It’s really a fun reading indiegamer forums. Everyone start a new thread only to advertise his own work. They haven’t realized that those forums are read just by developers? 🙂

Oh well.

It has become quite pathetic over time. I suppose I should post about the success I’m having with Magic Stones… but not, I think I don’t need this sort of compassion 🙂

Oh well.

Better browsing porn sites, really.

It’s fun because many people in the shareware games industry behave like old friends, always giving (wrong) advice. Surely there are some that are really helpful, and give true advice, but I’ve noticed an alarming increase of people simply telling “do this” and you then realize (1 month later, 1 year later) that it was obviously a lie (that is, was better if you do exactly the opposite).
Others simply ignore you, if they believe that now they are “big developers” maybe only because they got lucky and had one game published by a portal. Was fun one time when I asked a “friend” if he knew a new portal, and his reply was obviously “no, never heard of it” (thinking that maybe I was so dumb that couldn’t use google). When I showed him the webpage of that portal with ONE OF HIS GAMES THERE, he just pretended to realize “ah you mean THAT PORTAL, isn’t really a portal, is just a small website…blabla” (yes a small website with google pagerank of 7?).
So what I’m saying to new developers: shareware games is a business. And like in all kind of business there will always be honest people and others that aren’t!

They say that polishing your game is very important. To make it have a professional look, and to get more sales. Recently thanks to some great testers I polished even more my game Universal Boxing Manager.
I’m quite happy about the result. They’re small modification mostly, but I bet they’ll improve sales and general look of the game.
My favourite is the vitality bar in the fight screen: now it smoothly raises up when your boxer is knocked down, instead of going up all suddenly to the same value (it is used because when the boxer gets back up, he regains some lost vitality).
Other changes are the difficulty, balancing the game etc.
Surprisingly I had fun this time: I usually hated polishing my games (and I think they’re already well polished when they are released), but I’m starting to love it now. Is something really weird, you find yourself as a part of the game, you can almost feel like it is your son 😀

It was fun reading some posts in indiegamer about “AAA art studios offering big discount for indies”. That thing didn’t sound right to me. Of course they couldn’t provide any price indication for it, not even a rough approximate for the example they posted.
They even seemed annoyed when me and other forum members pointed this out, like if they didn’t want to put a fixed price in public.
I don’t understand at all this attitude, since I’m not even bothering to ask them if they can’t post any info about it.
Also, when one replied with a figure, it said “in the thousands”. Too fun, in the thoussands what exactly mean? $3000 or $8000 ? I don’t know if they understand that even $1000 is a big figure for an indie devs. They think everyone is successful as Popcap, Funpause and so on. The truth is that for most indies even a “small figure” like $1000 for art is already the limit.