ALIEN FLUX reviewed! And they mentioned Java!

[princec]

I'm gonna do an experiment and swap those buttons around and see how it fares.

Every 5 years a game comes out with the buttons swapped around and everyone gets used to it. Then it flips again. Weird.

Cas

[swpalmer]

I second that. l also found the controls backwards when I first played Alien Flux.

[kul_th_las]

I read the link to the other forum that you posted, Cas.

(Need another beer?)

I would have to disagree that Alien Flux is for hard-core gamers. I think it's a perfect fit for casual gamers. As a fully-licensed player of Alien Flux, and a hard-core gamer, and can tell you that my wife (a casual gamer) plays it more often than myself.

Just me, but if your game is simple to control (and it is), and it can be played in short, action-packed sessions (which it can) it is appealing to casual gamers. Think www.zone.com (sorry for the link to an M$ site).

Any exposure you can get on the Real or Shockwave fronts seems to be a good idea. I'm sure you have strong feelings about your game, and keeping the rights to it, but selling your game at this point may not be a bad idea, for the right price. If Puppy Games is to have a long future ahead of it, I think in 10 years time giving up the rights to Alien Flux will seem more sensible over time. Puppy Games will surely have bigger, and even better games in the years to come.

It's not like selling your game would mean that you "sold-out" (forgive the pun), it's a business decision, and sometimes in order to stay in business (the boring part of life) one must give up a beautiful creative ideal. When will the security of the bottom line become more important than the dream of a great game? It's already happened in the vast majority of commercial studios - it's only the very healthy studios that can do otherwise. This doesn't mean that the games aren't creative, or of good quality, it means that in order to be profitable, the artist must always come to terms with the reality check of the accounting department.

I think I can safely say that all of us on this site want Puppy Games to succeed and make more great games. If for no other reason than to help pave the way for Java games (despite our like or dislike of anything you make). So, get out there and do what you have to do, chum. I don't think anyone will hold it against you. Let the hobbists worry about artistic ideals, and get out there so you can tell the rest of us what it's like on the other side of the gaming world.

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

[princec]

Selling out does somewhat interfere with my 5-year business plan. Selling out non-exclusively doesn't though, so any deals I'm looking at are non-exclusive agreements.

Know the 5-year plan: If you want ultra-pro Java games, Puppy Games is the place to visit.

It's going to be a while before that becomes the reality! I need you guys to come up with some games that I can publish. Right now I'm not concerned with making money off of them; just growing the business. The only caveat is that they have to be of an equivalent quality to AF, with the same sort of attention to detail and slickness.

Get cracking!

Cas

[kul_th_las]

You're offering to be a publisher of quality games produced by this community?

[princec]

We certainly are, and for a year at least, for nothing.
The catch is "quality", which in turn requires dedication and perfectionist tendencies and a lot of time. There's been about 18 man-months dedicated to Alien Flux all-in and we'll be looking for the same kind of production quality in any game we publish although not necessarily the same depth. It's one of the reasons why we open source so much of our code instead of keeping it to ourselves: we need others to pick it up and make something of it; and there's a good chance that when it's finished it'll come back to us for publication.

That's the theory, anyway.

I'm having to shield myself from the stampede of eager developers... (sarcasm) but considering the fact that we've toiled to get all our code out in the open and make it all possible and slugged away at the flagship to prove it's all possible and built the company from scratch out of nothing to get stuff published and start making some money there's a surprising lack of indie Java developers who've approached us seriously with any inkling of a game. I'll advertise in here again methinks.

In fact to date only Elias & his dedicated team of gnomes have produced anything at all but I think he's more interested in going it alone, and maybe that'd be best because his is a radically different kind of game to ours. Although I may yet convince him

Cas

[Breakfast]

It's on the cover disc of this months PC Zone as well, so finally I've played it. Not really a twitcher myself, but it was as good as any game of that type I've played.

[blahblahblahh]

I'm having to shield myself from the stampede of eager developers... (sarcasm) but considering the fact that we've toiled to get all our code out in the open and make it all possible and slugged away at the flagship to prove it's all possible and built the company from scratch out of nothing to get stuff published and start making some money there's a surprising lack of indie Java developers who've approached us seriously with any inkling of a game. I'll advertise in here again methinks.

A couple of thoughts on that...

• You only want to see playable games (of course!), but once a game is playable, I suspect there's a fairly small window of time in which it doesn't have a publisher before it either finds one, or the team gives up (exhausted) and goes back to their day job(s) (to pay the now-rather-large bills). So, during any particular week of the year, there are few around.
  
• Indie games are hard to find on ANY platform. I missed ECTS this year, but at this year's IGF the games included some real low quality stuff - and even several of the finalists that made it to the GDC showfloor were very low quality...which most likely reflects on a relatively small number of entrants, since the screening process for IGF is pretty good, AFAICS
  
• I'd certainly take up your offer myself, but...all my game-coding time at the moment is going on a small browser-based MMOG that's about to go into beta. And gold hopefully four weeks after that.
  
