inspired (and/or stolen from) ehbgamers thread asking for feedback about his poor sales for his bouncer game, I figured it can't hurt to ask the same.

Sliders has been out for a month now and not so much as a nibble on the sales side. So I welcome complete and total debasement of the game, the website, the sales process and all other factors that you may consider relevant to the lack of sales for Sliders.

The small amount of feedback from those that have downloaded the game has all been positive so far, so I want someone to rip it to shreds and point out every small inconsistency, every tiny little niggle and hopefully suggest some ways to see an improvement in sales.

Nearly 400 people have downloaded it in this month (that I can track, it is on a lot of sites that don't track downloads). And not one sale. If the expected turn around is supposed to be around .5 to 1% then I should see at least one sale?

Bizarrely, most of those downloads happened within the first 2 weeks and now it has sort of died down with around 15 downloads a week. I guess a lot of this is from when Sliders was in the "new listings" sections of various sites.

Download:
Sliders Setup (http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dave88/newdeltagames/sliders_setup.exe)

Website info is in my sig. Feel free to debunk to the best of your abilities.

Just looking at your website, here are my thoughts:

1. The demo is kind of big. 5.4MB for a seemingly simple puzzle game is probably too big, especially given the graphics, which leads to my next point...

2. The graphics leave a lot to be desired. Flat colored squares (using the standard Windows palette no less) are pretty boring. Also, the playing field is pretty plain looking. Without a big visual improvement, I don't think you'll have much luck selling your game.

3. The text describing the game may scare away some potential customers: "What starts out as a simple game of matching tiles soon becomes a nightmare of trying to plan 5 moves ahead while all the time being careful you don't run out of movement. Oh, didn't I mention movement?" That doesn't sound like fun to me, it sounds like a nightmare, just as you say.

Based on what I saw on the website, I wouldn't be compelled to even try the demo. Fun, addictive gameplay is important, but your first hurdle is getting people to download your game, so I would concentrate on improving the visual appeal.

i just downloaded it.

firstly, i think the download is rather big; from what i can see on the screenshots on the website this game could be smaller than 5MB. i had a look at the folder where the game was installed and i saw that the loading screen tga alone is 1MB in size. the music files are big as well. i don't know if your installer compresses them good though. if i were you i would do anything to lower the download size, it just seems to be too much for this type of game.


when i start the game, i get an error messagebox:

"Runtime error '429' - ActiveX component can't create object."

so i can't run the game :( and there's no readme.txt so i could read about the system requirements/known problems etc..


if it helps: the system i ran it on is Win2000 SP3, DirectX 9.0b.

Not only the demo size, but the hardware requirements. Are 48 MB of RAM, a hardware accelerated video card and updated OpenGL drivers really needed to play a simple puzzle game? This (http://www.mrio-software.com/info.php?id=bbb) is playable (not smooth, but playable) in a 100 MHz system with a plain old video card, and it has many animations with almost every image alpha-blitted.

I guess high hardware requirements may be scaring potential downloaders. And you might have problems with OpenGL compatibility - ie the game may not even run for some people. I believe this is the main reason for the "failure" of Alien Flux, too.

I agree with Paul, the description also makes the game really scary. "No cheats to favor fair play"? It's OK for a multiplayer game, but for a single-player puzzle game, the focus should be making the game fun, not fair. Give players the freedom to play the way they want to.

kerchen

Yeah, the game is too big. I thought this too, but figured I'd see how much too big it was in terms of downloads before spending ages rewriting everything to try and shrink it.

I tried many different configurations during development to try and improve the board appearance, but all of them resulted in a cluttered look that either made you strain your eyes to play the game or distracted the player from the colours which is kind of important in this game. I guess I'll have to go and try another ton of combinations and see what happens. And FYI they aren't windows default pallette colours. They were chosen to be contrasting to each other to make spotting matches easier.

I'm going to spruce up the interface a lot I think. It is too bland.

