The Megamort expansion is now finished, I actually have the installer and patch sitting on my hard disk ready to go.  However I'm delaying release until next Wednesday (the 28th of November) for a couple of reasons:

• I've got plans for the weekend, if I released now I wouldn't be able to properly support it
• I don't really want to compete for eyeballs with the Steam Autumn / Thanksgiving sale (which looks pretty awesome)

The upshot of this is that I get a little bit more time for some final testing and preparation.  I'd like to make a new video for example.

I have gone ahead and reduced the price from $14.99 / €12.50 / £9.99 to $9.99 / €8.50 / £6.99 today.  I didn't really want to sell this cheap, but more than a few reviewers have said that they like the game but aren't really sure it's great value for money.  One of my goals with this expansion is to utterly crush this idea by simultaneously adding more content and reducing the price.  By my calculations it will be 2.18 times better value for money, based on total levels / price!



Right, I'd better go and get this press release done before someone notices that I announced the release date on TIG first!

Hi,

I love the way you've taken very old-school Dungeon Master style gameplay and subtly added a few modern tweaks like freedom of the camera, without taking it too far and destroying what it is.  I'm looking forward to playing when this game is finished!

I've previewed two more cards on the Facebook page:


The expansion card previews have been quite well received, much better than the ones I did before launching the game itself.  That's probably because people understand the context now and are much more interested to see what the cards will do.

---

I had hoped the expansion would be ready to go nowish, but my beta testers (a couple of friends) found an evil crash bug and it took several days to narrow it down ... plus about 30 minutes to actually fix it.  It turns out it's not a good idea to pass uninitialized floats into std::sort as it (occasionally) gets into trouble with strange floating point values such as NaN.  Anyway the expansions still needs a few tweaks, a bit more testing and an installer so I hope to have it done this week.

[impulse9]

Here's my latest screenshot, which comes from the new cave background in my expansion to The Trouble With Robots.  As you can see I'm playing with 'Rocket Drop', one of the new cards for the expansion:


Featuring animated bats!

impulse9 - great attention to detail
DustyDrake - interesting retro look
Ashkin - please explain your screenshot!

Woooow this game is my dream game :D Its amazing when it will be finished can't wait to play full version :D I am going to buy I copy I think

Thanks, the game is actually already available, click here for the demo!  What I'm currently working on is an expansion that will add more cards and levels and will be free for everybody who's bought the game.

Speaking of new cards, here's the first card preview as promised:

Thanks much! He's actually quite a lot better on pencil and paper

Have you tried using a scanner or digital camera then?  I think you can get quite good results with this process:
 1. draw something on paper
 2. scan it, load it into a paint package that supports layers
 3. create another layer on top, reduce the alpha or contrast of the original layer
 4. paint over the picture on the top layer
 5. discard the original layer

Wow, this has been a great read and incredibly informative!  Thanks so much.  We are starting marketing, PR and the ilk for our game.  There are some great insights here and I suggest anyone who skips to the end to take the time when you have it and read through the entire thread.

I am going to start a devlog, when I do I will certainly link to this.  Good luck and congrats on the Richard Garfield write up. (Pretty sweet)

Thanks, I'm glad you've found my DevLog useful.  Something I haven't really talked about much is how making and releasing an indie game is an absolute emotional roller coaster - Richard Garfield's write up was definitely one of the high points for me!

I definitely recommend you write a DevLog, it doesn't take much time and it may generate a little buzz, lead to some useful comments and perhaps help you to reflect on what you're doing as well.  Send me a message when you start it!

edit: I've found your DevLog!

I'm very nearly content complete for the expansion now.  All of the new levels and cards are in and I'm pleased with them.  Almost all of the new art work is in.  It's probably going to take another week to polish and test it all of course, and after that I'll find out if my patch creation process really works!



I'll have some card previews up soon.

The difference between DirectX 8 and 9 is actually bigger than you might think because DirectX 9 was updated over a long period of time after it's first release - from 2002 to 2010 I think.  A lot of new features and bug fixes have come in during that time, so definitely do stick with the DirectX 9 SDK.

Having said this the basics are not that different, so if your book explains things well then by all means follow it as far as you can.  Use it in conjunction with the DirectX 9 SDK help so that you can catch when function parameters have changed.

My (8 year old) brother is doing the art, which probably isn't the best quality.

That looks pretty good for an 8 year old!  Can't wait to see what he can do in a few years time...

Animated gifs, so I'm linking to em:

http://i.imgur.com/PxiXG.gif

http://i.imgur.com/1vsqp.gif

Curious.  Is this going to be some kind of puzzle game?

