Momentum

New Star Soccer 4 continues to gather pace as we see its first appearance in a UK magazine. MicroMart reviewed it last week awarding it 8/10 although I have yet to get hold of a copy. It should also be appearing on the MacWorld cover disc which is out this week in the UK. There will hopefully be reviews in the football magazine FourFourTwo as well as PC Gamer in the coming weeks, so I'm looking forward to those. Mac sales have definitely picked up which I'm attributing to the fact that the game is now listed in Apple.com's game section, so all in all I'm feeling very positive going into the new year. There are no Ferrari's on the horizon but as long as I can survive the dreaded "credit crunch" then I'll be very satisfied. 

I have spent the last few days revamping www.newstargames.com which I felt didn't have the warm welcoming feeling of the site from the NSS3 era. Hopefully I've addressed that now, going for a simpler pastel style with lots of whitespace and colourful game buttons. It's amazing how many skills you pick up in areas that you don't expect to when you just get your hands dirty and work towards an ideal. Designing websites is not something that I have ever been very interested in but when you're an indie developer you need to have a large hat rack to keep the costs down. Marketting is another area in which I have no expertise whatsoever and in fact find it a bit depressing but it's a necessary evil if I want my business to succeed. I have designed some advert banners that I hope will soon be appearing on various gaming sites, so look out for those. Speaking of advertising I decided to start hosting ads on my forum (and possibly the main site). I am loathe to do this but it does actually generate a few dollars a day and goes towards the hosting costs.

In terms of development I am gathering all the suggestions for NSS4 and whilst most of the bugs have now been squashed there will be a few more updates in early 2009. The more weighty requests will have to wait until NSS5 which is in the pipeline but it's not going to happen anytime soon obviously. I'd like to break away from releasing my NSS games right alongside FIFA, Pro-Evo and FM. It's simply too much competition for a minow like NSS and the only reason it has happened in the past is purely down to unlucky timing. As for future projects, I have started working on a new game in my spare time, not football related, but part of the New Star series. I won't tell you the sport as yet so you can post your guesses on the forum, but I'm very excited about the progress I've made so far considering that I'm only putting in a couple of hours here and there. It'll be a 2D game but will utilise lots of code from NSS4 (primarily the casino and relationship sections) and it will have a much more streamlined lifestyle element to it. Once I stop updating NSS4 I'll be able to ramp up development on the new project and I'm aiming to have it finished by May.