Traveling through towns of the island of Alamandi you get to try your skills in different mini games ranging from match-3 to favorite board games, at the same time enjoying various features like chat, build-your-own-house, create and customize your avatar, friends lists, team play, different gifts and awards.
In Facebook Alamandi Match 3 you need to remove stones of the same color to rescue turtles. The more you rescue, the higher you score. The higher you score the more awards you get to use in your MMO Alamandi profile. I think what makes it even more challenging and fun is that you can’t target for the best awards unless you have your friends to support you by joining the game as well!
Mahjong Epic HD is the first of our iPad projects to hit the App Store. Commissioned by Kristanix Games and released back in May, it recently entered the paid and free top 100 charts at the US App Store.
We are very proud of being behind the Mac version of Ranch Rush 2, for it is such a great time-management game! Fresh Games and Aliasworlds did a great work on this one, so good in fact that it got a 5-stars review from Gamezebo. Here is an excerpt:
Ranch Rush 2’s rock solid gameplay is practically unchanged from the original, but the completely new setting and the fact there are many additional tasks to take on make this time management adventure a blast to play. Over the course of 10 weeks, you’ll guide Sara’s efforts to lay the groundwork for her new tropical homestead and expand her business more and more each day.
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Each weekday you’ll fulfill orders from customers by planting and harvesting crops, making unique products with special machines, and tending to animals in your care.
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Other features like achievements, trophies, and optional Facebook connectivity further round out this stellar time-management game. Ranch Rush 2 simply looks great, plays great, and is a perfect example of a time management done well.
We are also collaborating with Fresh Games to bring Ranch Rush 2 to iPhone and iPad. Can’t say much about those yet, except that they will not be cheap, straight ports. For the moment however, I recommend you give the PC or Mac versions a try, or become a fan of Ranch Rush on Facebook to be up-to-date of new releases by Fresh Games.
Android 2.2 was announced last week at the Google IO 2010 conference. The update is already available for the Nexus One through non official channels and is expected to come soon to other second generation devices. Froyo packs many little new features and improvements, but there are several that I think will make game development on Android so much better:
Developers can now declare whether their app should be installed on internal memory or an SD card. They can also let the system automatically determine the install location. This is huge, because up until now the apps could only be installed to the internal memory, which ranged between 128 and 512 MB for most Android phones (a far cry from the gigabytes available on the iPhone and iPod touch). Because of this problem, the majority of games for Android have been very light in terms of contents and graphics quality so far. Hopefully the SD support will change this; we will no longer have to resort to workarounds such as downloading game assets to the external memory during the first run to make “big” games on Android viable.
Dalvik JIT. A Just In Time compiler was added to the Dalvik VM. Google says it can improve performance of apps between 2x and 5x, though when it comes to games the the real speedups will be much more modest. On our Nexus One, The Android game we are working does not run at a higher FPS rate —already over 30 FPs most of the time anyway—, though load times are now noticeably faster and hiccups are much less frequent. I wished the JIT compiler made it into firt generation devices such as the G1, because those phones would benefit greatly from it.
Application error and crash reports. When an app freezes or stops responding, the user can choose to send a bug report to the developer with a click of a button, right from their phone. The new button appears in the application error dialog; if the user chooses to click it, a report is sent to Google which can be later checked by the developer on the Android Market. We have had this feature on the iPhone for a long time already, but the main difference (and advantage IMHO), is that collection of reports on the iPhone is done automatically whenever the users syncs with iTunes. On Android however, users must explicitely click on the report button, and I suspect many will not (specially users without data plans).
Better control over audio with new SoundPool methods. The Android audio API sucks for games, because it offers little control over caching and playback of sound effects and usually behaves very erraticaly. That’s the reason most Android games limit themselves to a few SFX, and never try to play too many at once. The new API methods now let us detect completion of sound-loading, for instance. So SoundPool sucks a bit less now.
Finally, I have realized that most of the native apps —such as the browser— now support both landscape orientations. Prior to 2.2, you were only allowed to use the landscape mode with the hardware buttons to the right. Still, the on-screen keyboard on our app compiled for 1.6 will refuse to work on the alternative landscape orientation, so it looks like only apps that target 2.2 and higher will be able to handle both landscape orientationsn properly.
Much better now, but still harder to produce high-quality games on Android than on iPhone IMHO.
The Google Wave notes of the “writing real-time games for Android redux” session is also worth reading for some interesting bits of information. Most notably, it seems that devices running Android 1.5 and 1.6 still take about two thirds of the market. This kind of negates many of the improvements that Froyo brings, since devs will need to target Android 1.5 or 1.6 for a long time. Still, I can’t wait for the day when we will be able to target Android 2.2+ devices exclusively.
Last week we talked at CAMON in Alicante about the advantages and disadvantages of iPhone web applications, as opposed to native development using the iPhone SDK.
We explained how to address the main shortcomings of web apps to offer full-screen experiences that need no permanent internet connection to work.
The slides (Spanish only) are already available:
Update: the video recording of the talk is also available now at the CAMON website.
Miguel has been working on this for quite a while already, and we’re glad to announce we’re almost done with it. Ricochet Infinity for iPhone and iPod touch is not an straight port from the brick busting PC classic. The user interface has been completely re-imagined, there’s a new tilt mechanic that replaces the ‘recall’ feature on the PC and it’s got 100 new levels specifically made for the iPhone.
The initial hype about the iPad seems to be fading away, but we remain truly excited about this new little device and can’t wait to get our hands on one.
The powerful hardware specs and the high-resolution screen is surely going to drive a new generation of games with new user interfaces and much more detailed graphics overall. And when compared to the iPhone games market, the greater value and increased development costs of iPad games should translate into higher game prices overall too.
In addition to original games, some direct, 1-to-1 ports of casual games will also become very popular among iPad users. We won’t be surprised if many time-management or hidden-object object prove to be more fun —and easier— to play on the 9.7″ touch screen than on a PC or a Mac.
Finally, although Apple has not said how many units they expect to shift in 2010, we guess that the iPad market probably won’t reach a critical mass until the second half of 2011. That said, we are currently assessing several potential iPad projects and we should probably be able to ship something on this platform before summer.
Our latest project for german publisher INTENIUM entered the german App Store’s top 100 last week, at position #70. This action-puzzler is a conversion of the original PC game. The iPhone version does offer two new features, though. First, you can play on both portrait and landscape orientations, and second, you can post your high-scores to your Facebook wall. Oh, and we also added Spanish on top of the original localizations (English, French, Germand and Dutch)!
Cross-selling is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “selling an additional product or service to an existing customer“.
And starting with BioLabs: Outbreak! (App Store link), we are helping Reflexive to do just that by adding a “more games” link in the main menu of the game. Tapping on it opens an embedded browser with Reflexive’s current offer of iPhone games, complete with descriptions and links to full, lite and original (PC, Mac) versions.
For instance, this is the entry for Airport Mania:
