The end is pretty near…

The end is pretty near…

Well, at least the end of the year!

This year has been good, lots of great events have been happening in my life but since this blog is mainly about my game development activities I will stick to that. So far, The Carter Jones Adventures was released on BlackBerry 10, Windows Phone 8 and IOS. While the grunt of the work for the game was done in 2012 (and early 2013), it turned out to be quite challenging to find the time to actually finish the game for a specific platform. This was not due to the game, platform or tools but more because of my limited time for these activities.

Still, I did manage 3 platforms and there are a couple more coming up: Tizen, Android and I am considering Windows 8, the last one will be a challenge because it is not readily supported by the SDK that I am using. But it might be really easy and I will be investigating that soon.

Considering sales and downloads, I tried two strategies: the IOS and BlackBerry release were pay in advance downloads and did pretty bad considering sales. The Windows Phone 8 release was released for free with an in app purchase to enable level 5 and higher. So far the WP8 release got over 27.000 downloads, with just a few people who unlocked all levels.

So, financially, I won’t be quitting my day job anytime soon :-). Something odd happened though, I included Flurry statistics in the IOS version and after a couple of days the number of users was growing but the sales were not! Turns out, the one sale in China (so far) got installed on 50 or so other devices, even on an ipad 1 with IOS 5.1! (I excluded that option in the App store, although the game runs ok on an ipad 1 – it just reverts to the lowres gfx, I intended a special release for this later on). So…..jailbreak anyone?

Anyway I hope everyone playing The Carter Jones Adventures enjoys it, I know I did while making it. I love to hear any comments so keep those coming please! I guess what 2013 boils down to is that I am now an official Indie Game Developer, and I think that is a pretty neat achievement!

And I plan on making more games, it is a great way to combine my art and developer skills.

Totally unrelated but still (literally) pretty cool: a swan I carved from a 50cmx50cm ice block. I actually made two swans facing each other but this picture worked out great solo.