Bloblocks is nearly nearly nearly complete!

Only 21 puzzles to create… at least that’s a concrete count down.

I had this nice feeling today, that the end is really only a few days ahead, and not in a virtually infinite future!

If only there wasn’t all the marketing tasks lurking in the dark

I wrote a more complete post on my blog…

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This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2012 at 8:06 am 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.

Dear mum,

Yesterday I made 11 levels for my little game. You know Bloblocks, the game I told you about.

I could not resist adding a little feature: a block which destroys blocks, some kind of black hole.

I know… I said I would not add features. But this one made level creation more interesting and it helped me create at least 7 new levels in a blitz.

Today I worked on the promotional text for the stores (You can read it here). I hope people will like the text and then will buy the game and then will like the game and then will make love to each others.

I know a lot of them won’t… I’ll have to deal with it.

I also set up my google account so I will be able to sell the game on Google Play Store. It was somewhat easier than the App store but I felt a little bit poorer along the way.

This afternoon I tried to test the game on an android emulator since I don’t have a device.

I cried a little.

I am also afraid of all this devices. The minimum playable resolution for the game is 700×600 pixels. But it is not really helpful since I have to speak DPI for touch controls. I’ll start with xlarge and find a way to widen devices support later.

Testing a game on the simulator (a game made using haxe + flex + starling) is just hell on earth. That’s why I decided to order a Nexus 7. I wanted to do this anyway but not so soon. I felt poorer of 200€…

I hope I will sell enough Bloblocks to overcome the cost.

I must say I felt happier yesterday than today. I think I will create more levels tomorrow to cheer me up and may be reach the 50 levels objective.

I also have to translate all the game texts so you can understand it. It’s written in english for some unknow reason.

The children are happy and so is the wife. They don’t play Bloblocks yet but a family test is planned for this week. I think that 3 years old is not old enough to play this game… but Joseph still enjoys the explosions and touching colored blocks.

I hope you and grandma are doing well. I hope to see you both soon and I’ll send you more screenshots soon.

Laurent

We finally found a baby sitter in Barcelona! As a result I drank too much yesterday night and my head hurts a little 😉

By the way, Bloblocks was approved by apple during my sleep and is available for iPad!

http://itunes.com/apps/bloblocks

I waited 9 days but it may count as 8 since I am not in USA.

I’ll have to push a minor cosmetic and improved controls (two step swap and slightly better rotate) update but the little game works quite well I think. I hope reviews won’t be too bad…

I also made a small promotional website for the game this week, I still have to translate it to french: http://bloblocks.labe.me

The game is nearly ready for Android tablets too. It wasn’t that easy since I had to support portrait orientation and scale things so the game would be playable on 7″ devices. The last thing in my todo list for Android is to integrate Gree (or some other competitor) to support the Leaderboard and achievements.

The game was made with haxe, starling-framework, air, a lill bit of haxenme, emacs, org-mode, inkscape, sketchbook pro (MacBook air and iPad), pixelmator, sunvox, bmglyph, elbow grease, tapas and love. Prototyped with processing.

I am waiting for my first sells now, I think I will win the challenge too!

Regards

Laurent

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