[First Strike]

i just made a topic with a big graphic, but here it is for convenience:

First Strike

(2014)

$3.99

iOS, Android

$385'000 (gross)

/ 1 year

Been a while since I posted anything on TIG, but i thought this might interest some poeple:

We've been making a one year graphic like Octodad and Monument Valley, to chronicle a bit a what a mid-field debut title can acheive in one year on mobile.
Its quite huge, I'm not sure if the scaling will work. Else, here is the link to our post in our blog

cheers
- Jeremy

@agersant Oh yea, Donjon... that thing got me hooked. Also the team is pretty insane considering that the books have numbers between -100 and 200 

I can highly recommend:

Maus, by Art Spiegelmann


The life and times of scrooge mc duck by Don Rosa (seriously, that thing is amazing. Don Rosas Biography of Scrooge is a must read)


Watchmen by Alan Moore

I also really enjoyed Scott Pilgrim, Bone, Death Note and Blacksad. But those are multiple volumes each

Well, I still give him the benefit of the doubt that its actually just a joke...

gah, bad copying  , thanks
fixed now

I like it, its simple, has a nice mechanic and would work wonderful with a highscore, game center or facebook score share! It also looks very nice

Great stuff

One thing that annoyed me a bit is that i cant run and hold up/down to automatically go up an down stairs, but thats all

"Metaphors With Duck"

I see a SMASH HIT! 

If that's a valid criticism then the novel I'm reading is bad because it isn't a choose your own adventure.

Preemptively: interactivity is how the medium functions and distinguishes games from CG movies etcetera; to call it a relevant distinction would be to say that all games must play a certain way, or even that they must all have stories.

I heavily disagree.

Warren Spector gave a great acceptance speech last week for the GDC lifetime achievement award where he stressed out that we work in games, not literature, not theater, nor movies, a medium which has the sole unique feature of empowering the player. By making a story completely pre-written it might be a wonderful, moving story, but it might not be told through the right medium.

Of course we all know the difficulty of adaptive storytelling and the sheer impossibility of doing it right, but the criticism seems pretty valid, for me, if we talk about games

I just bought a a small puzzler named Grooh, which I thought pretty nice. I havent seen the floor-destruction gameplay before and the mascot has a nice Ghibli Totoro vibe to it.

Might be worth a look if you like puzzles and cute anime?

Ok, it works, thats for sure, however the space between obstacles is very hard to time, the controls aren't too tight to accurately jump

Maybe jump hight based on time pressed isn't the way to go, maybe a double jump would work better?

All in all I'm getting a bit PixelJunk Runner vibe from it.

I know the lives system is kind of normal, but how about that if you do good you get slowly further to the right, while miss-jumps knock you back? It would automatically scale the difficulty, making timing harder as you progress to the right, but giving you more room for error when you did very well.

All in all its pretty cute alltogether. Good start

You know, that is kind of geeky fanboyish, but one day I'd really like to do a sequel for Interstate 76 (no Interstate 82 doesn't count)

I just loved that game, especially because it was so hideous in that Mechwarrior 2 engine. The whole fictitious 70ies Nevada desert setting and cars with guns just appealed to me. So even if no-one cares about it, I'd just like to try to make it just for me to play.

"Swinger this is Stampede, do you copy?"
"Never get out of the car!"

@Eibx Didn't Molyneux just tweet something about giving a green pixel life :D It seems you are one step ahead of him

I just created a new Trailer today







I wanted a second one for Hollow Grounds that shows the character more. What do you think?

[Promo Codes]

@Señor Barborito

Well, a few weeks have passed, here are some statistics for people who are interested:

Promo Codes
Sent promo codes: 50
Used promo codes: 26
Personal Replies from sites: 16
Written news posts: 6
Written reviews: 7

Reviews:
Favorable Reviews: 5 (A- + Must have, Gold Award, 8/10, 7/10, 4/5)
Negative Reviews: 2 (No score, 2/5)

Most reviews really praise the game. One negative was from a reviewer who does entertaining bashes, so that was expected and funny. However the other one was unfortunately a very very big site. The negative review stems there from a bug due to insufficient testing on iPad. Very bad move on my part.

