My first instinct was to do what everyone else does, which is make help into a PDF. Unfortunately my basest of base platforms, Windows 98, no longer has a PDF viewer. I presume that I'll have to do CHM, which is just more monkey-work. I found a couple of HLP-to-CHM convertors that do a pretty horrid job, but I figure it might be good enough for the three minutes that you'll actually use it.
It looks like Bryan's games are unfortunately lost. Back around 1995 Bryan agreed to write a few games for a pack that needed 11 games completed in six weeks. When the pack went to Cosmi, I dropped Bryan's games from the set (because the contracts were just getting too danged hairy and also I'm a greedy sumbitch). I kept around the source code necessary to build the Cosmi packs but not the Expert packs, as the chance of Expert needing updates was nil. I backed up the Expert stuff on CD, but I can't find any of the old backups anywhere. Bryan backed up his stuff on tape and that's apparently lost too.
Which is a shame. A couple of his games were awesome. I considered just grabbing the executables off the old Expert CD's, but it turns out his little timer-based animation system wasn't quite as clock-agnostic as he thought. On my machine all of his games run several times too fast. They run beautifully under the Windows 98 emulator.
So unless I figure out something else, they're lost :(
Now I have to figure out how to market these things. I'll be honest and say that my Puzzle Pack 1 is not a big seller. I put it together during a rather different business model for The Code Zone. My original aim was to do daily puzzles and then upsell premium versions of the puzzles with. . .
1. better music and graphics
2. playable more than once a day.
Then the embedded ad-thing hit. And I found that I could make more money off ads than I could off actually selling games. So I made non-daily versions of all my puzzles that you could play as many times as you want and uploaded 'em to a couple-dozen game portals.
So where does that leave the Puzzle Pack? Well, you do have a little nicer music and graphics and they're not web-only so you can play 'em without an internet connection, but that's not all that compelling and isn't worth ten bucks (apparently).
So my thought at this point is to dump the Puzzle Pack entirely and replace it with the Retro Pack. That way they won't be competing with each other and I can conceivably still offer a big pile of games for a low price.
But I'll pull the Bulldozers out of the retro-pack because that's still my moneymaker.
And I was thinking of also making it a freebie if you bought both Duck Tiles and Bulldozer That way you can get a big honkin' pile of games for $20.
Actually the retro pack is shaping up to be 47 games. I could pump the count up to 48 if I finished up "Alien Isotope", which was a standalone bejeweled knockoff that I started in anticipation of another "N Games for Windows" pack that never happened because the standalone "N Games For Windows" market disappeared with the advent of web games.
48 isn't bad. It's not a nice round 50, though. Hmmmm.
Thoughts?
