Haha, did you watch the whole thing? Maybe it's not for everyone, but I think the main ideas of the speech are true and important, even if it's a little too focused on Crawford's life.

Happy you're enjoying it Bezzy,

Okay, you fight the Brother Bavakh twice. The first time you fight him, the way to win is to use the *second charge attack* (press right mouse click, wait until it charges to the second level, and release it on the enemy); this will cause Aa's tower's shots to all focus toward that point. The trick is that the Brother Bavakh randomly disrupts the flight pattern of the bullets, so you need to do it *at the right time*, notably in the instant just after all the bullets change course (they do so periodically). Aa's Limited Point is the strongest tower in that level, so sometimes it helps to restart the level several times until the Limited Point of Aa (he places it first I think) is in a good place, somewhere near the center. And use *all* the love points on Aa's Limited Point.

The second time you fight it, there's no way to win and you have to just let it through; it's part of the story. But that's probably not the time you're having trouble with.

It's a pretty challenging boss and I'm not really sure it was a good idea to end the demo with such a challenge, but again, experimentation is key. My reasoning was that if someone enjoyed the game enough to play through 32 levels and defeat a pretty tough boss, they'd probably want to buy the game to see how the story ends.

Well, it's still soft release, but feel free to post it on the blog if you play it and like it. I also told TimW I'd wait a few days before posting it on his blog, just in case there's a bug I don't know about yet and everyone's first impression of the game is that.

For instance, NOBODY TOLD ME that the menu on the game's old website was messed up in IE6 (I know, my fault for not testing it on an IE6 computer, but I did ask people if the site was okay and they all said it was fine -- until after release), so I had to change the site's theme today. More things like that could still lurk.

I decided on 22.95 mostly arbitrarily, but also in honor of Positech Games, my favorite indie company, who charges 22.95 for all their games. Cliffski is one of the more successful indie developers (one of the few to have made more than 100,000$ through indie games) so what he does is worth looking at, and he found that raising the price up to that level has no effect on conversion rate. Although his games can actually be found for 19.99 on some sites (like Manifesto Games), his site itself uses 22.95. Plus, it's easier to go down than up in price, and I want to test out the sales at different prices to see which sells better.

In general I'm talking a very experimental approach to selling the game (since it's my first), so I'm questioning a lot of the "standard" way to do things; another example is a lot of people say you shouldn't give away too much of the game or nobody will buy it, whereas I'm giving away 1/3rd of it. I can always later change that to 1/6th or a half and see what happens.

Because the sales are experimental and I'm mainly doing this as a learning experience, I'm not going to make a big secret about conversion rate and sales and all that, I'll post it regularly. For those curious, the first day's soft release: 43 downloads, 2 sales (one through a half-off offer I gave someone for telling me that two links on the site were broken). I know this is not yet statistically representative, so don't draw the conclusion that I have a 5% conversion rate or anything, that won't be statistically significant till I have like 1000+ downloads.

Happy you're replaying the first campaign w/ the story Geurt!

That's a good idea, though I'm not sure which I like better; I kind of like the feeling of using most of the game screen for about a page or less of text with each mission, because it makes it feel like a diary (one of my favorite games, Kartia for the PS1, used that format and I've had a soft spot for it, but that just may be me). I'll put experimenting with that on the wish list. Although it wouldn't actually take any *less* time to read if it appeared in separate paragraphs, I'd think...

Chris Crawford's infamous Dragon Speech is now on YouTube. The quality's a bit... YouTubed... but it's worth watching, and still relevant today (this was in 1992).

In five parts,
1 -


2 -


3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpW0fZ0390M
4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7N_Ju1L_Mg
5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqMwmdvf8v0

In Soviet Russia, games review YOU!!

Okay, the game has been released :O, many of the suggestions here have been used. I'm a bit tired, but there's still lots of "marketing" work to be done, like sending it to review sites and the like.

I still plan on improving the game. I may even completely revise the GUI and portraits and enemy graphics, add many new levels, a new medals system, and so on, but all of those aren't necessary to the core of the game and can be added as patches later; I'm a proponent of "a game is never finished", which is in contrast to how a lot of commercial developers do it (release a game and never update in major ways, if at all).