Highest Ranking:
36 in games, 11 in adventure, 1 in Kids (in Switzerland)

Quite a bit of home bonus here, since one of the favourable reviews were from the biggest swiss newspaper.

Sold units:
Less than 300

All in all you could call it a start but still a bit underwhelming at the moment. Well, when the iPad fix is out there will be another 50 codes and we'll try to make the best out of it by highlighting the favorable reviews we got so far.

I'll keep updating the thread

Well, the name got me hooked, I'll give it that   

I didn't play it too far to be honest. The second level already struck me as very brutal. It's not really the controls fault, its the scrolling. I think you are doing the exact opposite of what would be helpful:
When I'm walking to the right I want to see more space to the right. In the game I drag the camera behind me. That is a big problem, because I cant accurately see obstacles and enemies ahead of me, just behind me.

The controls aren't bad, however, Mouse + WASD + Space is pretty awkward on a laptop, let me tell you. Might be a good thing to keep in mind

Lastly, I don't know what the point of the big death trap with a diamond was in the first level. When I found it, I thought I had found a secret, but as far as I could tell, the only way to get out of it was by dying at the lava pit. Which forced me to replay the level. Did I miss an exit somewhere?

I gave it go just now.

I think the allround gameplay and enemy variety works well. I also like how you can fire faster when you are close to hitting an object, like space invaders. It makes you more daring in your attack patterns, which is good. Some small pointers:

- i think the directional input could use a bit of drag. It is nice that the ship instantly turns into the direction I'm pushing on the thumbstick, but my thumb was often not accurate enough. A bit of easing would have helped maybe.
- The collision box on drones and projectiles is very very small. Since the input with a thumbstick on a screen is not too accurate i had a hard time trying to hit them.
- on level 6 i couldn't really tell what the weak spot of the asteroid was supposed to be. That combined with the fact that the shield drones weren't really a threat at all made it a bit tedious.
- All in all it could very well benefit of some random pick-ups or power-ups. Right now there is not much incentive for me to off my desired strategic path, which left me using the same "run for half a circle, shoot, repeat" tactic

Well, were two weeks in the launch of our first game and something I've regularly heard now is that the Icon doesn't stick out very much. I agree, but I'm kind of lost on what best practises are on iOS Icons


Heres how it transitioned from first to final (final being on the right side)

It seems to me that it has to better use stark contrasts? Maybe? Did anyone also spend a lot of time with the subject matter and have some pointers or references on how to make an icon stick out?

The whole Icon deal kind of frustrates me, since its such a small pixel element that still should look sharp, clean and vivid. How do you guys do it?

Thanks for sharing. It's very insightful and full of interesting points. Very nice 

Wow, awesome detailed feedback guys, thank you very much!

I was fearing that it would get repetitive, Ooops, however, I just wasn't sure. You know how it is, it felt incredibly boring to me anyways after 4 months. Thanks. I really love the wall scraping idea from jonbro. Maybe switching the goal with purple stars to a wallscrape goal would get some variation into the game. I definitely need to test that! Maybe some Bonus caves with different goals would do the trick.

@dragonmaw Certainly, I'll PM you one right away

Weird, for some reason it didn't work for me before today. It always tried to switch the store and then had an Error that the game isn't available.

I'll send you three a code right away

There is also a Link to the App Store now, I'm still willing to give away Codes though, just to let you know how it looks

I really liked the presentation and the setting. It looks really nice and the characters are very lovely. The bag looks very free spirited and fragile, a wonderful character to guide through the levels

The gameplay itself was interesting and unique, but didn't feel tight or controllable enough for me to continue past level 5, which is sad since i really like the idea.

I also had some trouble with the dialogue at the beginning of the levels. Not because I wouldn't want a compelling love story, far from it. But it just din't move me, sadly.