snailfox

Sixty Five Million And One BC

When Dinosaurs Could Talk

~ Now Free from April 2011 ~

Sixty Five Million And One BC is a platform adventure about a bunch of velociraptors
trying to save the world from a comet.

You see, around about 65 million years ago, they reckon an enormous hunk of rock, 10 km across, hurtled down from space
and smacked rudely into what eventually became the Gulf of Mexico. It's what is generally thought
to have caused - or at least contributed to - the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Well guess what? The dinosaurs have gotten wind of this and they aren't too happy about it.

In Sixty Five Million And One BC you play a lean, green, smoothly animated velociraptor charged with trekking across
the Mesozoic world to gather parts for a dino-designed machine that will blow up the comet and save the world!

Simple, eh? Think again...



Genre: Platform / Adventure
Current Version: 1.2
Game File Size: 18.8 MB (no installers)
Resolution: Windowed 640 x 480
GM Version: GM7
Game Download: 65M+1BC_1.2.zip
Trailer: Trailer2.mov

Game features:
- A whole bunch of moves. The raptor can walk, run, jump, backflip, climb walls, duck, crawl, swim, bite, tailwhip, pounce, ground-slam and carry objects. The controls are context-sensitive, so only two action keys are needed on top of the four direction ones.

- Graphics and animations - Each of the character's moves are fully animated, nothing is static! The graphics are all smooth and cartoony, as can be seen from the screenshots. Forest, plains, mountains and cave level stages all look very different from each other.

- Realistic interactions - Pounce an enemy and it flies backwards, sprawling, spinning and writhing! Slopes can be smoothly traveled over, vertical surfaces can be climbed and leapt off, delicate objects can be smashed.

- Particle effects - Ripply realistic splashes, speeding dust trails, drifting particles in sunbeams, and meteor trails. Particle effects can be switched on and off during gameplay for speed enhancement - but they aren't overpowering, so they shouldn't need to be!

- Speech system and cutscenes - The game is driven by speech between the characters, presented in cutscenes that can be advanced manually or skipped. During a cutscene, the screen letterboxes cinematically and the story advances through character actions and dialogue.

- Original soundtrack - The music is all high-quality ogg format, and each level stage and cutscene has its own music, all variating on a few main themes. Check out a track to hear it!

Sixty Five Million And One BC was originally released as a commercial product back in 2008 and it sold just over 100 copies before I decided to make it a free product. It's all fun and games, after all! My sincere thanks go to those hundred people who bought the game and I hope none of you are put off by this change. Many thanks to all the people who supported 65M+1BC (then "raptor 2") through its long winding Work In Progress thread, and to the kind and thoroughly helpful testers: Hotshotscott, Adil Faqah, Tepi, Uber-Angus and Dark Star. You are truly friends of the dinosaurs.

Game Download: 65M+1BC_1.2.zip
Trailer: Trailer2.mov

Back in April 2008 I finished work on my last Game Maker creation - the dinosaur platform adventure, Sixty Five Million And One BC. I'd decided a couple of months prior to finishing that I wanted try and make some money from the game (at the expense of Game Maker karma, it turned out!), so I bought a domain name, set up a BMT Micro account and did a bit of marketing. Now, nine months later, the game has just sold its 50th copy and I've made $670 for the total domain name cost of $68 - not enough to buy a mansion and retire to the South of France, but a lot more than I was expecting and well worth all the efforts involved in development and marketing. I thought I'd write a bit about the course I took in case others are hoping to go that same way.

I should point out here that I'm not trying to break into the indie game market or forge a career in game design. Developing 65M+1BC was a pleasure and a hobby, and not something I would have expected to be paid for. If this weren't the case, I'd probably see the whole commercial venture as a complete disaster because the game took me nearly two years to make, and $670 just isn't that great an amount for two years and nine months' worth of work. Developers who think of game making as a chore probably shouldn't go down the same route as I have!

Here's a basic timeline:

April 08 - Finished game, set up website, set up BMT Micro account, preemptive marketing
May 08 - Publically released game and launched website, marketing
June 08 - Marketing
July through December 08 - Nothing
January 09 - Lowered price

Needless to comment, it's a fairly sparse timeline. The initial two months was the period in which I did the vast majority of the work - the game's website, its distribution and payment system, and the marketing.



The website
A website was always going to be vital for me, since I wanted to market 65M+1BC outside the Game Maker community and referring non GM-users to the game's forum thread here wouldn't have been impressive. I registered with the domain name provider, 1&1, and bought the domain name 65millionand1bc.com. Incidentally, one of the biggest regrets for me has been the game's ridiculously long name, which I should have thought through better. It serves its purpose in being distinctive and memorable, but fails miserably where ease of typage is concerned - I can imagine users starting to type 'sixty five million and one bc' into Google (as they apparantly have been - I'll get to that), only to give up halfway through and surf youtube instead.

1&1 deal with hosting as well as domain names, but you can reconfigure mysterious DNS things to point a 1&1 registered domain name to a different location if you are hosting your game elsewhere. I opted for the second-to-least expensive option at £4.99 per month, but only because I wanted to make use of PHP on my website - the cheapest package would have sufficed had it not been for that. One thing that caught me by surprise here was that there can be a huge price difference between the various domain suffixes - a .co.uk domain would have cost about 1/8 of the price of the .com one that I ended up buying. Aside from Game Maker itself, the hosting and domain name ended up being the only things I paid for during the commercial process. The 65M+1BC website ha been averaging out at between 1.5 and 2.5 thousand unique visits per month after its initial starting-up peak of over 5,000 - figures that I have been relatively pleased with.