• Finally...if you have any sense, and want to make a fast buck as a games developer, J2ME has been the way to go, historically. I'm only tangentially informed of developments in mobile games dev, but it looks like the gold-rush is over now, and it's not worth jumping in there from scratch any more - but lots and lots of new indies who set out to code games 12-18 months ago would have jumped into mobile first (there were some great short-lived first-mover opportunities from people like O2 floating around back then)...so they're probably largely still tied up - or may even have decided to stick with mobile. So, you may just have your timing wrong (to be a publisher) by 6-12 months (too early).
  

[princec]

12 months too early seems to be just about right if you're going to get to the top first.

Cas

[Mojomonkey]

Ok, my 2 cents on this.

While I think it's a great idea, I see a couple potential problems.  This is limited experience, so feel free to shoot down any of the points.

First, one typically goes to a publisher to find funding to complete a game. That is, they have a demo that shows promise, but it may only be a single level. Publisher says "Looks like it's got potential, here's a check, go finish." Those who already have completed games must have had money to do so, so what's keeping them from distributing it themselves? Or finding a more established publisher?

Secondly, let's say someone does have a completed game and don't feel like doing the leg work themselves to get it out. Why do they pick Puppgames? Alien Flux has done very poorly, you said so yourself. And it's a good game. Which to an outsider might make it look like Puppygames failed to get the word out on it. What's in it for the dev to take that chance that the same happens to their great game because they chose Puppygames over something else.

Trying to play devil's advocate here. I just see these as a couple hurdles to get over.

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

[bwbrooklyn]

Hey Cas,

Your plan to be a publisher of quality Java games actually inspired me to get a little more aggresive in my plan to dominate the world develop my own game. I had originally planned to try and release something by the summer of 2005 but now plan to try for something some time next year. I read an interview with the guy from Spiderweb software and he talked about how he doesn't make tons of money but he gets by. That's all I want to do. Just make games and see if I can get by. If not then I'll have to do something else. But I was concerned about trying to do all the publishing/distibution myself. Just knowing that there may be someone out there who may want to publish my game means I want to go ahead and really give it a try. So if you're still trying to publish by the time I get something developed, you'll be the first person I come and talk to.

WooHoo! My first post after lurking for a few months.

[princec]

Cool! I hope to see it soon

Mojo - what you've got to look at is why not get your game published with Puppy Games. We don't want an exclusive deal; you can sell it yourself on your own site too (less Puppy Games branding and server connections). We will help you integrate the game into our registration servers and instant buy servers (we've got the code all nicely sorted). We wil expose the game to about 200-odd sites where Alien Flux is already. We will get it reviewed. It will immediately have thousands of visitors all over it (we've had 15k downloads of Alien Flux now in just three months - the reason it's done relatively poorly is because, frankly, the current version sucks and those before it sucked even more). And most importantly we will do this for nothing for 12 months.

The only reason why we can do it for nothing is we are simply not going to be indundated with games so we can easily spend the time on the very few that will get submitted to us. Our objective is to get the site to reach critical mass; not to make money. It's the old internet story of build up the site for free and start charging later, no secrets.

In other words: publish your game with us and get free huge exposure, free bandwidth, free hosting, free help, and all the money for a year. You simply cannot lose in this situation.

Cas

[Mojomonkey]

That's exactly what I wanted to hear. I wish you the best of luck, and if I ever get off my butt and make a playable game rather than tech demos, I'll drop you a line.

[William Denniss]

I think you are on to something here.  Not saying it'll earn piles of money, but I like your idea.

I am starting the development of a game using Xith3D (which is currently jogl but lwjgl support is planned).  I really love programming games in java, and 3d ones all the more so.  The problem is that developing as a hobby is a task which requires patiance.  I have spent much time planning it and scoping out a 3D technology to use (I was going to use Java3D, but that was many many months ago and development was delayed due to it's uncertainty).  I have a full time job which pays the bills, but unfortunatally leaves little spare time (let alone coding time).  

Perhaps it is a dream but if I ever do get the game finished and more importantly am able to make it fun, the last thing I really want to worry about is self-publishing it.  I have a (very) small business and am fine with creating web pages (what the business is about) so I could publish it all myself, but to be quite frank I'd prefer to be creating the games.  Having someone else handle the credit card stuff and registration, not to mention added publicity would be ideal for me if I do get to that stage.  That and the fact I think puppygames is a very sleek looking site and it's owners are obviously very motivated.  The non-exclusivness is also very attractive.

On the money side, I think Puppy Games should get a small cut for for their effort at the very least to cover your costs (including labour).

Good luck with your plan and stick in there

Will.ell