April Progress Update 2
It's been a busy few weeks. While updates to the blog and Fun Infused Games website have been sparse, rest assured that there is much going on.
Abduction Action!
Perhaps most exciting, Abduction Action! was released on the 18th and is now available on the Xbox Live Marketplace for a price of 80 Microsoft Points (roughly one Earth dollar). Additionally one update for Abduction Action! should be hitting your Xbox soon (if not already), fixing a bug with saving of Gamertags in the high scores listing and adding highlighting to important parts of in-game text.
For the week of April 19th, Abduction Action! was the 16th Best Selling Game on Xbox Live Indie Games. Considering there are 900+ games, that's not too bad. We also made the IGN.com list in the United States and Europe (go us!). Currently the game is rated 3.5 out of 5 by 233 gamers... this is a half star better than Nasty was rated and puts us right around the 100th best rated game on XBLIGs. I think this is a good improvement though not as good as I had hoped. While there are a select few individuals that preferred Nasty, I feel as a whole gamers (and reviewers) find Abduction Action! to be a better game.
Sales data from Microsoft has been broken since the 20th, which means not only don't we have hard numbers on how well the game is doing but also the listings on the Xbox Dashboard and website have been frozen. Since the 20th, Abduction Action! has been sitting pretty as the 9th most downloaded XBLIG on your Dashboard. While part of me would like to have seen if we could go higher (and I think we could have, with the game being on the New Releases list, Top Downloads list, and IGN.com list), we're still in a much better position than games that released just a few days after us. Several of these newer games will not make the Top Downloads list during their run on the New Releases list and I suspect many will never make the list.
From the three days I do have sales data for, I have nearly made up for all the costs I spent on artwork and music for Abduction Action!. Unlike Nasty, which is now about halfway to profitability, Abduction Action! is out of the red and making me some money. Making money for me is good for gamers twofold... first, surely gamers delight in my happiness (I know I do). And two, the more money I make on Abduction Action!, the more than I can budget for future games (not to be confused with games about the future) and the more my future games can kick ass.
Nasty
I've been dragging my feet on the oft-promised update to Nasty. It is coming but I haven't put much work into it just yet. I've been reconsidering some aspects of the update though... adding 10-20 levels mixed in with the existing 100 isn't probably all that great for current owners of the game and likely won't do a lot to endure me to new gamers. But 50 to 100 levels... hmmm, that might be enough to warrant a new game.
Hypership Out of Control
Most of my work since completing Abduction Action has been on my next release, Hypership Out of Control. As I've mentioned several times here, I'm a bit dubious about the financial success of larger scale games and going so long between releases (8 months between my past two games). Hypership is a much smaller scale game (smaller in content though, not in fun) which I'm hoping to release in late May or June.
"Perhaps going around this asteroid may be a good idea."
As you can see from the above screen shot (w
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