Hello,

My name is Paul from Liverpool, UK. I'm 32 and I'm an Indie Game Developer Addict!!!

I'm not ready to give up though! hehe :p

I've been lurking the forum for some months now and decided to break the silence. I did once see an "introduce yourself" thread but I couldn't find it so maybe there is a need for a new one, and perhaps other Anonymous Lurkers can come out of the closet!

I've been developing games for around 20 years and was involved with Amiga shareware during it's peek. One of the best things about the Amiga was the indie developer scene. Through the later years developers moved to the Internet and a few special mailing lists grew. Most notable was the AMOS-List and the Blitz-List. I spent a good few years contributing to both of those early "Forums"; the energy, helpfulness and creativity that came out of those groups was fantastic. Discovering this Dexterity forum brought back some fond memories of a happy game developer community.

Back in the Amiga Shareware days, most developers were striving to be noticed by the commercial game companies. Everyone was aiming to become published, to have their games on store shelves. I was also caught up in that direction. It was much harder to make it alone back then. Even the Internet didn't offer enough customers and idies accepting credit cards and paypal was unheard of.

I've been involved in commercial game development (mainly porting games from PC to Mac) for the past 7 years and I'm still heavily involved in that side of the business. However, I have also been working on my own "Indie Games" for the past 10 months, I've used many of the tools and methods I've built up through commercial development -- using platform portability to the extreme. Building an Indie Game company from nothing to something that is now competing with my commercial work with regards to profits has been very rewarding and I'm only just getting started and learning the ropes!

I get a sense that - like me - other developers are no longer looking forward to so called "commercial" development but are happy to build up a complete business for themselves. There is a great opportunity for this to happen now. I wish I had restarted my Indie Development earlier, perhaps I would be as rich and as wise as Steve ;)

I didn't expect my introduction to turn out this way, I guess talking about and doing what you love to do brings out an emotional side :o

All the best!

Hi there, Paul!

Nice to know you. I don't have any problem with people getting emotional; if we didn't *love* what we do we would be miserable indeed. :)

I am glad you found your way here. Looking forward to reading your posts.

Cheers,
Rohit

Welcome to the forum.

Just had a look at your site, it's impressive that you also have Mac and Pocket PC versions of your games...obviously a talented indie.

I noticed on the Wordomatic game page that you mention well known games in that particular genre e.g. Scrabble (Giving it the trademark symbol) then mentioning who these trademarks belong to elsewhere on the page. Is this an intentional strategy to pull potential customers when they use search engines?

Intentional or not it seems like a good strategy many other indies could use to leverage existing brand names in their genre.

Alfie

Welcome Paul!! :)

I noticed on the Wordomatic game page that you mention well known games in that particular genre e.g. Scrabble (Giving it the trademark symbol) then mentioning who these trademarks belong to elsewhere on the page. Is this an intentional strategy to pull potential customers when they use search engines?

Yes, it was entirely for search engine keywords. I have started to remove them in some cases, especially where my pages already contain more than enough instances of those words. I used to acknowledge Pocket PC as a trademark but now my site is full of that key phrase. Also using the word Microsoft on the page is pretty useless ;)

Speaking of keywords, I've recently removed most instances of the word 'FREE' from my pages, especially in the <TITLE>. I feel that I'm starting to get a decent flow of search engine visitors and wanted to "optimize" the traffic a little. I don't know if that is a good or bad idea.

Cheers!

Welcome to the forum Paul.
Nice to see a fellow scouser here :)

Indeed welcome Paul.

After about a week of trying to activate my account, I too am now ready to come out (out of the lurker closet that is).

Anyway, I have about a year of commercial game experience, as well as some experience with millitary, and various non-entertainment virtual environments. I am now an independent contractor, doing indie games on the side. I got my start with an AppleII, but also played around with my firends C64 a lot, and eventually my own Amiga500.

It's good to see that dexterity.com has become such a rich resource, and I look forward to a more active role among this community. Props to everyone envolved.

Ashley Moore.

Good to see you, Paul! Nice site, BTW.

Incedentally, what kind of success have you had with PocketPC vs. Mac vs. PC? Is it true what they say about Macs having a much higher conversion rate?

Originally posted by Punchey
what kind of success have you had with PocketPC vs. Mac vs. PC? Is it true what they say about Macs having a much higher conversion rate?

