My main job of today was to complete the Martian Rover Patrol manual and prepare everything for uploading. These final tweaks drive me crazy. Like an albertross landing, the last parts seem to take a logarithmic age to set down. It's now 20:24 and I've just made the last programming tweaks, to fix (well address) the problem of Alt-Tab with both games. Fortunately, Radioactive (also a DirectX7 game) had the rudiments of code for this, so now both games have Alt-Tab support for the first time.
One choice was to work out payments, prices. I've decided to make both games $2 with a $2 option for the 16-bit 44100hz wave of the music. This is next to nothing. I had considered 'free' with donations, or perhaps a higher price, but I can but hope for a few sales at this price. There are so many games now and so many are free. Windows itself is, to some extent, on the decline as an operating system because a lot of people use phones, tablets or other devices to do the basic online ordering or web-form filling that modern life demands. Few people use chunky PC computers like myself, and those people, like myself, are computing professionals or old-school 40 or 50-somethings that have grown up using computers. Consoles are dominant for games, though Steam is a dominant (though expensive for developers) force in Windows gaming. For some games, the PC still remains a premiere gaming platform due to it sheer flexibility of controls (keyboards!), specialist game types that consoles haven't really made use of (consoles are still generally child/toy orientated), and the massive quantity of games.
Peter came for his lesson as planned and we talked about many things.
I finished watching a documentary about Jack Butler Yeats which was astonishingly hammily narrated by Pierce Brosnan. I found most of his art to be ugly and crude, but one or two had touching, almost ghostly qualties. In general, however, I found the titles to be better than the paintings.
