Mahjong Travel: It is a beautiful world

Miguel Villar November 20, 2012 Android, Game Development, iOS, Lemon Team 1 Comment

We made it. Finally Lemon Team released its first IP ever, Mahjong Travel. Despite that the production values aren’t very high (it is just a mahjong-based game), it’s been a hard process to make it real, and honestly we’re proud of the final result. Mainly it goes for iPad and Android tablets (more platforms in the future!), and it’s been localized into 8 languages! If you like traveling as well as playing board/puzzle/mahjong based games, this game is for you! Seriously!!!

From a technical standpoint, since it’s meant to run on many platforms (Android, iOS, Windows 8 and Windows Phone, PS Vita and Sony certified devices) and considering we haven’t used any third-party multi-platform engine, it hasn’t been easy at all.

But the most challenging part of developing Mahjong Travel has been content creation for sure. The idea behind the game was to create a classic mahjong-solitaire experience while giving players the opportunity to discover amazing places all over the world, feeling as they were traveling during the board resolution.

At the beginning we were just about to include 50 localizations, however we soon found out that amount wasn’t gonna be close enough. In our research trying to find the most beautiful and enigmatic places around the globe, we understood that not even 1000 places would be enough. There are literally dozens of worth-seen spots on every country, and as we couldn’t be able to include all of them, we finally decided to include 100 instead of just 50. We tried to add all continents but then we saw we had to remove some. The excluded ones were Australia and the Antarctica, though they’ll be added as a separate board-pack if the game is a success, which we hope so!

And specially, it was very hard to look at those beautiful pictures and didn’t imagine being really there We did realize how much beautiful the world can be. Sadly, looks like we human beings aren’t able to think about it more frequently! Looks like we are willing to destroy every piece of nature no matter what…

At least, we hope the game serves to raise awareness regarding taking care of the planet, because it’s the only one we have, it’s unique in the whole universe and it’s the one our children will have to live and enjoy. So please, let’s start taking care of it!

Finally, I would like to thank everybody involved in the game development, directly or indirectly. All of them (programmers, artists, translators, musicians, testers, researchers/travelers) have done a pretty good job! Also, I would like to thank the enormous community of photographers & travelers dedicated to show the most beautiful parts of the world, no matter where they hide, and of course all those sites/blogs that actively render that beauty across the internet every day (below I present some of them, from where we retrieved our list of “better spots” for the game).

Thank you travelers and wish us good luck!