Casual Games Harmony

Today, after exactly 1 and half year of development Ancient Quest of Saqqarah has been launched on Game Club Cafe. This is a pra-premiere of the game and for now you won’t find it anywhere else on the Internet. The game is available for purchase so if you’re wondering which seven puzzle types made it to the final version don’t lose this opportunity to give it a try!  Below you can find an official description of the game.

Restore the ruined temples in an ancient tournament of divine puzzles!

Take part in the Ancient Quest of Saqqarah and descend deep below the sands to the magical underground oasis filled with puzzles, treasures and mysteries! It’s up to you to fulfill an ancient Egyptian prophecy and stop evil god Seth from breaking out of his arcane tomb prison. In order to succeed the chosen one will have to master 7 different types of puzzles as well as exciting mini-games spread over half a thousand hand crafted levels. The Ancient Quest of Saqqarah awaits you!

Game features:

• 7 different puzzle mechanics
• Hidden Object bonus rounds
• Over 500 hand crafted levels
• Stunning high resolution graphics
• Earn Ranks, Trophies and Magic Powers
• Epic and engaging storyline narration

< Click here to play the final version of Saqqarah! >

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”

Today I have added several music tracks from our Magic Match: Journey to the Lands of Arcane game to the Game Music Section here on the Casual Games Harmony blog. I’m very happy with the music I made for the game as in my opinion it adds a lot the game’s mood and the theme is very strong and constant throughout the whole game. Of course the cut-scene songs were the most important part and also the most difficult to execute, but with the help of the voice talent Barry Seymour all went very good.

Continue reading “Magic Match Soundtrack + Bonus Song”

As promised I’m giving you a quick update on the progress of the beta tests of our latest game Ancient Quest of Saqqarah.  We are currently preparing a new version of the game which will be used in the closed beta. It means that we will choose the best testers from the open beta and give them the full version of the game in return for their voluntary playtesting services.

The new version should be ready in the next week and will include many fixes and improvements. We have already solved several difficult technical issues that prevented many gamers from playing the game, so if you were experiencing the strange mouse cursor delay problem on Win XP systems with Radeon Xpress 200 you should check the new version out. Also I am currently in the middle of adding several improvements to the game. Amongst many changes there will be better hints and adjusted tutorials, and additional Khufu in-game events. After careful analysis of almost 500 surveys we received we will also be changing the order in which new puzzle types are introduced throughout the game.

Now, you are probably wondering what the surprise is…

Continue reading “Saqqarah Beta Update + Surprise”

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”

Today is our big day. We have completed the beta version of Ancient Quest of Saqqarah, a game that we have been working on for almost 18 months now. This is one of those moments that you hold your breath as suddenly your 18 months of work will be evaluated in an instant by a bunch of various people – gamers, developers and publishers. Keep your fingers crossed for us.

Actually this is not only a beta of Saqqarah but also a beta of CUG Framework, our proprietary 2d game development engine. We sure expect to find lots of technical problems with it during the beta. There is a long way between a feature rich engine and a feature rich engine that was tested on millions of computers…

Continue reading “Saqqarah BETA is here”

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”

Yes this is the 13’th post of Casual Games Harmony, which is a major milestone for me as this is my very first blog. I’m not a superstitious person, but I didn’t want to risk writing about Saqqarah in the 13’th post - especially after StoneLoops! not performing up to our expectations on the first 3 portals it was recently launched on.

Anyway, misfortune is one of those things that you won’t find playing casual games. At least in the properly designed ones. Whenever you find your barbarian suddenly equipped with a Fizbin of Misfortune (Army Morale -2) she can’t throw away or you find that your dinosaurs suddenly destroyed the fences and left your dinosaur theme park, there is a good chance you are playing a hardcore game. The best casual games can give you satisfaction and immersion rivaling the best mainstream titles, but even the worst casual games will never frustrate you on par with some of the hardcore gaming classics. After all if they do frustrate then they are simply not casual anymore!

I realized today that this blog is targeted at both game developers as well as gamers and some of you might not know what the hell I’m talking about in certain posts. This is why I decided to launch a FAQ section that I will be updating with both obvious and not so obvious things and definitions so that all of you can enjoy the full capacity of this blog. If you’re not sure about something just post a comment and I will try to post clarifications in the FAQ section.