TMC's Shoot Em Up Construction Kit - Dev Diary

[T_M_C]

Going back to an earlier discussion, how about splitting tose functions between two tabs, "Basic" & "Advanced"?  That way you hide the scary stuff away from beginners and you can also lose the scrolling window.  Just a thought.

It's a thought.

I'm not sure i want to do that.

I'll have to wait and see the further into dev i get.

Thinking about other editors i've used, they all present the user with all the available options and the user ignores those which are irrelevent.

A good thing about using a Gui is that i can also reserve advanced / complicated options for a seperate floating window if needed.

It's still early days yet.

TMC

[Prime_8]

yeah i need to think that way too , basic and advanced modes/tabs is great system.

kills new user spook factor , and entices the option hungry

[T_M_C]

Well, heres a turn up for the books.

Zytron II has now been accepted on Desura.

I resubmitted the game last week and got an e-mail a few days later saying the game was accepted.


This is really interesting.  

Because the first rejection e-mail i recieved said the game was rejected because 'shoot em up's don't sell'.

Well, they obviously do, judging by the number of shoot em ups on the system, so i'm thinking now that the e-mail was a standard rejection letter.

And i'm really doubting if the game was played at all upon my first submission.

The game had no press when i first submitted the game, so it looks like that may have played a big part in getting the game accepted this time round.

And also one of the reviewers i sent the game too, posted on the Desura forums that he thought Zytron II should be on there.

So, it looks like a combination of good reviews and some fan support has helped get the game accepted.


But i'm not impressed with their system so far.

Seems to be really confusing and overwhelming for a developer to set up their game on there.

I'm currently waiting for staff approval of my game file before i can set up my zytron II page.


TMC

[fog]

Well I can see how that must be really frustrating.  At the end of the day though your perseverance has been worth it and it's on there so it's all good.  Congrats

I've read other devs saying that if you want any coverage you almost have to spam the news sites constantly.  If you think about it they must get a ridiculous number of submitted stories every day and however good it might be there's a huge amount of luck whether it ends up in the bin unread or ends up in the inbox of the one person on the staff that might love it.

Unfortunately for most of us, not only is that a huge time sink that few one man teams can afford, it's also not in most peoples nature to keep hassling people.  Well I know it's not in mine anyway. 

[Prime_8]

carpet bomb you tube !  start spamming links to your site and you tube videos of it on game forums ( by in your sig if possible )

get those meta crawlers and bots working for you .

make page for your app or game on s free site builder like yolasite .. and the like.. 

the meta crawlers and bots eat that up. likne all those to eachother ..  raises the standing in search engines when you have a good number of recipricol links.

give it 1 or 2 months . lol    then spam your submission gys again .. LOL

i sure they must look at google ratings and such .. LOL

[T_M_C]

Well I can see how that must be really frustrating.  At the end of the day though your perseverance has been worth it and it's on there so it's all good.  Congrats

Yeh, thanks Fog.   

Feels like i've been getting the run around though.   

Unfortunately for most of us, not only is that a huge time sink that few one man teams can afford, it's also not in most peoples nature to keep hassling people.  Well I know it's not in mine anyway.

Yeh, thats exactly how i feel. 

To be honest i don't want the hassle, but it's a necessary evil.

carpet bomb you tube !  start spamming links to your site and you tube videos of it on game forums ( by in your sig if possible )

get those meta crawlers and bots working for you .

make page for your app or game on s free site builder like yolasite .. and the like.. 

the meta crawlers and bots eat that up. likne all those to eachother ..  raises the standing in search engines when you have a good number of recipricol links.

give it 1 or 2 months . lol    then spam your submission gys again .. LOL

Cheers for the advice Prime.

i sure they must look at google ratings and such .. LOL

Yeh, i tend to agree with you.

Given the large number of submissions services such as Steam and Desura get, it must be really tempting for reviewers to simply do a quick google search instead of actually giving the game a good playtest.

I havn't heard a bean from Steam, despite 2 or 3 submissions.    

lol.

TMC

[Prime_8]

i dont think they even look at google .
i think the have a ratings tool .

one of my old employees tried to explain , there is a google tool that simply reports the active number of ,cross links , or some search rating .

ie . pluging the app name , or url  .

then you get a rating a simple set of numbers . it meant to track your own seacrh engine standing .. but well it can be applied to others ,, even if not fair or accurate .

lol,

it seems now , every app needs a home site , face book page , twitter page , digit page , and a user forum .
lol crazy now .

seems we must blast social media .

[T_M_C]

Right, that makes sense.

Something akin to Metascore.

Cheers for the heads up Prime.


Update
----------

I'm having major hassles getting my files uploaded to Desura.

I got really angry and frustrated this morning with the system, something that rarely happens and i just had to switch off and walk away before i started throwing things at the computer.

Just about to go back and make another attempt at their complicated and confusing system.

Now, i consider myself a reasonably intelligent person.  You have to have a certain amount of intelligence, right, in order to write the game in the first place, but this Desura control panel has me totally baffled.

If only there was a simple tutorial, taking you in baby steps through the process.

But although there are plenty of little help boxes with text explaining things, i'm still none the wiser.   

TMC

[fog]

How have they possibly managed to make an uploading process over complicated?  lol  Maybe they should hire a coder

I'm sure it will be worth all the hassle

[Prime_8]

lol,  seriously ... sounds more and more they are lax and let all to the user .

[T_M_C]

Well, i've had some success now in uploading the game files.

A lot of trial and error and a couple of e-mails to support have cleared up some issues.

It's a bizzarre process of creating Desura's own .mcf file of your game, uploading it, waiting for it to be approved, which then opens up some more options for it.

Creating Branches, which are either, full game, demo or other, assigning those branches to your game files and setting up payment options and other attributes.

I wont even go into the setting up install path options.  ( luckily the game 'exe's seem to be auto linked )

It seems you can't delete game files that have been uploaded.  But instead the system overwrites files, but only files that have been modified.

And thats only the basic process.

There are hundres of other options available which i havn't touched yet.

I can see there has been an awful lot of work that has been put into the system, but this has the detrimental effect of making it overly complicated.

I can also see that if you are familiar with the system then it could be quite powerful, but for the first time developer it's way too confusing and over complicated.

Anyways, i'm making slow progress.


Havn't had time to do any more with my project at the moment, but i have downloaded a new version of Blitzmax and Maxgui. Hoping the latest version will fix my Gui bugs.

Have yet to try it though.

TMC

[fog]

Havn't had time to do any more with my project at the moment, but i have downloaded a new version of Blitzmax and Maxgui. Hoping the latest version will fix my Gui bugs.

Is Blitzmax  still being updated?  I assumed that when Mark moved on to Monkey that he'd stop updating older languages.

[T_M_C]

Yeh, Blitzmax still gets updated.  

Although the bug fixes seem to be minor issues now.

I don't monitor the Blitz3d or Monkey forums so don't know about those.


Update
----------

Zytron II has gone live on Desura now.

http://www.desura.com/games/zytron-ii

And what a relief.  

It will be interesting to see how well it does.

TMC

[Prime_8]

very cool man

looks great

[T_M_C]

Cheers Prime.   

TMC