Finally finished off the box art for World Tour this afternoon, it’s still short of my original vision for it, but it’s near enough and all I can do with the time I have.

Here is tonight’s effort, a logo for the new World Tour version of Dirchie Kart. It was quite a challenge to come up with something to tie in the original logo with the newer 60’s style.

I implemented a quick and dirty free look camera in Dirchie Kart tonight to allow me to capture much better screen shots, the following are the first batch showing off the new tracks.

I’m sure you’ll agree the results speak for themselves, much, much better, you get a weird matrix style effect as you move around the game as it’s paused.

Plenty more tracks to come.

Here’s what I’ve been working on most of the day, the centre piece of the new Egypt track for Dirchie Kart 2 the Dirchie Sphinx.  Though the texturing isn’t anything to wright home about I’m really happy with the modeling itself.

The track itself needs a little more filling out, but I should knock that over tomorrow morning ready to grab some new screenies and knock up a new promo website. I’m pushing to get that all done ready for nomination in the Summer Uprising promotion coming later in the year on XBox live.

I’ve always been searching for a distinctive visual style for the backgrounds in Dirchie Kart, some of the tracks look alright but don’t really separate my game from it’s source material.

Today I’ve slapped together a test background decoration around the new Monaco track of a textured cartoon idea I’ve been thinking about. So far I’m really happy with the look, it’s nice and quick to put together as well.

Let me know what you think?

There’s another great article over on whatgamesare.com discussing the two ends of the current games climate, Nintendo’s trickle of high quality established titles and the iPad/iPhone platform with it’s flood of low quality software.

The XBLIG (Xbox live indie games) suffers from the same problem as the apple app store, actually it’s worse because it has a far smaller install base and is physically separated from the other games in the Xbox UI.

So basically you’ve got to make up your own story and try and drum up your own business if you want to make any sort of money on XBLIG, which is really difficult for a complete unknown like myself. You’ve got to be different to get noticed, but you can’t be too different or you’ll just confuse people.

I think Dirchie Kart has potential to fit this mould, but it needs a few changes, these are the first couple I’m going to tackle:

1. Visually it’s a little too close to Mario Kart, so it’s too easily dismissed as a clone.
2. Needs a few more tracks to give real value for money.

This leads me to the main point of this post, the release of Dirchie Kart is only the first step and by no means the end of it’s development, I’m not good enough to make it the best game it can be right off the cuff. So I’m going to iterate it over the next year of so till it is the best it can be.

The following quote from the article I mentioned before echoes this sentiment.

“The alternative is to polish in public. Early release, courting influencers, continuous improvement and communication with a fan base are all ways that any developer can get out there. And as their game improves and their fan base grows more voluble, so every release and update becomes a part of the polish process. As they continue to over-deliver, the fans love them and become their marketing machine.”

It’s very unlikely I’ll make any real money off it, but I really like what I’ve created and there’s heaps more I can do with the base I’ve created.  So while I’m enjoying it why not keep at it, who knows I might even start a bit of a fan base if the purchasers can see it changing and start some dialog with me.

My XNA 4.0 build is getting there, still got some serious performance issues but the pre-multiplied alpha has fixed up the particle system and the alpha blending in the track decorations, giving the whole game a visual lift.

Even though I’m nursing a sick baby today, I’ve managed to get those icons implemented into the admin program. I knocked up a custom ItemsControl with a BitmapImage and Title dependency properties, that has an Image with the TextBlock and a popup within the overwritten ControlTemplate.

The net result is the app “Home page” has gone from this horrible mess (Admittedly I let it get pretty bad because I knew it was going to be replaced):

To this:

I also coloured and overlayed some stripes to the outer border, the stripes are a reference to the program icon and I think the colour helps separate the application controls from the content controls within the navigation pane.

I’m happy with the overall visual design of the MilliT app now, the weighbridge client needs a little attention next.

Having a fun day at work today knocking up some iPhone like icons for a new main menu screen in our administration app at the mill, MilliT. The plan is that the main screen will be an array of these icons, when you either hover over or click (not sure which yet) the icon you’ll see a popup with a list of app navigation links to click on.

If I’ve done my job well you should be able to guess what each one if for, you can check by hovering over them.

I recon they hang together pretty well.

The graph to the left plots the number of downloads of Dirchie kart since launch on the Xbox live indie games marketplace, there’s a slight pattern of sales spikes over the weekends, but overall there is a fairly obvious pattern of “going to hell in a handbag!”

Having an Australian Xbox live account I can’t actually see the XBLIG channel through the dashboard (presumably we don’t have it because of Australia’s antiquated content rating laws), so I’m flying blind, but I suspect the trailing off has a one for one relationship to the latest release list.

I set a personal goal before launch to sell 1000 copies, a modest amount but I’d be happy with 1000 because Dirchie Kart was never conceived as a commercial product, it was made purely to serve me and my mates… if there are 1000 weirdos out there who also enjoy it then I’d call that a win.

I’m currently sitting on 270 copies sold, but with the grand total of 1 copy downloaded last Saturday (that’s downloaded not actually sold) I’m beginning to realise I’ve got some hard work ahead of me.

Part of me is demoralised by the quick drop off, ready to throw in the towel as shit like “Try not to fart” seems to sell like hot cakes. But to do that would mean all the years of effort to get this far would be for nothing, so I say f@#k it there must be more than a 1000 people out there looking at indie games who’d enjoy Dirchie Kart, it’s my challenge to find them.

Since it’s launch I’ve been reading up on marketing, it’s something I’m completely new to so it’s taken me a whole month to start putting anything in place. I recently started reading this What games are blog which has some interesting articles that rang really true to me Are you invisible? and  You need a marketing story. Taking these and some other books and references here’s what I’ve done so far:

1. Updated my site, trimming some of the superfluous crap and focusing it on my games.
2. Had a good hard think about the types of people who’d actually like Dirchie kart, namely people like me, older gamers who like retro gaming or race games.
3. Struggled for ages trying to put that down into words, but eventually drafted a review request letter and re-worded the Dirchie kart page.
4. Sent out some review request emails.
5. Now trying to get active on a few indie and gaming forums and sites, which I’m finding really hard… having spent most of the last 3 years working alone at home in a foreign country where I don’t know many people, hence focusing even deeper on my work a personal projects I realise I’ve become a social spastic.

So I’m starting to bang the drum, let’s see what happens!

Spending a little bit of time today to setup a new XNA 4.0 project for Dirchie Kart. At the same time I’m taking the opportunity to separate the “Ride the Fury” engine code from the game code.

Took me a little while to find out how I had the original project files linked together, it was handy because if you added a new source file to one it’d automatically update the other project. 

Curiously I couldn’t find any references on the web, so I figured I’d post it for future reference.

It’s pretty basic, just add your windows project or class lib then Right Click on it and select “Create Copy of Project for Xbox 360”. One cool thing I noticed is that if you have a class lib and game project both setup the same way it’ll automatically use the correct version for the project.