Hi everyone,
I am nearing completion on my first ppc game called "Ducklets". and a beta is available here:
I would really appreciate as much feedback as possible, especially for the following topics:
1) Does it actually work on your device? I have only tested on my iPaq1940, so am really hoping it will work on other devices too.
2) Does it run at an acceptable speed? ie. is it as smooth as you would expect?
3) What do you think of the game? Initial feedback from a few people I have showed it too have said it probably needs an added element of strategy, but couldn't say exactly what that might be ... I am still giving that thought.
4) What do you think it would be worth? I have no idea what price to put on it, but after having a bit of a browse around I think $4.95 is probably a good place to start (although I would much prefer $9.90 etc) I guess it's easy to try different things with pricing, but I would really like to hear from people who have been here before. Currently I am alt-tabbing between my handango developer registration form.
I would like to give Thierry a special thanks for PocketHAL. It was running at 13 FPS using GDI (which actually was quite playable), and I was going to leave it GDI but gave PocketHAL a go just to see how it would compare and haven't looked back. Also, I found an article written by Thierry on 3d basics, which I didn't actually use as my engine was well on it's way at that stage, but it seems he has over quite a few years put a lot of value into developer communities.
The story behind the game is ... well there is none yet. Basically, you have to shoot as many ducklets in 60 seconds as you can. You get more points for faster moving ducklets, and you lose points if you hit the plane.
I have tried to design a game that is simple, fun, and quick to play. Not sure what other people's opinion is, but I find the times when I play games on my iPaq is when I have a small amount of time to fill, and want to play something that's quick and easy, and doesn't take too much thinking. That was sort of the basis used to come up with the idea. Also, I tend not to keep huge (ie. 10MB) games on my ppc for very long - usually just to have a look, so I tried to keep the filesize of ducklets down as much as possible, and am pretty proud of the 180kb size (although most of the size is the background image).
Anyhow, looking forward to everyone's feedback.
Actually, while I'm in a typing mood - I would be interested to hear how other developers have found the developing process for ppcs. It has been such an uphill battle for me. I am very capable in Delphi and VB, and picked up C++ no worries, but found there are just so many things you have to build before you can even start thinking about creating a game. I have built all sorts of classes such as file, stream, graphics, image compression/loader, string, window/form controls, graphic based fonts, generic game and fps, and a whole bunch of other helper classes before I could even think about starting the 3d engine. It's fantastic now with all of the libraries I have developed, but for "backyard" developers starting up like myself, it's a huge investment of time before you can get a product on the market, and even then you are selling for prices that require huge quantities of sales to get return on investment. What do you guys think?
