Arcade-In-A-Box Games now live
Community Forums/Showcase/Arcade-In-A-Box Games now live
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| Arcade-In-A-Box Game's website is now live for developers to start registering. www.aiabgames.com (If you want to see a demo of the dev portal, just log in as ArcadEd/reztro) (If you want to see the store visit www.aiabgames.com/cre it's just not active yet, but there are few demo products to show) Here is a copy and paste of our current FAQ, hopefully it will answer some questions. If not, I'll be checking back here very often to help address any questions. What is AIAB Games? AIAB Games is a division of Arcade-In-A-Box, LLC. We are dedicated to finding talented independent game developers that have a desire to create arcade style games, and give them an outlet to sell their games. Our sole business is not to make profits off selling software. Our main business is manufacturing high quality arcade controllers and consoles. However, we do see opportunity to utilize these great games to help sell our units, while promoting your games in return. It?s a win both sides. What do I need to do to make my games available at AIAB Games? First, you will want to download the AIAB Technical Specifications Sheet. This document will give you a good idea of how to program games for this platform. If it is something you are interested in, then register for an account here. There are no setup fees, so registration is free. Once you have registered you can then login to the developer area. From there you can add games to the database, edit games, view stats, etc. What does AIAB Game get out of this? AIAB Games takes a 12% percent commission from each sale (10% +2% for credit card processing if a credit card is used.). The rest of the money you sell the game for is yours. The only exception to that is if you want to be paid via paypal, there is a small funds transfer fee. We make payments the 1st of every month. What is the process of adding a game? Once you have a final version of your game, login to your AIAB Games account to get to the Developer Portal. From their you will click the add game button and fill out the information. Once that is complete, you will get an email with the information to an ftp site to upload your game too. At this point, AIAB will test the game on an arcade system to make sure 1. It?s compatible and 2. There are no game killing bugs. Once 1 and 2 are cleared, the game is packaged in 3 ways. 1. Arcade Cabinet (MAME Compliant), 2. Arcade-In-A-Box, and 3. PC Compliant. Then it?s added to the store for download. How good does my game have to be? Over the years of playing video games, we have learned one thing; everyone has a different taste in what is fun. With that said, we will not judge your game. As long as it meets the technical requirements and is not buggy, it will be added to the store. Now whether it sells may determine how good it is. But, it won?t cost you anything to have it in our store. However, we do reserve the rights to remove any game from the store that is not selling if we become short of space After registering you will have access to the Developer Portal. Hopefully we can build a nice downloads section to help other developers with their projects. I hope to open the store May 1st, but if we have enough games before then I'll open it earlier. It would be great to have at least 5 games available when the store opens. Thanks again for all the hard work you put into you games. |
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| Fantastic! I've got a couple of developers who I'm sure would like to see thier games on this. I'll catch you off line. Cheers, Tim. |
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| Great. I just dumped my Plasmorg project, so expect a whole new game to come about when it's time. I'll register now, but the new game project of mine won't be released until it's on a "When It's Done" basis (now that sounds familiar). I just got done with the graphics and sound media, now to make this game work, that's another thing. Expect my "TumBlocks" project in, well, may take at least a couple of months to perfect the thing for this AIAB of yours. On top of that, my first version will be based around an X360 controller, so you may not get the Arcade version until late spring, early summer at least... |
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| Sounds good Bob, I look forward to it :). The beauty of this idea is it's pretty low cost for me, so I can maintain for a long while if it doesn't pick up right away. Even better is there is no up front fees for the devs. At least not yet. If I start maxing out my bandwidth and storage space, that might change. But everyone that has been on board since the start will be grandfathered in regardless. |
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| CG_01 would be great using the two joysticks... Cheers Charlie www.charliesgames.co.uk |
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Sounds like a great plan. Just better hope that using Tetris tiles in my game won't cause Elrog to anything I'll regret. Of course, there's a lot of space shooters with Space Invaders and Astrosmash, so that type of game won't be a problem. Here's some samples of what you'll be shooting down: The Blue Plasma Tile  The Cyan Plasma Tile  The Green Plasma Tile  The Pink Plasma Tile  The Red Plasma Tile  The Yellow Plasma Tile  The Player's Turret Cannon Well, seems like this will be quite a project, just better hope that having multiple animated plasma tiles won't cause any bugs (as that's one of your policies). Just trying to let the computer AI rotate the Tetris-style tiles as the player shoots them down before they reach the ground. Just better hope that Elrog'll lemme make a game like this. |
