Today I took a quick glance at my affiliate stats (me selling other games). I realized that you need a very high number of downloads to be able to generate a sale. Plimus allows you to see a cool buynow hits / sales report.
Well, the average value was 1 sale every 150-200 buynow hits! (not talking about downloads, but people who actually visited the product buynow page).
Not very encouraging… I bet the top affiliates have really tons of traffic to be able to live from sales…or maybe they live with ads… 😉

Yes today is my birthday 🙂
happy birthday to me…happy birthday to me…

Ok some more info about my games. I’m having a friend modifying the Magic Stones map so it looks better. I also started the Team and Player editor for The Goalkeeper game and USM2, the sequel of my first shareware game Universal Soccer Manager.
So people can start to edit the names of teams and player and be sure that USM2 will be able to read them as soon as it is released 🙂

I finished the character creation and now I’m doing the game itself. Many friends asked if the game was just a Magic clone, but it isn’t 😉
For start, there will be a mode in which you must explore dungeron, crypts, and other dangerous places like those to recover lost artifacts that will make your druid more powerful.
Then there’s another sub-game, in which you partecipate to a yearly tournament with the other druids controlled by computer.

Here is a preview of the map selection screen, need to work on it a bit:

Some fellow indie developers were really pissed about certain sites selling their games for discounts, small ones (10-15% off) but also big ones like 12.99$ instead of 19.99$ !
Well I don’t have many games on portals (and expecially none in those who do such discounts) but honestly I would be really pissed if I was in them!
Getting 4$ out of a sale (yes, 30% is the standard royalty rate, and 30% of 12.99$ is about 4$) is totally ridiculous, even if they sell 100 a month (and it’s already a big number even for a portal) they get 400$…!!! 🙁
Next time they sign a contract, I suggest them to ask for a simple clause “my game can’t be sold by you for less than xx.xx$ (price)”.

I finished the character creation process. It will be very similar to those you see in RPGs, even if the game isn’t really a RPG 🙂
A thing I have always loved is the “character background” stuff. One of my favourite game of all times, Darklands, had a character generation process very original: basically you decided what your character did by step of 5 years each one, choosing from various professions (like alchemist, journeman, trader, etc).
Mine is not so detailed because I wanted to keep the game easy, but you can select from 3 different “backgrounds” that will influence your character starting stats.

More info soon!