The Carter Jones Adventures – pending review
So, the good news is that The Carter Jones Adventures is being reviewed as we speak so it should be hitting BlackBerry’s App World pretty soon (for BB10). The release for IOS will follow in february and hopefully the Android version will be ready at that point as well! The Playbook version will be submitted right after the BB10 launch.
I’ve learned one thing over the past few months (years actually): making games from start-to-finish is pretty hard! Just check out this blog, I think I have started it over 3 years ago, writing about my game involving Carter Jones that I would bring to the XBOX Indie Games channel (XBLIG). Back then, I was expecting to finish it within a year or so…..
Now, we are 3 years later, the game is finally submitted to at least one store. But look into the history on this website, check out my submissions for the two DBP entries, find the screenshots of long ago and compare them with the screenshots that I show you here. It’s a totally different game!!! Still featuring Carter Jones but not the same at all!
After failing to even qualify for DBP (twice) I figured something had to be fundamentally wrong and with the state of the XBOX Live Indie Games channel at that point I decided to quit it altogether for and restart something new. I focussed on an IPad 2d Platformer first, trying to keep it short and sweet, I reused a lot of the tools (leveleditor, sprite editor, animation-tool) and ported my XNA code to C++. I also stuck to the same character: Carter Jones, an adventurer for hire, modelled after James Bond, Indiana Jones etc.
I was moving fast, things were looking good, but the same traps were lying ahead: feature creep, no clear deadline, wanting to perfect it instead of finishing, postponing chores and focussing on the fun stuff. Then along came Marmalade and BlackBerry, they said: ‘Hey, develop a game for our new BB10 platform and we’ll give you full developer support (tools & materials).’. I grabbed the chance with both hands and 4 months later – here we are! Game submitted! It just works for me when there is a third party expecting something from me, it gives me focus and a deadline. The best thing is: I didn’t feel like I was compromising on anything!
I still need to do a lot of stuff, there are a lot more levels coming up and I have many more plans but so far I am happy that I am about to release a game into the wild. Now I can start focussing on new fun stuff like marketing my game and seeing how it will be received by its players!
While we are awaiting approval from the App Store, here are a couple of screenshots (these are work in progress, I will show a few final images in a later post this week!):
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