Monthly Archives: September 2006

Empires and Dungeons

Today while browsing on internet I found a nice game from Niels Bauer, called “Empires and Dungeons”. It is a sort of mix between dungeon exploration and military conquest, in the style of Civilization or better the old Heroes of Might and Magic series. It has lot of features, like resource management, units/structures building and battles with various options.
The tutorial is very well done explaining every single step, so even if you aren’t exactly an expert of strategy/rpg games, you’ll be able to understand how to play it. Was really a pleasant surprise for me, always looking for more games of this kind.

Well done! 😉

the newbie indie first steps

Ok I want to have a bit of fun so I decided to write the:

typical average newbie indie developer first steps into the business!

Note: the following text is probably exaggerated a bit, but is based on real facts! I’ll call the developer Joe Smith.

  1. Joe looking for porn sites finds by accident one of those new blogs/sites that claim online business is the new golden age and starts to read it. Obviously he finds a reference to the famed Pavlina articles and goes to that site to read them.
  2. Joe starts to get interested by the sales figures. 100k/year here, another 50k prepay there and then he thinks “wow a tetris clone can make me 25k$ / year? pfui is a joke”
  3. he obviously joins indiegamer community and announces he is going to change the world with his first game
  4. he ignores any advice given there
  5. he realize that even making a simple tetris clone isn’t so easy, and his initial “short 2 weeks game project” takes in the end 6 months
  6. he announces his game to the world, expecting 100 sales overnight
  7. after 3 months and 3 sales (of which 1 refund because “the game made my kid cry for 1 week”) he starts to wonder what’s going on
  8. he is very angry and posts on indiegamer, “oh wtf, why my great exceptional original game doesn’t sell?! any suggestions?”
  9. after wasting money in PR servies or adwords without any sales improvement, he realizes that yes, there are people earning 100k, but like in any other industry,the remaining 99,9% earns less than a street-sweeper
  10. after 1 year of no-sex, his wife leaves him to go living with a famous black pornstar in a caribbean island

Ok hope you had a good laugh. That’s what happened to myself too, except for point 10 luckily! 😀

Portals are the doomsday messengers!

LOL! well, I just read this post from cliffsky blog… and must admit that I agree with most he said in there. I’m sure he won’t put his games on any portals in future 😉

However, a thing nobody says is that when you’re selling directly, you must expect very little earnings until 1-2 years have passed and several games have been released by you. Seriously, even a good game, if is the only one you have, won’t make you more than 200$/month. Surely there can be exceptions… but is more like 1 out of 1000 than 1 out of 10 !

usm2 delayed

After some recent troubles I decided to postpone the deadline for estimated release of usm2… I hoped to finish the beta for end of september, and indeed there isn’t much left to do. But I’m not a machine, I’m a human 🙂 so I really needed a break. After working hard for almost 2 years, I decided to take a small break of a week or so.

I was getting to a point where I could stare at the code for 2 hours and not find a very trivial bug! quite a signal of stress… 😀

Also I don’t want to ruin usm2 making a quick release. I want to plan carefully and release already a good beta. I want people to say “ooh great game!” already by playing the beta version. For this, I think I need 1 month more…!

humidity…!

humidityMy girlfriend got a present from her latest online-flower purchase… I don’t know the technical name but is one of those instrument to measure temperature, weather, humidity, etc.

Well look at this picture… I’m a bit scared, 71% humidity inside my room?! now I understand why I have sometime bones-pain …!!

I need to fix that stove as soon as possible…