KickStarter Bolt Riley - A Reggae Adventure Game - Chapter 1 Now Available

[V_K]

Wow, this Lowe character really seems like he's aiming to out-cleve Cleve.

 

[Infinitron]

It's also Trowe'esque Drama time.

Holy shit.

 

[V_K]

Fuck, just noticed that I severely misspelled Trowe...

 

[Crooked Bee]

Haha, Trowe's such a dick.

 

[Great Deceiver]

Was Trowe involved in anything other than QA/testing back in the Sierra days? Why does he think he's hot shit?

 

[DeepOcean]

Was Trowe involved in anything other than QA/testing back in the Sierra days? Why does he think he's hot shit?

That is why he thinking he is hot shit, the bigger the loser, the bigger is the ego.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Kickstarter campaign relaunched, just 5 days left:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soundguy/bolt-riley-a-reggae-adventure-game-chapter-1

During these hard times of war in my home country of Israel, I cannot help it but wanting to focus on something positive and try and promote a message of love and peace.

I’ve re-launched my game Bolt RIley in a very short 7 day blitz campaign yesterday.

If you don’t remember what Bolt Riley is , It’s a 2D point and click adventure game set in 1970’s Jamaica, and tells the story of the greatest Reggae musician that ever lived, through a journey of love, friendship and musical harmony.​

 

[MRY]

Under the circumstances, I hate to snark, but I cannot imagine a worse word-choice than "blitz campaign" given the lead-in hook.

 

[Jaesun]

I wish them good luck on this. I can't find a single reason this is even remotely interesting....?

 

[MRY]

Great art, novel setting and premise, creator seems to be deeply invested in the subject material and not just out trying to figure out what the marketplace wants?

That said, while I backed the first time, this time I probably won't. The gameplay that was demoed was really not at all appealing to me and the animations seemed problematic -- seems like perhaps the visuals are more than they can chew. And it always makes me nervous when someone does a second kickstarter at a fraction of the first, though his explanation in this instance actually seems reasonably persuasive. (Not the Israeli war thing, but where he says that he cut out physical rewards, got Ouya matching funds, etc.)

 

[Fronzel Neekburm]

BOLT RILEY, CHAPTER 1 - IS NOW AVAILABLE!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/soundguy/bolt-riley-a-reggae-adventure-game/posts/1551155

Bolt Riley, A Reggae Adventure - Chapter 1, is here.

Five years in the making, and now, it is finally available, as Early Access on Steam and Humble Bundle (and very soon Razer Forge TV and OUYA).

Launched at 4/20 at 4:20am PDT.


How to get Bolt Riley - Chapter 1.
If you're a backer of the second, successful campaign, please see the update that we just posted there.
https://www.kickstarter.com/project...reggae-adventure-game-chapter-1/posts/1551017

If you're one of those people who backed this campaign but didn't join in the other 757 new campaign backers, no worries, you can get the game on Steam and Humble store:

Itch.io: https://soundguy.itch.io/boltriley
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/331210
Humble: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/bolt-riley-a-reggae-adventure

A quote from our press release
“Being funded through Kickstarter back in 2014, we’re launching the game with high expectations,” said Oded Sharon, Adventure Mob’s CEO, “we are committed to our backers to deliver the game on time, so we pretty much have the date set in stoned, and we are working very hard to weed out all the bugs. We’ve chosen this particular launch date, well... because we wanted everything in the game to be properly baked and didn’t want our backers to get the munchies. Everything will be lit up on time, and I expect players will be lifted when playing it.”

Trailer and gameplay video
Check out some these new videos !








Spread the word! Share the love!
To be able to continue development on Chapter 2 it's important that a lot of people buy and play Chapter 1. So we would love it if you could spread the word about the game, post a review on steam, tell your friends, record a let's play video, or anything to let people know about it, and how awesome you think it is!

You can use this cool link:

http://bolt-riley.com/share

Thank you.
Finally, thank you. Thanks to every single one of you beautiful people who believed in me and helped me finish and get this game out, and especially to those who believed in me again and backed the second campaign.

I love all of you.

Oded

 

[Infinitron]

Wait, what? I didn't even notice that the second Kickstarter campaign succeeded.

 

[Wapcaplet]

Suddenly, Chapter 1 left early access today with a lower price and a very brief message from the devs. This appears to be the first time they've posted any news since last June, and there's still no word on if/when Chapter 2 will see the light of day.

http://steamcommunity.com/games/331210/announcements/detail/1653254536237349312

iOS, Android and out of early access!
FEBRUARY 8 - SOUNDGUY
Yo Reggae people!

After over a year since it’s release to early access, we got enough feedback from you and now it’s time to make some progress.

Bolt Riley is now no longer in Early Access and the first chapter’s price was reduced to match a price of a chapter, and to better match the mobile versions price.


If you liked Bolt Riley - also check it out on mobile:
iOS: {LINK REMOVED} Android: {LINK REMOVED}

Hope you enjoy!

Oded

 

[Boleskine]

Has any content actually been added to "Chapter 1?" This sounds like Oded trying to squeeze more sales out of people. This game was abandoned a long time ago. Most of the reviews mention that it is just a few short scenes.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/duffadash/recommended/331210/

When people say this game is unfinished or in a rough shape they are being kind to the game.
The majority of the work put into Bolt Riley is put into an unskippable tutorial that teached you how to play a point-and-click adventure game using hilarious 4th-wall breaking narration and explaining innovative new gameplay.

This game is not going to be finished. It is not being worked on. It doesn't have any jokes or good music. The art is bad. There is no reason to buy it whatsoever. Stay away and don't waste your money.

http://steamcommunity.com/id/cprn/recommended/331210/

The whole thing seems like a student's project and can be finished in less than fifty mouse clicks, even with the artificial playtime stretching (like forcing the player to use all the dialogue options restarting the conversation from the beginning each time) it's like 8 minutes to speedrun and far, FAR not enough for 10€!

There are a few Steam discussions reinforcing the same thing.

http://steamcommunity.com/app/331210/discussions/0/2217311444328985560/
http://steamcommunity.com/app/331210/discussions/0/350541595121882723/

The comments on Bolt Riley's Kickstarter page also show it is dead and abandoned. Based on the lack of development and Oded's silence for the last 2 years until this meaningless "coming out of early access" announcement, I wonder if the project was a scam. I'm glad I didn't back it.

 

[bertram_tung]

i already played and enjoyed the journey down that was enough of this jamaican shit for me

 

[Pyke]

https://www.patreon.com/posts/16877404

The Future of Bolt Riley (OR : Where’s me game chapter two, mon?)
Feb 8 at 4:28pm
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.

 

[Boleskine]

• Raised $32,000 for Chapter 1 after first campaign failed.
• According to reviews the result is equivalent to a short demo that can be completed in 10 minutes.
• Abandoned development and ignored backers who were asking when Chapter 1 would be completed.
• Came back two years later to announce mobile ports and "release" out of Early Access even though Chapter 1 is in the same unfinished state.
  
• Suddenly wants $42,000 or $3,500/mo through Patreon to make Chapter 2.