PUPPY GAMES needs YOUR GAME

General Discussions
#1

Puppy Games (that’s me, Chaz, and Charlotte) have only so many fingers, and most of the time, those fingers are occupied grubbing in the soil for worms for dinner instead of writing fantastic games.

So what are YOU doing with your spare time?

Puppy Games needs top quality games to publish. And here’s a special offer you cannot ignore:

We will publish your first Java game with us for no royalty for 12 months.

We have only a few criteria:

[]It’s got to be written in Java and use the LWJGL or similar tiny library…
[]…because the compiled demo EXE must be no more than about 10 megs or so
[]It’s got to live up to our production standards before we’ll publish it - and we’re very demanding
[]We don’t want to know unless it can be played! Keep your ideas to yourselves and get those alphas up and running
[*]It’s got to be original and fun. Or mostly original, and really fun :smiley:

Take advantage of the cross-promotional opportunity to sell games to other customers! Take advantage of our huge site exposure! Take advantage of our huge list of promotional contacts! Take advantage of our win-win publishing deal terms!

You CAN put Java gaming on the map. Please direct any enquiries to me directly via email.

NOW!

Cas :slight_smile:

#2

I Guess that means no J3D huh?

#3

Not a chance!

Cas :slight_smile:

#4

a question - what exactally do you mean by “compiled demo EXE”? Are you talking about the installer, or compiling the java code down to native code using somthing like Jet?

If the latter - why? Plenty of games are distributed with an installer.

Will.

#5

We compile the demo with JET to get the size down. As time goes by this gets less relevant… 60m broadband punters are around now…

Cas :slight_smile:

#6

Could you define for me “tiny library”? (or is benchmark for size setup according to size of LWJGL?)

#7

Well let’s put it this way - we’re doing OK with the demo currently running at 11.5mb but I wouldn’t stray too far beyond that if at all possible.

Having said that, we’re open to suggestions if someone came up with an awesome game.

Cas :slight_smile:

#8

I guess this also means no AWT, doesn’t it?
Or is a bytecode distribution for the demo possible too in any way?

Erik

#9

AWT is probably not going to happen while it bloats the distribution so massively. Having said that, if your game warrants having an entire JRE shipped along with it, maybe it’ll work out - I just think you’re hardly going to get any downloads. We have to be pretty realistic about why Java itself is spreading so slowly - it’s massive, and it doesn’t even do anything.

Cas :slight_smile:

#10

Not every game is Alian Flux however. Different games have different needs and target audiances.

If you target casual PC users then perhaps you need to ship everything, but advanced users may have no trouble with “if you don’t have java 1.4.2 installed - go here first”. It’s not too hard to have two downloads.

I think you are unnessesarily restricting your potential customer base. If someone thinks they can make a valid business poposal then why try to tell them otherwise? Is there anything to loose?

It appears many PC’s may be java-enabled in the near future anyway - http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/32981.html and Dell is where all the beginners go…

Do book publishers say “I will only publish books of 350 pages in soft cover”? or “I will only publish books for children”? Normally not - they think “can I make money (or exposure) from publishing this?”, “am I physically able to publish this?” and if the answer is yes to both - then they do.

just my thoughts,

Will.

#11

Isn’t the JRE download only like 8 megs? (that is, significantly smaller than directx)

#12

Just checked: 14.3 Megs

#13

I should start checking my facts. Hehe.

#14

William, we’re quite well researched on our business model and it does to a very large extent rely on vast exposure. This really isn’t the retail industry. The downloadable games industry has four main factors:

  1. Download size. Every increase of 5MB in the demo reduces the downloads by 10%.

  2. Exposure. To sell thousands you have to reach millions.

  3. Simplicity. If it’s any more complicated than click-download-install-run, you immediately lose huge numbers of players, and hence customers.

  4. Conversion. You have to be able to convert demo downloaders into customers.

Each factor is a multiplied together to get the final sales rate. If any one factor is below par, the whole sales rate is affected. One of the easiest factors to address is download size - unless you’re coding in Java. Simplicity is likewise one of the hardest factors to address - if you rely on having JVMs being downloaded first, you again lost a vast percentage of customers. And so on. Best go and check out the Developer Articles on Dexterity.com for a full and detailed explanation.

Cas :slight_smile:

#15

Losing AWT would not be that big a deal anyway if you use LWJGL. The only thing I would have to rewrite for example is the texture loading (and probably ditching AudioClip, but that should never have been in there anyway :)).

#16

The fact is you’ve got to compare the download size with what you get from a C++ application.

In a 20MB C++ application you’ve more or less got 2MB of code and 18MB for content - that’s a big game.

In a 20MB Java application you’ve got 14MB blown in a JVM, 2MB of code or so (they’re approximately equal), leaving just 4MB for content. That’s a 20MB download for 4MB of content. Ouch! One day in the distant future Java might be present on 80% of all desktops and Webstarting will be the norm but until that day comes you’ll find, like we did, that the vast majority of downloaders don’t try Webstart. We had it all nicely set up to autodetect on our site and so on, only to discover that of 20,000 visitors from java.com didn’t bother with Webstart, they went straight to the .exe. What’s more, many download sites including the ubiquitous download.com won’t let you link to a file that’s not an exe or zip.

Or you can sort of cheat, like we did, but we won’t go into that here because I’m still having immense difficulty getting hold of Chris…

Cas :slight_smile:

#17

So what about the size of Direct X compared to the size of the C++ game?

#18

On the long term, java web start actually decreases download size because when you release new version you don’t have to download the whole thing again if you set it up clever. You can also set things up so that the jars get downloaded once you need them (although that may be a annoying in a game in many cases).
Unfortunately, these are arguments that will only make sense to people that have already bought the game or have web start installed and are familiar with it.
Before that, the other arguments like simplicity (not wanting to bother to download the JRE, find out what web start is, download the game etc) but also exposure are probably more important.

Erik

#19

You’re in the same boat no matter what with a few important differences:

Nearly all Windows users have DirectX installed, and nearly all DirectX installations are at version 7 now. DirectX 7 is perfectly adequate for 3D gaming and can be relied upon to be present, basically. Microsoft takes care of distributing DirectX and they do a much, much, better job of it than Sun does of distributing the JRE, and we all know why that is.

About 35% of my potential customers it turns out don’t have OpenGL installed, and of that 35%, about 1% of them bother to subsequently get drivers just to try out my game. One of my biggest problems at the moment getting that 1% up to a much higher figure (ideally 100%). I’m working on an automatic GL driver downloader which will do it on the fly when GL drivers are missing.

Cas :slight_smile:

#20

[quote]So what about the size of Direct X compared to the size of the C++ game?
[/quote]
How is that so important? DX gets delivered with the OS and indie games rarely need a higher version than that. And it gets delivered on about every coverdisk you can find. Plus a new version gets installed automatically when you install a game from CD. So people are automatically up to date.
I only dl’ed DX once because my current version had an annoying bug related to my soundcard, not because I didn’t have or needed the latest features to play this particular game or something.