5 Feb

DoubleTake! Submitted

We submitted our latest game to the App Store late last night.

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We posted a first look video the other day, check it out here.

It’s another free game, continuing our ad-supported experiment that started with Elf Command. If there’s any interest in the stats, we’ll be posting some of our results here just like last time around.

I think we’ve taken the lessons from Elf Command and applied them well in DoubleTake, but only time will tell. Even if the ads thing doesn’t work out again, I think we’ve made another cool game. It was also nice to revisit DoubleTake and redesign and repackage it for the iPhone, I’m much happier with the end result than I was with the PC/Mac version.

Next week we should be submitting updates to Sneezies Lite and Easter Sneezies with some of the recent fixes and additions from Sneezies, and OpenFeint. DoubleTake has OpenFeint too.

Then we need to get back to the two new paid games we have in development. Hopefully we’ll have some progress updates to share, once we figure out how the schedule is going to go. And of course, like most iPhone developers, we’ll be spending a large portion of our time trying to figure out what exactly to do about the iPad.

Hopefully you’ll see DoubleTake in the App Store soon.

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4 Feb

DoubleTake! First Look

Here’s our first look video for DoubleTake!

We’ve just quickly cut together some gameplay footage, Craig will add a little more footage and music etc once the game is wrapped up and headed for the App Store… which should hopefully happen later today.

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3 Feb

Making iPhone Videos

We’re about ready to submit DoubleTake to the App Store, so it’s time we put some video footage out there.

If you’ve ever tried, you know recording iPhone footage is a bit tricky. You can often grab decent footage from the simulator, especially if you use something like iSimulate or Tappity to pass the touch and accelerometer data from a real device back in. But, sometimes it can be hard to get a video capture program to grab smooth enough footage at a decent frame rate, and we wanted footage from an actual device.

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With our first couple of games we didn’t record our own videos, and there were nice video reviews available shortly after launch, so we directed people to those instead. We tried now and again with various equipment, but none of our attempts resulted in anything we would want to share with the world.

So when we finished up Elf Command, Craig went out and found a video camera that could stay focused on the screen long enough to capture a decent gameplay session, and we found that decent manual focus and white balance controls can make all the difference.

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As the sticky tape in the photo hints, DoubleTake doesn’t use motion controls, so it’s not too complicated to record footage. I think the simulator might have the edge when you get accelerometer heavy games. I’ve seen some pretty elaborate rigs for that kind of thing in other blog posts on the subject though, so maybe we’ll come up with something when we need to.

We have some footage now, so I’m going to have a rough cut teaser to post up on the site later today, and Craig will take a crack at a more complete trailer or promo once he’s finished up the final graphical elements we’re waiting for for the game. We should be ready to submit DoubleTake the App Store tomorrow morning.

How do you make your iPhone videos? Any tips?

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29 Jan

Sneezies 1.7 Lives

Sneezies version 1.7 is now live in the App Store, featuring OpenFeint 2.4, and a few other bits and pieces.

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Aside from the new OpenFeint, many of the changes are subtle little things that have built up gradually over the last few months. We were tracking OpenFeint versions and making various additions and subtractions along the way, so it feels great to have this one up. We’ll be syncing all these changes with the Lite and Easter versions very soon.

Download it now, and don’t forget to rate the latest version :) .

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26 Jan

Retro Dreamer HQ

I have a great excuse for missing the weekly update last week: I was moving. I’m now in the US, on the same time-zone as Craig, and finally the little Retro Dreamer blurb down below is 100% accurate.

I had a great day yesterday working on a few things, including finally submitting a new Sneezies update with OpenFeint 2.4. It’s been a long time coming, but the integration now is much better, OpenFeint has improved hugely since our last update, and you can opt out anytime you like. I also noticed a few weeks ago that Sneezies didn’t respect the silent switch on startup, the new version fixes that too. Once this one is up and running, we’ll be adding all the same improvements to the Lite and Easter versions, and then the next round of updates will be to add achievements.

Today is our first day working as a team in our improvised HQ:-

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This should be fun, already this morning we’ve had a few things come up and be dealt with quickly that might have required an email or screen sharing episode. Had we been in different time-zones, Craig might even have had to wait until tomorrow to get a quick answer of fix on some no brainer issue. I’ve also interrupted Craig with pointless questions a few times already too, so we’re getting a good introduction to coworking.

We’ll figure out what schedule works best for us, but it seems to make sense spending at least a couple of days a week in the same place.

Here’s our little work area for now :) :-

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There’s room for another desk if we start kicking each other, and I think I must have drawn the short straw when the chairs were being handed out, but it’s cosy and functional enough for us to get cracking on some new games.

We have 3 projects on the go at the moment, but this week we’re mostly working on wrapping up our next free ad-supported game. This time the ads will be a bit more visible than in Elf Command, and it’ll be interesting to compare the results (we posted all the Elf Command figures here, if you missed them). There will be a paid version with no ads this time too.

The game is an iPhone version of our old PC/Mac game, DoubleTake, here’s an old YouTube video if you want an idea of what to expect. I’m hoping we’ll have it wrapped up sometime this week, but whatever happens, it’s not far away.

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