- Casual Connect - I'm back from the Casual Connect in Amsterdam and I really had a great time there. Lots of nice people, cool games and weird lunch boxes (I've never seen a raisin sandwich with cheese before). Here's how the SwapQuest booth looked like. - IMGA Nomination - I also learned during the show that SwapQuest has been nominated for the IMGA (International Mobile Gaming Awards) in the category Best Upcoming Game, which was a real surprise. I won't be able to attend the award ceremony as it is in San Francisco, but still I'm very excited for this. - New Icon - One last thing. Jussi has been working on a new icon, as the first one was not entirely what I was looking for. I'd really like to hear your feedback on the new version. That's it for today, I'll be doing mostly marketing preparations next week and hope Apple will approve the game very soon. Thanks for reading and please leave some feedback.
I like the characters on the app icon with no text, but I think I'd like it better if it was in pixel art. Hard to tell though, since it might have to lose something because of the limits of pixels. Really excited! Still on track for the 19th?
Thanks for your feedback, I will pass it on to the artist. The 19th will be difficult, as the game is still waiting for approval. Once it has been approved, I can start writing to the press. Unfortunately I'll also have to upload a new version with the new icon and some bug fixes, which also has to be approved, so it will most likely be delayed for another week or two. This is totally my fault, as I should've submitted the game earlier so that I would have known if there are technical problems as soon as possible. Now I simply have to wait and hope it doesn't take longer than the average time. Wish me luck.
VentureBeat has put up a list about '8 great indie games from Casual Connect Europe'. SwapQuest is also on it! Check it out! CLICK HERE
That's cool and I like the icon, it doesn't copy the game style but not all app icons do. It's up to the icon to get people to take a look at the app. Pixel art puts some people off but I think this icon will make people click to see more.
Yeah, some other people said the same, but I personally often don't like pixel icons. An icon should be really nice looking, no matter how it is scaled. With pixelated icons the pixels often look bad when they are scaled down (they sometimes don't look like squares anymore). As we're using a vectorized icon, we don't have that problem. Our artist has worked some more on the icon to include the gameplay, if only a little bit. What do you think?
Thanks a lot for your feedback on the icon, this is really reassuring. Today I've been trying to encapsulate the essence of SwapQuest into a single gif (inspired by the ingenious trailer gif for Threes). What do you think?
Looks cool, what's it going to be used for though? If it's some promo to show what the games about you might attract more interest adding the dog into it collecting some gems. I'm sure people like stuff like that.
I had him in it at first, but it became even more chaotic that way, so I changed it. And yes, I want to use it for marketing purposes, e.g. as the sticky tweet on Twitter. Maybe even put it on the website.
Ah I understand and I don't think I've ever asked before but how does the game save data? Always looking for games I can play across my iPad and iPhone. Although I always prefer them on my iPad anyway.
@ste86uk It simply saves the game data to a file, so cross play is not supported. I haven't really looked into the whole cloud saving thing. In other news, you may have noticed (or are about to) that SwapQuest won't be released today. Due to some unfortunate circumstances (Apple review times I didn't count into my calculations, me being sick for almost two weeks now, me being away for a week to the Casual Connect) I wasn't able to release it this month. The release version of the game is in review right now and will be released next month, most likely in the second half, as I don't want to collide with the Game Developers Conference (GDC), which will probably keep the press busy for some time. I'm sorry if you waiting for the February release, but I know one thing for certain: never rush a release or your game will most likely not get noticed at all.
I tried adding the Horde to the gif, but it didn't really work out, as it was very distracting and also made the file size huge (from 0.7mb to 5mb). But nevertheless I made an update, as I didn't like speeding it up. So now I made the character move a lot faster to make it shorter. What do you think? Also, do you think this would be cool to have on the official website (in the two devices)? SwapQuest.de ----- In other news, I implemented image sharing, so that you can show off your score on Twitter and Facebook. It took a while but now I'm really satisfied with it. The background changes depending on the last level you played. I also looked into Cloud saving, but sadly Game Maker doesn't support it on iOS, only Amazon WhisperSync is available.
