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I really don't understand, tight wallet or not, how someone could get down on the offered price of $2.50. Lunch generally costs me $5 most days, so a bit of entertainment that promises at least three hours of my time is most definitely worth half of that. What really entices me about this price is that I understand, as someone who worked on PC game development well over a decade ago, the drive to want to make your own game, and I appreciate that the developers openly admit to setting the low price point in an attempt to gather a wider audience, as opposed to the somewhat unrealistic dream of making cash off their creation. They have even gone as far as stepping over the demo limitation to allow us to play more of their game outside of the time limit. They really want to share their game with us.

As far as character size.. Yes, I could compare a screen shot from this game to say, Final Fantasy III(VI), and the characters would look bigger on FFVI. However, you're not taking into consideration the massive resolution that Light's End is running on. To fairly compare a screen shot from an old 320x200 SNES game, you're going to have to put it next to a 1920x1080 screen shot from this one. I think you're going to find that now instead of the characters of Light's End appearing to be the size of a dime, the entire screen of FFVI is going to be the size of a dime.

Community Game developers can't make their title for the Arcade on a whim just because they want to. Arcade games go through a much tighter authorization process overseen by Microsoft, which is why you generally only see big name companies putting out games on XBLA. If your concern is achievements, my friend, you forget what gaming meant to us before the Xbox.

It is very difficult to make a game, and as I understand it, the developers of Light's End paid themselves to work on the game full time for a year, and they may not be able to develop another game like this full time, due to the financial hardships of doing so. It is easy to suggest things like bigger characters, and to scrutinize the game's value(but for $2.50? C'mon, now) based on the length of the game, but you're not looking at the human element behind this game. This game was made by two people, not a faceless entity consisting of rooms of cubicle dwellers toiling away with a massive budget.

I'm enjoying this game. This is the first "Community" game I've put money on. And at $2.50, I wish that I could convince more people to give it a try.

Thanks for the support and understanding, Matt.

Just to clear up a couple points, I worked on the game for 7 months and Gravity Lord spent 4 months on it. So that's a total of 11 full-time working months. We didn't both spend a year as you suggested.

As far as resolution and character sizes. The resolution of the game is 1280x720. If you're running the higher HD mode, the XNA framework automatically scales it up to fit the screen, but you're not actually getting any extra detail. Characters are 48x64. This is the same dimensions as they were in Chrono Trigger, which had larger sprites than say the old Final Fantasy games. However, when these characters are placed in such a large resolution, they do look a bit small. Especially if you are running the game on a small SDTV, which I suspect Roberttitus is, everything will be scaled down. Braid has the same problem, when I played it on my SDTV, the characters were very low detail and hard to make out. But when I got an HDTV, it completely opened up and the characters are beautiful. As long as it's still playable on an SDTV, it's ok if certain elements don't look quite as good, because we need to place our games in the direction where technology is going. When I brought Gravity Lord onto the project, I had him make a 48x64 sprite for a test character, and left it up to him how he thought it looked on the screen and in the environments he envisioned for the game. He was happy with that size so we just ran with it. In the future, I agree that larger characters wouldn't hurt.

We really do need word of mouth to get our game to as many people as possible, so if you enjoyed Light's End, please tell your friends!

Actually my tv is a 36 inch tv with 1080i (even IGN talks about the small characters as a flaw in the game).... but nonetheless. I bought it & I think it has an interesting style to it & I have enjoyed it up until the point that I am currently at.... just met Brad & returned from Exile. I feel that the game could have benefited from fighting & leveling (I mean Crystal is a witch).... but I really can't complain.

Why would the game need fighting? The main characters aren't fighters, nor do they have any reason to go fight bandits by the cove to level up.

That's not what the game's about.

Well Maybe You And IGN Should Get Better (NOT Necessarily Bigger) TVs They Can Afford It. I Actually Like The No Fighting Part Gave Time To Focus On The Story. Try Riding That Horse The Right Way.

I'm afraid I must heartily disagree with you there. Most of the time I play an RPG, I feel like the combat does nothing at all but get in the way of the story. I'd much rather play three hours of uninterrupted story than four and a half hours of story interrupted by mashing "fight fight fight fight fight cure fight fight fight fight."