games – Hornbostel Productions Blog & Shop

Crowdsourcing adventures full of astounding worlds!

Okay, so updates include the arrival of:

-more and more new paintings about to reach Etsy, plus recent launch of confetti bags like this one that are rather unique insofar as they vary randomly and have printed textures. Plus while there are texture and 3d update delays on Itch.io and a lot of that scheduling clearly misfired, updates are nonetheless still on the way. I am still working on it and my hope is to have that all done finally this month well before the other big stuff of April 2024 drops.

Crowdsourced Adventure – browser-based sci-fi adventure multiverse

Astounding Worlds – unlock a menagerie of fascinating, even astounding, fantasy worlds.

Namely: By end of April 2024 I will post the fixed, reworked first areas of Crowdsourced Adventure, and a bunch of the Astounding Worlds stuff by end of May 2024. I am hoping for a Steam / Epic launch too coinciding with these, which means $400 getting two things launched across two stores at a price of $2 each on every store. That is a $2 launch price, but sales are likely to exist down the road and aside from that, the whole point of the launch is less about racking up profit and more emphasis on visibility. I think marketers call it ‘framing’ – you place it somewhere at a price but also note that it exists there somewhere else for intriguingly less. And you never really intended to mostly sell at the first price. You just wanted to make people aware of it in a big public setting aka Steam and pull them off to your own shop or site and get them playing THERE.

And the sites are already recently redesigned, with further overhauls imminent, and the two games will be HTML5/webgl browser game freeware there. There are ads at the bottom of the page below the game, but they are not going to interfere with the play of the game at all, they are just images with links, that exist along the bottom of the page.

Literally the only reason to play them through Steam then is to have an offline install for PC that fills 100%, not 90% of the full desktop screen area, with no ads at the bottom edge and no usual browser stuff at the top edge.

But the game itself is always exactly the same either way.

Questions people are likely to ask at this moment include:

What about your itch.IO listing?

-Yes, if you bought a big asset bundle of everything on my Itch.IO shop, you get the Astounding Worlds installer for PC the day it hits Steam and Epic. Or if you buy one in the next month, or whenever. Crowdsourced Adventure too – I am adding it to Itch.IO too as first part of the minigame pack.

What about Miniature Minigolf? Miniature Multiverse? Other games? You posted on YouTube and then silence…

-Other projects continue inching forward in development. The two mentioned in this question are HUGE projects for a solo dev and despite much progress there are hundreds of hours work remaining across just those two. If you want to help push those forward please keep visiting my sites and playing whatever I have already released as that is a real show of support for not only the released stuff but for future projects. If someone is playing the small projects it bodes well for bigger ones down the road. As for YouTube there will be video content on YT and Vimeo and HornbostelVideos.com soon relating to all the new launches. I am still actively preparing for HornbostelVideos.com relaunch and that will be big soon but I have to stop at some point in this ongoing addition of page after page, with video after video, and just put it online. That site… wow… I have maybe a hundred old videos headed there over the course of this year from 20+ years of crazy hobbyist video productions and that means occasional VFX fixes in places where they are crucial, including blurring out or replacing logos on T shirts and random business signage in urban outdoor scenes, HD AI upscaling on the older SD videos, adding subtitles, and running everything through cutting edge audio filters in an effort to clean up vocals slightly and reduce the interference and volume of clicks, hisses, wind, and non vocal irrelevant background noise in many dialogue scenes to make the voices clearer here and there where I can. And if the sound of people talking is still muddy, like with echoes, or just really bad built in mics, well, that’s when the subtitles under every video come in and help.

What is this ad nonsense along the bottom of the two new game sites?

It’s two types. One is just links to my various sites and shops, and the other, is to other peoples’ sites, shops, web comics, etc. It is an ad slot for many other indie sites’ banner ads. It’s part of a banner thing called ComicAd.net, and while some of the ad spaces at times might push towards mature content, violent or weird dark stuff, that’s true of a few of my own things too that can on occasion be a bit adult in various ways and forms – dark (adult in sense of violence, gore, psychologically horrifying, or sexually suggestive, or ominous or uneasy, disturbing). Or now and then adult just as it is aimed at thoughtful adults, not idiot kids. (Adult in the sense of at times smart, sophisticated and verbally complex, not in the sense of offensive)

I pretty much chose a range of ad filters reflecting the most ‘adult’ my online stuff ever gets, and set filters to that. Mature but not flat out pornographic. So the ads will be a mix of stuff and some of that will be dark. And it is filtered automatically, not by me. It is a lot of indie art stuff, mainly online web comics. It operates with ad slots and a bidding system, so if you wanted to you could easily post your own ads on a bunch of slots across my websites. Just last two months these Crowdsourced Adventure and Astounding Worlds ad spaces all combined have typically raised 3-5 cents daily, despite the reality that not much exists on the related sites yet. I hope the launch of the actual game content leads to a near tenfold spike in visitor activity there and we see as a result something close to $0.50 a day being bid on the ads across these sites, as that is roughly $15/month and it is the lowball threshold where ongoing regular updates make any sense. It takes me 10 to 25 hours of work typically to make a moderately substantial new area or world for either game. I am aiming to earn over $4/hr doing this, any less and it just makes zero sense as I can already make over minimum wage on many other things I have going. Therefore, $40 to $100 raised between all ads on these sites and all other sales of them on itch.io, steam, epic… that is the target that funds a new world addition. If the ad slots manage $0.50 daily, that’s a smallish $40 world added to one of these two projects every 2.5 months.

