Sale Price? Sold!
Since we managed to shift 5000 copies at $3, we’ve decided to drop the price to just $1, which is ridiculous value (in our opinions). There are many reasons for doing this, the main one being that on the Xbox Live Indie Games services, $1 seems to be the sweet spot for getting sales and snowballing the popularity of your game. We’re calling it a “sale” for now, as if it doesn’t work out we may put the price back up in 3 months.
The Free Update
We’re still working on this. It contains loads of improvements and fixes, particularly for the deathmatch mode. Here’s a little teaser screenshot of the new final level:
Good work Adam, it looks really pretty.
New Team Members
We’ve had some extremely valuable new people join our team. Josh Stewart has blessedly offered to take on the role of Lead Tester (aka QA and admin guru). He’s set us up hosted SVN for source control and an online bug tracking system which has been incredibly useful. He’s also proved quite proficient at finding bugs. I seriously never imagined there could be so many bugs, but at least they’re all logged with detailed descriptions and even screen shots and videos. Nice work Josh
Ben Schroeder has also offered to help on the testing and coding side. For now he’s mainly helping with testing and bug reporting, but he has an Xbox which is extremely helpful as it means someone other than myself can test the Xbox specific features. When we start work on the next project, he’ll bring his substantial skills to bear on the code.
Hacked!
You may have noticed this. There were a few days when our site was down because a wordpress exploit had allowed some script kiddie to infiltrate and overwrite our homepage with some Jihadi nonsense! That was a bit of a fright… thanks Josh for helping get it all back to normal.
I read that challenges might be introduced to Square Off? Whatever happened to those? Always love having something to go for even if they are the poor mans achievements. : )
Yeah, we did a heap of work on challenges but then we realised there was still a heap of work left to do, as well as a large amount of testing. It’s a shame but we decided to cut the feature in the interest of getting this update out!
That sucks having to cut things you wanted to include. Is there any other updates coming or busy working on a sequel?
Yep, it was a difficult decision. I don’t think there’ll be any further updates to Square Off after this one (unless there are major bugs of course!). We definitely want to focus on our next project(s) as this update has taken a lot of time.
I guess the plus side is that a lot of the work for Challenges can be reused for a sequel or any similar style of game.