Monthly Archives: April 2005

Excessive worries..

It’s always fun when you read in indiegamer forums newbies asking for useless advice, like how to save 20$ on payment methods, if that game clone of X would sell, if is better to use OpenGL or DirectX, etc etc
Those questions have really simple answers: work instead of asking and you’ll discover it yourself.
If you worry to save 20$ on a wire transfer, how much you think you can earn from the game you make? 200$ a month? then better give up no? πŸ™‚
If you waste time asking if game clone of X can sell, you would better spend that time finishing the game or thinking about a more original ideas…
At last, doesn’t matter if your game uses OpenGL or DirectX… there are plenty of OpenGL games that sells very well, and plenty of DirectX 7 games that sold crap. What it count it’s the game, if it is fun or not.

Note: I’m not criticizing those people, as only 2 years ago I was like them. Then I discovered the hard way that the best thing is to work and not ask questions (well, not always ask question on anything!).

Retail vs ESD

Found a interesting reading from a link posted in indiegamer forum. They say

Five years ago, those same people were making millions telling
everyone how their new dot com alone was going to have a 30% market share.
Digitally distributed games today account for one on-hundredth of that one
percent. Is it growing, sure. Will it be much bigger in five years? You bet.
But the reality is that customers will be downloading Madden 2010 from a
retailer’s website, not the developers.

Well, I partly disagree. If you take Madden for sure, but because is developed by big software house. But in future I see more chances for independent developers. Fun how anyone seems to have forgot what happened with Doom first and Quake then… those games were first ESD and then came to retail…!

The Goalkeeper update

I just finished a new version of my game The Goalkeeper. This new update introduces players/team editing using an external csv file (hopefully this will be easy enough for anyone, while I’m making the player editor).

Here’s the official press release:

What’s New in 1.1.7

  • Added possibility to change team names and players. To change team names edit the teams.ini file under the data subfolder
  • You can now change players editing the file players.csv which is a standard csv file. A separate editor is under development, but you can already edit your players using this popular format, knowing that the final editor will be able to use it.
  • Fixed a button placement bug in the Statistics Screen

Clones war!

No, not the Star Wars movie, but the casual games clones war πŸ™‚ recently my friend svero, runner of Twilight Games was very pissed to know that Realarcade is finishing a game very similar to his Beetle Bomp (which is a Zuma clone).
Seems really that even in the casual market we’re running out of new ideas, right? πŸ™

Terrain rendering

I wasted almost 3 days trying to find a good way to draw the maps on the game.
I tried to render some terrains with Bryce 5 (I bought it almost 8 months ago and never used it for anything useful so far…), the final effect is nice enough but don’t know if would fit well with the rest of the graphics.
I am also considering using simple “old-style” maps, drawn only with a single ink (color) on a old paper map…