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Gear Gauntlet Coming to Wii U
We’ve teamed up with UK based studio Drop Dead Interactive to bring their game, Gear Gauntlet, to the Wii U. It’s a fun but rage inducing 2D action arcade game that we think will be right at home on the Nintendo console. We’ve been hard at work porting it to Wii U for the last few months, adapting it to work with the Wii U’s unique GamePad controller, integrating Nintendo leaderboard API’s and adding a few extras like Miiverse functionality, Wii U Pro and Classic Controller support. Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be ensuring Gear Gauntlet passes all the requisite Nintendo checks, as well as promoting it, with the…
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An OUYA Story
Adventures on the Ground Floor In the summer of 2012, I was down the pub after an Android meetup, talking to this guy who reckoned OUYA was a big deal. This was two or three weeks into their kickstarter campaign and whilst I’d read about it, it had kinda passed me by up till that point. Next day, I gave it a lot of thought, properly checked out their kickstarter campaign and decided to give it a shot. Back then, I’d already been an indie game developer for over a year, struggling away making a game for Android in my own home-built java/openGL engine. Yes you may laugh, but I’d…
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My Gaming Year
Inspired by this tweet from Edge magazine, I’m putting down my thoughts on video gaming in the last year. The last year has been a bit underwhelming. I’ve come to terms with not having enough time between work and social commitments to sink 30 hours into epic open world games. Even so, no game really grabbed me and said “you need to play this!” My job in the industry as an indie game developer, I’m probably more than a touch jaded at this point, but it was still disappointing to watch the various E3 presentations and think “none of this stuff is really aimed at me”. In contrast to last…
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f2p needn’t be all bad
Whether you like or dislike the way any particular game uses f2p, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the concept. For those not familiar, f2p stands for “free to play”, and is a shorthand for any monetisation system that gives the base game away for free, then seeks to make money through the purchase of additional stuff for the game. That stuff can come in two main forms: “Consumables” covers things that have a one-time use in game, such as power ups or in-game currency. “Unlockables” are thing that can be used repeatedly, such as new levels or game modes. Unlockables are the easier to understand from a consumer perspective. I…
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Quick Reaction
Totem Topple has now been unleashed on an unsuspecting world, and the initial feedback on the game is starting to trickle in. To date, when I’ve watched people play the game, I’ve been able to approach them afterwards and quiz them on what they found the game to be like. Those observations have usually been made at gaming events, where there is a very different context to playing the game at home. It’s been fascinating watching the youtube gameplay videos that have gone up so far. Most have been from reviewers or people I’ve provided with early demo codes prior to release, so they’ve all been around the 5 minute mark…
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Totem Topple Release Date
Totem Topple to Launch on Wii U and PC on 19th November 2015 Totem Topple finally has a release date! It will come out on 19th of November on Wii U in North America and Europe, and worldwide on PC via itch.io. For those interested in getting a review copy, email contact |at| crystallinegreen.com Presskit also available It’ll be interesting to see how the game fares, considering this time of year is traditionally not a good time for small independent titles to get noticed. Usually the airwaves (or twittersphere or whatever passes for mass media these days) are filled with adverts for the latest blockbuster hits hoping to worm their way…
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Forward Progess
A brief update from here at Crystalline Green HQ: Exciting times for Totem Topple. We’ve now submitted the game into Nintendo’s Wii U approvals process (aka lotcheck). It takes a few weeks for them to go through everything and probably they’ll spot one or two things that need fixing at our end, so our current thinking is that the game will be released around the end of October or maybe early November. We’ll keep you posted on when we have an exact date! Meanwhile, we’ve switched back to working on Flight of Light. We’re currently rebuilding the game from the ground up in the latest version of Unity (5.2). After…
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Translation Topple
If you’d like to help with translating Totem Topple, you can do so here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/16L93VAZys5cdselM08FRpWKwJoZsXb62kiMlBCRoO4Q/edit#gid=0 Totem Topple is the first game where we’ve gone beyond English and translated the game into different languages. It’s always great for people to be able to enjoy games in their native language. All too often, there’s a touch of cultural arrogance from English speaking developers in assuming that the rest of the world will just deal with the fact the game is in one language only, so it’s nice to break that for once. Voice and text can add a huge amount to the playing experience, but for those games that don’t have a narrative…
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Technical: Unity to Android
This will be a semi-technical piece, in a departure from the normal things I write about. It was initially a reply to a facebook post, but having poured all my knowledge into a single, comprehensive reply, I discovered I’d misread the initial question posed. So instead I’m posting it here. The question I thought I was answering was “What should I know about putting my Unity game on Android” There are a few odd little technical things that can crop up when you first switch platform to Android in Unity. Mostly it’s solveable stuff though and no more than a couple of day’s work to get a build running on…
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On Apple TV (and why we’re sticking with Wii U)
Apple TV has been sat quietly at the back of Apple’s product line, ticking over for a number of years without the company making any sort of big, showy push for adoption typical of their other devices. No longer it seems, with a large segment of Apple’s latest live show dedicated to the newly revamped set-top-box. They also demoed the remote control it will use, which includes amongst other things, gyroscope functions that make it very similar to Wiimote controllers used by the Wii and Wii U. For us, and especially for our game Flight of Light, that might sound almost too good to be true. The game is designed…