Distribution and Payment
There are several companies that sell online payment and distribution services - you register an account, upload your software, specify its price and a way for the company to pay you, then they take a small cut of the money every time a customer downloads your software. This sort of thing saves the developer from having to deal with any of the complicated payment stuff and it's utilised by a lot of small scale software and indie game developers. The company I signed up with is BMT Micro, who don't charge anything either for registration or long-term account ownership. They currently host the full version of my game, while the demo version is hosted on my 1&1 website. When users navigate to the download page of my site, they are directed to BMT Micro's product payment, styled (as I was able to request) to match the design of my own site. The cut they take is 9.5% of each purchase, or a minimum of $1.25 - so in my case, for every $20 paid by a customer somewhere, BMT gets just under $2 and I get just over $18. It's a setup that works very well for me and I don't see it being problematic for anyone that wants to sell their Game Maker games. I set US $20 as the starting price for the game, but on reflection I feel that was rather ambitious and will probably have stunted the sales figures, which grew gradually to a peak of 15 sales in July and have since leveled off at 3 - 5/month. A lower starting price would almost certainly have increased figures.

Marketing
I thought quite carefully about paying for online adverts, but in the end decided not to on the grounds that it would have been too big a gamble to justify. So I can't say whether or not they are a good investment. My suspicion would be that you would have to spend a lot of money to see any difference in your site traffic, but people might well be more susceptible to online advertising than I give them credit for - I'd be genuinely interested to know. My methods of marketing consisted first and foremost of spreading awareness of 65M+1BC around the Game Maker Community (through posting in relevant topics and submitting to competitions) and in other forums - most notably the Indiegamer Developer discussion boards. This is easy to do as it generally only requires free, quick registration and a nicely presented forum topic; it can't really backfire unless people become enraged at seeing your game all over the place and begin spreading negative press, but as far as I'm aware this hasn't happened to me!

A more drawn-out method I undertook was to e-mail the administrators of a lot of game download sites - essentially the first twenty that come up in a Google search for 'game downloads' - and ask them if they would be willing to host Sixty Five Million And One BC. Of the half or so that replied, three agreed - Fenomen Games, Melon Games and Games du Jour - but in the following months I was contacted directly by several more game download sites with offers for hosting. Thanks to a combination of these external sites and 65M+1BC's relative popularity on the Yoyo Games homepage, the game was picked up by a handful of bloggers and general interest stumbleupon-type sites, and it's been sites like these that have contributed the most to traffic through my website (and to successful sales, I presume).



Ensuring that my game's site was highly visible in Google was a high priority and there are many well documented ways to maximise your site's ranking. Google also provides an excellent free set of tools - Google Webmaster - for site developers to monitor their site's popularity within the search engine, and using these I was able to see which search queries turned up my page ("velociraptors", "compies" and "game magazines", awesomely enough), and check which sites linked to any of my pages, amongst other useful things. I get the impression that these Webmaster tools would be especially useful for working out which sites to buy adverts on, but for me they were mostly just interesting.


And that about does it! I haven't put as much effort into the commercial aspects of game design that I know some other members of the GMC here have done, and for people planning a serious jump into the indie game market this quick writeup probably won't be of much use, but I hope it might be useful for people like me who enjoy making games for a hobby and perhaps have one they feel could make the transition from freebie to commercial product. It might lose you a few fans among the more... traditionalist members of the Game Maker community, but it certainly feels good to find that people will buy something you've created - and it might make you some money for your hard work!


Other miscellaneous things:

License free material
Fortunately for me, I had the tools and time to make my own sprites, sound effects, backgrounds and music, but if this isn't the case for you, there are several sites where you can download royalty-free material - three that that leap to mind are iStockPhoto, Soundsnap and The Free Sound Project. It's always going to be better if you can make your own material though, just in case some twerp gets it in his head to try and claim ownership of your game (only happened once, thankfully).

Site validation
Your website will be liked better by Google and displayed more consistently in browsers if it uses valid markup. You can check this at http://validator.w3.org and it's well worth taking the time to do this!


- Thanks to Mr.Chubigans for his topic that I read before starting my own venture :-)

Sixty Five Million And One BC was released a few weeks ago and the game has its own sleek and stylish marketing site!

www.65millionand1bc.com



Technical site features:
- Built in HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP
- Compliant with standards and works in IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera
- Markup valid to W3 standards

Content:
- Downloadable MP3 soundtrack from 65M+1BC
- Screenshots from the game
- News, FAQs and other information

If anyone finds display or rendering problems with the site, please let me know!

I'm having a problem with using the real() function to convert a string, read from a text file, into a real value. This error is fatal, causing the game to crash and burn, but it is only happening to roughly 1/10 people - can someone please give me a rundown on what causes the real function to error?

The only two things that I've found to do it:

1) passing an argument with letters, not in speech marks - real(test123) - causes the function to return a null value

2) passing a string with letters, in speech marks - real("test123") - causes the function to fatal error

The values I'm reading from the text file (on my computer, at least) are real numbers and key codes, in the format:

1.4823000
0.1222000
1.5000000

Is there anything else that breaks the function, or any reason you can think of why it would occasionally crop up on certain computers when reading from a saved text file?
Many thanks for any help.

I've recently started having problems with creating an object and setting one of its variables in the same step:

i = instance_create(x,y,obj)
i.variable = true

obj itself has this in its create event:

variable = false

- but when I call the create script above, it should override obj's create event and set variable to true... right??

Well it does, unless I have screen_redraw() in one of the room objects' create events. When there's a screen_redraw() in the creation of the room, some objects seem to call their create events twice.

Has anyone else had this kind of problem before? It sounds like I'm doing something stupid, but I don't see what that could be...