Inventive Dingo

Buying Mayhem Intergalactic on impulse was always a good idea*. Now, if you like, you can buy Mayhem Intergalactic on impulse on Impulse!

Confused? Allow me to clarify: Mayhem Intergalactic is now available on Impulse, Stardock Corporation’s digital distribution platform. Available for purchase, that is. Hooray!

Get a room, you-- waaaait. This joke seems oddly familiar.

The folks at Stardock Corporation seem like good chaps, despite their ominous-sounding company name (doom doom doom Stardock Corporation doom doom doom), so don’t be afraid to entrust them with the 19.95 intergalactic space dollars needed to make an Impulse purchase of said video game. Go forth and Impulse buy! They probably won’t spend their 30% cut on a nefarious plan to conquer the known universe.

* Especially thanks to Inventive Dingo’s iron-clad, water-tight, 100%-flip-flop-proof 30-Day Money Back Guarantee! (To be clear, the 30-Day Money Back Guarantee only applies to purchases made via this website; it doesn’t apply to purchases made via Impulse or Steam, since I don’t work for either of those fine companies. Impulse’s returns policy is here, and Steam… um… doesn’t do returns. Sadness.)

FYI, I’ll be attending Freeplay 2009 down in Melbourne this year. I’m not planning at the moment to have an expo booth or a speaking engagement or anything of the kind; I’m just going to meet people and have interesting conversations.

If you’re in the area and interested in independent games development, I hope to see you there!

Smoke from the Victorian bushfires mixes with clouds over Warrandyte. Photo: Nick Carson.

In February I announced I’d be making a donation to the appeal fund set up by the Australian Red Cross to help victims of the bushfires that were ravaging the Australian state of Victoria back then. Specifically, I promised to donate 50% of the proceeds received by yours truly from sales of Mayhem Intergalactic which occurred between Feb 7th and March 14th.

Red Cross receipt for the donation. Click for larger version.

Due largely to the inevitable lengthy delays involved in getting money from distributors and having it wired internationally, and also to this little thing I’ve got going on called “final year of university” and a lack of fondness for doing complicated accounting (this was harder to sort out than you’d think), I hadn’t done it until today.

Well, now I have (see image). Which means I can reveal how much money we raised:

$1,055.02. That’s one thousand and fifty-five dollars. And 2 cents. In Australian dollars – it’s “only” about $837 USD – but still, a grand is a grand! I’m seriously impressed it got that high. I have the best customers ever. I love you guys.

Unfortunately the bushfire appeal which I was intending to donate it to actually ended before I received the money (doh!), so I rounded up to $1,100 and donated the money to the Australian Red Cross’s “Where It’s Needed – Australia” category, that being the closest available. Mea culpa. I hope nobody is too disappointed with the category switch.

Happy Mayhem raising! Just… don’t do it on Earth.

“If you do, my robot protector named Gort will release insectile nanobots to scour all the pathetic life-forms from your puny planet! To, ah… save it from you. Yes.”

P.S. For the record, my stats show that, as expected, sales did not double during Feb 7th-March 14th – they merely continued their steep post-Steam-release decline – meaning that I now have less money than I would have if I hadn’t done this. Which was, of course, the entire point. I did it for its own sake, not as a nefarious capitalist stunt as some people have claimed.

The good folks over at Valve have recently created global gameplay stats pages for all Achievement-supporting games, including Mayhem Intergalactic. It makes for some interesting viewing. There’s quite a range of percentages, which speaks well to the achievement design skills of you guys and myself; a mere 0.9% of players have completed Maestro of Multiplayer Mayhem (not surprising), while First Blood is right up at 78.2%.

What does surprise me a little is that the highest percentage isn’t higher – it’s pretty much impossible to play the game at all without triggering at least one achievement. Maybe lots of people are playing in Steam’s offline mode, e.g. as a result of not having an always-on internet connection, so the achievements never trigger?

Whatever the reason, it’s not exclusive to Mayhem Intergalactic. Audiosurf and Valve’s own Left 4 Dead have maximum percentages which are even smaller (77.8% and 74.5% respectively). Interestingly, Braid has one achievement which is right up at 96.6%, and almost half of the people who bought the game managed to finish it (which is pretty good going). Perhaps the people who wanted to play Braid but didn’t have always-on internet connections decided to buy from one of the other online distributors, rather than Steam. It’s worth noting that Audiosurf and L4D are Steam exclusives, and Mayhem Intergalactic is only available on Steam and directly from me. This might support the “offline mode” hypothesis.

Strikingly, less than half of the people who bought Aquaria are recorded as managing to reach the second area (Open Waters). I know the home area is pretty big, but still, this is a bit saddening. Maybe they got bored because the combat wasn’t difficult enough, or because they got bored by the pure exploration part of the game (before you get weapons)? Push on, people! The game gets better (and harder) the further on you go!

(That reminds me – I still haven’t finished Aquaria. I almost beat the final form of the final boss before I got killed – his stomach beam is nasty – and then wasn’t particularly motivated to start the battle all over again. It’s looooong. Must get to that sometime.)

Well, that’s all for this post. Keeping on making Mayhem, folks!

P.S. Despite the recent radio silence, I certainly haven’t forgotten about my bushfire appeal pledge – I’ll post an update on how much we raised as soon as I get time to do the accounting. Stay tuned.

This just in: Mayhem Intergalactic’s bushfire appeal has been mentioned on this week’s episode of Good Game, Australia’s best (and only) gaming TV show. The segment can be viewed on the Good Game website; click on the Gamer News entry on the right-hand side of the video player.*

Thanks, Good Game!

* At least, you’ll be able to do that once they fix the video player. In the meantime, the episode can be freely downloaded in full via the ABC’s vodcasting site, in either WMV format or MP4 format (~100 MB in each case). And you don’t even have to visit dodgy websites and infringe copyright to do it. Isn’t public broadcasting awesome?