I’ve got 2 sales on my game in the android market place!

I’m pretty happy.

Thanks out to Ludum Dare organizers for challenging me to get something out there finally 😀

I also wanted to mention that I’ve released a FREE version of Qubid on Android Play.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codeherd.qubid.free

Oh and also I just started porting Qubid to iOS last night! 😀

(link)

ma3e is an iPhone/iPad app involving a ball and a 3D maze you can rotate. I scrambled to get it done ~5 business days before today (the end of the October challenge) but my first attempt at adding DLC resulted in a rejection because the testers couldn’t find the DLC. Anyway, I resolved that and currently the ball is in Apple’s park, so I think I currently fulfill the “taken all steps required to make a buck” requirement. I’m just a little sad you can’t get the game right now. By the way, the game is free. The DLC is how I plan to make my buck. Anyway, I’ll make a new post when you can get the game. I’m telling you now so it’s not spam!

Incomplete Soul has reached another iteration since its original release in Ludum Dare 22. This one now includes a lot less filler in the form of smaller compact mazes. The algorithm for creating them still needs a bit of work.

The program also badly need a music track to compliment the gameplay. Hoping to polish this off between work on other projects. Also check out my game development blog at wally2069′s Realm

Download – Incomplete Soul v3

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2012 at 6:14 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Thanks to you I’ve developed and published my first commercial game. Now I can call my self a TRU GAME DEVELOPER :).

BTW: this is my game Jackdaw Copter, the Copter game clone, but with nicer graphics ;).

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=pl.neciu.dovecopter.android

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Panda7, my October challenge game is finally finished. Sort of.

I started on 1st October and finished 10 minutes into the 1st of November.

This is the first game I’ve completed and by completed I mean the first game I’ve gotten to a decent playable state.

On Development

I feel like a Java pro.  I learn best by going head first into the unknown and making mistakes and this game was full of mistakes. I started this project not  confident with Java. It was fun and painful learning the quirks and weirdness of Java. Although similar, Java is not C#. C# makes life a lot easier. So many code re-writes. After writing hundreds of lines of code, my brain tells me, “You know what, I’m only going to tell you after you’ve spent 10 hours on code, a better way to do the whole thing”. This happened about twice a week and had me moving large chunks of code all over the place. Fortunately, I have a preference for re-writing things rather than fixing them, so this wasn’t too painful and I was used to things now working so no unusual problems there. The biggest code re-writes were;

• Splitting everything into Controller / Input / View.
• Moving all my sprite sheet slices and their destination rectangles into a single class. A class made up of nothing but static fields and methods.
• Game Logic got re-written a few times. It finally found it’s home in a method that returns after each successful logic execution. Gave my game that staggered one after the other effect.
• Removing my event system. The game was too small for an event system and the game logic also doesn’t traditionally run like a normal game. It only executes bit of logic per update (my normal games execute all logic)

Android.. horrible Android Fragmentation. I know that word gets thrown around a lot with regards to Android. Some things to know about Android

• There are a gazillion different versions
• There are a gazillion different screen resolutions
• There are a gazillion different screen aspect ratios
• All 3 of these are common

