In case you didn’t know, Soma Games was Founded by Chris Skaggs in 2005. Rande Bruhn John Bergquist joined the team in 2008. People ask us all the time for the story behind Soma (you can read chapter one and two with Chapter 3 being written soon). This past week Chris and John got to share just a…
I’ve always imagined Soma Games as a transmedia company. In fact I have a version of our logo that says Soma Media. While we’ve spent the majority of our time making games we’ve also dabbled in comics, fiction and video all along the way. For example have you seen the G inspired music video and…
This week we wrapped up V 1.0 of a new game and soon, Lord willing, Code-Monkeys will launch Magic & Magnums. (Dec 5 update: we locked up beta late last night and submitted to iOS. Now we’ll get various other builds wrapped up and submitted in the following days…just in time for Christmas..yippee!) It’s a goofy, spoofy, arcade game that is also an evolution of our game Santa’s Giftship (on iOS and Kindle) from 2011. And, as a sad matter of fact, this is the first real game release we’ve had since Suitor Shooter (iOS) in 2012…yikes!
But we have a good excuse…we really do…and it’s all connected.
Shortly after Suitor Shooter was in the store we got a call from a friend who was working on a project that sounded pretty fantastic. He had inked a deal to make a few games based on the Stargate SG1 TV show and he needed a quick and simple game that could be set in the Stargate world and be ready for ComicCon…in 3 weeks. It was meant to be a wham-bam quick project for marketing purposes, not a thoughtful, deep exploration of game design principles. Given the parameters we thought an SG1 version of Suitor Shooter could be put together quickly and off we went on a 3-week sprint without any expectation of it going any farther. ComicCon went off as planned but our friend wasn’t able to put the rest of the details together in that short time and wound up staying out of it – and so did our game. That was the first of a long chain of ‘almost launch’ events for what was then being called Stargate Gunship…a game that would, in the end, never come to be.
Redwall AbbeyCraft : The Corsair’s Last Treasure is live.
In case the point of that is lost, that means that the very first officially licensed Redwall video-gamish-thing is now out there in the wild. Bam!
If step one of our journey was to Shout It then step 2 was clearly to Ship It. In other words, we needed to come out with a win. When we were working on all the license deal for Redwall we found that the internet was littered with 15 years of false or failed announcements of various shows, movies, games, merchandise…you name it. Some of them were very professional and ‘real’ looking. Others were more plainly false. I can only speculate on the motives of those folks but whatever was intended we saw that the past as preserved on Bing presented us with an uphill PR challenge where fans were likely, and reasonably so, to say “I’ll believe it when I see it!” And while the success of the Kickstarter campaign was a good ‘win’ it ultimately only proved that we could rally some eyeballs and left open the question of whether or not we could build something that respected and embodied the spirit of Redwall.
To those Doubting Thomas’s out there – reach hither thy mouse and behold: Download The Corsair’s Last Treasure now!
A couple of days ago I had the pleasure of ‘meeting’ Phill Lollar via a quick phone interview. We don’t typically review games or upcoming projects here but this one seemed like a special case and I reached out to see if I could chat with the the gentleman. If you don’t know him, Phil…
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…
I was playing Minecraft with my son the other day and we were exploring a cave. As always there is the anxious advance-n-light process of posting torches around vacant spaces while you try to be prepared for a lurking creeper or skely. But at one point we turned a corner and found our first abandoned…
by Gavin Nichols
The other day, Soren Johnsen posted a tweet that really caught my interest. He said
“The next console generation will be won by whoever understands why the Xbox Indie Games Channel did not become the iOS App Store.’
This is true in so many ways.
The iOS App store has enjoyed an unparalleled level of success since it launched a few years back largely because it managed to hit a golden combination of approachability by both developers and consumers, while simultaneously lifting the best to the top through a natural feeling review system. For the first time Joe Schmoe could take his idea, build it himself and publish it to millions of potential customers, all from his living room. Customers had access to hundreds of thousands of apps at their fingertips, instantly, anytime and anywhere, for an affordable price.
We’re here at Intel Elements 2011, a “one year later” event from where we first heard Peter Biddle lay out a rather large vision for the Intel AppUp Center. Without going back into the history and our previous thoughts on AppUp I find myself feeling increasingly invested in this thing. Far more than getting tied up in what AppUp is or is not, I’m fascinated by what AppUp wants to become.
One of the most exciting and powerful tools available to the indie developer today is Unity 3D (http://www.unity3D.com), a wildly popular game engine that exploded in popularity when the iPhone app store roared into public prominence. The Unity 3D engine has become so popular in part because of its ease of use, powerful tools, and too-good-to-be-true pricing. We’ve raved about Unity as a tool in the past though so I wont get into all that again. Instead I’d like to look at one specific aspect of how Unity and AppUp work together in beautiful unison.
Big Lesson #1: Multi-platform is not an either-or concept. It’s emphatically an also-and concept.
One of the most valuable aspects of Unity 3D is its ability to deploy a single project to multiple platforms. By installing various plug-ins or a little ninja coding you can build one game that runs on everything from Mac and PC desktops, all manner of mobile devices and even in a browser. Today’s case in point will be our recent release of Bok Choy Boy and how we brought it to Intel AppUp (here) at the same time we launched to several other platforms including iPhone, iPad and a browser based mini-game.
IMHO the profound magic of the app store model, specifically places like AppUp, iTunes and the Android marketplace is a massive, instantaneous, global distribution network. So long as you plan for it up front there is no reason not to target ALL of these platforms at one time in order to create the widest possible exposure for your game…and in so doing try to take over the world…again. The reality is that you never know where a game will catch on. For example, when Bok Choy Boy launched we never expected the HUGE audience we garnered in China. Over half of the total downloads have been in a country that we weren’t even thinking of. In hindsight we can guess why the Chinese market liked it, but we would have lost a ton of customers if we hadn’t taken advantage of the globe spanning power of app stores like AppUp and planned for multi-platform distribution and used a tool like Unity 3D. So I could keep beating that horse but seriously…do this.