Aha, Windows XP uses hardware acceleration for sound output. OpenALSoft will direct its sound through that. So it is probably the case that your sound drivers just need updating. I hope.
Cas 
Upgrading drivers didnt help (although I more than sure that there is no normal driver updates for my soundcard, rather ‘cosmetic’, it was like 2011 July drivers on website, and during installation I saw actually 2008 year version).
But anyway I tried this game on virtual machine and yes, it rocks! Liked it! Smooth graphics and very special atmosphere.
Did you know, that there is a “revengeofthetitans” aur-package on Archlinux?
But it doesn’t work for me 
yaourt is not able to find the downloaded tar.gz in the tmp path. May be due to my little partition, having 1.3 GB space left…
I am blissfully unaware of the contents of Archlinux, and sleep soundly in my bed at night. Size won’t be the problem - Revenge is comparitively tiny.
Cas
yep… just downloaded the demo by hand. It’s just 75 MB, thats not too much. I also played it… is fun 
I really like the sprite style and… maybe sounds strange… but I like the rocks
Really good work!
We are especially proud of the rocks They took about 2 months to get right, and they change on Mars and Titan.
Cas
Cas,
Will you be publishing a postmortem or lessons learned?
I was very impressed by the use of this site/forum for your alpha and beta testing, the great feedback everyone provided, and your persistence to deliver a great game. Some of the posts had me believing that the effort wasn’t worth the money made -until the indie bundle.
I think you and your team did a great job with the game! I bought it when it went to Steam. As a non-released indie developer, I’d love to hear about your lessons learned, what ways worked in marketing your game, handling alpha and beta feedback, managing support, integrating and using Steam (DRM, etc), how do sales look as an indie game (expectations vs reality vs steam sales, etc), what tools you used, what you would do differently…
I know you are extremely busy. However, if you write something long enough, you could publish to Amazon and sell it for a few dollars to make the effort a little more worthwhile.
Otherwise, maybe you can start with just answering a few questions for your avid followers and developers:
- what were your sales numbers on Steam (if you don’t mind me asking)? Did it go up a lot when Steam advertised it on the front page? Or bundled it with other indie games? or ran a sale on the price? or the winter awards/tickets for playing games and winning a steam achievement?
- how long does an indie game sell? (i.e. 3 months then sales drop way off, etc)
- what avenues for marketing were the best options?
- was the integration with Steam easy/hard? do they provide enough info or did you have to discover? (I read your blog post regarding the activation codes and the birthday giveaway)
- what tools did you use? (development, art, exe for java, libraries)
- how does the auto-updater in steam work? (i.e. did you have to add custom code, etc)
- the indie bundle was a huge success… how did you guys become a part of that?
- any other comments / suggestions for other developers?
Thank you in advance!!!
-Charles
Cas,
I didn’t see your “Ask Anything” post until after I posted this. http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/go-on-ask-me-anything/23960/view.html
Many of the questions I asked are answered there… so you don’t need to repeat yourself if you don’t want to. A full postmortem would still be awesome!
I’ll post my findings from your other forum…
-
As of Jan 2012: Steam sold 335,445 units (~$500k). That included your 2 games on Steam (RotT and TA), right? How did just RotT do? But I still have questions on #1 that I couldn’t find.
-
Sounds like it was easy for you. Steampuppy API was given to Steam for others to use? “Java is really, really easy to use with Steam. Just plonk lib and bin dirs in your depots and that’s all there is to it. I’m working on a Steam SDK binding at the moment, but I’m only going so far as to implement the bits I need (which will be achievements and the Steam Cloud).”
-
Eclipse, LWJGL (a library you started!), JarBundler and Jigsaw (avoid moleboxed), DRM (http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=574), 3DSMax and Photoshop (Chaz used and created scripting to trim/pack, used XML for animation), JOrbis for playing OGG sound; NSIS for Windows installers.
Launching on the MAC: “As a .app like we do. Just grab one of ours, replace the jars and edit the plist and so on. I can’t remember who originally gave me a bit of Ant script that does this for us but it’s pretty trivial.” -
Sounded like ‘by accident’
BTW, you also had a link to some source code – but the link was no longer valid.
Based on me reading your posts… I’d say if you can get on Steam with a good game, you have a chance to make some money. The chance to get on Steam sounded like a “if they like your game, they will sell it” – probably most important to make sure your game installs easy, works, no crashes, etc.
Thanks for being so forthcoming in your posts, Cas!
