Greenlight votes skyrocketed and Ludum Dare

1000 Steam Greenlight Votes!!!!!!! 

Huge THANK YOU to everyone at Groupees.com for the support.

You are welcome to go and buy the bundle and support us indie developers. The community is friendly and chatty. Might sometimes go off point and talk about completely non related stuff, but still crazy and funny though. 

5 / 10 games from that bundle was already greenlit by the bundle and as you can see, DQ is going strong.

Here is a quick summary of all the games in the bundle from my Indie DB news page.

Ludum Dare 32. Theme: An Unconventional Weapon

Wow, what a unconventional theme :D

Some of the ideas we thought of:
Bovine launcher
Spatula of DOOM
Squid gun
Bar code scanner
Anti hipster weapon (shoots mainstream items at hipsters)

From that Bar code scanner sounded like fun, which in turn we thought of:

Tower Defense - Scanner towers - Kills bar code or their lines as they approach

Typing game - Click to scan code and then type code to destroy

Then we decided to try and look at a game from the perspective of the bar code. We ended up with AgentQR. A bar code agent which needs to reach the other side of an unconventional convenience store, in order to scan the disarming code into a bar code scanner / bomb.

Feel free to play it and let us know what you think :D

Ludum Dare Page

We also have a general mini pencil gun shopping trolley out to get you. 

This was my second Ludum Dare and my first one were I decided joined up with someone. My best friend Rudi was the obvious choice, as we have already dabbled in unity together and he is a good at Photoshop and coding. His expertise is mainly in webdesign, but I am slowly but surely luring him to the Indie Dark Side. So Rudi my young apprentice, I can't wait for the next Ludum Dare!

What an epic great week for indie development!

Can't wait to see what will happen in the next 7 days.

Till next week.

Cheers

My bad indie no dev week in South Africa

Welcome to dark africa... a mysterious place with slow bandwidth speeds, data caps, failing power grid and load shedding.

My week consisted mostly of chaos and darkness, so I am going to vent a bit here on my blog. You can skip my moaning and groaning and scroll down to see my updated steam greenlight stats and some other positive news :D

Quick personal info update: Seeing as I live in a very small town (100 people +-) I am the only one with any advanced IT knowledge.

Monday 
On my way home, just after I dropped my daughter off at school. I received a call to help with a dead computer, which died due to our power issues. So I needed to get a quote for a new computer and also for some UPSs due to all the load shedding. Then I needed to do some website maintenance work for some extra income.

Bye-bye quite morning of indie dev. I did get some work done in the afternoon.

Monday evenings, me and my best friend Rudi usually play some co-op games to relax and have some fun. Like 7 days to die, pay day 2, planet explorers, swtor or terraria. But oh-no not this evening, we both got load shedding!

Tuesday
6 am my ups alarm wakes me up. First I thought... o this is nice, load shedding early in the morning to get it out of the way. Sweet back to bed.... 9 o'clock and still no power. Asked around and found out they are busy fixing a problem on the power grid and the power will be off for the rest of the day. So bye-bye indie dev for Tuesday.

Wednesday
My humble bundle account for Delta Quadrant was activated. So I started to go through the motions of finalizing all the last info they needed. I needed to sign a Tax form(W-8BEN) they sent me, but I must fill in a ITIN number on there which I have no knowledge of. So of to the wonderful world of google. After reading on so local forums about other peoples experiences, I ended up on the IRS website.

Now I need to submit another form W-7 in order for me to receive the ITIN. Still not sure how this works, I continued reading and found this page where they list Acceptance Agent Program or Certified Acceptance Agents. The first one on the list - Deloitte and Touche has a local branch. Tried their website and found nothing to help me with this situation. I send them a support message, but haven't heard anything back yet.

With my wife off to work for the evening, the rest of the day consisted of watching after my daughter and more load shedding. Also starting to feel some flu symptoms.

Thursday 
The flu hit me hard throughout the night, so I decided to take a sick day and stay in bed. But, oh no.... murphy had some other plans for me. I received a call from that same person I helped on Monday. Nothing on their computer works, they can't open any files and some weird message about encryption is on their computer. Seeing as they have a business to run and everything has come to a standstill and no one close is even remotely able to help them. I had to take a warm shower and prepared to go out in the cold. After a quick look at their computer, I had no clue what caused the problem. But it had to be some kind of virus. Packed it up and took it home.

Ransomware, can you believe it!!!! They encrypt all your documents and even pictures and you have to pay them $500 in bit coins in order to receive the decryption. Read more - Wall Street Journal

Our local currency the ZAR is R12 for each $1. The $500 in our local currency is about R6000. That is a huge amount of money to pay, so of course they didn't. I had to format pc and with no backups It is a dire situation.

Friday
Today I helped setup the computer and tried to get them up and running. Also helped them with backup procedures. At least the flu symptoms are almost gone and I am feeling better. Looks like it was a quick and aggressive one.


Steam Stats Update

Still moving forward slowly, but I will get there :)

Part of a bundle

It looks like my game will be featured in a bundle next week! Can't wait and I will definitely blog about that next week. 

Ludum Dare 32

This weekend me and Rudi are doing the Ludum Dare!!!! My second one and I am so excited. Guaranteed to be blogged about also :D

Enjoy the weekend, I know I am! Even with all the stupid load shedding. 

Stay warm if you have an early winter like here. Till next week...

Jayson

Indie dev marketing slowly but surely

Still haven't heard anything from my email sent to Desura, so I decided to go on to the next target... Humble Store

Was a bit hard to find the page to submit a request to be on the market. But after I found the form, it was actually a breeze and also fun and funny. They have this whole Game of Thrones theme to all the examples where you have to fill in your info. Here is a screenshot:

I have submitted Delta Quadrant and I eagerly await their response.

The Steam Greenlight have lost some steam (pun unfortunately intended). The amount of unique visitors reaching DQs greenlight page has really slowed down. But it still keeps ticking on, so that's good at least. :D

There is some exciting news on the horizon, I just signed a contract yesterday to be part of an upcoming bundle sale. This includes NDAs and so forth so I am not sure if I am allowed to say who yet. 

The sale numbers for this type of bundles are usually around 3k-5k people. So this will be quite some exposure for Delta Quadrant. Hopefully this will lead back to the Steam Greenlight votes and give it a bit of a push.

One thing I can tell you... it is not a Humble Bundle :P

Till Next Week

Cheers

Jayson

Trying to publish to Desura and Steam update

With the steam greenlight slowly on its way I decided to start publishing to other markets also. I decided on Desura after seeing that they are being used by other indie devs on humble bundle and indie royale bundels and so on.

But for the life of me I cannot find a way to upload my game to them. I read through their guides and goggled for answers, but there is no clear guide with screenshots of the process. For example take a look at http://www.desura.com/how-to

There is only one screenshot on that page and it doesn't even look the same on my side. So I am totally confused as what to do. This "MCF create wizard" is nowhere to be found. I have sent them an email, informing them of my confusion.

Hopefully next week I will be able to provide you with an update on another place where DQ can be bought.

Steam greenlight update:

I have to say I hoped for better results, but it doesn't look like a lot of people are interested in this type of game. I am thinking of creating some "heavy casual" games. Games where you don't have to really think, just do. Some match 3 games or one click/touch games. Very basic and straight forward time wasters.

But I did get some great new comments:

Happy Easter

Till next week

Jayson