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Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

playadrift.com

211–220 of 341 posts

Re: Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

#211

I wanted to share this with you guys because it's taken around 3 years of reading HN to really convince myself to quit my job and build my a business with my friends

Very nice! I beat the ten demo levels too quickly, and found myself wanting more. Two things:

* An iPad version is needed. The graphics seem to be high res enough to make an iPad version feasible, and if this is on the iPad I'd buy it for sure. I don't really like the idea of trying to trace out the paths on the tiny iPhone screen.

* Charge money for it. I'd definitely be willing to pay personally.

Re: Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

#212
I love this game!! Once I got past the second level, I really got the hang of it and loved the mental challenge of solving levels.

One thought: I'd consider making the first few levels much easier. This article on Yoyodyne's trivia games is along those lines:

"As Yoyodyne got busier, we had less and less time to write each game's questions. Finally, one day, we launched a game that had very little effort put into the questions - a rush job, as I recall. The questions were factually correct, but there was no witty writing, no twist, and the questions were really easy to answer.

When the game ran, we were surprised to see that the response rate, instead of hovering around 30%, actually exceeded 60%. We had put less work into crafting the experience, and there were more players who wanted to participate. ... [u]sers wanted two things from their e-mail game experience:

1. POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT: Users wanted to be told that they got the answer right, and that they were winning.

2. NO INVESTMENT: Users did not want to pay for that positive reinforcement in any way. They didn't want to think, work, get up from their chair, or otherwise make any effort to get the reward."

http://www.goodexperience.com/columns/04/0513.slots.html

Re: Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

#213

Hey guys, thought I'd throw in my 2-cents as an Independent Games Festival judge, and as press. First of all, your presentation is terrific. Great art and sound. Top notch, feels like it came from a very talented team. With this game on your resume, you've got a great future ahead of yourselves. Now, the bad part: from a gameplay perspective, your game is not unique enough to win out on its own merits in any app stor…

>Oh, and when it comes to press, I really don't have any good advice.

I recommend contacting local newspapers, they are usually very willing to write stories like "local programmer quits day job to pursie his dream of creating games etc".

Re: Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

#214
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is disturbingly cynical advice. If you stand by it, why not attach your real name to it? If not, why put it in public? And by the way, you're recommending buying fake reviews. Here's a better tactic (and one that's guaranteed not to get you kicked out of the app store): get your launch announcement to the top slot on a popular discussion site, and get the real people there to leave real reviews instead. Which, i…

Hey, look at the top ten apps on both app stores, then come back here and try not to be cynical about anyone's chanced of succeeding there. I've seen numbers on sales in the app stores. If yer not in the top 25, you might as well not even be in the app store, from a meaningful revenue perspective. There are very few exceptions, as far as I know. One possible one would be any app that's $20. Those probably make money,…

Regarding the top 25 meaningful revenue... this all depends on your team size, does it not? If you are solo or a team of 2-3, you need a lot less revenue than a big company.

We're almost done with our slot machine game for iOS (lame, I know), but we only have 2 people, and we definitely don't need to be in the top 25 to make some real money (that can fund new, "real game" projects).

Re: Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

#215

Not to detract from the fun of the game, but I get a strong feeling that this is probably a very studied problem in topology - and that thought keeps on nagging me to write a solver script :)

Yes in fact I've spent the past 6 months thinking about whether i could build a level generator that can verify and solve the levels too. The way I see it, with a simple 5x5x5 cube with 5 colors on it, the number of possible combinations to check is 75^5, which might take awhile to brute force, so there needs to be a intelligent way to map lines.

This is an ideal problem for constraint solving. If there is one thing constraint solving does well it is make NP-Hard problems more manageable. I wrote up a quick solution to the first puzzle in sabr (1), you can see what the puzzle result looks like here (2). The key insight is: "each color must be surrounded by exactly two of its color, unless it is on an end, in which case it is surrounded by exactly one" after that it's just a matter of coding it up. It's not much extra work to go from here to a generator, which I may make later if I have time. Cool puzzle game, I like it ;D.

1) https://github.com/dbunker/SABR/blob/master/module/other-tes...

2) https://github.com/dbunker/SABR/blob/master/module/other-tes...

Re: Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since it is obvious he does not – and you give the impression of possessing some kind of explanation – why not directly explain your view of it to him instead of asking snarky questions that you already know the answer to? It is a much more meaningful way to advance the discussion.

Excellent comment, a very meaningful way to advance the discussion. Please post more of the same, more often. Also you may want to look up "rhetorical question" when you have a spare moment.

I fail to see how you not expecting your question to be answered makes it somehow more relevant. It is still simply belligerent criticism without any reasonable justification or explanation. If you were planning to follow up with something later on you could easily have cut out the middleman.

But you are right when you say that this discussion is way off topic, so I'll probably leave it at this. Nice seeing ya.

Re: Show HN: 6 months ago I quit my job to pursue indie dev. Here is our first game

#218
All you guys leaving advice and comments in this thread... download the app. It's much more polished than the website version.

I rated it 5 stars, added a review, and referred it to a couple friends. I want to see this game succeed. If you want to support these guys, why not do the same?

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