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!

Yes, I’m finishing the character screen. It come out very nicely. This time I planned it carefully on paper before starting to program it 🙂
I must say that was much better! another lesson learnt… plan every screen carefully on paper before start drawing all the various pieces of interface, otherwise you’ll spend much more time for corrections!

Today went to drive a lot and I’m broken. So I’ll just post another pic of a beautiful witch in my next game 🙂
…who said that witches are all old and ugly? 😉

I’m not referring to porn games 🙂 but to games playable only by adult people because they’re usually more complex than the standard casual games.
Magic Stones will be one of those. No worries, if you played any RPG or strategy game before, it won’t be much more difficult to learn (at all).
But it will have what i call deep gameplay: lot of items, monsters, spells, etc. I plan to expand the game even after is released with new additions.
With this move probably I’m cutting out a large piece of market (the so called “soccer-moms” and childrens) but unlikely other devs I’m making games because I like to make them.
Earning money isn’t my primary goal, for that is much better making websites or other cd-rom stuff (like this one).
To me, the people quitting their daily job to live with shareware (and maybe they even have a family to mantain) are completely crazy… it’s simply not possible nowadays 🙁

Well, time to show you another piece of art taken from Magic Stones. This time is a … succubus!