Hi all, I would like to present BOH, a commercial, 100% indie game I released for AmigaOS, AROS, Linux, MacOS and Windows. BOH is a unique retro-flavoured puzzle-riddled maze game spiced up with thrilling action. You move in claustrophobic, mysterious, dangerous battlefields searching for the Evil Masters, who throw countless enemies at you until you discover and face them in the final battle. Although your quests are made slightly less hard by the power-ups scattered all around, carrying out the missions demands lots of concentration and quick reflexes. With BOH the fun never ends: new missions can be added anytime and you can even create your own! And, as if that was not enough, you can also customize entirely its audio-visual aspect! BOH has been created with lots of passion and care to offer, with its oldschool style, a fascinatingly different videogaming experience. The game features: * immersive & thrilling gameplay; * 40 missions + 10 secret missions to unlock; * missions divided in 5 levels of difficulty; * multi-phase missions; * multi-floor battlefields of any size/shape; * mind-blowing puzzles and deadly traps; * many and varied power-ups; * several different kinds of enemies; * hand-pixelled 2D graphics; * real-time field of vision and lighting; * atmospheric audio and rich soundtrack; * 7 themes; * online world standings; * possibility of creating missions and themes; * Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish translations. BOH comes on a CD-ROM in a plastic DVD box along with a 24 pages, full-color printed manual or as a downloadable ISO image. Website: http://www.bohthegame.com Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/BOH/99598418583 Twitter: http://twitter.com/bohthegame I'll gladly answer any question. Thanks for the attention and enjoy!
No. After some research and a little survey, the company and I decided that direct selling was the best way to begin with. saimo
Affiliating is still direct selling. But you give a % to the people whom made the sale possible. Affiliates give you traffic you give them a % of the sale. JC
Sorry, I did not express my thoughts well. I meant to say that we went for a scheme where no third parties were involved in any way. saimo
I hope you do not mind if I quote the answer from the FAQ page of the website: That said, I believe - and somebody confirmed - that the information, the screenshots and the videos already available give a quite good idea of what the game is about. If there is something that is not clear or you cannot find anywhere, feel free to ask saimo
With my old Textureshock business, I did this. In hindsight, it wasn't a smart move. Affiliates and their web pages will help you to generate traffic and to not have to worry so much about doing all the selling, marketing, etc. on your own. They will help your product to turn up more often in browser searches than it would have otherwise. They will give you exposure, and on the net customers often translate that into popularity, quality, and how committed your company is. Affiliates take a percentage of your sales, but compared to a portal it is really tiny. Affiliates can provide data and suggestions to increase the viability of a product. After all, they're partially making a living from it, so they want it to sell as well as possible. I'm sure that there are dishonest affiliates out there, but one of the things this board is good at is pointing out the good ones. Use every resource to your advantage.
I agree with all of the above, but in our specific case affiliating would affect the business negatively at least at the beginning. I know it may sound strange, but that's the way it is. Thank you for the kind suggestion, though saimo
Actually, it's not the way it is, it's the way you think it is. Unfortunately for you, you're wrong. Affiliating is only a bad thing if your web presence is so huge and unmissable that all traffic would have gone to you if it wasn't stolen by them darn affiliates. For perspective, even Amazon has an affiliate program. You are just throwing money away by not affiliating your game.
First of all, I would like to clarify I appreciate the help you all are trying to offer. Thank you That said, a decision has been taken with the due pondering: if it is wrong (and I do consider this as a possibility), time will tell. For sure I cannot invest more of my time on discussing this issue here (actually, I would not even be entitled to, as I am not part of the publishing company). Please excuse me if it sounds arrogant, it is not meant to be so. Of course, I would gladly provide you with all the information you may want about the game itself as quickly and as comprehensively as possible. saimo
Hello. I like this game. Personally, I think affiliating would help you sell the game. Yes it's more work, but you get the support of other people's fanbase, thus more sales and possibly more fans. When you first start out, this is a great way to increase visibility. Whatever the circumstances keeping someone from accepting third party support, the fewer the barriers, the greater the opportunity. Also, I'd highly recommend displaying a demo(if there isn't one there already, but I haven't found it). Not only does the demo give people a nice taste of your game, it also ensures the game will work on their PC before they purchase it. Increasing consumer trust is very helpful in getting them to part with your future sales.
Thanks For now, no demo is available or planned for the reasons explained in post #7 here (I'm providing just a link to avoid cluttering the thread with the same things). If you haven't done so yet, please make sure you do not miss all the screenshots, the videos and the information (including the full, detailed user's manual) in the website - and, on top of that, feel free to ask me any question you may have. saimo
It just seems to me you lack the energy and patience to process everything related to your game. Trust me, we all do! I never get anything done these days because I do programming, art AND sound for all my games, AND I'm doing serious programming for someone who knows ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about designing a game, which just adds way more frustration. The solution - give some of the workload to someone else(if possible). You can leave the commerce work to BMT Micro for example. Add more questions/answers to the FAQ section. Leave some of the advertising to the affiliates/sign up for game producer sites. Even if the demo is a "specs checker", I think it's better than having no demo at all.
Thanks for your opinion, but the only thing I can comment on is this: I would if had any. I have already put there all the questions that have been made (even indirectly in some obscure forum in some obscure language). So, if there is anything that anybody here cannot already find an answer to by looking at the material on the website, do not hesitate ask saimo
Your explanation of why there is no demo doesn't make sense. All you have to do is have the exe check the filesize of the various xml files and if they're not correct throw the user out of the game. There are a million other checks and limitations you can do to prevent this kind of thing. You will almost certainly sell less copies if you don't have a demo. I can't see any reason not to affiliate unless you've entered into some kind of agreement that prevents you from doing so.
Hi all, I would like to point you to this nice review motorollin has written on Amiga.org. Moreover, you may want to have a look at the first comments given by other customers - you can find them on the COMMENTS page of BOH's website. Happy reading! saimo
Lack of a demo is just plain silly, at least for the windows version. It's the reason you're not getting the interest you want. Basically you need word of mouth, and the only way to really do that is to let people play it and see what it's about. In general you lock the demo into a few levels, it shouldn't be the same executable as the full version. Demo Exe should only run demo levels, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out how to change your level format just slightly so it doesn't work in the full version. So quit being stubborn already.