Monthly Archives: April 2013

A Game of Choices

Junction screenshot

Click on the screenshot for a larger version.

Junction is an adventure game at heart, but it takes a lot of inspiration and design cues from visual novels. When playing the game you will often come across prompts like the one pictured above, asking you how you want to respond to a situation. Of course, visual novels aren’t the only medium to use these as a mechanic, and even traditional adventure games like Secret of Monkey Island had them. But I think the way I’ve chosen to incorporate them has more to do with my experience with Japanese visual novels than anything else. Continue reading

The Story of Vision Riders’s Failures

So, what’s been up with Vision Riders lately? This is an excellent question. There’s a lot I’ve been meaning to write about for the past year but keep putting off because of life and just plain uncertainty. But now’s a good time to share some of this stuff, so I figure I might as well just dive in.

First off, the major news. Vision Riders Entertainment, as a Texas corporation, was dissolved on November 27th of last year. This means that I can no longer put that nifty little “Inc.” at the end of its name. To me this was sort of the end of an era. I’d put a lot of work into Vision Riders but never got any of the animation it was created for off the ground, and I wasn’t getting any freelance work. The past six years have been very demoralizing and stressful, and a lot of the time it’s hard not to feel like a failure. But it looks like the roller coaster ride isn’t quite over yet, and things may actually be looking up for a change!

I’ll likely be reforming Vision Riders as a limited liability corporation here in Kentucky for the release of Junction. From there the fate of the company (and, by extension, my career) as well as the direction it takes, if any, will be very much dependent on how the game performs. If it tallies around $10,000 to $15,000 in sales, though that may not sound like much I’d have enough to get by for a year while I work on another game or other project. Anything below that I might still be able to keep going, but I’d have to start getting freelance work again to make it pan out. More likely I’d be closing up shop and looking for a more permanent job, possibly in a different career considering the state of the industry and the economy.

So that’s where things stand, in a nutshell. But you may also be wondering what’s up with some of my older projects and what happened to them, so I think it’d be prudent of me to list them and explain their individual fates. Continue reading

Let’s Draw Heavy Weapons Guy!

Wherein I do a sketch of Heavy Weapons Guy, everyone’s favorite Russian dude with a giant minigun from Valve’s Team Fortress 2. You can post your own drawings of the Heavy here in the comments!

If you’re interested in commissioning some artwork for yourself, here’s my prices and information on how to get started:
http://www.dmajohnson.com/commissions.html

Heads up: there may be no Let’s Draw next week because I’ll be doing a second gameplay preview for Junction. I will continue with a new Let’s Draw the week after that, though, barring any unforeseen circumstances. allowfullscreen class=