Point taken on the website text. I'll be on that right away.

aspiral

I think the problem must be bacuse I used VB to make the simple aspects (configuration panel, registration etc) and the first time you run sliders it runs the configuration panel. Guess I'll be remaking them then. And I thought VB was supposed to be reliable :/

ggambett

The hardware requirements are more of a safety net than an actual requirement. The game can be played on a quite a bit less, but the idea was to stop people having to complain about terrible performance on lesser machines, hence losing a customer from any future potential whatsoever. I might remove them or lower them a lot and see if it improve downloads.

The only mention of the accelerated card is in the FAQ. I put that there because I assumed most people would only visit the faq if they were having problems with the game. An accelerated card is not required to play it, it's only there as a recommendation to improve performance.

And is 48 MB of ram really that high a demand? Win98 requires 32 just to run, leaving 16MB for apps to play with. Even my ageing old mother who daren't do anything other than click icons in case she breaks the computer has a 48 mb machine.

I don't see how I could be having OpenGL compatability problems. OpenGL ships with Win98 and later, and comes with most graphics card drivers/installers. It also has software support for any aspect of itself that is not supported on the hardware. I chose OpenGL for two reaosns - it is supposed to be reliable, and it is cross platform should I choose to move to another platform.

And can I ask, what is Betty's Beer Bar developed in?

Thanks for the feedback everyone, keep it coming :)

*waves pompoms* Hang in there!

I'm getting 300 downloads a day but only two sales so far. Trying not to get too antsy as it's only been a week. (BUY MY GAME DARNIT!) :)

Originally posted by damocles
The hardware requirements are more of a safety net than an actual requirement. The game can be played on a quite a bit less, but the idea was to stop people having to complain about terrible performance on lesser machines, hence losing a customer from any future potential whatsoever. I might remove them or lower them a lot and see if it improve downloads.
I don't know, I think it's better to lose some customers unhappy about bad performance that losing downloads because people think their machine won't be good enough. I know hardware requirements usually mean nothing, but unexperienced users (ie those who read the how to download page) might take them seriously.

An accelerated card is not required to play it, it's only there as a recommendation to improve performance.
I didn't download the game (I'm at work), but I wonder what kind of incredible graphics effect you're doing such that having a 3D accelerator actually makes a difference!

And is 48 MB of ram really that high a demand? Win98 requires 32 just to run, leaving 16MB for apps to play with. Even my ageing old mother who daren't do anything other than click icons in case she breaks the computer has a 48 mb machine.
The P100 I was refering to has 32 MB of RAM and runs Win95 (it's an admittedly low target, but if I can get a game running there, I know I have nothing to worry about). For a simple puzzle game, 48 MB still sounds excessive to me.

I chose OpenGL for two reaosns - it is supposed to be reliable, and it is cross platform should I choose to move to another platform.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge OpenGL fan. All my development takes place in Linux, where there is no Direct3D. But many people here has stated the necessity of using Direct3D for the Windows versions. Our next game will probably be 3D, and I'm considering writing a 3D renderer abstraction layer, with OpenGL and Direct3D implementations. No, I don't like Direct3D, but it seems it's the right decision from a business perspective.

And can I ask, what is Betty's Beer Bar developed in?
C++ for all engine and game code and Python scripts to build the project (compile the executable, preprocess the images, build resource files,...). The game is coded on top of a game framework written in C++ using SDL and other portable libraries. I made the framework itself portable - all development takes place in Linux, and even the Win32 executables are built from Linux. As you see, portability is a big concern for me. I'm also considering a Mac port (actually, I'm considering how to get a Mac :) ).

Originally posted by papillon
*waves pompoms* Hang in there!

I'm getting 300 downloads a day but only two sales so far. Trying not to get too antsy as it's only been a week. (BUY MY GAME DARNIT!) :)

300 downloads a day? May I ask what did you do to get that kind of traffic? download.com.com.com, finishing XYZ and what else? I dream of 300 downloads a day for BBB :)

Just being new on download.com - and NOT in the overstuffed puzzle category. It'll wear off fast (already is a bit). I did say it's only been a week. :)

Haven't gotten around to submitting to other sites, and most of the people I'm trying to set up deals with haven't gotten back to me.

