It's only Angelband (a basically unplayable demo at this point), Nanotron, Lucky's Puzzle Carnival, and an old RPG called Rabbits (which is hiding at
http://www.orbitalcows.com/cowgod/ because it doesn't have quality artwork). For Nanotron and Lucky's Puzzle Carnival, I split the profits with Eduardo, who did the artwork. There was also someone who did the music. I did all the programming myself.
There's also a couple of Gamemaker games that Eduardo made without my help. The rest of the games are games I'm selling as an affiliate through BMT Micro or freeware games the creators allow me to distribute on my website.
I have programmed other games, but they were more-or-less garbage. They were, however, stepping stones up to Nanotron and Lucky's Puzzle Carnival. I also made 3 "rpgs" which lead up to what I'm making now. (Rpg #1 was never finished because I didn't know what I was doing back then. Rpg #2 had a complete though low quality engine, but never really had content. Rpg #3 was a complete though fairly simple RPG.) Angelband is the next logical step in my rpg-chain. It's totally awesome except that the only thing you can do at this point is open a frigging door, but, trust me, the code I wrote for it is awesome.
Selling games as an affiliate can be a valuable source of income, though my website is too obscure to really make money from it
My current plan is to make a Rogue-like to give away as a free open source game. If I ever actually complete the Rogue-like, that might bring some people to my site. Then I plan to upgrade the Rogue-like to an actual RPG with a plot and improve it based upon the feedback from the Rogue-like.
The game should be much farther along than it actually is. I haven't been working on it enough, and alot of the work I've been doing is stuff that doesn't directly contribute to what the player does in the game. I just wrote a utility program for assembling images of body parts into one-frame character images, but that doesn't make the game immediately better.
I think we talked about this long ago, and I think you should ignore my previous advice. I looked at your games and I think you should do the following instead:
1. Use J2AS or use GWT for HTML5 or Flash output
2. Push your games on Flash websites with adverts
I think your previous advice would be good for transitioning to 3d games, which I have no idea how to make. I've never been sufficiently motivated to take that step though.
Nanotron and Lucky's Puzzle Carnival would most likely receive better sales on phones or ipads or some such thing than on the pc. And they would probably be played more as free games on Flash websites, though I doubt the advertisement income would be significant. It would still be better than the relative pittance of sales I have now.
However, I don't know if I want to invest the time to learn how to port the games to other platforms. I have to expend a significant amount of effort to learn how to port the game and then port the game. I recall an instance where Eduardo wanted me to port Nanotron to a handheld console from South Korea. I bought an external hard drive so that I could install Linux and try out their toolkit. I couldn't get my network card to work with Linux and gave up on it. I'm glad that I did because that handheld console is basically dead.
I would have had to buy the console just to test the game on it, and I'm not sure it's really worth it. It's the same with porting it to a phone or something.
I did port the games to Mac OS X at one point, but no one bought it. I stopped supported the Mac version and threw away the Mac I bought just to port the games.
I bookmarked a tutorial about GWT (which seems to be a little better organized than J2AS), but I've got a bad feeling that porting games over would be rather difficult. It seems more likely that I could develop games in Java specifically to be converted with GWT and the convert them. But then why not just make the games in HTML 5 in the first place?
At various times, I've considered making a game in Flash, and Eduardo seems to think that Gamemaker is wonderful for some reason. If I'm going to invest time into something new, I want it to be something that can produce better games, which Flash and Gamemaker can't. They may be faster, but I think the main problem with my games is quality, not platform.
You have lots of assets being wasted that would make you plenty. I didn't realize you had done so much. Great work BTW.
I also think that if you wanted to share then I could port them to my AllBinary Platform for J2ME and Android, but I have not finished my Adobe Air or HTML5 output yet.
I might be willing to do something like this with you. If you could port Nanotron and Lucky's Puzzle Carnival to other platforms with little or no effort from me, that might be worthwhile. I could probably convince Eduardo that we could share the profits from such an endeavor. However, I'm not sure there would actually be profits from this. Where would you distribute J2ME or Android games?
In the interest of full disclosure, Nanotron has only had several dozen sales (I don't know the exact number off the top of my head), and Lucky's Puzzle Carnival has had 0.
If you're really interesting in porting those 2 games in order to get a handful of sales, email me at
cowgod14@yahoo.com. I'll have to confer with Eduardo, but we might be able to work something out. It would have to be some kind of royalty agreement though because I lack confidence that moving the games to phones and such would solve their problems.
You might have been talking about the other games on the site anyways, but I have no control over those.
@fletchergames
did you build all games of OC without any engine? I mean, from scratch?
Only the games I actually made. But, yes, I built them from the scratch. My first couple of games that I made years ago used an engine, but then I taught myself to make my own.
I've always wanted to have some basic tutorials about how I did this on my website, but I never have time to do it. I did have a very basic tutorial at one point, but I took it down to make a better version. And then I never did.
The sad story is that I never have enough time. Last year was especially bad, but this year is looking a little bit better.
