I am considering describing my game as "Real time Risk© in space" in marketing materials.

The intent is a shortcut to give people an immediate idea of the gameplay mechanics. From what I understand, non-disparaging comparisons to other brands is acceptable, at least in the US. But of course, the devil is in the details.


Is this likely to land me in legal trouble?

Can't honestly say I understand Greenlight. I once put an 8bit platformer on there and got shit about it not being in HD, not running at 60fps and not being widescreen.... Essentially they were complaining about an 8bit game looking like an 8bit game.

Not to go off-topic (though a bump is a bump), but this is a *major* peeve of mine. 60fps *is* looking like an 8bit game, most all of them were. The fact that developers then could achieve that with a sub 2mhz machine, and "developers" now are either too lazy or unable to do that with literally millions of times the computing power, just boggles my mind. Any shit you got was probably an understatement.

So what is the answer? What did you do that you attribute getting greenlit to?

Interesting idea!

Much of the value of an unfinished project is dependent on how much work is required to finish it. How is a bidder to estimate this, without access to the code base? If a project is abandoned, then chances are there is a reason for it. It might be that the creator is burned out, or the code might be an unmaintainable, sphaghetti nightmare.

Will playable builds be made available?

These are valid points.

What about releasing on itch.io, since I think the revenue potential there is minimal anyway(?), and use whatever few people who buy it there as feedback/beta testers. While at the same time submitting the game to steam greenlight.

Does that sound like a reasonable plan? Or do I really need to deal with marketing first?

So...

I am *absolutely* burnt out on developing my game. I have, more or less, limped across the finish line, by working on it an hour here, an hour there.

And here's the thing: I have done literally *nothing* to market it. Nobody knows about it. I hate the thought of marketing, even thinking about it makes me want to throw up a little.

So my question is this: is there any reason not to release the game now, to itch.io and/or wherever, and submit it to Steam, and then worry about marketing later (if ever)? Or, would releasing now, with 0 marketing, be actively harmful, and somehow worse than waiting, doing a "marketing campaign" ( ), then at some point in the future, actually releasing it.

Thanks! I was so confused, that clears up so much!

Ok. I guess I am supposed to make a bundle then?

I am totally new to mac programming and macs in general.

This is driving me fucking insane. I'm trying to add an icon to a console app.

This didn't work:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/recipes/xcode_help-image_catalog-1.0/chapters/AddingIconSets2.html

I tried messing around with .icns files, and they did nothing either.

Hello,

I'm looking for someone to provide some vector animations for my game, PlanNet. Initially, I think I will need 3 animations, but I may need up to 5.

Stylistically, they need to match the rest of the game. Beyond that, I will leave that area up to you.

The images below shows what needs to be replaced. From the first image, I know I will need animation for the leftmost icon (Swords, clashing together), and the rightmost icon (Factory with smoke from smokestacks). I will attempt to render the middle two myself. From the second, I want an animated dove flying.

I want these animations to be short (< 1 second), with low fps (12 or less).

If interested, get back to me with your rate and some examples of your work.  

-Tweak the "weak player" threshold so that attacking someone 30-40 power levels below you isn't considered betrayal. It just didn't seem to fit. I didn't feel weak. I was probably the third strongest player in the game at that point.

The reason I implemented the alliance system is to facilitate come-from-behind victories. So that is why the threshold is high, if your power is in the 60-70 range it can be hard to come back, if you are busy fighting other lesser-powered nations. Whereas, the higher that threshold is, the more opportunities you have to win as the underdog.

If I click on something and drag the mouse, I expect it to react as if I clicked and dragged. It seemed like it may be that I tried to attack something before I had enough pulses to, so the "drag" didn't work and it just acted as a single click instead. If I remember right, I was selecting multiple planets to send pulses to the front, so the original planet that was in the string got removed from the path when the attack failed.

So, if your planets are numbered and the target is T, it was something like
1----2----3----T
And you selected 1-3, targeted T, and 3 didn't have enough pulses to attack?

I hope more people try out your game. It's really good, but I think it initially comes across as overly complicated even though it's pretty easy to play.

Do you think that perception would improve if all the numbers on the bottom were hidden, and only enabled with an "advanced mode" setting?

Thanks Quicksand for the very detailed feedback! If anyone else wants to try, the link on the first post is always up to date.

-The tutorial is pretty decent. The only thing I didn't like was that sometimes I knew what I was going to be asked to do and it wouldn't let me until I was told. It would be nice if it realized that I was trying to attack a planet and just went on to the next step, for example.

