What a week! Wind Up Robots (WUR) went live on the iTunes yesterday and positive reviews are streaming in. Right now it is being featured in the New and Noteworthy section.
On the Code-Monkeys side we finished a crazy two week development of Santa’s Giftship. And that is from the initial concept idea to finish. For the video update today we decided to take the game to George Fox University and see what the first reactions were from student. On a side note Chris will be giving the Mid-Year Commencement address this Saturday at Fox. You can watch live by following the link on the commencement page. If you have bought WUR we would love your reviews on iTunes. Have a great weekend!
We are excited to announce that Wind Up Robots has been approved by Apple and will be available in iTunes for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch December 15th (next Thursday). We also are about to release our Christmas Game Santa’s Gun Ship through our sister company, Code-Monkeys. For more details on both, please watch the video.
Posted 1 month, 3 weeks ago at 10:08 pm. Add a comment
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
We are getting so close to Wind Up Robots (WUR) going out the door and onto the app stores. With any game the final polish happens in the last 5% of game development. WUR is no different. The game has become so much more in just the past three weeks as the team has tackled some performance issues as well as added some of the details we have wanted all along. In this update Chris Skaggs interviews most of the WUR team form programing to art. Take a look behind the scenes. (And just to let you know you can get a glimpse of what WUR looks like).
The last session of CGDC this year was a roundtable discussion that opened with Mark Soderwall’s observation that where faith-laden works had made real headway in movies and books, when it came to games Christian content had scored a “big Goose Egg.” Now to be fair, Mark’s assertion was not accepted by all the members as accurate but I certainly agree that from the purely ‘sales=success’ metric used in basically any other conversation on a game’s success then we ought to be candid in saying that even the best-selling Christian games have come far, far short of secular games we’d call hits…but perhaps that’s a’changing.
Hexify recently released their hit Facebook game Journey of Moses as the first Bible-based game on the platform – and its success has been self-evident. A whole raft of articles have been written in both religious outlets like the Christian Post but also secular sites including CNN, Inside Social Games, and One News Now. But press coverage is one thing – what’s really impressive is the game’s track record. On October 4th Hexify released some ground breaking news:
I had the chance to have an informal interview with Brent Dusing* of Hexify to discuss some of the less-publicized aspects of the game. His insights should be of interest to anyone thinking about adding religious content to their video games but it should be of particular interest to the folks who want to add God to the game and ALSO make a profit.
This has been a week of rediscovering some of the games we love to play. We would like to say that we are regularly involved in all of the game communities we love. Busyness sets in though and many of those interactions fall to the side. These past two weeks we have been revisiting forums and communities. As always as we re-engaged we also get to see the great games other developers are making. Chris mentions a few of our favorites in this weeks update.
Gavin and I (Gavin gets the glory though since it was his idea) are launching a new blog/news feature called Flurry Friday at Soma where we will share ideas to give our community a consistent update on what we are seeing as cool or useful in the game development world .
The name Gavin picked is a variation of other feature Friday’s like Bungies. The Flurry part comes from my personal brand name John Flurry. I think it fits here too since that name for me is all about how creativity hits us.
1 a: a gust of wind b: a brief light snowfall
2 a: a brief period of commotion or excitement
This week we are furiously pushing toward beta for Wind Up Robots (WUR). Check out the episode and if you have any questions please leave them here or ask us on Twitter and Facebook.
Last here are a few things we would love from you:
1. Let us know what you would like to see in the Flurry Friday videos and updates.
2. Watch for feedback posts. The first one will be our TouchArcade Forum post where we will be asking for ideas for the WUR logo/button art. If you don’t know, Rovio chose red for their Angry Birds logo since there were few red icons on the store at the time. These are the kinds of things we are seeking from your feedaback.
3. On a side note our twin company Code-Monkeys is running a competition with gw-en.com for Bok Choy Boy Game. Post oyu high scores to win a t-shirt.
That is all for now. Have a great weekend!
Posted 3 months, 2 weeks ago at 12:11 pm. 4 comments
