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wagenheimer
21-03-2007, 01:24 PM
Abra Academy History

Me (Programmer), and a friend mine (Artist), did have done a scratch of a "Find Hidden Objects" game, almost fully completed, built in Delphi 2006 using the Asphyre Engine (Direct3D), and in setember/06, we began the process of sending the game to portals to get the game publicated. At the end, we done a exclusive distribuition contract with the BigFishGames, where BigFish buyed all the rights over our game, and then we will be must almost rebuild all the game, but now, with the BigFish support in the Game Design Area, QA and a lot of other things. In this change, we made a decission to use a engine that will be also MAC compatible, in the search for this engine, i did found the Phoenix Engine by Andreaz, that was only in the begining, but that was looking very mas que parecia muito promising, and I decided to bet in it. During the process, Andreaz did helped me a lot, developing a lot of resources in engine which I needed to make the game, I can cite between them, the possibility to use Different Sizes of Retangular Patterns (what it was really essential so that the game could exist), improvements in the Particle Engine, a Path Engine that helped me a lot and saved me of a lot of work, a lot of improvements onGui Engine, and a lot of other little things. In the begining, i was using Lazarus, but because a lot of bugs of Lazarus IDE, and the lack of a good Refactoring and Debug, i have changed all to Turbo Delphi, but keeping the FreePascal Compatibility.

In the end, the complete engines list of the game was!

- Powered by Phoenix Engine (By Andreaz), Powered by GLFW (Thanks LoneSock for the Help with changes in the DLL), Powered by OpenGl.
- Powered by OPENAL Sound Engine.
- Powered by Turbo Delphi 2006, but fully FreePascal Compatible.

http://upload7.postimage.org/310776/AbraMain.jpg (http://upload7.postimage.org/310776/photo_hosting.html)

http://upload7.postimage.org/310565/abra_academy_sc2.jpg (http://upload7.postimage.org/310565/photo_hosting.html)

http://upload7.postimage.org/310580/abra_academy_sc4.jpg (http://upload7.postimage.org/310580/photo_hosting.html)


After a lot o hard work, six months later the game was completed and ready to lunch, and was published by BigFishGames. From four days now, it is the most downloaded game on the BigFish Portal. =)

http://www.bigfishgames.com/downloads/abraacademy/index.html

Once again, thanks a lot Andreaz for all the work on the engine and all help and support that you did give me!
Traveler
21-03-2007, 01:34 PM
I've upgraded your post to a news item.

I'm also going to be trying your game out later today, when I get home.

Can you tell us how you got to BigFishGames? I'm also interested to know why they bought all rights to your game and if that's policy or by choice.
WILL
21-03-2007, 02:58 PM
Hope you don't mind all the questions, but I've got some too. :)

Any plans to release other versions of Abra Academy or any other titles for BigFishGames?

Any plans for Mac development in the near future using FPC/Lazarus?

And would you be willing to come back in 3-6 months time and let us know about your success(es) developing commercially?


Psst, you don't have to leave the community for that time, just let us know how you're doing in it. ;)
wagenheimer
21-03-2007, 03:33 PM
-> Can you tell us how you got to BigFishGames? I'm also interested to know why they bought all rights to your game and if that's policy or by choice.

Firsts, BigFish Published our first game (Druids Battle of Magic), we simple send the game to them for avaliation (http://www.bigfishgames.com/affiliates/developer.html), they liked and published our game with a non exclusive contract. When we finished the first version of Abra Academy, we did send to them, and so they had offered the Exclusive contract, and have adquired de Full Rights from us. I think that is not the default policy, but it was in our case.


- > Any plans to release other versions of Abra Academy or any other titles for BigFishGames?

http://upload7.postimage.org/312514/Druids.jpg (http://upload7.postimage.org/312514/photo_hosting.html)

Some time ago, about 1 year, we have already released Druids - Battle of Magic, all by ourselves (in our site www.brutomemo.com), and by BigFishGames, Reflexive, Trymedia and in some others games portals. (No Exclusive Contract). It was made using Asphyre Engine (Direct3D) and Delphi 2006.

http://www.bigfishgames.com/downloads/druidsbattleofmagi/index.html

We hope that BigFishGame ask us to do a sequel for AbraAcademy, because all the rights of Abra now belongs to they and so the only way to make a sequence is through them! We loved to work with them, and really hope that this of making a sequel could happen. It it did not happens, we have some others projects in mind, that we will try to release through BigFishGames and anothers portals that to show interest in our project.

