I’m no longer selling my BlitzMax Game Framework. This is because I’ve sold the IP to Big Fish Games in December 2008 (although I retain a lifetime license). I made sure that my contract allowed me to offer support to existing customers (bug fixes and documentation improvements etc) for another year. I still plan to make a V1.10 soonish including offering the framework as a module to compliment the plain source code version.

I’d like to thank all 200+ of my customers for your business, enthusiasm and help. The framework is way better because of your fantastic input, many thanks. I hope that you enjoy using it for your own games.

Please continue to keep the source code private as per the conditions of sale, especially now that BFG owns the framework, thanks!

I am keeping the forum too because it’s brilliant thanks to all of you!

Final Sales Figures

For those of you who are interested, here’s my final sales figures for the framework:

Time Period: 1st May 2006 to 11th December 2008 (31 months)

Units Sold: 203 + some freebies and competition winners etc.

Gross Revenue: Approx. £5910 (I say “approx” due to currency conversions)

Price: Started at £21.50/$39.00, then raised the price a bit, and finally raised it up to £29.95/$59.95 due to adding more stuff into it, and it kept on selling fine. It was probably too cheap actually (many people told me this) and I should have sold a commercial license for much more, but those people just got exceptional value for money

Sales Channels: 1 Direct Cheque, 59 via Share-It, and 143 via Paypal. Share-It’s fees were the biggest so I preferred Paypal (although Share-It dealt with the VAT for me whereas I had to work it out for each sale made via Paypal and then track it for my VAT return every quarter).

Costs: Excluding my time (we’ll get to that in a minute) I have recorded my costs as £968, which was BlitzMax, Payment Processing Fees, VAT, and some promotional refunds given to “winners”.

Net Profit: Approx. £4942

Time Worked on the Framework: Approx. 396 hours. Initially I logged all time I spent making the framework and this was a couple of hundred hours. Then I logged the time spent making the website and documents etc. I also logged time preparing version releases, processing sales and doing basic marketing (like posts about new versions etc). Plus I logged time spent on support and working on the Framework forum. Probably I’ve missed out quite a few hours of support and loose ends, but it’s a fairly accurate estimate. What is NOT included in that estimate is the time I spent improving the framework as part of the 4 games that I have made with it. That time could be quite large, but is accounted for as part of those games separately.

Hourly Rate: This gives an hourly rate of £12.48. Certainly not lots of money, but neither is it a kick in the teeth (many Indie games make way less money). The important thing to remember is that the framework was used to make 4 games (sor far) so this money is actually pure “bonus” money. All my games have made me much more per hour (and that amount rises every time I receive a royalty payment)…

IP Sale Price: So, I sold it to BFG for … Did you think I was really going to tell you? Sorry that information is private. What was good is that we agreed on a price when the Dollar to Pound ratio was 2:1, so I said how much the framework makes per year and extrapolated for future years of sales and increased marketing + adding in a sweetener etc and we agreed on a good price that I believe was fair for both parties. They have got a good deal though as the framework is awesome and paying someone to make one from scratch would cost a lot of money and take a long time, plus it would need to be tested thoroughly which mine already is. Damn when I say it like that, I think I should have got some more, lol.

Conclusion

In 2006 I needed a framework to make games and none existed for Blitzmax so I decided to write my own. I got lots of help from forum members in the early stages testing stuff out and working out solutions to various technical issues. Then after a while I realised that the framework was pretty cool and that maybe people would buy it (actually it was a “lightbulb” moment). As soon as I put it up for sale I made a large number of sales and people loved it.

There was (and still is) a tiny bit of dissension from a small minority of people who think that I just collected other people’s code and sold it. They don’t seem to understand that a) people gave that code freely in good spirit, and b) that code accounts for less than 1% of the total framework due to all the stuff I’ve added to it and research that I’ve done myself. However, over the years as my business has grown and had various successes, I’ve learnt that some people will always have a “bone to pick” with you maybe because they are jealous, or feeling like failures themselves, or whatever – it doesn’t really matter, the problems lies with them and they can keep it.

