Donations and Merchandise

[Joseph Hewitt]

I've activated the donation button on GearHead's SourceForge page. (cue violin music) Any money I receive will help me to rationalize the large amount of time and effort I put into the game. For just a few dollars you can sponsor an English teacher in a fully developed country. (cut violin music)

Joking aside, if you enjoy the game and have money to spare a donation would be appreciated. If GearHead were to earn money I could do things like hire real artists (or at least comic school students, those guys are cheap), get a domain, buy advertising, and so on. I'd be able to start treating it like a business rather than a pathological obsession... although, it would still be a pathological obsession...

Another way for GearHead to generate money would be through merchandise. This is better than the donation system, since I don't feel like a beggar for bringing it up. What kind of merchandise would people be interested in? T-shirts? Coffee mugs? Calendars? Collectable Zerosaiko bobbleheads? What kind of things would you like?

Comments?

[Keiseth]

Zerosaiko Bobbleheads! Wooo! T-shirts are always good and I'd love a GH mug; I've lost my old one it seems.

If I manage to get a job I'll donate right away, merchandise or not. I owe you something for the many, many hours of mecha fun I share with GH.

Actually, something like figurines (or equivalent) of some of the in-game mechs would be pretty awesome although I have no idea how one would have such a thing made.

I like that idea! A Zero Savin to guard my computer from attack.

EDIT: Scratch that. A Zwar; that thing is just plain menacing.

[Erathoniel]

Definitely figurines.

[macksting]

Swag sounds awesome, but I'm chronically broke and prefer to spend my money toward a computer system that'll be able to run Fallout 3.
Sorry.

[JohnnyDmonic]

It's notoriously difficult to make money with merchandising.  Unless you can be assured of lots of sales you're mostly stuck with cafe press for T-shirts with a thin margin.  It *is* possible to do garage kit vinyl figurines, in reference to the above but I have no idea what the price breakdown is, also I know no one with the skill or anything about it other than what was in the Otaku No Video OAV.  Maybe a pdf of a generic RPG campaign sourcebook for the gearhead universe?  There's a site that does a bunch of comic book PDF downloads, and often has free stuff, that I get the impression is kind of the PDF clearinghouse equivilant of Cafe Press.  Can't rememeber their name right now.  Might be Wowio I'm thinking of.  Hurt my arm today so I'm too lazy to dig through my links.  Speaking of which, going to stop typing now.

ETA:  Bethesda is ruininating it for all of us.  =p  You'll be happier giving the money to Joeseph, I can practically promise you.  1 city?  Real-time pause-menu combat? =p  Crack version of RPG-lite stats? =p  "Lot's of underground locations=Oblivion-like constant dungeon diving" =p

[Shymrok]

Good idea, i try to support your game with cash until you will make Linux version and ASCII. To bad i can't currently now...

[Joseph Hewitt]

Quoting: macksting

Swag sounds awesome, but I'm chronically broke and prefer to spend my money toward a computer system that'll be able to run Fallout 3.

No worries.

Quoting: Erathoniel

Definitely figurines.

This would be my favorite as well. I could use this as an excuse to buy that casting kit I always wanted from MicroMark... Unfortunately, I'm not much of a sculptor.

The other idea would be to slip the guys at Hasslefree Miniatures a copy of GearHead and hope they get addicted to it.

Quoting: JohnnyDmonic

It *is* possible to do garage kit vinyl figurines, in reference to the above but I have no idea what the price breakdown is

AFAIK, garage kits usually just break even.

Quoting: JohnnyDmonic

Maybe a pdf of a generic RPG campaign sourcebook for the gearhead universe? There's a site that does a bunch of comic book PDF downloads, and often has free stuff, that I get the impression is kind of the PDF clearinghouse equivilant of Cafe Press

I believe you're thinking about WOWIO. They put ads in the download books, which is where the money comes from. There's also Lulu, which is a print-on-demand service that can also do downloadable pdfs. I've been planning to do the "Voles of the Dusk" print edition there.

A gearhead RPG sourcebook does interest me. I need to work on my writing more, dagnabbit. My goal for this year was to get some work published but I actually didn't do as well as last year!

Quoting: JohnnyDmonic

ETA: Bethesda is ruininating it for all of us. =p You'll be happier giving the money to Joeseph, I can practically promise you

But it's Fallout! Besides, if he gave the money to me, I might use it to buy Fallout 3 myself... ^^;

ETA- For right now, I think I'll shop around for coffee mugs and t-shirts.

ETA2- Johnny, I hope your hand feels better soon.

[JohnnyDmonic]

Quoting: Joseph Hewitt

ETA2- Johnny, I hope your hand feels better soon.--

Thank you, I'm a baker nowadays (couldn't stand the thought of going back to tech support) so I've had a pretty lousy week trying to get the morning muffins done with a banged up arm.  Every day it's been a little better, but by the end of the day it's back to aching.  Thank goodness for the weekend.  Going to take a hot bath then do absolutely nothing for a while, I think.

