Hey,

So, I’m finally announcing Galcon Fusion to the world.  Fusion is a port of iPhone Galcon + Galcon Labs to the desktop.  This time with hi-def graphics and a full interactive soundtrack.  It’s going to be coming to Steam and direct on my website on Feb. 11.  Users who supported me when I was first starting (as in, you bought desktop Galcon), your license is compatible with Galcon Fusion.  Thanks!

There are a few technical things that were challenging, dealing with endiannes for my network code, supporting fullscreen vs widescreen resolutions, and supporting a wide range of resolutions (from 800×600 all the way up to 1920×1080.)  To make it short, here are a few conclusions: best to support endiannes from the start, fullscreen vs widescreen is a pain, and baking lots of image data into your binary is a pain because it requires a ton of recompilation.  Oh, and installing VC++2008 is waaaay easier than installing mingw32, but keeping code working on both takes more effort.

I think my biggest conclusion comes along with this announcement, is that doing “secret dev” work isn’t really that sensible.  If you look at that last paragraph, there are a ton of issues I could have documented in my blog that I didn’t because I was all being secretive.  And hey, since I was so mum on this, nobody has heard about it until today.  I guess there might be some benefits to this (??) but I can’t think of what they are.  I think blogging about my progress is a good way for me to be able to see what I’m doing and not get lost in the haze myself.  My recent article on VC++2008 is a great example of something I’m going to get quite a bit of value out of just for my own reference.

One big different thing I’m doing with this project is my wife Nan is doing the PR for it.  She’s contacting all the reviewers, the general press, the newsletters, the announcement blog, twitter, and everything.  I’m trying to take a more dev-only role in the announcement.  This is nice, because I’m not very good on PR.  I try .. but I really don’t do it as well as I want to, largely because on a launch of a product I’ve always got about 50 technical things I’m trying to do along with the PR!

-Phil

Two weeks ago, the price of Galcon @ $3, Labs @ $2, and Lite @ $0.  This past week, I changed them to Galcon @ $5, Labs @ $3, and Lite at $1.  I wanted to see how this would impact revenue.

…

And the big surprise is …

…

It didn’t!  Much.  Best I can calculate, revenue was down 10%.  The most dramatic change was Lite, which went from $0 revenue to a few bucks a day, and from a few hundred downloads to almost none.  So this week I’m changing the prices back to Galcon @ $3, Labs at $1, and Lite at $0.  What have we learned?  It seems that people who want a free game want a free game, and people who are willing to buy would rather spend less.  Since I’m not going to run this sale for a month I can’t say for sure what the long term effects will be, but I’d guess word-of-mouth would be reduced as the pool of Lite players shrunk.  Who knows

Cheers!
-Phil

(I should have posted this earlier, sorry blog-reading folks!)

Rev up your design skills and make a Galcon T-Shirt!  Top entries win a FREE T-Shirt and the admiration of the world!!

http://www.galcon.com/misc/compo.php?cid=2

Here’s some graphics, logos, fonts, and other goodies from the new iPhone Galcon that you can use on your T-Shirt:

http://www.galcon.com/stuff/tshirt2.zip

Contest Starts: August 25th
Contest Ends: September 8th
Voting Ends: September 14th

Fine print: T-Shirts must be family friendly.  Unfriendly t-shirts will be DQ’d and will incur the wrath of Nanno.  Upload a hi-res (300dpi) image, if trouble ensues, use the Contact form and bug Phil.  T-shirt designs become property of Galcon.com.

Preview entries here: http://www.galcon.com/misc/compo.php?action=ipreview&cid=2

Have fun!
-Phil

So .. After recovering from GDC, I’m working on wrapping up my “new game” .. Which is in RC1 tonight.  Hope to package it up and ship it tomorrow with a hopeful launch date of next week.  I gotta get all my press materials together tomorrow so that when it does launch I’m ready.  Here’s a checklist of things I need to get together:

• Website ?
• Game page
• More games page (linked to from game)
• Newsletter announcement
• Blog announcement
• E-mail announcement for reviewers
• AdHoc build with comments for reviewers
• Get a banner ad ready & pay for ad slot
• Description, title, screenshot, icon for AppStore
• Game assets / screenshots for reviewers
• YouTube video of gameplay
• YouTube video trailer

Well, I spent the last week putting ducks in rows. Mostly dealing with the business end of Galcon stuff. It has been a pretty long week, but I can’t complain since having lots of people interested in my games is always a good thing!

