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The Making of Platypus - Part 3Platypus Reborn
A couple of years later, Mike Boeh of Retro64 entered the story. Mike knew about Platypus (his game Best Friends was also written in Blitz), and he thought there was potential to sell the game as a downloadable. He talked to Idigicon, and acquired the rights to distribute the game online (and if I had've known it was that easy...)
Mike made a few changes to the game to make it more suitable for the downloadable market. He trimmed the filesize, and added much-needed mouse support. He also added even-more-much-needed "easy" and "medium" difficulty settings, because I'd made the original game far too hard for most people's tastes (ah well, live and learn). Unfortunately, my cool arcade-style attract mode and rolling demo was removed, but overall I think the changes he made were a definite improvement.
The game was duly re-released onto the internet, and it became a bit of a hit. It was #1 on Realarcade for a while, and it also won their "Action Game of the Year" award. It was also named as one of The Adrenaline Vault's top shareware games of that year. A lot of people have played Platypus now, and that's something I'm very happy about - and it would never have happened without Retro64's involvement, so I would like to say a big thank you to Mike for helping my little game get out there and make it in the big, wide world.
Of course, I would have liked to have been able to share some of the money it made, but there's always next time... you are all going to buy my next game, right? Right?
Oh, and one more thing. Through Mike's generosity, I have become an affiliate seller of Platypus, which means that if you buy it from my website (get it here), I do get money from the sale. More importantly, it means that I can have it here on my website with my other work. I found out the hard way that selling your intellectual property outright can be quite a traumatic experience. After all the work I put in, it's kind of hard to accept that it isn't actually mine. Because it feels like it's mine - but I can't actually control what happens to the game. But at least I can put it up it here now.
Welcome home, game. You did all right.
Update - 23/02/2006
Idigicon have cancelled the deal with Retro64, and by extension, with me. I have had to take Platypus off my website now. The game is now solely in the "care" of the people who have contributed the least to its success, while profiting the most. I fear that they will treat it badly.
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