Category Archives: indie life

Justified text power!

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Today I just downloaded the new PTK version. I was enthusiast to try the new “justified text align” in the DrawMultiline command. But in practice, what does this means? it means that now you can write “columns of text” with justified spacing, like those you see in the newspaper.

To make it even more clear, compare the 2 screenshots below:

Magic Stones quest screen before (normal centered text, look in particular to the right scroll)
Magic Stones quest screen now (justified text, isn’t much nicer?)

PTK is really becoming better and better 🙂

Selling games to europe?

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Today on indiegamer forums the author of Wildlife Tycoon: Venture Africa asked about selling games in Europe, the european market, what are best sites, and so on. I want to share my experience since 40% of my sales are from Europe:

  • localization was useless. I did german one for my game UBM when was just released, so selling exceptionally well, but basically had NO IMPACT on sales. I still remember a german guy asking me how to play the game in english…! 😮
  • direct bank transfer, BMT has this option. Had maybe 2-3 sales with that. Most people in europe have Paypal now. For example, Paypal in Italy grow up to 36% of e-commerce market (means that more than 1/3 of italians use it to buy stuff online)
  • what are the best sites? I’m a bit confused here 🙂 internet is global, so I don’t see why someone in europe wouldn’t come to any site on internet to buy. They come to my site, and to the one of many other developers to buy.
  • support: rarely you can get emails in french or spanish, but is like 1 out of 100 orders. Anyway not a problem.
  • the best print media… well is a long list. The best ones are UK and German mags 😉

Rant vs internet slowness

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Yes I’m pissed! I recently noticed that webdesigner tend to FILL the webpages with all the possible sort of flash intro, gif/png animations, huge buttons and so on. I don’t say this only because having a ISDN connection I have very long pages loading time, but also because is useless. If you check my sites, I do all in plain HTML, and I don’t think that I’m losing any customer for that. Actually I’m saving bandiwth, and I’m more likely to get a sale from a person who has a dialup connection (and are much more than what you could think about).

I saw many cool sites made in flash, and I’m quite capable of doing one (I was webdesigner for 2 years before starting my indie career) but I think they’re useless. If you’re making a flash/web game then ok, but if you just want to display a catalogue of games, why put all those useless and heavy flash stuff?

I'm done outsourcing

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I’ve already posted in the past about outsourcing problems, but today I made my decision: no more outsourcing for me. I was using the popular site “Rent a coder” to post small programming/other tasks.

Well saying that I am “disappointed” is the minimum. I’ve chosen even people with high rating (above 8) but they ALL managed NOT to deliver what I asked, except for 1 programmer that did a small flash application. That’s all. Everyone else wasn’t able NOT ONLY to deliver what I asked in time, but they were always bringing bad excuses, and in the end they left with half work done, pretending still to be paid for it.

Now everyone that knows a bit about game programming, knows that looking at someone else code is one of the worst thing that can happen 😀 usually you won’t be able to understand anything! or will take 1 month only to finish a project that for the previous programmer was “almost done”.

So I’ve made my mind, from today I’ve stopped outsourcing. Maybe art, if I need it, but no more programming tasks for sure!

New Year goals!

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Ok the new year has just started… well and I got a cold already, not bad 😀

My goals for this year? well release at least 3 new games, make some bigger updates for Magic Stones and UBM (and possibly other games!) and maybe start a sequel of one of my games. Which one? have yet to decide, but I’m more inclined to make a Supernova 2 game. That could be even completely different in terms of gameplay, but following the same “ambientation” (dark future, two factions fighting each other, conquer the galaxy and win space battles).

Yes, this 2007 could be interesting! 🙂