Well, seeing as I’m here… yes, one of these days I’ll write up a postmortem. But a few unanswered questions of yours could have some answers -
- Revenues now look like about $705k grossed as of July 2012. 121,457 units sold through Steam alone, 268,111 more keys given out through Humble Bundles and freebie promotions etc (total 389,568 units - so we’ve shifted another 55k units in 6 months)
- It’s still selling nicely though in general terms not enough to live on on a day-to-day basis; but occasional sales give big spikes which keep our daily average up at the level we need it to be. Only just, mind. If we were quicker at making games we’d probably be a lot better off but Chaz and I are very very very slow.
- In order of what things made the most money vs. time spent : 1. Being launched on Steam 2. Being in the Humble Indie Bundle #2. 3. Being in a Steam 24-hour Daily Deal 4. Being in one of the various Steam bundles. Everything else is so small as to be intangible but it’s hard to say whether anything else would be as effective without it. FWIW we only spend $10 a day on advertising and we barely make that back now in direct sales from puppygames.net.
- SteamPuppy implementations will be made available to all Steam NDA’d developers. The public Java API I can give out at random but it’s no use whatsoever unless you’re a Steam developer.
- Didn’t use JarBundler or Jigsaw btw
- It “Just Works”. Mostly always anyway. Seems to be missing CRC checksums which allows corrupted downloads. Grrr. You upload new files to Valve… shortly after everyone gets new files downloaded.
- By being very nice and helpful and polite to everyone we met for ten years. Yes, really! Got a big network of connections in the industry now.
- Not right now But let me just say that Java is pretty trivial to use on Steam and it’s made our lives massively easier as we’ve gotten Mac clients for free and with the forthcoming release of Steam for Linux we’ll have that covered at launch too - which is a pretty awesome situation to be in.
Cas
Being on Steam now is all about getting Greenlight. See http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/ This is Valve’s new ingenious shit filter.
You don’t even need code. Sketches, ideas, whatever. You just need a hoard of rabid fans to tell Valve they want to see your game. Obviously of course it is far easier if you’ve got a game to show people that they’ll do this. The purpose of Greenlight is to stop the constant flow of games that the tiny (<10 man) team at Valve who dealt with submissions had to wade through every day. I think we’re talking about tens of games every day they had to evaluate. They frequently got it wrong because, well, they’re just a bunch of people in a room. They had no idea what really was and wasn’t going to sell. Now they figure if you can get 10,000 people to ask Valve to greenlight a game then you’re in with a chance to make some money. Perfect.
Installation woes, crashes, etc - they’re all your own problem. Valve don’t have anything to do with it though I imagine after a certain threshold of complaint and whining they’d pull a title.
Cas
Thats very good news.
So basically you need a certain amount of “thumbs up” and you are in ?
and from what I read this can also take as long as you want/need
Yes - but remember you are essentially competing for hearts and minds against 1,000 other indie developers as well. I don’t know how they’re going to choose which greenlit titles to actually publish but I suspect that they’ll just pop the top 3 off the list every week.
Cas
Well clearly we just need to break all the other indie developers’ laptops.
We’re programmers! We can easily go evil and turn computers into bombs!
Cas,
Thanks again for the replies! You have been most helpful! I guess now that you have a published game on Steam, getting your next game there should be easy (maybe even not having to go through this Greenlight process).
The link you provided on the Greenlight process had something interesting…
“We’re going to be reaching out to developers as we see their games getting traction regardless of whether they have achieved a specific number of votes or are sitting 1st or 2nd place at any given time. We are most interested in finding the games that people want, not requiring them to always hit a specific number of votes.” - so, that’s good news.
I’ve thought about developing for the mobile devices - Unity3d being one of the tools that would make developing on any platform so much easier. However, I’d need to learn that tool and I’m not a 3d guy. Unity 4 looks to be an awesome tool though (and will support Linux on top of everything else it supports). I have years of Java experience (mostly web systems) with some UI and some game development on Java. I’ve even tried HTML5 game development - it works great for the right games. I guess it is time to start designing / planning a game to go after and determine the best tool for the job. I’m 90% sure though that I’ll be targeting Steam.
Cas, I’ll be looking for your next game! Keep up the great work!
One of my favorite games ;D Lots of fun to play, very addictive! I bought it on Steam a while ago and played it till the end, but I’m starting to feel the urge to start anew.
Congrats on making this a success!
I bought it some time ago in a humble indy bundle I think?
So where did I register it with an email of mine again? don’t know anymore I did anything like that, was it somewhere ingame?
If you got it from the Humble Bundle, that’s the place to download the latest version, assuming Jeffrey’s uploaded 1.80.18 by now.
Cas
sry that I wasn’t that clear, wanted to access the web editor^^