Casual Games Harmony

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”

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!”

Lately we’ve been giving several interviews for local magazines here in Poland. This is because there is a lot of hype going on with the recent release of StoneLoops! of Jurassica and the nearing beta of Saqqarah, our most ambitious project so far. Anyway, one of the interviews was quite peculiar because it focused on the production of the graphics for Magic Match (our most successful game so far) so I thought this is an interesting topic to write about in English as well…

There are many interesting things to say about Magic Match, both from the development and business points of view. If you ask me, the game deserves a whole postmortem of its own - and in fact I plan to write it soon. Anyway, before we get down to the details of making graphics for Magic Match there are some basic things you should know about the game’s development.

Magic Match was created by only two developers - me and my business partner Konrad. We did everything ourselves including the design, graphics, programming, sounds and music, testing and business stuff. The only outsourced element was the voice in the songs because our attempts to sing proved to be futile. We worked on the game for about a year, part time as we both attended daytime studies at the time.

Continue reading “The making of Magic Match: Graphics”

With StoneLoops! finding its way to many portals, and Saqqarah nearing beta, I find myself doing a lot of market research on the current state of the casual games market. This is because we at Codeminion are about to start new internal and second party projects. As always we have a lot of ideas but the decision which games to develop seems now harder than ever.

I remember that several years ago while developing Magic Match we witnessed the launch of PopCap’s Chuzzle Deluxe. This game made a huge impression on me as it was the first game to feature an explicit trophy reward system. Back in those days such an event was a no brainer for us. We instantly realized that we had to add a trophy reward system to Magic Match, which we did. Today it’s hard to find a game without some sort of a trophy reward system. Making changes was the right way to do even though it took a lot of reworking since Magic Match was almost complete at that time. I don’t know if Chuzzle was the first game to feature a trophy system – in fact I doubt it. The point is that anytime you’re doing market research on a constant basis you can react to the changes on the go and save both time and money.

Continue reading “Casual Games Market Research – Friend or foe?”