Click through for more photos:

Sandy had made birthday cupcakes which were quite good. She also had savory appetizers, fruit and marshmallow salad.

The guests were asked to guess how many candies were in the jar. Here, Jenna is working on her guess. Danny ended up winning the jar which had 1760 pieces of candy.

There was quite a bit of drama getting everyone into the garage without Brenda noticing. To get Brenda to come over to Sandy’s garage for the surprise, they told her that Jenna and Danny had an announcement. This story was Jenna’s idea and she and Danny made sure to warn their parents that there really wasn’t any news on the baby front! In this picture, Sandy and Tracy are trying to coordinate Brenda’s arrival.

All the deception seems to have worked. Here, Brenda is arriving at the party and she does seem to be surprised!

Along with the candy jar, Sandy had planned a bubble-gum bubble blowing contest (I won) and a round of musical chairs. Musical chairs was a big hit and Ziya ended up winning:

After the party, we setup our touch table in Sandy’s living room and played games the rest of the day. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and we got to test out Bio Infiltrators with all four positions controlled with phones. Here we are playing “Temple Raiding”

Download the rest of the pictures that I took of the party (92 MB).

This is the first time that I have sold software. I have given away lots of software and have done an ad supported phone app, but this is the first time I am asking people to part with their money for something that I made.

Getting the software ready for release has been a lot of work. All of these games have been done and playable for a long time, but there are a lot of things that have to be done before software is ready for public consumption. Here is what we have been doing for the last week to get ready for release.

• Support for windows touch events instead of just TUIO: We can sell to more people if we support windows touch events too. Unfortunately, windows touch events don’t have velocity information like TUIO events do. So I also added code to buffer up the incoming events and calculate a velocity. This also involved adding code to detect which touch events are coming in and only processing one or the other.
• Support for windows XP: XP didn’t have touch events, so we had to be careful not to call those functions directly and instead call them through function pointers returned from GetProcAddress.
• Support for lower-end hardware: We went through all of our graphics and reduced the sizes to at most 1024×1024 so that the games would run on older graphics cards.
• Removed requirement for redistributable: The way that we were building and linking a font library was causing a dependency on the C++ redistributable, so that had to be changed.
• Contracts: We wrote contracts for the two sites that will be selling the games.
• Instructions: We had some instructions within each game, but we made those better and made PDF instructions and took screenshots of the games.
• Remembering preferences: We added configurable options to some of the games and added a ‘fullscreen’ button to all the games. And we added saving those preferences between runs.
• Installers: We used Inno Setup to create installers for each game and for the bundle of games. We learned about a few more options in the Inno program because we needed to only remove the game launcher once all of our software was un-installed, and we needed to clean up our saved preferences.
• More testing.

Overall, I would say that we have spent a full week just on getting the games ready for sale. Some of that work went into engine improvements that will apply to all of our future games. And the next game that we release will have pre-made contracts and installers ready to go. If we end up releasing a lot of games, this time will be worthwhile, but I don’t really expect to make enough from this first set of games to justify the effort required to sell them.