Hi to all,

if you remember, 2 months ago I have presented beta of our first game to this forum. Now, I wish to thank everyone who helped me with testing and suggestions. :)

I am happy to anounce that CHICK-A-DROID has been published.

http://www.alawar.com/games/chick-a-droid/

Actually saw this on Alawar this morning before reading your post ;)

Good job!

Alex

do you use the alawar's 'exclusive service' or the 'affiliate' one? what % of the price go to them?

I use exclusive agreement and get 50%.

and do you know what % they get from the affiliate programme?

Originally posted by Vlado
Hi to all,

if you remember, 2 months ago I have presented beta of our first game to this forum. Now, I wish to thank everyone who helped me with testing and suggestions. :)

I am happy to anounce that CHICK-A-DROID has been published.

http://www.alawar.com/games/chick-a-droid/

Congratulations on getting a publisher! It was the most graphically polished puzzle game I had ever seen and the hardest puzzle game demo I had ever played. It will be interesting to see what has changed since the first time you announced the game in this forum.

Originally posted by CoLSoN
and do you know what % they get from the affiliate programme?


I'm not sure about this. You should ask them directly.

authors@alawar.com

Originally posted by Hydroaxe
Congratulations on getting a publisher! It was the most graphically polished puzzle game I had ever seen and the hardest puzzle game demo I had ever played. It will be interesting to see what has changed since the first time you announced the game in this forum.


I hope you will like it. Its a lot easier now:)

I played the new demo and I think it's much better balanced to make a sale. It only had 5 levels this time and left me wanting more, which is a good thing. It also wasn't hard to perceive that further levels would certainly provide wickedly challenging logic puzzles for hardcore players. I played level 5 a few times and never did it the same way twice. Good luck with Chick-A-Droid!

I can't get the demo on alawar's site. The URL is bad. Is it mirrored anywhere else?

Originally posted by svero
I can't get the demo on alawar's site. The URL is bad. Is it mirrored anywhere else?

Yes, try our page

http://www.brainwashinteractive.com

I remember ordering "Bubble Bobble Nostalgie" from Alawar a while back. They never contacted me, even after several mails. I had to get my money back from their payservice.

GRRRRRR !!!!!!!!!


PS! GRRRRRRRRRRR !!!!

Thanks for the alternate link. The one on Alawar kept hanging on me after downloading 8.42Mb of the demo. Seems quite a few people have been having problems :( Can't be good for sales...

The graphics/screenshots look superb. Made me want to try the game instantly. Will edit this and give you some more feedback once the download has finished and I've actually played it.

-Z-

<edit>

Hmm ok.. I've just played a quick game and ran into a few problems. First off though, WOW, I love it so far. The graphics are stunningly nice, - the tiles, the character, the animations, the GUI, everything. Beautiful.

Ok.. now the problems I encountered.

I was experiencing bad flickering / refresh problems and the white background of the containing window and its title bar kept showing through the graphics. (Screenshot 1 (http://zoggles.dyndns.org/junk/chick1.jpg) : Screenshot 2 (http://zoggles.dyndns.org/junk/chick1.jpg)) This flicker first starts on level 3 (?) with the bomb that bounces off the walls.

Also, after completing the few demo levels, it said "GAME OVER Press any key to restart" - which I then did, but insterad of restarting.. it just quit completely.

One small thing I noticed was on the options screen. The bottom 3 text items - when selected - the reversed text jumps up a few pixels (the baseline of the reverse-out block is in line with where the bottom of the text was, but the text itself has therefore moved up.

It might also be nice to maybe pause the game when those info panes pop up telling you about the various blocks etc. I almost didnt want to read them because things were moving at me and the clock was ticking down.

The concept is great, I've seen a couple of similar maze games, but never one that has been so nicely pulled off.

