Casual Games Harmony

I’ve been recently receiving lots of questions about StoneLoops! and about our upcoming games so I decided that it’s high time to write about it. Even though we didn’t release any new games in 2009, the last year was quite good for us. We weren’t affected by the collapsing economy and we managed to release third expansion pack for Saqqarah, both StoneLoops! and Saqqarah were released on the iPhone and we also released a short flash webgame version of Saqqarah. But what you might not know is that in 2009 we have started working on 6 new games and we have an ambitious plan to launch all (or at least most) of them this year! Continue reading “More games coming up in 2010″

I’m happy to announce that our latest game Ancient Quest of Saqqarah is now available on the IPhone from the itunes appstore. The game has been ported to Iphone by Virtual Programming. What is interesting is that the conversion is a near direct 1-1 code port from the Mac version of the game. It means that whether you are playing Saqqarah on a Mac or Iphone you are running the same code. Of course the game had to be squeezed from 1024×768 to 480×320 resolution, but it still features almost all of the eye-candy effects and all gameplay features from the original.
 
The game has been broken into 7 parts, so each temple can be purchased separately. Below are the links to the 4 versions that are already available in the appstore. Other temples will quickly follow, along with free evaluation versions.

The Temple of Isis

The Temple of Thot

The Temple of Anubis

The Temple of Bast

As you might know we are already working on a new, unannounced game. Everything is going all right so far, but the progress seems slow as we have just begun and we are still in early preproduction. During the last couple of weeks we’ve been defining the minimal feature set for the game, designing prototypes and experimenting with various ideas trying to see what elements will make it to the final game. We also had an interesting discussion about whether we should hype the new game or keep a low profile during the development.

Continue reading “To Hype or Not to Hype?”

Today we have launched Monkey Monarchs the first SaqPack expansion for our latest game Saqqarah. I hate repeating the news section of our website, but this time it is a very important moment for us as this is the first time ever that we have created an addon pack for our game.

What is also noteworthy is that today after many weeks of hunting we were finally able to reproduce and fix the “Access Violation” bug that was troubling many players in the temple of Bast. If you were affected by this bug, be sure to download the latest fixed version from the official game website. We are currently sending the fixed builds to all the portals so the updated version should soon be up everywhere.

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”

Yesterday we have launched our latest game Saqqarah for the Mac platform (available for both Intel and PowerPC). The game is available in both English and Polish language versions. This is a very important moment for us since this is our first game ever that has a Mac version. Additionally it takes advantage of our own CUG Framework game engine. You can download it both on Codeminion and on the official Saqqarah websites. The unlock codes for Saqqarah work on both Mac and Windows so if you purchased the game earlier and also happen to have a Mac be sure to check it out!

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”

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!”