Casual Games Harmony

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…

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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!

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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.

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The short answer is -  yes they can. The long one is – yes, they can and in fact they do it better than most people. I’m not talking about computers performing music (like a MIDI Player or a Toyota robot playing violin). I’m talking about computer software that is composing music - making up melodies and writing scores for some instruments. The only thing which gives us, people an edge at composing music is that a real person can tell which one composition sounds better than others. A computer can create hundreds of songs in a second but it will never be able to tell which one it likes the most. But let’s get back to the beginning…

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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”