Developing a Community

One thing I always aim to achieve with my games is developing a community around them. This has pretty much eluded me (at least to my standards) until now, as there there is a small community playing Stellar Forces.

However, I'm confused. I've just looked at the main page of a new game called Mule, which is an online remake of an old C64 game (which I've never played, BTW as I'm an old Speccy user and it would be against my religion to do so). As far as I can tell, it's only been going since December last year, and it already has over 8,000 registered users! There other stats are impressive to - 1,600 forum posts, 2,800 games played etc...

So my question is "What are they doing to get that many users?" It's obviously a far more polished affair than my own effort - is that it?

Use of Overriding Methods Considered Harmful

I've come to the conclusion that overriding methods is a bad idea.

You know the situation; you've subclassed another class, which has a method in it that's not quite perfect, so in your subclass you write another method (giving it the same parameters) that does something slightly different.

Cue several months later, and you innocently edit the method in the parent class, changing the method parameters. Suddenly bugs appear left right and centre. "But how?" you ask yourself.

Well, it's because the method in the subclass is now never called since the method signature is different to the parents signature. But how were you supposed to know? Exactly!!