I did find the demo incredibly easy though.. I breezed through the levels straight off and didn't find myself particularly challenged by it. I didn't actually lose a life, nor did I use a bomb. In fact I went back a second time and redid them just to see what a bomb did :)

Great looking game though

Oh and just thought I better include my spec:
P4 1.8ghz
256 Mb Ram
GeForce2 MX 64Mb
Win 2K Server
and plenty of HDD space.

-Z-
</edit>

Thanks for your suggestions.

We were solving this flickering problem (focus loosing), but according to your screenshots it appears that in some special situations we need to redraw status screen also. Do you have some software active, that could make the game loose focus?

*

I didn't want to pause a game when help boxes pop up, because these 4 intro levels are very easy - just to learn controls and enemies.

Only 5th level is actually for real playing. In full version there are 99 all-new levels without this demo levels. And they get harder and harder.

The first time I played it, yes I did have other software running:
WinTV, Outlook, IE x 4, MSMessenger and several other smaller programs including ProgressQuest. I also then added Photoshop to the list whilst taking those screengrabs. Nothing that would steal the focus though.

However, the second time, I wanted to make sure that it wasnt because of the other programs I had open and closed virtually everything else down. Same problem occured.

-Z-

IF you are using VC use WM_POPUP instead of WM_OVERLAPPED when creating a window.... may or not help, but seems from Z's screenshots, it may ;p

Originally posted by Zoggles

However, the second time, I wanted to make sure that it wasnt because of the other programs I had open and closed virtually everything else down. Same problem occured.

-Z-

Could you be running some residenatal programs, that are not visible?

Originally posted by Akura
IF you are using VC use WM_POPUP instead of WM_OVERLAPPED when creating a window.... may or not help, but seems from Z's screenshots, it may ;p


Thanks, I'll give it a try. But its hard to test it for me, beacuse it doesn't happen on our computers.

Originally posted by Vlado
Could you be running some residenatal programs, that are not visible?

The only only things running were services such as MySQL server etc.

The first two levels play perfectly. It's only when I get to level 3 that the problem occurs.

-Z-

The game looks awesome! I remember trying the beta and thinking it was very polished. The new music is really good, its perfect for this game. The popup tips in the beginning are slightly annoying because they all start to overlap until you realize you have to press esc, but its no big deal.

NICE JOB VLADO!! I look forward to hearing how your sales go!

just tried it again, and did run into a bug i think...
on the 5th level (last?) I tried to restart the level and the game crashed every time. Then I beat the 5th level and it said Game Over press any key to restart, then it crashed when i hit a key...

Originally posted by BrewKnowC
The game looks awesome! I remember trying the beta and thinking it was very polished. The new music is really good, its perfect for this game. The popup tips in the beginning are slightly annoying because they all start to overlap until you realize you have to press esc, but its no big deal.

NICE JOB VLADO!! I look forward to hearing how your sales go!

just tried it again, and did run into a bug i think...
on the 5th level (last?) I tried to restart the level and the game crashed every time. Then I beat the 5th level and it said Game Over press any key to restart, then it crashed when i hit a key...

Thank you.

This is again a bug that is hard to track, since it doesn't happen here, but I'll try to widen our beta-testing farm. Can you please describe your pc configuration?

We have only 10 copies sold by now (8K+ downloads). This is our first game, (and it has been available for 10 days now), so I don't know how long it usually takes for a downloader to decide and buy it?

Does anybody here have a statistics for this? Can I expect this 0,1% rate to go higher in future?

My system is:
AMD Athlon 850
128 mb ram
32mb ATI rage 128
windows xp

If i were to hazard a guess without looking at your code, it seems to happen only when a restart is initiated on the last level and when the game is over (from beating the demo). Whatever things these two have in common may help you narrow it down. I hope this helps at all... I'd be glad to keep trying any changes you make on my system until the problem is worked out. Again I must say, "Great Game".

As far as your sales, I have yet to start selling my game yet, so I can't answer that, but this surprises me because your game is one of the most polished indie games I have ever played and its FUN!