After a long break, I’ve started to do some developing on Boulder Defense again. The game now has simple physics, just to cover what’s needed. It’s nice to see that things are moving and bouncing around in the game field, it feels like I passed a milestone in the development. I did take a look at Box2D Physics Engine and liked it, might use it in a future project, but decided to use what I already done. Boulder Defense doesn’t need that kind of physics engine and it wouldn’t give me less work anyway.

You can now control the player’s sprite by moving the finger on the screen. I’m not sure I like it, feels as the finger is in the way of the game. But I’ll do some more testing, in a more game like environment. Even if it would work fine I have plans to implement controls with iPhone’s accelerometer and give the player the option to choose.

The development have been a bit slow on Boulder Defense. I’ve implemented sprites, so things are showing on the screen. Done some thinking about how I want the control system to work, but still need to do some more study before I know how to implement it.

Next step would be to make objects to interact, when that is in place it will feel like a game. Crude, but still a game. After those three major parts are in place (graphics, control and interact), development will be more evolutionary by prototyping one minor feature after another. In this, more or less, inactive developing time I’ve got until now, I hade lots of more ideas that need to be tested in-game.  The goal is the make a game that is fun and feels intuitive, so I don’t want features that will clutter the game.

At last we got a working title for our next game, Boulder Defense. It’s a simple title that describe the game a little bit; you are defending yourself with a boulder. Other than coming up with a working title, I’ve been doing some more design. Mostly what you will be encounter in the field. The prototyping have been a bit slow, but this week I’ll pick up some pace.

I’ve also been drawing some simple mokcups to see in what perspective of the game that is most fit for this style of game, but also to see how large sprites to use.

The first mockup is when you view the field straight from above. I thought this style would give a strategic feeling, but after the mockup I’m not so sure. It also felt that it would be harder to give the sprites more character.

The second mockup is with the sprites face front. I think that will make it easier to give the sprites more character and more details. The sprites will probably need to be made smaller. I think the game might feel a little tame if there aren’t room for lot of enemies

So, Ziggy the Worm, our first game has been out for about two and a half years now. I’d like to sum these two and a half years up.

First off - what was our intentions to release a game for free?

1. We wanted to get something released. Something to justify (to our selves) all the time we spend developing games. Get a taste of the feeling to actually have released something that a lot of people enjoys playing.
2. We wanted to spread the word about our company. We figured that once we got something to sell it would be a lot easier to get started selling, if we’re not totally unknown in the business. Hopefully Ziggy won’t scare people off…

So, “why another snake game”, you say. Given the prerequisites (free game = minimal budget), our primary reason for deciding to develop a snake game remake was that we wanted to make a game small enough so it wouldn’t take “forever” to develop.

At first we were aiming to add a lot of features such as network play, but we skipped all the extras (except the split screen mode) so that we would have something left to do for a second version. Skipping the extras helped us getting the game out in time (and keeping it free).

How did we promote the game? We haven’t yet… we simply released the game (for Windows and Linux) on our own website and posted it on download.com and some other download sites. Not much happened, downloads-wise, at this point though.

A few months later we released a patched version of the game, but this time we added a native Mac OS X binary to our file list. We also posted the game on the apple downloads website at this point.

Posting the game on apple downloads was the best thing that ever happened to Ziggy. We got recommended as “staff pick” and our downloads rocketed!

At this point the Mac OS X version of Ziggy is the most popular one, closely followed by Windows. The Linux version isn’t getting many downloads at all and to be honest we probably won’t be releasing any more games for Linux. It simply isn’t worth the time and all the fuss.

Exact download numbers are hard to get since the game is available on many freeware game sites now. But we got somewhere around 40.000 downloads (and counting) from our website. The figure will probably be more than the double if you count all the downloads from download.com, freeware websites and likes. Which is pretty OK for a simple snake remake!

So was it worth all the time spent? Most definitely! We are very pleased with all the downloads and the feedback we got and it has certainly encouraged us to work even harder on our next game.

We would really love to develop a sequel to the game with all the features we first planned and hopefully we’ll get the time to do it in a not to distant future.

Although we will probably not develop another free game in the foreseeable future. We simply cannot afford to spend our time on non-profit projects at the moment. But for those with the time (and the money) to do so, we would highly recommend it to boost your company!

Still no working title for our first iPhone game, but I’ve been working on refining the concept. Basically the game is about defending yourself from evil doers by bouncing a ball against them. The hard part seems to be to get the game to have a fast-paced-action-game feeling, when you only bounce a ball. I’ll need to do some testing for enemy behavior, ball physics and other game elements. So I need to do a prototype, which I’ll start on next week.

I’ll be releasing screenshots of the prototype as the work progresses.