Display Originally I had coded the game to change all my screen elements to different sizes and different spacing depending on the size of the screen. It worked, but it was messy. The code was messy (I was inconsistent) and the game screens were inconsistent. The last run of coding was re-doing the display system. Essentially all I’ve done is designed it for a 480×800 screen and linearly scale it for different resolutions. It means it will look a bit silly for the more squarish screens with the extra space on the sides. Weird bugs and debugging When I first started making the game for Android I had crashes all the time. I had no idea what caused them and no idea how to fix them. The Internet helped a little. The biggest help was my house mate giving me mini lessons memory address and stack traces (I hadn’t learnt about it  before in class, I am a still a current student after all). So thanks house mate for that. It made tracking down bugs a lot easier. My game has HD and SD graphics. If your device is over 600px wide, the game will switch to HD mode. This was a problem in my emulator which only had 128Mb of RAM. I spent plenty of time fixing it, clearing memory and only loading images that needed it. For some reason, Android 2.3.3 would constantly throw out of memory errors when loading HD Bitmaps. Bitmap objects have a method called .recycle(). A lifesaver. UI I started coding a screen overlay, a menu with things like “Go to title screen, mute sound/music, restart game”. Mid way through I remembered that Android has a menu button. That was incredibly easy to implement so I used that instead. I ran into problems towards the end when I found out that later versions of android tablets don’t have menu buttons. It is still a problem I haven’t fixed yet. Not sure what to do. Graphics The easiest part of the whole process for me. I spent a couple of hours designing the game visually in Adobe Illustrator. The benefit of working in vector is I can just click on objects and I have the x,y,w,h coordinates immediately. Rects and Rectangles The default class Android uses for rectangles is called Rects. A Rect rectangle is defined by left, top, right, bottom. I think it’s the same in pygame. I hate it. I wrote a new Rectangle class which defines a rectangle as x,y,w,h. The way god intended. It ended up being a great idea, things got done a lot quicker and the code was tidier. They did a couple of extra things, take in pretty much any data type in the constructor. They remembered their original size, which allowed me to have a absolute scale method. Very handy. Adventure Mode Adventure mode was meant to be a main feature in my game and it’s the thing I wanted to add more than anything but time just didn’t allow for it. Now that the game is done and it is mostly nice code, it’s doable. So if I have the time I’ll add that. Ads My game is a free game. I needed to get some experience with monetization so to start with I’ve got advertisements. They’re horrible and ugly but I’m not going to make a dollar for the October challenge unless I have them. They were quite a tricky to put in. I’m not familiar with Android and I learnt everything as I went along. What I think I did was create my game view/surface independent of the typical Android way and I believe the Ads needed the typical way. I ended up creating a layout Java code, added my Game View and Ad View to that in code. The ad supplier I used was AdMob by Google. Besides the above, it was a painless procedure. Publishing to Play Store Incredibly simple process. I uploaded it at midnight and it didn’t appear on the store before I went to sleep. It was there in the morning so my guess is it takes about 4-8 hours to appear on the store. That’s it for now. If you read the whole thing, thanks for reading. Please  feel free to download it and leave positive feedback and click ads. It’s here and it’s free https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.handsomegoats.panda7

Tags: admob, ads, android, app, coding, free, game, gamedev, Google, indie, java, ld, Ludum Dare, october challenge, play, play store, post-mortem, store

Is almost finished. Just some game play tweaks required, which may have to wait until the morning (it’s almost 2am here). In the mean time here are some screen grabs:

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As the October Challenge comes to an end, and my game finished, I feel the need to talk about my first purely private game. Sure my October Challenge game was released and had 5 sales, but it’s still not completely private. I did it for the challenge.

The next game will be (and already) more planned than the previous. This time it will be built better from the start, now that I have experience.

It’s an assassination game. You jump and avoid the guard’s sight to kill your target. As you play the story develops and you unlock weapons. If you want to Alpha test, contact me @gkamer8 on twitter.

That is right! We managed to do the release yesterday and we even got the dollar (we are actually #1 Top Paid Game at the moment I write! [boast]way over Angry Birds =D[/boast] . You can check out our October Challenge entry here:

FlyCraft – October Challenge Entry

It was a roller coaster ride to develop this game, you know, the crazy ones! Me and Thanasis managed to gain so much experience during this month than hardly any other process I can think of can provide.

The fact that the game we made was so well received by the gamers was the topping of the cake. Such a great feeling, after a month of long nights of work! A few hours after the release, we were receiving this kind of reviews on AppWorld:

“Fun game, gets your creative mind going.” 5 stars

“This is a fun game if you have a few minutes to spare & want something to do. At $1.99 you can’t go wrong….now if you will excuse me I have got to get back to the game. I’m trying hard to get “Herbie” to fly further then 200cm….I keep getting so so close lol BTW that reminds me. This game comes with Scoreloop integration so you can compete with your friends :)” 5 stars

“This is a great game and logs of original fun. Looking forward to more materials to smash on the landing pad. Great original concept!” 5 stars

“Fun game, gets your creative mind going.” 5 stars

The list can go on and on! We are so humbled by these people.

We have updated the game’s website with the launch trailer. We hope you will like it as much as we do.

The plan from now on is to add in the game all the cool features we left out due to the time constraint of the challenge. Some of the things we left out with a cold heart were the instant replay system that will allow you to view your flights again but also to share them with friends, the ability to save multiple crafts and challenge friends to fly your crafts and do better, and lot more stuff that I will not reveal at the moment! 😉

Thanks again everybody it was a great experience we all shared here! Good luck to all the contenders!

 

After 31 days of hard work we have finished our game… and we have made our dollar!

So much to talk about yet so little time as I want to spend my dollar on a horrible cheap coffee. It has been a great experience! I think the only thing I would change looking back is coming up with a more original name.

I knocked together a very rough looking trailer here.

Feel free to check the game out here.

Good luck to everyone else!

