Monday, June 25, 2007

Feedback

I don't know if I should feel slightly annoyed with myself or with the open-source community. I uploaded a new version of Nuclear Graveyard on May 2nd. Since that date, the number of players slowly dwindled, and I was wondering why. I thought people had maybe got bored of it. However, it was still being downloaded 2-3 times a day.

Then, just today (June 25th) I received an email from a kind soul who has informed me that the download from Sourceforge is corrupt! Aaaarrrgghhhhh!! I know it was my fault for uploading a corrupt file and then not testing it, but you would have thought that one of the 100+ people that have downloaded it might have just sent me a quick email to let me know!

3 comments:

Charlie said...

You need to be more vocal about releases! I don't remember this. Anyway I'll mention you on Free Gamer this week so see if we can get a few more players. :-)

Steve said...

If you could, that would be great - knowing there are people who play my games is the one thing that keeps me programming, so the more the better!

Cheers!

Jonas said...

Hi, as the developer of another 3D open source game, I can confirm that the open source community might be a wild bunch, but it's not a very communicative bunch. I learned the same lesson as you did when I uploaded a corrupted release.

My game is distributed as an autopackage, which gathers some online statistics about the number of installs, number of failures, which dependencies are missing and so on. That's very useful in finding out what's going wrong.

For the next release of my game I'll ask the people in the gamedev.net forum to test it before making it public. They come to the forum to communicate, so they'll be more inclined to talk than the people who come to the game's homepage just to play a free game.