News

6th March 2007

Today I've raised the prices for both Storm and Sunny Ball from $9.99 to $19.99. This was a hard decision to make, but I am not selling enough games from this site to even pay to keep this website online. In the past I launched Storm at a $19.99 price point and after some time this was lowered to $15.99 and then after more time to $9.99. I did the same thing with Sunny Ball and I hoped each time I lowered the price that this would result in more sales and more attention from customers.

Logically you would expect the games to sell better at $9.99 than $19.99, but after looking at my figures from when the prices were lowered for both games, I can see absolutely no increase in sales at all. With the few sales I do make every penny counts, and so reluctantly I am forced to try to maximise profits from each sale by raising the price. I'm sorry I have to do this, and I would be happy to sell my games at $9.99 if I could make a living doing it, but that is not happening at the moment.

19th December 2006

I've added Reflexive Arcade games to the site. Please look through these games and buy the ones you like! Every sale helps me stay in business.

25th October 2006

And.. Reflected Games is back with a brand new game, a site redesign and a drop in price for Sunny Ball!

Those of you who have read the news entry for 2nd January 2006 might be surprised by this, but this time my new game Neon Wars has been developed in partnership with my good friend Michael P. Welch at Blitwise.com. Mike has been able to help improve and refine the design of Neon Wars as well as test the game more throughly than I could do alone.

Mike has also helped with providing the music and is now publishing Neon Wars on his Blitwise site which has a massive fan base and a large amount of internet traffic. Hopefully his fanbase and traffic will mean that Neon Wars sells well enough that we both benefit and I can continue to make fun games for people to play and enjoy. It is still my dream to have people enjoy my games and make a living out of Shareware!

I'm very proud of my new game Neon Wars. It requires OpenGL to run, but makes arena based shooters playable for anyone with a mouse. This makes a new genre available to people without joypads and is also a lot of fun for players of all skill levels! We've put a lot of love into Neon Wars and tried our hardest to make it a good game while also innovating with aspects of the design, so we hope you all enjoy playing.

As well as Neon Wars, Sunny Ball and Storm are both available again at the low price of only $9.99. Please support my efforts by buying one or more of the games! Finally, thank you for all the kind e-mails I received saying how much they enjoy playing my games, it helps make all this effort worthwhile. :)

2nd January 2006

Some sad news for you all. I've thought long and hard about the future of Reflected Games during the Christmas break. Despite creating two shareware games I have not had great results in terms of sales. Halfway through my third game I started to question whether it would fare any better.

I came to the conclusion that it wouldn't really make any difference. It is very difficult for one person to make all aspects of a game and market and sell it successfully unless he or she has excellent skills in many different areas. I'm afraid I don't quite come into that category.

So, with sales only just bringing in more money than the server costs I have to pay to keep the site up and running, it is not financially viable to continue this on my own. As a consequence it is with a heavy heart that I have to say that Reflected Games will be closing in a month or two's time.

Thank you for everyone who supported my efforts and liked my work.
Richard Phipps

25th September 2005

It was my Birthday earlier this week and Storm has now been on release for over a year. To celebrate I have decided to offer you all a present by reducing the price for Storm to just $9.99! I've also started working on my next shareware game as well.

17th July 2005

Sunny Ball (v1.1) uploaded. This release contains several improvements based on customer feedback:

Automatic savepoints every 5 boards, allowing the player to start at any save point reached in a board pack.

Made the powerups fall a bit slower in normal mode.

Removed white crystal powerup to make crystal combinations a bit easier.

Changed bad powerups to have a brighter red background.

Pressing escape ingame now pauses the game, and pressing escape again exits to the title screen.

16th July 2005

I have now finished all 8 Game Creation Articles with the end result being a fully playable multiplayer game. I hope these prove useful!

11th June 2005

I've uploaded the first of a new series of articles under the Create menu link. These articles are aimed at people who are just getting into programming games and will deal with developing a 2D arcade game from start to finish. I hope the articles prove useful!

9th May 2005

Sunny Ball (v1.02) uploaded. I've fixed a serious bug which could cause some boards to fail to finish when all the bricks were destroyed. All existing customers can use the download links they received to update to the new version.

5th May 2005

Sunny Ball (v1.01) uploaded. I've fixed a bug which caused some gfx errors when graphics cards selected a 24bit screen mode. I've also disabled the automatic web site opening after a few complaints. Existing customers do not need this bug fix as the problem would have been visible in the demo version.

30th April 2005

My second game Sunny Ball has been launched! This is a beautiful breakout game for both casual gamers and breakout fans.
To coincide with the launch I've also redesigned the Reflected Games website, using a new theme and design which I think works a lot better. With the new theme I'm also going to try to use a more personal tone for the website as this is the whole idea behind Reflected Games.

21st January 2005

Storm has been updated to v1.22 which fixs a bug with the joypad support.

16th September 2004

Storm v1.21 has been released. This version disables the moving cloud effect in the title screen to improve the speed on some PC's. The mouse behaviour when over the menu option has also been changed slightly and a few other bugs have been fixed.
Current customers can simply use the download instructions they received by email to download the updated version.

8th September 2004

Storm v1.2 has been released. This adds two new firing systems: Four key/button direction firing and Eight key numpad firing. This version also includes support for using the mouse to move and shoot as well as mouse & keyboard combinations. Also included is mouse cursor support for the menus.

Firing System	One Button	Four Key/Button	Eight Key numpad
Keyboard	Yes	Yes	Yes
Joypad	Yes	Yes	No
Mouse	Yes	Yes (Mouse + Keys only)	Yes (Mouse + Keys only)

1st September 2004

Storm is released!