Stumbling out of the gate by Mr Jack

Alien Swing has been on the store for just over three weeks now, and we've had several fairly positive reviews (here, here and here), we were even briefly features under "New and Noteworthy" on the US store. But sales have been... lackluster, shall we say.

Unfortunately this has meant that there's not enough money coming in for me to continue working full time on this side of the business and I've had to take on some work for other people to balance the books. This means that further developments from Mr Jack Games will be stalled for a while.

All is not lost though, with Apple's new 20Mb 3G/EDGE download limit, we should be able to boost sales a little by trimming things down to fit under that threshold and I'm working on doing just that with a few nifty compression tricks. I've alse got a plan for a sort of "lite" version. I'm not a big fan of out and out lites for games at the bottom end of the price range; but I've got some ideas for creating a series of minigames using most of the same art assets and game mechanics as for the main game and putting out a "freemium" game featuring one of these games free for download and offering others as DLC at 99 cents a pop.

Hopefully this can help spread the word and get sales of Alien Swing back on track.

Release date confirmed by Mr Jack

Alien Swing has passed review at Apple and will go on sale on Friday 5th February.

Needless to say, we're rather excited!

Submitted! by Mr Jack

Alien Swing is now with Apple for review. The plan is that I'll spend the next week and half getting a good looking website and some promo videos together and generally trying to pimp it to App Review sites and on iPhone forums before release on Friday 5^th February.

Although that, of course, depends on it passing review nice and quickly.

A few screenshots by Mr Jack

I haven't updated much lately, what with Christmas and New Year. Here's a few screenshots so you can see how the game is progressing:

Screenshots of game in progress

Personally, I'm loving the look Rich's art is giving to the game.

Ever onward by Mr Jack

Hmm... haven't updated for a while; but we've got a lot done. The arts started going in and now I've put in some of the scoring, life-tracking, and frontend code and you can begin to see the final game emerging from the fog. A lot of my time, though, has been spent doing stuff that appears behind the scenes: a tool to pack the art images into larger texture pages and convert them into a ready to use format (which makes more efficient use of memory, and loads and displays faster too) instead of painstackingly doing them by hand, support code for the frontend and other menus, a system for recording video direction from the iPod. All of which is needed but doesn't make the game look obviously different.

Another day, another OS by Mr Jack

Today, yet another piece of hardware turned up in the form of an Acer Revo, which we picked up for just £145. It's not a throbbing powerhouse by any means: running just a 1.6GHz Atom, with 1Gb of RAM and a 160Gb HDD; but that's plenty to do what we want - specifically run the perforce server. It's also utterly silent and draws less than 20W: perfect for an always-on machine. That price comes with a couple of catches though: no sensible installed OS, and no optical drive - which has meant spending the afternoon learning enough about Ubuntu to install it from a USB, get SSH running and transfer the Perforce database over from the MiniMac.

"Just a 1.6GHz Atom, with 1Gb of RAM and a 160Gb HDD" I say! When I first learnt to program it was on a ZX81, it had a 3.25Hz (not megahertz, not gigahertz, just plain ol' hertz) processor and 1K of RAM. We, though, had the upgrade allowing a huge 16K of RAM! You did have type gently though, or it'd come lose and crash the thing... The first HDD we had, when I was about 14 or 15, was a 20Mb beast - we couldn't see how we'd ever fill it. How fast things change!