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! Continue reading “More games coming up in 2010″

I know that lately I haven’t been blogging a lot, but recently something very notable  happened that I feel everybody should learn about. As you know our marble popping game StoneLoops! of Jurassica has been ported to the iPhone platform and proved to be a huge success. It  stayed in the global US app top 10 for almost two months and never dropped out of top 100. Until now that is, because today StoneLoops! has been removed from the App Store by Apple on the request of… MumboJumbo.

If you don’t know Mumbo Jumbo, this is the company that creates Luxor marble popping games. In fact Luxor is one of the  biggest marble popper franchises in the entire casual games market. When StoneLoops! was released on the PC and MAC it was over 3 years after the first Luxor game and the marble popping genre was almost dead. In result StoneLoops! never reached any serious top-tens and has stayed in the shadow of the giants - Luxor and Zuma. But on the iPhone it was the other way round.

Together with an external company Playcreek we managed to prepare a very solid port of StoneLoops! to the iPhone platform. It was a great success for us that we managed to launch the game sooner than MumboJumbo managed to complete their iPhone port of Luxor. In result the roles for StoneLoops! and Luxor have reversed in the AppStore. Due to an excellent port and good timing our game became the genre leader receiving hundreds of positive user reviews. In the meanwhile Luxor for the iPhone received very little attention and quickly dropped out of the various top100’s. I can imagine that MumboJumbo wasn’t entirely satisfied with this result, but hey – what can you do about it? It seems you can do quite a lot…

Continue reading “Where is StoneLoops? Or how to get rid of your competition in the Apple AppStore?”

I recently answered a question on a polish gamedev message board about how game sales vary by Country and I thought that it would be a good idea to post it here as well. As far as I know this kind of stats are very difficult to find.

The stats shown below are based on sales made over the last 5 years on our own website (www.codeminion.com). In this time we recorded online transactions in almost 100 countries (94 to be exact). I find it pretty impressive, as we even had sales in the Vatican. Anyway, click the continue reading button if you’d like to learn which 20 countries make up the most of our sales.

Continue reading “Sales stats by country”

Just a quick notice for you, that StoneLoops! is out for the IPhone and the game has so far exceeded our expectations. We are currently nr 4 app in the US and nr 3 in games. In many countries we are already nr 1. Here is the link to StoneLoops app store page, you can check how awesome the game is for yourself!

I’m happy to announce that our latest game Ancient Quest of Saqqarah is now available on the IPhone from the itunes appstore. The game has been ported to Iphone by Virtual Programming. What is interesting is that the conversion is a near direct 1-1 code port from the Mac version of the game. It means that whether you are playing Saqqarah on a Mac or Iphone you are running the same code. Of course the game had to be squeezed from 1024×768 to 480×320 resolution, but it still features almost all of the eye-candy effects and all gameplay features from the original.
 
The game has been broken into 7 parts, so each temple can be purchased separately. Below are the links to the 4 versions that are already available in the appstore. Other temples will quickly follow, along with free evaluation versions.

The Temple of Isis

The Temple of Thot

The Temple of Anubis

The Temple of Bast

After previewing the upcoming StoneLoops! for IPhone a week ago, I would like to make one more announcement about a game that we have coming up. Brunhilda and the Dark Crystal is a game that’s been in the works for almost a year now, but it’s not an in-house production. It’s being developed by a small but very talented external team.

The screenshots you can see above and below are the first ones shown publicly. Of course they still are a work in progress so the final materials might vary a bit. You can see that the game is different from our earlier games as it is not a match-3 and that it features a slightly different style of graphics.

Continue reading “Brunhilda and the Dark Crystal”

It’s not official yet, but I’m already sharing with you that we have licensed StoneLoops! for IPhone development and the project is already in a very advanced state.

As a proof I have uploaded a short video that shows how smooth the game is on the IPhone and how close it matches the PC/MAC original experience. Please note that it’s still a work in progress and the final version will be even better.

The company that is developing the port (which I will not disclose at this time, as I’m not sure if they would want it) has done an amazing job in our opinion. I’m not sure when the game will be finished, but it will be a matter of months or perhaps even weeks. Anyway, if you wish to be notified when the game is available please stay tuned or simply subscribe to our newsletter at our website.

If you haven’t been watching the downloadable casual game market lately you will be surprised to learn that 19.95 is no longer a standard price. For some time the market has seen loyalty programs (such as giving discounts to customers who sign up to buy more than one game) but now it seems that the 19.95 USD price point for casually buying  a single game is going away.

Continue reading “Prices go down”

As you might know we are already working on a new, unannounced game. Everything is going all right so far, but the progress seems slow as we have just begun and we are still in early preproduction. During the last couple of weeks we’ve been defining the minimal feature set for the game, designing prototypes and experimenting with various ideas trying to see what elements will make it to the final game. We also had an interesting discussion about whether we should hype the new game or keep a low profile during the development.

Continue reading “To Hype or Not to Hype?”

Today we have launched Monkey Monarchs the first SaqPack expansion for our latest game Saqqarah. I hate repeating the news section of our website, but this time it is a very important moment for us as this is the first time ever that we have created an addon pack for our game.

What is also noteworthy is that today after many weeks of hunting we were finally able to reproduce and fix the “Access Violation” bug that was troubling many players in the temple of Bast. If you were affected by this bug, be sure to download the latest fixed version from the official game website. We are currently sending the fixed builds to all the portals so the updated version should soon be up everywhere.