The problem is that it is sometimes very easy to accidentally skip, especially when the mouse is already by the planet because of the last segment, so I went out of my way to prevent that. Hrm..

-At one point, the tutorial says something about "Blandons". It just comes out of nowhere, and without knowing the story of the game it seems completely random and weird.

Inside joke, I probably need to get rid of it.

-The icons at the bottom kind of all blend together because they're so close to one another. It looks like there's some space on the right too, so I'm not sure why things aren't more spread out.

The space on the right is reserved for the AI/Continue/Resign buttons

-Those icons also don't look like much because they're covered by numbers. When it said "the sword icons", all I saw was weird bug things, with two wings sticking out above the numbers.

I was worried about that. I don't know what I can do, apart from finding a really good icon designer who can work around the limitation of the numbers obscuring the center.

-I'm not sure what I think of the lack of clarity. What I mean is that some planets are considered "bigger" than others, but it's not clear how much size affects things. It's also unclear how much of a defense bonus planets get, or if it is affected by anything.

Planets produce pulses at a rate proportional to their 2D area. Defenders have an advantage over attackers at a ratio of 6:5. It seemed a bit much to tell players this, I was hoping they would get a feel for these factors through play. You think it might be a good idea to explicitly state this?

-When there are multiple colors present, it's hard to tell which planets are mine. They all have a blue glow around them (atmosphere?) while the actual player colors are more subtle. I feel like it'd be better if the primary glow was the player color.

I'm a bit surprised you were having this problem. I've gotten this complaint before, but I thought I solved it by tinting the planet's surface with it's color, as well as the surrounding space. What kind of display are you using? The blue glow signifies that a player is weak, not atmosphere (explained below).

-Attacking someone much weaker counts as betrayal? I'm not allied with the little, wimpy nations, so why is that betrayal?

Ok, so I've been having a *huge* problem communicating this concept, you are in good company!!! Here's the deal: When you're power (the sword/bug icon to the far left) falls below a certain level for more than a few seconds, you are considered "weak". You then get the blue glow, all your associated numbers turn blue, the spacey "wubwubwubwub..." sound plays and your planets flicker. When you are in the weak state, you are implicitly allied with all the other weak players. If you attack another weak player, it triggers the "Traitor!" effect and all the weak players will consider you an enemy for 15 seconds. If your power then climbs above a higher threshold, it plays the "Rowwwrrrrr" sound, your planets glow, the blue glow fades away, and you aren't allied with anyone.

To me, it seems simple enough, but I invented it, and I'm used to it. NOBODY ELSE gets it. NO ONE. I have to explain it in person, every time.I'm going to add a dove icon on top of all the weak planets, to try to further reinforce this signal. But what else can I do???

-It's very easy to click on a planet to change the direction of its pulses and have it just cancel the pulse-transmission instead. I think that got a few of my planets captured.

If you continue playing, let me know if you still have this problem, it seems to be a newbie-only issue.

I get a Dropbox page that says "Link not found" when I click your download link.

Weird, some kind of Dropbox screwup, but it works now.  I had to copy, delete, and copy back.

Sorry! Please download again.

That was the ANGLE build, which doesn't work on all configurations. This is the OpenGl build, which I've never seen fail, except on very old PCs (like mine).

Any feedback then on why you aren't interested?

This game was written in C++ using OpenGL 2.0 and SDL. It took me... too long.

There is already a tutorial, so I won't explain anything. Check it out, and let me know what you think!

Download (Windows only):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/399pm44q13oiw45/PlanNet.rar?dl=0


Video:

Bejeweled/Candy Crush, Angry Birds, and Flappy Bird, no question.

your game is overrated

yeah, you

Making its true merit deep into the negative.

I submitted after seeing this thread. Fortunately I'll be in the UK during the time of the event. Hopefully the response is better than Casual Connect, who didn't even deign to send a blow-off e-mail.

I've been fighting the problem of resolution independent fonts for a while now. Messing with different versions of the font optimized for different ranges of resolutions. It's been a huge pain in the ass. I just had an idea. Why not just use trilinear filtering?

So easy, and it works wonderfully! Now, the same bitmap font that looks crisp at 1080p, is perfectly legible at 640x480. I didn't realize it, but the main reason that 1080p looked good was the fonts. Now, 640x480 looks fine, maybe 70% as good as 1080p. This opens up a whole new market of Eastern Eurpoean and South American gamers stuck with  geforce 6200s to buy download my game!