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Comment by fiblye | Hacker News Reader

Demo uploaded to mediafire because I don't want to completely kill my server: http://www.mediafire.com/?hh5x0jcvvkiwd5i

I tried to get it out fast and just barely tested it, but it should be stable. The demo has three bosses, ~25 areas, and a good taste of the gameplay.

My server seems to be intermittently dying, so Chrome Store link for anybody interested in purchasing (buying through my site would be preferable, though): https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subbania/epnejcjdg...

The demo now lets players skip cutscenes by hitting the Enter/Return key. Z/X/C (or 1/2/3 if you don't have a QWERTY keyboard) control actions and the arrow keys control movement.

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Long time indie game developer here; if you're looking to make money from this, you need to have the demo playable directly on your website.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that serving the game even on S3 would cost $2 per 1000 players - much less elsewhere (I use 100tb but that's overkill for you).

I don't know if you're keeping track of the conversions - from hit to download and hit to sale - but you should easily make $10 per 1000 hits. $3 is also too low; you're likely to make far more revenue at $5 or $7.

I wouldn't be surprised if this change alone raised your revenue by ten times or more for people not coming from the ultra curious HN crowd.

You also should make the intro more like 10 seconds long at most. Split the intro cutscene up and show it slowly over the levels.

Seriously. You need to do this. I guarantee you're losing at least half the players.

Some other notes from a quick playthrough:

* Shadowing is impressive!

* You should probably scale 2x by default. Full screen is too big and default is too small

* I love the premise of the story

* You should have a visual reaction when you're hit

* Sticking in the same direction as you're firing works but I would limit it to key down, not key hit - let the player turn as normal when they tap fire

* It would be awesome if stalactites fell when you shot them, able to take out enemies

* Unfortunately I closed the game accidentally having gotten this far in the list and couldn't bring myself to button mash through the intro again :)

One last thing; I understand that it's the end of a long project and you just want to get it out. But the hours you spend to get the launch right (marketing, testing, feedback from friends etc) are critically important to the success of the product as a whole.

They're easily worth 10x as much to the bottom line as the hours you spend hacking away in the middle of the project. Single changes can have a 20% or 50% or 100% impact on sales.

I wouldn't try to release quickly and barely test a project I've been working on for two weeks, let alone two years - something to keep in mind so you don't have to learn it the hard way like I (and many others here) did.

In any case, great first project! Do you have a mailing list to sign up to? I'd be interested in hearing about whatever you come up with next.

Such great advice. While I was excited by this, I never actually ended up installing the game, because it was perceived as too much effort.

I clicked on the article link expecting to be able to play something straight away without installing anything, given that it's HTML5. Also considering the epicness of such a personal and time consuming project, I was surprised to find a youtube video, followed by a payment decision.

OTOH if I'd been playing a demo already while while being entertained, converting to a paying customer, would have been much more likely.

I say all this of course, because given what I saw in the video, it looks awesome and want you to be rewarded as much as possible for your efforts.

Amazing game. You could easily charge 8-10$ for it. Maybe more with the right marketing.

I'm not sure about the cut-scene advice. Yes - I can see you loosing players but It's part of what makes this game feel very retro. Sure, you could tweak it a bit and do the cut scenes a bit shorter. Also you should add an option of skipping the cut-scenes alltogether. I did a replay of the first part and would happilly trade x-x-x with a single escape press.

Agree with the @reitzensteinm. You should have visual reaction to hit. I was kind of expecting it since you had a lot of other visual effects such as screen shake etc.

You've done an amazing job. Do you have a twitter account we could follow? app.net?

The introductory cutscenes could be really trimmed down and still convey the same basic plot and feel.

Regardless, they should be ruthlessly expunged from the demo. :)

>if you're looking to make money from this, you need to have the demo playable directly on your website.

I'll work on this. My website seems to be handling the strain better than I'd expected, so I really have no excuse.

>$3 is also too low; you're likely to make far more revenue at $5 or $7.

I actually tested it at $3.99 when I first submitted it. Nobody was buying it at all, so I dropped it to $2.99 and quickly made my first few sales. It could probably also be attributed to my lack of a demo during this period, though, but I'm pretty certain the price drop had a non-negligible effect. Maybe $3.99 is just an ugly number?

>You also should make the intro more like 10 seconds long at most. Split the intro cutscene up and show it slowly over the levels.

This is honestly something I struggled with. I didn't want an overly long intro, but at the same time I wanted an intro that'd let the player know what's going on immediately. I couldn't find any other way to pace it, so I loaded it up front and towards the end with the meatiest part of the gameplay in the middle fairly uninterrupted. I probably did lose some of the customers who play games exclusively for the action, but my main goal was to make something that wasn't necessarily complex gameplay-wise, but had a decent plot to help string it along.

>* Shadowing is impressive!

Most of my initial criticism came from how I did shadows, but I insisted upon keeping them. I'm surprised I've actually received positive multiple comments on it.

>I wouldn't try to release quickly and barely test a project I've been working on for two weeks, let alone two years - something to keep in mind so you don't have to learn it the hard way like I (and many others here) did.

The main game's been extensively tested; the demo was rushed out because I didn't really plan on releasing one. Comments and criticisms will be immediately applied to the demo, but I'll slowly add them into the full game so that I have time to test them more fully. It's also a reason why cutscene skipping isn't in the full game yet--it can sometimes yield weird audio issues.

>In any case, great first project! Do you have a mailing list to sign up to? I'd be interested in hearing about whatever you come up with next.

