Universal Minigore 2: Zombies - (by Mountain Sheep)

New characters with out IAP would be good though but maps are more important

 

Making commercially successful iPhone games is tough, and you rarely see those who fail, only those who make it. For Minigore, we released more than a dozen updates - granted, many of them small - while the income from the app slowly diminished to the point where it alone couldn't justify or support having a team working on it. Things like co-op multiplayer took months to develop as it's hard for a game like this, but it didn't do much for sales. Basically, making the co-op multiplayer cost us much more money than it brought us. The people who bought Minigore for a dollar when it came out had no reasonable way of supporting this, and Apple doesn't let users "tip" developers. We could have added some kind of freemium model with diamonds and whatnot, but that's not our thing.

Minigore 2 was the only way we could add the things we wanted to add to Minigore while actually making a living making it. We didn't abandon Minigore the brand; this *is* the expansion many of you wanted, with the kind of things you were hoping for. If we had tacked them on to the original game years after release, well... companies like that don't always survive for very long. We don't have external funding in the company, we live on the individual dollars we receive directly from you, the players.

As stated elsewhere, we've now grown to the size of 10 people in Mountain Sheep, while Gameloft etc. are 5000+ employees. We do the best we can, and with support and feedback we keep getting better at it.

We hope you find plenty to love in Minigore 2, and there will be more to come.

 

Will we see hardgore after this?

 

The coin doubler actually works, but the message from successfully activating the coin doubler never shows up.

You'll know for sure you have it when you only get even numbers of souls in the gameplay - 2,4,6,8,10 instead of 1,2,3,4,5.

Sorry about that; we're working on an urgent update.

 

The game may crash when it runs out of memory during gameplay - like, going to a shop, etc - since the iPod Touch 4 doesn't have quite enough RAM. Rebooting the device is a good way to clear up memory clutter and may help some. We still can't guarantee it on IPT 4th gen, but hopefully you can squeeze two dollars worth of entertainment out of it if you go out on a limb and buy it anyway.

 

1st one let me down big time. Will wait to see what they do with this one, or the eventual sale. I do not trust these devs anymore.

 

This game definitely needs LEADERBOARDS and more than one achievement!
Other than that, the game is freaking awesome.

 

I'll be diplomatic and say we're going to see evolution of several of the ideas we've been bouncing around from day 1, but also that whatever form the sequels and spinoffs of Minigore take they probably won't be called Hardgore thanks to that unfortunate naming collision.

 

Will the fix be long? My game closed while playing and won't work again no matter what I do. I don't fancy installing again as I've spend hours on it.

But other than that I'm enjoying the game much more than the first too

 

I don't mean to be rude, but why is it that whenever someone mentions the lack of leaderboards it goes completely ignored? Please respond about this. Thank you.

 

Or you could add achievements like kill 100,000 enemies, complete the game etc

Also can you add a 3 second countdown after you un-pause the game just like the original minigore.

Btw loving the game, it has been the highlight of my week

 

You sound new here, even with your big post count.

If you *really* want to know I guess you could dig up the original minigore topic and see how that developed. But in the tl;dr version, it was a game full of promises that never became more than that. Sure, I can post in a thread all day promising stuff and generating hype, but if I don't deliver, why did I talk at all? For a present example see Super Crate Box vs Space Miner (the topics for both games).

(Disclaimer: hype generates sales, which is why it is always good to generate hype, but with no dlc for added content is not so good to deliver).

Also I'm amazed by people's funny analysis of money. Just so you know, in any give market you should analyze stuff by its relative value *inside the same market* if you want a relatively objective measure of "worth" (and I say relatively objective because nothing is truly objective, and people and likes vary a ton). I'm not gonna correct you, but I want you to know w/e you say about value of the game, especially argumented like that, is your opinion and probably won't be more than that.

Nowadays a game, especially around here where games are created faster than my hair grows, is more than just the game, is the maintenance, is the hype, is the promises, if devs pretend to launch more than a one-hit wonder, they should care about their rep. (Another comparable example is what happened to 100 Rogues, if you want to look that up). (Also that's an answer to the comment on trust being a strong word in case it wasnt clear).

