I reached that magic number a couple of days ago and I’m really pleased. I’ve been selling the Grey Alien BlitzMax Game Framework since may 2006 (nearly two years ago) and it’s gone from strength to strength. I’ve personally used it for 3 of my games including the top-selling Fairway Solitaire and many of my customers have made games with it too.

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 just released V1.04 of the Grey Alien BlitzMax Game Framework. I released V1.03 in January so it’s been 5 months since then!

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).

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.