And if you unexpectedly make a lot, like $10, daily, across all this?

There will be a funding pool for game dev. I have only so many hours in a day and these two projects will max out at two hours daily work each. Or… $16 a day. At that level, we may see significant nearly weekly updates. If income on this effort climbs above $20-25 a day for a while it means I will feel pretty safe to also divert a bit of it to other game dev project budgets as well… and donate some of the cash too. I certainly would love to see at least half the income over the $20 daily mark sent to charitable causes and used to solve real world problems. So… that is what I will do. And the goal’s not out of reach. Puzzle / adventure games that are open-ended and continually expanded like this are rare in gaming, and the reason they are rarely done is probably because the first big gaming attempt at a puzzle MMO flopped really badly despite strong reviews, lovely art direction and sound design, over $12 million in development prior to first launch circa end of 2003, and a recognizable adventure genre IP. (Myst Online, aka Uru) but it turned out, funny thing, even there if they scaled down to match a low end estimate of their playerbase audience they were eventually able to make it sustainable. Today Uru is back online and is operating sustainably purely on a donation based maintenance budget that is just enough to cover electrical bills, internet bandwidth, and occasional staff maintenance, or around $15,000 annually. And it has survived and remained online on such a budget for over a decade now. And it is even growing finally due to a few people making fan content and forwarding it to the Myst studio (Cyan) for inclusion on the servers.

So why is that relevant here?

Well, I’m actually a fan of what Cyan did with Uru in many ways. I find the Myst series inspiring creatively, aesthetically and was super impressed by the stuff the studio did in its ’90s heyday from a technical POV and frustrated when it all fell apart in the 2000s and sort of cautiously optimistic that they’d bounce back since then, which seems to be happening somewhat, despite one or two mediocre missteps like Firmament. But when Uru flopped, it killed the notion of ‘puzzles in multiplayer’ entirely for the entire games industry for ten years until the classic console title Journey in 2013, which promoted itself as an artful platformer, not as puzzle game or even as a game that had multiplayer. I also can see in retrospect that the entire adventure genre has unraveled over time and puzzlers with stories and real ambition are now rare. There were plenty of warning signs. Grim Fandango, circa 1996, is a genre classic but it sort of flopped out of the gate despite being one of the best adventure classics ever made. The Longest Journey was a marginally successful game despite being amazing, and its sequels chose to add clunky combat mechanics and then when that didn’t boost appeal on the second title just kind of gave up on puzzles and most gameplay mechanics almost completely in favor of just wrapping up the storyline fast in the third and final title. Syberia likewise limped along after the first title, with not a single entry in the series breaking into the mainstream. Those were in 2000, 2001. And every Myst title after the first for a good while was selling about half as well as the previous one regardless of quality. Myst (1993) sold 7 million copies. Riven sold about 4 million. Exile just shy of 2 million. By the time Uru came along the sales were in the low hundreds of thousands and only just over 30,000 even logged into the online part before it was axed by Ubisoft. When Portal revived the ‘dead’ idea of puzzles and innovated in puzzle design circa 2007 with a really cool concept underlying every puzzle setup, everybody bent over backwards to emphasize it as a platformer, not as a puzzle platformer. Puzzles were always the dorky thing nobody wanted to discuss in gaming circles. Puzzles were sudoku and match-3 and cheap junk. Bro gamers wanted to pretend they weren’t actually a thing that could be done well or that could work well. So when a game like the Talos Principle comes out (2014) and it’s one of the top ten sellers that year, and is excellent, and spawns a sequel last year (2023) that’s also excellent and is the first game to truly take advantage of Unreal Engine 5, we sort of try to ignore that. We try to ignore that to some extent the amazing parts of Tears of the Kingdom in 2023, one of the best games in recent memory, were not just related to physics but the use of physics in really inventive puzzle design that always offered multiple valid solutions, yeah, we kind of ignore it again. Everyone always tries to ignore it. We ignore it at our peril though. Game devs ignored Myst when it sold 7 million copies and topped annual PC sales charts three years in a row. (1993-1995) and it was in much the same way that they ignored The Sims when it finally broke that record and sold 14 million copies by 2002. Myst and The Sims are two VERY DIFFERENT games, but the common thread is they broke through to audiences who don’t normally play many games and got those audiences into gaming. They were well made games at the time, doing somewhat novel things nobody had been doing all that well previously, and they stumbled onto unexpected success by appealing to broad swaths of gamers, including many women, who normally were excluded from gamer culture. We dismiss a wide range of ‘boring, simplistic’ casual games, narrative games, puzzle games, or games that expand gaming to new and broader markets, at our peril as developers.

