Monthly Archives: June 2005

Impossible heat

Here in Italy we have absurd temperatures… average of 33°C with 60% humidity minimum 🙁
No need to say that is impossible to work with computer in such conditions…! so I guess I’ll have to take a forced break from my job until the heat stops… I don’t want absolutely to buy an A/C for that!

longevity of a shareware game

On indieforum site my friend cliffsky asked an interesting question about market saturation.
Many people agreed that there’s no need to worry about them in indie market. I believe it so, even if I am not too enthusiastic about it. I believe it all depends on what COMPETITION you have.
Say you make another of those align 3 color game… unless it has a good graphics or at least some innovative ideas (very hard), you’re likely to sell close to zero 😛
Same thing applies for all kind of games. If you make a basketball management game, and there’s little competition, you might continue to sell it for 10 years. But if after 2 months another similar game comes out which beats yours 10 a zero, you’ll sell much less.
Still, my first game USM was basically a soccer management game like the Championship manager series with only one advantage over it: the speed of execution. That was enough and is still enough to get some sales every month, after 2 years… 😉

New Zealand

Recently I read a lot of good things about that place. I watched a tv show 2 days ago, and was awesome. Nature, green places, few density of people per km… seems really a wonderful place to live.
Also you can see the dawn and the sunset over the sea… what more can you ask? 😉 who knows, maybe in some years I’ll think seriously about it!

Bologna FC relegated :(

Yeah, took me almost a week to recover from the shock :p
My team, Bologna FC, got relegated. I must say that they deserved it, as they lost with two semi-autogoals and did nothing to win that game. Well I guess that when I’ll program my game USM2 I’ll need to include also italian Serie B so I can play Bologna while testing the game 😉

DirectX vs OpenGL

On indiegamer forums are debating again which graphic render is the best. Well personally I use PTK to make my games, so until 2 months ago I could just use OpenGL. Now that DX support has become available, I tried porting my game The Goalkeeper. Now you can play it both using OpenGL or DirectX (you can choose at startup). I can say that the number of sales has slightly increased. It’s too early to tell (just 2 months of data isn’t enough) but I am thinking seriously that having the possibility to run the game also using DX is a very good thing…!