Claymore Games

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!

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.”

Get Plum Crazy on the App Store now! Only £0.69!

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!

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.

Yes, it’s been a bit quiet around here lately, but rest assured that we’re busy working away on our next title, as well as re-arranging things so that Claymore Games becomes our primary interest.

The success of Super Solitaire (which has now sold around 20,000 copies worldwide!) has spurred us on and has given us the confidence to take the leap and attempt to go (more or less) full time with Claymore and games development in general. This will be a long transitional period, but we’ll get there in the end. There’s plans to tidy up this website a bit to make it easier to update so you can hear how we’re doing and what we’re working on.

But, for now, here’s an interview of yours truly, by Phil Harris of SquareGo fame…

http://www.square-go.com/feature/brian-hackett-claymore-games—scotland-in-focus-1219

Pocket Gamer – Super Solitaire

Not solitaire in the way you might expect, but a little bit super, Super Solitaire is the perfect puzzler for a spare five minutes. Its more prudent puzzles contrast nicely with its non-stop action arcade side
- Keith Andrew

Super Solitaire has been on sale now for a few months (as those of you following us on Twitter or Facebook will know) and it’s doing well for our first in-house game! We have many more games planned, which we hope to release early next year, as well as iPhone and Android versions of Super Solitaire. Check back here later for more information.

Anyone paying attention will have noticed that we have updated our website. This is the first step in a round of updates that will be happening over the next few months, so stay tuned!