I only added the Mac versions this month (one of them was only released yesterday) so it's too early to say. It's quite fun releasing 3 games in 3 weeks, the registrations have flooded in! I could say that Mac versions have doubled my sales but I think it's too say for sure. Game sales are often good in the first month so releasing all at once was a buzz.

My guess is that Mac sales are very good and certainly worthwhile adding Mac as a target platform if you can. However, it'll be interesting to see if the good sales continue for months or years to come. I see Windows as a huge crowded market that will give relatively small sales for years to come. I see Mac as a much smaller less crowded market where sales could come in quick but dry out. I hope not though! :)

Pocket PC game sales have been very good, almost matching PC sales. Most of my Pocket PC sales are made by Handango.com, the download/purchase conversion rate is about 10% (not a typo!) which is really amazing but starting to become hard to stand out with so many other Pocket PC games being released.

I'm working on Smartphone versions this month. It could be very interesting because unlike Pocket PC games, the Smartphone market is begging for products so it's easy to stand out in the Handango listings.

I'm committed to sticking with a "one serial works with all versions" system, so my PC/Pocket PC/Mac sales figures are not easy to separate but I know for sure I'm not wasting any time with the different versions.

Cheers!

Wow, that's really great to hear, Paul! Would you happen to have any tips or good links to sites about this level of cross-platform compatability? Also, what language and API(s) are you using to acheive this level of cross-platform compatability? I'm still finishing some screensaver projects currently, so before I start on my own game project, I'd like to get as portable a start as possible.

Originally posted by Punchey
Would you happen to have any tips or good links to sites about this level of cross-platform compatibility? Also, what language and API(s) are you using to achieve this level of cross-platform compatibility?

I use a cross platform library I developed myself (interestingly enough the library is called Dexter - short for Dexterous - so I had a happy surprise discovering Dexterity Software.) The library is very similar to SDL ( http://www.libsdl.org ) but it was written from scratch because I wanted full control over the target platforms. I have used Dexter for platforms not supported by SDL so it was a big advantage. My first project for Dexter was porting Simon the Sorcerer 2 to Amiga and Mac. More recent commercial ports I'm using it for include projects for Linux, XBox and PS2. The only platform I've failed to tackle with this system is Palm OS which looks like it might require a whole new system with dedicated game code. The size of the Palm market may make it worthwhile though.

My library is for private use only, mainly because I really don't have time to support other developers with documentation, example code and guides. Also being completely closed means I can change it at the drop of a hat, although after 2-3 years of development changes are few and far between now. I will consider opening the system up in future but currently I'm working flat out on my own stuff.

As far as tips go, I wouldn't suggest looking at the SDL source because it's a nightmare and I've never managed to get any sense out of it. However! Do look at the source code for some of the games that use SDL, that will show you how a fully portable framework could be done. Also look at a few ports of Quake 1 (for Windows, Mac, Pocket PC, even Amiga port) for another view on very portable game code. Whenever I'm planning to add a new platform to Dexter I will study the platforms Quake port first, even just to see how memory, timing, input and 2d graphics are handled. SDL and Quake show two different sides to portability and abstraction, I lean towards the SDL side myself but you could start with just a few reusable library functions.

I could go on for many more pages but I think this is enough technical stuff for one post :)

Cheers!

That's very interesting. What a coincidence with Dexter/Dexterity eh?! :)

So, for someone who doesn't have their own custom lib and doesn't want to take the time to develop one on their own, what would you recommend? I've had my eye on Allegro, and on SDL. And I'm not sure which of the two might offer more of what I'm looking for. The down-side to SDL as I see it is that its 3D is implemented via OpenGL which, according to many on this forum, is a no-no these days for the PC platform. The downside to Allegro, however, is that (AFAIK) it doesn't currently have a Mac port. So unless you're terribly concerned about porting to Linux (which I'm definitely not), Allegro probably wouldn't give you much in the way of portability. It will, however, ease doing 2D graphics with added features like alpha blending.

Do you know of any other "off-the-shelf" libs that might apply here?

Best of luck with your games!

The most recent release of allegro has MAC support.

http://www.talula.demon.co.uk/allegro/

Originally posted by Punchey
So, for someone who doesn't have their own custom lib and doesn't want to take the time to develop one on their own, what would you recommend?


