and items of interest in most locations
• Click a button to check for new versions – and if so, download the upgrade
• Trial version limitations and nag screens

The upgrade feature is a simple version checker plus redirection to the Wildhollow webpage where some PHP scripts will run. It may be simple but it will be a major time saver when I release updates! If you’re running a trial version, it will redirect you to the updated trial download; if you’re running a full version you’ll have to enter your e-mail address and it’ll authenticate the e-mail with the purchaser database before sending the upgrade.

The last item is trail version limitations.

So far I haven’t bothered with having a trial/full version but from now on the trial versions I release will be limited to 60 minutes, have a nagging screen, and be content limited. There are three reasons why I have content limitation as well as a time limit:

1. The download will be smaller
2. Games are always cracked, and with missing content I’ll ensure that it’s slightly harder to get a full version of the game. You can’t just run a patch to remove the trial limitations
3. Related to the second item, I chose to have a really trivial method to determine trial vs full version. I assume that the game will be cracked swiftly either way so I’m taking the least problematic route for me. Thus I really need to have content limitations – otherwise I’m guaranteeing instant warezing of the game. As it is now a pirate will have to get hold of the full version first, at least

All good reasons, I think.

I received some good feedback on how to improve the trailer, so I’ve gathered a few things to look into:

• Better source clips that show interesting scenes and more variation
• Mess around with the music – switch between a few different music clips
• Probably keep the sound FX from the game
• Experiment more with zoom/rotation/transitions to get dynamics

Things are moving fast… Wildhollow is ready for release soon, and I want to have a nice and exciting trailer for the game before that date!

Flash development is something that’s completely new to me, so this is a fun opportunity to learn more about how to make web games. This is as far as I’ve gotten right now:

In this version you can drag food items and drag them to the bovine animal. Feeding it something it likes results in a big boost of the score, but feeding it something it dislikes results in negative points. You can see that bovine beasts don’t like fish or meat, for example.

Right now there’s just one animal, but – as the “Stage 1″ text in the beginning hints at – I’m planning on having several stages with different animal types.

Still not very impressive. But from the last time I’ve refactored a lot of the code, learned how to use external Actionscript files, learned about creating MovieClips and applying filters through the code, and learned that it’s very easy to extend a MovieClip with needed variables. For example, each food item (and the animal) have a value assigned to it to identify what type it is.

Still a lot of things missing, though:

• More animals
• Maybe animations for the animals
• Logic to determine when a game is lost/won
• Decide how a game stage should work
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Investigate if there can be smoother scrolling for the foodstuffs
• Sound
• Loading screen
• Title screen
• One-screen tutorial

We’ll see how far I get next week!

As a side project to Wildhollow I’m planning on creating a simple Flash game for the website – a Wildhollow teaser, so to speak. I’m aiming for a game where you learn what animals like what types of food; something that’s useful to know in the real game too. This is as far as I’ve gotten right now:

You can drag the food items if you click and hold the mouse button. My plan is to let the player feed animals this way later.

Not very impressive, no. But so far I’ve learned how to create instances of movie clips, deal with arrays, handle mouse input and make a single main loop function that takes care of all instances.

So, what’s missing? A lot:

• Animals to feed with the foodstuffs
• Animations for the animals
• Scoring
• Logic to determine when a game is lost/won
• Possibly, an online highscore table
• Investigate if there can be smoother scrolling for the foodstuffs
• Sound
• Loading screen
• Title screen
• One-screen tutorial

Still, it’s not much work at all compared to the complete Wildhollow game…

Why, not at all! Wildhollow has been delayed due to work, personal issues and a long frigging trip to China among other things, but at long last I’m on track again. I’m planning an autumn release, and judging from the v0.3 that I finished today things are looking good.

Here are some screenshots to tease you with:

But you’re not getting a download just yet. I need to have a quick sanity check: some people need to test it before I can make a public release. Just in case I’ve left some horrible bug or other issue that makes the game unplayable and/or unenjoyable.