At a total ad revenue and/or sale revenue of 10% the current reduced Uru donation revenue, or a target of $1500/year, I am agreeing to make and actively build monthly expansions for, two different games, one with a roughly scifi focus, one more fantasy styled, that is a new world on each every month or 24 worlds yearly. These don’t match Cyan’s technical ambition. They are not multiplayer. Puzzles in mine will border on casual, to the point where some will describe these as walking sims in the same way “Gone Home” is often categorized as such despite it actually having some simple puzzles. They are more old school PnC adventure titles in some aspects. But the core appeal is there. Beautiful art direction, capable sound design, and even if puzzles are relatively simple, they’ll be greatly varied, along with the settings you can explore, which I feel is a lot of what I love about the Myst metaverse, just the variety and imagination in the scenes involved. Plus like those, I’ll lean heavy on that intangible sense of wornness, weatheredness, detailing that makes impossible places feel plausible, like they have history, and I’ll have many worlds with their own distinct storylines that can be uncovered. Some of these are unexpected and inventive storytelling in their own right. The first hub world in CrowdSourced Adventure, it’s a nice setup, but the first three concepts and the related puzzles and stories and the way the places, puzzles, and stories blend nicely and all three work, the three choices presented in poll one, are all ambitious, all interesting, and I’m entirely torn as to which one to pursue first. But that’s not up to me, it’s up to the players what the next release is!

See, the community forums and polling attached will be an engaging thing – as both Crowdsourced Adventure and Astounding Worlds will allow player communities to vote on updates over time, with little posted packages of concept ideas and design drawings, maps and terse text summaries, and polls allowing the community to decide which addition is most promising, and which should therefore be the next one to move forward. There will even be systems by which people can post their own concepts and ideas and if something sticks out as cool it may end up drifting up into the polling system in some form.

And while nobody ever has paid me $50-60 to make or even $10 to slightly customize, a world for them, even though that does exist as a product on Etsy and is pretty cool, maybe, just maybe, a couple thousand engaged players across two games might be enough to collectively raise that much just with related ads, even if the players themselves are not really paying anything individually.

And if you are concerned I’m hijacking Uru’s slim playerbase, note I have actual respect for them and as someone who respects them, will not hesitate to namedrop Uru. I’ve donated easily $300+ to Uru’s fund over the last decade. I feel that this post, which may take risks in mentioning many other noteworthy puzzlers and adventure titles, might get in trouble with the devs of those titles. I wish all of you to recognize I genuinely like that stuff, and that this post, and this game content, though taking some ideas from existing puzzlers… is not tied to them. My games here won’t connect to any of their trademarks or canon. It might, however, be a thing that causes people to realize those other historically significant puzzle games exist, which for younger people is truly not a given. I can see one reason Cyan seems to keep rereleasing Myst every 7 years or so in some new overhauled edition is that they want a way for old people who recall the game to share it with their kids or other younger family, in a way that won’t alienate them due to the archaic tech. They want to keep it accessible to younger generations who are just exploring the different types of gaming for the first time, all the zoomers and soon gen alpha kids who were born years after this was a thing. Every time they do this they seem to pick up a new wave of people who become fans. And this year the first Myst sequel, Riven, is also getting a huge remake. [launch later in 2024] and so on.

But if this isn’t enough, I will push further. If revenue from the ad slots and sales across all venues for (Crowdsourced Adventure) and (Astounding Worlds) exceeds $1000 by the end of summer 2024, I agree to commit to getting a full-blown Uru expansion out to the point where it can be played by the public by December this year. That’s all the stuff I worked on a little bit here and there beginning in 2014 with Sevkor. I had to completely rebuild that age, to fit the criteria of the Guild of Writers and use the new toolset Korman. The original version was pretty but inefficient, and later iterations underway are way more obsessively optimized, with a filesize of all texture and graphical data in the 40MB range, not 145MB+ and I’ve also worked on four other fan ages connected to that, which can result in a 300mb expansion with five ages of about 60mb each. They’ll run smoothly, they’ll look great, they have related lore and puzzles and I worry that the lore will be a holdup as it’s hard to tell any real story in the setting without triggering problems with the canon and fan age guidelines. Between lore and minor technical revisions and fixes to bugs people might discover, no guarantee of it all making it past Gehn shard to Minkata, much less the official servers, by end of 2024, but… just getting it all there to a point where it is all fully playable and looks, sounds good at all THIS YEAR will be tricky and involves a couple hundred hours additional work. I could keep kicking this fan stuff down the road and barely progressing on it. If it continues at the rate it’s gone so far, I’d say the ages maybe would be done in 2026. But if the Myst fandom can help boost my stuff, make it a hit a bit more out of the gate, I’ll definitely prioritize them as well over most of the 20-odd other backlogged slow moving things in my queue. It’s not just that I’m trying to cover my bills and somehow scrape together $10k+ from all sources this year to get off disability support entirely, and be self-supporting despite numerous mental health and other medical challenges, but the fact is I’m under some pressure to do so by family, friends, myself. I find it difficult to justify any fan art or no-profit creative work around the edges or any project that fails to make income. I’ve been quite clearly discouraged from any fan art by parents and others, in favor of maximizing hourly pay. I barely can justify even commercial indie game dev and only then on dubious claims that it might pay off. My stock media on itch.io, is slowed to a crawl because not many sales are taking place there. I’m making under a dollar per hour worked on stock media packs. Etsy? The papercraft is cool but is rarely selling. Most creative products sell poorly or not at all. Paintings – only half the paintings ever posted there have sold, usually discounted to levels where I make no more than $2.50 per hour worked on them. The one thing that is working is print services – posters, bookmarks, and so on. I make just over minimum wage on many of those listings. ($7.50/hr roughly) and that’d be good except that it is wildly inconsistent in volume and frequency of sales. Most days, zero, one, possibly two sales there. Then once in a while on a holiday time, usually the 45-60 days leading to Christmas it all goes nuts. I go from not enough sales to ten, fifteen a day and drown in overtime and refunding orders from people who I could not get the order done for in time… profit drops almost to zero, maybe goes somewhat negative with some scathing feedback, despite enormous effort and workload as seen in late 2023. How I wish Etsy could hold steady at 5-6 orders a day year round. If I somehow had THAT, I’d be making the requisite 10k from that alone already.

