Fairway Solitaire released for Mac!
Community Forums/Showcase/Fairway Solitaire released for Mac!
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| Grey Alien Games is proud to present Fairway Solitaire for Mac (Universal Binary). This top 10 smash hit game is an unusual mix of Solitaire and Golf which has proved extremely successful, earning the game "WINNER! #1 Card/Mahjong Game of 2007" on Big Fish Games. Fairway Solitaire showcases what BlitzMax can achieve in a top-level super-addictive casual game that many hardcore game players have found themselves seriously hooked on. Give it a try today and see what all the fuss is about.   |
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| Awesome! Let us know how well this goes mate. :-) |
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| is this free?!?! man you could be making a pretty penny off this great work though! I've heard about it, and not through blitzmax lines, so it's getting around. |
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| z80jim: No it's not free, sorry. Programming games is my day job and this took 9 months so I need to get paid somehow :-) Glad you've heard about it. Lots of people have played it for sure! |
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| Is this the first *real* test of the 'Mac users buy games' theory? Hope it goes well Jake. |
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| Mac users do buy games (I've sold as many Mac versions of Eschalon as I have the Windows version). Also, Linux users buy games too- at a much lower volume, but sizable enough that I will always support that market. |
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| ... that's interesting to know. Wonder whether it is the same for casual games as games with more 'depth'. Fairway Solitaire and Eschalon are both top products so both deserve to do well on all platforms. |
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| Thanks tonyg. I can say that this has certainly sold good numbers in the first few days. Not as many as PC but *definitely* enough to justify making a Mac version. I'll be watching the sales figures over the first month to compare them with the PC ones to see what sort of % they are of total sales. Possibly some Mac sales are lost to people who own a PC and a Mac who already bought it on PC, but I doubt that's very many people in reality. Also I'll be interested to find out if the Mac conversion rate is any higher. The PC conversion rate was very good anyway. BFG didn't want to do a Linux version btw, as they don't sell Linux games on their site. Perhaps that will change in the future, who knows? One thing I've recently finished is localised versions in German, French and Spanish. Apparently these always convert well as people prefer to play the games in their native language of course and BFG have a big German and French site with a Spanish one starting soon. I certainly advise anyone writing a game to have all the text in a separate file so that it can be localised easily, plus you should leave enough space for the text on buttons and other HUD items for longer words in other languages (especially German). |
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| well it's certainly worth being sold, I can tell just from what I see of it sorry I don't have time to try it in depth. And just so you know, personally I as a mac user and many of my friends are big gamers, so there you go :) |
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| Today Fairway is no.1 on the Mac games page! |
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| Congrats :) If I look at the games on that page, I really ask myself why I force myself to create "indepth gaming experience" if the top 10 are mainly ruled by shallow kiddy games :$ |
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| congrats :) |
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| This is a pretty fun game, I was surprised, it's well polished and lighthearted and unique. Good job sir. |
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| I finally got the chance to try it, and I am in love with it! Great job, I will buy it as soon as I possibly can given the fact that I have parents lol. |
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| Thanks all for your kind words! ImaginaryHuman: Glad you got to try it out as I know you are a Mac user. z80jim, maybe you can get your parents to play it too? If they get addicted, perhaps they'll buy it for you... Dreamora: Actually I think there's some pretty good games in the Mac top 10. Naturally there's mine ;-) Then there's Azada which is a very popular selection of mini-"room escape" puzzles and mini-games. Madame Fate and Ravenhearst are very good hidden object games. I played Sparkles yesterday and it was well made and addictive. Chocolatier 2 is some kind of strategy/sim which is well respected but I've not got round to playing it yet. I think Tradewind legends is another strategy/sim. Apart from that pet game at no.10 the other two are hidden objects games which people either love or hate I guess (I quite enjoy playing the good ones with my family). There's that's the low down. Depending on how you make an in-depth game it could do really well (like Fairy Godmother - great game, and like Chocolatier) or not if it's aimed at techie types who never buy games anyway unless you hit some kind of big time Indie award or something I guess (like Aquaria)... |
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| I found a bug.... I was on full screen at first of course, but after a while I switched it to window. It worked fine, but when I opened it the next time I came back to play, it was still in window screen, but it wasn't working. The game mouse was where it should be, but I could click on anything with it, because the real mouse was hidden and way below the game mouse cursor. To fix it I had to try multiple times to click on options then try and get it back on full screen. After swtching it to full screen, it worked, and when I switched it to window again, it worked. So the bug is opening the app with it already on window. |
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| OK thanks for the details. Weirdly I converted the game in Windowed mode so I loaded it up in windowed mode many many times and it was fine. If you load it up in Windowed mode again, do you get the same bug i.e. does it occur every time or was it a one off bug? Maybe the real issue was that the mouse cursor was not where it was supposed to be (you say the OSX cursor was visible but further down the screen? |
