My Game Company - Newsletter

The MGC Times

July 2010 Newsletter

President's Corner

Well, it's official - I'm now working full-time on the game company!

Now that I have more time available, I've been revisiting the list of features and enhancements that customers have been asking for. More and more of our Windows customers are starting to use Windows 7, and some of our Linux customers have run into issues with some of the newer Linux distributions. Also, customers have asked for some enhancements for particular games, which I will describe in more detail below.

So I've decided to split my time for the next few weeks between supporting these requests and continuing development on Dirk Dashing 2. The rest of this newsletter will bring you up to speed on what we're doing for each of our games.

- Troy Hepfner

Dirk Dashing 2 Production Update

Now that I'm working full-time, I've been able to figure out the problems with the lighting effects. I've got it working almost perfectly, as you can see from the screenshot below.

It took a lot of work to get to this point, as you can see from all the failed attempts below. I tried a lot of different techniques, using per tile lighting, reversing the triangle direction depending on which side of the light source it was on, using smaller tiles, etc. But I finally discovered the right combination of lighting parameters and triangle orientation to get it working just right.

Some of you have asked why I'm spending so much time on lighting effects. As an independent developer who is now trying to do this full-time for a living, I'm painfully aware of the reality of indie games as a business. An indie needs to sell a full-price game direct to a customer every 45 minutes in order to have a career as a full-time indie. The average conversion rate of downloads to sales is about 1%, which means someone needs to be downloading my game demo every 27 seconds. That means I have to make my game really good. I'm competing for your money against thousands of other games, most of which are produced by larger companies with deeper pockets than mine. So I have to make my games better than they have been in the past, just to survive in this market.

One of the frequent criticisms that I receive about the first Dirk Dashing game is the graphics. Even though the game itself is fun, I'm painfully aware that the graphics in the first game are flat, and parts of the animation aren't very smooth. I'm planning to address those issues in the sequel by making the animation smoother, applying cell-shading to the characters and objects, and doing more detailed backgrounds with lighting effects. Hopefully that will result in better screenshots that will convince more people to download the game and try it out.

By the way, I'm nowhere near selling games at the rate of 1 every 45 minutes. If I sell a dozen in one day, I'm doing exceptionally well. This is one of the reasons why I decided to risk going full-time (even though the business can't sustain me yet), so that I could spend the necessary time to make my games better. I look at it as an investment.

Rick Rocket Update

I've finally gotten around to implementing a much-requested feature for Rick Rocket: the ability to customize keyboard keys and joystick functions. I'm hoping to release an update for Rick Rocket within the next few weeks. Here's a quick screen grab of what the new customization screen looks like:

Fashion Cents Gents Update

Last night, I finished a recording session with Hilary Burris, the young gal who did the voices for Fashion Cents. (She was 10 when we recorded the original voiceovers back in 2003, and now she's almost 18!) We recorded a whole new set of voiceovers for Gents. The original valley-girl voices just don't work with that game, but I haven't been able to arrange for her to record new voices until now. The new voices are much better. And those of you who were concerned that some of the Fashion Cents Deluxe voices sounded too rude won't need to worry this time - we took care to avoid that problem with the new voices.

Watch for an update to Fashion Cents Gents sometime next month. We also have some new add-ons coming soon!

Updates for Our Other Games

Our other games are pretty solid, and we haven't had many feature requests lately. So the updates for those games will mainly involve adding support for Windows 7 and upgrading to the latest version of SDL, which will solve a number of audio issues on recent Linux distributions. Those updates should be available sometime next month.

June's Top 10 Sellers

Here are the most popular games from last month!

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