I am glad to announce the development of Mechanized, a project commissioned to us by the US based studio Gorgon Interactive.

Our team is extremely excited to be working with ex-Blizzard veteran Eric Sexton on this new IP for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

click on the image for a high resolution wallpaper

So what is the game about? Mechanized is a Tactical Strategy game that will pit players against teams of Robots in competition to win the super-duper Robotic Championship.

The player will be able to build their Robots from a variety of parts including Weapons, Armor, and Special Upgrades. With their Robot team constructed, player will enter the arena to fight against other Robot teams in his division.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, you will need to wait a few months to play it. Until then, you can keep up with the latest news from Mechanized by following GorgonGames at Twitter or Facebook.

Read on for the full press release from Gorgon Interactive

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I will be speaking about what we do at Lemon Team in the Software Development Days 2009 conference at the University of Alicante (Jornadas de Informática 2009) on the thursday 22nd this month at 11 AM. I will go through some of the technical problems we have faced so far, and how our education in Software Engineering helped.

Later in November, I will be also speaking at the Spanish Game Developers Conference 2009 (Congreso de Desarrolladores de Videojuegos). I will share some insight into the creation and management of a service oriented game development company like Lemon Team, and comment on several good project management practices. CDV 2009 runs from the 5th to the 7th November at Fira de Valencia.

On a side note, NatGeo’s Lost City of Z, our latest Mac port for our friends at Merscom, is already available for download at Mac Game Store and Reflexive Arcade.

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Righteous Kill 2 and Winemaker Extraordinaire, our two latest Mac ports —both commissioned by Merscom— are now available at the Mac section of Big Fish Games.

Righteous Kill 2 is a hidden object game, where the player assumes the role of a NYPD investigator who must hunt down a copycat killer and try to stop a rash of murders across New York City.

Winemaker Extraordinaire is a strategy game (in casual terms) around —you guessed it— winemaking. Maria Bellaventura has just inherited an Italian winery, and is leaving her stress-filled life as a corporate lawyer behind. Players must help Maria transform her small rural winery into an international winemaking empire, and become the Winemaker Extraordinaire she is destined to be.

Both games seem to have done pretty well, with Righteous Kill 2 now sitting in the #7 spot of the BFG Mac charts and Winemaker reaching #6 when it launched back in june.

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Music Catch, our latest iPhone game for Reflexive, has been updated to version 1.0.1. The new version includes two new songs by Isaac Shepard, increasing the total song count to four:

• “Before Dawn” from “Swept Away”
• “Leaves in the Wind” from “Deep Joy”
• “Gentle” from “Deep Joy”
• “Letting Go” from “Deep Joy”

Download Music Catch for your iPhone or iPod Touch

Play Music Catch on your PC or Mac

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The latest newsletter from development tools company Pinch Media answers some of the most common questions asked by iPhone developers such as “which iPhone OS version should I target”. I have shamelessly stolen the first chart of their newsletter to share it with you:

You can read the full report by clicking here.

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I just realized that Airport Mania is now occupying the number 1 spot at the paid apps ranking in the App Store of Switzerland.

Merci vilmal!

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Commissioned by Reflexive (now a part of Amazon), and based on the original PC/Mac title developed by my good friend Juan Pablo Ferreyra from South Winds Games, Airport Mania: First Flight is our latest iPhone game available on the App Store. Coincidentally, it is the first iPhone project we started working on, back in 2008′s summer.

The game has about two thirds of the levels found on the original title and keeps all of its features, unlockable paper planes included. Everything, from positioning and size of dialogs to level balancing, has been revised and adapted for the touch screen, resulting on a top of the line port that has been received very positively so far. Special kudos go to Reflexive’s Russell Carroll, for his support and personal involvement on this project.

So, what are you waiting for? Go look for $1, get the game, and fasten your seatbelts :)

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After I published our iPhone analytics and monetization solutions matrix, Vishal Gurbuxani —one of Mobclix‘s co-founders— got in touch with us as he felt we had left out some unique features out of our matrix. Vishal was kind enough to walk me through their offering, highlighting what he believes are the five core differentiating features of Mobclix:

1. Event Logs: log custom events with different log levels.
2. User Feedback: a comment form to get anonymous qualitative feedback on your app.
3. User Ratings: a rating form to get quantitative feedback the appearance, fun, overall, performance, recommendation, usability, and value of your app.
4. Interactive Ad Units: small JavaScript (SproutCore) based apps within a frame.
5. Application Ranking: I’m not sure how it works (based on sales, popularity?), but it seems to give a good idea of how apps are performing compared to others.

With the only exception of the first feature —which I have seen implemented on other solutions—, I think the other four are pretty unique (though I could be wrong). Among all the usage stats collected by Mobclix’s platform, I personally loved the breakdown of Wi-Fi vs 3G downloads. For iPhone developers wondering if keeping the download size of their apps under 10 MB (for OTA purchasing) pays off, having access to that data would give them an definite answer.

When I asked Vishal about his thoughts on Android, he said they are working on an Android version of the analytics tools that shares the same feature set as the iPhone one. He also added that the while iPhone users currently outnumber the G1 about 20 to 1, that is expected to change soon as more Android–based phones are introduced.

I would like to thank Vishal for his help and hope this post will help fellow iPhone developers on the look for an analytics/monetization solution decide between Mobclix and its competitors.

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Mahjong Epic is our latest commisioned iPhone game to appear on the App Store. Designed by Kristanix Games and based on its big brother for PC and Mac, Mahjong Epic’s unique selling points are the vast collection of boards –100- and the built in board editor. AppCraver.com reviewed it recently, giving it an 8/10 score.

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Keeping the size of your iPhone App to a minimum is interesting because of many reasons, but probably the most important of them is Apple’s 10 MB app size limit to App Store downloads over cellular networks (3G or EDGE). Mind you, this limit to OTA downloads applies to final compressed (zipped) size. Although compressing you app bundle with the “Compress” Finder action will give you an fairly accurate estimate of the final download size, be aware that the iTunes Connect metada might increase size in a couple hundred kilobytes.

Keep reading for two tips on reducing the size of your iPhone apps.

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