Category Archives: indie life

How to lose a potential customer: phone verifications

Yesterday wanted to advertise my games (old and new ones as well), so thought to try those blog advertising services.

I had already used their services in the past, and must say that got some positive review and traffic from the posts. So yesterday wanted to buy more ads, and went to one of the 3. Unfortunately, even if I had previously bought lot of posts from them (over $500 value), they decided that I couldn’t buy anymore if I didn’t call them by phone (of course a USA number) to verify my credit card info! (big cheer sound)

Of course, being european, I am not surely going to call someone in USA to verify my CC info. Also, what they need to verify? they expect me to tell my CC number over the phone? no thanks, is much safer to use the web! 😐

So they lost a potential good customer for a totally useless anti-fraud system (expecially in this case since I already bought several stuff from them before). No problem, I’ll go with the other 2 who aren’t so dumb to use such system (they even let me use Paypal actually!). I’m not saying which one of the 3 is, but is enough to browse their sites to find out… 😉

Future titles of Winter Wolves & Tycoon Games

Today I did a plan on what to do next. Was hard since I have always so many ideas and so little time… 🙂

Anyway, here is the plan:

Winter Wolves

– working on Tower Of Destiny, a dungeon hack’n’slash RPG with first person view, character creation with party of 5 members, a general storyline, a pool of 20-25 heroes that will stay in town while you choose a party to go exploring the dungeon. The heroes that remains in town can train some of their skills meanwhile.

– thinking about doing a complete rewrite of UBM engine, as suggested by the feedback of some users in my forums. So creating first a generic engine that I can use to make both UBM2, but also a sort of “gladiator management game” 🙂 the idea could be very fun, especially if I manage to make it multiplayer

Tycoon Games

– working on a Tower Defense game using Supernova 2 engine. Not sure yet if will be fantasy or sci-fi. Imagine a tower defense game with a storyline, upgrading towers and mobile defenses like characters using special attack. Have still to decide if to do it turn-based or real-time, even if I am more inclined to do it real-time

– working on several updates for Supernova 2, like the addition of a skirmish mode, that will let the player buy ships and jump straight into the battle, without any macromanagement part. I plan also to add more ship/weapons and (probably later, next year) a sort of ship-design screen where you can design your own custom ship configurations

I am also experimenting with other languages (like Flash) and other ideas, but officially I’m developing those 3 titles/engines right now. I’m working a bit on every one, even if the game that will probably finish first will be the Tower Defense game, since I can use good part of Supernova 2 engine.

That’s all for now 😀

Supernova 2: FINISHED!!!!

Woot!!!! 😀

It has been a LONG LONG time, but in last couple of days (after some last minute bugfixes) I finally released Supernova 2:Spacewar!! I am really proud of it, since I consider it a complex game but with an accessible interface. I asked some classic “casual gamers” friends to test it, and they were all able to figure out how to play after “only” a few hours 😀

The version now is 1.0, and if you downloaded any demo or earlier 1.0 (it had unfortunately a crashing bug on startup on some macs!) please redownload it, as now I have fixed everything (at least I hope so!!).

To download the game visit this page: http://www.tycoongames.eu/freetrials.php

People on forums are already making good suggestions in my forums, like this one:

I probably should have mentioned this much earlier, but have you considered adding a skirmish mode also. By skirmish mode, I mean fighting one mission after another without all the macromanagement parts in between. For example, it would be nice to start with some units in battle one, and as you keep winning battles you gain currency to buy more of the same units or new units for battle two and so on.

Indeed I find it a very good idea, and not even much complex to implement in the game engine, so I’m probably going to make it. I have also other minor features to add, like auto-units deployments, and so on, to make the game even more accessible.

