The Future of Bolt Riley (OR : Where’s me game chapter two, mon?)
Before I’ll start talking about Chapter Two, let's begin talking about Chapter 1 and Adventure Mob.

With no steady income- every single person who worked for Adventure Mob is currently busy with other projects. There are Israeli regulatory and maintenance fees required just to keep a company afloat, these sum up to about $5000 annually (Company registrar annual fee, annual company report fees, accountants, lawyers, server costs etc..)

What about Bolt Riley’s Chapter 1 Revenues?

With full transparency - here is the full info on Bolt Riley’s sales figures:

On Humble Bundle the game made $250 gross or net $175 after the 30% platform cut.

 On Steam the game made significantly more: 

 

The first peak is the game’s initial release to early access.
Second peak is the game’s first sale.
Later peaks are more sales. After each sale - the game sells less copies.
Total Steam revenue:$2,372 gross - $1,660 net after platform’s 30% cut.

Current total combined net revenue from game sales- $1,835

You can notice that half the people who own Bolt Riley - are about 500 kickstarter backers who got their game copy through the campaign.

More Revenue potential:
Today I launched Bolt Riley on both iOS and Android. Feel free to check them out) :
 iOS: http://bit.ly/BoltRileyIOS Android: http://bit.ly/BoltAndroid 

I am hoping there will be some additional revenue for Bolt Riley coming from sales, IOS + Android, and perhaps additional platforms like MacOS, TVOS, Amazon, or Windows store (which the game isn’t currently on). Adding the game to those platforms takes time and effort though.
Also there could be some additional funds from more sales through bundles, but from past experience those don't amount to more than a few hundred dollars. 

Bolt Riley's Chapter 2

My goal was to have the entire game's story told in either 2 or 3 chapters.

In theory - chapter 2 can include both the storylines of what’s currently deemed chapters 2 and 3.
Chapter 2’s has almost all brand new screens and characters- The Trench town market, an area local DJ, a back alley.
Chapter 3's design has plenty of re-usage of Chapter 1 and 2’s content, but  you pretty much go and revisit most of these scenes again with new goals and puzzles, dialog and story.
This, form a gameplay point of make, makes sense to combine these two chapters into one, but - only if the budget permits.

The current state of Chapter 2:

  • All backgrounds are done. 
  • Puzzle, story and dialog design are about  75 complete.
  • Coding is 30% complete.
  • Animations are 50% complete
  • There are of course no voices and no music yet in that chapter.

From a technological aspect, Bolt Riley’s code  is somewhat stale  (both chapter 1 and chapter 2's code) ,  it needs to be upgraded to Unity 2017 or 2018 and an additional upgrade to Adventure Creator, Dialog System and other plugins will be required, QA and debug new bugs arising from the upgrade, just to get it to it's original state. This is plenty of work, just to even get the project running again.

My estimate for the completion of the game at its current state is $42,000.

Or, if split this into 12 months of work - a monthly estimate of $3500 over one year. 

With the current sales (A total of $1,835 ) it doesn’t not make any commercial sense to invest in Bolt RIley’s development.  No publishers would want to put in an advance payment to develop another chapter, and $1,835 just wouldn’t be enough to make a good game without further funding.

This means that I either need to go through Kickstarter to fundraise an additional $42,000 to complete chapter 2 (and perhaps with luck it will also include Chapter 3).

Having failed in one Bolt Riley kickstarter campaign, and barely scratched the $32k goal of the second campaign- the challenge of raising $42k from Kickstarter seems unlikely. 

Another option is to aspire to gain $3500 monthly though Patreon support, from you lovely folks. 

With the current patronage there is still a long way to go, and I think that if I see enough interest and support that's something like $1500 or more, I can re-start putting more focus on working on Bolt Riley, at least part time.

So what’s next ?

Personally, I’ve been mainly working on other projects, mostly the passion projects you’re seeing here in my other Patreon posts.
I'm very passionate about making all these stuffs, including VR and maker stuff. But I also want to see Bolt continue his adventures and finish the next chapter.

I want to hear your voices, opinions and feedback to gauge if there is enough interest to make a financial decision to pursue another chapter of Bolt Riley.

If you are so inclined and want to see more of Bolt Riley and more of my games, your support will be more than welcome! That "Become a patron" button sure looks friendly and inviting, doesn't it?

Keep on jammin’ 

Oded

P.s I'm also going to post an update to the Bolt Riley Kickstater campaign soon. 

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Oded Sharon

creating Video Games & VR, Maker & DIY inventions, and other art

Oded Sharon

creating Video Games & VR, Maker & DIY inventions, and other art

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