Over time I kept on adding to cool new stuff to the framework and it became even better value for money. Also people were testing it out in their own games and helping me to make it more stable. About a year ago a customer helped me to set up a forum and that was a really great move as people could make suggestions, discuss bugs and showcase their own games. It was really nice to have a community build up around the framework.

I’ve made some great contacts and friends through the framework, learned a ton of stuff, and thorough enjoyed working on it, plus it has panned out well financially for me – I couldn’t really ask for more.

So there you have it, (almost) all the info laid bare for all to see. I bet American citizens wish their treasury guy was as transparent about where their trillions of tax money was “spent/lent” to alleviate the credit crunch…ooh I went all political there, sorry.

http://www.greyaliengames.com/forum/

You can find out more details about my framework and download a demo in this thread.

There are loads of changes in this release but I don’t have time to list them all right now, so here are the main ones:

- It’s now SuperStrict compatible!
- TButton now supports a TImageFont or TBitmapFont caption! Very useful for localising button captions instead of having to generate graphics for each one.
- TSprite and TParticle enhancements.
- TKeyRepeat and TMouseRepeat added and TListBox uses them.
- TImageBank, TSoundBank and TGameText now use TMap instead of TList for speed.
- Lots of tweaks and some bugs fixes to CommonTypes.
- Slow motion/speed up ability added to TFixedRateLogic.
- TBitmapFont data files now no longer need to be edited before use.
- Few CommonCode tweaks and new functions.
- Moved examples from AOTMG into a special Examples folder.
- Updated BasicSetup.bmx to use AOTMG graphics so that it can be compiled straight away.
- Bug fix in AOTMG TPlayer.Die().
- Possible Fix to “No Sound on Mac” issue.
- Mac Shared Data path fix.

Enjoy!

btw, my new game is due out in November and will be using this framework, so keep an eye out for it. It will hopefully be another top 10 hit.

Those sales have occurred over the last 26 months, which is an average of $384 per month. One of those sales was direct (via cheque) and the other 174 were made up of 118 Paypal sales and 56 Share-it sales. I added share-it in case people didn’t want to use Paypal for any reason – good job I did! Because my customers are worldwide I made 3 buy buttons so that people could purchase in Dollars, Pounds and Euros depending on what they are most comfortable with (and people do use all three).

In total I’ve spent 387 hours on the framework. The bulk of this was the initial development (lots of development time is now often logged separately as part of whatever game I’m working on currently), and the rest is marketing and supporting the customers.

After my costs (£830), which include Paypal and Share-it fees, VAT, BlitzMax and promotional refunds, I have worked for £10.78 per hour which is not stellar but it’s pretty good considering I just had an idea one day that went “Hey, this framework is pretty good. I wonder if anyone would buy it?” – and the rest, as they say, is history Don’t forget that I needed the framework ANYWAY for my own games, so any money made selling it is pure bonus. Plus my customers have helped me to improve it and fix bugs and I’ve met some great people – bonus!

Also in December 2007, one of my customers kindly set up a forum for framework users. This has been a great success as framework users can now help each other (and me) and also showcase their projects.

I’ve had a great year so far for framework sales which may well be due to the release of Fairway Solitaire. Perhaps it’s due to other factors too like an improved Blitz forum signature. Or maybe it’s just that the customer base has reached a critical mass where recommendations become a real factor. Whatever the reason, I’m very pleased

So, anyway, a big thanks to all my customers for your continued support and help. I’ve received numerous suggestions for bug fixes and improvements from my customers and the Mac support is greatly improved due to help from some very kind users – so thanks very much everyone!

In January I set up a forum for framework customers and this has proven a success – in fact it wasn’t even my idea to set it up and I also delegated the task to someone more competent than myself! Now forum members can help each other and also show off their creations. Plus they helped me solve some Mac technical problems, which was great.

