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!

But, don’t forget, you can find us on Twitter and Facebook too!

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.

Something not touched upon is listening to feedback from your users/players. The first thing we did when Plum Crazy was released was to go to various forums and post about it, asking for feedback, good or bad. The Touch Arcade forums were by far the most active in this regard and it’s amazing how far Plum Crazy has come thanks to all of the brilliant suggestions from the members there. There were some suggestions and improvements that we took from showing the game to other people, a lot of which were echoed in the feedback on the forums.

You can find the Plum Crazy forum thread here: http://bit.ly/rmrZql

The biggest changes have been (including updates that are in v1.3, which has to have had the fastest approval ever at only 5 hours from submission to being available!)…

1. Our juicy hero now rolls in one smooth motion, instead of stopping and starting.
2. Two new control methods have been added: DPAD and Accelerometer or tilt controls.
3. The difficulty of the first few levels have been revised.
4. The iCade and Joypad App are fully supported.
5. A tutorial mode has been added, with further improvements made by allowing you to skip controls you don’t want to try out.
6. More checkpoints have been added to all levels.

I’m sure there are more, but these are the biggest ones. It’s amazing how many assumptions you make when developing a game. You forget that you’re used to exactly how it should be played and that people aren’t necessarily going to pick it up right away. I can’t believe we released it without a tutorial, but that’s one lesson we son’t soon forget!

Unfortunately sales haven’t been as good as we’d hoped, but we’re certainly partly to blame for that. We didn’t spend enough time talking about it before we released it. We know it’s a good game, it’s getting great feedback from all players (except for a few odd requests!). Our lack of a reputation has hurt our exposure in the media too. We were lucky with Super Solitaire, we hit a market that hadn’t yet been exploited and took advantage of it. But, it’s getting harder and harder to stand out in the mobile market!

So, expect to hear from us soon about our next few games…

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

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!

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!).

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!

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)!

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.

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