Author Archives: admin

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 ! 🙂

the importance of Backup!

Backup is one of the most important, and often neglected, aspect of anyone doing business online.

Surely as game indie dev the first thought goes to the content. Source code, art, sounds, any kind of asset. Backing those up is essential . It never cease to amaze me how often I heard even experienced developer say “I lost xxx because didn’t make the backup since 1 month and the HD crashed”.

Where and how to backup? a cool little utility I found is Cobian Backup, very nice and easy to use. You can of course make your custom code, or use anything else you want, as simple as just copying the file with windows explorer to an external device, but you MUST DO IT OFTEN.

I do it daily. Call me paranoic, but if tomorrow morning I wake up and my Pc somehow doesn’t start, I can restore everything with my external HD. And just in case I have another Pc and a Mac iBook with some less recent backup, but never 1 month old.

I would say, use also backup devices like DVD-RW, but don’t trust them too much. In my experience, they don’t last long, usually becoming unreadable after few months. Better just use a DVD-R and make a backup after reaching an important milestone. The best is an external USB Hard-Disk, and have also other Pc or even, if you have a dedicated server, do a online backup. With a RAR archive and a password protected file (of course choose at least a 16-32 characters encryption word) you’re quite safe.

Do backup also of your online stuff if you have any. Forums, blogs, sites. Anything. Forums comes usually with backup, and even blog software like WordPress (the one I’m using) has backup script available. Use them, losing 1 year of posts would be bad for your traffic 😉

I’m using it right now!

can you work without a broadband connection?

That’s a good question. One of the first ones you should consider, if you’re interested in starting to be an indie developer but also in general for ANY kind of work-at-home business!

The answer could be “maybe”, but recently I am more gearing towards “No”.

Why? you could ask yourself. Well let’s take for example the best connection you can have, beside DSL. That is, ISDN connection, maybe using both channel, for 128 kB/s upload/download speed. In indie business, UPLOAD speed is almost important (if not MORE important) than download. Indeed during your work, you’ll normally find yourself uploading a lot of times, expecially the day/week of release.

Even if you did an extensive beta-testing, there WILL ALWAYS BE (Murphy’s law) unexpected bug popping out exactly the day of release or shortly after it 🙂

So as you can imagine, and expecially if you opt for a fullversion download, the upload speed will become crucial. Even using the 2 ISDN channels a 15mb file (which is the average now for a shareware game) takes 15-20 minutes to upload. If you use fullversion and maybe even Pc/Mac version, total time is already 1h!

…and what if a few hours later you found another bug and have to recompile? 😀

ok now I guess you understand why a broadband connection is becoming a MUST if you want to do such kind of online business!