Yep Tay that the way to do it. Just work your ass off and enjoy the success (sp) and learn from the failure that happen. But at this age we got the energy so we got to be hungry and driven to want more. I guess this talk as of late with age, work, reviews from third parties has got me thinking about wanting more in life. I know my dad thinks I'm too hungry for money, but it's just that I want more, you know just more of everything, no point in passivly sitting on the sidelines watching. Got to jump in the game, get hurt, score the big goals, have fun.

Don't worry Al, with a graphics score of 3/10 I don't think I'll be getting too cocky anytime soon, haha.

But to be honest, I listened to the IGN podcast where the guy explained why he gave it a 3, and basically he seems to think that all of the graphics were just scanned into the computer. Unfortunately that's not the case. Some of the graphics were certainly scanned, I won't deny that, but a good portion of them were created by hand from scratch in photoshop. The eraser, the spraycan, the dice, the playing cards, the calculator, the d-pad: all those things are very complex objects which were made by me in photoshop, and they certainly were not scanned. In a certain way I think getting a low score in graphics is almost a compliment that attests to my ability to create photorealistic objects.

In that sense, maybe I did TOO good of a job, haha.


But trust me Al. I won't change. Even if my game was outselling FF (which it 100% guaranteed will not even come close to doing) I still wouldn't let it affect me. That's just not how I roll. It's when you think you're unstoppable that you let your guard down. Stay humble, keep your guard up, and keep working hard. Failure will come and go just as success will come and just as easily go.

Good job Tay! But don't let it go to your head, sale numbers are more important to you especially for a small company like yours. Good reviews bring attention to your product but if sales don't materialise it won't matter how good the reviews are.

well, I never in a million years expected to see this:

Defend Your Castle
Final Fantasy

DYC was given a score of 7.9
FF was given a score of 7.5

Are you kidding me? Better than FF?

Well you aren't old, but you also aren't young. You have about the same energy, spirit and enthusiasm (sp) as a teenager but the patience, understanding and perseverance of age. In other words watch out! Think of this as your prime, you have the world by the tail!

yeah, I'm the aforementioned geezer. Though I'm 26 now, not 25. Gawdang I'm an old man. I can't believe msnbc called me a geezer, haha.

That's a crappy ascii art arrow pointint to the void in question.

Hey Par who is this guy?

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I should have read the N-Europe one, too, quoting Mr. "Taylor Shchaerer":

When Skye first approached me with the idea of doing an entirely new version of Defend Your Castle, we joked around about seeing the clouds dangling from strings. I thought it would be funny if our whole game looked like it was literally held together by string, tape, and bubblegum. All joking aside, however, we were actually kind of serious about taking the art style in that direction; on some level, we recognized that if the idea alone was that entertaining to us, then producing a game with that idea could have the potential to be just as entertaining for anyone else. Ultimately, we didn't deliberate on the art style for this project; our first concept seemed to be a really natural fit for the game. I made a few mock-up screens to elaborate on the vision I had in my head and from then on we just rolled with it.

Working with a small development team also gave me a lot of freedom to explore the idea and to take it in whatever creative direction that I felt I needed to pursue. The majority of my inspiration for the graphics in this game came from my own personal childhood activities. As a kid I used to draw superheroes and video game characters constantly, and whenever I had the time to do so I was "inventing" my own semi-playable video game systems constructed out of cardboard, paper, wheels, a lot of tape, and sometimes more ambitiously using only the red and blue pencils in the pencil crayon pack and a pair of red-blue 3D glasses from the bottom of a cereal box. In tackling Defend Your Castle I wasn't trying to re-create these old childhood projects, but I definitely made an effort to try to get into that headspace again. I think anyone can understand the appeal in having limited supplies to work with and yet with a bit of ingenuity finding that you are by no means limited in what you can do with them. It's just a very liberating feeling to have such unrestrained imaginative control over your surroundings, and I think that as we get older we tend to lose that experience, so anything that can remind us of that feeling is something that will make people feel good. I hope that in some small way the art direction for Defend Your Castle can achieve that.

Finally, as an artist and a musician, it's important to me that we constantly test boundaries and try to break new ground in whatever our respective fields may be. While there's obviously a risk involved with deviating from the norm, I think it's a risk that's offset by a greater reward if successful. And even if it doesn't work out there's always the chance that what is considered a failure today may turn out to be the seed of a thought that germinates into something truly astounding and ground-breaking tomorrow. I'm just really passionate about pushing the limits, and that passion allowed me to jump headfirst into developing the unique visual aesthetic that we were trying to pursue with Defend Your Castle without any sort of reservation.