Casual Games Harmony

Saqqarah is now on BigFish and I am very happy to report that on the second day after the launch we’ve made it to the top ten. Till the last minute we didn’t know how the market would respond to the game and now we feel a big relief,  although it’s of course too early to tell if the game will be a great success over time - but all initial signs sure look encouraging!

Anyway the game is now an exclusive title for BigFish and it is currently getting serious promotion on their website.  What more could a developer want? In fact I could think of something, especially  after some recent events…

Continue reading “The good BIG bad FISH exclusive GAMES…”

Tomorrow is our big day. Ancient Quest of Saqqarah will be launched on the first portal, namely BigFishGames. The game will be available exclusively on BigFish for two weeks in exchange for a small promotion campaign. After that time it will hopefully appear on all major portals. Of course please remember that the game was first soft-launched on Game Club Cafe and our users are enjoying the full version for almost two weeks now.  Anyway, the coming weeks and days will finally show what our game is ultimately worth. We are very nervous, so please keep your fingers crossed for us!

I hope that you don’t mind that recently every blog post on Casual Games Harmony is about Saqqarah, but I can’t help it as there is so much going on! Anyway we’re thrilled to see how good the game is doing so far. The feedback is very enthusiastic and coming from both gamers and publishers. So far the game has not been rejected by a single publisher we talked to, and we already talked to about 10 different distribution channels. We were very worried that we would have problems similar to the ones I wrote about earlier regarding StoneLoops! After all Saqqarah is also not a hidden object game. Fortunately everyone seems to be noticing how much effort went into creating Saqqarah and now we have first hints that not giving up on quality was the right way to go and that we won’t regret it.  Anyway, you’re probably wondering what record I was referring to in the title of the post…

Continue reading “Saqqarah - a new record!”

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!”

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”

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.

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!”