ALIEN FLUX reviewed! And they mentioned Java!

[princec]

w00t! http://www.staticgamer.com/articles.php?action=show&id=70 Five out of five baby!

Cas

[Herkules]

Cool cool - hopefully this gets you another dozen of copies sold ....  

[starlord]

GREAT review,hopefully this get's people's attention to alien flux as it deserve's.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Matzon]

Excellent, a good review!!

However, technically it isn't 5 out of 5, but rather A-
I like the last paragraph:

P.S. While we don't really have an official "Static Gamer Pick of Month" award(yet), I'd give Alien Flux such an award for the month of July.

[princec]

AND AGAIN! IndieGamer.com review

Blistering Barnacles!

Cas

[swpalmer]

I'm curious if you are getting significant sales.  Is it going well? (I hope so)

[princec]

No! Haha! Where's my Mac port
I'm sure it'll pick up sooner or later - it's early days yet.
One thing that might be interesting is that we're hoping to get it bundled with Mandrake Linux. But this rather hinges on me getting through to them that they need to pre-install the JRE instead of just leave it in an RPM for an adventurous user to find... I wonder if it'll lead to any sales though?

Cas

[swpalmer]

Bummer  :-/
Ask Gregory Pierce about the Mac Port...
I have had so little time to work on it.. I did have some of the OpenAL stuff making noise, the wrong noise mind you... but something  (I suspected a little/big endian issue)
I also had some issues with loading the OpenAL library.. I never found a good way to do it when it was installed to the default location.  I had to move it to another location (think "system32") to get it to load at all... but I'm just not that familiar with the OS X environment yet to know how to fix that properly.

[princec]

There's another chap by the name of DCoder who seems to be looking at it too.

Cas

[shawnkendall]

Congrats Flux "team" ;-)

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[Mamoulian]

Very nice reviews!

Cas, do sales go up after the reviews were posted. I mean by a significant level.

[princec]

Er, no.
So clearly we need to do something else, which I'm scratching me head over right now...

Cas

[Breakfast]

If you can afford it, advertising on penny arcade seems to be quite a successful choice among independant games companies. I don't know how much it costs or anything but may be worth a look- they love their old-school games there too.

[Mojomonkey]

No no no. You don't seem to understand! If you want to sell copies you need to rename it! Add a II or 2 at the end. Viola! More sales, guaranteed.

However, I think the biggest problem is lack of press. Like Breakfast said, getting it out on a bigger site (both of those reviews are on gaming sites with almost no reader base).

In order to makes sales, buzz needs to be generated. Submit news to every game site you know of, get people talking about it.

[mik]

Mojo you are right. (for the milkshape loader not enough time
)

Steve Pavlina writes some good articles about that:
http://www.dexterity.com/articles/

Princec where are you for the j2me edition?

Duh,

Mik

[princec]

Still sorting out niggles with the full version.
Jet can be... difficult.. sometimes.

Cas

[mik]

Yap the win32 demo version freeze my Win2000 Dell Inspiron7500. I need to switch off it.

Duh

[ChrisM]

Just put up AF on the front of our site with links back to Shave....oooppppsss....PuppyGames

Cheers!

-SG

[princec]

Er, which site?

Cas

[Herkules]

http://community.java.net/games/

Cool! Now all developers can read about the game! Another dozen sold....

java.com would be better.... (2 dozen) .

[Herkules]

Uh oh .... it already IS on java.com


http://www.java.com/en/explore/games/alien_flux.jsp

Not easy to find....

[Mojomonkey]

While I appreciate both java.net and java.com for what it's trying to do. Advertising on there (as Herk mentioned) is not a great way to get the word out. Send gamespy and gamespot free copies, maybe they will review it? Send news to bluesnews, as mentioned before try Pennyarcade. There are all sorts of sites out there frequented by gamers. Many of whom are looking for something different, something that can be played in a 15 minute session.

Good luck, Cas!

[princec]

Nearly every website on the internet has had about 3 press releases from us, but a surprising number of them didn't get in touch I was especially disappointed the ever-sweet Shugashak (now shacknews.com) hasn't bothered to mention us.

Cas

[JasonB]

Ermm.. by press release, do you mean printed or emailed?

If the latter, it means your PR will probably just go straight to the slush pile.  I mean, personally, I receive a shite-load of press releases every week (and I'm not all that 'visible') so I inevitably end up skimming (with emphasis on the skim) them for something interesting.  And your typical game rag editor probably receives a bucketload more than I do... with predictable results for your chance at being heard over the rest clamouring for attention.

Actually, I'd focus on one printed magazine.  How about sending a demo disk, glossy brochure, etc to EDGE magazine (for example).  Follow up with a phone call to make sure they received it, and perhaps keep following up (bugging them) until you get some sort of response.  If you can get a positive review from a printed mag, that goes at the top of your next Press Release (i.e. Alien Flux rated x/10 by EDGE magazine) and you've got a better chance of being noticed.

(PS:  the EDGE would be a good choice, since not only is it the top end of the games mags, they also used to focus a bit on the indie scene... sigh... I miss my EDGE subscription... )

[ryanm]

yeah, EDGE is good.  Come to think of it, i found out about JavaGaming.org when it was mentioned in Edge some years ago.

The circle is complete.

[Golthar]

No! Haha! Where's my Mac port
I'm sure it'll pick up sooner or later - it's early days yet.
One thing that might be interesting is that we're hoping to get it bundled with Mandrake Linux. But this rather hinges on me getting through to them that they need to pre-install the JRE instead of just leave it in an RPM for an adventurous user to find... I wonder if it'll lead to any sales though?

Cas

Small problem.
Mandrake believes in shipping a linux version with free software only, the jre is not "free"
Though if you could reach them and get them to pre install it, that would be great.
(They do deliver non free software on extra cd's though)

[princec]

I'm talking to Mandrakesoft now about the issue. They might yet install the Sun JRE. Otherwise it's a bit of a hassle running Alien Flux.

While I'm here we picked up a few more reviews:

http://nesiapc.net/index.php?view=reviews&action=view&id=14

http://www.gaminginvasion.com/index.php?article=254

Nice!


Cas

[nech_neb]

Some one suggested penny arcade,

http://www.nuklearpower.com/

Is another place old school gamers frequent.
Just a thought.

GREAT job on the game BTW,
I'm bugging all my friends to try it out.

Especially the ones that tell me Java is too
slow to write a game....

[princec]

Well, I hope they're in need of some serious shooter lovin', because we sure need some support! (As you will see if you check out this thread )

Cas

[Kevdog]

With regards to the controls being weird, I have to agree.

The first thing I did was switch the firing to mouse button 1 (fairly standard) and the thrust to mouse button 2 and the game became instantly much easier to play.  After I did that I finished the first 3 levels in about 10 mins, where before I was having trouble on level 1 because it was counter-intuitive.