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

playadrift.com

251–260 of 341 posts

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

#251

Just FYI, google thinks your dev blog is / has spam: http://i.imgur.com/za2UXWh.png One a separate note - awesome game! I plan to buy it. On the web version, one thing I'd like would be able to toggle a miss clicked space back to "neutral" with a click. I'd also make the levels slightly harder before getting to level 5 - they all seemed too easy up to that point.

Yeah I can't figure out where thats coming from, I've poured over my site to find it and even resubmitted to google and they don't see that spam when i manually submit. Maybe I should just go with a hosted solution and stop trying to manage wordpress on my own.

[site:craftymind.com viagra]

Try that query on there. They managed to index a LOT of pages that way.

Here's the thing. Your site has been compromised. Look. I'll fetch the same page with two different user-agents. One will show up as some generic curl thing and the other will look like Google's crawler.

    $ curl http://www.craftymind.com/factory/guimark3/video/flash_720p_high.html > ordinary

    $ curl -A "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)" http://www.craftymind.com/factory/guimark3/video/flash_720p_high.html > googlebot
So I look for the term in the first file.

    $ grep viagra ordinary
    $
... Nothing.

I do the same for the second.

    $ grep viagra googlebot
    [ ... tons and tons of garbage ... ]
Your site is running something which only emits garbage when Googlebot (or something resembling it) hits it. Install a user-agent switcher in your browser and you can see it for yourself.

Sorry.

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

#252
Playing this triggered a familiar sensation, and I realized that this game has strong similarities with Slitherlink, an addictive puzzle developed by Nikoli, the Japanese publisher who popularized sudoku. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slitherlink

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

#254
Minor issue: if you accidentally cross the paths of the colors, it fails silently. There's no "you fail" message or anything like that given, and it's not immediately obvious that the only way to try again is to reload the level.

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

#256
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I have for years. Believe me, the idea that the app store is a positive feedback loop and you have to clear the inital hurdle to get anywhere is not news to me. But the advice you're giving here is roughly equivalent to telling a young cyclist in their first pro race, "hey, listen buddy. If you want to succeed, you've got to dope. Everybody's doing it. There's no other way."

Except, that analogy is true: purportedly, doping is really pervasive in pro-cycling and is basically necessitated to be anywhere near competitive. The same is true of the app store.

It's not optimal, but it's the status quo that tens of thousands of developers face: you can't win if you don't employ dubious means.

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

#257

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. Try to find some small outlets to work with because the big guys will ignore you, and do so in a mean and churlish way.

With nearly 600 upvotes, 250+ comments, and the front page of Hacker News, he shouldn't have trouble finding press coverage.

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

#259
You should monetize with paid hints. I've got a similar game in the App Store (I'll be polite and skip linking to it) and as of this morning, 53.8% of my total revenue has come from hint packs.

To see what I mean by hints, see this HTML5 port of my game I've been doing (work in-progress): http://noisytyping.com/NCT6745/index.html

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

#260

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…

This is a horrible, selfish advise, and you should be ashamed of yourself! It harms both the community and the games. What's more surprising is that this is a top comment! People who upvoted this are not any better than you are! It's always better to be honest and take pride in your work. Hacking is about making something great and interesting, not making a cheap buck.

People who didn't upvote it aren't, either
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