Well I must admit, I like it and it's a nice twist on the classic. Then again, I'm a big puzzle game fan anyway.

I agree the download size is a bit on the hefty side, but I think the graphics and presentation are very nice. the menu effects and in-game effects are nice, clear and not distracting and add to the overall game.

I picked it up pretty quickly, but a simple paragraph of instructions would be nice as I sat looking at the screen for a while initially pondering what I was supposed to be doing.

Score.. Scoring seems a little detached. I think I would rather see more score increase for getting nice long combos. There didn't seem to be any score change whenever I got the "Lots in a row" messages and it seems like its merely dependant on the amount of moves you have left when you reach the padlock.

The game itself seemed pretty easy and I drifted through to the end of the demo first go. The only mild challenge was level 12 where you have to use the bombs in the correct place.

Come to think of it, it has just occured to me that I could probably have moved the lock and not just the key! That might have made the game even easier. Not something I actually tried doing I'll have to admit.


Bugs found:

At one point, I had two rotate arrows next to each other, but no colour shifting occured when they blew up.

It doesnt like Multiple monitors. The title screen loaded on my secondary monitor, and then the game tried to load on the primary monitor, but sat there as a blank screen. After disabling the second monitor and trying again, I encountered no other problems with running it.

P4 1.8Ghz, 384Mb Ram, Win 2K Server, 64Mb GeForce2 MX400 (Twice)


-Z-

ggambett

Yeah, I guess I'll try drastically reducing or removing the requirements. See if it has any sort of positive effects. I think the 48MB will definintely go. I said 48 to include the windows operating RAM with it. Perhaps that's a mistake.

The improvement to performance form having a 3D accelerator is because OpenGL uses 3D to render 2D graphics. Basically just flat polygons without the perspective calculations. I spoke to a few people about the blitting options available in OpenGL and everyone said to use the 3D because it was faster on all but the most archaic of systems.

Can someone elaborate on the necessity of using D3D for windows versions? It's only slightly faster and doesn't ship with almost every drivers installer like OGL does. OGL even ships with most versions of windows, where DX only ships with ME or later.

BBB seems ot be using the same general technology/underlying graphics processes as Sliders does, so there's every chance that Sliders could run on a P100 with standard 2D card - I just don't know anyone with that old a system to test on.

Zoggles

Yeah, I'm currently looking into methods to shrink the installer (PNG files, JPEGs, shrink the music file maybe)

I think I'll add a little help button on both the main and game screens that displays a little description of hoe to play in game.

You do get extra points for longer combos. Perhaps I'll make a little feature that shows the score you just acheived floating up from the score itself.

Yeah, you can move the lock too :) Everyone makes that assumption.

And yes, it is easy for more hardened gamers, but your average gamjer struggles beleive it or not. Only one person I have tested it with (other than the guys here) managed to breeze throuhg to level 12. Some people really suck. My girlfriend plays it quite a lot and has still to get past level 7.

For the hardended gamers, the full version gets progrssively harder and has a starting level option, so the super hardcore can start on stupidly difficult levels.

Not sure how the arrows bug came about. First time I've seen it, and I played it a LOT of times. Might have been a once off bug, might be a small gap in the logic somewhere that requires a very unique set of circumstances to cause it. I'll look through the code and see what I can find...

I have no idea how or why the double monitors causes problems. Is your desktop spread across both? It's probably related to that somehow. Unfortunately I have only one monitor and no experience in programming for multiple monitors, so chances are I won't be able to find the solution to this problem any time soon :(

Thanks for you help guys.

Originally posted by damocles
BBB seems ot be using the same general technology/underlying graphics processes as Sliders does, so there's every chance that Sliders could run on a P100 with standard 2D card - I just don't know anyone with that old a system to test on.
Bear in mind that BBB uses SDL, which draws to DirectDraw (in Windows) or X11 (in Linux), so OpenGL is not involved in the process.

A quick note on the OpenGL conundrum:
It's true that OpenGL has been supported since Windows 95 OSR2 or something however it's also true that it is not hardware accelerated on default Windows XP installations. Argh!

