next »

[Eiswuxe]

Hi Guys,

some of you might know me as the creator of the Freeware game "Hurrican" by Poke53280.
Today I would like to announce the release of my first serious Android game called "Bloo Kid".

It is a "one-screen" (like Bubble Bobble) jump and run game featuring cute pixelart, a full chiptune soundtrack und 60 levels across five unique worlds with five bossmonsters to defeat.

You control your character with on-screen buttons. The game gets quite challenging, especially if you want to complete all levels with a 3-star rating.Unfortunately, I don't have a trailer video yet, so the screens must suffice for now. The game is free. It shows some advertising, but not during normal gameplay, just in the menus.

I would be glad to hear some opinions on the game!

[EDIT]
The game is finally available for iPhone and iPod Touch
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bloo-kid/id452677855

https://market.android.com/details?id=de.eiswuxe.blookid


Trailer video





Screenshots

[AuthenticKaizen]

looks good (i really like single screen platformers)
would be cool if you would record a little video of the game for those who doesn't own an android phone.

...moreover any chance for a pc version?



-----------

consider also to introduce yourself in this thread.

btw you forgot to add a link to hurrican...

[johnjamie]

Hi Eiswuxe,

Perhaps if you found a free android emulator software for windows and included a download link for it in your post, so ppl with windows could try out your game.

I like the graphics and am interesting in trying the game, googling for android emulator for windows now...

Cheers,

John Urquhart

[BlueSweatshirt]

There is an Android emulator that comes with the Android SDK, but it is not ideal for consumers. It's not exactly an instant or trivial setup, and then there's the fact that his game would probably get like 5~10 fps on the emulator. Not ideal.

[moi]

in what language was hurrican written, if I may ask

[Eiswuxe]

@AuthenticKaizen
I'll introduce myself in the near future when I got time to dig um some screenshots of my early games

Like Jakman4242 said, running the game on an emulator would not be fun at all. Besides the low framerate you need two hands to play the game on a device. That get's quite tricky when you only got one mouse for touch input on the simulator

@moi
Hurrican was written in C++ using Visual Studio 6.0. We used DirectX for graphics and input as well as the FMOD library from Firelight Technologies which is free to use for non-commercial products.

Thanks for your interest so far!

[Noisefever]

that's a really nice jump n run game! nice graphics, nice sound, simple but addicting gameplay! until now there is nothing to bitch about. thank you for sharing it for free and keeping the ads decent!

(running it on HTC Desire S)

[Eiswuxe]

Hi guys, I am glad you like the game.

I just released an update with the following fixes / changes:
- game gets paused when suspended by incoming phonecall
- tutorial signs are only shown on first play of level
- touch tutorial signs to read them

Have fun playing!

[Woodlawn]

Looks good.  I have a Motorola Droid, played great, no problems.  Did you have any problems testing?  Is it using OpenGL?

[Eiswuxe]

@Woodlawn
I used the Corona SDK to create the game and I am pretty sure that they use OpenGL for rendering. Corona offers an implementation for Android AND iOS, so the game will be available on the iPhone soon

[moi]

Could you share your experience with corona sdk?
Also, isn't $349/year a bit expensive for both platforms?

[Eiswuxe]

$349/year may sound expensive. But when I compare it to the time corona saved me, it becomes insignificant.

At first I was a bit dissapointed since the android port was not on a par with the iOS port, but that changed soon, and now most of the iOS features are available on android, too.

Since I want to focus on games, I dont need to write an engine first, so I decided to give corona a try. And I came along with something playable within hours and I knew that was the way to go.

The combination of a stable engine and a powerful scripting language (LUA) makes corona perfect for 2D games in my opinion.

They got daily builds for subscribers and fix bugs pretty fast. The community is a definitive plus since there are many experienced members that hang around in the IRC channel where you can ask them directly if you dont find any answers in the forums.

If you are still looking for a multi-platform framework, give it a try. There is a free, unlimited trial available. And no, they don't pay me money for this

[moi]

Ok, thanks for sharing

[Ozoh]

Haha, very nice 'little' game.
I really like it.

Played it for about ten minutes on my galaxy s2.

[Eiswuxe]

There is a trailervideo  available here

[Eiswuxe]

The game is finally available for iPhone and iPod Touch!
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bloo-kid/id452677855

[klobit]

Wow, this game look absolutely fantastic.  Downloading now!  A couple of questions.

I noticed you have 100,000+ downloads. How is AdMob working out for you?  I am just getting into Android development and was curious if you can make any money that way.  Question 2, any plans for a PC release?  I'd love to play this with an actual keyboard / controller.

[Eiswuxe]

I just released an update to Bloo Kid that makes the game run on tablets and other devices with honeycomb 3.x installed, like galaxy tab, asus transformer, motorola xoom etc.

https://market.android.com/details?id=de.eiswuxe.blookid

@klobit
In fact I got 15k downloads up to date. Unfortunately, the game has a very low eCPM, just $0.01, and a fillrate of about 20%. I am still wondering if it has to do with my admob config or if it is not possible to make any decent money with admob nowadays.
The ads could have been placed better, but I did not want ads during actual gameplay, only in menus. Plus, I think no one really clicks on the ads, not even accidentaly, since they are on the bottom of the screen on and like I said, only visible in menus.

But if you want to have some numbers:
I make about $2 a day with ads in Bloo Kid. Nothing to make a living from

I recently released the iPhone version of the game. There is a LITE version available. The game is out for two weeks only, so I can say nothing on the numbers, only that the conversion rate from lite to full is constantly at 10%, which is more than I expected. So I only need enough people to try the lite version

I will post some full reports on my revenue from ads and sales in a few weeks, when there is something to tell about. So stay tuned.

No PC release planned yet. I'll try to add hardware keyboard support, so that it plays like a handheld game

[moi]

So I tried to download your game to my android device But the market told me that my device is not compatible with your game.
My device is a ZTE Blade, which is considered as a good entry level device. The processor is a bit weak at 600Mhz but everything else is good, it has a native rez of 480x800.
I don't see any reason why my device would not be compatible. Most games of the market are working on my device.
that may be your problem right there, you might have to tweak a couple thing in your manifest file to make the game more compatible across the board.

Do you even have access to your manifest ? what is the process to port the game from Corona to android market? Could you tell me about this?

[Eiswuxe]

@moi
Thanks for the info that the game won't run on your device. From the technical side it should run with no problems. Must indeed be some error in the manifest file.

Corona works the way that you build for android and get a ready-to-release APK file. You can specify manifest permissions in your build.settings which are then written into the manifest file by the corona build-process, but normally you cannot access the manifest file directly.
But you can "decompile" the APK with apktool, alter the manifest, and rebuild/sign/zipalign the APK. So I basically can alter the manifest at my own will