Brawsome!

Oh what a week! This working while marketing Jolly Rover thing is really taking 120% out of me. It’ been great learning experience though, I must admit I understimated the effort it would require to market Jolly Rover by about 50%. Thinking I could just market Jolly Rover part time was a bit of an understimate.

But the result of that hard work is paying off, with great reviews such as those done by Adventure Island (7/10), DIY Gamer, AusGamers (7.7/10) and the MX Newspaper (3/5) (Thanks to Barbara Kerr for this photo!).

So, Jolly Rover has been out a month now and I’m running the first ever Jolly Rover sale! This sale is exclusive to people who have signed up on the mailing list (eyes left), are following brawsome on twitter or a fan Jolly Rover on facebook. On July 24 I’ll be sending out a discount code to anyone on the aforementioned services that will allow them to purchase a Steam Key direct from Brawsome at a 50% discount between July 25-26, let’s call it “Jolly Christmas”. Copies aren’t limited per user, so if you’ve already bought Jolly Rover you can still give the gift of adventure gaming this Jolly Christmas.

Just read this great review of Jolly Rover from Gamer Vision (8.25/10). It’s been out since Monday but I missed it. It hasn’t been updated on Metacritic yet, but hopefully it’ll pull the score up a little further.

And not to be outdone, the Indie Games Channel also did a nice review. You may remember the Indie Games Channel from their earlier Jolly Rover Interview.

Boy, a lot seems to happen between updates, which is a good thing! But means I have less time to focus on other things, such as writing, design, and most importantly, trying to get more funding to develop games.

It’s been a year for awesome events, the first being the release of Jolly Rover, and now this article I wrote appearing on Gamasutra – State Of The Point-and-Click Art. Also of note was being able to catch up with the super-nice Dave Grossman at GDC and at least get emails back from several ex Lucas Arts and Sierra adventure game greats (not Ron Gilbert though, but I won’t give up!).

Currently though, I’m in a lull, I suppose it’s post-project blues, with an indefinite start date for when I can start implementing new ideas again, but I’m always chasing up different avenues of making game development a reality, like the Indie Fund.

Oh right! Cool stuff. Jolly Rover was reviewed well on PC Gamezone (7.5), Jay Is Games, and Game Shark (B). If you’d like to be awesome, jump on Jay Is Games and vote for Jolly Rover, and leave nice comments under the other reviews.

Finally, and I just found out about this today. Jolly Rover is now up and about on the Adventure Store!

We have 3 great reviews for Jolly Rover coming in from QuestZone.RU, Explicit Gamer, and a Kotaku AU Reader.

At the moment I’m on a 6 month contract working 3 days a week teaching programming at a local games uni. I’m back to the 3 hour a day commute. At least I’m catching up on my reading. It’s just one of the realities of being an indie developer with a family to support, but with reviews like this hopefully I’ll be able to get back to developing the games I love soon. =0)

Recently the jolly kind folks at Gamezebo decided to give me a short interview, but I turned it into a long one. Check it out here.  Also, the game was reviewed kindly on JustAdventure, getting a generous B+! Check that out here.

Oh, and lastly Jolly Rover is set to appear on The Adventure Shop around the start of July.