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Regarding the plot in particular, is the Balkvian emperor [can't remember the specific name for him at the moment] seen in the campaign the same one featured in the main plot? Furthermore, is he killed in his attempt at crossing the path in VII?

Hey--it's a different emperor. I forget exactly what I called him, but I remember using letters in his name (Emperor Corybantes SR-5 or something similar) to make it seem fairly unrelated to the original campaign--guess I didn't do a good enough job of it. The whole Murderer storyline is unrelated to the storyline with Subject K; it's just a weird "short story" using the pathspace mechanics.

So I've started up my webcomic again: The Man Who Hates Fun. 

The comic is about a Stoic philosopher who is beset by various miseries in his quest for Perfection.  It's been around since 2004 in one or another state of being updated.  It lay dormant for the better part of a year and a half while I was looking for better work than I had.  It's now updating again, I'm trying to build back my readership, and I figured people who like my writing on Immortal Defense might just like my writing and art on this.

Check it out--and if you like it, consider voting for me on buzzcomix, huh?

Thanks!

I'll tell you right now that you're wrong, and here is why. 

The story is structured in blocks of 16, or the four suits by four.  Every individual mission in a campaign can be thought of as the crossing of one suit by another suit: cups/cups, for example, is the mission where the Love point is introduced.  pentacles/pentacles is the Raberata mission at the end.

Moreover, there are six campaigns.  Each campaign represents one astrological house.  We could only do six because of technical problems with this release, the signs starting from Aries at the opening of the year: Immortal Defense 2 will feature the rest up through Pisces whenever it's made.  The game tracks the progression of the fundamental unities of the suits through the seasonal fluctuations of the zodiac as a phenomenological/metaphysical model of human consciousness as it develops toward self-realization/nullity/immortality.  It is impossible to truly understand the game without understanding this.

So I'm sorry, but your analysis is incorrect.  Our next major game, code-named "SD", will in fact be about the major arcana, however, with the debate between the Crowleyan and Ridder-Waite positioning of the Chariot as a central theme.  Look for it!

Rinku said that maybe I'd respond, so I will.  The sequel is still a long way off since there's another game project to come first that we're all working on and that I think everyone will like.  That one has a happy ending (imo.)  Based on what I've written so far for Immortal Defense 2 (not very much)--it won't.

This may or may not come as good news to you, depending on what you liked about the first game.

(Oh: and my current plans do include K coming back, but not in quite the same role.  ID2 is seriously years away, though, so nothing here should really be taken as gospel.)

Final June Sales Info:

Total Sales: 56
Total Money for Advertising/Next Secret Game: $964.51
Gross Earnings From Sales: $1,078.56
Avg Sales/Day (for June only): 1.87

And a sneak preview of July Sales:

Total Sales: 1
Gross Earnings From Sales: $20.77
Avg Sales/Day: 0.25

It works grammatically (parallel structure with the verb) but agree that it's somewhat awkward.  Probably better would be "You'll experience an interesting combination of procedural and pixel-art, an original soundtrack, and a story about love, duty, and the consequences etc."

Thanks for the handshake and the support, my friend

The writer of ID is a professional writer (and more importantly, a great writer) but not in sci-fi -- most of his work is ghostwriting and freelance writing stuff.

I *have* published two short stories professionally, you know--not that they're that widely available (I don't even know where to get a copy of the second one.)  But yeah, most of my professional work is horrible marketing copy and mindless webcomix.

Those are both pretty cool ideas, actually.  But if there is a sequel to ID, though, it'd be very different and probably wouldn't deal with Subject K at all.  There's not that much else for him to do, you see--

Just a note: as of June 25, we hit our sales threshold of 50 sales.  We were originally worried that we wouldn't make fifty sales in two months--glad to see that we did it in less than one!

So as of now, there's just over $964 in the advertising account for ID and for our next secret game.  Not counting the game giveaway of the day money, I have now personally made $3.41 off of Immortal Defense (to be paid in August, of course.)

That's just because we got one big-assed payout from paypal, though.  Most of the money will come from BMT

In the spirit of marketing openness, here's some hard data about sales figures from my fancy-ass spreadsheet.  Bear in mind that this is just for June so far and that we don't have access to most of the money earned from June sales until August.  But we are doing our first MADD PAYOUTS today (now that we've gotten access to actual paypal money), so it's festive to mark the occasion.

So here we go:

Total Sales since June 1: 45
Days: 18
Sales/Day: 2.5
Gross Earnings from Sales: $871.23 (including BMT fees--about $2 per sale)
Gross Earnings from Otherwise: $384.10 (due to paypal fees!)
Gross Earnings Altogether: $1,255.33

Bandwidth Costs since June 1: $5.48
Hosting Costs since June 1: $55.29 (alarmingly high, but most of that goes to the domain, which is an annual cost.  Technically rinku's already paid this, but I'm of the opinion that ID/RPGC should reimburse him for those fees directly, since none of us could be getting paid at all if he hadn't paid that out of pocket.)
Gross Costs: $60.77

Net Earnings (Paypal alone): $323.33
Net Earnings Altogether: $1194.56

This is for the first 18 days, which I think is pretty okay.  Our initial agreement with this game was to reserve the money earned from the first fifty sales for advertising purposes and other such-and-such, so all of that fat $871 and change is going to go toward that (plus the next five sales, whenever they come in.)  But the rest of the cash we're paying out already.  This insane--I wasn't figuring that we'd have anything like this as soon as we do, yet we do.

Part of the motivation for this post is rank delight and braggartry, of course--but I hope that getting specific with these figures is helpful as an "open secret".  Just figuring out where all the money goes was pretty surprising to me, anyway--anyone who wants to successfully market a game has to reckon with all kinds of weird payment delays, hosting costs, etc.  It's not just a matter of you get a sale/you get paid--baffling and bizarre to all.

The game takes more than 3-4 hours to finish (although maybe you mean the demo section), though I really need to put in a timer to measure total game time (the way the Final Fantasy games do). I think 6-12 hours is more accurate though, particularly because the latter levels tend to be a bit longer and require multiple re-tries before they can be finished.

Man--it's probably taken me something like 15 hours so far (in campaign IV with the full version), but that's mostly because I'm not that good at the game/obsessively play earlier levels to boost cache.

We'd better do one; I already outlined the story for it

My friend Chris Schock posted a comment on my LJ about how this game would work well on XBLA.  Is that something feasible right now/in the next few months?