Alora Fane

My site went down, again! Very annoying!! It's back now (obviously), but I don't even know if the issue is fixed, so I still need to do some work there. MARDEK's waiting on review, but that's taking time too!

Essentially, the site seems to have been taken down because it was sending out an excessive amount of emails; over 100,000, according to my webhost's support. That certainly wasn't me! I mean, I did send out a mass email to everyone in Brajarajnagar - the town and municipality in the Jharsuguda district in the state of Odisha, India - both begging and threatening them to buy MARDEK on Steam, but that was only around 80,000 emails, so it's a huge mystery!!

I suspect it might have been related to that previous infection a few weeks ago. Maybe that left something - or stole something - that allowed spambots to hijack the mail services. I can imagine this being how spambots typically function, as it'd save their loving creators the hassle of having to set up and maintain accounts for them on special servers. They probably just write some general code that sends them out like viruses, or spores, which hijack unsuspecting hosts to send out more spores.

Annoyingly though, it's not as if it's obvious this is what's going on. I can't check my website's email addresses and see a whole list of things like "goldbitcoinerection4u@imascammer.orgy", or whatever, which I can easily delete. I also can't see the emails that my 'system at alorafane' account automatically generates in any Sent folder either, though.

Those emails haven't been going through for a while, as people have been unable to verify accounts, so I suspect these issues are related, but... I don't know. I've responded to the support email with more questions, but I don't know how much good that'll do. They must deal with stupid shallow issues all the time ("I forgot my password!"), so I can't imagine they look very deeply into more complicated ones.

I've finished everything with MARDEK, but now I'm at the point where I just have to wait for Steam to review it. That doesn't mean they play the whole game - that'd be unreasonable - but I assume they make some basic checks and either give you a Success result, allowing you to move to Coming Soon, or a 'failure' result if there are any issues. Based on the amount of rubbish that somehow makes it through this process, I'm assuming its main purpose is just to make sure you're not uploading literal nazi porn viruses or whatever.

I've got a 'failed' result twice now, both times for stupid little things! The first time was because the annoying 'capsule' images contained some (deliberate) blackness which made it look like the graphics weren't fully filling the space. Fair enough, I fixed it, resubmitted... Again, failure! This time because I'd neglected to untick some box somewhere deep in the labyrinthine folds of Steam's upload forms (there are dozens of pages and it's hard to keep track of everything), which meant cloud saves were restricted to developers. Why they didn't tell me that the first time, I don't know! And why it blocked release entirely is also strange to me since cloud saves aren't a necessary feature and the fix was trivial. There were some other 'cautions' which it said were suggested but optional - like the Steam overlay not appearing when you press something+TAB, and a default control scheme for Steam's built-in controller system - but I'm just going to ignore those because I haven't the time (or interest, honestly) to devote to trying to get them working with this port of an old game when I can't imagine it'll sell well enough for many - or any - people to even be interested in these features.

Concerningly though, I see this on my developer dashboard thing:

As you can see, you need both the STORE PAGE and BUILD STATUS bits to say 'ready', and they're both reviewed separately. The STORE PAGE for MARDEK has been saying 'for review' since the start, but even though I've put in a review for the BUILD STATUS - and the option to do so is no longer available as a result - it's still saying 'incomplete' there, which is what it says before you put in a review. So I don't know what's going on there. I hope the review is pending! I can see the request I made, and it says it was 34 hours ago, so hopefully it's just a bit of a delay. It didn't take that long for them to get back to me the previous two times though. Or did it? Honestly I can't remember! There are COVID warnings and apologies about the delays all that might cause everywhere, though, and maybe the workers were faster at the start of the week but have slumped in the hump.

I've also had issues even accessing MARDEK's store page, which you can usually do as the developer before release, and which I could do shortly after adding the game, so I don't know what's going on there!

Also, concerningly/annoyingly, this is what I saw before for the OST & Extras thing:

And this is what I see now:

The important "Browse Local Files" button is mysteriously missing, which is what you need to press to access the notes I've included. I mean, you can also manually navigate to them, but that's way more awkward and I don't even know where to find the folder myself; these "Music" Steam things are stored in a different location to the games. I don't know if this is some issue I introduced as the developer (though I certainly didn't change anything on purpose), or whether it's on the client end, but it's very annoying!

So many annoyances... On a personal note, I've been having head issues recently too, which I suspect - and hope - is due to stress, spending all my time at this computer, and poor sleep... rather than my brain cancer stuff. I keep waking up at like 4am and can't get back to sleep, so the past few days I've just been getting up around that time instead. Did you know that depression can cause insomnia, and insomnia can cause depressive moods? Isn't that useful to know?? I had sleep issues following the brain surgery, so I can't help but wonder whether I'm struggling with sleep because of literal brain damage, but there's enough other crappy lifestyle stuff that could easily point to the same thing that it's probably just something mundane. Annoying though.

Though what's more annoying is MY BUM HURTING from sitting so much. Very distracting! I try to move around fairly often, and I shift my position all the time, but I probably shift to stupid positions - like having my knees up and resting most of my weight on my sacrum - which can't be doing any good. I've been looking into alternatives like kneeling chairs, but I think what I really need is just to go out for more walks or something. Such a tedious chore, though!

Despite that, I did a lot of work on Divine Dreams yesterday! I've mostly implemented the new battle system I recently talked about, and I'm in the process of ironing things out. I'll write more about that at the end of the week.

Oh, also! I'm thinking of putting Sindrel Song on sale for the next few weeks, so people who were interested by MARDEK might find it and buy it afterwards. I've been told that a lot of people don't buy games unless they're on sale, and there are many times more people who've added the game to their wishlists than have actually bought it, so maybe there'll be some conversions if I do a sale.

What percentage off do games usually do though, and for how long do sales usually last? I'm sure there's a lot of variety, but what do you see most often, or what percentage off would strongly motivate you to buy a game? If you saw 50% off, would you buy a game without hesitation? If you saw just 10% or 20% off, would you just wait for a better sale to come along? I don't buy enough Steam games (no money or time) to be familiar with the trends myself, so your input will be useful (though it always is)!

I've actually been thinking about Sindrel Song a lot recently myself, and wanting to replay it, so I'll probably do that if I put it on sale.

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