Was inspired by a thread on Blitz to list my favourite game types:

Turns out that I like lots of game types:

– FPS (not played many recently though)
– Point n click adventure games (again not played any for years)
– Quite a few casual games
– Retro platform action
– Scrolling shoot ’em ups
– Tie Fighter and other various 3D flying star wars games.
– Scrolling beat ’em ups (prefer to static ones)
– 3rd person games like Tomb Raider (if they are good)
– A few RTS and turn-based games like Xcom, C&C.
– Gosh, I nearly missed out one of my favourite types: RPG games! Both 3D and Baldur’s gate style.
– Oh and I like some Alien Breed style games too.

I may well have missed some out, but that list is pretty comprehensive.

Game types that I dislike (or am indifferent to):

– Pretty much all sport and racing games except for a few like Golf, SSX Tricky, Burnout, GT3 etc.
– Sim games
– Dancing games
– Some retro games like Pac Man and Space Invaders basically are a bit boring.
– 3D space trading sims
– MMORPGs
– Deathmatch games (was addicted a few times to some like Quake3, and Unreal Tournament but ultimately they don’t hold much for me)

Probably I could add to this list but I don’t want to think about games that I don’t like any more 🙂

The sales stats for Gish have been released on Game Tunnel. This was an indie game that nearly everyone thought was cool but it’s interesting to see that it didn’t make a ton of money.

In fact assuming that the 3 developers worked full-time for the 6 months stated in the figures, then they each got $40000 each, so around $6722 per month. This is pretty good, but it’s not “massive”, especially for such a well known game.

Does this show that the holy gail of innovative Indie action games doesn’t actually pay out that well? I know someone who loved the game and said he would have bought it but he found it on a warez site first. How many other people did the same? That’s the problem with the target audience – they are warez savvy.

One thing I am impressed by is that they made such a huge number of sales (4521) on their *own* website, i.e. not on any portals. In fact portal sales are surprisingly low.

Anyway great stats, very interesting, thanks Game Tunnel!

Well maybe …

Basically I know for sure that V1.04 will support Windows Vista and Macs. But I’ve also started enquiries into Widescreen support and also Linux Support. So I’ll keep you posted on that when I know more.

Looks like I’ll finally be adding Bitmap Font support probably supporting the file format made by Fontext by Beaker.

I’ve already added some cool stuff to the particle engine such as particle generators and particle generator lists. Plus I’ve added a user specified function to the particle phases so that you can take action when a particle reaches a certain phase e.g. boost score when a coin bonus hits the score area. Also fixed a couple of bugs with the scaling due to ScaleSpeed not being floating point.

What else? Oh I added a bezier curve function, some functions to read strings and paragraphs from a data file (this is because I’m making sure that my current game can be fully localised into European languages and Japanese!). Plus some other minor improvements which you may find useful.

It looks like I’ll also be adding a Scrollbar type which I’ll link to the List Box type.

I expect some other stuff will be added to but to be honest I’m finding that I don’t really need to add much as I’m developing my current game because it’s all in there already. I’m just making things a little bit more flexible or adding new minor features. This is a good sign for the framework.

Wow just realised it’s one year old now, so I’m running a sort of competition over on this thread.