Merry merry!

Merry Christmas everyone!

 

It's been a busy weekend, so let's get right to it.

 

Late last week, Diana and I met up with her parents at Quail Gardens and saw the Christmas lights and stuff.  Santa was there, and Allison actually got up on his lap and had her picture taken.  She was a little shy, but told him her name and said she wanted candy for Christmas.  It was really cute.

 

On Christmas Eve day, it was beautiful and sunny, so we opened one of her presents early (a cool stomp-rocket set from Uncle Dave) and met up with Mike and Gwen and Ripley at the park.  Mike and I tossed the football.  Allison gave Ripley some treats and played on the playground a bit, and did plenty of rocket-stomping.  Good times.

 

That evening, we went to my parents house for a delicious prime rib dinner and some presents, as they were leaving the next morning for Montana.

 

When we got home, we decided that Santa's reindeer would want some carrots to eat, and Santa would also like carrots, as well as some broccoli crackers.  So we set those out on a plate, as well as a letter that Allison wrote (dictated) at preschool, and headed to bed.

 

Allison woke up the next morning at 5:30am, and I went in to see her to try to get her back to sleep.  Thankfully she did, but not before asking if Santa had already come.  We woke up to her later yelling that "Santa came!  Santa came!"  She had found two rolls of Smarties candies under her tree, and was very fired up by this.  (All this is reported by Diana… I was still in bed at this point).  She apparently lined them all up and counted them all and ate them.

 

That morning, we opened some presents, and got ready to head over to Diana's parents for more celebrating.  Allison got a new blue Cars shirt with about 20 characters on the front, which she immediately put on (and I'm not sure if she's taken it off since…)  She also got some Dora the Explorer underwear, so had to put those on right away, too.

 

We headed over to Diana's parents house, opened more presents and generally hung out and played for the rest of the day.  Diana and I snuck away during naptime (aka "quiet time", as naps don't really happen over there) and had a nice walk on the beach.

 

The next morning, we went back to Diana's parents and met up with all the Schatz's and their respective spouses and kids.  It was great to see Katie and Lindsey and baby Romy, as well as talk indie gaming stuff with Andy.

 

And now, back to work.  A nice long weekend.

 

The other big news is that my indie gaming project went live over the weekend.  Bad Golf finally passed peer review, and hit the Xbox Live Indie Games marketplace on the morning of 12/24.  I wasn't immediately able to see how many copies had been downloaded or sold, but I was able to see that reviews (just a star rating) were starting to come in.  By the end of the day, there were 20 or so reviews, the average of which was about 3.9 out of 5.

 

On 12/25, I was able to see 12/24 sales data, and found that I'd sold 60 copies (with 643 people trying the free trial version)!  This was very exciting.

 

On 12/26, the sales data wasn't updated, but my number of ratings climbed steadily up to about 40.

 

On 12/27 (today), I can see sales data for 12/24 and 12/25.

 

1757 downloads (trials)

227 purchases

12.93% purchase/trial ratio

 

The game sells at $1 per copy, and I get 70% of that (eventually, I guess).  So I've already made back my $99 investment to become a Creators Club member.  I'm sure the game won't make, like, thousands of dollars, but maybe a couple hundred?  That's kinda neat.

 

Much more importantly, though, is that I'm pretty proud of myself for finally sticking with a project for long enough to see it all the way through.  I've started a lot of game programming projects, but soon after getting some of the broad strokes complete, I think to myself "Who is actually going to play this?  Why am I doing this?  Maybe I could convince some of my friends to humor me, but what's the point of all this effort?"  Having the Xbox Live Indie Gamers system was really a big motivation, as it gave me a very real, tangible outlet to distribute the game.  That's neat.

 

I already have my next idea for a game, and I'm pretty excited about it.  I think it's a pretty original idea for the XBLIG scene.  So I'll give myself a little break and maybe start working on that sometime soon.