It is NOT for lack of trying to make things happen. I have so many product lines and ventures in the pipeline and they’re not stalled even if they may seem like it, they are all moving slowly forward. I’ve been working at least 10-11 hours a day across all this, at a pay of around $1/hr and change overall, which comes out to about $4k, possibly $5k earned a year on a good recent year. Get the pay rate up to near $2.50/hr and I’m good. THAT is what I need to get off disability. But I don’t make that much and most things in development have not taken off yet for those products launched, or aren’t even released yet. I am trying. 75 hours a week working on creative stuff is trying. It’s not working. And I get nobody will ever hire me. I can’t just ‘get a job’ because autism and mental disorders and lack of recent work history and other stupid red flags always trump the fact that I’m wildly creative, hardworking, skilled, and will work for super low pay in even really technically complex jobs.

That’s the reality. If these games somehow succeed post-release that WILL be huge for me. It’ll even be huge for the entire adventure genre, and the world more broadly.

BONUS: IF, between these two games and everything else, I exceed $10k in earnings for 2024, anything above $10k will be donated. I will donate to lifesaving charities, as a result of this success. And every year after, over 50% of all my earnings above that 10k mark. I will be SO thrilled to be that guy who somehow clawed his way off of govt. support through sheer effort and paid taxes, would be nice for my self-esteem and would be good for the world too.

NOT trying to be rich. NEVER want to be. I am asking for support and for someone to hire me for gigs just because I am trying to stay afloat financially on the cheap and retain creative freedom and help make the world better. This grind is not to make a fortune, it’s to make art and games and do so with a minimum of interference and fewer creative limitations, while also assisting others to survive, thrive, fulfill their own dreams in the process.

Ending Etsy Printing Services

The shippable items on Etsy are gone and I’m sure many of you noticed that.

At the moment only digital delivery products are still present there.

Maybe you are upset by this and want them back – I may offer them again at some point but no guarantees for now. If they do reappear that might be mostly on this site (the HornbostelProductions.com shop) instead of Etsy. That would mean similar pricing but more profitability as it would be outside of Etsy’s steadily rising fee structure.

Why would I ditch an Etsy product line that was taking off and proving highly successful? Well, there are three major reasons.

Etsy printing services are not super creative and not what I most want to be doing. Cutting that off allows me to focus more of my time on other projects. For example, game dev stuff, and the imminent launch of a massively expanded HornbostelVideos website.
Etsy wasn’t only time consuming, it was a bit stressful trying to ship batches of packages out on a daily basis. Other (digital) products are different in that I can step back from working on them when I’m getting upset/stressed instead of feeling like I have to keep working through the misery to get stuff out for the mail truck when it swings by.
Final note there is the fact that this year I’ll be moving to a new house. It’s in Sewickley, PA. So that move is going to disrupt any possible work and shipping regardless for the next 2-3 months.
I don’t need the Etsy money at this point, not really. I’ve gotten a mild boost in income in spots outside of Etsy so will likely be able to leverage THAT now instead of Etsy print sales and still make nearly the same amount. It’s enough cash saved or flowing in that I am in a good spot to complete things like Vivid Minigolf. That project, has two courses I still haven’t yet built or implemented, plus various remaining minor bugs across otherwise completed ones. But if I push on that now I can definitely still get it onto Steam by mid March 2023. For various reasons, I will ignore mainstream advice relating to Steam releases. There have been talks about how ‘optimal pricing’ for indie games is $15-20. Now in this case, I don’t care if the cash coming in is ‘optimal’. I mostly just want the game to be accessible and playable for people and I want players to have fun. I considered a $5.99 price point for a while but have shifted my views on this. Current price point at launch is now likely to be in the $3 range instead.