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| Looks fun Charlie. And 2 sticks is fine, just change the key inputs to use the player 2 joystick as the right stick and your rocking :). At least on my units the sticks are not too far apart to be uncomfortable playing a game like that. Something else you could do it, or put in addition, is make the joystick move and trackball shoot, or vice versa. Bob, Looking good :). |
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| Yeah, the computer plays Tetris, but you have to shoot the tiles down, and you will have to figure out how to implement difficulty settings, since I'm gonna set Easy/Slow, Medium/Mid-speed, and Difficult/Fast settings on the Tetris AI of the PC. |
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| Wow, great sounding game you got started, Mr. Iron Bob. And great sounding company, Mr. ArcadEd! If I can understand my own code, maybe I'll give it a shot! |
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| Thanks Buggy :). I know what you mean about the code. Game code seems to get out of hand rather quickly for me as well LOL. |
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| so it has to be arcade style? I might look into this. This sounds fun. |
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| N8r2k, Not really, that's just how the controls are setup. If you can think of something else using those controls, I say have at it. There is no reason you couldn't make an adventure game or rpg. Just realize that most of these systems (AIAB excluded) involve standing or sitting on bar stools/chairs. But yeah, whatever you wanna do. It's just a PC under the hood running windows xp :). |
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Yeah, I think that an arcade could use more along the lines of hybrid game design. What I mean by "hybrid" is clashing two different games together, use my imagination, and creating my own little niche in how to use one game, and combine it with another, like the one I'm doing now. Having that in an arcade cabinet would be ideal. That would sell, having two classic iconic games wrapped into one, and a whole new setting, that should work out well. Thanks Buggy, and I'll see what transpires with my game project. I'm going to develop my game around my X360 controller first, just to see how it plays. Then I'll create a separate version of the game for the arcade cabinet after the fact using the keyboard controls. BTW, here's how the controls should work on the X360 controller (if anyone wants to convert this from Blitz 3D to BlitzMax for porting into a console, be my guest, because it is really a 2D game with 3D graphics (I would've made it 3D, but it just wouldn't feel right)): Tried to mouse-draw the game controller, but of course, my Wacom tablet couldn't fit the controller on it (it's only the 4x5 model, and maybe would've needed the 6x8 Wacom in order for the controller to fit), so I had to draw the controller the hard way, not easy. However, you get the idea of how this game's gonna be programmed... |
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| Just curious, Is there some where else on Blitzmax.com I should post this? I'm not sure the showcase area is the right spot for people to hear about it :). Any thoughts. Should I submit it as news? |
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| You need to do a press release, you'll get it out to thousands of the right people overnight. The press will pick it up and you'll have everyone knocking on your door. http://www.indiegamebusiness.com/gamedev.ipress.php |
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| Just curious, Is there some where else on Blitzmax.com I should post this? I'm not sure the showcase area is the right spot for people to hear about it :). Any thoughts. Should I submit it as news? You should, on top of that, since BlitzMax also gathers in the Mac and the Linux community, you should also allow for developers from those platforms to be able to make some nice arcade games (I should know since I already converted to Linux myself on my desktop, my notebook still runs Win XP Pro, and Blitz 3D, tho). IMHO, BMax is a strong 2D version of Blitz that will actually work on any platform available on the market, and it's just as stable on all three. Whether you would want to port a BMax game into a game console (since XBox uses Linux code), I'm sort of wondering if that Open Source XDK will be friendly enough for you to put some games in the Live Arcade. My guess, out of research on BMax with Linux, it seems like this would be an up and coming community for Arcade-based games. Just as long as there are drivers for the X360 or the XBox controller designed for Linux, I don't see this as being a problem... |
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| OK cool. I am going to be holding a contest that will start this week giving away a few arcade in a box kits, so I'll wait until I am ready to post the information about that :). |
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