Monthly Archives: August 2006

choosing the right hosting

What is the right move for hosting? as you know, being indie means having your own “shop on the web”. Having a reliable webhosting is very important. I think that while in the beginning a shared hosting is ok, once you start to have several games out is very important to have your own dedicated server.

I strongly reccommend to avoid any VPS! I tried myself, and was really a bad experience! Site was always slow, had lot of problems, totally unreliable. I talked to several other author and webdesigner and everyone told me to avoid VPS like plague, so if you are so stubborn to get one, don’t complain once you’ll start to have problems 😉

Beside that, the price difference from a (good) VPS to a dedicated server is marginal and so really there’s no reason to save even 20-30$ a month (which is 1-2 sales) to have a website running badly. If you’re not ready for the big step, is better to just keep using a normal shared hosting, at least you save money ! :p

omega syndrome

I recently found a nice shareware game made by a fellow australian developer, called Omega Syndrome, and decided to give it a try because I read on the website that was a title similar to Fallout serie (which I loved). After playing it for a while was surprised, the game reminds me really of Fallout and the battles are in the Jagged Alliance 2 style (which was another great game from the past).

I suggest all turn-based games lovers to try this one, could be a pleasant surprise!

Magic Stones 1.1.8 BETA ready to test

Sometime you think a game or an update would be very fast to make and instead takes you twice the time… on the other hand, sometime what you think will take lot of time, gets done much faster. This happened with my latest Magic Stones update, that you can download right now here:
http://www.didone.com/games/MagicStonesTrial.exe (Pc)
http://www.didone.com/games/MagicStonesTrial.zip (Mac)

as always if you already have bought the game, just reinstall and it will keep your current druid progresses. New quest added and 2 new avatars. Remember is a BETA, so there could be still bugs!

Fa cup, coup de la ligue, coup de France…

Arrrghhh why some countries have so many cups!? that’s insane 🙂

Yeah I’m still struggling with the cup fixture generation for USM2, and just found out that some countries have really an insane amount of competition each season. France for example has 2 cups, england one + the Charity Shield (winner of past championship vs winner of past FA Cup), the spanish one has 2 cups as well… hmm ! luckily I can use already the integrated editor to add cups on the fly and so I’m also testing it at same time.

Well my goal for version 1.0 is to release leagues+national cups. I hope also to include international cups like UEFA cup and Champions League, but I’m not sure 100% it will be in initial release, maybe in an update a few weeks later 😉

leagues and cups

Yeah it seems that I’m close to finally have both leagues and cups (national cups only) working 100% on USM2. This is one of the biggest step forward the completion of the so-long-awaited version 1.0! 🙂

However, programming such games is really tiring ^_^ yeah, can work on it only a few hours a day (maybe I’m getting old?) and then have to do something else. So I thought, why not proceed with the new Magic Stones update?

Works well so far for me. In the morning, with fresh mind, I code. In the afternoon I do less brain-intensive stuff like graphic or updates (that require no excessive programming). In the evening… well I relax! is still summer and sun has come back out here at last ! 🙂