Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Frayed Knights: Now a Little Cheaper

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 3, 2012

Between it being a holiday weekend here in the U.S., the start of a new month, exciting things happening on the sequel (not nearly fast enough, but happening), and the Valve Greenlight thing going on, I figured it was time:

Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon is being reduced in price.  It’s not a huge price reduction, but it’s permanent.  This includes direct sales, affiliate sales, Desura, and IndieVania.

I figured it’s getting seen by a few more people now, so it may be time to get it down below that psychological barrier of $20.

I’m pleased that more people are starting to discover the game. While it was geared more towards the hard-core, old-school gamers, I never intended that to be it’s exclusive audience. I am planning changes in the sequel (and, as time allows, small updates to the original as well) to help make it easier to get into by less veteran gamers.

This has brought up a couple of issues, though. Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon made something of a joke of going to excess, especially with things like spells. I don’t want to lose that, as spells like Power Word: Defenestrate, Boot to the Head, and Hellacious Incendiary Crackleball have a lot more character than “Fire Blast 1, Fire Blast 2, Fire Blast 3, etc…”  But the latter is a lot easier to code for, to build an interface around, and certainly create detailed special effects for (you do it once, and then maybe just add more particles for the upgrades).

These are issues I’m still wrangling with. But I am still pretty pleased with Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon as being a game that is overloaded with that kind of stuff, even if the average player won’t see a lot of it.

 


Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Game Announcements - Comments: 3 Comments to Read



  • Bad Sector said,

    You may want to remove the Indievania one. The site is sadly dying and it (and the games people bought from there) may disappear at any moment.

    I finally got paid enough money to buy a game that costs more than 4-5 dollars and decided to get Frayed Knights. But since i’m not that good with backups (and honestly, it is very inconvenient to do otherwise) i wanted to get it from a site that allows me to redownload stuff very often (sadly the bmtmicro people do not seem to understand how important this is – they do everything else right, except this one).

    I can’t buy it from Desura because for some reason it doesn’t want to work with my PayPal account. This is strange because i have used PayPal in a lot of other places and Desura is the only one i experienced a problem with. From what i’ve understood, it seems that they require from PayPal to transfer the money immediately which isn’t possible with my bank. A workaround is to transfer money from the bank to PayPal manually, but (according to PayPal) this may take a lot of time, maybe days. Talk about impulse purchases!

    It might be possible with Indievania (i haven’t tried it) but if you look around the site you’ll see that it is basically abandoned from its creators. I made a relevant thread in Reddit to see if anyone knows what is going on, but it seems that others think the same.

    Maybe IndieCity is a viable alternative? They look prettier for sure, but i’m not sure if they update often and there are a bunch of missing features compared to Indievania (no search by price – really, i only have so much money to spend at any given point and i want to set a threshold – no comments from users, etc). Also i’m not sure what the “Underground” games (which are hidden by default0 are supposed to be.

  • WhineAboutGames said,

    > (sadly the bmtmicro people do not seem to understand how important this is – they do everything else right, except this one).

    Some of that can be tweaked in settings, and it’s always possible to ask the seller of a game on BMT Micro to issue a new download link. All we have to do is look up your order and press a button and you get a new email with new, fresh download links.

    It’s admittedly less convenient for a user than being able to do it yourself, though, since you have to be able to reach the developer and pester them.

  • Bad Sector said,

    Yeah i know, i actually asked bmtmicro about this stuff a while ago. But it isn’t the same, far from it. Even if you build your own automated download method (something a few indies, like the developers behind Monster RPG 2 and Wrack, do these days) it isn’t the same.

    It is also about security of my purchase. Imagine, for example, if i had to contact Troika every time i wanted to download/play Bloodlines. Well… that wouldn’t work nowadays since they’re long gone. But thanks to Steam it doesn’t matter – i can redownload and play it any time i want.

    The same applies to that random indie game i’ve bought from App Store in my iPod – the developer might have stopped supporting or caring about it, but i can still redownload and play it.

    At the same time i’ve lost both my downloads for Apogee’s Shadow Warrior (which i’ve got from a shareware-like store in 3D Realms’ site) and Aquaria.

    Some days ago i was reading a reddit post (that i can’t find) about some price drop in a game. That was for UbiSoft’s or Atari’s own estore for games. In that thread someone “warned” others that they cannot redownload the game (they actually have to pay for this and only for a limited time) and another post was from someone else surprised that they do not offer unlimited redownloads.

    Because of Steam it is now expected as a minimum that people will be able to redownload their files forever – or at least as long as the service is around (which they do not expect to go offline anytime “soon”). I can see why actually.

    This is why i’m saying that bmtmicro does not understand how important this is. We aren’t anymore in 90s and early 2000s when selling shareware was a matter of dropping a link to a file in someone’s inbox and good luck. People expect more (and it is a reason they use digital distribution despite the lack of something physical).

    The case with Indievania is actually somewhat bad because if they do close (and if the site continues to be as abandoned as it is right now, they will close) they will break the trust people have in both their service *and* any other service smaller than Steam, thus cementing Steam’s position as the “PC games marketplace” even more (which isn’t a good thing).

    Btw, what happened with the Gamer’s Gate submission?

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