Bizzy's Spelling Bee released

Actually it was released on 27th April but I forgot to mention it here. Been a little busy.

Anyhoo... screenshots, demo download link and info can be found here.

The demo is a little over 5mb. If you want to download it via one-click, then click here. Its feature-limited, and plays in 15-minute sessions. You can play as many sessions as you like but no game statistics will be stored and saved games are disabled.

Had a lot of assistance from numerous people with this, including; Gabriel (currently launching mass pimpage to shareware sites), Caff, Scouse, and chief problem-causer Big10p. So, thanks to everyone.

Its currently on sale at $19.95, with a 25% discount to bb.com members throughout May 2007. That means you can get the full version of the game for less than £7.50. Just enter code WFG003LQ on the order page.

My new website is also up and running too - DesktopGaming.net. I've spent the last month or so learning HTML, PHP and MySQL after using WYSIWYG editors for years. Being so new to that stuff, I'm very happy with the outcome.

Anyways, have a look. Won't cost you anything.

:)

Ciao.

[edit] Oh... was written in Blitzmax, by the way. Which was an experience in itself!

[edit again!] Forgot to mention, thanks to Scouse (Tom) for some of the graphics!

Yeah saw it on the news page congrats! Gotta say the demo time is a bit short plus the demo is crippled. This is an unusal tactic this day. Reasoning? Mind you I crippled my games to have no levels beyond about level 10, but entering the key unlocked them. If I was to play your game until the demo expired then I'd want it to keep my progress so if I was a paying customer I could continue where I left off i.e. saved games should work. That's my feeling on the matter.

Hey you left me of the list of helpers ;-)

Anyway good luck with this, your site and future games!

Er... Grey Alien helped, too. ;)

He's my tea bitch. :D

I updated my post - its actually 15-minute sessions, not 20 minutes. I originally had it at 20 but the general opinion was that it was too long, given that the number of sessions is unlimited.

I don't consider that its crippled. The player has full access to 'Classic' game mode. The other two game modes are expansions of that. How far you can get in the demo depends on how fast you play - other than the 15 minute time limit there is no restriction on how far you can get.

I've also made the difficulty curve a little steeper in the demo, to give players an impression of the whole game, rather than just the start of it. You'll see things in the first few demo levels that you would not see in the same timeframe from playing the full game.

Reasoning? Oh God....

First of all, I don't have any income at all just now, and its cost me nearly $300 to get it to where it is now. That's money I didn't really have in the first place - my bank balance has a minus in front of it.

Second, I did a little research and found that, basically, anything thats allegedly protected with Armadillo gets cracked within days of release. Therefore I could never justify paying out another $299 that, at the end of the day, doesn't solve the problem I expected it to solve. A new approach is needed.

[edit] Oh, and if this game doesn't do OK, there won't be any future games. Spending money on this has caused shall we say other problems. I wouldn't be willing to do it again.

Hope it does well for you GfK, it certainly deserves to. A very nice and polished looking game. I'll probably get a copy, if only to give you some encouragement ;)

I certainly wouldn't like to see you stop pushing out those games.

Well done Gfk, and congrats on getting yet another project out the door. That's a massive achievement in itself. Hope this one does well for ya! ;)

GfK. thanks for the reasoning. So you never used Armadillo in the end then. What was the $300 for? Art, sound/music and marketing I guess (plus domain/hosting?). It's a pretty low spend on a game really. But yeah, welcome to the negative bank account club :-) Don't let it put you off making other games though. You gotta keep on trying, and even fail to success blah blah.

So did you do this full-time or did you have another job meanwhile? I used to have a job alongside my game programming but there simply wasn't enough time to make my games so I went full-time. This was a painful time period (nearly 2 years) but it all panned out in the end.

Congrats.

Well done.

nice game and website :)

Demo's just been updated - couple of bug fixes.

Pimped

http://www.binaryjoy.co.uk/games/games-news/monkeys-and-bees/

Nice :)

congratulations, downloading the demo right now,

women do tend to moan a lot dont they?

Huh?! Umm...well that's not good. I was just about to bust out the $300 for it... What's an alternative?