I figured it was about time that I talked a bit about our newest iOS title, Neofire.
I posted some screen shots over on our Google+ page a while back, but those were only of the menu system. Not something you can easily get excited about! However, look below and you’ll see some lovely screen shots of the game in action! These are from the iPad version.
We hope you’ve all recovered from the festivities and are ready for a new year of gaming!
We certainly are and we have a number of games in the pipeline (some further along than others). We’re planning something exciting for the beta of Neofire, but I can’t tell you anything until we work out if it’s going to work, or if we’re even allowed to do it! Either way, we’ll be revving up development on Neofire and will have more to show you in the coming weeks/months.
Finally, keep an eye out on our twitter feed as we’ll be giving away some Plum Crazy promo codes soon!
As most of you may be aware, Google+ now offers pages for companies and Claymore Games can now be followed! (just click the link there).
But, don’t forget, you can find us on Twitter and Facebook too!
I’ve just finished watching Brian Baglow’s excellent IGDA Scotland presentation. I’d heartily recommend all developers watch it!
You can find it here: http://vimeo.com/28846726
I’ll wait while you watch it…
Not really! Anyway, we’re pretty much guilty of all the things NOT to do. We certainly failed at the most important one, talking about your game before it comes out. But that’s not what this is about.
Last night I did a presentation at the latest Glasgow meeting for IGDA Scotland. I’m not normally one for public speaking, but I actually really enjoyed myself, even if I did stumble through my written notes at a fair pace and skipped most of what I’d written. I survived the barrage of questions at the end too, even if I couldn’t answer some of them! Which is one of my pet hates of being in the games industry (or any industry for that matter), “Sorry, but I can’t tell you!”.
The whole meeting was recorded and I’ll post the video when it’s available (assuming I’m allowed to!), but for now, you can see my slides here: http://bit.ly/rt9lQ1
Our wonderful friends over at Square-Go have published an excellent review of Plum Crazy!
http://www.square-go.com/review/plum-crazy-1827 (4/5 from the sublime Mr. Phil Doyle!)
“Plum Crazy is a great name for a video game, a game that really gets under the skin of the socio-political nature of fruit and the struggles they face to forge a cohesive society. Actually, that is a bit of bunkum, it’s more about wiping out as many plums as possible as quickly as you can.”
It’s been just over a week since Plum Crazy went live in the App Store and it’s doing well (especially considering it’s not had any media exposure yet!). We’ve sold more than a few copies (but not nearly enough!) and have a solid 5 star rating so far.
Almost immediately we were getting some good feedback on the game, which lead to the very quick release of v1.1, which included an update to let you toggle the control method between TAP and SWIPE. This makes the game much easier to control and has been getting a lot of positive feedback.
We have also been advertising the game on forums and have been getting some very good feedback there too. The most notable of which is that we are now working on adding a tutorial mode, which will allow you to practice controlling and playing the game. We’re also working on tweaking the difficulty of some of the levels, to help ease the player into the later, much harder levels.
Player feedback is very important to us and we value everything we get – good or bad! After all, if we can’t make our players happy then we’re not doing it right!
Unfortunately we seem to have clashed with Gamescom and GDC Europe this week, so we’re going to have to wait a bit before sending out more review copies (at the moment Square-Go have an exclusive review and we can’t wait to hear what they have to say!).
So, it’s finally happened, PLUM CRAZY is available on the App Store!
It’s been a long journey, but it’s definitely been worth it. We hope you will enjoy playing the game as much as we enjoyed making it.
To celebrate we’re giving away 5 free copies if you like the game’s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Plum-Crazy/241647685869026
Check out the game’s page on our site for screenshots and a gameplay video!
So, I’m finally putting the finishing touches to our first iOS game. The last thing we need is the final audio files and then we’ll be sending out test builds to those who have been kind enough to offer their time to help us make sure we’ve caught all the bugs and that the gameplay is spot on!
There have been many delays that have held us back – most of which were us stumbling about, trying to find our way around the iOS APIs. However, this extra time has allowed me to make sure the engine (Primordial Soup, an in-house developed engine) is as good as it can be (at least for our first game!). It’s also meant we’ve avoided the Independence Day sales and EA stomping all over the charts.
I’ve learned a lot over the last 6 months, but the most recent thing was finally getting the audio part of the engine working properly, and it’s thanks to Ben Britten and his wonderful post on OpenAL that I’m finally happy with it! (Well, except one annoying bug… the first sound played on the iPad always sounds a bit distorted… time for some googling!)
Stay tuned, I’ll be posting screenshots and videos of the new game soon (hopefully next week)!
I’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning of the website. The biggest difference is that you should see this post (and future posts) appear automatically on our Facebook page and on Twitter, making it much easier to follow what’s going on! The backend of the website has also been simplified, hopefully making it much easier to update in general.
Admittedly we’ve not been posting much for a while, but that’s going to change as we’re gearing up to release our first iOS game soon. We’re just tweaking the levels a bit and waiting on final audio before we submit it to the App Store. Once we’ve submitted it we’ll let you know more about the game and about the next few games we’re working on (one of which is finally porting Super Solitaire to iOS, although we still need a new name for it, answers on a postcard!).
I don’t want to go into too much detail, but now that I’m coping with my health problems a bit better you should be seeing much more content coming from Claymore Games over the next few months. This blog will now be a development blog, providing we’re actually allowed to post about what we’re developing. Any small news or announcements will be on Facebook and Twitter, so make sure you follow us, pretty please.