Hey,

So we are 1st of November and PowerUp is not yet released

However it’s definitively going to be released during November. The game is 90% percent done, currently realizing how much “it takes 90% of a project time to finish the last 10%” is true. Evil is in the detail after all 😉

To mark the end of the October Challenge I created a new gameplay video to show how crazy 4 players games are!

Also I’m trying to spread the word around. Already created a post in the upcoming section of TouchArcade. A small step for the Internet but a big step for ZappedCow! Do anybody knows other good forums were I can advertise my upcoming game?

1st October I had no idea were I was going, now I have a fully playable game that need polish. For that I’m very grateful to the Ludum Dare organizers and its community. You are all awesome, really! Thank you!. I also want to thanks my lovely second half who is doing the arts and supporting me. PowerUp won’t be what it is without her!

Oh and of course, do not forget to follow us on twitter 😉

I’m far from finished my game, it lacks lot of contents and story …

I lacked time and I had to deal with unexpected, but I don’t give up, that’s my November challenge, maybe December :p

I published what I did so far : here

I plan to publish it on Appstore and Google play, when Stencyl 3.0 will be release.

Good luck everyone for your sales 😉

Well, it’s not perfect but it’s live. Which is a bit like the film it’s based on. You’ll need a modern browser to play, such as Chrome, Firefox or IE9. I haven’t tested Opera or Safari but it might work. Seamless looping of audio is nigh impossible in HTML so there might be some clipping of the sound track and the audio plain doesn’t work in Firefox for some reason.

http://escape-from-plan9.com/

Some sort of donation button will be on there soon.

Hello everyone,

We’d like the chance to introduce you to our first released game, ‘Blob Cannon’.
Blob Cannon Trailer

To summarize this project, it’s designed to be a fun, challenging arcade feeling title that has you battling through stages to not only try to post your highscore, but to try and even complete it (in a fun way, not a frustrating way ^^).

Here is a screenshot, followed by some core components of our game.

STATS – You can choose which to gain after leveling up your character.
MONUMENTS – Find these to gain a bonus for their represented stat for the current stage.
POWERUPS – 3 different types of powerups can be found by destroying obstacles.
One type of powerup is a bonus powerup where you can gain additional lives or cannons to use.
The second type, is a Trait. These you can equip to give your character additional abilities.
The third type, is a Power. These enchant your cannon with their powers after activation.
Further details can be found at : Blob Cannon Ludum Dare October challenge 2012
And instructions can be found here (they are also in-game) Blob Cannon Instructions

If this holds your interest at all, please try out the game and share with us your experience.

You can play this game online at our site : Midnight Tinkering – Blob cannon
And if you enjoy your experience with the game and would like to support our future projects, please consider purchasing the game (for any amount you would like ^^) here : (Now just available for free- Purchase Blob Cannon )

I had to concentrate on testing the functionality, mechanics and overall gameplay of the game for the period of development, as well as testing bugs and issues that popped up, because of this most of the scaling of exp/points were rough estimations, and the pacing may be off.
I would love for those who try out this game to please share your experiences here, and give feedback on how the game felt.
I’d also like you to report any bugs you find, and I’ll monitor any bugs found and update the games page with them as I fix them.
(The project will be updated online continuously however the download at Sellbox will only be updated after a large amount of changes, or important changes occur, at which point I’ll update the Sellbox link on the web games page – though I’m more than happy to update the link earlier if asked ^^).

I really hope you take the time to try our game and share your feelings on how you felt playing it, I look forward to your responses, thank you very much for taking your time to read this.
Now I’m off to take a breather, count how many gray hairs I’ve gained, and how much hair I haven’t pulled out, and then I can start playing the game myself, and enjoy it without watching the clock every 10 seconds :).

–
[update] Only minor, but just found out that I can update/replace files where my file is being taken for Sellbox, and so I’ll be able to easily update that when I make any changes to the web version (I won’t have to add new sale/change links anywhere, etc), which is really really awesome.
On that note just fixed a couple things I found – exiting from pause menu didn’t work and your cannons still collided with an owl after it was trapped in a bubble.

While I wasn’t able to get my celestial pollination game Panspermia up on a store by the end of the month I’ve managed a huge number of improvements and am almost ready to put it up, so while I did fail to complete the challenge I’m very happy with the results and plan to finish it out

I’ve tweaked almost every aspect of the game, from the graphics, to sounds, to the speed of gameplay and I’m really excited about where the game stands. I still have plenty of work to do before I’m willing to offer it up for sale. I need to add some basic gameplay explanation replace some filler sounds, and add a level select screen. Once I get those things in and polished up I’ve already got it running on iOS and Android and plan to release it on both the iOS App Store and the Google Play store.

