Author Archives: admin

NWN2 bugs

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I’m quite disappointed… I was playing NWN2 (my Christmas gift) and so far, was very pleased with it. Of course I installed the patch 1.04 since the beginning, because it contains many bugfixes.

Then I realized that this game is really “haunted” by bugs 😐 not only minor ones (like quest not completing, and so on) but the worst one is that my game completely freeze!! yes, when I come back to Neverwinter town after solving the Issani quest (and recruiting paladin Donavir, etc) I got another task to go check back the warehouse on north of the town: well, after the first 2-3 rooms, the game completely freeze. Every time. I don’t think is a bug of my system since the rest of the game works, but I don’t really understand why freeze like that.

I don’t even think about starting over, since I played already lot of hours. I’m going to try it on another pc just to be sure that isn’t a system config problem (even if really shouldn’t be…!). A real pity, since apart for this the game rules…!

Selling games to europe?

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Today on indiegamer forums the author of Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa asked about selling games in Europe, the european market, what are best sites, and so on. I want to share my experience since 40% of my sales are from Europe:

  • localization was useless. I did german one for my game UBM when was just released, so selling exceptionally well, but basically had NO IMPACT on sales. I still remember a german guy asking me how to play the game in english…! 😮
  • direct bank transfer, BMT has this option. Had maybe 2-3 sales with that. Most people in europe have Paypal now. For example, Paypal in Italy grow up to 36% of e-commerce market (means that more than 1/3 of italians use it to buy stuff online)
  • what are the best sites? I’m a bit confused here 🙂 internet is global, so I don’t see why someone in europe wouldn’t come to any site on internet to buy. They come to my site, and to the one of many other developers to buy.
  • support: rarely you can get emails in french or spanish, but is like 1 out of 100 orders. Anyway not a problem.
  • the best print media… well is a long list. The best ones are UK and German mags 😉

The old west

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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

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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

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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!