I was quite surprised a while back when I was told that my hypothetical game submission would only be released several months later, if accepted.

This is of course understandable with the increasing submission volume you're no doubt getting. Would it be possible to have some kind of target date or counter in the developer section to indicate the current queue length?

Just a suggestion as this rough theoretical release date could help when considering certain relevant factors.

Thanks :)

That was due in part to us receiving an unusually high volume of submissions in the Spring, sometimes over 100 per week, and we happened to find a surge of very good games to publish. The lead time now is not as great, as we've taken many steps to fix this problem. Presently our lead time should only be 1-2 months, but this isn't idle time -- your Producer would be working back and forth with you on QA and polishing issues.

Previously we would schedule the launch dates for each game well in advance, and these dates are posted on a private section of our site that's available to all our developer partners. But some developers have been much faster at working with us to get their games through QA than others, and some haven't been happy with their pre-assigned dates, based largely on when they signed the contract. Not every developer we work with is a full-time indie -- some have other jobs on the side. So we're working to maintain a more flexible queueing method where we don't schedule launch dates so far in advance. We couldn't do this in the beginning, but now we have the experience and systems to juggle launch dates more easily, and we also don't have so many games in the queue that we feel pressured to plan the launch dates in advance. We're also getting a more manageable volume of submissions after tightening up our submission criteria to filter out most submissions that wouldn't be appropriate for us.

Also, we made improvements to our QA process to speed it up and improve turnaround time. And instead of having 5-6 games in the queue at any one time, we now have only 2-3.

So while a long release cycle was a problem for us earlier this year, I believe this problem is now fixed. For new games we sign up, your launch date would largely be determined by how much polishing work your game needs and by how quickly you can complete the work.

Hey Dexterity folks,

What are your feelings about non-C/C++ self-contained games? That is, games that are written in Java or Flash but which have been packaged up to not require any external software (just like a regular ol' exe)?

Is there any reason why a game like this (assuming it was wonderful in every other respect :-) ) wouldn't work for you guys?

The technology behind the game isn't too important to us -- it's the end user experience that matters.

Right now we have a mixture of C/C++, Delphi, and Visual Basic games, but we're open to publishing any games that will run on a PC, regardless of the technology used. So if Flash or Java games are compiled to run as standalone EXEs, we wouldn't reject such games on that basis. What we don't want to do is publish games that require uncommon plug-ins that the player would have to download and install separately.

We've receive plenty of Flash and Java game submissions. What usually causes us to reject such games though is that they tend to be too simplistic and don't offer sufficient gameplay value to be worth $20 to a typical player. I suspect this is because they're often ported from web games. Getting people to play web games online for free is quite different than getting them to part with $20 for the privilege. That's just the pattern I see -- there's no intrinsic reason that Flash or Java can't be used to create games comparable to others we've published.

Down the road I plan for Dexterity to expand into Mac and PDA games, but right now doing that would spread us too thin. I'm also keeping an eye on the Linux market, but the sales potential there seems a bit uncertain to me.

Thanks Steve, I figured as much. And I think you're right about the simplisticness (if that's a word) of most games that start life as web-based -- that may well be the case with the game I submitted to you guys a couple of weeks ago (which I hope you pick up, but if not, you won't hurt my feelings!).

But, I've been looking at a couple of original ideas that would do very well in Flash (standalone) or possibly Java, and I think could be put together in a fraction of the time and money of what it would take to create them in C/C++. I'm not against standard .exe games either -- I'm just for what provides the best user experience with the least cost, time, and risk.

And when you get ready to look at Mac and PDA games, we should definitely talk. But both are highly variable markets.

simplicity :)

Ironic that when trying to describe the simplicity of web games you used a complicated variation of the word simplicity..... ug, sorry about me, I think i've been staying up to late coding. No more Bawls (http://www.bawls.com) for me!

Heh. Actually, I think simplicity is a good thing (think elegance), while 'simplisticness' isn't (think shallowness). Sort of like the difference between child-like and childish. ;-)

For me and most of the designers I know, the elegance we all want in games is much more difficult to achieve in a small game than in a large game. Games like Tetris or Metasquares are cut right to their essentials -- they are simple, but not simplistic. A difficult quality to grab and distill into a game.