Nope. I just infrequently update my blog. I only feel comfortable showing my work after I consider it complete, and it's definitely a problem because it's practically impossible to generate hype.

Something you didn't mention, but something I definitely need to work on, is my writing and organization. If I hadn't spent all my time throwing random elements of the game together at arbitrary points in time, I could easily make something of this caliber every few months.

And thanks for the advice.

This is great and really helpful advice, and why I still believe HN has the best signal to noise ratio of any site out there.

  this.img.src = this.img.src.replace(/Fish[a-zA-Z0-9]\./, "Fish"+this.direction+".")

It looks like this line is executed on every frame for all fish in the level. For Firefox users who have the Ghostery addon installed, this makes things rather slow because every setting of the src property invokes Ghostery to check whether or not it wants to block the image load.

Granted, that should be another reason for me to uninstall Ghostery, but I wanted to let you know.

That was the first NPC I ever made and it's evidence of my dumb code from back then. Guess I forgot to change it.

how did you figure out that this LOC slowed things down?

Using the new Firefox profiler [0], which isn't quite ready for public consumption yet but already very helpful:

1. Download Firefox Nightly [1]

2. Install the profiler addon [2]

3. Play the game

4. Press Cmd+Shift+O to open a profile of the most recent few seconds

5. Wade through the tree until you find nsIDOMHTMLImageElement_SetSrc, which is called by <Anonymous>() @ CompletedEnemies.js:2460. This function contains only one line which assigns to the src property of an image, and that's the line I pasted.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Performance/Profili... [1] http://nightly.mozilla.org/ [2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/gecko-profile...

I knew I was gonna get something good when I asked that question, thank you!

Very cool game. I love the art style!

I've been working on Ejecta[1] in the past few month. If you want to publish your game on the iPhone/iPad, this could be interesting to you. I'd love to know if (and how well) it works with your game.

[1] http://impactjs.com/ejecta

Your project looks cool. Did you implement it from scratch or are you using any iOS web framework ?

It's all from scratch. The canvas implementation initially had some bugs, but it should be pretty close to the spec right now.

Are you Peter, and did I meet you at SS2012?

I am curious about your javascript integration with the app. Did you use V8 internally with some kind of bridging for Objective-C ? It would be great if you have a blog on the subject. Thanks.

Since you already went to the work of implementing everything from scratch anyway, is there a reason that you don't compile the code up front?

My understanding was that the big bottleneck for Javascript on iOS was the inability to use JIT (due to the lack of execute support for code on the stack or heap) and this seems like the perfect opportunity to bypass that issue entirely.

Just downloaded it. I'll test it out soon.

Agreed, the cutscenes are way way too long for a demo! The dialogue took forever to change, as well.

(Probably too long for the game, hard to judge.)

For a demo, I think the ideal length would be under 5s, just to show the artistic style. :)

Maybe I'm just impatient, but after the third consecutive cut-scene I just closed the window and uninstalled it.

I think you should give the option to the user to skip the cut scenes altogether.

I did originally have the option to skip cutscenes, but removed it.

Is holding X to skip through dialogue not enough? Because I could re-add skipping.

In a demo it should be skipped by default.

I just re-added the ability to skip cutscenes by hitting Return/Enter.

I think that in terms of pacing, it would be a lot better to have a much shorter cutscene followed by at least a little gameplay and then have some more cutscenes.

I only kept going because so many people here praised the art style (which is brilliant, by the way).

Pacing. Pacing. Pacing. Three cutscenes in a row isn't a video game, it's a lecture :)

FYI, I bought my copy through the Chrome store because I've had so many negative experiences with PayPal. If it's preferable people buy through you, maybe doing something like Stripe would make sense?

I bought the game via the PayPal link but so far haven't received my copy. Not sure if this is related to the load on your site. In the meantime I'll play around with the demo. But I did want to mention that I hadn't received it yet as there are likely to be other people in a similar situation. Maybe it's worth putting a note on the blog post?

I'll send it to you right now.

I did make a little note at the bottom of the page about the possibility and I'd hoped it wouldn't happen, but I hope everybody who has a problem tells me as soon as possible.

awesome, thanks! I'll definitely give it a more complete try soon :) Immediate impression though was that it badly needs some kind of key explanation - so far I've figured out arrow keys, and space or 'x' to fire, but I have no clue if that's everything or if I'm missing something important (like that sign before the save point - can I read it? it looks interact-able, but I can't figure out how).

as a fyi: I seem to be stuck here on the demo: http://cl.ly/image/2o0m202s361M which appears after this: http://cl.ly/image/0C0b423f1Q2b (I basically touch the stala(ctite|gmite) combo and then I'm stuck).

Thanks for not obscuring the source, I'm enjoying reading it :)

You're welcome.

I knew that obscuring the source code wouldn't do anything to prevent piracy, so I figured I'd just leave it as is so people can see how I did things.

Thanks a lot. Aspiring developers, like myself, can learn a lot from your work.

Thank you. Very inspiring!

Seems to be broken in Firefox 16.01 (Linux).

I get the title screen. 'x' or return will take me to a map screen, at which nothing happens except music playing.

"I tried to get it out fast and just barely tested it, but it should be stable."

So you spent 2 years developing something, but then didn't even test it for a few days because you wanted to get it out "fast"? I just don't understand this mentality.

He did not have a demo when posting on Hacker News. Someone asked for one in the comments here, so he put it together as fast as he could. So really, he just didn't think of creating a demo at all until after he announced the game. These things happen, things can be overlooked.

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