On Selling Novashell Games

[loken]

I hope to eventually sell a game in which I'm designing with Novashell in mind and I was wondering if theres going to be a built in mechanism for registering a game through a service such as Regnow?

To clarify, say I want people to be able to play a downloadable demo, but offer the choice of registering for the full game. Upon registration the user is given a key. Will there be some sort of integrated way to unlock a full version game?

I'm completely unfamiliar with registration techniques, and I realize this is pretty far down the road given Novashell's current state.

Any thoughts or insights would be awesome. :)

[whisperstorm]

Given the way everything is editable and the source is there, you'd probably have to have two different versions of the game - the limited one and the unlimited one.

Also there's supposed to be a compressed format sometime in the future - but that would still not prevent someone from simply unzipping the files and getting to the expanded game.

[loken]

My concerns exactly Whisperstorm..

Piracy and cracking is pretty much a given no matter what you do, but I'd prefer it at least be somewhat difficult.

[Seth]

That's a good question.

I think for a lot of devs, like whisperstorm mentioned, you could just have two versions - the 'full' would be a separate download after purchasing. Cuts down support, there is some piracy but hey, all in all, most people are who would have paid probably still are.

I have a lot of friends that use this approach and have had zero problems.

Security 'wrappers' such as Big Fish Game/Real uses would also work fine, they limit the gamer to 60 minutes until he pays. Most people won't care or realize what engine is used or that they could just grab an unlocked .exe of novashell and play the game for free. A little extra security could be added by checking if a certain parm, like "-jshdkjshd" was used to run novashell, if not, they didn't run from the wrapper and you could detect it.

To go beyond those steps, for instance, to make a special .exe with special code for security, you need to compile your own version.

The source will be available a bit later on (under some kind of special "don't share it" license) but you would need MS Visual C++ 8 and some C++ expertise to get it going.

Linux and OSX versions would be a similar deal.

[Ian]

It seems like people are putting the cart before the horse here.

[loken]

Seth, thanks for the input. I probably will just end up providing two different files, the full version one being highly safeguarded and protected via some sort of authentication on the website itself.

Ian, that may be true, but it's a question that I've been kicking around in my head for awhile now. I'm about to start an honest to god ligit company and I find Novashell to be pretty much perfect for the plans I have in mind for the flagship title even if Novashell isn't nearly ready for primetime. So my mind is all over the place, not the least of which is how to sell the product.

[whisperstorm]

You may consider giving your first game away for free and selling your services instead. A free game gets distributed very widely and can serve as a resume. That said, you might redo your game such that the first "world" or "chapter" is the free one. Look at how aveyond fared.