jdodson1

Joined 01/23/2012

I'm an Engineer and built the video game community Cheerful Ghost and text based mini-MMO Tale of the White Wyvern.

2746 Posts

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Now that Starship Rubicon has been launched into orbit I want to focus some attention to Cheerful Ghost. As a community we've come really far on this current site and technology platform but I have some ideas on ways to improve things that should help us out quite a bit. Over the last couple months i've sent out some emails to community members where we've discussed ideas i've had but I want to now ask everyone together.

What kinds of things do you want to see Cheerful Ghost do? Is there something you do on the site now you'd like to see improved? Is there something you'd like us to get into? We are a community and as such i'd like to hear your ideas and work on the stuff we all find important. I can't promise that i'll get to everything as I am only one person but I'd like to hear from people all the same.

To pull back the curtain a bit, one aspect of the site I plan to make changes to is our event system. What we use it for currently it wasn't really written to support and i'd like to increase it's usefulness on the site because it's such an important part of what we do.

Thanks for being part of the community and I hope you can experience the new stuff when it fully launches!


Charisma isn't something i've spent many points on in Fallout but I am thinking having a more Charismatic character might be something I do this time around. Talking people into things seems like a better solution and I remember many times in Fallout 3 where it would have saved me much grief to make friends instead of blasting away.


Chet Faliszek is a writer at Valve that worked on Portal, Left 4 Dead and Half-life. He is currently working on VR at Valve and gave a great talk at this years EGX. If you are interested in learning more about VR and how Valve and HTC are making the Vive you need to check this out. Plus, you know, it's more from Valve.... Don't we all love everything they do?


Cough. Yeah, well you know I couldn't really help making that pun so... anyways, let's not count this too far against me ok? Anyways, oh right Knuckle Sandwich is a great new upcoming RPG game from Indie developer Andrew Brophy that just dropped on Steam Greenlight.

"Knuckle Sandwich is an adventure / rpg thing where you play as a young man who starts working at a run down diner. His job sucks and his boss isn't much chop either! Luckily, people from around town start to go missing and a hella mysterious cult appears and they're looking for someone who seems dangerous.

Wait, no - that's not lucky, that's bad!

It's not up to you to get to the bottom of this mystery, but you do it anyway because your job is terrible and you'd rather be anywhere else.
"

It looks to bring back some of the lost RPG flavor that has been missing from recent triple A RPG's of late and I really appreciate that. I upvoted them on Steam and I seriously recommend you head over and check the game out on Greenlight too.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=455482194


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I've been waiting to pre-order Legacy of the Void until details of the Collectors Edition dropped and today was a good day. If you saw the Diablo 3, Reaper of Souls, Starcraft 2 or Heart of the Swarm Collectors Editions this is fits along side those. Featuring the base game, CD score, behind the scenes DVD & Bluray and field manual this version should round out my collectors set for the trilogy.

http://us.battle.net/sc2/en/blog/19907624


"To accompany the game, Ben Prunty composed a masterful sci-fi soundtrack that we're thrilled to release on vinyl for the very first time! Give it a listen here. To do this vinyl recording its ultimate justice, we had the audio mastered at Telegraph Mastering Studio. We can't wait for you to hear it like this!

We teamed up with Leif Podhajsky to design a vinyl package that blows our minds with its awesomeness! Leif's pedigree includes album covers for many top labels, including famed rock group, Tame Impala.
"

I like seeing this kind of lush physical release treatment for Indie games and soundtracks as they generally only exist digitally. This is a nice piece to put on the shelf and listen to. Personally I still buy CD's(I know, I know I am very old) and Vinyl isn't too far removed from that.

This is also interesting news coming on the heels of recent reports that claim the new Vinyl sales market is now outpacing streaming services such as Spotify. Kind of makes sense as artists always make more when you buy music than stream it but I wish streaming were a bit more artist lucrative as it's the new primary way people consume music.

http://store.iam8bit.com/products/ftl-vinyl
http://time.com/money/4056464/vinyl-records-sales-streaming-revenues/


As WhiteboySlim mentioned in the latest roundtable, ConcernedApe is nearing the release of Stardew Valley. He says it should be out sometime this year and as such Chucklefish streamed the game for an hour. Personally I want to wait to experience the game fresh, but I don't fault you for peeking early. I'll clip out a bit from a recent blog post on the matter:

"The game is very close to being finished. I don’t have a set release date yet, but it will certainly be out this year. Single player is 99% finished, but needs a more polishing and debugging. Multiplayer still needs some work, and I am looking into possibly switching to MonoGame, which would allow for a Mac and Linux release. I can’t make any promises about that, but I’d really like for it to happen."

http://stardewvalley.net/dev-update-30/


"A highly curated bundle of our favorite games at one fixed price. Includes everything from recent hits to hidden gems to timeless classics - every month. Receive a bundle every month. Simply sign up, and let the games roll in. Discover games that haven't been featured in other bundles. Help worthwhile causes — 5% of each month's proceeds support charity."

If one of the problems in your life is not having enough games to play, The Humble folks are on the scene with The Humble Monthly Bundle. You pay a monthly subscription of $12 a month and you get a bundle delivered to you each month. New subscribers get Legend of Grimrock 2 and you can cancel anytime. What I like about this is that the games you pay for that month are yours to keep. What I don't understand about this is what games are going in the first bundle? I am also not sure how many games will come with it each month?

That said, I bet this hits the sweet spot for many games and I am curious if this is something you are going to look into?

https://www.humblebundle.com/monthly


I thought it would be fun to talk about AdVenture Capitalist on the day we drop traditional web advertising from Cheerful Ghost. AdVenture Capitalist is a free to play game by Hippo Games that takes the cookie clicker formula, simplifies it and is styled after a 1920's era Capitalist Utopia. You start the game by selling lemonade and can upgrade to a newspaper route, car wash, pizza delivery all the way to running your own oil company. Since clicking each time you want to sell something is tedious and not very Capitalist the game allows you to hire managers to do the clicking for you. If you get Managers running all your companies you can step away and come back to billions in profit(wish it were that simple). You can reset the game to gain Angel investors that grant you bonuses next game and each reset gains you leaderboard ranking.

AdVenture Capitalist is a free to play game funded by ads and in app purchases and available on Steam on PC, Mac and Linux alongside iOS and Android.


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When I launched Cheerful Ghost more than three years ago I wanted to build an amazing video game community that was funded by its users. Initially I had three ideas for ways to make enough money to keep things going and one was using traditional web banner advertising. I didn't plan on this making us much money, but felt it was a good compromise to make a few bucks to offset some of our traffic costs. In a perfect world, I don't actually mind this model as it mirrors much of how traditional forms of radio and television use to fund the programs we love. With that, there have been some very interesting conversations recently about web advertising, privacy and respect for your readers. These factors coupled with the simple fact that our 3 year net on ads is less than the price of Fallout 4 has led us to drop our use of traditional web advertising. We don't find it effective, respectful of your privacy or very awesome to look at. We have replaced our advertising banner space with a rotating mention system. Right now it rotates between two things that mention that we recently published our first game Starship Rubicon and mentions how our site is funded.

Cheerful Ghost is a site aimed at creating a safe, open and independent place for people to talk about what interests them in video games. If you have any ideas on how we can do this better or ways we can improve our current Membership system, let us know.