Making a framework is essential for any game developer. You need to put all your core reusable code in some special files that can be used (and improved) for each game you make. After writing a basic framework for three solid months I realised that it was pretty neat and I wondered what would happen if I tried to sell it. There was an instant demand for it and I was pleased to sell loads of copies. It continues to sell every month (the fact that I keep releasing real games with it helps) and is generating a nice passive income for me (over $8000 so far). Plus my customers make suggestions, spot bugs and help me to solve technical issues – this has made the framework way better than it would have been if I had kept it private. When I first sold it I did consider if I should keep it private in case I gave my competitors an unfair advantage but I thought that really there was enough room for us all in the market AND I’m encouraged to stay one step ahead and make great games!

When I hit 150 sales, I ran a little competition on the Blitz Forums where I said that I’d give a full refund to one of my next 3 customers chosen at random. The 3 sales came in two days – nice and quick. I ran the same competition before when I’d made 100 sales so I knew that it worked (it generates revenue and exposure). Is there some way you can encourage people to buy your product with a competition or a temporary discount? I guess the 3 people that bought it reasoned that they stood a 33% chance of getting it for free which is pretty good odds for a competition!

A big thanks to all my customers for your continued support, and good luck with your games!

I’ve also made a special webpage all about the framework. I’m hoping that this will answer any questions that potential customers may have and thus help them to decide to buy the framework.

V1.05 will be released after I finish my current game and should have support for “proper” Vista directories and also full Mac support (it already compiles on the Mac, but I want to convert some special Windows API calls to Mac).

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.

Well my engine is for BlitzMax and basically the language is relatively new and I knew that I needed a game engine to make some professional games for it but there were no engines in existence. There was lots of useful code on the forums which I gathered together and did research on and found out fixes of my own etc to throw into the mix. This gave me a technical framework and then on top of that I build tons of my own Types (e.g. TButton, TMenu, TSprite etc) and a system of Screen management which works well.

When I first released it, I released it with a demo game so people could see it in action and I listed a summary of its features as well as having a full list of features in an FAQ. The FAQ is here:

http://www.greyaliengames.com/framework/faq.html

Initially upon release lots of people were very interested in it but a few people claimed that I’d just cobbled together some free code from the forums and was selling it. In reality the forum code is about 1% of my framework. But you always get a few moaners whatever you do – they are mainly just jealous.

When I released it there was clearly a demand as I sold 27 copies in the first month! I also put the price up a little bit when I released a new version and it kept on selling. Price has gone up a bit more again since then but the framework is more stable, has more features and has been used for several professional games since then. Sales carry on but not at such a high rate. I have to “pimp” the framework occasionally by mentioning it and by making new releases. However, it has many fans who help to promote it for me.

I didn’t make the framework with the aim of selling it originally, it was just for me. Then one day I had a brainwave “I wonder if anyone would pay for this?” I thought that because *I* would have paid for it because it took me months (hundreds of hours) to research, make and test. And I was right, people DID want to pay for it. I also had some pretty good sales copy to help people get excited and my demo game is loaded with cool little things.

Anyway, It’s made me several thousand pounds so far, which is not loads of money, but it’s pretty good. In order to sell it I had to make an FAQ, a Getting Started Guide (which needs improving for sure) and a few pieces of example code. This all took time. Also of course I had to offer support. Most people don’t ask for support but a few do. Most of the time the support questions are easy and don’t take long, so it’s not a major issue, but I know other people who have made modules and got endless support emails. I pride myself on my support and my customers seem to be grateful.

The other good thing with people using my framework is that they effectively test it for me and help me find bugs and offer good new suggestions (as well as some not so good ones). So as a result my framework gets better! This means that we all win.

I’ve also given away a few copies of the framework to people I’m working with and to key members of the Blitz community in exchange for their products etc. It’s nice to trade like that, but it’s nice to get paid for it too

Soon the framework will be made 100% Vista compatible and fully Mac compatible (it already compiles on the Mac but is missing some features). This should happen in June as I’m contractually bound to do this work for Big Fish Games.