I've spent most of the week working on new levels for the expansion, along with new baddies, story and humour to fill them.  For pretty much all of these I take the approach of designing (and implementing, to a point) more than I really need, then cutting back to just the best stuff.  You never know what's going to work until you try it!

The surprising part is that this is especially important for humour.  There really is no substitute for writing more material than you need, coming back in a few days time, showing it to other people etc and mercilously removing or rewriting anything that doesn't make you smile (I would love to hear about other people's writing processes!)

Oh, here's an early screenshot I used for the Screenshot Saturday thread.  It's from one of the new challenge levels, 'VR Lab':

Here's an early pic of one of the new levels from the expansion (codename 'Megamort') for my game The Trouble With Robots (DevLog).  The level is called 'VR Lab' and features procedurally generated waves of enemies, which keeps it fresh and challenging.

Just played for 5 minutes with my girlfriend and someone else (was it you?).  The game was easy to start and we didn't have any technical difficulties.  Gameplay is very basic but quite fun for a short time.  Obviously it could do with different weapons, power-ups etc (I think a speed powerup would be really good) and probably changing maps every few minutes.

The bigger issue is that you don't have enough players, if I'd turned up on my own there would have been nobody else there and I'd have left after 10 seconds.  I'm not sure what you can do to fix this, I guess you need to find a way to attract players together at particular times of day?

IGF submissions closed a few days ago with a whopping 589 submissions.  Having seen my entry on their site I decided to revise a few details so that everything fits together a bit better.  I'm looking forward to taking a look at some of the other entries over the weekend!

On the development side I've added a new challenge level to the expansion where you face random waves of enemies each time you play.  It turns out this design keeps you on your toes and is really fun.

Over the last few days I've been working on card designs for the expansion.  This has been much more difficult than I expected because I feel each one of them has to really add something interesting to the game - just throwing together a new combination of existing abilities doesn't do it for me.  The new designs also have to play well with the old cards and be balanced at a similar power level.  I've probably prototyped something like 20 different designs before cutting to the 8 I now have, which I'm really happy with.  They just need a bit more polish now. Another thing I've done recently is tuning the difficulty in a few places (medium difficulty and a couple of the demo levels are now slightly harder) in response to feedback, and I've give the trolls better stats since I've come to believe they were a bit weak.

[Richard Garfield wrote about my game]

A couple more things that happened over the last few weeks:

Richard Garfield wrote about my game!  I don't know how well known he is to your average gamer, but in the Magic: The Gathering world he's pretty famous as the creator of, well, Magic: The Gathering.  It looks like he enjoyed The Trouble With Robots, I got a bit of traffic from his modest blog and a shiny new quote to put on my web site!

The Trouble With Robots was part of the Get Games Sci-Fi weekend sale.  This was very simple to do at my end, I got an e-mail about it on Friday and replied saying basically 'yep, go ahead'.  They sold the game at 50% off RRP, and along with 31 other games the sale was promoted on their front page and other places.  I don't have any sales figures yet but I noticed a recommendation for the game on reddit and on Sunday it hit #10 on their 'top 10 PC games' list!

Lessons learned:

• Don't be afraid to approach famous people like Richard Garfield (where appropriate)
• Weekend sales work

A couple of early screenshots from the new levels:



I'm trying to mix things up a bit in the new levels to keep experienced players interested.  For example the the following screen is from a level that's only three waves long, which is also quite difficult so you'll need to adapt your strategy:



Also the new music is in, thanks to Matt Javanshir once again!  It looks like you can listen to it on his site (the last track is the new one).

Maybe read "Predictably Irrational" book? There are tons of research on the irrationality of decision making currently and they all seem to agree that it's all relative to the context in which the decision maker is.

I got this book on Audio CD and I have to say it was excellent.  One of the major points was that people anchor their prices based on what they have previously seen the same or similar products costing.  A clear example is the iPhone games market where people expect games to cost 99p because that's what all the other games cost, not because they're inherently only worth the same amount as 1/3 of a pint of beer!

Yesterday The Trouble With Robots finally launched on ArcadeTown.  I'm quite impressed with their reporting system and I'm really looking forward to comparing my sales on core stores vs casual portals. Incidentally, making a game that's somewhere between core/indie and casual is not a strategy I would recommend.  My audience seems to be a sort of mish-mash of indie gamers, CCG players, casual and family gamers which is great except that they don't really correspond to the traditional groupings - which unfortunately makes them harder to reach!