Monthly Archives: July 2005

The Zuma clone invasion

Recently there has been a flood of Zuma clones. While personally I don’t like much casual games, I must say that Zuma clones are quite fun even for me 🙂
A new game that just came out, Atalantis is a very good example.
Made by a friend with the powerful PTK, shows what can be achieved in short time (the rumours talk about 2 months of development time) if you have the right skills!

DirectX AND OpenGL

Yes, isn’t anymore a battle between the two: thanks to the latest PTK release, you can have BOTH 🙂
That’s what I did with my games The Goalkeeper and Quizland. I just added a small launcher window (default as DirectX to have more compatibility) and a simple checkbox that allows the user to choose between the two driver possibilities.
This way, I’m reducing the number of people that can’t play the demo by a very small percentage: if for some reason the DX version doesn’t work, they can simply try the Gl one and vice-versa.

A really winning solution!

Other devs sales figures

Is fun that a recurring question of other indies (expecially newbies) is about the sales figures of games. That is really a useless information, and I don’t understand why people keep asking for that.
You read that developer X sold 100 the first month. Ok, now what? you think “if he made it I will make it too”? you couldn’t be more wrong… there are 1000 things that can go bad in selling a game. Even if you write a game better than that game Y who sold 100 in a month. Some things that could go wrong are:
– your site/server goes down in the most unappropriate moment (the day of release)
– you thought your game was without bug but… all people keep getting that bug X that prevents them from running the most important part of the game
– you do a wrong marketing campaign so you don’t fullfill the game potential
– another game with very very similar gameplay comes out the day after from a big publisher… no need to say that all people prefer to buy that one instead of yours 😉

I’m sure there are more things beside the one I’ve listed. Of course your game release could go very smooth, and maybe you could sell well too. But then again, knowing that someone else sold 100 did change anything for you? and if the answer to your question was “I sold 10” what would you have done, abandoned indie dev even before starting? 🙂

Sales figures of other people are useless! 🙂 you can be curious about them but don’t let them influence you in any way!

ADSL in my region

https://gcms.regione.emilia-romagna.it/templatecms/down.asp?id=1052293&state=notlive
this is the current situation in my region. Not bad as I thought, even if the HDSL offer is prohibitive for small companies like mine. I really hope the new elected president of Emilia Romagna, dr. Errani, will mantain his promises to fully cover the region by end of 2006.
In my new house that is under the Town of “Albareto” (province of Parma), I actually can have only ISDN connection that is not exactly the best one available… 🙂
I was thinking about buying a satellite connection, but I’ll just wait some months to see if maybe ADSL will become available in my town (even if my house is far away from the town center, just behind a mountain – I like being an heremite!).

victory!

I have almost finished the “victory screen” of Magic Stones 🙂 this screen shows up when you either win or you are defeated in the battle. It also shows you your improvements in mastering the various runes (spells) of the game, as well as your current artifacts status (they can deteriorate and break) and also new ones you got (only if you were exploring a dungeon).
Finally, you also see how much experience you made in the battle. You can make experience even if you lose the battle, but not if you retire/flee from the battlefield!