Dusk and Dawn

Last we left our mad hacker, he was staring at a screen like this one:

The last optimization worked to get T2DTileLayer out of the running for top framerate sink. Now T2DAnimatedSprite had risen up to claim the crown. A bit of investigation pinned vertex buffer updates as the slowest operation associated with rendering […]

With the content cleared of the easy performance problems, it was time to settle into some serious code profiling. And so, I rolled up my sleeves, ran Legend of the Rune Lords through Torque 2D X’s profiler and got a little something like this:

What immediately jumped out was seeing that I was spending over […]

Recently, I’ve been working on a small update for Legend of the Rune Lords. This has been a chance to clean up some of the dirty bits of code that I let slide during the original rush to release. In particular, I’ve had a chance to profile a lot of the game and […]

The numbers are in for July, the first month for Legend of the Rune Lords being completely off the Xbox Live Marketplace dashboard. As one might expect, the numbers for July are down compared to June, generally about a quarter of the figures from LotRL’s initial month. The numbers are low, but not […]

On June 11, 2010, I released my first indie game, Legend of the Rune Lords, on Xbox Live Indie Games. LotRL is a short role-playing game featuring many of the trappings of full RPGs: stat-driven combat, leveling, multiple characters, and a cutscene-driven story. While hardly a great game, I think that it stands as […]

I just posted the soundtrack for Legend of the Rune Lords up on YouTube. Hit the following links to give it a listen:

Follow Me
Winning Over the World
Condor
In Your Face
Equine Dreams
Medieval Village
Rise Again

Or you can hit up the soundtrack in playlist form here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hbg5sXpvoKc&feature=PlayList&p=2712D8AFB98AA854&playnext_from=PL&index=0

The initial sales figures are in for Legend of the Rune Lords and they look a little something like this:
Total trials and purchases from 6/11/2010 to 6/23/2010
Trials: 2481
Purchases: 445
Purchase/Trial Ratio: 17.94 %
In pretty chart form, the data looks like this:
Trials

Sales

These curves are pretty typical of most XBLIG games. New XBLIG start off with a […]

The funny thing about releasing a game on Xbox Live Indie games is that you start to view prices in terms of unit sales of your game.
Cheeseburger ($5)?
7 copies of Legend of the Rune Lords.
Worth it?
With Monterrey Jack cheese, most definitely.
Pint of Nakameguro Taproom beer ($10, but sooo delicious)?
14 copies of Legend of […]

Just finished a new trailer for Legend of the Rune Lords and uploaded it to YouTube. You can check it out right here:
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2BmVD6hiZRM
Or you can download the trailer directly in both standard and high-definition flavors:
SD (480p): http://www.dusk-and-dawn.com/images/etc/LotRL_Trailer_480p.wmv
HD (720p): http://www.dusk-and-dawn.com/images/etc/LotRL_Trailer_720p.wmv

Hey look, a typical display of DVDs of Japanese musical idol groups, the kind of thing you see all over Japan:

Except, something doesn’t feel quite right… Oh yeah! This is the bottom floor of the Tsutaya in Shibuya. The floor that used to be dedicated totally to video games. Demo kiosks, […]