As for Fallout 3, I'm split 50/50 on the screenshots they've released.  I dislike the orc-like look of their super-mutants, but I like the road-warrioresque junk armor.  So far their version of 'tongue-in-cheek' humor isn't really cutting it for me (the Nuclear Catapult named 'fatboy') but maybe that will get better.  The pause-menu FFXII style 'realtime' combat is probably the best we could have hoped for, but I'll be honest, I spent around 200 hours in FFXII just working the directional control and never paying attention to my characters in combat.  I expect this will end up being the same because they wont want to risk making it difficult enough that I'll need to pay attention.  Actually, it'll be slightly worse, since they wont have the characters auto-attack like FFXII did.  So I'll have to click on each enemy once.  The single city size of the world...I hate.  Hate hate hate.  With a passion.  That's not a Fallout game, that's a stupid dungeon crawl.  Huge world?  My ass.  Oblivion was only 16 sq miles, and they talked that up like it was a continent.  'It would take hours to walk in real time'  So?  Freaking Daggerfall took days to walk across in real-time, but then they fired all the people who made that great and hired a bunch of graphics artists to replace them.   PLLLPHT on Bethesda.  And the plot revolving around the character following after his father?  WTH?  And besides, it's only one city.  How long could it take to catch up to him?  I mean, seriously, is he at the end of the block?  The next block over?  Who really cares, it's one single measely city.  But they've promised 'lots of underground locations'.  Freaking yay.  Freaking random sewer-dungeons for pointless random guild quests ala Oblivion.  Feh.   The dumbed down rpg-lite statistics don't really do it for me either.

Also, all real-time combat turns into nothing but a DPS race, this will be the same.  The 'pausable-action-targeting' thingie can't compensate for that.  There's some indication that they've gone with an under-the-hood action point system that *may* actually make some strategic effort worthwhile, but I imagine it'll still come down to spamming the best damage-per-second weapon.

Still bitter.

[macksting]

Quoting: JohnnyDmonic

And the plot revolving around the character following after his father?

Fallout 1's plot started small. Saving one vault? No big deal. It ended with saving the western US.
Fallout 2's plot started even smaller, saving one village, but with a bigger device. Eh.
Fallout 3's start sounds fairly down to earth.

[JohnnyDmonic]

The problem is it ties the character down to a specific path.  In some ways the vault/waterchip also did, but there are some significant differences.  It's an invasion of the personal character choice.  Also, word is the dad is unkillable, which is irritating.  *Everything* should be killable in Fallout. (Technically the Overseer of Vault 13 in the first one was unkillable, although there was a glitch/workaround that allowed it)  Still...it is worrisome.  I'm split 50/50 overall.  So far it sounds like about the best that I could have hoped for (not quite what I want, but the best to be hoped for in this day and age of 'Immersiveness'), except for the limited world size.  I *LOVED* wandering the world map looking for specials.  I dunno.  We'll see.

[macksting]

Although I like the idea of using the subway tunnels (and before anyone grouses it's a dungeon, they're clearly forgetting how much time is spent in the sewers of Necropolis or the mines of Fallout 2! Yes, I've heard this complaint) extending the map, I agree that one city is too small, especially for Bethesda.

[Erathoniel]

Of course, you could sell naming of in-game landmarks and whatnot on Sourceforge. Pure profit! Also, it would help a backstory builder. Also, you could sell corporation names and behaviors, as well as naming of artifacts, spinners, and whatnot. If you use this, you can thank me by naming something "Woodenbow ..." Dr. Erathoniel Woodenbow found it. You don't have to thank me, of course.

[Joseph Hewitt]

I thought about that, but it didn't seem viable given that all the data for GearHead is stored in easily modifiable text files. Still, it's something to consider. One thing webcomics do for donations is to release wallpaper, secret episodes, and other goodies in exchange for donations. I could try that, or maybe a premium mecha pack.

[PotatoEngineer]

I'm not convinced bigger is better.  The big thing I worry about for Fallout 3, as far as "size" goes, is whether there's both an overland map and local maps.  Daggerfall may have been enormous, but it was just the same town copied 100 times, with the same randomly-generated shops and quests.  As long as there are various zones with differing enemy types, random encounters, and special zones, it doesn't matter whether the overland map is one square mile or 10,000.

I could care less (though not much) whether it happens to a city or a continent.  Just make it interesting, so that everywhere I go, something can happen, and let the plot be nonlinear enough to have the plethora of side-quests for which Fallout is famous.

[Erathoniel]

GH2 is, from my impression, mainly randomly generated. These spinners would be more like stop-over points than main plot places.