So basically:

Vivid Minigolf launch is early 2023, on Itch.IO and Steam at a price of $2.75. It will go on sale too with increasingly solid discounts as months pass, eventually dropping as much as 75-80% off which is to say, about 50 cents. Plus there will be DLC every once in a while, at no additional cost. There will also be a free version on the game’s official site which lags roughly a year behind the paid version in content terms. And it has a few ads spaced around it on the webpage. When the game first launches that free version will have one course included, so for the first year it’s essentially a demo. But at the end of year one, by that point the Steam version will have some free DLC and the free version will lag behind said DLC and just have the core seven courses. And so on. Eventually, by 2026 or 2027, DLC updates will likely be over and the free version will fully catch up with the paid one and at that point the ‘paid’ Steam game will go freeware. It’s up to you whether paying $2.75 at launch is worth it, or under $1 about nine months after that, or NOTHING AT ALL but you would need to wait four years.

Astounding Worlds (previously Panoramic Worlds) is now set up for status as an Itch.IO and AstoundingWorlds.com exclusive, free plus optional tip on Itch.Io, and free with a few ads on the official site. That and the minigames like Spiral Skies, Easely, Eracer, and Vortex, all will go live in Summer 2023. The entire batch will be accessible for $1 on Itch (or) free with ads on the official game site in the case of Astounding Worlds.

Miniature Multiverse should be ready to launch by November 2023. It will be priced similarly to Vivid Minigolf.

After all that, who knows? I’m open to going heavily into reimagining other backburner projects from World Pinball to Isola, to a Troop 4 adventure and some fangame stuff.

But the bottom line on all of this is it’s all greenlit and moving forward faster now. I can afford to get all these projects done. Watch for exciting updates ahead!

Etsy status in October 2022 + other notes

Another week, another Etsy sale. Most of the time *something* is on sale on Etsy even if not the most popular items (ie printing services) and that’s intentional, it’s a rotation of items on sale from week to week. Some weeks multiple categories are discounted and on holidays everything is discounted HEAVILY. This October has been an anomaly: more sales made the first half of October 2022 than the first half of the year 2021. A twelvefold increase in frequency of sales! That of course makes it something of a challenge to keep up. I try to get every order out on time of course but occasionally things do arrive late especially during sale events or when a HUGE order has been placed.

This month has seen $450 in sales and it hasn’t even hit the halfway mark!

So that is astounding, even if 67-72% of it is getting eaten up by materials and shipping supplies and so on. I even am releasing new print products now like (very cheap, my cheapest material) prints on copy paper and small print items like bookmarks!

The Halloween rush is going to be deranged in its level of activity. I’m pretty sure of that. I am of course setting a lot of other tasks aside to stay focused on fulfilling Etsy orders for the rest of October. A few things still get some attention though – one being the ongoing work on Vivid Minigolf. I aimed for a ‘late 2022’ release and still am hoping to get that done successfully.

Southwest desert course in Vivid Minigolf

Japanese Garden minigolf course (most of it visible, anyway – the image is cropped, not just resized)

Any success via Etsy will slow down the first release of the game slightly but will also give it a stronger shot at visibility when it does get released. Right now I’ve built courses, implemented features, am actively debugging the game… all the mini supply materials involved were covered months ago, the software side of things and the Steam fee are covered too. But that leaves me with a bit of a challenge in gaining publicity at time of release.

Should Halloween prove effective in generating sales activity, it will give me a bigger promotional budget to work with which in turn may have a multiplier effect if used well, in that this title might appear somewhere on the lists of popular releases. Ideally first page of Itch with no scrolling down the list, maybe a bit of scrolling on Steam but not too much? That kind of thing helps people notice that a game exists! I will be messaging a (fixed) list of Youtubers and game news sites with download keys, of course, and my policy is not to hand out keys to anyone not on that top-100 list. I know random people will claim to be a popular Youtuber, ask for free keys, and then resell them on the cesspool that is G2A, it’s a common tactic. I’m just not going along with that, in general.

Other than the PR kit, the key distribution / mailing effort… a better YouTube trailer and more and more gameplay clips by time of launch… and my ongoing manual commenting on minigolf related videos on YT (I think I’ve linked to the game project on something like a hundred of the more popular YouTube minigolf videos at this point) I will also run a massive $150+ ad campaign across Google/YouTube, several banner ad networks, Twitter ads, Facebook/Instagram, and Bing/Yahoo search. I have already fine tuned with the initial $25 – am confident I can make over 5 million (generally, relevant) people aware that this game exists when it launches. This is in terms of *impressions* of course and it will probably translate to at most 1% of that group clicking through, and probable 1-3% of that 1% buying the game. In theory, then, we’re talking 500-1500 sales over time which… anything in that range would be amazing if it pans out. We are talking $1000-3000 there, factoring in the reality that many of the buys will be during sales and that Valve gets a 30% cut.

If that happens though, great potential for free updates over that first year of release. The core seven courses only involved $500 in materials, $200 in Steam submission and software expenses specific to the project, $150 or more promoting the thing at launch. Not to mention hundreds of hours of work as an indie with no actual pay rate.

