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cairnswm
31-03-2004, 05:07 AM
I have finally got down to writing a game that I plan to sell as Shareware. I have actually already set up my sales acount through BMT Micro and have spent about a year now looking into the Shareware market and what sort of goals would be considered reasonable. Anyone interested in this sort of thing should look at www.dexterity.com 's forums.

I have decided to start with a simple puzzle game about matching pictures on a grid. Very similar to Popcap games' "Noah's Ark".

The game is currently playable but I still need to add a lot before I can make it available for people to test. My expected Alpha Version release date will be the end of April. I expect to put it up for download at the end of May and hopefully in June I'll be able to get my first sales.

I have so far put in about 40 hours of work. I expect it will need about 200 hours of work to complete. That means about 100 hours per month from now on... Not sure how I will achieve that.

cairnswm
31-05-2004, 05:50 AM
Farmer Joe's Matching Yard version 1.03 is available for Download from my web site:

http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/download.asp?file=sales/matching.exe

I'd love some feedback on the game, gameplay etc. The web site still needs a lot of work.

I have now moved into a testing phase. Testing will continue until about June 15th after which I'll enable registration of the game.

Harry Hunt
31-05-2004, 07:19 AM
Hey, that's very nice!
Here are two things I noticed:

- The installer creates a desktop shortcut without asking (or maybe I missed the checkbox). Maybe you can change that.
- When the farm asks for two things that you can't give him because they're under a pile of other stuff, it should display a message like "DEADLOCKED!" or something.

apart from that it's very cool.

Paulius
31-05-2004, 09:27 AM
Have you bought fmod? 'Cause it's not free for commercial use. If not, I suggest you switch to playing sounds with mmsystem, witch is quite enough for such a game.

Ultra
31-05-2004, 05:19 PM
It's a pretty fun game. What will be the price for the full version?

WILL
31-05-2004, 10:07 PM
Have you bought fmod? 'Cause it's not free for commercial use. If not, I suggest you switch to playing sounds with mmsystem, witch is quite enough for such a game.
Just FYI: FMOD, like BASS has a reduced licence price tag on it per title or per site as shareware. But still costs you coin to sell. Thats more or less why I use the ModPlug API Oliver released(I have the converted headers and most recent DLL for it, but you'll have to write the playback code onto your sound output device ala DirectSound or OpenAL, etc) and am working on a open source playback library for MODs(Still in heavy development, not usable yet). The other option would be to find and use the Sillex ModPlayer Component that uses the ModPlug Sound System(API) which if I did not mention before is the actual code used in the ModPlug Player NOT IE Plug-in(npm32.dll, etc) that has been made into a Delphi component before.

Let me know if this is an issue as I'm sure I can give you a few extra options for MOD file playback.

cairnswm
01-06-2004, 08:09 PM
Version 1.4 uploaded to the site:

http://www.cairnsgames.co.za/download.asp?file=sales/matching.exe

I have converted all the sound calls to use OpenAL as well. From the OpenAL sites it looks like its completely free to use and was very easy to add into my program.

The Click Team installer doesn't give an option to ask about the desktop icon. Either I remove it or leave it in..... Currently I've left it in as I think my game will be played by casual players and the desktop icon is then to my benefit as they will see it more often. (If you don't like it please delete it from your desktop :) )

I've also had some feedback on very slow performance on older PCs. It all seems to be based on the PC's screen cards and I have spent some time lowering the screen memory requirements. Anyone with an 8MB card (and a screen with 1024x768 resolution) please test for me.

All my optimisations also lowered the install file from 1.1MB to 850KB.

Would using 256 color images save space in the screen card? I dont think it will as it would be conveted to whatever the screen buffer supports. Anyone know differently?