Dave Hailwood's Forum Posts

  • Hi chaps!

    Well, it's been a fair old while since I stopped by or made games and stuff (focused on creating digital comics at the moment) but I was wondering if anyone's been keeping up with the whole VATMOSS debacle? In short, from January 1st, if you sell any digital products (including downloadable games) in any of the 28 EU countries, you will be required to pay VAT taxes (in a fashion that it almost impossible for 'micro businesses' such as ourselves to do, due to the maddening complexities of the laws) even if you only make £1. Anyway, you can read a lot more about it on Down The Tubes (a comics website) here: http://downthetubes.net/?p=18808

    It's all maddeningly confusing stuff, and doesn't apply to everyone as if your product is sold through a big games marketplace they are liable for the taxes instead of you (though if you sell on your own website, you may have problems). There's a lot on Twitter about it, under #VATMOSS, and I'd recommend taking a look or signing the petitions if you think you'll be affected.

    If anyone's already covered this elsewhere on the forum, then apologies for waffling on about all this rather boring stuff!

    • Dave

  • rocky10529 You may already be aware of this, but it looks like someone's completely ripped off your Magnetized game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pixel-p ... 48888?mt=8

    On the plus side, they have really annoying mid-game pop-up ads that ruin the experience. On the minus side, their version is free which might cut into your sales.

    Best wishes for whatever projects you might be working on.

    -Dave

  • rocky10529

    Its great to see this game make it straight onto the Ap Stores Best New Games list. A highly addictive game, and I wish you the best of luck with it.

  • I've just added a stats update to the front page of this post - I hope it's helpful to some people.

    Have a fantastic New Year, folks!

    • Dave

  • Hello folks,

    It's Dave Hailwood here (creator of Board Horde)

    As well as fiddling around with a few potential games, I recently put my own bi-monthly sci-fi comic anthology out (always looking for more contributors, if there are any writers or artists interested!)

    As a jolly lovely Xmas treat, the first issue of '100% Biodegradable' is now available to download for free at the following links:

    Comicsy

    Drivethru Comics

    Please check it out and spread the word to anyone who might be interested, if you have the time/inclination.

    Have a chuffin' marvellous Xmas!

    <img src="http://www.judgephuz.webspace.virginmedia.com/pix/xmascard2013.png" border="0">

  • Binkus

    thanks for the kind words. Judging by your profile picture, you even dressed for the occassion!

    There were a lot more features that I'd hoped to add (including a 3 player mode, event cards and more potion effects) but after having spent 8 solid months on the game I needed to get back to my writing. Hopefully I'll get the time to give it a mild overhaul next year.

    Best of luck with your own projects.

  • farflamex I'm glad to hear you're going to carry on making the sort of games that you enjoy (otherwise what's the point of putting all that time and effort into it?). At the end of the day, as long as you've made something you're reasonably happy with that's what counts. And all it takes is one big success for all the other projects to fall into place.

    harrio It's unlikely that the sitcom me and my writing partner wrote will actually get made at this stage, as we're just new writers with only a few credits to our names. But we have some useful contacts now and a huge surge of motivation to write like crazy folk! It's a very long road from BBC Finalist to BBC Showrunner, but I'm going to drag my asthmatic ass from one end of that road to the other and try not to get ploughed down by the Truck Of Obscurity along the way.

    I look forward to seeing what new games the pair of you come up with in the new year. Now that Scirra's trying to make things easier to publish to Android I may give Board Horde another outing if I get the chance.

  • farflamex harrio   

    Jolly nice to hear from you chaps!

    I've been away from game making for a fair old while now, as I made it to the BBC finals with a sitcom I wrote with a friend and had to switch my priorities to Tv/Radio writing (which is where my main focus will lie in the new year).

    Board Horde seems to actually be doing better now that it was before, with a sudden upsurge in plays mid-November (where it went from 5 or so a day to 80). I've only made $3.50 from Clay advertising revenue so far, but that's a lot more than I made anywhere else (almost all plays come from Clay, with the occassional one or two a week on Gamejolt/Newgrounds/Kongregate).

    Although I've considered ios etc, I think it would probably take more time to convert than I can currently commit (especially since it was my first game and I was figuring things out as I went along. It was quite a few thousand events long, and probably didn't need to be). Also it seems that whenever technology changes slightly or web hosts alter their layout a bit, problems beyond me control start to arise (to list a few problems I've encountered: On Clay the adverts suddenly started obscuring parts of the game when viewed on PC, when there had been no problem before. On Newgrounds the delivery of games was changed so that they're in a frame, which stopped the game working on ipad (this has been fixed now). On ipad I recently updated to ios 7 and now lots of graphic elements from Board Horde are missing along with other new bugs.

