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[Guert]

Well, you can experiment, like I said, it's just a thought. There's a good chance that it makes it longer to read too...

Anyway, it's a detail that is not important because it works right now.
Later!

[Bezzy]

Thanks for the tip!

I like that it was a bit of a puzzle, Rinku... I just thought that there was going to be some sort of funny twist, like, I kill him with "love", because he's the grouch monster. Or something.

Also, I know it was in the first level, but I never really got the feeling that I was ever doing a charge attack correctly. Maybe I'm being thick about it. I just couldn't tell whether it was working or not. I think you might need some stand-out effect (and escalating sound effect) to indicate that you're successfully charging. Maybe make your cursor flash at increasing frequency? I dunno. There's lots of ways you could do it.

By the way, about losing your cursor in the fog of particles - Making sure that it's the last thing drawn (always on top), and adding a high contrast outline would probably do the trick, so long as it doesn't destroy the aesthetic.

[Bezzy]

Playing again... I'm embarassed. My last comment about the secondary fire was unfair - I was just being stupid. The secondary is pretty obvious once you know about it. I guess that the moment you click the right mouse button, it doesn't have an immediate change to make you feel like you did something important. You have to wait for the charge up.


Cleared that level no problem once I got the hang of it. Thanks!

[Alex May]

Congrats on the release Paul. Just bought my copy   

[Paul Eres]

Yeah, today I woke up to 4 new copies sold (I had sold 4 copies previous to that, so it's a total of 8 now) which was pretty nice :D

[TeeGee]

That's just great! Let's hope it will remain that way for you. Ha! Normally you would get one more sale of the game, but I already posses the full version .

[Inane]

God, you have made like, the best tower defense game ever. Seriously.

Criticism!:
Demo is too long. Honestly, it would have been better to end it at the end of the first chapter or whatever. By the end of the demo I was getting tired of the game (Not like, the long-lasting tired where you've worn out all the games value, but you know, it was the limit for one sitting) which isn't a good thing, since at that point it's much less likely for you to nab an impulse buy, methinks. You also reveal like, 3/4 of the points, gettin' rid of some of the mystery value.

And sorry, I can't buy it at the moment. Spent the last of my cash on Pokemon, right before realizing I really don't feel like playing pokemon.

[Paul Eres]

That's exactly why I made the demo long, I don't want people buying it as an impulse buy, and I don't think it's a good idea to play through the demo in one sitting, since it's not just a few minutes to show the game, it's several hours of free content. I only want people buying it who genuinely like the game and want to see how the story ends, *especially* because people sometimes buy something and then don't like it and regret the decision to buy it, and I don't want that to happen.

So I think that the only reason the demo seems "too long" is that all other demos are too short. If people had the idea of demos that they were games unto themselves, like they used to be with Commander Keen and Doom and all those other early shareware games that gave you a third or so of the game for free, it wouldn't seem so long.

[Bezzy]

rinkuhero = the new Jesus, with his sacrifice and his morals.

Applaudable, sir!

[Paul Eres]

Haha, it's not sacrifice really. It's just that I value having a positive impact through my games, if anything it's more egoistic than someone who'd sacrifice disappointed customers for a little more money in the short term.

[Bezzy]

Hey I agree.

But, should you ever feel the need to justify this to a cynical businessy type guy in a way he can understand, just say that you're "nurturing goodwill within the community as part of a long term marketing strategy".

[Paul Eres]

There's that, but in general being an indie at all can't really be justified from a business standpoint. Any good indie could easily work at EA or something and make 5x-10x as much, and (probably) for easier work.

[Derek]

There's that, but in general being an indie at all can't really be justified from a business standpoint. Any good indie could easily work at EA or something and make 5x-10x as much, and (probably) for easier work.

Yeah, but also really boring, crippling, soulless work.  What I don't understand are indies who make bad casual games.  Because then you're doing boring, crippling, soulless work with no job security.

Anyway, congrats again on releasing the game!  Tell us how things are going with it!

[Paul Eres]

Making a casual puzzle game is easy, they take three weeks to make. There are some exceptions like Chocolate Castle, but generally puzzle games don't take much work or new ideas to make, I think that's actually why there are so many of them, it's not that people keep making them intentionally, it's just that other genres take much more work, so you see less of them completed.

Take RPGs for instance, it takes about 2-3 years to make a good indie RPG in my experience, sometimes much longer (Sword of Jade, on my site, took nearly 7 years!). So I think that how many games in a particular genre appear is directly proportional to how long they take to complete.

As for how ID's going, I created a thread -- I'm going to be posting all stats related to the game there once per week (download number, number of sales, yadda yadda) but so far, 11 sales in 5 days out of 400 downloads, and each week I'm trying a different strategy of marketing (week 1 is forums).

The game's story's writer and I were also interviewed, if anyone wants to read more about the development process or what we were going for.

[Derek]

Well, you've definitely exploded a little happiness into me with that post.