- >Any plans for Mac development in the near future using FPC/Lazarus?
Yes, we are planing to make the conversion of Abra Academy to Mac as soon as possible. Somebody here have some experienci with this?... All my game engine is Lazarus compatible, and i believe that all that i did use in the game also are, with versions to Mac (FreePascal, GLFW) everithing looks to have Mac Version, so i hope begin the conversion very soon.
Traveler
22-03-2007, 12:48 PM
Thanks for the info.

I've tried your game for a spin last night and I must say, its very nice!
Although it is not really my type of game, the gameplay is easy and the levels are nicely made, with excellent graphics.
Sometimes the objects are quite difficult to find though (yellow duck on top of a yellow background), up to the point where I give up and open the cage to release a faerie.

Anyway, good luck on your next game!

PS

I noticed one minor spelling error. Die should be Dice.
Mirage
22-03-2007, 03:28 PM
Wow, first in BigFish's top! Congrats, wagenheimer!
Personally I don't like exclusive contracts but it's me. :P
Good job!
WILL
22-03-2007, 03:45 PM
Well I think that if they didn't want to try to make an series out of it, they would not have pushed for exclusive rights to the game.

Because it was just released it would need a trail period to see how well it will do.
Traveler
22-03-2007, 04:12 PM
I'm not completely familiar with the details, but somehow the idea of giving someone else the rights to a game you designed/created yourself doesn't sound very good. I wonder what is so beneficial to agree to such a contract.
savage
22-03-2007, 04:51 PM
Well theoreticaly they should pay you extra for full rights. That, however, could mean they could get another development company to port the game idea to say the XBox or some other platform without having to pay the original developers anything. At least that's my take on it, though I am not legal eagle.
wagenheimer
22-03-2007, 07:59 PM
Hi Everyone!

Some good news, they said the game is going well, and asked us to start the work on a sequel! =)

Thanks everyone for the comments and support! =)
WILL
22-03-2007, 08:23 PM
Great job guys! ;) Congrats!

Be sure to more news back our way about the sequel. And of course the community here is always available to help you out whenever possible. :)
Huehnerschaender
23-03-2007, 08:21 AM
Hi Wagenheimer!

I remember your Druids game and the questions we discussed on Afterwarp forums. I am glad to hear you managed to complete a second game and release it commercial. Wow! Gratulations on this!

The game itself looks very nice! Your artist seems to be a very skilled one!

Anyway:
I would really like to know how this contracts you made with bigfish look like... I can't imagine how much such a game is worth to them. If they buy the complete rights of a game and you are still the developer with months of work, how much profit is there for a developer?
Of course I understand that you cannot post an amount of cash or the content of your contract here, but I am very curious how this things look like...

Greetings,
Dirk
Luuk van Venrooij
23-03-2007, 10:15 AM
He wagenheimer,

Just checked it out :). Not my type of game either but the look and feel of it are just great. Also the sounds are very nice:). Goodluck with the sequal:).

Grz

Luuk
wodzu
29-03-2007, 01:15 PM
Wow I just played in a demo of that game. Its really really nice :) I am also very happy that you made to get it commercial!

Two small notes. The standard mouse cursor doesn't look to well or maybe my low-end intel video integrated card have problems with displaying it?;)
Also a progress bar during loading of title screen would be helpfull for those who have slow machines. Anyway, very good job and music is awesome:)

Regards,

Wodzu
wagenheimer
04-04-2007, 12:18 PM
Somebody here have some experience in FPC on MAC???

I Will need to convert to MAC! But i do not have a MAC and have a Lot of Questions!

1 - FPC will create Universal Binnary Mac Executables?
2 - I do use GLFW, FreeImage... Mac do not use DLL´s, how it will use this components?

Somebody with some experience would like to chat (MSN/ICQ/SKYPE)?

Thanks
savage
04-04-2007, 01:08 PM
Drop me an ICQ message and we can chat.
I did some work getting JEDI-SDL working on MacOS X. You can read up about it here -
http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13163
and
http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=13138

If you really want to maintain only one codebase and deploy on multiple platforms, I really would suggest looking into JEDI-SDL, especially of you are using OpenGL.