July 17, 2012

When highscores go global

We have plunged head first into the world of databases and online functionality lately, and while those unlock the possibility to do some neat stuff, there are tons of things below the surface to consider. Data security first and foremost obviously, but what else?

We have been thinking a lot about how people use Internet on their mobile devices. Are they usually on WiFi? What kind of data plan does an average user have? How much data is it ok to transfer each time we, say, download highscore? This article gave us some perspective on the US market, which could be considered our main market area, but we still need to find out how things work in mainland Europe or Russia, both of which are also important to us.

So as much as we would want to see our new shiny database filled with entries, we politely ask the user if they would like to have just an offline highscore funtionality instead.

So this is what we go with right now:


Last week we finalized our newest addition to WP7 catalogue, which should be though the  certification process this week with any luck. More on that later!

July 3, 2012

Maybe we'll stick to indie marketing for now.


So, we made an expedition into the swamp of online advertising the other day. Boring statistics reveal that a) paying for online ads isn't all that effective for a small WP7 developer, or b) we are doing something very wrong. Maybe both, back to the lab!

This week we have been dabbling with SQL and PHP again, programming an online highscore funtionality for another Kajak team. This has been a great opportunity (read: pretext) to rewrite some messy code from earlier, making it easier for us to apply online highscore functionality in our future games as well.

Speaking of which, if things go all right, we will publish a fun little game for WP7 soon! Beyond all the fun the game is also an experiment to see how we can affect the downloads of another WP game by releasing a promotional minigame. We will go into more detail about it in a later post.