Oh, and Matrox's OpenGL drivers are flaky :P

I don't believe this is the main reason for Alien Flux's failure so far. Let's face it, versions 1.0 - 1.3 sucked anyway. It's only just gotten "pretty good" and I've still got some tricks up my sleeve.


Cas :)

You do get extra points for longer combos. Perhaps I'll make a little feature that shows the score you just acheived floating up from the score itself.

I think perhaps making these points more noticable even if this does score, it seems very very minimal in comparison with the end of level moves-left bonus. This tends to make any combo score seem completely insignificant.

I have no idea how or why the double monitors causes problems. Is your desktop spread across both?

Yes.


-Z-

Tried to run it on my Thinkpad and it ran terribly, first telling me that 640x480 full screen display wasn't accepted?!

It's a Thinkpad 600E, P2 400 - a bit short of your requirements but most shareware runs on it and I use it to test out most peoples games from the forum and they often work fine. I personally think that anything with simple sprite based graphics in 640x480 should definately be running on at least a P400 with an old graphics card (unless of course a lot of 3D hardware effects are being used). This thing runs Half Life fine in 512x384 :)

For a puzzle game like this I can't understand what you are doing to make everything run so slowly... for a start are you rendering the entire gamescreen each loop? - there doesn't seem like a lot is happening most of the time - you should consider adopting dirty rectangles or some other technique.

I also think you should consider changing the 'Configure Sliders' and 'Register Sliders' icons to something other than the standard VB form icons :)

Well, I cant say much about tech side and I assume that everyone here would be 1000times smarter anyway, BUT there is one thing I noticed, surfing your image files:

You havent indexed the images. For example, I took BuyNow image (which is originally 42Kb) and indexed it. There is no visible difference but file size drops to 17Kb!

I chose to use 32-bit files so that it would have smooth edged alpha blending. That's why none of the images are indexed as almost all of them need smooth edges.

I'm currently trying to move to PNG to reduce file sizes that way.

umm, yes, i can see the point of smooth blending, but looking closer at the pictures, they are all also strangely positioned. Like, file which visually should appear like something like 32x32 image, is actually 64x64 (i believe that was the right size).
Which results in even those images which have no apparent need for overlaying over others, have transparency as well. And transparency area is almost as huge as actual visible part of the image.
Was that done so that all the images in-game would be the same size?
Again, I am not a coder, just an artist, so there might be some trick which escapes me, but from my point of view, it is huge waste of resources.

About the feel and look of the game - i believe colors are not the problem. You should simply give some shading to pieces. Its a simple touch, but gives much to the feeling.

And on almost related note - I didnt play around much with the game, mostly because screen was flickering like mad (especially the menu for some reason). I have experienced it in some Java games, so maybe its something drivers or sostware-wise, but, if I`m not the only one, this would explain why noone buys the game. At current state of flickering, it was almost imossible to look at the screen, and definetly not enjoy it.

Sorry if I sound cryptic to you, really didnt meant to let you down.

Which file are you talking about that is 64x64 but displays 32x32?

Not sure how the screen flickering is coming about. I use double buffering and swapbuffers like everyone else.

For example blockkey.tga, block.tga or blockcolorbomb.tga (well, I`m going after alphabet here:) If taking key image in-game, its simple key, while graph editor shows that huge transparency around. I mean, really huge.

As I said, because of flickering, I didnt toy around much, so maybe it is neccessary for things to happen, but it sure adds to the file weight.

I would say, maybe it would be wise to sacrifice smooth transpareny and simply slightly change the images themselves, so they dont need it.

Just my two cents of course.

The block* files are actually 48x48 in game (although it gets shrunk down in 640x480, resulting in what looks like 32x32), and because openGL likes textures in either 32x32 or 64x64, I went with the latter.

The extra large lumps of transparency have little effect on the files because they are RLE eoncoded, so most of it gets compressed into just a few bytes of data.

I think I'll look into which images could be converted to 1-bit alpha/indexed mode to shrink sizes some more.