On the Market

I woke up to a pleasant surprise this morning. CodeCanyon accepted my item with the new documentation. You can go grab a license by clicking here.

I am quite excited about this, and hoping that I see enough sales from this to give me a reason to continue to put up more items for sale. I have several more starter kits planned, and after a little while of watching this first one's sales, I will figure out if this is the way that I'm going to go with releasing the other kits.

If there is anything you would like to see me create a starter kit for, please let me know!

In other news, Zombies Til Dawn got accepted into the Game Shop on fgl, so I'm excited about that too. Hopefully I get some sales from that. And also, you should really give the game a play on Kongregate, as that will help support me and my developments!

Lotta Documentation

Hello, May!

Okay, well CodeCanyon rejected my item saying the documentation was lacking. So I spent a couple days writing complete and thorough documentation, as well as a thorough "idiot's guide" style ebook for those non-technical people that want to buy the item, and I also went through all the code and overhauled everything to make it as clean and simple as I possibly could. And I've just resubmitted the item for review. Hoping that it gets accepted this time. If it doesn't, I'm just going to end up selling it through my new Gumroad account. More on that later.

In the process I found Remarkable, a rather useful tool which lets me write in Markdown and then export a shiny styled PDF document. I'll be using this software quite a bit.

I have also learned quite a bit about HTML5 game development, and with this new-found knowledge, I am planning on putting together an educational course which I will be selling in the near future.

Ghosts in the Wrapper

A GHOST POSSESSED MY GRANOLA BAR WRAPPER AND COMPLETED A PUZZLE ON MY ANDROID TABLET!

...Or, y'know some logical explanation...

I absentmindedly placed the wrapper for a granola bar on top of my android tablet, and it moved around a bit from the air flow in the room, and apparently the material is conductive or something, because my tablet started to respond as if I were using it. And to top it off, I had a game open on the tablet and the granola bar wrapper solved a puzzle in the android game.

Testing the Market

I submitted my first item for sale to the CodeCanyon Envato marketplace before heading to bed last night. Crossing my fingers in hopes that it gets accepted and gets some sales so I can start to see some kind of ROI for my time investment.

If things don't go well with CodeCanyon, then I will end up selling the item myself directly via a PayPal button. But I really hope that things do go well. I've got a lot on my mind lately, and some extra funds would help relieve the stress.

Zombies Til Dawn has seen under 20 plays so far, and hasn't made a penny in ad revenue, so I'm rather depressed about that. I am considering selling the source to the game. Interested? Let me know.

My dashboard says that people are watching this blog, but I'm suspicious that it's mostly just bots. Please prove me wrong by actually writing a comment.

Zombies Til Dawn

Well it's been a little while since I posted anything. Even though I completely missed out on LD32, I finished my game anyway and today I am here to announce the fully-playable and mobile-ready (to the best of my knowledge) HTML5 game Zombies Til Dawn.

You can play the game by clicking here.

I opted to avoid the use of any third party libraries. The game is made with pure JS, and should run equally well on all platforms. I've tested with my desktop in 3 browsers, and my android phone and tablet. I'd love to hear if the game works or does not work on your iOS devices or your browser.

I kept a log of all the time that went into the game, and it totals at 13 hours, 13 minutes, and 13 seconds... yeah, lol it surprised me too.

The game has an adsense banner so I can try to make a few pennies off of it. If you really like the game, I'd be happy to sell you an ad-free license. Contact me.

So... I know you are wondering What IS Zombies Til Dawn?

Zombies Til Dawn is a turn-based strategy game where the goal is simple. You must survive until dawn. Your means of survival is in surrounding yourself with explosives and hoping that the zombies get blown up and don't get to you.

I hope that you enjoy my little game. Well, not little, but minimalist. It clocks in at 1965 lines of code! Please, try out Zombies Til Dawn and let me know what you thought about the game!

Of all the luck...

