Midnight @ Blackberry

BB World_Get It_BLK Box I have removed The Lords of Midnight and Doomdark’s Revenge from Blackberry App World. It’s been a tough decision to finally make, but the games are just not viable on that platform. There are a couple of major issues that I have:
Firstly, the games are not really selling, so the low numbers mean that I am not triggering Blackberry’s minimum payment thresholds. I estimate that I have sold somewhere between 100 and 200 units of The Lords of Midnight, but Blackberry use three different payment vendors depending on how the game is purchased. These are Bango, Digital River, and Blackberry themselves.
Bango, and Blackberry have minimum payment thresholds, and I have received no payment for games sold through them.
Digital River have paid me, but they pay in USD into the business paypal account. This is really poor and a nightmare to administer from an accounting point of view. In particular it makes calculating my VAT very difficult.
The fact that my sales are estimates is because you are unable to get accurate reports from the Blackberry Vendor Portal. You have to rely on statements to calculate your sales. But some of the Vendor statements ( Digital River ) appear to lack any reference to the game sold. So I can’t separate the sales for the two games.

Should there be enough interest, I will consider placing the Blackberry .bar files for future updates on this website, so that the keen players can side load the updates themselves.

Update for Doomdark’s Revenge released

ddr_icon_iosI have just pushed a new version of Doomdark’s Revenge out for ALL platforms. This brings all platforms in line with each other. The previous update was only released for Android and iOS. I apologiss for the delay in getting the last two versions out, but my heart and mind has just not been in it for the last couple of months.

Hopefully this will fix the remaining issues with the gameplay, and will also be the last of the 1.3 changes. The intention is that any update to follow will include some new features.

The Windows and Mac version should be showing up on your main menu now. Android/Amazon version should be ready now, or very soon. Mac App Store and iOS version will take a week in Apple Clearance, and Blackberry version usually takes a couple of days.

The changes are..

v1.3.6
1. Fix recruitment check. Loyalty of character being approached now correctly gives +1 and when the lord is treacherous the chance of recruitment is halved – This fix should mean that treacherous lords are no harder to recruit for AI lords, which should stop lords swapping allegiance so much. They should therefore be able to focus on the task at hand.

v1.3.5
1. Morkin’s AI attribute is reset once recruited. Stops him moving and allows him to move in tunnels. Previously Morkin’s AI attribute remained set after Tarithel recruited him. This mean that he didn’t work in tunnels very well, and had a habit of wandering off at night.
2. Tarithel can no longer be recruited away. Tarithel was incorrectly being recruited by AI lords.
3. Spell of Carudrium now works correctly. Previously this was bringing ALL characters to the location of the caster, and not just the the lords loyal to the Moonprince.

If the AI characters are still not behaving like the original, I am going to have to spend a lot more time analysing why. I can’t see any reason why the logic should not play out the same as the original ( other than the difference in random numbers ). This will involved a lot of debugging. But hopefully this version should just nudge everything in the right direction.

 

I follow no road, I simply ride.

I’ve had a torrid few days with the updates. Only myself to blame really. I managed to release, not one, but two updates with debug code left in. Rookie mistakes! I must be more strict with the regression testing and debug development. But it’s difficult when you are working alone and trying to react as quick as possible to issues raised. This has not been made any easier by working in a Hotel where the internet access doesn’t really get going until after Midnight. Pushing out an update involves building ten different versions, and uploading ~300mb – tethering on my phone has taken a battering and my Data Plan has been boosted once already.

For the record, and just in case you have updated during that time, the two issues are; Approach will always succeed, no matter who you are or who you approach, and after attacking a stronghold, the next morning your lords will seem to have scattered. If you see this happen, you need the latest update.

iOS and OSX App Store will not have these issues as the releases had not made their way through the original update process. If you have updated Windows or Mac through the game menu, you might want to check again.

Anyway I am hoping that the latest update 1.3.4 will settle and I can take a break.