Casual Games Harmony

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.

A really funny thing happened to me today. When StoneLoops! was launched on Reflexive Arcade I decided to write and submit a short review for the game. After all everyone is entitled to having his own opinion and developers should not be discriminated in this manner. The review was quite honest (in my utterly biased kind of way) and went like this:

Wow! This game is simply amazing! Even if you don’t like marble poppers you should check it out because it has this new pull and shoot mechanics that I’ve never seen in any similar game before. The gameplay is much more strategic then in Zuma or Luxor because you get to choose marbles directly from the path. Such a small change, and suddenly the rusty old marble popping gets interesting and fun again.

The screenshots don’t do the game any justice - it looks much better in motion and with all the sound effects. The only negative thing I have to say about this game is that the sounds are a bit on the aggressive side and can get tiresome after a while, but you can always tweak the volume to your liking and keep having lots of fun!

The funny part started today when I was contacted and informed that my review was chosen as the last weeks best review. I was happy to hear that due to this StoneLoops! review will be featured on the Reflexive front page during the whole next week. It will hopefully give a nice boost to the game. Oh, and I also get to choose one free game! I think that I will be writing more reviews from now on. If you’re a developer of causal games I suggest you do the same – if your game is not a time management or hidden object, this might be the only way to get your game some front page portal promotion…

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!”

StoneLoops! is a good game but not a great hit. At least not as big of a hit as we have hoped for. This is due to the fact that the game was launched about a year late off the schedule and with passing time the market became very harsh for marble poppers. I will be writing more about it in the postmortem of the game later on. Anyway, StoneLoops! has already been launched on several portals (Bigfish, Reflexive and Iwin) and is on its way to others, but still there are some distributors that passed on launching the game.

We asked a representative of one of such portals (which I won’t name here) about the reason for the rejection of the game’s submission. To our surprise we received a very honest answer, which went something like this:

Continue reading “Portals not interested in high quality games?”