Messages

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Games / Re: My Game Immortal Defense on Sale for Anything You Want

« on: January 21, 2010, 03:09:39 am »

sale is over; if you're interested, it sold about 1200 copies, average price of $2.30 -- was a fun sale but i had to manually email everyone cause the auto reply was getting sent to their spam filter

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Games / My Game Immortal Defense on Sale for Anything You Want

« on: December 24, 2009, 08:50:44 pm »

My indie game, Immortal Defense, which is a story-based tower defense game, is on sale for whatever price you want to pay through PayPal (normal price $15), through January 1:

http://studioeres.com/games/content/immortal-defense-pay-what-you-want-sale

The idea of 'pay whatever you want' was taken from World of Goo, which had a similar sale a few months ago.

I figured some of those who liked Aquaria might also like this game, since both are story-based. Trivia: Derek (of Aquaria fame) liked the game but didn't like the portrait art, so he actually helped us redraw some of the portraits for the game awhile back, although I haven't yet made an update to the game which includes his portrait improvements (although I plan to eventually!).

The game is Windows only currently, unfortunately.

Shine,

3

Support / Re: How to Download the Latest Version: 1.1.1

« on: December 27, 2008, 02:47:59 pm »

Just a note for those who dislike having to redownload the entire game -- creating an auto-patching system isn't a trivial thing (a friend of mine once spent two months on it), and especially for an independent developer that's a lot of time. Considering how fast download speeds are nowadays, re-downloading 200mb takes like 5 minutes on broadband, which is a lot better than like two months of work for an auto-patcher. Those things make sense when you have millions of people downloading it, because all the 5 minutes in sum are greater than the time it'd take to code an auto-patching system, but for indie games they can be excessive.

As for Plimus not responding, I personally wouldn't trust customer support to those e-commerce service providers (I use BMT-Micro, but they're largely the same). Personally I think handling responses manually is probably a better idea, especially because they tend not to reply if the information is incomplete (which can annoy people who can't figure out what they need to send and don't know what they did wrong), although you have to handle more requests than I did so it's a bigger problem (I only had to handle about 200-300 when I released v1.1 of my game).

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Modding / Re: Opening up default Aquaria adventure in Editor / making world easier

« on: October 25, 2008, 07:23:02 am »

I don't think it's just about dexterity, it's also about frustration level. Some people get easily frustrated, others don't, and I think that's the big difference between hardcore and casual gamers -- the casual ones are the ones who get easily frustrated, which prevents them from enjoying hardcore games, which kind of rely on frustration (dying, learning, and trying again) as a game mechanic.

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General / Re: Aquaria on STEAM?

« on: October 22, 2008, 12:16:39 am »

Hmm, that's interesting, and seems in line with what I've heard about their selection process. I guess I'll have to try to improve the popularity of my game first before asking them (the ID forums are only 1/10th the size of this one in terms of total posts for instance).

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Modding / Re: Opening up default Aquaria adventure in Editor / making world easier

« on: October 22, 2008, 12:13:39 am »

I know this is late, but I agree that just reducing damage taken and increasing damage inflicted and increasing ingredient drops and healing power wouldn't make the game casual. If I were to recommend strategies for making the game casual, here are a few suggestions:

- Fewer enemies. Just removing a few here and there so that the world is less populated with them. Replace them with more friendly creatures which don't harm you, but just swim around and add to the atmosphere of the game.

- Hints for the bosses. Perhaps when the player dies, a hint on how to kill the boss would appear. These hints could get gradually more specific. Another possibility is to reduce the HP of the bosses each time the player tries and fails to kill it. After enough tries, its HP might be only half or a third of what it would be normally.

I think those two alone would do it. You wouldn't need to tweak anything numerically, and it'd make the game much more casual-friendly.

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Modding / Re: Big Energy-Form Battle

« on: October 21, 2008, 11:34:14 pm »

This is a nice idea, I'll try it soon.

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General / Re: Aquaria on STEAM?

« on: October 21, 2008, 11:09:29 pm »

I was also one of those people who was very wary of Vista until I actually tried it, and am now in the "meh, it works" camp. Although there are a few games which worked on XP which do not work on Vista which I'm a bit upset about, but that isn't too major of an issue.

Also Alec, if you have any advice on getting onto Steam, or even want to mention my game to them, I'd be grateful! I haven't contacted them myself yet except that I sent an email asking about more information on getting a game onto Steam, but I sent that about a year ago and they never replied, so maybe it's time to send them another email.

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General / Re: Aquaria OST on you tube

« on: October 09, 2008, 05:49:44 am »

I like this idea, I might even put up my own game's soundtrack on YouTube. Aquaria has a great soundtrack! Does v1.1 have any new music?

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General / Re: Aquaria on STEAM?

« on: October 09, 2008, 05:45:01 am »

Glad to see you're making progress getting it on there!

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Games / Re: Tips for starting an indie development team?

« on: April 14, 2008, 03:43:46 pm »

I second the "never do a RPG as your first game" thing. They're the hardest genres of game to do. I know from experience: in 1997 I started work on a RPG of my own. I never finished it. In 1999 I started work on a different RPG. I never finished it. And so on. Finally, in 2005, I decided to try a small shooter. I finished it. Then I made and finished a tower defense game. You really can't finish a RPG on your own unless you put in tens of thousands of hours of work (which by comparison is probably more time than you spent in high school over the course of four years). Whereas you can complete other genres relatively easily and you'd learn from them the skills you need to one day make larger games.

As for finding teams, I suggest volunteering to help others on their games -- like an apprenticeship. That way you can learn from someone who's actually doing it, and make friends among people who make games. I also recommend creating mods (perhaps mods of Aquaria), they're much easier than making a game from scratch and can teach you a lot about how to make a good game (especially about how to design good levels).

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General / Re: What Are Your Sales Expectations for this Game?

« on: December 23, 2007, 08:41:53 am »

I think they should make "I'm O.K. Again -- The Return".

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General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 23, 2007, 08:39:37 am »

It might not be enough to cover the development costs as they are now for mainstream games, but it'd probably be enough to cover development costs for low budget games. For instance, Desktop Tower Defense (a flash game) reportedly made over 100,000$ through ads, so much that the author quit his job to begin to make flash games full time. 100k wouldn't cover the development costs for a game like Final Fantasy 13, but it'd cover the development costs for a game like Aquaria.

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General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 19, 2007, 10:31:30 am »

I wasn't thinking of advertising in the *middle* of a game -- I think when a game is first loading up (and only then) is a good time and wouldn't be too obstructive.

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General / Re: Aquaria hit the P2P

« on: December 18, 2007, 02:10:35 am »

I don't really care about kids trading games in school, what bothers me is adults with jobs who could easily afford it pirate a game and then use the extra money to buy some extra beer or potato chips or something instead, and then say that piracy doesn't hurt games and that the reason PC game sales are down to about a third of what they were before the world wide web existed has nothing to do with piracy.

I think the long-term answer to piracy though is to make games free and make money through advertising. A lot of popular free Flash games make hundreds of thousands of dollars for their creators through advertising. I just hope Flash improves enough that games like Aquaria will one day be possible to make in it.