Sputnik Games

Let me tell you a quick story about porting Cowabunga.  One day, a few months ago, I get a call from Microsoft asking if I’d port my games to WP7.  At around the same time I get a call from Intel asking if I’d be interested in porting it to their AppUp store. I checked out each platform and decided to give it a shot.

I started with Windows Phone 7.  I’ve used Visual Studio before but that was about 8 years ago when I was writing Xtras for Director.  So Microsoft’s Visual Studio was once again new to me.  I also never wrote anything in C# before, and I really knew nothing of XNA.

Learning C# was surprising easy and Visual Studio is a great IDE.  This made it very fun to re-write this game in XNA and I basically ported the code in three weeks. One week for porting, and two weeks of re-skinning and testing.

The people at Microsoft were great.  They helped me get up to speed with C#, gave me contacts to key people when I had specific questions and basically bent over backward to make sure I had everything I needed to make launch day.

So at the same time I started porting Cowabunga to AppUp.  I decided to use Adobe AIR and build it using Flash Builder.  Now, like I mentioned in my other post, I like ActionScript 3 and writing code in Flash Builder is not bad at all.  Porting took only about a week too.  But that’s where the fun ended.  There is just too much red tape to get such a simple game published that it turned me off completely.  So there will not be any ports of my games to AppUp.

I also finished porting Cowabunga to Android.  Since I used Cocos2D to build this game originally this by far was the easiest (code-wise) port.  It was the most difficult getting the Android SDK installed correctly, figuring out how the Android OS works, signing the completed app correctly and buying a decent phone for testing.  See where I’m going with this?

The Android market is totally fragmented.  Seriously,  what the hell are they doing?  The thing that pissed me off the most was that I bought the wrong phone!  The messed up thing is I though I researched correctly. This phone has a software OpenGL renderer so nothing runs on it.  I mean seriously.  Games were running a 2 maybe 5 frames a second.  Cowabunga  only runs at 12! This wasn’t a cheap phone either.  SIGH.  So I get and Nexus One instead and craigslist the other phone to see if I can get some money back.

I’ll be porting one maybe two more games to Android but I’m not sure I’ll focus any time toward porting any of the new games.

So, basically Microsoft makes really easy and fun to write for Windows Phone 7.  They still have some things to iron out with the Marketplace web dashboard but I think they are on the right track.  Fish Food Frenzy is getting closer to final and I can’t wait to release it for Windows Phone 7.

As far a new games?  I’ll still be releasing them on iPhone and iPad first.

When I started designing my latest game I saw it ladened heavy with rock/punk/metal guitar tracks.  A steal string cacophony of sorts. I didn’t just want any guitar to write the music.  I wanted the first electric guitar I ever owned.  It’s not like I don’t have guitars that’ll fit the bill.  I do. A few of them in fact but I didn’t have this one.

What is this guitar that is my inspiration for the music for my new game?  It’s a black Kramer Focus 2000 guitar.  It’s not a great guitar and many would consider it a POS but to me it’s worth it weight in gold. It’s the instrument that I learned how to live and breath guitar. The only problem is that it’s missing it’s neck. I still have the body, all the electronics and Floyd Rose but I lost the freaking neck.  I took it apart to repaint it but never did.  Plus Nuno Bettencount sighed it with a signature so freaking big I didn’t know if I wanted to frame it or burn it. So what to do?

eBay!

I’ve been looking for this guitar on and off for a few of years with no luck.  Yeah, there were some here and there but not the one I wanted.  Then a few weeks ago there it was, begging me to empty my PayPal account.  I didn’t even ask what condition it was in.  I just asked how the seller would pack it for shipping. Hell, I might have paid way too much for it too but I don’t care.   I have everything I needed but the neck to make it rock in case it was a bad purchase.  Luckily it wasn’t.

So now I have the guitar to start writing the music for the game! w00t!  So what does this game look like?  Here’s some art.

Yeah, its not much but I don’t want to give away a lot yet.  When I get near beta I’ll start posting better images.  It’s written in ObjC using Cocos2D and of course will have Open Feint and some <headbang>awesome music </headbang>.

Next post, Windows Phone 7.

Holy Crap it’s been two years!  Two whole years since my first iPhone game, Cowabunga, was released and two years of independent game development. w00t!

Someone asked me how I got started so in this entry I’m gonna reflect on how Sputnik Games began.  I then hope to finally start writing more often by adding new entries once a week with topics about what I’m currently working on, what I’m thinking about and hopefully not write about code.  Not that I couldn’t.  It’s just that there are a lot of blogs about with great code and tutorials that are well written by people who are smarter than me.   This blog will be more like an indie/developer/creative mind vomit/diary.  Kinda…

In the late 90s I was working at Disney Online.  Let me tell you, I was workin’ with some great people; Andrew F., Jung S., Frank C., Pam B. , Tony T., Dave E., Todd C., Chris C. just to name a few.  Just being around these people made you think you can do anything creatively and Sputnik Games was one of the creative sparks that came to me while I was there.

