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[paperdragongames]

Hi all,

I've been frequenting the iDevGames mac development community for the past year, but I'm new around here.

I posted a link in your "games you'd like to see reviewed" thread, but I thought I'd make an announcement here to get some feedback from your community.

The game is called Constellation and it took 2nd place in the uDevGames mac game development contest earlier this year.   Constellation is an original strategy game for the computer designed to have the feel of a board game.  Fans of the game have compared it to Risk, Othello, Go and Minesweeper. 

You can download it for mac or pc from my website at www.paperdragongames.com

I hope you enjoy it, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

-Matt

Here are some screenshots:

[ortoslon]

I think that I'll like this, but I can't say much because I've only played several times and haven't won once. My favorite board game is backgammon, Constellation is very different (fixed board & luck during the game VS random board & deterministic combat).

Will you add online multiplayer mode to the paid version?

[Loren Schmidt]

This looks promising- I'll post my impressions as soon as I've played a bit.

[paperdragongames]

Thanks for trying guys.  I do plan to add online multiplayer if this initial release is successful.  It works great multiplayer on the same computer.

I wanted to give people a heads up that I received this last night from my e-commerce provider:

"Unfortunately, and not by our choice, our primary payment gateway provider has temporarily suspended our ability to process real-time transactions for the next 3-5 days while a review is performed regarding one of our clients. For legal reasons, I am not able to comment further on the client under investigation.

While this review takes place, we are still collecting all information for each transaction submitted via our order forms, and they are being placed in a queue which will be processed as soon as our primary service has been restored. We apologize for this inconvenience, and please know we are doing everything in our power to accelerate the process.

If you do have an alternative e-commerce you can use for this short period of time, please feel free to do so, and we will be keeping our entire client base aware of our progress with updates as we work with our payment gateway providers to restore service as soon as possible."

Yikes.  This is not what I needed less than a week after releasing my game.  I have no alternative e-commerce sites at the moment, but its looking like I should.

If anyone trys to order the full version, be aware that your order may be held up for a few days.  In the meantime please download and enjoy the demo.

-Cheers,  Matt

[Loren Schmidt]

I'm sorry to hear about the difficulties with your payment service, what awful timing!

I've played the game a bit, and I'm pleased to say that my initial good impression proved accurate. The core rules are simple and have enough depth to be interesting. There's a fair amount of interesting decision making to be done every move. The game reminds me a bit of nine men's morris, did that influence you at all?

The presentation is pretty nice as well. I'm used to BrettspielWelt's terrible UI, so it's nice to play a digital board game with a clean, well-planned interface for a change. The one recommendation I might make is that rollover effects (a simple effect + a sound) might make playing more tactile.

Thanks for posting, here, this is a pretty neat, well executed idea.

[paperdragongames]

Glad you enjoy the game Sparky.   Interesting thought for rollovers, you are the first person to suggest that.  I don't think I'd want sound there though, but a highlight might be nice.  I have heard of Nine Men's Morris, but never played it.  I just looked up the rules.  It looks fun.  I'll have to try it sometime.  My strongest inspiration was actually an obscure Apple II game called Fortress that I had as a kid.  If anyone is curious about my design/development process for the game, you can read my uDev contest postmortem here:

http://www.idevgames.com/postmortems/constellation

Cheers,

-Matt

[Kunal]

Played a couple of rounds and it seems like good fun so far.

One minor thing - One of the sound effects is a lot like the alert Avast antivirus  gives when a virus is found , so you might want to change that.

[paperdragongames]

One minor thing - One of the sound effects is a lot like the alert Avast antivirus  gives when a virus is found , so you might want to change that.

Interesting.  I was pleased with that sound.  I spent awhile trying to find an siege alert that sounded like a warning siren, but didn't get too annoying.  Is Avast a common antivirus software?  I've never heard of it.  I'm a mac guy though so I'm not all that familiar with them.

In other news, my e-commerce provider is back up and running with their real time credit card processing so no more transaction delays.

Also, I have redesigned my website(www.paperdragongames.com) with a blog style.  I plan on chronicling my successes and failures as I try to market Constellation, create other games, and find my way through the world of indie game development.   Maybe some of my experiences will be helpful to people here.