Tommy wrote:
Sorry to disappoint you a bit but what is so AWESOME about your game?
Sounds to me like the typical sidescroller that you can download for free at every corner...
You could just use my "Back to the past" or StarCleaner source code and voila - you've got your side scrolling game for free. Just modify it a bit and add your graphics and your own bells and whistles

4 levels? Every dungeon crawler/roguelike comes with around 20 to endless number of levels. Side scrollers also tend to have more than just 4 levels...
First free then 5$? What is the difference between the two versions? Why should I pay when you first give it away for free?
How do you plan to sell the game? Portals? Own page? How to get traffic and sales?
What about other stuff? Online high scores, achievements, multiplayer? Download version or online (Applet)? Android version? What about sfx and music? Do you have a musician too?
Can we see some of the graphics of the great artist? Add watermarks if you want.
Currently it sounds more like a 48 hour competition entry than a game that could sell.
I know it sounds harsh but it needs more than an AWESOME idea to convince a developer (or at least me

) to jump the boat...
Its not really a dissapointment to me as much as I may have caused some inconvenience for you. My apologies. To answer your questions:
The AWESOME part to me, and it might not be awesome to you, is having upgradeable weapons and to discover them hidden throughout the dungeons. I said 4 levels in the first episode, sorry if it wasn't clear, I might even make it something near 20 then do a bug fix update then add another 20, etc.. I would get our own website or can even host it in my home since I have done web hosting here before, I have one of my friends making a Java game website like Miniclip but ONLY for java games and he said Diamond, our game, could be on there. And by portals, if you mean something like Steam or something in that manner, I contacted Steam but they have not yet replied.
About your 'other' stuff, well to have a highscore system, you need a point system, the only highscores I can think of for this game would be the time you have completed each dungeon in, or without dying, etc... For the multiplayer it would be a bit more complex but could be in a major patch such as 2.0 or since the game will start out in alpha, then beta, and when it hits the full 1.0, then it would have multiplayer integrated.
I have a very good installer for Windows users which installs the game with all necessarey libraries and images, but for Linux and Mac OS users I was thinking to either use a JNLP type of thing or the other day I found getdown
http://code.google.com/p/getdown/. For music and SFX, I am just about to contact a musician about him possible working for us, otherwise my artist claims he can do SFX, lets see if that's true, and if he cant I'll get another musician.
As I said, I am not sure if the game will ever be on sale for $5.00USD, it was an idea... It will probably stay free for the community to play and have fun.
Attached is a sample image of a very basic tileset I asked my artist to make. Here is the TwitPic URL:
http://twitpic.com/6k9rjb
In conclusion, why not help out your community and have fun!
Again sorry if I cause any innconvience about my game to you. If you are interested just PM me or continue on this thread if you want and I will give you means of contacting me.