One of the big reasons that I decided to port Depths of Peril to the Mac was that apple hosted a downloads section linked directly off of their own website. I knew going in we would have a nice big, focused source of traffic for Mac gamers. At the time I didn't know if this would make up for the differences in the size of the Mac and Windows markets though. Note: there are many other reasons to have a Mac version, this just happens to be a big one.

Well I did decide to port over to the Mac despite it being somewhat risky. Using our 20/20 hind vision, it was a very good decision. The porting work paid for itself a long time ago (I wish I could say this for other things). What I have found out since then is that the apple.com downloads section is where most of our Mac gamers come from. It is pretty important to Soldak's Mac sales.

Unfortunately, here's where the problem is. Along comes the iPad and apple replaces the download link on their main page to an iPad link. This has already significantly reduced our flow of Mac gamers. Even worse is that apparently as of late March they have stopped updating the downloads section at all. This is going to make it much harder for new games and updates to get noticed.

I really have no idea what Apple is thinking over there. I really hope they plan on replacing the downloads section with something at least as good, because I can't imagine this is going to do anything other than hurt Mac gamers. :(

Anyway, despite what Apple does or does not do, indie companies like us need to find other ways to attract Mac gamers. I have gotten the Din's Curse demo on macgamefiles, macupdate, versiontracker, and iusethis. Where else do you guys find Mac games? What else can I do to get noticed in the Mac gaming world?

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Now that our beta / pre-order program for Din's Curse is over I thought I would write up some of my thoughts about it. Hopefully this will be interesting to our gamers and might also be helpful to other indie developers.

The good:

We got a ton of really good feedback. Right now there are 2,153 posts in the Din's Curse beta forum. For our forums, that's a lot. It's second only to the DoP main forum. Also if you look at the change lists, you'll notice a ton of changes were from our beta testers. I've said this a few times, but I'll say it again our beta testers helped a lot and I'm very grateful.

I think the biggest benefit to the feedback was to the balance of the game. It started out fairly rough, but I'm much happier where things are now. We wouldn't have officially released that rough, but I think it is better now than it would have been without the beta.

This one didn't occur to me until we had actually officially released the game, but on day 1 of the official release we had a bunch of experts in the forums. This is extremely helpful and it makes multi-party discussions happen more often (not just me and whoever started the thread).

I really like how the credits thing worked out. I already keep a pretty good done list, so tacking on someone's name to each item is fairly easy. I think it worked to give out a little recognition to people that helped out and is just kind of cool. I've actually had several people comment on it, so I think it was well received.

I ended up adding more new features than I expected to. I did expect to add some, just not this many. I suppose this could technically go into the neutral section, but Din's Curse is a better game with all of the new additions.

The game was pretty stable when the beta started, but I did squash a few crash bugs here and there. This is one of those places that is hard to test as an indie. You need more players and more configurations to track down some things.

The bad:

The only bad thing I can really think of is that we shipped later than I thought due to the beta. In reality, although the release date shifted out, I probably didn't actually lose any time overall. Without the beta, I still probably would have fixed many of the same bugs, it just would have happened during a private beta or in patches after release.

The neutral:

I really liked having open forums for the beta. I'm really not sure if this was ultimately a positive or a negative though. It could potentially have scared people away or encouraged them to join in. Actually I'm sure it did both, but how many of each I have no idea. It was nice that I didn't have to grant access to a private forum for anyone.

In theory, we will get better reviews since the whole idea was to make a better, more polished game before release. This probably should be under good, but I have no way to verify it either way.

Overall I think it went really well, so we are likely to do something similar for future games. What do you all think?

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Here's some of my latest tweets from twitter / facebook with a bit more explanation.

I made lots of balancing changes today especially for melee characters. This was back for version 0.905 and was mostly strength and dexterity related.

Fixed a targeting issue today that has plagued some users but I never noticed, turns out it's because they use skills differently. I mostly use the right click skills. The issue was skills used from one the main slots wasn't always changing the target to what was being pointed at.

Changed some quests to go obsolete instead of failing today, mostly just a perception change, but I think it will be more fun. Everyone has probably seen this by now. It just makes an escalation of a quest a little less harsh.

