So we did it. Wind Up Robots is submitted first to Apple and as of yesterday The Barnes and Nobles Store for the Nook and the Amazon Store for the Kindle Fire and the Intel AppUp store for PC’s. It will also be available for the the Android Marketplace soon. The game should be available very soon.
On another note our sister company Code-Monkeys has launched a new game that will be coming out Christmas week. The whole shop loves what Limbic Studios did with Zombie Gunship. In a tribute to them we are publishing our ode to thier mighty craft in a game called Santa’s Gift Ship. Now let your imagination go wild there for a minute and you will basically fall on what our team has come up with. We know you are going to love it.
So we’re all hard at work getting Wind Up Robots ready for the store and as we were doing that I was thinking we ought to look at the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablets as additional platforms. So I hurried on over to Best Buy and picked up the hardware so we could test it all out.
To cut to the chase, I am quite impressed with the Kindle. (I haven’t had the chance to really dig into the Nook yet but I’ll get to it). First off, the UI that Amazon rolled for the tool is very well done and it’s the first time I’ve been impressed by the design, images, and feel of a tablet UX that wasn’t the iPad. Other tablets have done reasonably well…but also fallen short of the experience that for many people is the default – Apple’s. But Amazon put good effort here and it shows.
Second – Wind Up Robots looks and plays great on the Kindle. The game was made using Unity3D and with the Android plug-in we just exported and run. It was simple and what’s more, the hardware kept up wonderfully with a game that’s designed to be pretty intense on the CPU. I was frankly expecting a noticeable drop in frame-rate but quite to the contrary, the Kindle even performed better in some ways than the iPad, specifically in touch response. You can see us testing the game on the Fire in in the video below.
Personally, I’m not a fan of the 7″ form factor, it’s too small for me, but other guys here like it and if my main activity is reading eBooks, then the smaller form makes for easier reading…so I may not be the target audience here.
But most importantly (to me) this is the first place I’ve been motivated to make the effort to put my product in an Android app store. Now that Amazon has taken a big step toward the moderated, managed and at-least-slightly-walled garden app store, suddenly they have my interest as a developer. For all the Android hardware that’s being sold the dirty little secret among developers is that Android customers simply don’t spend any money which makes for a lousy business model. (see more here) But I for one am very encouraged by the Amazon store and how it looks like a great step toward finding and training a body of customers who aren’t looking for everything to be free. (Not that free is always bad, but always free is bad). Of course time will tell if Kindle Fire customers act more like Amazon customers than Google customers - but I for one am impressed and ready to roll the dice.
So I set out to shoot a video on game icon development and then tried the trial, tribulations and glory of game level design and balancing but when the team saw me coming they either ducked or just glared at me with that look of a bridezilla before the wedding day. Ok, I am overstating it a bit. The truth is we love this part of development. Everyone is functioning at their highest. Yes, it is a little tense at times but really we would not have it any other way. The game is almost ready to submit. The polish we have done in the last three weeks really shows.
This week we unveiled the game icon after taking your feedback on the poll both on Touch Arcade, FB and Google Plus. The results were a landslide for Laser. I guess you could call him the Ronald Reagan of wind up robots.
WUR has 28 levels that are now shiny, fun, exciting and balanced (at least as far as we can tell). Cross platform work has begun. We plan for you to be able to play it initially on iOS and then on all PC’s (tablets, desktops, netbooks such), general Android systems including the Amazon Fire.
So by next week we will have submitted the game to Apple and enjoying some turkey day festivities. Thanks again for joining us on the journey. We appreciated you help so much in choosing the icon. So with that we wish you a very good Thanksgiving. May your time with your friends and family be magical and enduring.
Part 2: Friday by Chris Skaggs
So JB asked me to look this over and publish it when I thought it was ready… I thought I would add a bit. Today we’re all feeling a lot better, a lot more confident. Energy is high…aw heck, lets just shoot a second video…
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:33 pm. 3 comments
There is an old Spanish saying, “You can’t have more bed-bugs than a blanket-full”. We are not even sure what that means but we sure feel like we have our share of bugs as we near launch for Wind Up Robots. In any final stages of a game project it sure seems like you can. We are bug hunting and often fixing one bug can lead to several more. The trick is to keep looking. A tendency as we hunt has also been to add in cool things that we either had wanted originally or have thought of late in the game. But we have to ship and ship is what we do. Chris and Gavin took a moment late last night to discuss this stage for this weeks Flurry Friday Update. See our past updates as well to view more of our development process. Have a great Veterans Day and here is a shout out to all the service men and women that have endured wars for our countries sake. Thank you for sacrificing and fighting for us. We are so grateful for what you did.
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 9:22 am. Add a comment
So if there’s one thing I’m learning in my career shift to “mobile developer,” it’s that computer programming is a science and that I’m not a scientist.