The idea was to create simple, fun to play games for the web and sell downloadable versions for a couple of bucks. Since I was working full time it was pretty hard to get Sputnik Games off the ground.  I’d work 10 to 12 hours writing code and by the time I got home I was burnt out.  Some days, when I had the energy I did code and I started building a library of Shockwave games. When Shockwave died ( I know it’s not ‘dead’ dead but as a platform it really is ) I tried porting to ActionScript.  I found out quickly that ActionScript 2 sucked so porting stopped.  I stopped making my own games for awhile and focused on MMO and P2P code for other companies.  Oh, and somewhere in there I had a two kids and those of us with kids know how much they need!

When I learned that I could write games for mobile in 2006 I knew that was the direction I had to go and Sputnik Games had finally found it’s niche.  The only problem was trying to get ANYTHING onto mobile at the time was a nightmare.

Then Apple, as we all know, changed everything.

I dropped everything in the spring of 2008 and focused all my energy into creating games for the new device.  Cowabunga was launched in August 2008 and reached the top ten quickly.  Poker Solitaire and Soccer Kickoff was launched soon after and Soccer Kickoff also spent a lot of time in the top 100 games. At one point both Cowabunga and Soccer Kickoff were chasing each other in that top 100 list.  Aerolite, my awesome Asteroids game, also made the top 100 games list that year.  In 2009 I launched Fish Food Frenzy and Fish Food Frenzy Free and it has done amazing well.  It was in the top 10 games and kids game list ( it’s currently number 16 when I wrote this ) for a year and is currently climbing the arcade game list.

So what’s next for Sputnik Games?  I’m porting my popular titles over to Window Phone 7 using XNA and I’m getting back into ActionScript programing.  I found that XNA made it very easy to port to and I’m excited about that platform.  Although there are some quirks and a TON of red tape to get something like xBox Live approved. Open Feint where are you?!?

As for ActionScript, I really love ActionScript 3 so I’m porting a couple of titles to the web to be launched on FaceBook and also on Intel Atom NetBooks via the AppUp store.

Lastly, for iOS, I got a “killer” new game in the works and I can’t wait to share it.  Stay tuned to this blog for some sneak peaks.

The iPad startup bug has been approved and should be in the app store within the next few hours.

I just released an update to Poker Solitaire.  There seems to be an issue.  iPads and older devices running non iOS 4 crashes on start up.  I found the fix right away and it was submitted this morning. Sorry about the bug and thanks to Jan for the heads up!

Soccer Kickoff 3.0 is finally out!  You can download it here Soccer Kickoff 3.0 This release has 32 unlock-able balls all representing the countries in the World Cup.  Open Feint was updated to 2.4.8 as well.  The ad free version should be released soon.

Follow me on twitter @MarkAndrade or check this blog on hints of how to unlock World Cup balls

Yesterday, Fish Food Frenzy Free has been downloaded 1,021,241 times!!!  It’s only been out just over a month and I’m totally excited!  Thank you everybody that downloaded it and look for more updates and additions to the game in the near (relative to apples approval processes) future.

For those of you who upgraded Fish Food Frenzy to 1.1 you might have noticed that it mistakenly has the ‘free’ icon.  That was a bone headed move on my part.  When saving the new icon designs I accidentally wrote over the non-free icon with the free one. Anyway, a fix is in 1.2 which is currently in review at the app store.   I’ve included a joystick sensitivity option, swipe control and swipe control sensitivity option new fish and a few more things.  Look out for it hopefully this week.

Cowabunga for Nokia is live, finally!  This is my first game using Flash Lite and publishing an app into the Nokia OVI environment. Let me tell you, it was, and still is a bumpy ride.  Porting the game to AS2, easy.  Getting the app to show up in the OVI store, painful. It took about two months of silly QA rejections!

The funny thing about the Nokia OVI QA process is that if the game works on a phone that is not OVI store compatible that game fails QA.  Why then is that phone even listed in the OVI publishing device list?  To get Cowabunga to pass QA I started removing specific devices that the game is compatible with until it finally passed.  No code changes, just a ton of guess work in selecting phones even when following their guidelines.

When it finally passed QA I received an email saying that the game will be live in about one business day.  That one day turned into 14 days.  Now, I understand that the store is going through some growing pains.  I can understand if there is a back log of apps waiting to be published and my app has to wait in the back of this virtual line.  Just don’t tell me it’ll be published in about one business day.  Tell me it’ll take two weeks and if it comes out earlier that’s a bonus!  Also, OVI publishing did not tell me when the app actually  went live either.  I’d love to get an email stating that the app is about to or currently went live like I receive with Apple’s App Store publishing.  That would sure as hell beat go to the OVI publisher site every day to check.

Now, I’ve been told that Cowabunga does not work properly on the 5800 Xpress Music.   Since I’m unable to physically test on a 5800,  I marked the 5800 and all S60v5 phones as “Might work” in the Nokia Publishing page. I’m betting QA didn’t even test it since it passed.  I learned my lesson here.  

If you bought Cowabunga and have the 5800, I’ll be working on a fix for it during the next couple of weeks. How long it’ll take to go through QA and wait in the publishing line, now that could take another month.

This weekend Soccer Kickoff hit the one million unique download mark!  What’s even cooler is that it looks like Cowabunga will hit it’s one million milestone by tonight or tomorrow as well.  It just needs 4001 more downloads.  Two free apps,  two million downloads.  For free apps they continue to bring in cash everyday with adMob.  So much so that Sputnik Games is now my full time job.

I’m fighting with feedburner and I’m losing. If you’re having problems with this rss feed please let me know. Hopefully it should be working by tonight.