So, I decided to have a play through of the recently released Jones on Fire platform adventure for Android tonight and I can happily report that it’s a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

You play the role of Jones the Firefighter and your objective is to save kitties from a blazing fire surrounding your stylish fire dept (soon to be overrun with baby cats) I started off with feelings of frustration with the game, wandering why I couldn’t link the two main moves of jumping and dashing together, harking back to the days of the Megaman X series.

Thankfully after my first couple of playthroughs I found there was an in-game shop where I could buy such an item, yay! I was worried for a moment before then!

My main criticism of the runner genre of games on mobiles is that so many of them rely on swipe gestures which always seem frustratingly unreliable at some point or another mid-gameplay. Jones on fire thankfully does away with that and simplifies the controls to tap the left side of the screen to jump and the right side to bravely dash through the flames which makes the game much more focused around the essential gameplay mechanics, no wiping away fire with an awkwardly aimed swipe, thank goodness.

The graphics suit the nature of the game, keeping things simple, low-poly and untextured is the order of play here and that’s not a bad thing, each asset looks at home, including the power-ups you’ll unlock later on through the game.

I would love to see a more fully fledged online high-score system for Jones on Fire and hope that someday google can offer the same service as gamecenter does, although for the moment tweeting your high scores is a good replacement.

Overall Jones on Fire is a solid runner with clean cutesy graphics, cracking music and some well-made sound effects, It’ll keep you entertained for hours, it’s available on Google Play now for £1.33 here

Firstly, success is measured in lots of ways, for me, the main success was in the act of publishing a commercial game and watching the reviews come along at the start of February. Yes, I was also amazed to see that people were buying the game too!

Super Grid Run peaked in google plays top new paid section at number 8 which was far higher up then I expected to get and has so far had just over 500 paid installs of the full version (more on that later) and just over 8,000 installs of the free version.

Google Play sales statistics 31st Jan - 27th Feb 2013

A quick check of the high scores tables a few minutes ago indicated that there were over 2,000 unique players. Now, each paid user has a unique id assigned to them upon first play which means that ~1,500 pirated copies exist. Meh, that’s 3x the number of copies sold!

After publishing to the Apple store and being approved mid-february all 50 review codes got sent out quickly after launch. Still not a single review for the iOS version has been published which I’m sure is a massive factor in sales. After all, how are potential players supposed to even know about the release if it’s not reviewed out there? To this point ~50 copies have sold on the App store.

I’m guessing I should have sent the review copies out before letting the release go out there, it seems odd that after some decent android coverage the iPhone version has recieved none. Never mind, I’ll consider it as a lesson learnt for the next game release

A couple of sales on amazon and indie city also occurred but nothing with much significance, the smallers android app markets (slideMe and appslib) show absolutely nothing.

Advertising revenue from the Free version so far totals in at around £10 after > 10,000 impressions which i’m fine with, the advertising on the free version is fairly minor as I didn’t want to blanket spam free users with adverts.

All-in-all I’m really happy with how Super Grid Run has sold, reviews really make or break a games release and I should probably give the Apple game reviewers more time to review a game before releasing in order to get a greater presence out there.

Now, back to making March’s onegameamonth.com entry and adding game center, achievements and the extra modes to Super Grid Run

Had an amazing time at the Explay meet up last night, a fellow MLA graduate Tom Jackson aka quickfingerz took us through the ins and outs of his experiences in the game industry from flash to unity.

Then showed off the amazing mechanim and nav mesh path-finding capabilities in Unity 4, both of which helped him to code a game live in front of us in under 35 minutes!

It was great to meet and chat to other game developers, designers and artists at the event. Of course, I showed a few peeps Super Grid Run and got some really groovy feedback for a few things I really should add to the game, most notably gamecenter integration and achievements.

Hopefully updating / upgrading a game can be considered as adding a new game to my one game a month profile as I really want to push these updates out, including the new conquest modes before the end of February!

All in all, if you’re a game dev, new or old, I highly recommend you checkout the explay meet-ups in Plymouth, they’re a lot of fun and informative to boot!

Special thanks to Iain Lobb (@iainlobb) for organising the event and Tom Jackson (@quickfingerz) for the awesomely fast coding and reminding me of years back at Uni!

So, yes, Super Grid Run is out on Android and it seems to be doing rather well for itself which is fantastic as to release a game to market and for it to be reviewed and then for some people to even buy it has ben a long time goal for me ever since I first touched Commodore + 4 basic at the age of 4 so, yaaay, I feel more vindicated in my place on this world, massive thank yous to everyone who has supporeted me throughout this project.

It’s project 1 of 12 and shall have some updates including new game modes poured over it over the coming months, so, even if you manage to get past the first loop on Extra Mode there will still be some more challenges out there for you to complete, more details on those later.

