Originally posted by LordKronos: PH. Read the tone or Aaron’s message again, then read the tone of your message. His (sarcastic) message sounds like whining and complaining to me. Your message (to me) sounds more like a suggestion, that along with the fact that you gave me constructive feedback. Not sure though why you felt it so necessary to mention what bugs you found when you already notified me of them directly.
Oh, I missed Aaron’s post…sorry.
The reason I mentioned the bugs, was just to point out that I was trying to be helpful and not just posting a complaint about the “annoying thing”. No big deal.
And I wish you good luck with selling your game ( and you too Optimizer ).
[This message has been edited by PH (edited 08-17-2002).]
Originally posted by Optimizer:
[b] Well, the game does not change the mouse speed, it uses the same speed as you have in Windows. Try to disable mouse acceleration it helps a lot. Anyway I’ll change paddle movement in the next version.
About joypad. The problem is I do not use DirectX at all and I am not sure if Windows supports it without DirectX.[/b]
My problem is not that you ask the user to buy the game. It would be silly to release a demo that didn’t tell the user how to purchase the full version. My problem is the frequency with which you ask. Why the hell would I want to buy the game after playing only the first training level? Or the second? Or the third? Or the… I think you get the idea. If I want to buy a game, I’ll buy it after I finish the demo.
If you want to use the OpenGL forums for free advertising, you’d better be ready for some free criticism.
Aaron, is it really your job to tell Kronos how to sell his game? You could have told him that you thought he was pushing to buy the game to much without the sarchasm.
Kronos, you could have done without the sarchasm in your first post too.
First, I’m not going to try and debate with you about the nag screens. Its a marketing issue, and my research has indicated that it actually helps.
you’d better be ready for some free criticism.
There is a difference between criticizing and what you posted. Your sarcastic “criticism” screems “I’m a prick”.
And “Miko” is not a name.
Really? Now that is a serious problem. Perhaps you should try telling that to the thousands of people who actually are named Miko. And guess what…Miko is also a not-uncommon name for a cat. Go figure.
Originally posted by WhatEver: Kronos, you could have done without the sarchasm in your first post too.
Sarcasm? Perhaps you read the meaning of my post wrong. I wanted to let some people here know about the game for a while, but in the spirit of not starting an “off-topic” thread and getting pounced on, I decided against doing so. However, now that one was already started, I thought there was little harm in mentioning it here. If I were actually trying to jump on Optimizer for starting the thread, I would have done much worse.
Originally posted by LordKronos: …Its a marketing issue, and my research has indicated that it actually helps.
The choice is yours of course but personally I think it will have the opposite effect. Take the shareware version of DOOM for example ( and optimizers approach ), an endscreen with ordering details. My point is, if the game is good enough that people actually want more, they’ll buy it.
Also, on your website, “buy now” signs are all over the place - annoying your potential customers won’t help ( they’ll know where to find the ordering form if they came to buy the game ).
I just think the “standard” approach to selling shareware will be more effective.
[This message has been edited by PH (edited 08-18-2002).]
I guess I misunderstood the tone of your post, but it wasn’t the tone that bothered me.
It annoys me that a single post like this is considered spam to some people. Spamming is when somone posts somtehing persistantly. Optimizer was not spamming. What annoys me even more is that you considered this spam and then you did it yourself.
Kronos, you did not spam, and Optimizer did not spam. Calling someone a spammer is a huge accusation and should only be used when you’re sure it’s spam.
Don’t get me wrong Kronos, I have nothing against you, I’m just stating my thoughts.
Originally posted by WhatEver: It annoys me that a single post like this is considered spam to some people. Spamming is when somone posts somtehing persistantly.
Well, I guess that’s debatable. Some people think of it that way, others consider it something that was not asked for. In the case of newsgroups/forum, I think a common meaning of “spam” is a thread that does not properly fall under the name of that group/forum. In this case “OpenGL coding: advanced”. I don’t particularly have a problem with these kinds of posts (as long as they don’t happen too often and clutter up the place), but I was afraid others around here would, hence the reason I was apprehensive about posting earlier. Sorry for the confusion.
