Crystal Towers 2 - Out of steam

[davidn]

I am now the proud owner of a rejection letter from Steam. I really am, actually - everyone in the independent community says that it's really difficult to get any sort of response from them at all, so I'm at least proud that I got past their initial filtering process and into the zone where I was under serious consideration.

This doesn't really set the wider plans back a whole lot, as it was just an experiment which didn't work - I'll have to take some more time to actually advertise it, though, organizing an extended demo and getting a development log together on TIGSource. And find out if Paypal's an acceptable way to take payment for distributing this, I suppose. All this means that Boxplode is going to be getting some more attention in the immediate future, as it's now the one of my game projects that needs the least work done to it before I release it (some improvement to the way tutorials are displayed, more levels, that's about all). I've also refitted Special Agent to be a Flash game, the same way that I did for Treasure Tower before, and bidding for it will close soon.

Also, somebody emailed me a job offer out of absolutely nowhere this afternoon. It's nice to feel appreciated by people who I haven't even met.

Comments

[igorium.livejournal.com]

Did you try Impulse? They must be very pro-indie :)

[davidn]

That could be a very good idea - I hadn't heard of them, but I did know of Stardock, which they... connect with, or something like that. I will look around and let you know :)

[igorium.livejournal.com]

As far as I know Stardock owns Impulse, and it is one of their few profit-makers.
And they spend the profit to create their games, which are thus indie too :) AFAIK their only successful games are GalCiv series (which is great).

BTW, I like Impulse more than Steam in every respect (got a few games in both).

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

I remember when I bought the special editions of the Chzo mythos games.

Yahtzee sent me an e-mail a little bit after I paypaled him with links and said "hurry I change them every few days".

Then later on when there was a Let's Play of the series he admitted that he only changed the urls like every other month!

[davidn]

I remember that system well - I think I tried my links again out of curiosity, about a month after I got them the first time, but I can't remember if they still worked or not.

I'm not sure how to play it myself - I think things will be slow enough so that I can organize a link for each individual person, further giving me the advantage that I can tell if anybody spreads it around, and can append "is a cockend" to their account on the site.

[dr-dos.livejournal.com]

The problem with that, (unless i'm missing something), is that if I already download the game from your link, I can just reupload it myself somewhere.

Minecraft's account system is probably decent, there's obviously account sharing but it at least filters some people out.

[davidn]

Copy protection is a tricky issue... people don't seem to mind Minecraft at all, but I'm wary of doing absolutely anything that would result in it being preferable to get a version where any such checks had been illegitimately disabled, over a genuine paid-for copy.

I was surprised by how little piracy I saw for the Chzo series - granted, I never actually looked for the special editions anywhere else, but... it didn't even occur to me to look. I think that people in general are slightly more hesitant to pirate if it's from an independent developer with some semblance of a face, rather than from some unknown company, and I know that no effort will eliminate pirated versions altogether.

What am I saying - I'd be flattered if anyone puts it on a torrent, it would imply it was worth any old rope.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm also a proud owner of one of those letters... well... emails.

I must recommending trying a flash port instead. It's absurd the amount of plays a flash game gets compared to a downloadable game. While I'm aware you game has a large amount of graphics, a good flash demo would draw people in to buy the full version.

Honestly I don't know why many of the downloadable games (such as the nifflas ones) aren't built with Flash in mind, they're not particularly pushing the limits of the graphics card. I think gamers are going less and less for downloadable games when they can get identical content in their browser.

That said, I know a lot of MMF extensions have yet to be ported, so the game may be beyond the point of no return as far as Flash goes.

[ryanachronism.livejournal.com]

^ Oops that was me.

[davidn]

CT2 does do a lot of stuff that isn't available (or wise to do) in Flash - humiliatingly, it was actually started before the Flash runtime was!

Flash has definitely become the focus for games, now, so the runtime is a huge advantage when working with MMF now - part of my plan is to put together a cut-down demo that can run on Flash, so that it can be distributed far and wide and lead people back to the full version.