Crashblock

[jasonf]

Since the PGD competition, I've been working hard on Crashblock, fixing bugs and taking some of the suggestions I'd received over the competition period and acting on them.

As part of the changes, I've been working on Re-vamping the menu system..


http://upload3.postimage.org/67179/mainmenu.jpg (http://upload3.postimage.org/67179/photo_hosting.html)

http://upload3.postimage.org/67188/settingsmenu.jpg (http://upload3.postimage.org/67188/photo_hosting.html)

http://upload3.postimage.org/67201/startlevel.jpg (http://upload3.postimage.org/67201/photo_hosting.html)

I've also been working feverishly on a site for it
http://www.crashblock.com/test It's not finished yet so be nice :-)
Please bear in mind that the current site is not for public release. It will be set to public as soon as I've got at least a Windows version for download.

As always, Comments are more than welcome.

[Huehnerschaender]

Very cool!

I like the site very much. Also the high amount of merchandising product amazed me...

All in all it looks very professional and polished! Great job!

[jasonf]

Cheers matey :D

The shop does deliver world wide, in fact I think they're based in Germany.

I don't think I receive any profit from the merchandise as I've not specified a commission on any of the items.
I've tried to keep them as cheap as possible and I can attest to the quality of the items. One guy in my office at work is proudly wearing a Crashblock tee-shirt :D

I'm glad you like the site. Many hours were spent fighting with CSS to get it working. There's a working forum too.

the on-line ordering doesn't work yet and there's not much to download apart from a PDF instruction manual. This will all change very shortly.

[jdarling]

So, Jason, whats the PGD discounted price going to be :)???


On the serious side, site looks good but the speed is a bit slow. The screen shots section needs some work (the blue borders are just distracting) and maybe a face lift to fit the home page. Integrate the order page into the current template, right now it just doesn't fit. Support and Contact obviously need to be built out. Overall though, a good start.

Have you started to think about how your going to push out the marketing and get attention? What about SEO and cross linking? Finally, whats your future strategy to keep players coming back?

If you want some help on those sides of the world drop me an IM and I'll see what I can do within our company. Can't make any promises, but I can say that I will try :).

[jasonf]

PGD Discounted price eh? I'm guessing that's most of my client base :lol:;)

The blue borders along with the next and previous image links are all on my todo list (along with lots of other stuff)
The site speed I'll work on with Technomage, as he's hosting it for me.
I'm also working on the order page (tonight's job amongst other things) along with more graphics.

I'm unsure as what to do about support and contact information. I don't know what level of support I should offer, email or phone...I've set up a forum to try to handle the majority of support situations but customers will always want more support than I can offer, even if it's just email.

The bigger companies offer phone support.. I could get another company to do it with an 0845 number (premium charge in the UK) as I can't afford to spend that much time with individual cases and there must be an agency who can do that kind of thing. But I think I'll crawl before I can walk.

Keeping the customers coming back.. that's a tricky one. Not something I've really considered. Thinking about it, I don't really re-visit sites where I've brought games from.. but I do recommend.

But I suppose for a start, there's the obvious (unfortunate ,and not intentional, but a fact of life) patches which will address issues the customers find. That's negative though and too many patches will damage the game's image.

I was thinking of adding extras to the game later to give an incentive for people to come back, extra levels, better animations, monsters.. as long as they don't unbalance the game, it might be worthwhile.

I've not thought too much about the marketing either outside of posting to various sites. I know it's wrong to think of it as an afterthought, but as with all small groups, it's hard to cover all the bases and get anything completed within a reasonable time frame unless one knows Exactly what they're doing and can plan effectively based on experience.

Anyone with marketing advice, please get in touch.

[jdarling]

Keeping people coming back isn't as tricky as you think. Some ways off the top of my head:

Contest for high scores
New skins for the game
New characters for the game
Patches that add features
New versions
News items that make sense and having a RSS feed associated with them

You have to offer up some free stuff every now and then as well as reasonable prices.

Here is another suggestion, make sure and get viral with your marketing strategy (I forgot to mention this in my message back to you, but its important). Word of mouth is the cheapest and best marketing you can get :).

[arthurprs]

The game from pgd video on youtube XD
nice, i will download

[WILL]

Video is a great medium Jason!

I've been working with it for some time now and you can see the great reception of the one I made about the Genesis Device engine. And I didn't really post it anywhere else but here on PGD.

Make a nice video to show off some of the major highlights of your game and put it up on the YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo! Video sites. Then you can also post this into your CrashBlock profile on GGE and on other forums that allow flash objects or YouTube videos to be posted.

