Gerry's Guides Harvest Moon 64 Guide to Release for Free

SNES, HM64, BTN, STH, A Wonderful Life, Another Wonderful Life, AWL:SE, Magical Melody, Puzzle de HM, Tree of Tranquility, Animal Parade, Frantic Farming, Hero of Leaf Valley, My Little Shop, Seeds of Memories, Lil' Farmers, Light of Hope, Popolocrois: SoS, and Doraemon: SoS.
BigIVIO
New Seedling
New Seedling
Posts: 5
Joined: Jul 11, 2016 1:03 pm

Post  Posted:

If the kickstarter is backed, the pdf will be released for free to the public forever.

Kickstarter Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/11 ... deo-guides

Three and a half years ago I started work on creating an English Harvest Moon 64 player's guide. When I was a kid I loved collecting player's guides almost as much as I loved playing the games those guides were for. The original artwork in them and the many mysteries those guides unraveled were something special to me. I always thought it was unfortunate that Harvest Moon 64, my favorite game, didn't have a guide made for it (especially since there were so many undocumented things in it) so I decided I'd make one for myself.


I honestly didn't know what I was in for. I have been a professional motion graphics artist, a vfx artist, and most recently a software developer and even my most difficult projects didn't prepare me for the many difficulties I would face to create this guide.


To ensure this guides accuracy I learned MIPs Assembly language so that I could make sure I knew the repercussions of every action you took in the game. It took me a good 3-4 months of learning MIPs before I could really figure out exactly what was happening. I went through every guide on the internet I could find and fact checked them all and then expanded upon them.


After I did my fact checking and testing I wanted to get some of the games original artwork and restore it for this guide. I looked around and found out a Japanese players guide was made for Harvest Moon 64 back when it was released. So I built a program to search the web for me daily until I could find one for sale. It took around a month, but my program found one and I bought it for around $100 USD. I took all the artwork in that guide, upresed them and in many cases added color to them.


Once this was done I went on to design the layout for the guide. I wanted to design the guide as if it was Jack's diary that he keeps on his table and writes in each and every night. It took me months to design it and nearly a year to format every page correctly. Unfortunately I had no idea about bleed margins and cmyk colors for print and all that junk so I had to go and redo the entire guides format after I was done which took around another month.


When I was done with that I moved on to trying to print the book and boy was I surprised by the prices of printing. It cost me $55 to print a single book from the cheapest printer. That was fine for me, but by this time I had shared my work with the community and I wanted to offer them a cheaper option, so I reformatted the book for a third time so that I could deliver it digitally in e-reader format.


To my surprise (I was honestly kinda shocked), kindle books are in a totally different format than iBooks and I would've had to reformat my book for a fourth time to bring it to the kindle/most android devices so I decided to cut my losses. I made the book for myself mainly and while I was thrilled so many were interested I couldn't bring myself to format it again.


So I'm now offering an alternative option. If the community backs this kickstarter I will release the guide in pdf and epub format for free to the community.

There is a backer option to get one of the 3 prototype guides I made to prepare for the print release of the guide, if you're in to collecting things like that. I planned to keep them for myself forever, but I figured I'd offer two of the three guides to the community if they wanted them.