This is the internet. I have no requirement to be honest with you, nor myself really. I can say whatever I want and pretty much unless it sounds as preposterous as "Yeah I flew to the moon last night in my new car!" you have to take me at my word.
But I think being fairly honest with you and myself is really the way to go here.
(I know it says by erebusman - that's my forum name on their website ; but it's still me)
No sooner did I finish my first goal in programming did I allow myself to become distracted and start a new goal...
But really it was for good reason. Like many indie developers I hope that somehow one or more of my activities might eventually result in either a reasonable size payout or a small recurring revenue stream.
The Game Creator's was my choice of programming outlet and after getting familiar with their site I realized they have this "FPS Creator" (which is abbreviated "FPSC" for short) engine to make FPS games with. Not only that but if you go through a process and you qualify you can sell 3d models on their "Game Creator Store".
To make a medium sized story a bit shorter, I've been modelling since about 1998 and I have a LOT of 3D Models that have never seen the light of day. I decided to polish a few up and sell them.
This process took me from September 2011 until the very end of January 2012. So 4 months of lost time regarding my new programming goals.
But near the end of December I set my final goal to produce the Salamander model (previously seen in this post ) and I was able to hit that goal at the end of January and resume my programming at the first of February 2012.
The moral of this story is ; that some times you can set other goals and return to your original goal and be successful but it is a very risky thing to do so.
While I am not permitted to disclose the arrangements of my selling on The Game Creator Store I can say - I have not made a penny as of this date. And looking at the rate of sales I expect that I may not ever see income from it.
That's okay ; it was a short diversion and I do enjoy seeing my models put to some use that never got used for anything. But in retrospect had I known how difficult it would be to make money in that market place I would probably have declined to spend the time doing them at this particular juncture in my life.
It could be that I lack the talent to drive proper sales in the 3D Modelling and animation market place but I think the real problem in The Game Creator's store is the market seems to demand an extremely low price (around $2.00 US Dollars per model as an average).
Normally I would only produce these low polygon models for sale at somewhere around 800-1500 per model depending on the polygon counts and texture size and other factors. Its okay to sell something cheaper if your doing non-exclusive deals and expect to move several (or dozens) of copies of it ; but at $2.00 a shot .. I mean a freaking coffee at Starbucks is more than that.
The market place there truly devalues the artwork and I now feel that it was not a smart choice to spend 4 months to create content to sell for that low of a price. Its true they let me 'set the price' but you can't walk into a market where the average price for a product is $2.00 and ask for $100.00 can you? Everyone's going to laugh and walk by pointing at you for being absurd.
So I took a risk hoping that I'd sell several hundred copies of each model and that the volume would mean that it was worth it, sort of like selling Apps in the Apple IOS AppStore right?
It has not worked out so far - I'm hoping that there is a seasonal flux or a build up over time; and if so I will report back in a future update and let you know.
So anyways; a bit off track there. From here forward my updates should be more programming centric and will quickly catch up to where I am actually at presently. I wanted to cover this background and now that is out of the way.
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