Say hello, shoot the breeze about mobile games!

[Adam Schmelzle]

First off, about Attack Chopper...

If anybody here has an OLDER version, like 1.7x, 1.6x, or 1.5x, they'd have the tutorial, but only 5 or 10 levels without the ads. When I added the advertising, it takes up 20KB, so I had to drastically reduce the size of my game from 64KB down to 44KB, so the ads would fit into the 64KB limit I set for myself. I basically stripped out every singe little piece of code I could; which meant removing the tutorial level, and all the sound support. I felt really bad having to chop that stuff out, since I put a TON of work into those features, and NOBODY gets to experience them.

I have mentioned before that AC is on sale in Europe, but since it went on sale there on June 28th, I have sold a whopping 20 copies. 20! So I have actually LOST money selling my game, because of the cost of shipping the contract back and forth, as well as invoices and such overseas.

You may be interested to know that I do however make money giving my game away for free, which sounds really stupid, but it's true. The money I make is minimal, but after I have a few games out, it should be enough to pay my bills at least (food, rent, student loans, new baby...).

Wow, I must be in the mood for ranting, 'cause this is turning into a long post...

I wish more people would hang out here and just shoot the breeze, 'cause I havn't found ANYWHERE on the net with active conversions about mobile games. Even IGN's mobile board only gets about 1 post a week. Getjar doesn't have one, which I think is ridiculous seeing how popular the site is, and every other board is virtually dead.

If my next game "Attack Paddle" (name not final), does as well as I think it will, I should be making enough money, than I can spend time on something with online gameplay. I think a lot more people will play AP, since it's going to be a more mainstream type of game, as well as having a lot of replay value with the upgrade system. I am hoping that it'll be played somewhere between 4 and 10 times as much, which would at least put me on the low end of a Software Dev's reasonable salary range finally.

What mobile games do you folks play? How often do you guys get to play em? What kind of game does everybody WANT to play on their phones? Where is everyone from? I don't get nice stats from getjar, so I have no clue.

If anybody is curious, I live in London, Ontario, Canada, and went to the University of Western Ontario, where I got an Honors Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.

Don't be shy, say hello!

[dust]

Hi

Aye, the tutorial level for AC 1 is quite nicely done; it helped explain the use of artillery strikes (i didn't know it existed before playing the tutorial hehehe).

Tis' a shame that the sound volume couldn't be adjusted; but that's no issue since i'd prefer sound off anyway.

I usually prefer to play puzzles & board games types on my RAZR V3 when i'm on the move. I've obtained 5ud0ku and Pipes from getjar. Since my cousins prefer racing sims and shoot-em ups, i've ended up buying the ad-free versions of AC1 and AP as well.

[Adam Schmelzle]

You may like Attack Brain. I JUST now put together the Getjar.com download page, and it'll be available to the public there probably by tomorrow. Attack brain is a remake of Mastermind/Super-Mastermind, and is a pure 100% bain involved puzzle game. No twitchy reflexes required.

I think I'll go setup a new board for that now...

[dust]

cool, will be looking forward to try it ^^

[Adam Schmelzle]

I hope you like it

The online scoreboard has 3 rankings: Total standard games completed, Total Super games completed, and best Time-Attack score

[Sasha Bataligin]

Yes it's me.

I removed your e-mail address, because you'll get 100000x the spam with it on a public website.

[Adam Schmelzle]

Woah... I'm sending you an e-mail.

[ober]

yo, i get through attack chopper 2 and on the finish is msg: come on board and say hello, so im here to say hello ^^

i love that game, its funny, not to easy and dynamic as i like. If i can have some suggestion - u can make some additional/secret rooms when player pass your game once and bonus stuff like that - cutting health and giving more power on start is nothing special and if there will be new things to discover then u want to play more

and sorry for my poor english im only polish card player =)

[Adam Schmelzle]

Glad you liked it! Congrats on finishing the game, only a few people have done that so far.

As for having more stuff after the game is done, I don't think I'll do that in this one. The reason I won't is simply because I wanted the "completion time" score to be fairly consistant. If there was more stuff, it would take longer to do.

When I get around to Attack Chopper 3 however, that kind of stuff is a great idea! I'll just have to make the scoring system a little different to take that into acount.

[gnasher1001]

AC3! Woo! a mention of it from the developer! You do realise we'll be impatiently waiting for it now? lol
As you can see, I'm on my 4th round of AC2 and it is getting harder, but the additional powerups is making it much quicker I hope to break the 2'30" barrier next...
An other game I've liked is Alpha Wing 1 & 2 on mobiles. easy to control, but your games kicks their ass!

[Adam Schmelzle]

Thanks! I don't have any plans yet for AC3, but people really like AC1, and hopefully 2, so it's almost a given.

Depending on how well my crazy MMO game does (2 projects from now), I'll have a better idea of what I can do with online features in mobile phones. I am a big fan of multiplayer games, and would love to have a multiplayer AC. I just don't know what I would do with multiplayer in AC yet....

[gnasher1001]

if you did do an mmo game, I'd love to help test turn based games too. Isn't there that online turn based game Fallout or something like that? You could look at that for inspiration on mobiles, there's a game called Outlast that's interesting, but far from perfect. It's more a social game. But I'm not a programmer or anything like that, but I'm good at finding bugs when playing

[Adam Schmelzle]

My MMO game will not be turn based. You guys could guess all day long and never come up with what I'm gonna do

I don't have anything against turn based games though.

[gnasher1001]

I won't guess, just wish you luck. The bandwidth and processing power mobiles have, means any kind of mmo game would be an achievement Also I'm guessing that the whole structure is subject to massive change before you have anything anywhere near a playable alpha?

[Adam Schmelzle]

Well, I don't even have anything written down on this one. I like to let an idea stew in in the back of my brain while I work on other things.

It's precisely because of the technical challenge of making an MMO that doesn't seem like it's being hindered by the mobile phones that makes me want to do it. If it ends up as popular as AC1, I expect to have a few thousand people play every day, and I want them all to be in the same game.

It of course can't be like WOW with a thousand people in one room all saying "lol, rofl" at the same time, but I don't think that is the kind of game that belongs on a mobile anyway.

[mc3]

did u say theres some ideas about how to play AC and AC2? I dont see any links here. what does

mean. and exalt seems premature it should appear below the content.

[Adam Schmelzle]

? I don't really understand the question(s)...