The Road to the Trilogy - Funding Maybe or Maybe Not

Hello. C J here. I’ve spent a while posting food and Minecraft updates to this blog. Minecraft is really helpful to my eventual goal of making the massive video game trilogy I have planned composed of the games Allegro, Absolute and Ancestral. These games are huge projects that I’ve been learning and training most of my life to do. They’re also hobby projects that require no funding and no team. Let me explain.

I went into making these expecting that I needed a lot of things done for me in order to make them. Source code, lighting engine, sound design, asset modelling, animation creation, voice acting and, worst of all, the code for combat mechanics. I needed money to do all of this. Then I learned about the Unreal Engine. An all in one game design software with all of those things built in and a coding language I actually like? Amazing. Wait, it’s free?

Wait, what?

I spent a good five or six years learning how to use it and everything made sense. I can code in it, either by following a known documentation with steps or by using my knowledge of game design to lay out Blueprints in the right order. Blueprints are the code language it uses. I’m great at it, it turns out. Then I found the free asset section of their website and used it to download lifetimes worth of free assets, animations and sound effects. Then I figured out how to recolour and alter these to make them on brand.

This is all a good thing. I can make some of the world’s largest and most ambitious video games without spending a dollar. Just for reference, Absolute is set on 40 planetoids. Each one will have ten 2.5m square maps detailing its every city, mountain and forest in the planetoid. I’m making all of these myself. That’s the bulk of work that I have to do. The project’s main means of funding itself is that I can take these when they’re done, sell them on the Unreal Engine website and be paid money for each set of ten. I’m probably charging $450 each set because they’re an all in one game right out of the box.

The plan was to use that to fund getting the stuff I can’t make. Then I found out that I don’t need to because the online store has all of that for free. My point I’m making is that this is not what I was expecting. I realized about this time that I can voice act the dialogue and compose the music myself and make it a true one person project. I am part way through writing the first chapter of the 40 chapter script. The prologue is written and the epilogue will be done last in order. I’ll also sell the music there when I have enough tracks for an album.

In light of all this I’m probably going to make the final games free on the Android store. There are a lot of good free games there and I can also use the final games to market the map packs. That works. This is the exact opposite of what I thought this process would be like. I’m kind of at a loss actually for what the most ethical thing to do would be. There’s one of me. I don’t need to fund a whole team. And this is a hobby project while I work on writing cookbooks and novels. It will take a ton of work but that’s the point. These are thoughts.

I’m resuming work on the script tomorrow and I hope to get most of the first chapter done then. I might have some more free samples. Then again the entire game will be free. Again, I don’t know how much to give away and how much to keep to myself. I don’t want to tell you all the ending, but I kind of do want to. It’s a really cool ending. My concerns here are more about spoiling the game rather than money. Actually, they’re entirely me not wanting to spoil the game and nothing about money.

C J Mcpherson