August 2011 Archives - Ziggy's Games

Model vs. view separation, and Java interface segregation

Aug 292011

Aurelion Ribon has a great post on his blog explaining this concept. The idea is pretty simple – you want to keep your model separate from your view. One handles the logic of your game world, the other takes care of rendering the game world. One deals with game world units and physics and simulations, the other deals with screen resolutions and textures and actual pixels. If you do it right, you can change the render code without having to touch any of the game logic, which can be pretty useful, as I’ve learned.

Neil Rajah progress report: 8/28

Dev Notes, Neil Rajah No Responses »

Aug 282011

Continuing on from my previous post. Did some more work on taking the prototype level in this post and converting it over to the Weapon / Bullet classes that I described earlier. I was happy that I was able to add a new weapon type in just a few minutes.

Neil Rajah progress report

Dev Notes, Neil Rajah No Responses »

Aug 252011

I have to admit, I’ve mostly been procrastinating. I’ve also been busy at work. But I have been working on the game a bit. I’ve started putting together a framework / engine that would run the game mechanics. I started with the weapon / bullet classes, since I have a good idea of how I want that to work. My inexperience with Java is showing, combined with my ability to get sidetracked on minutiae – I’ve spent hours staring at a single file, debating whether that should be an abstract class or an interface. In the end, I’m using a mix of both, hopefully correctly. I’ve taken the previous prototype game, and I’m trying to re-implement parts of that using my framework. The goal at this point is to make sure I like the way my abstractions work, so I can add new types of weapons and bullets without too much trouble. So far, I’m fairly satisfied with how things are turning out.

Bus Jumper crosses 50,000 users

Alternative Markets, Bus Jumper, Downloads, Drippy the Raindrop 2 Responses »

Aug 222011

As reported by Flurry. Less than 34,000 of those are from the Google Android market, so it’ll still take some time for the Market page to update to the next “50,000 – 100,000″ bracket. Bus Jumper also crossed 100 ratings, although I only have 49 5-star ratings, still waiting for the 50th In other milestone news, Drippy crossed 1,000 downloads on Google (and is close to 2,000 downloads total).

Got a compliment for Mobclix today

Dev Notes 2 Responses »

Aug 192011

I received this email today:

Hi my name is <…> and I’m part of a start-up mobile game company. I noticed the ads in your game were of far better quality than even those of top free games. Do you use something other than Admob?

If we put ads in our next game it would be much nicer not to have sketchy dating ads.

Overall, I would agree. Even recently, I’ve played games with AdMob ads in them, and marveled at how poor some of the ads were. In contrast, the ads that show up in my game are usually decent. Also, I think I get better ad rotation / variety with Mobclix than I’ve seen with AdMob, which makes sense since they’re serving ads from multiple companies.

Of course, the ‘sketchy dating ads’ issue exists with Mobclix too. I have my apps set to no adult content, but I guess “Chat with sexy singles” doesn’t count as adult content since there’s no overt sexuality in the text or image. But still, that’s not appropriate for a game like Drippy, that I’m trying to position as being suitable for kids, and I wish there was a way to turn that off. The only thing I’ve thought of is to find out which ad agency those ads are coming from, and disable it.

But other than that, I’ve been pretty happy with Mobclix overall.

Freemium?

Dev Notes, Downloads, Revenue No Responses »

Aug 182011

GetJar had an interesting post on their blog today, talking about ‘freemium’ apps. For those who’ve never heard the term before, here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Freemium is a business model that works by offering a game, product or service free of charge (such as software, web services or other) while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services.The word “freemium” is a portmanteau combining the two aspects of the business model: “free” and “premium”.

There are some well known applications / websites that fit this model, like Skype and Flickr. Narrowing the scope to mobile apps / games, there are many articles describing the options available to a developer -provide a free version with limited features, sell the game for free but sell in-app gameplay items, charge for new levels / maps, etc. I’ve read some of these articles, and while I understand the concepts, I’ve never really thought about how I might apply these ideas to my own games.

Older Entries