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.

256 was not enough!

Hello again after two weeks! TJR HQ has moved to new business premises and we hope we can resume active blog keeping.

Headlines of the week: For the first time we failed a Windows Phone Marketplace certification process. Twice, to be exact, but for very different reasons.

Spiritual, our most graphics heavy game so far, hit the recently lowered ceiling for memory usage on WP7. (90 MB for the new WP Tango devices, note to developers.) This is actually very welcome wake-up call for us: While 256 MB of RAM is not much for a modern smartphone, it should be more than enough for a game like this. Back to optimizing, and let's do that from the beginning with the next project.

Then there is Ouroboring Life, which apparently is our first R-rated title. In case you are unfamiliar with the project, it is a simple rhythm based life simulator where your goal is to achieve perfect life after a few generations of fortune building. The game was made for this year's Global Game Jam. You can get better idea of what it's all about by watching the trailer.

During the game you come across life events, two of which are pretty hardcore: "Just enjoyed your first XXX!" and "Got an STD..." While we understand the cultural differences, it was still a bit of a surprise for the game not to pass the filter in some areas. We decided we're against the idea of changing the content, so we simply removed a few regions from the list.

Ouroboring Life is available for PC here and for Windows Phone here (both free!), in case you want to check out all the hardcore action yourself. :P

Status report, stat!

Since we don't have anything too specific to report this week, we thought we might as well shed some light on several projects we are working on and their statuses, so here goes:

Break MORE Aliens! is nearly finished and will go through some testing and analyzing by Kajak students in a few days.We're pretty exited to hear their thoughts on it!

Spiritual is not under active development, but we have plans for the additional content, which will most likely be published during summer.

Interplanetary is going through a slower phase in development at the moment. This is because we prefer it to have our full attention once we can get cracking again.

Dr. Globdor is coming along nicely. We mentioned last week the possibility of a PC release, and that's actually become our main focus. We will not release a finished game right away, but instead give players the essentials and a chance to give us input on which features they'd like to see in the finished game. Because we're indie developers and not a major publisher, this is actually a valid strategy and not an excuse to cut development time. ;)

Besides those we are of course working on subcontracting projects all the time. And finally, here's a little sneak peek to a whole new game project we will be working on this summer:

Weekend with (nature) Spirits

So we had a bit of a crunch weekend, and Windows Phone 7 version of Spiritual is coming along nicely. If all goes well it will be available in your pocket before the year is over!

We are currently pondering some game design choices: There will be "skills" or "spells" in the game to remedy the situation where player could, in the original Spiritual, get stuck in the changing maze for several seconds. Now we have to decide if we want to make several of these skills available at all times like we originally planned, or maybe restrict them to one usable skill at a time which would make things less complicated. Use of these skills will be restricted by the amount of mana player has, so we also need to decide whether the mana should be "charged" in special tiles in each level, or maybe by items player will pick up randomly?

We are also pretty sure there will be collectable artifact pieces that make something beautiful when they all have been gathered and combined. Plan is to make one artifact piece available in each level, which should add a little replay value for those players who like to collect things.

Collectable artifact pieces also mean that the levels will no longer be infinite of course. They will still be randomly generated and thus different each time, but we are thinking of a world consisting of ~15 levels, which get more difficult and present new things to player towards the end. Final level will of course be awesome and something completely different.

...and if people like our game enough, there will be more than one world to explore! :D

Ludun Dare 21 and Spiritual

We just got a shiny new promo video of Spiritual, our Ludum Dare 21 Jam entry, and I realised we have not mentioned the game here at all.

"Spiritual is a game about a mischievous Wisp who gets thrown into a world of swamp and mazes as a punishment for slacking off from his divine duties. Your mission is to guide him through the everchanging network of duckboards, collect the Wisplings he needs to reactivate the Seal he came through and take one step closer to home. To be honest though, the levels are procedurally generated and the difficulty increases indefinitely, so the road is quite long. Maybe we need a sequel to relieve the Wisp from his torment? "

That's the original decription from the Ludum Dare site. So now that you know what Spiritual is about, here's how it works: Each procedurally generated level in the game consists of tiles that form a maze. Rows and colums of these tiles move randomly back and forth every few seconds to open new routes while blocking old ones, and player's goal is to find a way through this mess into the exit tile. The levels get bigger as the game advances, and during each level passable tiles are gradually changed into impassable ones. (Honestly the video and game itself explain this way better, check the links after this babblage.) The game was made with XNA, surprise.

We are happy with the result, for once we had a full team and could make a game with beautiful graphics and sound instead of having our programmers waste time figuring out how stick figures work. Our new assemblage paid off rather well too, as Spiritual was voted to have the best graphics and second best audio out of all Jam gategory games! We got third place in innovation too. Thanks to everyone who voted if you're reading this!

To be honest there were some less awesome features in the game as well, for an example player sometimes has to wait way too long before the platforms move into desirable positions to advance. We really want to work on this game some more to correct these faults and add new stuff to expand Spiritual into somethig that can be considered a full game. If all this works out well enough, we might even publish it on XBLA or something. Thanks for your support!

PS. We already ported the game on Windows Phone just to see how it works, and it was better than expected. We'll get back to that later I hope. ;)

TL;DR: We made a game called Spiritual for Ludum Dare 21 and people liked it. We will make it even better and maybe publish it on XBLA and/or Windows Phone 7 if all goes well.

And finally, the video can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Mv00n-gwc

Spiritual can be downloaded directly here:
http://goo.gl/MNua2