Walker Software Weblog

I write shareware and I’m rather new at it. You see, I’m written commercial offerings for over 10 years, but I’ve never had to do everything else — marketing, sales, dealing the resellers, etc. And I’ve learned a few lessons lately.

First, some download websites are totally full of them selves. They are making money selling ads on their sites and expect you to pay a minimum of $80 per year *per product* (and they consider product for mac and windows to be two products). That seems excessive to me. If I wanted to buy and ad I’d buy an ad — being buried halfway in thousands of search results at download site is not an ad.

Second, I’ve hit about every deployment issue I think could up. Test, test, and retest your deployments. Yes, you may have put a file on your web server a hundred million times, but it only a screw-up once — like default permissions getting reset to something odd — to lose a few sales.

Third, These “resellers” that can auto generate shareware “keys” and send them out are woefully under-documented. I thought I had everything setup correctly. Then, I found out that customers that bought my game a week ago still had not received their keys. While trying to figure out what went wrong, I find that my understanding of their process was flawed and the correct way is not fully documented.

Four, on the technical side, Java’s fullscreen API is a little quirky. On the Mac, Java will happily make a window or canvas a fullscreen object. Windows doesn’t complain if you make the Canvas the fullscreen object, but it won’t actually draw anything to the screen either. The final version I stumbled on that works on both platforms is 1) if fullscreen, make the window the fullscreen object and do not add a canvas 2) if windowed, create a window add a canvas and create the BufferStrategy from the canvas.

Summary, test,test,test,test, and retest.