The new location for the demo is at http://immortaldefense.com

If any of you that offered suggestions actually intends to buy it, pm me first for a discount code.

Thanks again, everyone.

Most of my games are made by loose, large groups of people online, and yeah, we usually have to vote about features (although usually the person who is overseeing everything and doing most of the work takes priority and has veto power).

Too many people and the games take forever to make though, I think the optimum is around 3-5, any less and you're relying on one person having a bunch of different skills (and everyone has some weak points), and any more and the communications take longer than making the actual game.

BMT-Micro is less than Plimus at the minimum (9.5% to 10%), but other than that, that sounds about right to me.

Another note is you don't have to use only one. I have heard that Cliffski has several accounts so that he can switch between them when needs be (and also for their separate affiliate networks).

Depends on the game, most of the time I co-create games with friends and we talk about ideas and save the conversation logs as notes.

The 2.5% + 1$ seems a bit deceiving -- it's still 7.5% on 20$. So it's not much more nicer than most of the others.

There are freeware sound effects, I use those. Make sure they explicitly say 'free for commercial use' or 'public domain' though. And even then you have to be careful because a lot of "free sound effect" sites allow random people to upload anything. http://flashkit.com has a lot of good free ones though.

Well, some indies use them so I'm not sure if they should be totally excluded, but you have to do a lot more work with them. For instance, I believe hpapillon used PayPal for her games (not sure if she still does), and she manually had to send out links to the full version of the game for everyone who paid, so if she was on vacation or away from the computer they often had to wait a day or two till she got around to it, which is pretty annoying to the buyer not to get it instantly when they buy the game. But it can be done, and if someone only plans on like a few sales a week and doesn't mind manually mailing out links to the full version to every person who buys the game PayPal is an option. But personally I don't like the idea of the player having to wait for me to get to my email before they get the game.

I actually intended to use Plimus at first, but I had major problems setting up an account (it didn't work correctly), I emailed them about it a week or two ago and they've yet to reply (which doesn't speak well of them), so I went with BMT micro and found signing up and setting it up a breeze.

PayPal and Google Checkout aren't really e-commerce services because they don't handle the majority of e-commerce activities (such as, like, fraud protection or automated delivery of a link to the full game or an affiliate system). PayPal is probably a bad idea to use exclusively because there are many countries that PayPal doesn't accept money from yet. And Google Checkout requires that you have a merchant account I believe, which costs about a thousand dollars last I heard.

You also forgot a few, like e-sellerate (I think TeeGee uses that one).

Generally I'm most impressed with BMT-micro, and plan to use them, and already set up an account and did a test-purchase and it seems to work fine.

One thing you can do is simply remove collisions: don't make crashes due to two bikes hitting, for either one, but act as if they can go through each other.

BTW, this game reminds me of Exitebike, the basic mechanics anyway. Which is good, I liked that game. Perhaps a level modding feature would be good if possible? But GBA probably has restrictions on save file size so you might not have enough room for that.

Will play it more soon, I'll definately try to get through most of the levels and report back,

Very good, I'll give more feedback later (though it seems like it's a finished project, will you still be making changes to it based on feedback?).

One thing that annoyed me is that (it seems like) whenever the enemies touch me I fall down, but they don't fall down whenever I touch them, which seems unfair.

This isn't really a comment about the game, but how do you get the borders of your screenshot to fade into to a color like that? Is there some filter that does that? Does it use PNG semi-transparency, or is the color always the same?

Still needs bigger sprites! Other than that, yes, these changes look much better (do I get a patch, btw?).

No, I think your way of reviewing is fine, and it's understandable to talk about how the game fit together, as the whole is supposed to be greater than the sum of the parts. It's just that I felt your "whole" was skewed toward the gameplay (most of your topics -- economics, ergonomics, etc., refer to gameplay aspects), and that there are other reasons to play a game besides gameplay. Even most movie reviewers usually mention the soundtrack or the cinematography or plot somewhere in the review. But as gameplay feedback, it was very great.

Kudos: Rock Legend is out: http://forums.indiegamer.com/showthread.php?t=10780

Has anyone played/enjoyed Cliffski's games in general? I find all of them to be really great.