Monday 23 April 2012

Almost Ready For Testing

I am a bit late writing this latest post, but things have been going crazy recently, with work and also looking at houses etc... I had very little time carrying on with work on my up and coming game, which I will give the code name of  'phoenix'.  But I did have enough time to make some necessary changes and update to phoenix which introduced a new obstacle that I had never thought about previously.

I wrote down my To-Do list,  and before I go into alpha testing I only have a few things left to do, which includes splitting the game into a Paid Version and Free Version.   I can give details on what the differences will be:

Free Version:  iAds,  1 World (25 levels),   No Future worlds added

Paid Version: NO ADS,  3 initial Worlds (75 levels),  GameCenter Leader boards and achievements,  Post Status to Twitter/Facebook,  All future worlds free.

I have yet to decide whether it will be universal app for both iPhone and iPad, it all depends on how alpha testing goes.    If that fails, I will make a separate game which might be different for the iPad as there is more space available to play around with,  I will have to think about this later on.

I anticipate in the next few weeks or so I will be reaching the alpha stages in the development on phoenix,  and if that goes as planned,  I will announce the name of the game, and post a few images.  During this time phoenix will be in the beta testing stage, and I will keep you up to date as often as I can.

Until next time

Goodbye


Friday 13 April 2012

Introduction

Hello all,

I have never written a blog before, so I do apologize in advanced if it is a tedious post or if it may include grammatical or spelling mistakes :).

The reason that I have decided to set up a blog is to document the development of my up and coming mobile games.  As you may have read on my profile, I am a IT technician by day, and in my spare time I am a mobile game developer.   My name is Michael (Mike) Jones, but I have set up this blog with my company name Gwef Tech.  My games come under my company, so seeing that this blog is set up for letting the world know about my development, it just seemed like a good idea to have the username as my company name

I have one game currently on the market, this was my first experience in game development, and it was fun.  The game I created was a Christmas game called 'Save Xmas', in terms of success, it made £20 after Apple's deductions.  I had expected the worst, I was really expecting 0 downloads, but somehow I made £20, which in terms of expectations, was a success!  The game took round about 2 months to design and develop,  which really is not enough time to develop a very polished game, but it was great experience to get the feel of how it's like in the AppStore and developing.  (Save Xmas is now free,  feel free to give it a try,  more info on Save Xmas )


In January,  I came up with a idea for a game which was inspired by a game I saw on the on the Stencyl website called Drop Block - Link here.  If you never heard of it before I will give a brief description of what the game is.  You need to get yourself to the "finish line" (or whatever you want to call it), but you have blocks in your way, so you tap them to destroy them and it allows you to carry on moving towards your goal.  As the levels go on, you need to think more on how you get to the "finish line".  It is a very interesting game, and a game that made me think of my current game (currently in development).   I use Stencyl to develop this new game I am creating.  For my previous game Save Xmas, I used GameSalad.  Both have their advantages/disadvantages, but I am not going to go into that.   All I will say is that Stencyl is a great tool, and I will most likely now stick with Stencyl,  I learn new things each day I use it and I feel that my games will be just get better and better if I use Stencyl.

Over the next couple of  weeks/months I will post some more details of my game, some spoilers and images.  If anyone happens to see these posts/images/spoilers and want to give input on the game, feel free to contact me. I look forward to posting more information up soon, I will try and keep to 1-2 blog posts a week, so in a worst case scenario, my next blog post will be next Friday.  I have no idea what it will contain just yet, but you will find out soon enough.

Cheers,
Mike