Caltrops - Cryptozookeeper

Forum Overview :: Cryptozookeeper

by Ice Cream Jonsey 09/16/2011, 2:10pm PDT

(I should say that I think it's OK if I post an e-mail I wrote to other people, but I would never do the reverse.)

Back when E3 was going on, they had a tweet or an article or something that said words to this effect: "We spent the week talking about the most commercial games in the world. Send us your suggestions for the least commercial games." And that's really cool. That's why I like that site, they do stuff like that.

So I wrote John Walker directly, because he's the best game journo going. (He rallied the troops to get the OMM article saved.) I sent him this:

Hi, John

Say, I caught the tweet about the wankiest and least commercial indie games, and I wanted to quickly write you about a game I just finished making last week. It's called Cryptozookeeper, and it is a 500 megabyte graphical text adventure.

It's a character-driven piece where the player attempts to solve puzzles and explore the game world in order to obtain DNA to make cryptids with - so, the human and ape DNA mixed would give us the humanzee, and the horse plus rhino would give us the unicorn. The game then lets you fight them to raise their stats, to defeat the protagonist's enemies.

While I created, in real-life as many cryptids as I could for the game's graphics, like the fur-bearing trout (my cats needed a shave anyway), I leveraged Creative Commons for photos of some life forms that would end me if I tried to photograph them, like the Iberian lynx or rather untrustworthy Great Barrier Reef. The soundtrack is also thanks to Creative Commons. This means that even if I could find a commercial distributor, I would then get to tell them that the game's license means that anyone can download it for free at any time. With that anti-money-making setup, I'm a bit out of luck unless the next big game publisher is suddenly pets.com.

(Info on where to get the game deleted)

Back in June I wasn't including the direct link to get the game. I was trying to be polite and give people the archive.org page. I know that page can be a little tough to navigate. John wrote back to ask for the download link directly, which I gave him.

I don't believe RPS went through with the article. That was how I left it. I really don't want to bug people, but that's pretty much what you have to do to get any sort of traction. I am really going out of my mind trying to get ONE big site to mention it. Blues and the Retroist are the largest sites so far, but I'd do unspeakable things for a mention on RPS or TIG Source or something.

ICJ