I want to tell everybody that my first game hit the Nintendo eshop :)

You can find it here :

UK/EU : https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-download-software/Balloon-Girl-1944572.html US: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/balloon-girl-switch/

Some Post-Mortem about the game

Development began initially in 2014/2015 around. It was initially planned as a mobile game for iOS and Android. The first ideas was to make an "endless" game out of it.

The first screen i found was this (this is the very fist testversion i made) :

For a mobile game it had to be a funny concept but i had a new idea. What about mixing candy crush with a "one screen" level game ?

So i tried something like this:

However it turned out i need more space to have more different levels. So i didn't set the bounds to a screen.

After that i did some progress from year to year (sometimes). And in the end of 2018 (November) i finally shipped the android version of the game.

As the play store sucks ass the game was not recognized by players (that is normal at the android store). I also was burned out by mobile and thought about making a PC game.

So (my silly idea:D) was : hey i have this game here which is finally done. How about to port it and adjust it for a PC Game ? Well i am not sure if the idea was good at all.

But i did - it also means i changed a bunch of stuff. For example: the mobile version had 5 lives system (like in candy crush) and if you loose all lives an video ad was visible to get a new live.

So i changed a bunch of stuff and released it on Steam on Juli 2019. The steam release was also not a real success. Until today it was below 100 bucks at all.

The i got the chance to get approved to Nintendo Switch (and also Xbox One) so i decided to make a game for it. And what could be the best idea to port a game over to the switch ? :joy:

Thats what i did.

Here is how it looks now:

Why i did that ? Well at least - even if the game wouldn't be a financial success - it is helpful to get a game out. After i released Balloon Girl at Steam i got approved at Nintendo and Xbox. And to get the complete process for switch (and Xbox maybe too) is helpful.

I have a second game which will be released in April for Switch too (which i am working on in the last weeks) and the process to setup the game was so much faster, because i know knew how to do it.

Conclusion: If you make a game which is good enough for PC and console - why not try to get it out ? Even if it is not a financial success (which happens often) - you can learn from every step.

And a small Fun Fact: from the beginning in 2015 until today i took part in 9 Ludum Dares :D

And some final words: if you release a game on the nintendo switch it is something like a childhood dream come true. I grown up with a gameboy, famicon and snes and my dream was to release a game for a console.

I appologize for the long text at all - but i hope someone like it or read it.

Now i cannot wait that LD48 starts :)