June 20, 2012

What is this, a review!?


Hello readers, meet Cripplecat, our new Lumia 610 test device. Since we have been busy with outsourcing projects again this week, we thought we might as well introduce this little thing and share our thoughts about it with a few lines.

If you happen to be a WP7 developer, there are two sides to this device. It's existence will force you to decide whether you want to set some limits to your design, or cut out a portion on potential audience by opting out 256 devices. On the other hand this device offers pretty good bang for the buck, which means it has a good chance to gather more of that audience we ever so desire.

We found 610 to be surprisingly agile little thing. There's no noticeable lag anywhere, and in most cases it performs much better than many earlier devices with 512 memory. However, we ran into serious problems when running the graphics intensive Spiritual on it, and thus decided to make the game unavailable on 256 devices for now. Developing games for 610 shouldn't be a problem though, if the memory usage is well thought out from the beginning. We admit that this has been a bit of a learning experience.

For end users  still without a WP7 device this phone is an excellent choice, especially if you want the best value instead of best performance. There are some apps Lumia 610 will not work with, including Skype, so you might want to check out before marching to the store.

June 11, 2012

Busy busy business


Whoa! Several weeks went by just like that. We are sorry to have missed some blog posts between this and the last one. These weeks have been quite eventful, so lets take a look at some past events:

Riku Leinonen has joined our crew for the next few months, as it turns out our 3:1 ratio of programmers and artists needs even more imbalance. Welcome!

Break MORE Aliens! has been published, and we even stayed on schedule. A future blog post will go into more detail about the publishing process, advertising, reviews ans all that jazz, but right now you can:

Check out the game itself! (If you have a Windows Phone)
Take a look at the official trailer!
And read through this awesome review by wpcentral.com!

We were lucky enough to teach game programming basics last week at Kajaani UAS, very rewarding experience. To all our students, thanks for attending, and keep making games on your own time! To all those who took entrance exams during the week, see you in September! ;D

Along these we have been, and still are, working on some very interesting subcontracting projects.

Next week we will finally begin our grand summer project, stay tuned! TJR out.