I have been doing art and game dev related projects for 15 years (not programming though) so I am used to all sorts of reactions -- from jaws dropping to people hating it.
Honestly the most common reaction is no reaction at all.
That is probably the worst of them -- the inability to provoke a reaction with your art really says that this means nothing to the viewer to the point they don't even care enough to say I don't like this?
Having experienced it all I was prepared for anything ...and after 3 weeks I now have some "results" to share with you!
Read more after the break!
I'm not sure whether I should share the specific sites with you at this point ; I do not wish to damage relationships if some employee should happen to be reading this so I will keep it generic for now.
I also do not at this time see any value in calling out the sites either - so there is really nothing that I'm sheltering honestly.
Site 1 Results: No response after 3 weeks. As I said this is the worst type of feed back ; did they get my email? Who knows? Was it so bad they don't even want to deign to waste the time to compose a respones? Who knows? Maybe its in queue and they will get back to me in 3 more weeks? Who knows!?
See what I mean .. not hearing at all is the worst!
Site 2 Results: Site 2 was in the process of approving the game but several tests came back with some crashes. I had seen some of these crashes in testing myself but they did not happen often. It was very difficult for me to say what the magnitude of crashes/errors would be so I determined to send it off; its possible they might not see them at all? Or .. possibly be bad enough to decline the game.
This is a really tough call too! I tested the game on 8 different systems with 3 different OS's (operating systems) as a one man indie developer this is all the resources I could gather (between myself and friends/beta testers) without releasing a wider beta that I had a lot of qualms about managing without my software being pirated - as well as these would not be professional QA people - what would the results be? Would I spend more time doing tech support than coding my game?
So the end results is the infrequent crashes appeared to be more than infrequent for the site #2 and I have decided to withdraw the game for approval at this point because I do not want to ship a crashing game and ruin my reptuation.
I believe I know the source of almost all these crashes -- and I will have to re-write my game in C++ rather than DarkBasicPro to fix them so this is my next task I have set for myself
Site 3 Results: Site 3 was very quick to respond - 1 business day. They told me it had a missing DLL on their clean test system.
So I looked up what this was and found that the Matrix utils I was using for DBPro required this DLL ; I immediately regretted using the Matrix utils. I know they are very useful but in the 4 areas I had initially used Matrix utils I had already removed 3 of them because hand writing code was more 'control' in the exact way I wanted my game to work than the plug in provided.
The final way I used it defintely saved me oh.. say 100 lines of code but I would rather have written those lines than have to require my users go find a random DLL on the internet and I am unsure of the policy on redistributing the DLL myself. Certain to avoid any copyright issues with distributing someone elses DLL's I should have just written the 100 lines of code.
But they took the DLL's and then got back to me in one more day with this:
We were able to get the game working, that’s for the update.
Unfortunately
we have chosen not to move forward with your game "Pirates Treasure" in
our Game Service. However, we would like to take the opportunity to
encourage
you to continue to submit your titles to us in the future.
Naturally I was crushed, but it was quick, polite and to the point. I have naturally written them asking what if anything was the problem and if anything can be done to correct it -- however as above I suspect they ran into these crashes and what I need to do is re-write my game in C++
So that comes to the final thoughts about my over-all rejection:
Writing this game in BASIC / Dark Basic Pro enabled me to learn how to program a game in 4 months -- however I ended up with an unmarketable product.
I am NOT blaming DBPro right now ; its very possible a game written by someone with no experience (like me) in C++ would ALSO crash and be rejected.
The problem though is I feel as if these crashes are a bug in the BASIC interpreter they use and have found evidence on their forums to suggest this is true and others have experienced the same problems.
Learning to program this way was very very very good experience and I have no regrets about spending that time doing so in DBPro. 90% of the concepts I learned will be directly applicable in any language. BASIC made the learning curve much easier for me and I am happy I took that route.
I do however have lots of learning and most importantly work left to do.
It's time to learn C++ and port my game over; and hope that my suspicions are correct.
Even if I have a game with issues once I re-write it in C++ I feel like I will have the tools to handle it; like a world class debugger (DBPro's debugger leaves much to be desired in my opinion). So I will be in a better place even if I do have problems.
And yes, finally, : I'm a little depressed.
Naturally I had dreams of it being good enough to make it on a game site and selling a couple of copies ; its disappointing that it didn't make the cut in its current form.
Never give up, never surrender. Obstacles are only there to prove how hard you want something right?
No comments:
Post a Comment