Casual Games Harmony

I’ve been recently receiving lots of questions about StoneLoops! and about our upcoming games so I decided that it’s high time to write about it. Even though we didn’t release any new games in 2009, the last year was quite good for us. We weren’t affected by the collapsing economy and we managed to release third expansion pack for Saqqarah, both StoneLoops! and Saqqarah were released on the iPhone and we also released a short flash webgame version of Saqqarah. But what you might not know is that in 2009 we have started working on 6 new games and we have an ambitious plan to launch all (or at least most) of them this year!

Most of the games we are working on are adventure / hidden object games, but we’ll also have something for puzzle enthusiasts and even a simulation type game with an original gameplay mechanic. But if you are hoping for a new match-3 game, I’m afraid that I will have to disappoint you. We don’t have any match-3 games currently in the works. One of the games we are working on is a small puzzle game for the iphone, but the other 5 will be big PC/Mac downloadable games.

Of all those 6 games the most complete one is Brunhilda and the dark Crystal. The game had a very rough development cycle (it was delayed many times) but it was worth all the efforts and we’re quite happy with how good it’s turning out now. We’re currently doing internal tests and we plan to start open beta tests in about a month. If you’d like to participate in open tests of the game please be sure to join our beta program now. We’ll soon be launching a dedicated website for the game, so stay tuned.

The next downloadable game that we’ll release will probably be Phantasmat. Just like Brunhilda, Phantasmat will be an adventure / hidden object game. I’m very eager to see how players will react to both games as they are totally different in terms of presentation, theme, story and even mechanics. If everything goes according to plan we should be launching Phantasmat open beta in early May.

Also in the first half of 2010 we’ll release the iPhone game I wrote about. This leaves the other 3 games for the second half of 2010. I’d rather not talk about specific dates as they still might change.

Finally I would like to address the StoneLoops! issue, as we get lots of questions regarding bringing the game back to the AppStore. Unfortunately I don’t have any exciting news to report here. When the game was removed from the AppStore we tried to defend our rights by reasoning with Apple and MumboJumbo but this got us nowhere. We’ve been consulting with lawyers for the past few months and currently it seems that the only way to end the dispute would be in the court of law. This would cost us a lot, it would certainly delay our other games and as usual the verdict might depend on which side has better lawyers. I know it doesn’t sound positive but we’re not giving up just yet – we’ll still be looking for other options and although going to American court against a larger American company seems a very risky endeavor for a small Polish company like us, we haven’t ruled anything out just yet.

Anyway I would like to thank everyone who supports us, and I will let you know when anything new turns out.