What about future plans? I started a classic dungeon explration RPG called Tower Of Destiny last year which I plan to work on. I’ve also started another “secret” project to make an ideal sequel to Magic Stones (yes a card-battles game!) and a sort of Princess Maker game… However for now I have to take a pause , both to relax, and think my strategy… 😀

Thanks everyone for the support! Days like this make me happy to be an indie developer 🙂

Future Plans

Tomorrow is the 1st of April, and almost one quarter of this year has passed. Time flew very quickly for me -maybe because was working so hard to finish Supernova 2 (the final game should be ready very soon) and also pondering what to do after it.

I have still a project on stand-by – Tower of Destiny. However I’m thinking also about learning Flash/Director to make a online game. I have what I think to be a pretty cool idea that all Magic Stones fans will surely like, a sort of online rpg card game. The advantages of a online-only game are lots, for example multiplayer possibility, no need to store the data on your pc, possibility to play the game anywhere (even at work! eheh) and also the micropayment thing, so that you can pay only for how much you play the game (have still to decide the details, but this would allow much more flexibility on payment methods).

However I’m not saying that TOD will become waporware: I’ll resume working on it at same time as the online game. Just don’t ask me release dates, because I really have no clue, it’s going to be a very BIG game 🙂

Magic Stones Postmortem

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Last year was contacted by a person from idevgames to write a postmortem about my game Magic Stones. Since over 1 year has passed already and he didn’t post anything in his site, I thought to post the postmortem in my blog, so at least I didn’t waste my time writing it and maybe someone could find it interesting, who knows.

Here it goes – enjoy it!

Overview

I always liked the idea of making a fantasy-card game, so I started to outline the basic idea on a piece of paper. Yes planning was essential in this kind of game, I knew it from the start (and luckily I did it).

I decided to base everything on celtic mythology, so I first started to do some research both in local library and also on the net. Found the celtic runes and thought to assign to each one of them a spell or a summoned avatar in the game. I divided the runes into 4 elements (the classic air, water, fire and earth) even if their original meaning is a bit different (but hey is just a game!).

So after sketching out the general features, statistics, skills, creatures, background story, etc of the game, I put all those numbers together in a spreadsheet page.

Then had to solve a big problem, to make the graphic of such a game, and found in Poser a very good solution. Bought several ready-made 3d models, and after several weeks spent on various renderings, I had the basic 48 avatars ready (20 avatars for the 4 elements plus many neutral/evil ones).

I added a roleplaying element to the game, so that in addition to your “deck of card” you had also an in-game alter-ego, with an inventory of items that could affect your power and a set of basic skills that would influence the game in general.

Tools used

I used xCode and a very simple but really powerful 2d programming API called PTK (website http://www.phelios.com/ptk) that I had already used in all my previous games with great success.

As I already said, for graphics I used mostly Poser 5/6 for the monsters, characters, etc and photoshop to design the interface of the game.

For the music I just bought royalty-free music from one of the many online stores.

What went right

The game had since its launch a good group of loyal followers. This maybe also because I decided, shortly after I released version 1.0, to add “bonus pack” or “expansion packs” with new game features and new avatars/quests, completely free for registered users. This was both a hard move (once I had announced it, I couldn’t change my mind) but also a winning one because it helped greatly to improve customers loyalty and is keeping my game always “on the news” thanks to those frequent updates (about every 2-3 months usually).

What went wrong

Despite I had planned everything, as always happens in this sort of games, you’ll need to TEST TEST and TEST. When you make a simple match3 game, is hard to have bugs after hours of playing (because game mechanic is always the same). With this kind of game instead, I had many bugs in the initial version 1.0 because I didn’t took the time to test it properly since was too eager to release it (a mistake I will never repeat in any future games!).

Conclusion

I can say that it was both a very rewarding experience (got so many enthusiast email feedbacks!) but also very stressing. The day after release was working 10hours a day to fix all the bug and I had also a tight deadline to deliver the first expansion “The Bone Lord” in time for Christmas 2005. Keeping the game updated also is not so simple, since need to add more content like new art/sounds, and new gameplay elements. But overall I like this kind of games so in this case the passion plays an important role.