Hello World

Monkey Archive Forums/Monkey Discussion/Hello World

Psychosanity(Posted 2012) [#1]
I just wanted to say a quick Hello to the community. Maybe get myself better known to the frequent faces of the monkey forums

Monkey is actually my very first programming language, besides using clickteam tools such as Multimedia Fusion and such.

I did manage to create a fairly large project (small game but 1 hour play-through) using just the monkey demo, using some help from what is on the forums, but asking for no help on my own.

I mostly want to say now that i've paid and registered that i'm a lurker no more, and would love as much help as I can get with my project

I'm actually relying on this game to pull me out of my hole and help me with some income, and I want it to be the best it can be, before releasing it to the android market.

I have a few questions, my biggest one has to be security. I'm very new to coding in general so i'm not sure if there are any kind of security precautions I will need to take? For example my game is sitting around on my website without any password protection, should the data folder be protected?

Also, I have questions about my games graphics. I see the games the rest of the community are designing and the graphics seem to blow mine away. I'm not a graphics designer at all and did my best at drawing and designing everything, do you think it's good enough? or How can I make them look better? Are there any tricks I am missing?

I'm just looking for advice, and I suppose I'm a little paranoid and uneasy about releasing my first game, I want it to do well, but I need to release it soon, i'm a little tight on cash.

If anyone wants to take the time to give it a good look-through I would be thrilled. I've already posted the game "Schizo Ballz" in the Monkey Projects section. A link to it is http://www.monkeycoder.co.nz/Community/posts.php?topic=2493 Thanks for any feedback or advice you can give!


therevills(Posted 2012) [#2]
Welcome to the land of coding, whilst you are here you will be happy, sad, confused and angry... all at the same time ;)

Re: Making money, don't expect it to happen quickly. Lots of experienced coders don't make any money. Lots of noobies think it will be easy etc

Re: Security, I wouldnt worry about it - if someone uses your media you can send them a cease and desist or just sue them :P

Re: Graphics, this is where many coders fall down. We can program nice tidy code which works well, but we cant draw to save our lives... most successful games, coders will hire an artist.

Re: Schizo Balls - looks good and fun. Not sure how the controls will work on Android (accelerometer?) - would I pay for it... I doubt it, maybe you need to release it free and add Ads. With my Pirate Solitaire I found it was VERY hard to market it. I had two version a free cut down version and the full paid version, I thought the users could find the paid version by themselves - I was wrong, I was getting less than $10 a month from the paid version. Until recently I added a link to the free version to "Buy Pirate Solitaire", this has worked pretty well I now make $50 per month by just doing this alone.

Good Luck and enjoy you stay :)


Samah(Posted 2012) [#3]
Lots of experienced coders don't make any money.

Cough... ;)


AdamRedwoods(Posted 2012) [#4]
Welcome. Don't expect revenue until a year or two after you've started and have several assets out and active.


A quick word on protection:

Is is one of my complaints towards HTML5. But I feel a possible work-around is to use a base64 (or ascii85) decoder for a single-text file which could encapsulate all your assets (XML for encapsulating files, base64 for the data).

This won't guarantee anything, but will keep search engines and the average user out of your assets.


therevills(Posted 2012) [#5]
Cough... ;)

I wasnt naming names :P

but will keep search engines and the average user out of your assets.

Couldnt you just put a robot file in the data folder? And stop users browsing the folder too?


Paul - Taiphoz(Posted 2012) [#6]
Yeah welcome, like the others said, try not to make money an issue, I know like me it would be nice to be financially viable but there is so much luck involved that you really should just focus on making a fun game, and let the money thing deal with itself.

As for the community, ask questions, ask lots and lots of questions, there will always be some people who get annoyed that you spam a lot of stuff but ignore them.

There is no such thing as a stupid question, only questions you dont know the answer to, the good thing is that this community out of all those I have used is by far the most helpful so your in a good place.

finally criticism, people will critique your work, when this is bad do not let it bother you, but do try and give it some thought, if their telling you something does not work, then there is probably a good reason for it, whats important is that you try and filter out what you really need to listen to, and what might just be one guys personal taste.

So listen to all your critics, but filter out those who dont like the idea, or critic something their personal taste does not like and listen to those that are telling you about something thats broken, or not working well.

erm..

hope this helps.


Psychosanity(Posted 2012) [#7]
Thanks for all the welcomes and the advice guys! I've found alot of it very useful.


ziggy(Posted 2012) [#8]
Welcome! You'll find this is a very nice place to stay