Seriously. WTF!? My ENTIRE day has been pretty much a complete waste of time. I woke up and noticed that my phone was sitting on the "boot" animation screen. I shrugged and ignored it. I checked it again about 30 minutes later, and it STILL was on the boot animation screen. So I knew there was a problem. This tends to happen every once in a while when over-the-air updates come through, or a system app crashes. The fix is usually to pop out the battery and then pop it back in and power the phone back on...

Well, I did just that, and it resumed the boot animation for an hour, then the animation froze and the phone did nothing. SHIT! Alright, so time to dig in and try to resolve this quickly so I can get on with my day...HAH!

I've got an old smartphone. No, really, an OLD AT&T branded HTC Inspire 4G (Also known correctly as the HTC Desire HD aka The "ACE".) Several years ago I unlocked the phone and flashed a custom ROM to the device; And until today it had worked great. MUCH better than the stock HTC Sense that ships with the phone. So, the first thing I did was boot into recovery mode using the Volume-down button + Power-button power-on trick and choose RECOVERY from the hboot bootloader. And then I proceeded to attempt to create a backup of my device's data, settings, apps, and shit. Well, that failed miserably for whatever reason. Maybe it has to do with the screwed up boot? I don't have a clue. It doesn't matter at this point anyway...

So with all my data lost anyway, I formatted all my partitions and cleared my dalvik cache and proceeded to attempt to re-install my custom rom. Things appeared to be going smoothly just like it did years ago when I first installed it...

Then, after booting the freshly installed rom and going through all the motions of setting up my google account, and configuring all the settings how I like them....I have a nice ugly NO SERVICE notice on the screen. Well that's just great. I have a phone with no way to use it as a PHONE. I've had that message pop up a couple times over the last two years, and the solution was to simply reboot, then things were fine... NOT THIS TIME, NOoooo. So, NO SERVICE is pretty useless. I went back into the recovery mode and tried again, cause y'know, maybe something dropped a bit somewhere...

After the THIRD attempt, I decided to say FUCK IT and go back to the stock rom...7 failed attempts of finding a working HTC Sense rom, and I said screw it, and started looking at other options... I tried out 12, yes, TWELVE different custom roms and NOT ONE OF THEM worked for me. In the process, I ended up installing two new recovery images, flashing 6 new boot images, and factory-reset/formatting more times than I can remember...

I finally have gotten truly fed-up and I have yet another custom rom installed, and it still says NO SERVICE on my phone, and I've decided to contact customer support. So I head over to the AT&T site and after a chat with a rep, I learn that it's too damn early to talk to a technical support agent, and that I gotta try back later during business hours!

So here I am, more than 12 hours later, still with no usable phone, and that's not the only problem. I did not get to finish my LD32 entry because of all of this bullshit today. I was so close to finishing last night, but I needed to get sleep. In hind sight that was a mistake, because I got shit sleep, and then did not get to finish my entry because I was stuck dealing with a stupid piece of shit smartphone.

Right, so yeah. end-rant and all that.
Until next time, this is the Rambling Indie Richard Marks.

Behind the scenes

The past few days I have been carefully considering our studio's next move. Some things have come to light which have brought us to a position of needing to make some serious decisions with how to proceed. We have a few new projects that are starting the early stages of concept and design, and we are working on some new marketable resources which will become available for purchase in the near future.

I am working on a high resolution stylized castle tileset completely in vector format using Inkscape. I'm pretty satisfied with the results so far. I will have some visuals to show off soon.

Pushing Pixels

I have spent most of today working on some isometric tiles for a client. Tasked with creating damaged roman roads with a near photo-realistic aesthetic. I am needing to really stretch my pixel pushing powers to get this one done. I don't think I can show off the work publicly yet, so I won't be posting any screenshots of the set until I clear it with the client.

In other news, we've not been getting any positive feedback from publishers for our HTML5 game. So that sucks. Still waiting to hear back from a few more. I'm not going to get my hopes up though. I think the market is done for.

A Day of Rest

I didn't get anything done today. Just relaxed, did some reading, and light programming just for the hell of it (solved a few challenges on codeeval.com) and pushed a few pixels in GIMP toying with the many features that I never usually touch. Nothing to really show, as I didn't save any of the images.