    On the plus side though I managed to make a complete game that I'm very happy with (and which you fine chaps enjoyed too, gawd bless yer!). Hopefully I'll manage to knock out a quick game at some point next year, though I'm going to be very busy with my writing and also putting out my own regular comic anthology (100% Biodegradable, which can be purchased here: comicsy.co.uk/biomekazoik/). I'm planning on making the comic free on the 24-26th December, so check it out then if you get the chance (and if you know of any mighty fine artists who might be interested in contributing, please send them my way).

    Anyway, thanks Farflamex for supporting Board Horde on Gamejolt, and cheers Harrio for all the encouragement. I'll still be lurking around the forum in the new year, and will let you know if any new projects surface. Best of luck with your own games!

    • Dave

  • Hello folks,

    A while back I put my Board Horde game up on Gamejolt, and discovered that none of the touchscreen functions work anymore when testing on several iOS devices (ipad 3, ipad mini and iPod touch). However, the Clay.io version works perfectly fine on tablet devices and is exactly the same.

    Anyway, I thought little of it until recently a vast quantity of the Touchjam games stopped working on mobile devices on Newgrounds, including mine which had been functioning just fine until last week. After a bit of communication with Tom Fulp it turned out the reason for this is they recently changed the games from displaying in 'full screen' to 'embed' (if you have a game on Newgrounds then don't panic - they'll be fixing the problem soon).

    I tried various methods to get my game working, including using the 'export for embedded sites' option, disabling iOS retina, disabling webgl, checking it doesn't lose focus etc, but nothing worked (sometimes the touch would only work for the top two thirds of the screen) It must be possible for games to still work properly when embedded, as two of the top ten Newgrounds competition entries still worked ok (Magnetized and Help The Dodo).

    So if anyone has any suggestions on how to improve the chances of games working on touchscreen devices when embedded on Gamejolt or Newgrounds, it would be hugely appreciated (hopefully I've missed something simple, but the fact that so many of the Touchjam games now don't work seems to imply a lot of people are in the same boat as me).

    Here's the links to the games (which should work fine on desktop) if anyone fancies testing them:

    newgrounds.com/portal/view/616297

    gamejolt.com/games/other/board-horde/15408

    Many thanks!

  • harrio

    Thank you kindly!   Because of folk like yourself the Kickstarter has just reached its goal. So if anyone else is wanting to grab a copy of the comic anthology for cheaper than retail price, there's still about 12 hours left.

    That's another beer I owe you, dear chap!

    -Dave

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  • Hello again! Well, with just 24 hours left to go the Spod comic Kickstarter is just �98 off meeting its target. So if anyone fancies backing a comic full of sci-fi carnage and mayhem, any support you can lend would be hugely appreciated.

    Cheers!

    -Dave

  • nutmix

    Just tested the link on Chrome on my ipad, and it worked fine. I did experience the same error yesterday on my own game, and it seemed to occur when I had multiple windows open at once (might be a coincidence). It's possible that Chrome have done an update which conflicted somehow (as I've also noticed there's a few resizing issues on my own game when using Chrome, which weren't there a week or so ago).

    Anyway, try running from Chrome after clearing your cache and see if the problem occurs again (I haven't experienced it since)

  • Hello folks,

    for anyone who's interested in comics, I just wanted to mention that I have a strip scheduled to appear in SPOD - the Oddities From Space comic anthology which is currently on Kickstarter.

    The Kickstarter only has 9 days left to go, and is over half way towards its target. It contains the work of 43 comics creators, including Jeff Mccomsey, Monty Nero and Neil Gibson, and is 130 colour pages.

    So please give it a look at the following Kickstarter link if you get the chance. And if you don't have any pennies to spare then spread the word.

    Thanks for your time,

    • Dave

    Spod Kickstarter

    <img src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7299/9368353473_5f6c69561d_o.jpg" border="0">

  • Blacksmith

    Always a pleasure!

    Some more info which might be of use: After having received 400 plays in the first weekend on Kongregate (which are trailing off now, and I expect my game will soon sink into obscurity due to its low rating) I have earnt 40 cents (once Kongregate has taken its share). Doing a quick bit of maths, this suggests that all games launched on Kongregate would need to get around 25,000 plays before the creator is actually paid anything (based on the rough estimate of $1 per 1,000 plays, a 35% profit share if a score api is added, and the fact that Kongregate only pay the creator once $25 revenue has been reached). There are also bonuses that you can earn, but your game has to do extremely well before making these.

    I will continue exploring revenue options with Board Horde and posting my findings (I'm not expecting to make money from the game, just learn the best approach to the market). What I might do at some point is put an advert in the main game itself rather than just on the start menu (something I'd hoped to avoid doing, but since it's in the name of research, what the heck?) and see if a persistent ad raises the revenue, or lowers the play figures.

  • nutmix

    I usually use Audacity (free music program) to do my audio conversion, as I seem to recall it being mentioned somewhere that C2 won't convert if you're using Windows XP/Vista. So you could try converting the MP3's in Audacity (I think audacity requires an plug-in to handle the conversion) into both M4a and Ogg, then importing them into C2.