Thank you for your support and feedback @franktech!
Yep, security is certainly something I need to stay on top of. I’m pulling out steps to make sure the site is as secure as possible. I’ve got a bit of work to do in this regard, but its an ongoing priority.
I’ll certainly look at alternatives to PayPal. PayPal is great for developers as they have very extensive and secure API’s that make accepting and sending payments simple, but also safe. I will shop around though!
I’m hoping if I stay connected with the community, with forums like this, I can continually improve the site and make it the best it very can be.
Anyway, what can we expect from the front page? I see no games approved yet, or do you even have a front page design yet? I don’t know if anyone else uploaded anything, but you can at last “approve” mine if you want to have at least something on the front page for us to get an idea.
Also, I don’t like being forced to give a minimum price. I’d like to have the option to make the game free, either through a sale system, or through hard setting the price to $0.00.
Thank you @Mbublitz! Let’s see if I can be the facebook of games distribution
Done
I’m a little unsure about where to go with it. At the moment, its the main page for displaying all games. That might not be the best way to go though.
On a second though, I’m thinking it would probably be better to have promo stuff (latest releases etc) on the main page, and then a separate page for actually searching games.
Also, by the way, you might want to delete and re-upload the photos. When you uploaded the game, I still had the image settings scaling the images right down, so your images look very low res at the moment because of this. I’ve put the settings back to a normal resolution, so if you re-upload the images, they will look better!
A couple more suggestions based on things I’ve experienced. It’d be nice to have the ability to either upload a “box” image (essentially the “Main” image for the game), or at least specify which one of your images to display as the main or default image that will be used on the front page.
Also, and this might change when I re-upload the images, I’m not sure, but it almost seems to me that the amount of space set aside for the images and the amount of space set aside for the text should be reversed. It just seems like there’s a wide area for the image, and all my text is in one long, narrow column on the screen. (Of course, this was looking at the site from my IPad.)
Finally, and I don’t know if you had seen my post above after the edit or not, but in case you missed it, I’ll post it here again: I’d like the option to set the price to FREE–either directly, or, at least through a “sale” that can be run. (Probably something that is already coming down the pike, but need to voice it anyway.) When I uploaded the game, I tried setting the price to 0, but it said it needed to be at least 1. While I’m planning on charging for the game after it comes out of Alpha, right now I’m giving access to the playable builds in exchange for (or, in the hopes of) feedback. So I don’t really want to charge right now.
But for now, that’s about it. If I think of anything else, I’ll be sure to let you know here as always.
Allowing users to at least be able to select a default/primary image is a must I agree. I really want to enable drag & rearrange, but it’s quite complicated to implement. I’ll keep it in the pipeline though!
Do you mean on the game page itself? Yeah, I might take you up on that. I’ve been thinking to have some form of photo gallery view, so if users want to look through photos, they can look through nice large images.
While on the note about the iPad though, at the moment, the layout is focused on PC widescreen monitor, but I will add stylesheets for mobile/small devices.
The topic of ‘FREE’ games was something I was thinking about before. I want to avoid making an entire game free. If you tick the box next to any game folders and mark them as ‘demo’, they will be publicly available for free. So I think this works for your scenario
I can understand that, and the DEMO box should work fine for my purposes right now. But still, definitely have to have the “sale” option for putting our games on-sale at a reduced priced (either by % or to a specific amount).
Also, I tried to re-upload the images, but the quality didn’t seem to change with the re-uploaded images, and I didn’t seem to be able to delete any images, either. Tried to delete them all, but none of them seemed to delete.
I’ll keep the sale idea in mind and see how I can implement that.
I will try to figure out the issue with the images. When you click on the image to delete it, do you get the alert pop-up? (“Do you want to delete this image?”).
That most recent image you uploaded, looks a lot better. I still need to make some tweaks to how the images are uploaded however.
I’ve made a start on the proper API. I’ve kicked it off with a couple of basic GET urls you can use to get public game data. They return JSON data.
The following URL will give you the core data of all games found. The only optional parameter at the moment is ‘category’, but this will expand http://buy-ue4-games.com/api/search.php
The following URL, will return data for the given game referenced by the ‘iGameID’ parameter. You can add the parameters ‘images’ or ‘tags’ (no value needed) to get related info about those. http://buy-ue4-games.com/api/game.php?iGameID=8&images&tags
Once I’ve set up security essentials, I will start adding POST/DELETE capabilities.
I like that much better. I’m going to be uploading the video to YouTube again to get the quality better, too. Don’t know why YouTube didn’t keep the HD version that was uploaded.
And in response to your other post, I got a popup asking if I wanted to delete it, but that was it. And they never went away. I’ve been taking some new screenshots with some new additions to the game so I’ll try again tonight probably.
Also, I’m going to upload a new version of the game itself later, so I’ll check out how that process goes.
Trying to upload another version of the executable, and I have to say that this really is a very slow upload. I’ve already updated and it was very quick. Thankfully my game file is only about 450 MB because it’s EXTREMELY slow. You may want to find another host for your files.
Just a few numbers for you (because I know the phrase “a long time” is relative and could mean different things to different people): I re-uploaded a time-test version today. The upload (approx. 450MB) started at 10:07 and finished at 10:48, so it took 41 minutes to upload. Conversely, I sent the file up to my page immediately afterwards and that started at 10:49 and ended at 10:57, so 8 minutes.
EDIT: Also tested to IndieGameStand and came in there at 13 minutes. Anyway, just some FYI numbers for you. Hope these help.
I downloaded IE to see if I gained the same problems as you.
Good news: I had the same issues with the images. It was IE caching the results of a request for the images. I’m fixed that and you should see the images delete properly now.
Bad news: I tried uploading the file again and still had normal results, so I’m still not too sure whats going on there. I’m going to have a dig to find any compatibility issues.
Basically, IE is a piece of **** but people use it so I need to fix and make it work in IE
So I’ve tried uploading the same file in Chrome, Firefox, IE and edge. On two different computers, all with the same, expected upload time of about 7 minutes.
Maybe its the server region. My s3 storage is a European server. Are you in a distant region? Wouldn’t imagine it would make a huge difference.
That’s not the same thing at all. It’s more like saying, let’s make another MySpace, but only for metal artists. Or a Facebook for only Swedish people.
Anyway, I would be most worried about the actual experience level of the creator of this, and if he is actually competent enough to do this securely. The fact alone that he has chosen PHP is a major concern, as PHP is notoriously difficult to secure compared to say a .Net solution.
BTW: The domain name is seriously cheesy. You should really reconsider that.
Also, why are you not using a proper front end framework? You’re developing this like it’s 1995. You need to use React, Angular or something to get a proper responsive SPA style web app. It would also immediately look a little bit nicer if you used Bootstrap or something similar. Or material design/polymer.
From what I can see and your choices you don’t seem well-versed in modern web development.
You should take this to heart and do something about it, and not mistake criticism for “hating” again.
So difficult to secure, that many major companies use it? Like Facebook and oh, this website your using!
I don’t need to. No I don’t need to use “React, Angular or something”. This is a matter of preference if somebody chooses to use these. Not a requirement.
Judging by your poor judgement, it is you that lacks proper understanding, or simply had a log shoved up his ***.
Now, unless you’re an expert web developer who actually has some useful insight to give, maybe you should leave the technical advice to the experts.
Anything else you would like to tear apart, or are you quite finished?
P.S, I look forward to seeing some of your amazing work.