So if this goes well, great! The target of $1000 in sales pretty much means breaking even on this project, and every $1000 or so above that means maybe some new features added, and an extra 5-6 courses posted in a free update to all players who bought the game.

I have thoughts about revising the game features to include, for example, randomly mixed 18-hole courses. Either a front nine/ back nine selectable combo or just 18 completely randomly selected holes. That is one of those things which would involve a lot of reworking of code to implement (like online multiplayer functions, multiplayer beyond hotseat) but which I would like to do in an update in early 2023. I also want to port this to mobile devices, touchscreen UI and all that. And I want to build AI opponents somehow as an option, even though that is tricky to do well.

I get it, you would all prefer these features exist at the outset. But I am a solo indie game developer. It takes time and cash to add all of this. I don’t have immense resources going in and I am hoping you all understand this. A game with a dev budget below $1k and an unpaid solo dev, is not going to be the most impressive thing ever, but if there is an audience for this, if people buy it and are patient, I will take that support seriously and do what I can to build amazing things with it in the next year.

Links relating to all of this:

http://www.vividminigolf.com

https://www.etsy.com/shop/MatthewLHornbostel

Thanks for everything!

Revised roadmap & a challenge for everyone

I’ll be posting two new stock media packs [3d asset packs] on my Itch.IO page sometime soon, probably within the next 5-10 days. These are the ‘Forests & Flowers’ and ‘Snow & Sand’ packs that I’ve been working on. They’ll be $1.10 each except during sales or in bundle pricing situations.
I’m trying to update some websites a bit more, I’ve already overhauled MiniatureMultiverse.com somewhat, and TriumphantArtists.com should see a few small fixes & updates soon as well, along with minor improvements across some of my other websites.
I’m actively ordering a bunch of additional art supplies, shipping supplies, and DVDs/DVD cases. Why? I intend to launch all the Itch.IO content together as a singular $14.99 DVD product on eBay and here as well. I also intend to make a new batch of artworks and sell those too. As in, giant 24″x36″ size artworks, big, beautiful pieces with prices starting around $23.99.
All this stuff going on will coincide with a staggering mix of ad campaigns that should draw in thousands of people and generate crazy levels of traffic from March 15 – April 15. The total cost is estimated at $45, or $1.50 spent on the campaign per day.
I have some fan art stuff going on, behind schedule, but it is happening nonetheless. I also have some updates on RedeemerDocumentary.com heading in soon; you’ll see more content relating to the virtual church building tour which is nearing completion. I am also digitally reconstructing my old house in Houston, TX, and between all the various examples piling up, of my ability to realistically reconstruct architectural spaces, well… I’ll be posting a sale item here which essentially allows for people to hire me to make a made-to-order 3d level/tour for them in Unity.
All the [still unposted] House Trek videos are going to be posted on HornbostelVideos.com shortly, except for the making-of stuff, and the animated DVD menus. And that’s just part of what’ll be posted. Watch for a PDF ebook, and also a printed paper equivalent, that showcases essentially all my work, with an emphasis on the creative process and what I’ve learned by doing all the stuff I’ve done [relating to game development, video production, handmade art, etc] it’s an insightful history summing up the last two decades of my life and it has hundreds of pics – giving you an inside look at a lot of things only friends and family know about so far, massive piles of interesting stuff the internet in general, currently has no idea exists. And no, not a puff piece, I very clearly and bluntly describe my mistakes and errors in judgement, and offer useful advice on solving common issues, that’ll make creative efforts hopefully easier for you than things have been for me.
All of this sale stuff being launched, the artworks and other items, the book, stock media packs/DVDs, and the month-long ad campaign… it’s all a gambit to secure funding to do all the stuff I’m hoping to do by year’s end. I have three videos to shoot, about a dozen to actually finish, plus game content, including Vivid Minigolf v2, and Miniature Multiverse, those two in particular are challenging insofar as they each still have unresolved costs of over $250, in miniature materials alone. And then tack on the $450+ goals in funding between the three videos I’d like to record, plus all the other stuff involved… yeah, basically I hope this plays out well. If I don’t have close to $1k earned by end of Spring 2019, it means a lot of the goals for summer and fall of this year will fall through. And, quite bluntly, if you’re as tired of the slow rate of progress around here as I am, I’m pretty much begging you to buy something of mine, because if sales volume across my web network climbs high enough, and the percentage of visitors who transition to buyers climbs from a current level of 0.0135% to 5%, that’d change almost everything around here! (I seriously have thousands of visitors – around 2500 – every week, across my various websites and shops, and yet the majority of weeks nothing is actually sold anywhere on my network.)

I’ve flown to Pittsburgh

I’ve had a bit of an adorable ‘trial by fire’ in Pittsburgh, with my first two days after my flight, involving twin boys, Nick & Ben, 4 years old, and a 2 year old girl [Evelyn]. They’re my sister’s children and they’re cute but exhausting.

But that’s precisely why I moved to Pittsburgh. I want to be there to help and be a friendly and fun uncle.

