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 6 months, 1 week 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).
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 6:02 pm. Add a comment
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.
We’re in the middle of a fantastic but unexpected experience. We were planning on running a promo for our iOS version of Bok Choy Boy with OpenFeint this week but due to some unforeseen complications we had to change horses at he last minute and we swapped G:Into The Rain into the slot. Even though G is over 2 years old now (which is like 407 in app years) the game popped up out of the ranking basement and rose to a high of #23 in puzzles, #38 in arcade and #143 in all games.
Look – I know those aren’t like astronomical numbers, but without any real effort or preparation on our part and a last-miunte promo with OF the game proved to still have legs and we continue to get great reviews from folks who are discovering it for the first time.
The conventional wisdom in the app world seems to be that an app’s shelf life is something like 3-months if you’re lucky. But I think the most compelling lesson of the Angry Birds saga is that they had a hit and then they stuck with it instead of moving on to something else. Perhaps one of the most powerful but generally overlooked aspects of the long-tail economy is the persistence of a product and the ongoing ability for new users to find your game, share it, and become new fans. We certainly never expected G to keep on living the way it has but it’s the app that just wont die…and we kinda like it that way.
Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:37 am. Add a comment
I have about eight blog posts I wan to make coming out of the Intel Elements 2011 Conference, most of them positive. BUt one of these seems pretty time sensitive and I want to be part of the conversation out here so I’m going to do this now even if it’s only half baked.
Whoever is in charge – you cannot use the name Tizen – it’s about the worst possible marketing move possible at this moment. Instead – call it MeeGo5 – and you’ll be celebrated instead of mocked.
We are used to planning for disaster, disappointment, failure or bad news. How often do we prepare to celebrate? Celebration is such a critical part of business and company culture.
Today we are celebrating our Code-Monkey’s title Bok Choy Boys game we made with A&A Global being featured by Apple’s New and Noteworthy section on the iTunes store. Our team was obviously energized and excited about the news. We instantly made plans to celebrate and congratulate all of our friends, collaborators and hard working artists that made this happen.
So why don’t we plan for things like this? Something common to our staff in discussing the topic is that all of them have the experienced the opposite. People opt out of walking when receiving a degree. First steps, words and birthdays are lauded but as we grow older we shy away from them.
So at Soma and Code-Monkey we want to break the mold. We are taking time out to cherish this a bit. If you are near our office we invite you stop by and have some fun. We will have an open house from 1-3 pm this next Thursday June 30th 2011.
And if you find yourself in our shoes take a minute out of your schedule and value celebration.
Posted 10 months, 4 weeks ago at 3:13 pm. 3 comments
The premier entertainment electronics show in the world is going on as I write this and one of the feelings coming out of this year’s E3 is that it’s decidedly underwhelming. Dig this quote from a Wired article:
“As the E3 Expo, the videogame industry’s annual bombastic show of force, begins anew Tuesday, it’s getting harder and harder to tell one game from another. This is not simply because of the unceasing epileptic blasts of light and deafening cacophony of sound that fill the darkened halls of the Los Angeles Convention Center all week — although those help. It’s because as gamemakers come to grips with the ever-riskier business of building big-budget entertainment, more and more of them are playing it safe just to survive, feeding in the same narrowing pool of game genres.
The article goes on to make some observations about why gaming finds itself in a creative rut and the most persuasive idea seems to revolve around simple economics. Gaming has become a riskier and riskier industry (the AAA space anyway – more to that point in a moment) and studios thinking about investing $50M tend to play it safe. I can understand that.
But this observation of E3 makes me think about something else that has been scratching at the back of my mind for years, something that’s been hard to put words to but it comes to something like this. As Christians we claim to be in contact with, indeed to be individually lead by, the Creator of Creation. How is it that the state of Christian art has suffered so much diminution that with precious few exceptions Christian creativity has become almost entirely an enterprise of copying secular art and then pasting a fish over the top?
The majority of Christian history has included a strong impulse to truly and universally excellent artwork in every discipline. Paint, architecture, music, playwriting, literature. I’d bet that a majority of the truly great western artists of the last 2000 years were either Christians themselves or they were largely creating Christian art. But somewhere, perhaps around the time of the Reformation, that vein started to run dry in the church. There’s probably a great and fruitful conversation about why that happened but it’s beside the point for me today.
In “On Moral Fiction” John Gardner states that all true art is moral. That its function in a civilization is to beat back the trolls of chaos and darkness and futility that constantly threaten to unravel society. He also suggests that in the relatively recent past we, as a culture, have forgotten what art is for and therefore resort to portraying the simply entertaining or the plainly trivial. To build on Gardner’s thesis I say that art can be, at its best, one of the Truest and most Spiritual things we can do as human beings.
By virtue of our identity in Christ, Christians ought to be the most creative, innovative people in the world.
To be less is to live beneath our station.
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.
