Monthly Archives: January 2007

The old west

Recently I’ve been playing a lot the game Westward, that could be shortly defined as “Virtual Villager clone with Wild West settings”. It is a nice game, with all the “required” features. This kind of games even if are defined “casual”, have some appeal also to a “old hardcore” player like me. I mean, they surely have some limitations and too much “tutorial”, but they’re definitely miles away from the classical match3! 🙂

Rant vs internet slowness

Yes I’m pissed! I recently noticed that webdesigner tend to FILL the webpages with all the possible sort of flash intro, gif/png animations, huge buttons and so on. I don’t say this only because having a ISDN connection I have very long pages loading time, but also because is useless. If you check my sites, I do all in plain HTML, and I don’t think that I’m losing any customer for that. Actually I’m saving bandiwth, and I’m more likely to get a sale from a person who has a dialup connection (and are much more than what you could think about).

I saw many cool sites made in flash, and I’m quite capable of doing one (I was webdesigner for 2 years before starting my indie career) but I think they’re useless. If you’re making a flash/web game then ok, but if you just want to display a catalogue of games, why put all those useless and heavy flash stuff?

I'm done outsourcing

I’ve already posted in the past about outsourcing problems, but today I made my decision: no more outsourcing for me. I was using the popular site “Rent a coder” to post small programming/other tasks.

Well saying that I am “disappointed” is the minimum. I’ve chosen even people with high rating (above 8) but they ALL managed NOT to deliver what I asked, except for 1 programmer that did a small flash application. That’s all. Everyone else wasn’t able NOT ONLY to deliver what I asked in time, but they were always bringing bad excuses, and in the end they left with half work done, pretending still to be paid for it.

Now everyone that knows a bit about game programming, knows that looking at someone else code is one of the worst thing that can happen 😀 usually you won’t be able to understand anything! or will take 1 month only to finish a project that for the previous programmer was “almost done”.

So I’ve made my mind, from today I’ve stopped outsourcing. Maybe art, if I need it, but no more programming tasks for sure!

New Year goals!

Ok the new year has just started… well and I got a cold already, not bad 😀

My goals for this year? well release at least 3 new games, make some bigger updates for Magic Stones and UBM (and possibly other games!) and maybe start a sequel of one of my games. Which one? have yet to decide, but I’m more inclined to make a Supernova 2 game. That could be even completely different in terms of gameplay, but following the same “ambientation” (dark future, two factions fighting each other, conquer the galaxy and win space battles).

Yes, this 2007 could be interesting! 🙂