A lot of our family is now gravitating towards the Pittsburgh area actually – my parents (the tots’ grandparents) and my grandmother, now in her early 80s, who’s now a great-grandmother for the kiddos.

Downside: Lots of eBay delays – the big moving truck that is carrying my PC and my art supplies left Houston a little while before I did, and it still has not arrived in Pittsburgh at the new house. We continue to wait as it is en route. I am hoping the truck will arrive to unload the stuff within the next couple days and only then will I realistically be able to begin making/shipping eBay items again.

My digital content seems like it’ll likely mostly be fine; I took one copy of all my data on a handful of hard drives. The backup copy of the same data was carried by my family in their luggage on other separate flights.

Between the local backups and the fact that nearly 2/3 of the data also exists in the loud via BackBlaze, I think it’s likely nothing of value will be lost in the transition.

I’ll catch up on delivering eBay orders as soon as I’m able to do so, and will continue chipping away at my other projects as well, once that’s settled.

I am also planning some fun activities with the family. Sure, they’re playing games on my aging and slightly screen-cracked iPad, which is what I’m writing this update on.

But I’ll also try organzing active games, outings, simple board/card games, reading to the kids/playing word games, and some video projects even. I’ll even show you fragments of what I’ve planned – I was thinking of activities with family even before I packed everything up. So here are some images hinting at planned fun things:

The floor is lava – a VFX test for a video with the children.

I’ll record a short and silly video in which the children are playing ‘the floor is lava’ – complete with menacingly realistic looking lava! Basically we will get to see what the children are imagining come to life.

There’s even a lava monster.

I also have plans for a reconfigurable, modular box maze. It uses the medium-sized Home Depot boxes that we have packed stuff into for the move, and they’ll be arrnaged into a bunch of different maze configurations, a new one each day for a week or so.

This was an early 3d mockup of a possible layout before I shifted to the ‘modular’ design plans:

An old design test for a childrens’ box maze / fortress.

And yes, the twins are very silly, I introduced myself as Uncle Matthew and Ben the twin, started calling me Buncle Bayou for some reason. The absurd nickname’s a running joke now.

And finally, some kid friendly crossword puzzles. I don’t think they’re quite ready for these but they’ll get there soon enough.

Colors, numbers and shapes kid crossword.

Crossword with all words made from the letters in the word ‘teacups’. For children.

The most commonly used English words placed in a crossword puzzle.

Anyway, you can tell I’m getting into the role of fun uncle or ‘funcle’ in Pennsylvania, but that does NOT mean I’ve forgotten about my internet audience, eBay customers, or my friends still living in Houston, Texas!

Acceleration in late February 2018?

Despite a strongly positive reputation on eBay specifically, I do struggle with some notoriety for being ‘unreliable’ in the timing of new releases.

This has been the case for years, even before I had any websites allowing a wider audience to notice my work. Why do I keep falling behind on my scheduled releases? Why do I so frequently disappoint everyone on the web with how slow my work goes?

It is largely due to the amount of my time dedicated to earning money to make content… and the generally abysmal rate at which that money is earned. We’re talking $5.50 per hour in the best cases, and often no more than $2 or $3/hour.

When the total list of videos and video games I want to release [in the near future] looks like it’ll cost at least $10,000 more to complete everything I want to complete – between hardware, equipment, art supplies, miniature elements, and other costs – well, that’s a problem. That’s about 3000 hours of work just to finance everything and probably another 3600-4500 to actually make the content once it’s paid for even if no setbacks or major problems occur. So let’s say I average 11 hours a day on this, it’s still about 600 more days to get all these things done. And as usual, nothing ever goes as smoothly as I’d want it to.

Now, I’ve had a tendency to drift focus a lot in a rotation, from project to project, making incremental progress on things in a sort of loop, but quite frankly I’m getting tired of the perception that nothing’s happening and I want to upend that.

In the last two weeks, I have made – saved up – a decent amount of money and also upgraded a few critical toolsets. That’s great. But now I’m looking at the mind-numbingly tedious sub-minimum-wage gigs I have been doing all the freaking time to cover the bills and the eBay auctions of artworks for customers that I make no more than $2/hour on or so, at best, and thinking “Why can’t I try to pare this back? Do I really think this is the best use of my time? Is this what most of my audience actually wants to see me doing?”

And the answer’s definitively a NO.

The audience here wants:

-Games, Videos, Comics, Artworks, and assorted creative stuff available to everyone, either dirt cheap or ideally completely free, and they want that stuff soon, they don’t want to wait forever for the content to materialize.

Now, there’s actually a way to make that happen. It’s a simple well-worn concept that underlies a ton of things from broadcast TV networks, to Google, Facebook, Twitter, to the various blogs you see across the web.

Advertising.

The problem with ads on a website is that for them to be viable, you need a LARGE and LOYAL audience – a lot of people visiting regularly.

I’m only currently at 1% of the level needed for the ad revenue to be substantial enough to replace my need to sell products or work on freelance gigs [transcription & such].

At the threshold of 100x as many visitors as I’m getting now, advertising covers everything on my network.

