[ANN] Welcome to Souptoys - It's Time To Play!

[Rory]

Hi Girls and Boys,

After a long time in development the Souptoys team has released the Souptoys Toybox over at www.Souptoys.com (http://www.souptoys.com). Head on over to download the latest in desktop toys.

"Souptoys are the newest way to have fun on your computer. Sitting right alongside your other applications Souptoys turns your desktop into a playroom. They are fun and simple to play with and have unlimited possibilities. Build great castles, set up fantastic contraptions, decorate your dekstop or just fling your toys around. It's your choice - They're your toys!"

Here are some screenshots of our toys in action:

All the toys (http://www.souptoys.com/gfx/screens/alltoys.jpg)
Dominoes falling up (http://www.souptoys.com/gfx/screens/dominoupwards.jpg)
The Great Aussie Drop Bear (http://www.souptoys.com/gfx/screens/dropbear.jpg)
Beebee's Castle (http://www.souptoys.com/gfx/screens/castlebeebee.jpg)

Click here to download the trial version. (http://downloads.souptoys.com/SouptoysInstaller.msi)

System Requirements
Windows XP or 2000
PIII 600mhz or better
At least 128mb of RAM

Thanks to everyone here at Indiegamer. The advice and information i have found here over the last 16 months has been invaluable.
I can't wait to hear what everyone thinks at last. :)

Rory

[Barlok]

Wow :eek: Cool addictive game with interesting gameplay and beatiful graphics, physics nice & realistic! I think, this game favorite for kids!
IMHO, Poor, that your game selling on BMT, for many peoples on this forum & another simillar theme forums best variant - RegNow or eSellerate. :(

[Sharpfish]

IMHO, Poor, that your game selling on BMT, for many peoples on this forum & another simillar theme forums best variant - RegNow or eSellerate. :(


Tell that to http://www.retro64.com - they seem to do ok with BMT ;)

[Rory]

We've found BMT to be helpful and really quick to respond to any questions we have had so far. When we were integrating their order form into the Souptoys page we went back and forth multiple times and they (thanks Kim!) were always happy to do what we wanted, whether it was removing text fields or just shifting a picture one pixel to the left. And then shifting it back again.

I couldn't see many differences between the Credit Card processing companies, so in the end i decided on the one with the best customer service reviews.
Having said all that a nice integrated, fully customised payment system, with animated VeriSign logos like PopCap.com, would be sweet.

[RohoMech]

erm...kinda odd, the game "crashed" when I tried run it, although if i didn't click anything on the error box, I could still play with the toys (its pretty cool btw).

[Rory]

Thanks for the info Roho. If you could send me a pm and let me know what the error message you were seeing was that would be great.
cheers

[Rory]

Thanks to Rohomech and everyone else who has told me of their problems related to downloading and corrupted installers. I think we've traced the problem down to our friends over at GoDaddy.com. In the first 12 hours we started receiving reports that downloads were getting about halfway through then quitting randomly. So we decided to setup a little test on our download which was hosted at GoDaddy. The test simply downloaded the SouptoysInstaller.msi off the server every ten minutes and recorded the average rate it was being downloaded for 12 hours.

12 hours later...

A simple graph of the 12 hour period produced some very strange results. Click here for your free graph. (http://i2.tinypic.com/qy7ewg.jpg)
The most notciable thing are the peaks and the troughs. It seemed we were getting 2 downloads at about 500-600 KB/s. Then we would have 1 download at 200 KB/s. This cycle continued throughout the period.

The second obvious problem are the times when the download hit 0KB/s resulting in a person's download being cancelled.

A phone call to GoDaddy support produced very little. We were told that yes we did have a problem and that we had been 'escalated'. We weren't quite sure what that meant, but it sounded good.

While waiting for a respone, you know because we had been 'escalated' :) , we started getting reports that installer files were smaller than they should be. For example, one user told us she had a 1.6mb installer file as opposed to the 12.5mb file it should have been. I proposed that it was GoDaddy's fault once again.

With still no response from GoDaddy we jumped ship and shifted our installer file over to the good people at Pair (http://www.pair.com). We ran the same test last night with these results. (http://i2.tinypic.com/qy7l0m.jpg) As you can see the average rate was 350-600 KB/s with no failed downloads.

We hope that this will have fixed the problem and if any of you are keen to put the new host through its paces and download the free trial (http://www.souptoys.com/get_toybox.php), please do and let me know if you have any comments or problems with regard to download or running the .msi from the location.

Lesson learnt: You get what you pay for. ;)