This month has been a great time for me to really focus on this game and polish Panspermia beyond any game I’ve made before. I’ll post again when I release, hopefully in the next couple of weeks!

Let’s close the case of my little game on this site.

The game was on the iPad 2+ App store last week-end and Android tablets 2 days ago. I made a few bucks with almost 20 sells for the iPad version! Now that’s one or two concrete beers!

I sure have lot to learn about marketing my stuff…

I am working on the iPhone version. Then I’ll release the game on kongregate  in the hope of gaining some visibility. Finally will make a lite version with just the arcade mode and ads before Christmas. The goal is to test many revenue possibilities before starting my next game.

I’ll make a debrief of all this on my blog and put some stats for other indies.

There’s one thing I can share right now: if you intend to target the iPhone and the Ipad market, it may be a good idea to start from the iPhone resolution and then adapt to the greater resolution than the reverse… you should gain time this way but of course it depends of your game. Oh and make sure you disable the game for iPad1 and old devices until you know for sure it works on it…

So far my best reward is my only review from the USA App Store. I am so proud of it, I printed it!

Fresh puzzle game ★★★★★

by Joeld42 – Version 1.0.0 – Oct 27, 2012 (USA) Nice take on the matching game. Really stylish and I like the puzzle mode a lot. Nice variety of powers.

http://bloblocks.labe.me

http://labe.me

Ok, it seems I earned somewhere between 1-2$ on my game on google play so success

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindhelix.jengAR2

 

And today I released LITE, ad-supported version, you can get it here:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindhelix.jengARLite

 

Hope someone will enjoy it

Tags: poland, renegades

Had my first sales today via Ubuntu Software Centre which felt really good, a day late, but I’m still happy!

I’ve really slacked on “marketing” the game as we’ve been crunching at work, but hopefully in next few weeks I can make proper demo version and port the game to windows (note to self: how come I’m always able to blame work for my slacking).

Getting the game published in the Software Centre was simple and the review process was really fast (wish other platforms would work as well).

I’ve been toying with the idea of porting the game for Android, but I have not done any research about that yet (never done any mobile development).
The game is written in fairly standard C++ (uses some POSIX libraries) and SDL, and AFAIK that combo should work decently well on Android.

The games October challenge submission is here: Tiny Puzzle Garden

 

Thanks for the fun event and good luck with your sales everyone!

Tags: challenge, completed, first sale, october, tiny puzzle garden

October Challenge won.

Okay so I didn’t get an alpha done so I owe 6 people a buck. Hopefully with paypal.

So if you guys have paypal give me a paypal address. If you don’t, we’ll probably have to do via mail. (Or come to some other arrangement, voxel mentioned me writing an OC post-mortem in lieu of a dollar).

GBGames

voxel – Not paid in full (updated Monday Nov 5th, 2012) – refused dollar –
“voxel> Uhfgood: I dont want your money”
“voxel> i dont want you to bring me down by sending my cash”
“voxel> Uhfgood, I want you to hold onto the dollar so that I can always mention that you owe me a dollar”

SethR – Paid in full (updated Sunday Nov 4th, 2012)

NeiloGD – Paid in full (updated Friday Nov 2nd, 2012)

ratking – Paid in full (refused a dollar, but paid 1.00 for a game from his site (updated Friday Nov 2nd, 2012)

Raimonds – Paid in full (updated Thursday Nov 8th, 2012)

————————————
Jedi – had agreed instead of me sending him a dollar that I buy a copy of his first released game, which I agreed to do.

So my October Challenge goal to launch a Kickstarter for Another Castle hasn’t quite made it. I’ve made a lot of progress on the game this month, and I’ve just released a new version, 0.04.

I have all of the basic functionality in the game now, but I want to take some more time to polish the Kickstarter pitch to be as awesome as possible. I feel this is important as the campaign will pretty much make or break whether I’ll be able to complete the game. I mainly want to add, or at least concept, some of the more flashy things in the game, such as a flame thrower, freeze ray, jet pack, and some awesome looking enemies. My target now is to launch the Kickstarter either Nov. 29 or Dec. 6.

Here’s a vid showing off the new version which I released today:

And as always you can play the current prototype at http://www.AnotherCastleTheGame.com

 

 

I just submitted an unfinished and accidental October Challenge game called NES.quiz.  I only made 99 cents off it, but when I found out I was pretty jazzed.  It’s better than finding $5 bucks on the ground–hell maybe even $10.

 

-c

P.S.  I have a site up for submitting community NES quiz questions as well.  My goal is to release free community quiz packs with these questions.

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This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2012 at 5:44 pm and is filed under October Challenge 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.