First of all – we’re working on sequels to two of our very popular and successful titles. There are new levels and update coming for DoodleBlast (and we plan to publish the game for iPad as well – under the name Scribbles) and Battle of Britain is coming to iPad and BlackBerry Playbook. We’re also doing some work about sequel to BofB called Battle of Britain: Fighter Command (more advanced and with totally new strategic/RPG aspect).

Furia is going to be a physics based platform/hack&slash game. We have some really nice concepts how to show sword fights in the platform game.

You can check some more mockups from the Furia at dribbble.

Ferocious Tournaments is a co-operation we’re doing with the awesome UK based studio called CodeHeads. It’s going to be huge tactical game, with a lot of economic features. The player goal would be to train a team of gladiators in the post-apocalyptic world and fight against other teams (yup – it’s going to be mulitplayer). There’ll be some story added to the game as well. All that would be served with very classy, vintage pixel-art feel. The game is being created with HTML5, so it’s going to target all the platforms out there.

Click to enlarge

You can also check more mockups from the Ferocious Tournaments at dribbble.

Iron Grip is another co-operation project we’re involved with. Steve Fulton has come up with some awesome puzzle-like space fights game idea – I loved it the minute I saw it. BlackMoon is creating some slick pixels to make the game look beautiful. It’s going to be mobile cross-platform game.

Banana Frenzy is a humorous variation about the good-old Dyna Blaster game. The player controls a monkey who eat bananas to produce… well lets call it “bombs”. We’re doing this game together with Michał Budzyński (so yup – it’s going to be HTML5).

All that is on the top of few totally awesome project we’re doing commercially for our clients (I cannot really tell much about them, but those are pretty stunning).

Stay tuned for more info about all those grand games!

Making the game

The idea for the game was pretty simple – blocks fall down (as in tetris), you need to evade them (as in platform game) and put them in a line (as in tetris).
We really wanted to check if you can create a Flash game for iPhone and would it work. We decided to create a flash game, try to sponsor it on FGL and than make it a iOS game.
The game design took about 2 hours, the nice, pixel-art, retro graphics took 13 hours and the development took 80 hours. After that time we had the Flash version of the game ready and we uploaded it to FGL to find a sponsor.

Sponsoring

The bidding looked as follows:
02/19 – Sponsor A – $300 [primary]
02/22 – Sponsor B – $320 [primary]
03/03 – Sponsor C – $400 [primary]
03/04 – Sponsor D – $440 [primary]

We went with Sponsor D offer (you can easily check who that is in the game itself:) (although the numbers were not what we were hoping for)

The Sponsor asked for branding the game and to pack it in a “frame”, since the game size was created to fit the iPhone (480×320) – and that was a little bit too small. Creating the graphic for the frame was rather easy (2h), but wrapping the game in the frame proved tricky (another 20h of work).

The game hit the Flash portals and was generally well met, but it didn’t become a hit.

Flash game on the iPhone

Soon after the launch we started to publishing the game on iPhone. The initial test shown need for some optimization (another 16 hours), but the game run pretty smooth on the iPhone after that. We uploaded to Apple, wait few days till it’s published and than started to brag about it on social site and send info about the game with code to download it to all known portals that handle iOS games. We even created a video trailer for the game!

Some of the portals gave some good reviews of the game and there was some initial peak of sales (up to 50 a day). It didn’t last for long though.
We were trying to figure out what to do to market the game, when suddenly Evil Robot showed up in the “Featured” section of the AppStore.
We were totally, absolutely thrilled to see that, and we were checking the iTunes sales recored pretty much every 5 minutes (it refreshes once a day).
To our disappointment – the week of being featured in AppStore brought us total of 68 sales :/

We decided the game has a potential (since it was featured, right?) so we spend $200 on AdMob ads. In 10 days it gave us 922,156 impressions, with 4,979 click (this means almost five thousands people were on the game AppStore page with just a “Buy” tap away from sale). It made absolutely no change to the sale line, which was looking quite flat and low at that time.

Word on finances

In general – after 140 hours of work we got $440 for the primary flash game sponsoring plus aprox. $100 for iPhone sales (minus $200 spend on ads).
This would mean about $2.5 per hour;)

Things we learnt

1. We shouldn’t have accepted the bid as early. With 4 sponsors bidding we could have count on sponsors out bidding each other.

2. We should have launched the game on both Flash and iOS at once and put all the marketing effort during the first week after.

3. We should have used the Flash version as a marketing tool for the iOS – putting simple button pointing to the iTunes could be very nice.

4. There’s no big difference on how “good” game would do compared to the “poor” one. To really hope for your game to get the audience it really needs to be “totally awesome”.

5. Evil Robot proved to us it’s possible to develop iOS games with Flash

In general – it was great fun to create this game and we’re really happy how it worked out.

If you would like to check the game for yourself – here are some links:

Buy in AppStore ($0.99)

Play on Kongregate

Download layered .PSD file for the set

Click on the image to see the whole set

Some time ago I was asked to help polish branch of Adobe to record some video tutorials on how great Flash CS 5.5 is for mobile game development. Together with some great guys from Adobe and Eduweb.pl I’ve recorded three video tutorials how to optimize games for mobile and how to publish them for iOS and Android.
You can check those videos at mobiliusz.pl (you can even play the mini-game we did for the tutorial;) Enojoy!

Some time ago guys at 8bitrocket.com announced the contest for Atari inspired, web-based game that’ll fit under 16 kilobytes. We took the challenge and have created a game called “16k Lander”. As the name suggest – it’s a cover of the Atari famous arcade title called “Lunar Lander”.
We’re very happy to tell you that “16k Lander” actually won the competition and claimed the Grand Prize!
Yup – we rock!

You can play the game here.

I’ve created another pixel-art illustration with Firefoxzilla (huge Fire-fox like mechanical droid that helps people) for challenge on Mozilla’s Creative Collective. It got to the top finals and scored quite a huge number of votes.
Let’s hope Firefoxzilla will keep coming back:)

There’s quite huge event coming in July – the 4 days long Game Developers Summit 2010 in Gdansk. We can’t really miss such fun – the whole BlackMoon team is going there. Mike and I will be giving the presentations on the event – about game usability, team work (those two are mine) and Flash/AIR game development techniques (Mike will talk about that). It looks like really good event is coming for game developers – check more at zjazdtworcowgier.pl

Here’s how our little app looks like

Drivers start your engines! Designing and coding the widget in just 5 hours needed some haste