I know there are a few SDL-like libraries but I'm really not too familiar with them all. Mine was created with no prior research into what already existed, I wanted a system that was as portable as C++ but had the rapid game development powers of Blitz Basic. I wasn't really too familiar with SDL at the time other than it being the thing to use for Linux.

I don't know what to suggest really, other than working on a PC only library with a view to adding other "platform modules" later. Remember to abstract anything that might not be portable such as memory, time, mouse/keyboard input, file access, opening screens, playing sounds etc. all must be handled "through" portable functions (the abstraction.) If you plan ahead for any possibility you should find a Mac port could be easy once you have your PC system working and adding PocketPC or Linux to your library is literally a few weeks work.

To give you an example, a few years ago I was given the job of porting the classic adventure game Simon the Sorcerer 2 to Mac. I didn't have a Mac but I started planning and developing my library (on Windows) with almost any possibility in mind (I even abstracted fopen() and malloc() just in case Mac had a problem with even the basic stuff.) I think it took me about 2 months to get the basic system working and then I was given an iMac by the publisher. It only took 1 month before the game was in final testing for Mac, because all I had to do was "fill in" some basic functions like GetTime() GetNextMouseEvent() OpenScreen() etc. The most difficult part was trying to deal with Apple's really awful documentation and the total mess of legacy MacOS API's (this was before OSX, at least things are a bit better now.)

If I was creating my library now and I didn't have to consider porting PC games to Mac (my other job!) it would be a whole lot easier. Porting other peoples code between x86 and PowerPC brings many other problems (Endian issues) and porting games that have their own rendering engines brings about pixel format issues. Earlier versions of MacOS didn't even have multitasking so multi threaded games were sometimes a huge problem to port. Creating a good solid portability library for small scale games (expand it to bigger projects i.e. 3D and networking later) would be a much easier job.

Good luck!

Thanks for all the tips, Paul! And I hope you have a great time participating on these forums. I know I'm personally glad that you've "come out" ;). You've already been a great help!

Dan MacDonald:
Cool, I'd heard something about a Mac port, but when I looked a little bit ago, it looked like it wasn't supported yet... so any idea how they're implementing their 3D functionality? OpenGL I presume?

Nice to read you here Paul :-)

I like your web site... I mean, wow... textual links! Now, *that* is innovation!
I think I'll follow a similar design for mine (I can't draw anyway) :-)

Regarding the multiplatform subject, I'm going to use SDL. Started playing with DevC++ and SDL, so far so good.

Hey Paul,

Welcome, I am sure your vast experience will no doubt add to the pool already here at Dexterity.

Your site is great as well, I'm interested in the name of your company; 'ShoeCake', sure there is a funny story right there :)

So once again, welcome to the family.

Originally posted by StAn
I like your web site... I mean, wow... textual links! Now, *that* is innovation!
I think I'll follow a similar design for mine (I can't draw anyway) :-)


Hey StAn, i stole the text links concept from you! But we both better change, I think Yahoo have a patent on that advanced "textual hyper link technology" stuff! ;)

I also noticed your Snake game, cool! Did you ever see my Sneech game?, that was released around 97 so perhaps I stole that idea from you too ;)

..... Regarding (Nick) the question of the shoecake name. I better leave that to a whole new thread (one day!) :D

Cheers!

:-)

Originally posted by shoecake
I also noticed your Snake game, cool! Did you ever see my Sneech game?, that was released around 97 so perhaps I stole that idea from you too ;)


Eh, I didn't think you'd look at my web site :-). No, I don't think I ever saw Sneech... If it works on gfx cards I'll give it a go :-)

Originally posted by StAn
Eh, I didn't think you'd look at my web site :-). No, I don't think I ever saw Sneech... If it works on gfx cards I'll give it a go :-)

Sadly not, it was an ECS game. I moved to a GFX card only Amiga myself quite a few years ago when I developed my real-time strategy game (Foundation). I also have a PegasOS running MorphOS which is quite cool but I don't actually use it for anything more than typing 'make' once in a while ;)

Sneech is a game I'm most proud of and have been planning to port it to PC and other platforms. It's been pushed back a few times because I don't want it to compromise any of the weird gameplay and dont want to rush it. It's one of those games I'll work on when I no longer need the money. I know a number of people will love it to death and wont care about sales figures :)