New Game Release Soon!

I received the music for Bubble Blitz (ooh look – it has a name!) last weekend and adding it into the game has made everything seem much more complete. There are a couple of small bits of art to finish off and then I need to sort out the website. I’ve already done the simple things but have wanted to change things around on Binary Sun for a while now. When it comes to web design I’m a fan of progressive enhancement – I don’t intend to redesign everything but will adjust and improve things as necessary.

I want to make the homepage more interesting, giving emphasis to the games and the fact that I’m an indie game developer as opposed to a large company. Part of this will involve adding a flash banner to the top of the page showing off a single game, eventually this banner will rotate so that every time you visit the page a different product will be promoted.

The main navigation needs work as well. The ‘applications’ button will be removed and a more discrete developers tab added. There will also be a store tab that will let people have a pseudo shopping cart. I hope to be able to give people discounts if they should decide to purchase more than one game. I’ve got a few, more enticing, promotions planned that will hopefully help increase sales, but they can wait until the game is on sale properly.

Permalinks are something else I’d like to try. They have proven incredibly worthwhile here on Binary Moon, Google, in particular, seems to love them. What I intend to do is to keep the page locations as they are (so that existing bookmarks and links continue to work) and add new mod-rewrite rules to improve, well, everything. Permalinks should also ease the inevitable transition to PHP so all round they seem very worthwhile.

Talking of PHP; something I have wanted to do from the start is integrate the forum into the design of the site adding the ability for people to register their games, which in turn gives them extra goodies (screen savers, wallpapers, mp3’s etc.). I don’t know how popular this will be and it will be a lot of work so it’s not something I’m going to do straight away but it is on the ‘to do’ list.

So… lots of work for little old me. I hope to have the minimum for release complete in the next week or two, and then I will add the other things as and when I get the time. Of course once Bubble Blitz is complete I’m going to want to start on my next game. I’ve already started thinking about what I’m going to do with that one – and it won’t be a colour matcher!