Previous thesis statement: memory is a magical unlimited resource. 200 mb webapp? No big deal – my desktop has plenty to spare. Zombie objects? Let ‘em be, they’re not hurting any one.
New thesis statement: memory management stinks. Texture memory? Draw calls? GPU? Power of 2 Textures? This is starting to smell a lot like the low lands of computer science and less like the flowered fields of Scriptable Mesa in the land of GigaBytes O’Ram.
So were just wrapping up the 2011 MeeGo conference (#meegoconf) down here in San Francisco and we’ve seen some really cool stuff, heard some interesting news, and met some awesome people – but the first thing I want to write about is a bit of news I just heard from Tom Sperry of Exit Games.
Earlier this month Exit released their Photon multiplayer socket tech as a library for MeeGo – which is a big score for the adolescent OS.
First off – if you don’t know Photon, check it out here: http://www.exitgames.com/Photon
In the spirit of full disclosure this is technology that we are only starting to dig into but it’s very interesting what were seeing especially with it’s connection to OpenFeint. Simply put, Photon is a library/SDK that facilitates real-time cross-platform multiplayer networking for multiple devices. You want your iPad app to play connect-four with the Android handset version? Check out Photon…
Anyway, while it’s a very tech all by itself, the news that they now have a MeeGo flavor really caught my eye. For one thing it says something about the growing body of code going into this system that is only just coming out of the gates. Two – like it or not, MeeGo will probably get its best shot in the arm from a viable body of mobile games, and sweet utilities like Photon will enable the kind of functionality that could make a genuine hit.
So that’s really it for this post. It’s really just a news bulletin…but if you want to learn more about Photon and Exit Games come on over to CGDC in July (#cgdc2011 / CGDC site) where Tom will be moderating a round table discussion…and ask him about MmeGo.
Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:22 pm. Add a comment
If you have hung around with us at any trade shows in the last year you probably would have heard one of us, at some point, as “Where is BlackBerry?”
Ever since the iPhone started to eat into the smartphone space like one my famished coffee-bean-headed farm zombies we kept waiting for RIM to respond and as months turned into years we started to think they’d lost it. “it” being both the HUGE advantage they had worked hard to gain with the brilliance of the click-wheel and also their collective minds. By January this year I had crossed my confidence tipping point and figured BlackBerry for the walking dead – still shambling about but done nonetheless.
Then at GDC I got a very pleasant surprise – the soon-to-be-released BlackBerry Playbook.
Are you buying family games this Christmas? We are. We bought a few favorites for the kids, but actually took them back in favor of the eVersions. This was a choice my wife made. That really surprised me. Let me just say in our family, she is not the gadget freak the rest of us are. My Kids and I play games on all of our devices (we have many, one of the perks being in the gadget/game/app development business). She has always resisted using them…until now. To set the scene, about two weeks ago the kids introduced her to Angry Birds on the iPad. She was instantly hooked. Then this last weekend the Electronic Arts sale was announced and I grabbed many of the titles for 99 cents that were usually $6.99 – 9.99. One of the games happened to be the same as a boxed game she had bought, Piktureka, as a Christmas present . After playing as a family and enjoying the sounds, unique and enjoyable playtime, she bagged up the boxed version and took it back to the store.
I asked her why, and she said that it just made sense. The iPad version reduces clutter, is more fun to play, you can’t lose pieces, and she really likes the sound effects. And to top it all off this is coming from the least techy person in our house. So there you have it. What games are you buying this Christmas. We are also enjoying Clue Spy, Yatzee, and the kids really like Life, although Life for me feels a bit claustrophobic on the iPad.
Posted 1 year, 1 month ago at 10:00 am. 5 comments
Multitasking and iOs 4.0 – What it is and what it is not.
For a while there it seemed Android phones really had the iPhone beat with a certain feature known as Multi-tasking. It was all over the news and yadda yadda yada. Then Apple announced an upgrade that now includes – wait for it – multitasking. But it may not be what you think it is. We want to take a moment here to answer a few FAQs about the multi-tasking mystique and to speak another obvious question – what’s this got to do with AppUp.
First, lets talk about the concepts here. When an operating system can multitask this is its ability to run more than one program at the same time. (Not to be confused with threads which are different) This gives each running program access to important system resources simultaneously and the user gets the ability to do several things at once. For example an MP3 player bopping along while your email client checks POP3 while you’re editing a text document. When it comes to our desktop systems – we’ve come to expect this kind of behavior as minimal requirements. But prior to iOS4 the iPhone didn’t allow any third party processes (read: your app) to continue running after it lost focus. In fact, the iPhone “single-thread” experience has become a marketing point in many places and people started rediscovering the mental clarity of doing one thing at a time. It should be noted however that Apple always kept certain classes for their own use and apps like iCal were treated as a special case, often behaving in a multi-tasking kind of way. It just was something mere mortals were forbidden to do. Continue Reading…
Posted 1 year, 5 months ago at 4:08 pm. Add a comment
