Retrorunner Refurb

[meems]

I've got 2 games projects on atm.
One of them is refurbing and publishing a game i made 4 years ago, but didn't release cos I lost interest once the fun coding part finished.
RetroRunner 2, written in blitzbasic. Anyone remember it? I posted in on the blitzresearch showcase, then I made a sequel, but didn't inform anyone.

RetroRunner 2 - What I worked on thru my 20s


Like many, I get bogged down with 'paperwork', i find it a chore, but I think it holds me back more than most.
What I want to do here is log the process of getting a 99.9% finished game onto the market. Was hoping the community could help a bit, from what I gather there is substantial experience of getting a game to market, which impresses me. I hope I can learn from you.
So its not a normal worklog. But if all goes well, this worklog should be a useful record for anyone like me who finds publishing a game daunting.

tasks I see ahead
1. get the game working on as many test PCs as possible
2. create a game company ltd
3. get a publisher to accept game
4. marketing
- get profit -

starting with 1. I've got the demo pretty much fully working again on my dev PC, but I need to test it on other PCs. Anyone like to test it?

[IanMartin]

1. Yes, and as many different OSes.  If it's Windows, it should run back to Win 7.  You don't need to worry much about XP as official support has ended.  It should also run on the latest Windows 10.
2. Depending on which country you live in, you may not have to do this.  A lot of people spend a bunch on making an official company or corporation before they are making enough profit to worry about such things.
3. You don't really need to do that anymore either.  If it's Windows, the market is 99% Steam, and you can set everything up there for yourself.
4.   Does anyone know how to do that right?!

[meems]

Hi Ian
It for windows. I designed it on win98, XP, and win7 and as far as I know it works on them and win8. But for win10 it wouldn't load, the fonts and the graphic reloads were causing images to go 'missing'. Strangely some of the bugs made sense when I traced them, like they were genuine errors in the code, but somehow they didn't manifest on previous windows versions. 
fixed now, at least on my dev machine. up next : make a zip file and test it on other machines.

[IanMartin]

Windows 10 does things different with files permissions.  If you're running your game in Program Files, you can't write to there, for instance, you have to write your saves, etc. to %AppData%
Most of the things that ran on Win 7 but won't work on 10 were file issues.  Most people are on 10 now, so you need to make sure it works on that platform!

Good luck with it, it looks cool to me, love the retro stuff

[meems]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1sbd7esbzy42yy2/rr2install.exe?dl=0

here's a test demo. please try it out. does it work on your machine? any glitches?

[Naughty Alien]

..tested it just now and so far works very well..always loved lode runner type of games..nice work..ill try later more.. 

[meems]

2. Depending on which country you live in, you may not have to do this.  A lot of people spend a bunch on making an official company or corporation before they are making enough profit to worry about such things.

In my case it may be prudent. I took music from the mod archive. I spent weeks hunting down as many authors as I could and got either signed permission or email permission, but some I just couldn't contact. It wasn't a half-assed search either, I asked around several music communities, followed every lead, and contacted several authors who'se email addresses on author info sites were out of date, some who were no longer in the music communities. It was quite fun, felt like a detective.

So, I figure I'd just publish the game w/o full permission on all of the music. Chances are the uncontactable authors will not be bothered. If they are, then I'll be ready to respond with either an agreement or withdrawal of use. but if they are unreasonable and want to destroy me then it would be nice to have a company ltd as a shield.
I wonder if anyone else has been down this path.

[Naughty Alien]

..henry makes me angry..

[meems]

https://meemoeuk.itch.io/retrorunner-2-demo

ok I've put the demo on itch, which was very easy to do. any advice on what happens next?

@greyAlien
erm, have you got past that fiend Henry yet? No joke, it's vital I get a good idea how players 1st deal with the game. In this modern era of insta-play games, can't have the 1st levels being too awkward to get into by todays standards.

[meems]

my game isn't found in the itch search by is name ( RetroRunner 2 ) or the tags I gave it.

wot do? Wait for it to be audited or something?

edit : I had to make it 'public'. ok, done.

[meems]

so what use is itch?
i thought it was a more accessible version of steam, and structurally yes, its exactly that.
But there's something wrong, perhaps its not itch's fault, or at least not itch's intention.
  There appears to be too much influx of new games for it to function as a game outlet.

I've uploaded my game and it hasn't immediately gone viral. I'm also looking at others trying to get their game noticed on itch, and it looks impractical. The rate of new game influx is about 1 every 30 minutes. The dev & new game to player ratio seems way too high. Some devs are fighting to fanfare the release of their game above the noise of influx of new games, but they don't seem to be doing well. I don't fancy that, I've tried b4, no fun.

So if itch IS functioning as an all purpose game outlet, how does it work?
i see 2 ways
1. quick way : dev pays itch to sticky their game on the front page
2. slow way
i) game released, gets 6 hrs and a couple of downloads on the front page b4 vanishing into the swamp
ii) a very slow amount of traffic finds its way to un-noticed games via the tags
iii) if game is exceptionally good, and with a lot of luck, slowly over months, game goes viral via social nets.

otherwise itch functions only as a game repository for devs, with the odd player wandering in by mistake.
Time to look at marketing it seems, any advice on this?

[meems]

for e.g. on the impracticality of advertising on itch.
Aside the auto showcasing of your game as its released, itch has an announcement forum. So announce your new game there! show it to the world! Erm no. The new topic life is even shorter than the new game showcase, like 15 minutes, because aside the flood on new game announcements, there's also new update announcements. The views per announcement are typically single digit, and thats just the dev team looking at their own thread. Devs who fight to keep there game up on the board get to low double digits, before their announcement thread sinks into the swamp.

something else has to be done b4 your game can be effectively released to the consumer market.

[Steve Elliott]

Before you think about advertising you should ensure it runs on the latest version of Windows.

[meems]

does it work on your PC Steve?

[Steve Elliott]

I'm having all sorts of problems meems, I'll elaborate tomorrow.