A Happy New Year update and our DMCA situation
Happy New Year!
There was a big uptick in people playing today so if one of those people was you, I hope you and your viewers enjoyed the game. This little early access game keeps getting better as more people play it and tell me what is right/wrong, so keep the feedback coming!
I've got some bigger changes on the way, specifically, adding some better on-boarding instructions/tutorial for streamers and the chat. Some viewers and streamers figure the games out quickly and other groups don't, and that's a failing on my part. Regardless, because of the sudden uptick in people playing I wanted to quickly patch in some fixes.
DMCA:
If you're familiar with the Twitch DMCA situation, some streamers have gotten DMCAed because of licensed audio in the games they stream. Here's the situation for this game: Last year I spoke with SOCAN, and because the incredible band Couteau Papillon owns all their masters, Couteau Papillon fully control all their music, not the record companies. Which means the band is the only group that would have a legitimate DMCA claim. The band has done video game music before (notably the Spaceteam soundtrack), and while it cost a pretty penny to license the music and get a new song created, they understand that the game is designed to be streamed and everything is in the clear for this game and for streaming their music over Twitch.
Changes in this new version (0.38):
One thing that's still on my todo list:
With Happy Tanksgiving and Bombertown, Streamers start the lobby with some protection until the lobby closes and the game starts. But with Minesweeper 100, it's actually possible for a streamer to dig a space before the lobby closes, discover it's a mine, and kill themselves. And if people are still joining the lobby, the board can expand and reset the space to undug, and now it looks like they got killed for no reason.
This is a terrible experience so it's my highest priority right now, and I may have to simply lock the controls until the game starts. Either way, it'll get fixed.
That's all for now, and I wish you a happy 2021!
-Jaime
There was a big uptick in people playing today so if one of those people was you, I hope you and your viewers enjoyed the game. This little early access game keeps getting better as more people play it and tell me what is right/wrong, so keep the feedback coming!
I've got some bigger changes on the way, specifically, adding some better on-boarding instructions/tutorial for streamers and the chat. Some viewers and streamers figure the games out quickly and other groups don't, and that's a failing on my part. Regardless, because of the sudden uptick in people playing I wanted to quickly patch in some fixes.
DMCA:
If you're familiar with the Twitch DMCA situation, some streamers have gotten DMCAed because of licensed audio in the games they stream. Here's the situation for this game: Last year I spoke with SOCAN, and because the incredible band Couteau Papillon owns all their masters, Couteau Papillon fully control all their music, not the record companies. Which means the band is the only group that would have a legitimate DMCA claim. The band has done video game music before (notably the Spaceteam soundtrack), and while it cost a pretty penny to license the music and get a new song created, they understand that the game is designed to be streamed and everything is in the clear for this game and for streaming their music over Twitch.
Changes in this new version (0.38):
- The music is way quieter!! Gamemaker Studio has a huge problem with game audio, and despite the song file being properly leveled against other music, I had to crank it down to get it to sound normal.
- One thing that I didn't catch in the massive GameMaker Studio update, was that sometimes Steam would say that it couldn't find the exe, except that the exe was like.... totally there. That is fixed now!
- Other quick fixes to minor bugs I found have been implemented. I don't have a large streaming audience so it's really, really tough for me to test without having 100 real people playing at once. Luckily, my bug-reporting systems are pretty good!
One thing that's still on my todo list:
With Happy Tanksgiving and Bombertown, Streamers start the lobby with some protection until the lobby closes and the game starts. But with Minesweeper 100, it's actually possible for a streamer to dig a space before the lobby closes, discover it's a mine, and kill themselves. And if people are still joining the lobby, the board can expand and reset the space to undug, and now it looks like they got killed for no reason.
This is a terrible experience so it's my highest priority right now, and I may have to simply lock the controls until the game starts. Either way, it'll get fixed.
That's all for now, and I wish you a happy 2021!
-Jaime