GameMints.com - submit your games and news

[mrobert]

Hello everyone,

We are preparing in to release GameMints.com (http://www.GameMints.com)
It's a gaming news and downloads portal.
We would like to invite those of you that develop games, to submit your titles, and news items if you have any.

It's not yet another PAD site, and we have an extensive advertising campaign prepared to promote the site once it's launched (very soon now).

It will also be constantly promoted along with the PC games we develop and sell.

You may submit news here:
http://www.gamemints.com/submit.php

and games, here:
http://www.gamemints.com/submit-game.php

[JoKa]

It's not yet another PAD site
Ok, but a little PAD support would be great, nevertheless :)

Would save us time and surely increase your number of entries.

[mrobert]

Hi,

Sorry ... but as mentioned, it won't be "yet another PAD site".
Everything is manually edited, and we are investing more in the website.

These days the internet is full with PAD sites, and that is something we don't want to be mistaken for.

Soon, the site will be havily advertised on some very good channels and we aim to offer a good value to fellow indie developers ;)

[GolfHacker]

Manual entry by YOU is fine. But I'm with JoKa - I really hate typing in the same text into the same fields on every game site. Even copying and pasting it is a hassle. That's why PAD files were invented, to save us that time.

Now, if you want to edit our entry information to clean it up, make it sound a bit different than other sites, etc, then I guess that's ok. That's what download.com does. But that's your prerogative as editor of your site. Not allowing us the option of using a PAD file for the submission process may turn off potential developers, unless of course your site ends up with a super Alexa rating (which isn't likely to happen overnight).

By the way: thanks for the news about your site. We appreciate you looking out for indies!

[mrobert]

Hi,

I understand your issue with PAD files, as I am an indie developer myself.
However, I consider that if we will deliver quality for developers, it will worth the effort.
I don't mind having to manually email GamersHell for example :) It's well worth it.
We want to focus on having returning visitors and quality traffic. That's why you won't see hundreds of new releases daily.

Those of you who are around for a few years, know how things were back then. There were 10 gaming sites / download directories, and they all did the job. Now, we have to go through hundreds of sites, and eventually realize that only 10-20 worth the effort of submitting to.

I consider it's worth the effort, if we manage to deliver at least 2000 downloads for each title, from it's release, and not 1-2, like the hundreds of PAD site clones out there.

[OremLK]

I like the site design, very clean and intuitive--something too many sites get horribly wrong.

Are you going to implement any web programming-type features, such as user ratings, download hit tracking, and such?

[mrobert]

@OremLK:

Thank you! :)
Yes, we are going to add a lot of extra features to the website.
We are planning for a lot of unique and usefull features to be added in the time to come, and offcourse, we are open to any suggestions.

[OremLK]

@OremLK:

Thank you! :)
Yes, we are going to add a lot of extra features to the website.
We are planning for a lot of unique and usefull features to be added in the time to come, and offcourse, we are open to any suggestions.

Good to hear :) My suggestions are pretty much what I asked about above--the ability for users to register, rate games, post reviews/comments, and also hit tracking for each game would be nice. In any case, I'll be happy to submit my game to your site when it's finished in the next couple weeks.

[lennard]

Hey, where's my screenshot for Real E$tate Empire?

[mrobert]

@OremLK: I will let you know as soon as they are ready.

lennard: Apparently you haven't uploaded one. Please email it to me at:
robert (at) exosyphen (dot) com and I will take care of it.

[lennard]

Done. I did upload one though - maybe it required one from my hard drive instead of a link to an online image?

[mrobert]

@lennard: Yes, the image must be from your hardrive, as we are hosting them. Please give a link to your screenshot and I will take care of it.

[lennard]

I did and I emailed you the images as well. By the way, your site is down as you have exceeded your bandwidth limit.

[mrobert]

@Lennard : I haven't received the images email. Have you replied to the verification email? I am using boxtrapper against spam.

The site is back now ... I forgot to adjust the bandwidth once the site was released :(

[GeekNProud]

I can see this site getting popular in the near future. I'm curious, though; are all files required to be Windows Executables? Every one I have looked at seems to wield the dreaded ".exe" that we Mac users hate so much.

[OremLK]

I can see this site getting popular in the near future. I'm curious, though; are all files required to be Windows Executables? Every one I have looked at seems to wield the dreaded ".exe" that we Mac users hate so much.

That's a good point, although if you go to "visit related site" below the download link it'll take you to the game's main page. Usually (if a developer is worth his salt at marketing) it'll be very easy to download the demo for all supported operating systems from there.

[mrobert]

Hi,

If any of you has any Mac games, let me know and I will create a category dedicated to Mac games, so that you can submit the listings there, separately.

[Adrian Cummings]

That worked! - thanks for printing my news mrobert.

Cheers,

[mrobert]

You're welcome, Adrian :) Thanks for contributing to our website, and we hope to turn it into a valuable resource for developers.

[mrobert]

Hello everyone,

I have just added a separate category for Mac games, since I have noticed some Mac game submissions.

[GeekNProud]

The site's coming along nicely!

If I could make one more suggestion, it would be a search box on the main page, so people wouldn't have to click through each genre to find a specific game that could be classified as more than one.

[mrobert]

@GeekNProud: That's coming right up :)

[ChrisP]

Something I noticed: You don't have proper thumbnails. Your "thumbnails" are actually the full-sized image, resized down by the browser. Couple of problems with this:

- You're merrily throwing away bandwidth; both yours, and that of your visitors.
- It makes your site seem slow. On a page full of game images, I would typically get tired of waiting for them all to load and click through to another page. Not good.
- Browsers are horrible at resizing images! They typically do a quick-and-dirty "nearest pixel" resize, which makes the screenshot look really pixellated.

The rule of thumb is that the width and height attributes on the IMG tag should always match the actual width and height of the image, in pixels.

I realise it's a pain to produce all the thumbnails manually, but you don't have to do it that way. Presumably you have some kind of content management system driving the site (I hope you do, for your sake!), even if it's just a hand-rolled behind-the-scenes script. If so, it shouldn't be too difficult to build automatic thumbnail generation into it, using an appropriate image processing tool. If not, I advise that you start automating now, before your workload gets too huge.

[mrobert]

Hello,

Thumbnail generation is now working, and everything is now done with thumbnails ;)

@ChrisP: Offcourse we do have a content management system :)

[mrobert]

@GeekNProud: Search functionality has been implemented :)

[ChrisP]

Better and better. :)

[rico]

Guys, regarding my Tongits game. It runs both on Mac and Windows. I noticed that you placed it on a "Mac" category and I can't find it in the puzzle & cards category. Thanks!

[mrobert]

@rico: I moved it to the Mac category.

If you have a game that runs both on the Mac and on the PC, yu can submit it twice, for both categories.

[Fizzysoft]

That's kind of annoying. Why not have a "supported platforms" list?

[mrobert]

@Fizzysoft: We accept games for any platforms. You just need to specifiy that in the game title or description.

[Sybixsus]

@Fizzysoft: We accept games for any platforms. You just need to specifiy that in the game title or description.

I think he meant that listing games once for each platform was annoying, and that having a section in each listing detailing what platforms the game was available for would be preferable.

I tend to agree with him actually. You could still filter search results so that people can easily search only among games which work on the platform(s) they are interested in.

[mrobert]

Thanks for the suggestions. I will keep these in mind.