Hey, thanks for the positive feedback, benjipenguin. It's kind of ironic that we've gotten more positive comments about Al Emmo here and on the TellTale Games forums than at our own Himalaya forums, but nevertheless, I'm glad to hear that you enjoyed playing the demo. The game took an immense amount of work to complete.
Despite being released nearly a year ago, the jury's still out in regards to whether the game has sold well enough to be considered successful. We'll need to wait until the retail version becomes available in order to determine the overall sales patterns. To date, I think the game has sold fairly well through our own channels, especially considering we've only really marketed it online on an extremely limited budget. We still continue to sell copies here and there, but sales were definitely at their highest point in the months following the release.
We have signed with a North American publisher, but recently they hit a few hurdles and things have been delayed by at least three months. A German retail version will be released shortly, and a Russian version will follow sometime after that. We're also trying to source other publishers who are willing to translate and localize the game.
As for helping out, sure, you can let people know about the game. Tell them to buy a copy instead of downloading it, and possibly let publishers know that there's still fan support for this kind of niche market adventure game at a retail level. It's difficult getting publishers to show interest in 2D adventure games these days, but not impossible. They just need to see that there are people willing to invest in such titles.
That said, we really need to get the game into retail in order to have any further major impact on our sales, as most of the people who know about Al Emmo through the online Adventure Gaming community (and wanted it) have already bought it by now. The rest of the purchasers are mainly online stragglers who stumbled across it and thought it looked interesting, but who otherwise hadn't heard of the game before. Teaming up with Telltale Games has been beneficial, as that has allowed us to tap into the LucasArts fanbase as well. Recently someone bought a copy because they had read a discussion about Al Emmo and TellTale on the LucasArts forums. However, getting Al Emmo into retail will advertise it to a wider audience, that spans beyond the limited online community. Having it on store shelves will get people more familiar with the brand name, even if they don't buy it. And this will also help to spread the title by word of mouth.
Needless to say, the success of Al Emmo plays an important part in whether we can continue making future games. I started doing this when I was like 22 or 23. Now I'm nearly 30. It takes so much time to make games that you certainly need to see at least the same kind of money come from it as you would from a normal day job. If you don't, then you're just working twice as long and twice as hard as a regular person on something that's earning you far less. So, yeah, you can help by just spreading the word, getting any rich relatives to buy multiple copies, forcing your friends/enemies at gunpoint.. those kind of things would be great. Thanks!