Yes, today finally I took a day off my job.
Fun because I work more now that I’m self-employed than before 🙂
Anyway today didn’t touch the computer (except for now) and took a nice trip on a nearby town called “Pontremoli”. Went to a restaurant for an exquisite meal then wandered around the city a bit to explore it.

Really a good day 🙂 need to do that more often!

Yes I’m not a so-called geek programmer. That is, I can program a long game like Magic Stones, but if it comes down to implement a logic algorithm, I am out 🙂
I’m experiencing this right now, trying to make a sort of casual puzzle game. Man those fucking coloured pieces that must connect one to each other are really a pain in the ass !! 🙂
Well, I found a solution, instead of using diamond shapes, I reverted back to good old square shapes. Easier! not worth wasting days trying to find a programming solution when you can solve it simply changing the shape in Photoshop in 3 minutes 🙂

Yeah, ok I’m not a very good programmer, I know…!!

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 😀