Saturday, September 13, 2014

A Sweet New Style

Hey again everyone! This weeks build is all about style. Kurt has been cranking away in order to pump out a bunch of new sprites and animations for the characters in the game. So far, we have humans (with different hair styles), twerps, fishmen, giant robots, sea golems and gas skeletons. They all looks really sweet so check out the latest build below and give it a play.


I will keep this post pretty short because most of the new stuff you should really see by playing yourself. Nonetheless, below are some screen shots of some of the new characters. However, you really have see them in action to really appreciate the awesome animations.

Trying to survive a robot attack

How did sea golem's get on my boat!?

Twerps spawning from a portal

Another new feature that is introduced in this build is the ability to go on an excursion onto an island. In the future we plan to do a lot of different events that will take place on islands, but for now there is just one simple one to test the feature. Most of the work this release went into building a framework that can randomly generate islands on the fly. So, pretty much every island that you go to in the game will be a little bit different. The system is pretty interesting as it uses an alteration on a classic midpoint displacement algorithm in order to generate the terrain. In the future as we fill out the island content much more, so I am sure that I will have more to say about it then!


Wandering around a random island (test graphics)

As always, thanks for following along and beware of the many bugs you are sure to find in the build! Below is a list of the major changes in the build if you are interested. Also, don't forget to leave your thoughts in the comments.


---- v0.9 Ship Notes ----
- New more realistic water sprites
- Add new human sprites
- Make humans NPC's able to equip and use various types of weapons
- Add Twerp enemy type which is small and fast
- Add framework for random island generation
- Add new Twerp Portals event
- Add Steam Robot enemy type
- Add Gas Skeleton enemy type
- Add island event (test graphics only)
- Major perf improvements to the sprite manager system
- Add Fishman enemy type
- Add Sea Golem enemy type
- Make enemies able to have multiple attack types
- New Portals event type

- New events for new types of enemies

Saturday, September 6, 2014

1 Million Downloads

This post is just to take a moment to celebrate that I recently crossed the 1 million downloads line for all of my games. It is a pretty exciting milestone as and indie developer, and I am really thankful to all of the people who have taken the time to download and enjoy my games. It is a huge joy to read all of the reviews and comments and see that people like them for the same reasons that I do! So, the journey took about 3 years and the following graph tells the tail...

Windows Phone downloads (~982k)

Most of my success has been on windows phone where I still receive about 300 downloads a day even though I haven't updated my most popular game Legends of Decent for well over a year. You can see a few large peaks in the daily downloads which represent times when my game was featured on the front of the windows phone app store. Otherwise, it has been a stead crawl most of the way.

Windows 8 downloads (~19k)

I ported the game to windows 8 shortly after the OS was launched, but haven't been able to find the same success there. However, the 19k downloads were still part of getting me over the 1 million line, so I guess it was worth the effort. I have often wondered how the game would have done on android or iOS, but I think that I did benefit from the visibility that I got from being in a less crowded marketplace.

Nonetheless, by far my proudest achievement has been how well reviewed Legends of Descent has been ever since launch. I still get a new 5 star review every few days, which is really incredible.

Reviews for Legends of Descent in the US

Anyways, it has been a fantastic journey and I hope that my next game will be as well received as this one was and can put me on the road to the next million (or 10)!