Casual Games Harmony

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.

Localizing games – or basically translating them into different languages, if you’re not familiar with the term – is now a common thing on the task list of a game developer, and casual games are no exception. Unfortunately the more complex a game is, the more difficult and costly it is to make localized versions of it. What’s more, if you don’t plan ahead for future localization right from the start it is possible then later localizing a poorly coded game will not be plausible at all! I know something about it as our first casual game Magic Match is available exclusively in English and it is not without a reason…

Continue reading “Localizing Saqqarah”

As you see lately I’m not posting  as often as I used to. That is because I’m very busy both at work and in personal live. Anyway here is a small update on what’s currently going on with Codeminion and our games.

Continue reading “July Update”

Lately we are doing a lot of stuff that is new to us. Most important is that we are now self publishing our games under the Game Club Cafe brand. This is different than with Magic Match, as this game was published on an exclusive basis by Oberon Media, who later purchased the entire IP (intellectual property) rights to the game.  There are days when we regret selling Magic Match to Oberon, but generally we think that it was a fairly good decision business wise.

Continue reading “Casual Games Exclusive vs. Self Publishing”

We are currently working hard to bring our latest games (StoneLoops! and Saqqarah) to the Mac platform and I must say I am shocked to see how problematic it is. StoneLoops! was developed using the Popcap Framework and is now being ported by RedMarble Games.  With the second game it is different because Saqqarah is the first game developed on our own new 2d game engine CUG Framework, which was designed to support Mac out of the box. What is interesting that both games are actually running fine on Mac computers but almost every day we encounter a new issue which prevents us from calling the games complete!

Continue reading “Mac game porting”

After writing about Magic Match and about Pteroglider it’s time to go even further back in time. Actually I would like to go to the very beginning and give you a glimpse of how it all begun with Codeminion. This will be a story of Spellscape, the first game that was developed under the Codeminion brand. We are used to thinking about it as a “spectacular failure” …

What you must know is that we didn’t start by making casual games - mainly because back then no one knew the term and we didn’t even know that such games have already started appearing. Rather than that, we were under heavy influence of “normal” hardcore games like Diablo, Master of Magic, Lands of Lore and such, and we wanted to be a part of it. Bu let’s not get ahead of things.

Continue reading “Spellscape cRPG Postmortem”

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”

In case you haven’t noticed I have launched a Game Music Section here on the Casual Games Harmony blog. It will feature various soundtracks I did for our games as well as other compositions I created over the years.

Currently the Game Music Section only has the music from Pteroglider and some samples from cgMusic, but I will be adding more tracks from my other projects on a regular basis. Most of my compositions are instrumental pieces so Pteroglider’s electronic soundtrack is not what I usually do. I remember that after the launch of the game we received several reviews on the Internet. One review author was even generous enough to include a single sentence summarizing my music! I remember it till this day, because it went like this:

Continue reading “Game Music Section: Pteroglider Soundtrack”

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!”