First off, I'm sorry that our forums were turned off for a week. :(  That was longer than I was expecting, but there were a lot of things to setup on the server, a lot of things to learn, and I was unfortunately out of town this weekend.

However, the new server should be much faster and reliable than the old one.  I also have much more control since it's a dedicated server instead of a shared one.  For example, I have turned on the email notification in the forums.  If you subscribe to a thread the forums will email you when someone has replied to that thread. People have been asking for this for a long time, but I could never do it with our previous server's strict email limits.

On a personal note, I didn't realize how much I like our forums.  Not having our forums turned on made it feel like I was cut off from all of you, which really sucked.  One of the nice things about being an indie is direct contact with gamers (no publishers, distributors, and retailers in the middle).  Not having forums kills a lot of that.

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I've been able to get a lot more done on the networking lately. 

The client and server are much smarter about their current state.  If they wait too long for a response now they will resend the message.  They will also ignore messages they get from the wrong server or they are not expecting.  Both of them will also drop a connection if they don't hear anything from the other side for too long.

The game now does some more advanced stuff like fragmenting large messages and encrypts the messages slightly.

The game itself has also gotten some attention.  There is now some movement smoothing/interpolation (this also makes single player look better).  Above other players you now see their health bar, their mana bar, and their name.  Other players also show up on the minimap and the world map.

There is now even more sharing that goes on.  I mentioned a while back that players share score since Kivi is designed to be co-op. Well now keys, secrets, and super secrets are also shared.  There is no reason to have people fight over who finds the secrets and having someone leave the game with the only red key would cause slight issues.

Right now I only have a few small issues left, a bunch of playtesting to do, and I need to find a solution for a master server (I'm talking to a couple people for this though).

One of the remaining issues is what do I do about limited lives?  I'm not sure the idea works in multiplayer.  A client that runs out of lives can just exit and come back in again (which is just a nuisance), but the server can't without taking down the entire game with him.  Right now I'm just leaning towards infinite lives but you still lose the end of adventure bonus if you die.  Anyone have any thoughts?

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Another fellow indie rpg developer, Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software, has been posting sales stats for one of his games on his new blog lately.  Quite frankly they are quite fascinating.

The short summary is that Geneforge 4 (one of his average sellers) has sold a little less than 4000 copies, it cost around $120K to make, and has almost broke even over the last few years. Considering that it is one of his average sellers and breaking even means the game paid his salary for a year, this is a pretty good thing.

For me this is a glimpse into a successful indie that I would actually like to mimic.  Usually the few success stories that I hear many details about are some crappy game on the iphone or some casual game on the PC.  Personally I'd rather go back to the normal retail industry than make any of these types of games, so it is cool to hear details about a fellow indie rpg developer.

Jeff is basically where I would like to be someday, making games he likes and getting paid to do it so he can continue to make cool games for all of us.

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They might not know it yet, but the Sci Fi channel is dying.  They just announced that they are changing the name to Syfy

Here's a fun quote from the article: “The name Sci Fi has been associated with geeks and dysfunctional, antisocial boys in their basements with video games and stuff like that, as opposed to the general public and the female audience in particular,” said TV historian Tim Brooks.

So insulting your niche audience and changing your name to something stupid is a positive step?  This is an early April fool's day joke, right?

Get rid of good Sci Fi shows (Stargate & Battlestar Galactica), check. Don't add any new interesting Sci Fi shows, check. Add shows that aren't even remotely interesting to your core audience like wrestling, check. Piss off core audience, check.  Change station name to something stupid, check.  Just another crappy TV station, check.

Apparently it's not a joke.

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