Casual Games Harmony

Yes, it’s true – Saqqarah will be launched on one of our websites in a few days. This will be a short two-week soft launch and we will try to catch some last minutes bugs and make some final improvements before we give green light to selling the game on the portals. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that we are very excited and anxious to see how Saqqarah will do on the market. We are also a bit worried that it won’t do as good as we expect because the market for online downloadable games has dramatically changed over the last several years.

Continue reading “Saqqarah Launches Soon!”

Yesterday we have launched Game Club Cafe, our premium casual games distribution portal. Like with most our projects we had many problems developing the website (don’t ask me why is that - we probably are cursed or something). We had to limit the scope of the project several times and it took very very very long to complete, but finally the first version of the website is online. Currently Game Club Cafe has a selection of 112 games. All of them were handpicked and we believe that it is the single best catalogue of high quality casual games from all over the Internet. Be sure to bookmark the website because we will be adding more new quality games on a regular basis.

Continue reading “Best games on Game Club Cafe”

A lot of people wonder how do we make our game downloads so small. Magic Match installer download with everything including all 7 cut-scene songs was 6,5 MB and our upcoming game Ancient Quest of Saqqarah which is packed with high resolution graphics is only 25 MB. It is easy to find games with far less content that are much bigger in size. But is shrinking the games to the largest possible extent worth the effort? After all broadband connections are more popular with each day and portals often sell games which are more than 100 MB.

Continue reading “Small game downloads”

When it comes to Codeminion Games I’ve been writing about Magic Match, StoneLoops and Saqqarah for the most of the time. But in the past we’ve made much more games and worked on many “interesting” projects. Pteroglider is one of those interesting projects  - it was our first finished game actually published on the Internet. It’s also a space shooter. If you wish to play the game you can jump straight to the end of this article, but if you want to know what, when and why then please read on.

Continue reading “Pteroglider Postmortem + full version now free!”

When you look at our website it may seem that not a lot is going on. But on the contrary the moments when our website is quiet are probably the ones when we have a lot of work. Just to give you a small idea of what’s coming up here is a list of things that we are currently working on:

• Anceint Quest of Saqqarah BETA version (for PC and Mac)
• Saqqarah Teaser Trailer
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica Mac version
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica localized versions (French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish and Russian)
• StoneLoops! of Jurassica flash webgame
• Premium game distribution website
• One second party unannounced game in early preproduction
• Two in-house unannounced games in the design phase

As you see we have a lot of work. And apart from this we also need to handle the business part of running the company, distribution of games already launched, provide support for our customers and maintain our websites. This is a lot of work, especially for a team of 6.

There are many ways to compare performance of different games. You can look at the top tens of a particular portal, check a global game top-ten charts (like the one of Logler) or even sort games according to their score on CasualCharts.com. Unfortunately all top-ten based methods of comparison have a serious flaw – they are always relative and their meaning changes over time. Today’s number one game might be selling less copies than yesterdays number two. If only we had an objective way to compare games…

Continue reading “Using Google Trends to compare games”

We came up with the idea of StoneLoops! less than 3 years ago when Luxor and Luxor Amun Rising were topping the charts. At the root of the idea there was a very simple (yet powerful) twist on the usual marble popping mechanics. We would try to blend the mechanics of Luxor with the pull and push gameplay of Astropop. We knew that what we came up with would work the moment we completed the prototype. Making it took us about 3 hours with one of the early versions of our in-house game engine CUG Framework.

On the screenshot to the right you can see how the prototype looked. If you’re interested you can even give it a try! Anyway, we had this great idea but we didn’t have the time to implement it. This was because after completing Magic Match and witnessing its success, we (me and Konrad) decided to finish our master studies. Then we would be setting up an office and gathering a team of developers. But that’s another story.

In the end we decided to outsource the development of StoneLoops! to a second party developer – The Farm 51, also from Poland. Everything looked good up till this point. We had a solid initial design, a working prototype and a company run by retail industry veterans to develop the game. What more would you want? A lot, in fact. According to the development contract StoneLoops! was to be completed over a period of 4 months and launched before December 2006. Yes, this is not a typo. The game was finally launched in March 2008, which gives a 16 month delay to the original schedule. Interested what the hell happened? Read on!

Continue reading “The making of StoneLoops!”

When we were going full time with Codeminion (less than two years ago) we decided to open an office and try to grow our business step by step. At that time we had to make many decisions, like for example do we need a conference room or do we need a centralized server for the network. Now we regret many of the decisions we made - like having a conference room that is rarely used - but there are also ones that we are happy about  - like having a centralized server for the network.

Continue reading “Ideas on managing your projects”

StoneLoops! is a good game but not a great hit. At least not as big of a hit as we have hoped for. This is due to the fact that the game was launched about a year late off the schedule and with passing time the market became very harsh for marble poppers. I will be writing more about it in the postmortem of the game later on. Anyway, StoneLoops! has already been launched on several portals (Bigfish, Reflexive and Iwin) and is on its way to others, but still there are some distributors that passed on launching the game.

We asked a representative of one of such portals (which I won’t name here) about the reason for the rejection of the game’s submission. To our surprise we received a very honest answer, which went something like this:

Continue reading “Portals not interested in high quality games?”

In case you missed it, today we have announced the gameplay details of Saqqarah, our biggest and most ambitious project so far. Jumping right to the point, the biggest single innovation in the game is the “distorted grid” board system. Basically while other match-3 games use grid like regular boards, in Saqqarah every single level is a graph with an unrestricted layout of nodes and curved connections.

I remember the day (about one and a half years ago) when we came up with the idea. By that time we were very impressed with strategic games like Pax Galaxia and Galcon and wanted to do something similar, but all our initial ideas were basically simplified war games played on graphs and we knew that it just wouldn’t appeal to the casual audience. Suddenly we asked ourselves the question: why not make a match-3 game played on graphs? After making a quick prototype we knew that this was a great idea as all of the popular match-3 mechanics (swap, rotate, drag select, pop, etc.) worked well with such a setup and felt very fresh. Now the question was: which one should we implement in the final game?

Continue reading “Saqqarah USP’s revealed!”