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| first, unfortunately I can't do any testing. I used up the demo and had loads of fun every second I used it. Second, yes that's what happened except that it was invisible until I clicked somewhere where the OS cursor would be off the window, then the game would pause, the OS cursor would appear, and the active app would be finder. If I moved over a button with the game cursor, the button would light up but when I clicked on it I would find out that the cursor is actually lower, which is how I found the bug. To get to options to turn back on full screen, I had to find the button with the invisible OS cursor, and click really fast because when I moved over the button with the OS cursor it was only active for a short second before I'd have to move the mouse again and click fast to click on the button. |
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| Thanks for the details. Mind if I ask: 1) Are you on OSX 10.4 or something different? 2) So just to confirm, did you try loading the game a 2nd time in Windowed mode and the bug was still there? 3) How much further down was the OS cursor than it should have been (a little bit or a lot) Anything else you can think of? thx. Hmm, I think I know the thing you are talking about. Once or twice in development I saw something similar but couldn't reliably duplicate it. If i moved the mouse cursor over a button the button would flick rapidly between active and non-active and it kept repeating the "mouse over" noise rapidly. Sound like what happened to you? |
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| I have 105.2 When I loaded the game the time after I had switched it to window, it started in window and I had the problem. After managing to switch it to full screen I was fine, unfortunately my demo period quit the game on me so I didn't even have the chance to duplicate it. Sorry. look at your last post, and if the game cursor was pointing to the top of it the OSX cursor would be pointing somewhere near the bottom of your post. Nothing, except that when I moved over it with the game cursor, it acted like I could press it, the button lit up and stayed lit, but with the OSX cursor it only flashed for a brief second before it was unclickable. Kind of... except that the flickering button only happened with the lower OSX cursor, the game cursor acted like it should lol except that I couldn't click with it. |
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| OK cool, that's pretty much what I've seen one when the system got confused about where the window was positioned. Thx. |
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| np glad to help :) |
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| hey grey alien... did you have to pay to get fairway solitaire to be a featured 3rd party app on apple's downloads page? If not then congrats! |
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| Hey, this game is #1 on the games page at apple.com |
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| AWESOME! That will seriously boost sales considering the crazy high conversion rate on Macs (at least twice that of PCs I can confirm, and the PC CR was very high). Thanks for letting me know! I didn't pay anything, but Big Fish Games might have, but I doubt it. I suspect they have a good relationship with apple like the other portals that they've put fairway on, and apple want to show good games for the Mac so they were happy to put it on the front page (it says Staff Pick by it - probably they got hopelessly addicted like everyone else and felt compelled to promote it haha). This is a great achievement, it's going in my "cool stuff diary"! |
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| I'm doing my best to get to buy it you really did blitzmax proud :) Just wondering... do you provide the source code upon purchasing of it? I'd love to look at it. |
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| Hey, this game is #1 on the games page at apple.com makes you wonder about apples gaming in general no offence grey |
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| It appears that your demo is the feature download on Apple's games downloads site, too! And that's just in the general Games category :) (Unless it's trying to mess with my head). Heh, and I just noticed you have the version number on the flag there. Clever! This game completely deserves that spot simply for having amazing polish. It's polish like that which brings a smile for a perfection nut like me. Edit: Eeek! I swear your post wasn't there before... |
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| Just wondering... do you provide the source code upon purchasing of it? I'd love to look at it. No I'm afraid not as Big Fish Games own it. However you can purchase my Game Framework which the whole game (and Mac conversion) is based on :-) makes you wonder about apples gaming in general Well my game is partly just there because it's new that's all really (well OK it's damned good too).Picklesworth: Wow thanks for the kind words man! Funnily the game is no.9 on OVERALL downloads of all types of software. It's between Firefox and Google Earth. |
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| so did you kinda just help them, or did they help you? I'm really curious about your relationship with them now lol cuz it seems to me if it was your idea and you "hired" them to help you should have the rights. |
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| Big Fish Games hired me to make the game for them, it was their idea and I programmed it and put lots of little ideas and polish into it. They paid me to make it which worked out great. The game I'm currently making for them is also their idea, but I'm putting even more ideas into it, it's been great fun designing it with their top designer, John Cutter, over the last couple of weeks. |
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| Much kudos to you Grey, I'm pleased with your framework on the PC, next step is to get myself a Mac to try your framework out on..... http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/index.html Well done. |
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| Thanks! **Fairway Solitaire auf Deutsch!** It's no.3 in the German chart today! http://www.bigfishgames.de/download-spiele/top-100-spiele-downloads.html French version will be out next week and Spanish soon after. (Oh the localised versions are for PC only) |
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