Casual Games Harmony

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!”

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”

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.

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”