The best advice I can give to newbie indie developers (this might apply also in general) is: try to collaborate. Try to create and mantain good relationship with other indie developers.
Too many times I’ve heard some people “I don’t trust that one” and so on. This is really stupid, expecially when you’re starting. Fun because those same people refuse maybe to do a links exchange, to make a game together, to allow some other developer to port his game to a different platform (Mac, PocketPC) and maybe THEN they accept 20% royalties from unknown publishers or give retail licensing rights to the 1st distributor that ask them…
The other fellow developers are much more likely to be honest like you: they’re person, not corporations… 😉

As you may know recently Google did a major update that seems isn’t finished yet.
It happened also on november 2004, and in both cases my site got severely penalized 🙁
It seems that got a hard hit on various search queries, but is slowly going up… like if they put all sites to “zero” and then they gained positions again depending on links number/quality.
Anyway the most fun thing is that the number of sales remain the same even with about 800 less visitors (daily)…!!

That’s really not my lucky period… only 6 months ago I lost my sweet kitten Maja and now was the turn of Lucy, my black dwarf rabbit 🙁
I have many thoughts in my mind now, many memories of her. No need to say that I miss her a lot….I’d like anyone who is used to have cats and dogs (I have them too) to try to have a rabbit, they can give you a lot with only a bit of attention in exchange!
I’m sure many people would be surprised by their sweet behaviour, even if dwarf rabbits are very fragile (their average life is 7-8 years only).

Well it seems that maybe next year my favourite team, Bologna FC, will be playing in Serie B… 🙁
Today match was lame… and they’ll have to play the play-off match against Parma. Even if in the 1st match they’ll play without a lot of titolars (like Gilardino, Morfeo, etc) I have do doubt that Bologna will manage not to score!!
Anyway… the USM2 database engine is coming out very nicely. I plan to include also more accurate financial informations in this sequel. I hope to finish Magic Stones soon too… argh I’m doing too many things together!!!

Well… as expected I couldn’t really finish my next game Magic Stones by the end of May 🙁
There are various reasons for this, including the fact that I prefer to delay the game release by some weeks but have it free of bugs. Another good reason is that I am working at the same time on my soccer game USM2 🙂