Big enough wall of text so I hope this is enough argumentation for you to let me express myself the way I did and to unboggle your mind, but I could go on if needed.

 

Hey, *I* would like that! Instead, I have to buy my console games for 60 euros each ($78 USD) for PS3 and Xbox 360 and hope they can entertain me for 10-20 hours.

I kind of understand the disappointment of some people, though; it's not about the money, it's about the dream or fantasy of what the game could have become. It's about betting on the right horse, not about how much you bet on it that counts.

Making games is still something of a black art when looking from the outside and often games just "appear" out of nowhere and sometimes seem to get "stuck" with nothing happening for ages. If we had our way we'd accomplish all the features with the snap of our fingers rather than having to labor over them for months. Yes, the wait may have seemed like a long time from the outside, but think about the guys on the inside who have been grinding on these same things for the past months and years.

I think we'd make a lot more money if iTunes allowed us to make a honest and straightforward *demo* the same way you get demos of console games or digital downloads on XBLA/PSN - you'd pick up the game for free without the awkward freemium pretense of the game being your friend just long enough to get to your wallet - and you'd know exactly what kind of experience you're getting by the time the game asks you to make the purchase decision. Now we're asking for money up front, and all we have to show for it are some pretty pictures and a description text almost very few people ever read.

 

Haha +1 to that, the fact that we are paying normally around 69p/.99$ for a game is crazy these days, in money terms it should be value for money if it keeps you happy for somewhere between 5seconds and a minute. Instead people complain seriously I will NEVER understand how someone can complain about a 69p purchase.?.

 

But this is 2 dollars for a spruced up 99 cent game

 

This has to be the most ridiculous forum thread I've ever seen. Kudos to the devs for trying their best to respond to such irrational, angry comments.

I don't expect updates, or for the devs to implement my suggestions or else I'll jump off a cliff or whatever. I paid $2 for this great game as is, period. Any additional content is icing on the cake, even if its IAP. I do expect bug fixes, as those can ruin the existing experience.

I understand people having strong emotions because they love the game. But people, take a step back and realize it's not rational to demand the game be tailor made to your list of demands.

Back to the cake example: If I go to a bakery and buy a cake for $2, it doesn't make sense to demand another free cake every few weeks after that or I'll go postal. I understand there's an appstore mentality that says if we pay a dollar we deserve tons of content and free updates forever, but thats insane. That mentality does not lead to bigger and better iOS games; it leads to free downloads full of timers with the sole purpose of talking you into consumable IAPs.

The argument that the devs "owe" us now because of "broken promises" is silly. Let's not demonize the dev for being open and discussing their games and possible plans with us. It's a privilege. They're running a business (how horrible!), and they have to make decisions that keep them in business, or else there will be no more content or games whatsoever.

Back on topic: To anyone that is on the fence and could actually read through this thread: This is worth it. They did a great job with this game.

 

Is there any differences between the characters? Should I unlock others or focus on levelling up John?

 

I think the only difference I can see is that they have different default weapons.

 

We can be overoptimistic with regards to what we can deliver, but we've never tried to deceive anyone or intentionally hype things up. On the other hand, if we weren't optimistic like this we wouldn't have jumped on iOS at all - there are now over 730K applications available, how crazy do you have to be to expect getting to top-100, let alone top-10? We really love this stuff and we believe what we talk about, but sometimes it takes longer to bend the reality to our will than we'd like.

At the time of the Minigore thread, there were three of us. We talked openly about what we did and shared our plans and concepts, and people loved those sometimes more than they loved the end product. Ultimately, game development is a process of finding a consistent set of compromises between what we want to do and what we can deliver, and having people fall in love with things they can't have has a tendency of backfiring.

With Minigore, Death Rally, Bike Baron, Ice Rage and now Minigore 2, I think we're doing alright. Five games, 20+ million downloads, 4-5 star average reviews and zero banner marketing or paid "user acquisition", but just living on the quality of games and word of mouth... I think we're doing alright.

We care about our games, reputation is what follows.