Stating the obvious, it’s February now and that means game 2 of 12 needs to be brought into action and I’m going to ressurect a game I gave up on last year, one I made before even attemping a game jam. That game would be Penguins Quest, see some of my really early blog posts for reference on that

It’s going to be slightly different to the original game however, the original was to feature a bunch of levels where you tilt the screen to get to the end of the level, collecting power ups, dodging baddies, etc,etc. Nothing particularly new or innovative but it proved to be a useful training game nonetheless.

This time around you will be helping a family of penguins, Mum, Dad and Son through their perilous journey across icy terrain to get to… err something, perhaps a 4th Penguin? Yes, that would work nicely, it can be a Daughter perhaps (note to self yes, a Daughter penguin would be cool and most stereotypical to get captured)

Each penguin has it’s own unique role within the family to aid them through their progress.

The dad penguin could be super fast, or perhaps have some sort of eye laser
The mum penguin could throw ice walls or err fire balls maybe ? That may be slightly uncharacteristic mind.
Aaand the little son penguin could lob sand at things (oil spills, blinding enemies and the like)

I’m thinking about using Tilt controls to handle moving left and right, tapping the leader penguin to use it’s main power and tapping the other penguins to switch between them at will.

A seperate jump button may be needed through which would be a shame but probably necessary.

Ice walls bring up a few nice gameplay concepts such as shielding from attacks, reflecting attacks and using them as rudimentary platforms to avoid dangers from the depths so I think that’s a must in here. Could be really nice for boss battles, etc.

Each level would have  time limit before it sinks into the ocean maybe? then some hungry shark could pop -up and go “NYOM!” but in a ‘non-bloody mess’ way.

Perhaps looking into high scores again ala super grid run with best times ,etc for each level. each penguin could have a distinct speed to encourage swift switch overs, maybe even level rankings (S,A-C) would be nice. But probably not all possible within a month. But I think this will be my game for February. Possible also March

Yes, got the paid and free versions of Super Grid Run uploaded to google play, amazon and slideMe, all ready for publishing, it’s been a long journey for such a simple game and I’m glad I didn’t make something more complicated which would be tougher to expand upon later on in the year.

There will be updates to Super Grid Run over the coming months, mostly new game modes and enemy types, just to spice things up

The last week has mostly consisted of:

1. Bug fixes – check, check and triple check. (There were a few little bugs, one larger one)
2. Sent some copies out to review sites – check.
3. Made a new promo video and graphics – check.

I’m glad that I’ve gone through and re-checked the code and game before final submission to app stores it’s made me feel more confident about the release which is good as my emotions about the game have been all over the place over the last week also, sending out playtest copies has kept me stable though, thanks again to all the playtesters, you’re all awesome!

I wish I was submitting to the apple app store also right now but I can’t find any links to a document I need to agree to regarding iOS paid development, which is really frustrating as I don’t want to neglect iOS users, heck, that was the only reason I went off and bought a mac mini and the dev subscription.

I’m not sure exactly how I would even send unity builds out to iOS app stores to be honest, any tips on this would be rgeat. With android it’s just been a simple case of linking to the apk file which is fine by me, sure, it’s not the most secure thing to do but if you can’t trust the review sites then who can you trust?

I’ve ran into a few pay for review sites along the search through app review sites, needless to say, those ones were ignored.

The new promo stuff is currently viewable at: http://www.supergridrun.com/ Go check it out

Another weekend of fun making a game in under 48 hours!

I really got into the theme of “You are the Villain” this time around add came up with some pretty nasty ideas. The full post-mortem is available here on the Ludum Dare Website –> Read the Full Post-mortem

Looking forward to the next game jam and finally releasing Super Grid Run after Christmas and the amazing One Game A Month challenge next year! More details on that soon!

The feedback from the beta version has been so useful. I’ve got a few more features to add now before final release which is fantastic. Sure it means i’ll have to push the release back until after Christmas probably but the result will be a more complete game for people to enjoy.

Expect to see more updates here and on supergridrun.com soon!

Well. After a couple of months of moonlighting as a game developer and getting Some good progress over recent weekends Super Grid Run is nearly here!

I wanted to be finished ideally by the 26th of November so I could release on iOS by the 6th of December but never mind. That’s the problem with moonlighting I guess.

Oh. Of course screenies are below, enjoy

Mimicking web-design, the last few percent takes most of the time and when you can only get a couple of hours in here and there it seems to drag on forever!

I’m looking forward to how testers feel the differing levels work. They are pseudo-randomnly pattern based with progressing difficulty, bonus rounds nad ever increasing speed.

The GUI has moved along to make things slightly clearer for testers and shouldn’t need much more further tweaking.

If you would like to test the android version out for review purposes, please Direct Message me on twitter @refrescreation or send an email to ryan@refreshcreations.co.uk

The more feedback, the better the end game will be! At least, that’s the theory anyway

All going well , I’ll be sending review copies out on Monday and be released come Thursday / Friday.