Great link, although 24K doesn't seem like much for a lifetimes work! I look forward to playing some of the games. The teaser reminded me of Infocom's Hitchhikers Guide for some reason...
If you haven't yet, check out inform7.com. It's a free system for developing text adventures, with a sweet GUI IDE (cross platform Win/Mac/Gnome) and a language that's similar to English yet has interesting support for relationships between game items. (ie, you can define a relationship of 'loathing' between characters that influences reactions.)
It can compile to the same format as the old Infocom games, or to glulx, a new format by Andrew Plotkin (the guy this thread is about) that allows for bigger games.
It sounds as if he had already built up a reputation within a certain community, and is now just capitalising on that. Without that reputational factor, he probably wouldn't have been able to raise much funds.
It wasn't that hard for me. I had a creative project. I had a plan and a reason for seeking funding upfront. I had something to give to those that funded me.
That seems to be the only real requirements.
Of course, I only got $25 pledge towards my $4,000 goal. So it must not of been that good of an idea.
That is the correct answer on a LOT of "How do you do it"s, actually. Sometimes there are alternatives, but you cannot beat a longtime community involvement if you want your voice to be heard...
Seeing this I have some faith that my latest lark might get some attention (not money attention, but people attention). I am going to work on a hand held text adventure play thing. Going to post the schematics on the web, I could use an aruduino but that would overshoot my small (very very small) budget. Lets see where this goes.
Please check out the Ben Nanonote -- this is just the sort of thing that it might be good for. I know that some kind of inform interpreter has been ported for it, but a nice little adventure client could be very spiffy!
I have one of these things with the latest firmware (OpenWRT linux with some modifications). It is an incredibly cool device. You actually have a keyboard that has all the stuff you need for programming (or general unixy/emaily things), a pretty nice colour display and a reasonable amount of horsepower. I like to think of it as an SGI Indy that I can put in a pocket...
Thanks for the pointer, but no this is not what I am thinking. This project is supposed to be a intermediate level electronics project. This is most probably going to have a black and white screen and an avr controller of some sort. I chose IF to implement on this because I love solving little text adventures.
New interview of the author: http://www.adventureclassicgaming.com/index.php/site/intervi...