A Shooter Enters Peer Review

So what next?

Take a nice break and sip a BIIG cuppa tea?

Nope is the short answer. In fact i started this morning by peer reviewing 4 games. I know i should have been working on the Press release, but i gotta pay my dues. In fact i quite enjoyed most of them, so it wasn't torture, but it does take me a fair while to get through them. When i am in the middle of developing a game i do not have much bandwidth to do much reviewing and i tend to prefer Playtest anyways. So they are the only games i usually do, unless it is one of the Peers i chat with regularly on Twitter. My Tweeple can have my time anytime!

So yeah, ya mighta guessed it. I have not done the press release yet. and to be honest i am not in the mood tonight either, or not at this point in time. So maybe tomorrow sometime, i will see then. What is bothering me is still the setting up of the competitions for the t-shirts and hats i bought. What if the high score sharing component doesn't work out. I guess i could cancel the comp till i do another version, yeah maybe thats it.

Well i have spent an hour testing my games review version on the xbox and it seems aok. time will tell on that one as well.

G'night

I suck at The Midway Comps

So far i have run 2 competitions for Codes for The Midway. Both have managed to suck in some way or other. Let me tell you about them.

1. My first try was to do a ReTweet competition. I see these all the time and i think they are fast, dynamic and easy. Well i thought they seemed easy till i actually did one. First off ya gotta have enough followers that are interested in what you are giving away. Most of my followers are industry peeps and mostly on the Xbox. This seems like the wrong demographic to be giving out codes to. You are correct of course it was. Though that was not my real issue.
I started off by saying the comp would end at midnight and someone would be chosen that was following me and retweeted #themidway tag. Seemed simple enough and i was just following on from what i have seen others do. However i ran into an issue right away.
Which midnight? Yep, thats right i needed to clarify that i mean't Pacific standard time, as i am a west coaster. DOH! time for some retweets of my midified 140 chars.
At 10 minutes to midnight i decided to start looking at who might be eligible for winning. I was really interested in how many people were in the running. As it turns out a quick search showed me 3. I had hoped for 6 at least, ahh well. Then i went thru my emails telling me that people had started following me. Lo and behold there was a person in there that had started following me and had also retweeted my message, BUT was not appearing the search list. How, How can that be? I still do not have the answer, but i added him to the list and at 12 midnight i got a random number and it hit one on the list. I DM'd him the code and that was that.
2. My second competition was simple as well. This time i put in a barkey code into a post i have on this blog. I then colored it black to match the background. To see it you just have to select the page and Whammo, there it is. I only tweeted about the fact that it existed and before long someone had found it. But it did not work for him. I was sorely disappointed, but at the time had no idea why it did not work.
It has to do with zones. I did not know that my codes were only for the American servers. So the people that kept finding the code in my Blog post were from Europe, bah! This disappoints me greatly.
In the end someone tried the code from America on my blog only to discover it has already gone. Though i do not know who has claimed it, as they have not told me. But i am glad someone is using the barkey now 8D

Next competition will be another twitter one, but i am running out of time before i travel to England tomorrow. so maybe i will get one more in tonight, and then i will do more of them when i get back from Blighty. Also i will ask for some european codes as well. I hate to miss people out, isn't that some sort of prejudice ? haha

Laters

Once again Twitter Buddies to the Rescue

Today and in fact a few days ago i was stuggling with some Xna coding. I know i probably should read all the help and documents pertaining to the C# language and the Xna suite provided by Microsoft. But i cannot bring myself to spend the time. It would be time not spent on programming and gameplay. So what do i do when i get stuck.

Well to start off i try to find any web page with the right info on it. Then i browse the Xna forums and Faqs. But if these turn up empty, as they have recently, what should I do ?

In both these cases i ended up posting a simple question to my twitter feed. Then wait a few minutes or less, and Voila.. refresh and the answers are mine. Not just simple answers. Some people give me links and more info than i ever needed. WOOT! It is like having my own workmates, or online live help. Seome people from twitter have helped me sort design items out and color etc.

These people ROCK and deserve a lot of credit for caring about lil ole me.

Thanks eveyrone for the recent help.
@clingermangw
@quimbyrbg
@mikebmcl
@mechaghost
@echofiend
@kriswd40
@hodsey77
@tehgrumpydude

This is only the recent selection of help i have received. I apologize if your name is not present and you have helped me recently. I cannot get it all right all the time. Or even some of it right some of the time. HAHA

g'night and Twitter on!

Some Devs just Rock

Lately i have been chatting quite a lot with various other Xblig Developers. We hav been sending little messages across twitter and back. It has been fun, it has been revealing. It has been a litle bit of an eye opener.

I have gotten closer to some of these devs because they are like me. In various ways I see what they are up to and can most definitely feel their pains and as well as their hopes and dreams.

Here are a few points..
We all want more from Xblig
We want the channel to be more successful, not just our own titles.
We see that other titles being successful has the potential to be good for our business too.
We all put our hearts and souls into our games.
Disappointment when soemthing worked on so hard is not successful.
Some level of disappointment when an Avatar zombie game that is crap sells well.
Although we do not all have the same experience or talent, effort is measurable.
We want to do more from our games, but feel that current Xblig will not support our efforts.

Ok, i am gonna stop there. I have had a lot of conversations with other devs. It has ben fun and that is something i never expected from Twitter, which at one time i hated and thought was worthless. I no longer feel that way. It has given me a way to connect with my Peers and i love it for that.

So... To all you Indie devs that I chat with each month or week on and off. Keep doing what ya doing and I wish ya all the best of luck. (yes, i know some people i am refering too are not on Xblig, but Xna and iPhone etc).

Time to work on the Global high score again :o