121–130 of 147 posts
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Thanks for not obscuring the source, I'm enjoying reading it :)
You're welcome. I knew that obscuring the source code wouldn't do anything to prevent piracy, so I figured I'd just leave it as is so people can see how I did things.
Please consider allowing people to pay with bitcoins for your game. http://mtgox.com has a shopping cart that is trivial to integrate and allows people to pay with their bitcoins (also buy some if they don't have them yet).
I'm just suggesting alternative mode of payment that would be useful fore some of his customers.
You can set up mtgox cart so that all bitcoins you receive are immediately sold and money transfered to you so the whole process is transparent for the seller. (S)he doesn't have to have any knowledge or interest in bitcoins. You can set price in dollars and the amount the customer should pay in bitcoins is automatically determined.
You'll also get more money for each dollar your customer pays than with PayPal.
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If javascript could run outside of the browser, I'd use it for everything. Javascript was nothing but pure bliss to work with, but the browsers were hell. Overall I know I'm definitely going to keep making short, simple games with javascript because it's a wonderful tool for the job. Long-term projects are a bit risky due to browser issues, so this'll probably be my last huge game with the language (sadly). If you're…
I'm working full time on a game development project in Unity. I have nothing but good things to say about it. The community is great, and our development would take twice the time without community-created tools like NGUI and PlayMaker. Unity 4 will address some major irks of mine (esp. animation handling), and a new UI engine is down the road. Its Javascript support is probably what's drawing you to the engine thoug…
I used to be all about HTML5 but after a while I realized that I don't like javascript and I hate dealing with browser quirks. C# Unity is where it's at.
I'm curious as to your reasoning behind spending 2 years developing this in HTML5? The art style is great and all, but you could have knocked up a game like this in an engine like Unity within 3 months and deployed it to iOS, PC/MAC, even Xbox Arcade.
You could save time by doing this though, as you say. I'm leaning more towards the idea of reusing code and trusting other peoples engines at this point. But we've all made our own engines and, as other posters have said, this is the guys hobby, and most likely a labour of love.
Any way to transfer progress from demo to full?
Copy what's displayed.
Then open the main game and do this in the Javascript console: states = JSON.parse(paste your copied data here)
I actually did have that feature in the game, but I deactivated it once it seemed my apparent save corruption issue was gone (didn't want to bring attention to any possible bugginess). I should reactivate it in an update.
Demo uploaded to mediafire because I don't want to completely kill my server: http://www.mediafire.com/?hh5x0jcvvkiwd5i I tried to get it out fast and just barely tested it, but it should be stable. The demo has three bosses, ~25 areas, and a good taste of the gameplay. My server seems to be intermittently dying, so Chrome Store link for anybody interested in purchasing (buying through my site would be preferable, th…
Long time indie game developer here; if you're looking to make money from this, you need to have the demo playable directly on your website. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that serving the game even on S3 would cost $2 per 1000 players - much less elsewhere (I use 100tb but that's overkill for you). I don't know if you're keeping track of the conversions - from hit to download and hit to sale - but you s…
I'll work on this. My website seems to be handling the strain better than I'd expected, so I really have no excuse.
>$3 is also too low; you're likely to make far more revenue at $5 or $7.
I actually tested it at $3.99 when I first submitted it. Nobody was buying it at all, so I dropped it to $2.99 and quickly made my first few sales. It could probably also be attributed to my lack of a demo during this period, though, but I'm pretty certain the price drop had a non-negligible effect. Maybe $3.99 is just an ugly number?
>You also should make the intro more like 10 seconds long at most. Split the intro cutscene up and show it slowly over the levels.
This is honestly something I struggled with. I didn't want an overly long intro, but at the same time I wanted an intro that'd let the player know what's going on immediately. I couldn't find any other way to pace it, so I loaded it up front and towards the end with the meatiest part of the gameplay in the middle fairly uninterrupted. I probably did lose some of the customers who play games exclusively for the action, but my main goal was to make something that wasn't necessarily complex gameplay-wise, but had a decent plot to help string it along.
>* Shadowing is impressive!
Most of my initial criticism came from how I did shadows, but I insisted upon keeping them. I'm surprised I've actually received positive multiple comments on it.
>I wouldn't try to release quickly and barely test a project I've been working on for two weeks, let alone two years - something to keep in mind so you don't have to learn it the hard way like I (and many others here) did.
The main game's been extensively tested; the demo was rushed out because I didn't really plan on releasing one. Comments and criticisms will be immediately applied to the demo, but I'll slowly add them into the full game so that I have time to test them more fully. It's also a reason why cutscene skipping isn't in the full game yet--it can sometimes yield weird audio issues.
>In any case, great first project! Do you have a mailing list to sign up to? I'd be interested in hearing about whatever you come up with next.
Nope. I just infrequently update my blog. I only feel comfortable showing my work after I consider it complete, and it's definitely a problem because it's practically impossible to generate hype.
Something you didn't mention, but something I definitely need to work on, is my writing and organization. If I hadn't spent all my time throwing random elements of the game together at arbitrary points in time, I could easily make something of this caliber every few months.
And thanks for the advice.
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I think he meant javascript running client-side outside the browser. The closest analog I can think of is ActionScript in Adobe Flash/Air/Flex, but that's not a mast I would lash myself to right now.
As somebody who is stuck for the foreseeable future maintaining a huge AIR app I resemble that comment! It's kinda a drag though because AIR actually provides a fantastic cross-platform solution for desktop apps. Even thought they are in ActionScript, it's extremely similar writing Javascript apps that have model binding. I feel like I've tried every cross platform environment from AIR to Titanium to Java/QT to RealB…
AIR is a great idea, but it would be way better (for me, at least) if they incorporated a decent HTML/CSS rendering engine that had the same potential as the ones we see on modern browsers.