How to Fly

After two years of canceling projects, I finally finished something!

Read about it here:
http://zandairstudios.110mb.com/news.php?readmore=20

Took me two weeks to make.

Any thoughts?

I still need to spread the game around some (gonna post it at GMC and might submit it to some indie game sites). But having the game reach number 7 on the Top Rated Games of All Time list on Yoyo doesn't hurt. :)

Of course, that was only after 2 plays. It'll plummet soon. But still, I might end up getting a larger potential audience for this than I thought...

EDIT: Damn! Shot down already! After the fifth guy who played it gave the game a one (I calculated...). Grr...

Alex wrote:EDIT: Damn! Shot down already! After the fifth guy who played it gave the game a one (I calculated...). Grr...

The maturity of the average Yoyogames user rivals most eight-year-olds. You can't expect an art game to go far in YYG. They're a bunch of whiny and unappreciative preteens, I mean the one-starers will go crazy with underrating but they can't make a game outside the resource pack themselves. Which is why I stopped using Game Maker. Still I have an slight urge to post a game on there just because I'm so good at Game Maker now and they have a huge user base.

Actually, I'm overall pleased with how people have responded to the game. I've been tracking each and every rating (Usually only another person rates it each time I check out the game on YoYo, so its fairly easy)
So far:
3 5s
2 4s
2 1s

I added the warning in the info box in case it'd scare the kiddies away.

Zandair, I noticed you used all WAV files for the game. You should look into OGG files. There's sure to be extensions for ogg playback. WAV files are completely uncompressed so your download is huge at 12mb (which doesn't seem so bad it's just some people have crap ISPs).

But remember don't compress OGG too much, use at least 256kbps. The problem with low-bitrate audio is that it'll start crackling on high-end equipment (not to mention it'll cut off the lows and highs). Which is why lossy formats suck because most people don't understand that and compress their stuff to hell to save hard drive space.

Reason for not suggestion MP3s is: 1. the format itself is copyrighted. 2. itunes or another equally crappy media player* might pick up your mp3s.

*Foobar2000 is an example of a good media player. iTunes is the new Real player.

I'll keep that in mind next time, thanks.

"but it was the first GM game that anyone besides Jonny or Aaron put their hands on. It was pretty exciting."

At least 300 people have played the Game Maker version of Pixelia. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I know it's at least that. Someone took the trouble of uploading it under their name on YYG, and just that got almost 200 people most of which loved it. Thin Ice 3 was played over 400 times on yoyogames alone. It was down-rated fast being a competition entry. Not that I care.

Funny the preteen community of Yoyogames think they have a chance in the competitions even though their games consist mostly of this image:

It's wrong to think you're going to be universally praised (or even praised at all). I don't really like my Thin Ice 3 game that much, but still it beats the pants off the resource pack games.

Yoyo Games might be the Xbox Live of game development communities, but you get a lot of traffic.

The reason that I was critical of Game Maker Games was that so few people even considered playing it.
Two of the three people who actually commented on the game itself didn't like it because it didn't fit their definition of a game. One of them didn't even play it.
Sure, their opinions are as valid as most, but its not helpful, and the players clearly didn't enjoy the game. Nothing's going to change their opinion any time soon.
My next game will have a simple combat mechanic for the sake of narrative (albeit an unchallenging one), in addition to some exploration. Pseudo-gameplay like that might trick them...

BTW, I'm not totally pleased with this game myself. The fact that I could already dissect so many flaws in it independently shows that.
I've only got 23 downloads so far (yoyo+filefront). What did you do to spread Pixelia around?

Alex wrote:What did you do to spread Pixelia around?

I never actually advertised the game itself besides putting it on the GMC. All I did was advertise my old site. I'd link it in my signature, I submitted it the GMG Topsites (it got all the way up to #3), and I got my site linked to by some Game Maker resource site. The game was good so it did well. Almost everyone who plays it likes it.

I guess my crumby old site saw a lot of traffic

I actually found your old site once before I met you on SW. Heh.