>> LordKronos
I’ve published a similar game a few month ago… for free and with source… because I think it’s impossible to earn money with such a game
At the moment I also develop a game called ‘Blibs’ which is also similar to yours.
(but this time its also commercial)
Originally posted by AblazeSpace: >> LordKronos
I’ve published a similar game a few month ago… for free and with source… because I think it’s impossible to earn money with such a game
Far from it. There is quite a misconception about this, but the fact is that there is a lot of money available in puzzle games, its a pretty big market for shareware developers. The problem is that programming the game isn’t even half the work. There is a lot to be done in marketing it effectively, which is where even most great developers fail miserably (and I’m determined not to). It’s too bad you didn’t have much success with Convey. I kinda liked the game.
Quoting WhatEver: Aaron, is it really your job to tell Kronos how to sell his game? You could have told him that you thought he was pushing to buy the game to much without the sarchasm.
Yes, it is my job to tell Kronos how to sell his game. And sarchasm[sic] is my middle name, but I spell it without the “h”.
[This message has been edited by Aaron (edited 08-18-2002).]
Originally posted by LordKronos Some of them dont have more than a Riva 128. Let’s see you do all of your flashy graphics on one of those. I mean seriously, pretty graphics for the sake of pretty graphics is just silly, especially when in doing so you alienate people with hardware more than 6 months old.
This is an opengl forum - pretty graphics is pretty much all ‘we’ care about…if you don’t want a critique of your graphical techniques, then it’s totally inappropriate to advertise your app here.
Just my inevitable negative comment.
[This message has been edited by knackered (edited 08-19-2002).]
did you design those levels yourself or do you have some kind of generator?
Very clever positioning of objects in some cases.
Just a few things.
Although I like the effect of no mipmaps, it is better to use them.
I had no sound.
It was opening netscape all the time. Stop it please. Nothing is more annoying than having one program launch another without a warning.
Just put in some shadows, and a better camera.
I give it a 7 on 10
PS: how do you unlock the door for the castle on level 5?
V-man:
I had a more detailed response, but I forgot to enter my username, and the browser erased my whole response when I went back so here is a quick summary
The levels were made by hand. Random generation wouldn’t be very good for something like this. Some of the levels take hours of thought and looking at from different approaches to make sure there are no “trivial” solutions.
About the mipmaps, there were reasons I removed them, mostly to deal with old hardware. I would like to add them back, but its not a priority.
About the sound, I will email you later about this and see if we can figure out what it is.
About opening netscape, that was because you chose Buy Now from the sales screen. I am changing this so that Keep Playing is the default (so there are fewer accidents).
Shadows arent a priority, I’m a lot more concerned with gameplay. I wont be bothering with them unless I get a deal to port this to a console, which I will be looking into later this year.
I would be curious what you didnt like with the camera. However, I tried many camera systems, and the simplest one seemed to work best (it didn’t make some people sick like most 3D games do).
I would like to think the game is better than “7 on 10” when you take gameplay and originality into consideration, but I know the graphics dont quite cut it around here, so OK.
PS: Castle on level 5? Was that question intended for Optimizer?
I completed the demo ( it’s really quite addicting ) but I did find it difficult to see some of the different hights due to the lack of shadows. I think it would improve gameplay if you added some lightmap shadows ( this should work on old hardware ). Mipmaps would be great too, this can’t take that long to add ( at least as a quick solution, you could use auto-generated mipmaps on hardware with the appropriate extension - this is just one or two lines of code to add ).
I too had a few problems with the camera. I would like to see a camera mode that allows you to drag the screen ( hold down shift key and use arrow keys ? ).
Please leave this thread. We mixed two games and I do not understand which questions intended for me and which for you. If you’d like to hear opinions about your game please start new thread. Thanks.
.
so here is a quick summary