One of these days I'm going to write up a blog about the weird bugs I've had to track down, today's was stuck illusions. What was happening is a stuck illusion was stuck because there was a lever attached to it. Since it's not always possible to get to the lever and you can't physically break an illusion these would be impassible many times. Now clicking will always work even if there is a lever.

Added in a bet type quest from gamblers today. Basically this is bet from the gambler that you can't do something without dying first.

I found 4 lesser vaults almost right next to each other today. As usual this is what random numbers do. Sometimes you get an interesting streak of good stuff.

The last few days my todo list has once again started to go in the correct direction, I think that's a good sign. It's gone up since then some, but it is well down from the start of the beta.

Did a large pass over all of the unique and set items in the game yesterday and today. A bunch of the set and unique items got better. I'm trying to make it so more of the rarities are viable more often.

Just passed by a blast trigger, an explosion barrel, and an energy vortex right next to each other. For a change I wasn't very tempted to pull it. Usually I just have to pull these and see what blows up. This time it was pretty obvious, it was just going to be me.

Added 10 new quests today to Din's Curse. These were mostly related to Super Bosses. Kind of a cheesy name, but it gets the point across pretty well.

Monsters now have the possibility of "leveling up" all of the way from a normal monster to a boss. It's really not likely for any one monster to go all of the way from a normal monster to a boss, but it's possible now. Basically for the lower level rarities each time they kill something they have a chance to go to the next rarity.

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The war between pirates and publishers continues unabated. I'm sure most of you have heard about Ubisoft's DRM they are in putting in their latest PC games. If you have been living under a rock :), it basically boils down to you need a constant internet connection to play their single player games. Being someone that develops games for a living, doing it as an indie, and being a big fan of PC games I have a different point of view about all of this.

This doesn't surprise me in the least. Ubisoft, like most publishers, feels like they are getting backed into a corner. They are more and more feeling like the PC market is dying, not because there aren't a ton of PCs out there playing games, but because of all of the piracy. They are getting more and more desperate to try to continue to make games on the PC, but they feel they can't without more and more restrictive DRM. Others are just abandoning the platform for the consoles or moving over to server side games like MMOs or facebook games. I at least give Ubisoft some credit for trying.

However, my opinion specifically about their DRM is that it sucks. Being cut off from playing a single player game you bought because your internet connection goes down, because Ubisoft's servers go down (which it has already), or because you are on the train with your laptop is just plain wrong. I understand why Ubisoft wants to do this, but it still sucks. All this is going to do is piss off paying customers, which is never a good idea.

Unfortunately, what is going to happen is a bunch of people are going to use this crappy DRM as an excuse to download the cracked version and possibly continue with other games. Even if you bought a legit version of the product you are still part of the problem. This will just make publishers want to use even worse DRM. If you do this, you just become part of the endless cycle.

I'm going to let you in on a secret, most developers and publishers don't like DRM. In general, it costs a lot of money, takes developer time, introduces more bugs, and causes problems for your customers. Most companies would get rid of all DRM in their products if they thought they could do it without losing money. Yes, I know there are some companies out there that want to restrict how you can use your purchase so they can sell you the same thing multiple times, but they are a small minority. Piracy is the root cause of why we have most DRM.

Why does any of this bother me? Well for 2 reasons. I really like the PC as a platform, but if current trends continue the only games that we are going to have on the PC eventually are things that have a server side component like MMOs. This is going to suck. The other reason is that despite all of the bull-shit justifications that pirates use, they still pirate from us indie companies that are struggling to survive, that have large demos, and that have pretty cheap games just like pirate everything else. Actually piracy hurts us even more than a big publisher. At least big publishers have mega hits here and there that supports everything else they do, most indies do not have this luxury.

My humble suggestion to everyone is vote with you wallet. Don't side with the pirates, they are the ones instigating the problem in the first place and siding with them just results in worse DRM later. However, don't side with the publishers that put in DRM that hurts you, the customer. Buying their crap just tells them it is ok. Instead go buy some other cool game that doesn't have crappy restrictions. Show your support for PC games, but don't support the individual games that do stupid crap.

Now for my pitch. Hey it is my blog after all. :) Our games have pretty large demos (Din's Curse will soon), are fairly cheap, have money back guarantees, try to be unique and not just simple clones, and only use simple keys for copy protection. We also actually listen to our gamers and try to be a very open company. So what do you have to lose?

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