Hello there!
I just wanted to throw a few lines about how the shipments are going:
Around 65% of the games have been shipped and I sent an email with the tracking number to their owners (please check your spam folder).
By the end of this month, percentage should get to 80% or more.
Yes, I know, things are going a bit slower than expected, but here is why:
Having to manufacture each copy by hand, check it, package it etc takes more than 1 hour for each copy (around 1 hour and a half). Having to make all the physical versions (which is twice than the amount we expected) means that even working many, many hours every day, we can only produce around 40 units a week.
Believe me (or not) we are working very hard (my older son and I), I have been taking many pain-killers due to the constant back pain which gets worse every day, the pain-killers destroyed my defenses and I got some serious infections, so no more pain-killers, just pain.
To make things worse, at this time of the year my town is so warm that hobbits all over the world come here to melt their cursed rings, so weather doesn’t help either.
I also wish to point out that even though this game has been received extremely well and has sold way more than we expected, that doesn’t mean I got rich, quite the contrary:
This game took 6 months of FULL TIME development (including weekends) and the «profits» it generated just covered 2 of those months. The other 4 months came out of my pocket (savings).
But as I stated from the first day, we did this game for fun, as a hobby, while I took a few months on vacation, because I wanted to do it, and the way I wanted to do it, without hurrying it up or any pressure due to time/costs.
Why am I saying all this?
Well, I just want to let people know some facts so those who can appreciate what it took in order to make this game.
Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining, we had a lot of fun doing this game (except for this month dealing with the manufacturing and shipment of each copy) and we are very happy with the results, and above all, with the warm and excellent reception it had among the MSX community and the very nice comments you guys have been sending me.
Thank you very much, folks!