Another great way to get noticed is contact gaming magazines about your game! I can pass you the Dev.Mag editor's contact if you like, but what you really want is to be noticed by ones that are more so for gamers. Or even game review sites would do this too.

Try these:

http://www.bytten.com/
http://www.gametunnel.com/
http://www.playthisthing.com/
http://www.tigsource.com/
http://www.madmonkey.net/
http://www.simplegamereviews.com/
http://www.grrlgamer.com/ <-- Chicks will love your game. ;)

and others... these were just from a quick google!


Also don't forget IOTD on GameDev.net and DevMaster.net!!!

[jasonf]

Thanks for those Jason, Some of them look really interesting and I'll certainly be contacting them as soon as the shareware version is ready (not long now)

On another note, My wife has been helping out with the graphical design side of the game, she's quite an accomplished artist with 2 MA's to her name and last night she basically told me that some of the new stuff I was doing looked horrible.
Specifically, she hates the font I'm using and thinks my new Next and Previous buttons are terrible.

Well, honesty is the best policy because if she thinks it, then there'll be someone else out there in Internetland who things the same or worse.

So I'm working hard on making the menus look as nice as possible, reducing the amount of text I'm using and increasing the number of icons.

I have 2 agendas really.

1. To make the menu system, which is the first thing the player sees, as pretty and as easy to understand as possible.

2. To allow people who may not have English as their first language (or at all) the opportunity to play the game and to minimize the amount of Localization work I have to do. A picture is worth a thousand words and all that :)

I'll post more screenies soon. It's got to look nice for the shareware outing , but most of all, for the IGD..

[jasonf]

I've added a new feature which was sadly missing from the Compo version.

Joystick control.

I've added controls to alter the deadzone on the joystick too, this seems to work really well, although I've only got one joystick to test it on.
It uses a 7 button joystick with a hat on top. (how common are these?)

Left-Right Axis for movement (same as keys left-right)
btn1: Call crane
btn2: Jump
btn3: Drop shape
btn6: Drop Bomb
btn7: Use Timeout

Hat Up and Hat Down Rotate shape.

The player can still use the keys though in case they don't have a 7 btn joystick with a hat.

I thought I'd implemented joystick support in my CBCFoundation classes a long time ago, but I'd only done half of it... so most of today was spent writing joystick code to fit in with my input system.
Still, it works really nicely now and I've even got the mouse pointer being controlled by the joystick if the player wants.

I'm going to get a joypad for my PC I think, so I can try it out.
Can anyone suggest a good one, or the most popular.

[WILL]

I personally love my MadCatz game pad. Pretty nice quality and comfortable hold. It's styled exactly like the X-Box controller so as long as you don't prefer the Playstation style controllers it should be alright. There are both Wireless and USB(cord) models.

You are using SDL for input, correct? I can pass you my own input unit that you can take from if you want to give the option of customizable controls. In reality I think this might hurt you to leave them out as joysticks can really vary in what they have.

ie. X-Box style would have like 6 axis (last 2 which are used like triggers) and 8 buttons with only 1 hat. Where as PS1-3 would have (I think) 1 hat, 4 axis and 10 buttons. I'm not too sure about the Analog button or the vibrate features. They two also obviously differ in thumb placement of primary directional controls AND if it's a hat or a analog stick in the most comfortable spot.

The biggest concern is that not all the buttons are ordered the same so you might be completely changing gameplay for different controllers.

[jasonf]

My input handler is fairly comprehensive but it doesn't support definable controls and I won't have time to implement and test with the other stuff I have to do too before the IGF deadline.. which is approaching rapidly. I agree hoever that it is important for a shareware game.

I've got a few things left to do with presentation, these things seem to take SO much time! Today just vanished while I worked, fixing up the sound and music menus, implementing the joystick stuff and fixing the odd bug, the day had gone. So either I code at a glacial pace or the frilly stuff around the edges of the game takes more time than the game itself.

I wouldn't mind taking a peek at your input controller though, it never hurts to see how someone else is solving similar problems.

[WILL]

No problem I'll PM you with a copy of it. I'm the type of coder that likes to keep things simple so you may find it rather easy to mimic what I do.

Also I use a small data file format that contains the keys/joystick buttons and their alternates. And I use a tiny tool that generates them for default distributable files. So all you would need to do is copy over my save/load routines if you had an easy way to integrate with my input type structures.

The part that might take you longer would probably be the in-game configuration menu.

[WILL]

Crash Block got a review on Bytten not to long ago. It didn't do too bad either with a 70% score.

Bytten's Crash Block Review (http://www.bytten.com/gamereview.php?id=261)