At or above that threshold, none of the products [videos, games] I release need to be anything other than freeware.

All the games – free, 100%, and production would double in speed across the board… on everything I’m doing.

I WON’T BLUDGEON YOU WITH REQUESTS TO VISIT MORE OFTEN OR RECRUIT A BUNCH OF FRIENDS SIMPLY FOR THIS REASON.

I want to instead entice you to do that with some cool stuff that’ll make you WANT to come back often and which will make this network EASY to recommend to friends.

So here’s my idea. The last two weeks I earned a fair amount of cash.

The next 3 weeks, I’ll work on wrapping up some exciting things, actually finishing or at least getting to a point of viability, on a few new items you’re all getting tired of waiting for.

Then the final week of February, if all goes well:

-a large but finely tuned ad campaign will draw a few thousand new visitors to my web network.

-systematic restructure of my web network, new content appearing in various places.

-New video material, all the House Trek stuff and a couple of other things too, posted on HornbostelVideos.com, with a higher-quality disc version [with animated menus and special feature stuff] available on this website’s shop for $2.99 download or $11.99 DVD / 14.99 BluRay.

-Some added comics stuff and completion of the several articles sub-sections that are still vacant.

-A new batch of pyrotechnics elements, both real video content and some clips done with advanced gas/fluid simulation, in the stock media section.

The material’s all shot or simulated at 120fps, and slowed down to 24fps and 30fps variants. The free video files will be reduced-resolution 960×540, the paid versions 1920×1080. [full HD!] and the paid versions will show up on HornbostelProductions.com for $5.99 as downloadable content on HornbostelProductions.com, $14.99 on DVD on HornbostelProductions.com, or $16.99 shipped on a data DVD through eBay. (I was considering a $14.99 price on eBay too, but given the typical fees I have to pay there, which come close to 20%, $16.99 is basically As low as I can justify.)

I’ve ordered two new additional high-speed cameras, and will be setting up some black backing, reflective mirrors [really it’s a nice clean thick cardstock type material with a very reflective mirror-like coating on one side sort of like aluminum foil without wrinkles.] set at 45-degree angles, telephoto lenses, fireproofing supplies, etc, for the recording of the real-world pyrotechnic elements. All the equipment required is en route, and I’ll try my best to make the recorded material look amazing. The idea with the mirrors is to minimize risk to the camera. These are old-school Hollywood methods basically, you can set the mirror above or below the effect and align the camera to focus on the mirror, so you get the explosion billowing towards the camera in some interesting ways without actually endangering the camera. As for shooting at 120fps, that makes the effect look bigger and more impressive [and makes it last 4x longer when reduced to 30fps or 5x longer at 24fps] than the limited-scale effect it actually is. Recording at such high speed allows a miniature to move physics-wise as though it were 16 times bigger than it actually is, giving the illusion of immense scale and mass. The effects in question will only be four or five feet or so in size at most, in reality and will dissipate within two seconds. But they’ll seem far bigger as recorded, gigantic even, and the effects elements could each last up to 8-10 seconds when played back at a typical speed.

-New game content. I’ve had some frustration with WebGL releases from Unity as they were tricky to debug at times, and WebGL apps require that the game files AND the RAM usage fit within a 1GB limit, to run in a web browser. That said, I am now realizing that these limitations aren’t so bad if used for a lower-res demo version of an ambitious game and not a full-res one. So my plan is to release some of my game content in WebGL form, but with quarter-res graphics. That is, all textures switched on export to half the vertical and half the horizontal pixel count they’d ordinarily use. That reduces file size and memory use on all these projects from around 2-4 GB to under 1GB as far as web-embedded release goes.

So I’m aiming to launch a lower-res ‘Miniature Multiverse’ demo and a bit of other stuff like an early ‘Vivid Minigolf’ reworking posted in HTML5 WebGL form near the end of Feb. 2018, barring an unplanned complication. Neither is the full game feature wise or content wise, they’re both early beta releases with a lot of the content not yet included, and lower-res textures. They will, however, be freeware, and playable on my web network [embedded in the page, with a bit of ad stuff underneath.]

The idea on most of the games, videos, everything, is it is all going to be accessible free in some form, either the full, entire version for free, as with the comics, or some sort of reduced-resolution form, but otherwise as functional as the full version in the case of video and video game content.

If this succeeds, that’d be great. I’m hoping ongoing traffic levels have climbed 10-fold by end of February, covering a full 10% of my production costs, and that most of the other 90% of my costs in running this network can be covered by sales of high-value products that have better profit margins than before either because they don’t involve shipping [downloadables] or because they’re high quality enough and widely viewed enough that they end up selling for a bit more than they would have before.

Update: There’s been an extensive ad campaign ramping up – and fortunately 200+ people have viewed the stock media section of TriumphantArtists.com just in the past 72 hours.

By the time of launch, I think that figure will be more like 1200-1500, and I’m optimistic that the new pyrotechnic stock media / stock footage collection, which will have cost me a bit over $250 in incendiary materials, other materials and camera gear, will ultimately result in an explosion of sales. [Pun intended]