a hero and a garden console port & what led up to it

i wanted to make a post about the console release for a hero and a garden (since i wasn't able to talk about it when i was actually working on it haha), so here it is! 

for a general timeline, i signed a contract to publish the game with ratalaika (the publisher) last november (2019) & have been slowly working on it since. i wasn't working on it very actively - most of the time between november and the release (august) was just a lot of waiting. 

i contacted ratalaika because they're the only publisher i know that can port renpy to consoles. (other publishers have said they can but i don't think anyone else has actually done it and released a game for consoles with renpy.) 

for the price i discussed with the publisher (i think in general it's around 5 USD in most regions). since the game is available for free on pc and android, i wanted to add extra content, which is why i added the music box/little art gallery & updated the graphics from 720p to 1080p. (i actually fixed up a lot of little mistakes from the original version that i didn't notice... but i also made the original jam version in one month for nanoreno, so i think the mistakes can be forgiven.) 

the publisher handled everything on the submission side, so what i had to do on my end was provide the game files & make sure things looked ok. i wasn't involved with adding in any of the console-required stuff (controller button icons, trophies/achievements for ps4/xb1, &c.).

overall i think the process was very smooth, if slow, and i'd consider doing another console port in the future, but most of my other games i think are too short - a hero and a garden had the berry-picking gameplay portion to add play time and actually has the longest wordcount of any of my games too. 

for a quick comparison using the english word count:

• a hero and a garden: 16,453 words (honestly looking at this again i'm really impressed with myself for finishing this game with all the gameplay mechanics in one month...)
• tomato clinic: 10,007 words
• spring leaves no flowers: 9,113 words
• magical witch bell: 8,871 words

i would kind of like to port the three spring games as one game because then volume-wise i'd feel ok selling it, but i'd have to do a lot of coding stuff to put the games into one game, and i'm not actually sure i can do that right now... and that'd be a lot of art to upgrade to 1080p 😅 the games also have mild nudity, alcohol and discussion of sex which would be annoying for the age rating, so that's something else to consider.

something releasing a paid game has made me realise though is that when i release games for free, it makes some people think that they have no 'value'. the reason i release games for free is that i want everyone to be able to pay them, but i don't think that they are actually 0 dollars in value. that's why i always have the option to pwyw on pc or tip on android. 

however, i've had people directly contacting me to complain about how i've released a paid game for consoles when the game is free on pc/android, and somehow that is me 'ripping them off' and being 'anti-consumer', when actually what it is was me choosing to be kind and releasing games for free that shouldn't have been free in the first place.

this is making me rethink my stance on free games a bit. i still need to think about this more, but it really sucks having people yell at me for asking for money for a game i've worked hard on. 

that said, i still like having my games be available for everyone, so i will still be releasing games as i have been. if i end up making another console port though, i'll be sure to let you all know (:  

the images for this post are the little sketches i included for the music gallery extras page - they're taken from the artbook!