On more dev-side note, I purchased a previous-gen MacBook Pro yesterday. I hope it arrives soon. I’m getting this because I would really like to consolidate my development onto a single machine. Using Parallels desktop, I’m really hoping to be able to do my Linux, Mac, and Windows dev all from the comfort of that one laptop. I’m starting a new game project this coming week, so I’ll give it a real try for a month and see how it goes. If it doesn’t work out as well as I hope, well, at least I’ve got a new laptop

On a “if you are a game dev you better show up” note, Ludum Dare #13 is this weekend. You get 48 hours to make a great game! I’m quite looking forward to this one

Cheers!
-Phil

So this past week or so was pretty wild. I was doing all “behind the scenes” stuff mainly. Sometimes these sorts of things are kind of weird to do, because the main goal is to do them in such a way that nobody really notices that I did them (so the point of this blog post is to point out the invisible so I can FEEL like I accomplished something in the last two weeks) … Anyway, they (supposedly) had to get done so that everything can keep moving along without collapsing.

• Fixing up the themes on galcon.com so that all the pages actually use the same header/footer and everything. I also restyled the whole site so that all the pages use the same style.css file. (Previously each part of galcon.com had its own stylesheet. Weirdness.)
• Moved to using a real mailing list (it took me forever to decide!) But in the end yourmailinglistprovider.com seemed to be the ticket. This is a pretty big step. Previously I was running some script which took a very long time to send out the newsletter and made me very nervous.
• Updated my game server with init.d scripts so that should my server get rebooted, the game servers will automagically restart. Previously, well, if the server got rebooted, no games would come up.
• I also migrated www.imitationpickles.org/galcon/ to point to www.galcon.com .. So now all the “classic” Galcon customers get to see my new swell site. This is also good for search engine stuff, so galcon.com has a nice position now.
• While I was at it, I set up google mail for galcon.com .. So now I can e-mail in style!
• Upgraded the maze so that each user’s “save state” is a single database record. Previously I saved the full history of a user’s game, so a single user could have hundreds of records if they were wandering around. This table got to around 362,525 records and it was making those pages go pretty slow! With a single record per user, I’ve only got 1371 records in the table and things are nice and fast again. (BTW – Maze 2.0 is up, you can create your own separate adventure mazes now!)

On a more “in your face note” I did add in a games section to galcon.com. I’m sort of excited about this, because it makes it look like I’ve actually made more than one game More importantly, it makes it really easy for me to put up a quick page for small games. I’m always making new mini-games for game-dev compos or whatever that don’t necessarily deserve their own “special custom website” but I still want people to be able to get at them. This will make that possible. It also makes it easy for me to link to some of my game-dev friend’s games.

Laters!
-Phil

Right now I send out my newsletter via a hand-rolled PHP script.  I just sent out a letter this morning and it took 80 minutes to process.  Not only does it take forever, but I am a bit concerned I might not be doing it “right”.

All that said, I’m in the market for getting some decent mailing list software, or subscribing to a decent service.

So, “dear lazy web” .. Can anyone give me a rec?  What’s good in the software or service markets?

My one “requirement” is the ability to import a CSV file of e-mail addresses every month.  And if someone unsubscribes, I want it to be smart enough not to re-add them if I re-import them.

Thanks!
-Phil

Hey – my healthcare business is hiring! Yay!

We’re looking for someone who lives in western New York, is a pythonic PHP coder, and enjoys consulting and software maintenance.

Here’s the full listing at monster and at craigslist.

Cheers!
-Phil

Watermelons is the ultimate fruit rescue mission game! The local watermelon tree has gone berserk and is producing fresh watermelons at an amazing rate.

You must move your trampoline at high speed in order to save the melons from splattering horribly on the ground. You get ten slip-ups before you lose your job as the Melon Master.

Includes high scores, realistic watermelon sound effects and authentic watermelon bouncing soundtrack.

Watermelons was first created in several hours using python+pygame.  I then ported it to haxe.  And then last of all, I ported it to the iPhone / iPod touch using C code.  I suppose the dev lesson learned is .. rapid prototyping stuff in python is really quick and easy.  So when I port a game from python to something else, I’ve got the whole game concept down, so it’s fairly straight forward to switch to a static language like C.  If say, the problem was not well defined, I suspect it would be harder to implement the games in C first.  (I think my statement here was particularly true for porting Galcon to the iPhone.)

Anyway, check out the flash version, and if you think it’s worth your 0.99, you can get it on the App Store now

A client of mine hosted with cihost recently had an outage.  (Which hasn’t ended.)  They want to move their dedicated server elsewhere.  Any suggestions?  I’ve done plenty of googling for stuff, but really, personal rec’s carry way more weight for me.  We want a host that:

• linux (LAMP stuff)
• e-mail server
• has excellent uptime
• can manage backups
• has excellent support
• can manage security
• is able to deal with a crisis (say, a backhoe digs up their fiber, they are able to get your server running somehow within half a day)

Which I suppose aren’t really extravagant demands, but anyway .. I’d appreciate any recommendations you can offer.  The hosting is for a U.S. based company, so we’ll want a host with data centers here.

Please don’t bother responding with a rec if you haven’t personally been with said host for at least 3 years.