This site has now had 250,000 over the last 2 years or so. That’s a really small amount of hits compared to some sites that get way more than that in a single day, but I’m proud of that number I track “old-skool” hits, not unique visitors or any of that fancy stuff, and probably a few thousand of the hits are mine from testing out site changes!

I basically don’t do any marketing for this site except for having a link to it in my form signatures and relying on google. There are a few links to it from other sites, but nothing special. I make some money from Adsense, but nothing to write home about, and I make more from affiliate games sales and direct sales of my own games. I could market the site a lot more and probably make some reasonable money from it, but my main job is writing games and the site is just a “web-presence”, as you hear people say. If I was to spend more time on my site, my game programming would suffer so I stick to what I’m best at for now. Actually, ideally I’d love to delegate the running of the site to someone who can really turn it into something good…

Finally I’ve finished localising Fairway Solitaire (It was a tad laborious to say the least, but it will generate more sales). And now I’m ready to start a new game! I love this bit - end of one project, start of another.

For a few days I’ll be going over the new game’s design docs (sent to me by John Cutter from BFG) and offering my feedback on them, and then I’ll make a giant plan with time estimates before I even start programming. It’s a fun stage full of idea generation and lots of lying around on my sofa thinking stuff up haha (I’d prefer to be in the garden but it’s not warm enough yet).

‘ll be working with a new artist on this one and a new art director so it’ll be interesting getting to know them and their working methods.

Not sure how long the game will take yet until I’ve finished the plan. We’ve got tons of ideas as per usual but we may have to slim them down in order to get the game out in a reasonable time frame. Unfortunately because I’ve signed a contract, I can’t talk about the game so you’ll just have to wait until it’s finished…

Anyone else exited to start something new recently (or soon)?

I’ve been getting lots of emails about how to cheat on Fairway Solitaire because some of the end courses are really tough. There are no in-game cheats at all I’m afraid - they were all removed in the final version. However, it is possible to modify one of the data files to make the tough courses easier as follows (Windows XP):

- Go to your C Drive via My Computer
- Go to Program Files\Fairway Solitaire
- Go into Data\Levels
- Make a backup copy of CourseList.csv somewhere safe.
- Right Click CourseList.csv and click Open with WordPad or NotePad (if you are using Windows Vista you need to open it with Adminstrator privileges)
- Find the course AFTER the one you are stuck on
- If you are modifying Joe’s Gas and Golf - find where it says SCORE,-1 and change -1 to something much easier like 20
- If you are modifying Mystery Madness - find where it says TOKENS,25000 and change 25000 to something much easier like 1000
- Save the file.
- Run the game and check the course goal, it should have changed.
- Tada!

The courses mentioned in the cheats are only really hard in V1.01 of the game. They are easier in V1.02 and higher. Please note that it is not possible to cheat on the last course: The Baron. Also there are no cheats for the Mac version.

Hope this helps you out, and thanks for playing the game so far!

Mac

It is possible to adjust the data files using the above technique on the Mac version shipped by BFG, but it requires a little “hacking”. The problem is that the data folder is a hidden folder, and it’s inside the application bundle. So once you get inside the application bundle you need to tell Finder to be able to view hidden folders so that you can locate the data folder. However, I cannot tell you how to do that because BFG would not be happy if I said how to hack their Mac wrapper. If you googled for the information you might succeed…but it’s probably easier to just try to beat the level