Prompted by the January 16th IGF final-round submission deadline, Beesly's Buzzwords has been updated to version 1.1. New to this version:

* demo now uses eSellerate's integrated purchasing SDK
* bug fixes
* slight difficulty balancing tweaks
* added OpenGL rasterizer
* added company logo
* added web version to website
* magic new title music (http://www.flashbangstudios.biz/tests/xps-new_buzzwords_theme.mp3) (1.26MB)

Fairly small changes, overall. The version update was actually heavily prompted by the new music. The audio guys did it just the other day, and I knew I had to deploy an update that included it. I heartily recommend anyone with broadband give it a quick listen.

How are your first party sales doing? I remember reading you just started selling Beasly's Buzzwords through your website last month.

Are your Real/Big Fish sales holding steady still?

Nice music (I didn't listen carefully but I liked it nonetheless), but the graphics are still trashed on my Athlon 850/480MB/ProSavage4 32MB/Win98/DX8.
This time I've made a grab. The button gets trashed only once I've moved the mouse pointer on top of it.
In game, the background and some other gfx in the right bottom hand corner of the window are trashed likewise.

Apart from that, I found it annoying that there is no way to minimise the window, and that there are two "exit" crosses on the top right hand corner but the topmost one doesn't seem to do anything.

PS: I haven't got any other game with trashed gfx like that.

Chris: 1st-party sales are still fairly low-traffic, simply because we haven't been doing any marketing (and don't really plan to until our next games are out). I think we've had around ~20 1st-party sales so far. I don't have latest numbers on any of our distribution channels, but I expect they've slowed after initial launch marketing. We hit #12 for sales on RealOne Arcade in our launch cycle, which essentially means we missed the boat on marketing. As I understand it, the only way to get serious marketing might behind your game is to land in the top 10. I'm planning on doing a Beesly's Buzzwords postmortem at a future local IGDA meeting, after we have a solid idea of what our long-term revenue stream will look like. When I do the talk, I'll post the slides and meeting notes here.

StAn: We use Virtools Dev to develop both our web and standalone games, and their render engine is blackbox to us at our license level. The downside, of course, is that we have no power to correct graphic glitches like that (looks like it's breaking for fonts and sprite modulation). I'll pass on your issue to Virtools.

Ok, I feared so... I hope virtools will be fixed then :-).

Re the exit cross thing, I tried it again and it actually works... unless I first click on the task button in the taskbar (which doesn't minimise the window but stops the music). Once I've done that, the topmost cross (white on black) doesn't work, but clicking anywhere in the window after clicking in the white cross "un-pauses" the game and then exits.
So well... the only problem is that the game doesn't minimise ;-). (which is also related to Virtools, I guess)