So, here I am again, it’s been a VERY long time since I’ve last posted, but all has been well.

Placement Year

While I’ve been neglecting my Blog, I’ve been on my Placement Year for my Computer Games Programming course. My situation with the Placement Year was a little unusual, people would usually expect you to go out into the industry, join a big company for a year and gain experience that way, but I was a little different.

I was approached by my Course Leader, who wanted to set up his own games company, and employ me and one other student on their placement year (Justin Alexander) to work alongside him! Of course, this was an offer I could not turn down, working on iPhone and Xbox Live Arcade titles would be a great year, in which I could no doubt learn a lot. The games company that I worked for, and helped build, is ‘We Are Colin’ (www.wearecolin.co.uk), we’ve published 9 games over the year (and a bit):

Screw the Dealer – Card game – iPhone

To start of with, we started on a pretty easy game type to develop quickly. Screw the Dealer is a card game similar to ‘Whist’ or ‘Spades’. We released 2 versions of the game, one was Free and had adverts in it. The other was Paid for and had more content with no Adverts. We thought that this business model would work quite well, but unfortunately it didn’t fair very well in the App Store. People who played it said it was good, but not many people did play it.

Check out the game(s) here: http://www.wearecolin.com/screwthedealer/main.php

Cavemen Vs. Aliens – Strategy – Xbox Live Indies

Cavemen Vs. Aliens was the next game to come from the Studio, this was mainly developed by my work colleague, Justin, and I helped out after completing Screw the Dealer. It’s a tricky game to explain, so I’ll just point you to the website. The game didn’t do as well as we’d hoped, since we spent a while refining the Graphics and Sound to make it an appealing game. Once again, lots of people liked the game, but not many people could find the game in the first place!

Website: http://www.wearecolin.com/cva/main.php

WordSearch Rush – Word Game – iPhone / XBLIG

Next to be developed was WordSearch Rush, a game prototype that our Boss had originally developed and we all thought would be and awesome game on the iPhone. This of a WordSearch Game, without the word list, and with a Topic for which you have to find words related to. For Example, Colour may be the topic, so you have to find colours in the word search grid.

This game did remarkably well! We marketed this game a little more, got a few posative reviews from websites and most influential of all. APPLE FEATURED IT! That’s right, our game was on the Front page of the App Store in the UK and featured under the ‘Hot Games’ in the US and worldwide. GREAT SUCCESS!

Website: http://www.WordSearchRush.co.uk/

This game also got made into a few sequals, which did not sell as well. We created WordSearch Rush GOLD, which had all of the downloadable packs already built into the game, WordSearch Rush: HD for the iPad and WordSearch Rush on the Xbox Live Indies. None of these sold extremely well, but they we’re, in all admitance, slightly rushed.

iSevens World Tour – Card – iPhone

While developing our first game, Screw the Dealer, for the iPhone, we also partly developed another card game, iSevens which is a iPhone version of the card game Sevens. This is a more fully fledged card game, with a whole world tour and character system. It was a very good game, but sold poorly since not many people were that interested.

Website: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/isevens-world-tour/id375968132?mt=8

Gravity Runner – Action – iPhone

To finish our year off, we both worked together on an Action game for which we both though up the ideas for. Gravity Runner is a really great game, and I’m extremely pleased with how it turned out. Very much praise from a huge amount of people, almost every website covered the game in some way or another, and 90% of them loved it!

I’d recommend checking it out asap =P: http://www.wearecolin.co.uk/gravityrunner/

What I Learnt

So much was learnt over the year (and a bit) when it comes to development of games.

• First and Foremost, iPhone App Development. We used Torque Game Builder for the iPhone to create our iPhone Games, so we had to learn how to use this engine from scratch. Also this didn’t stop me looking into the Objective-C and C++ code behind it, lots of editing of the Engine was needed and a learnt a huge amount about how massive game engines are built and work.
• Mac OS X – Never been used before by myself, and I found it quite a challenging experience. Not because it’s a bad OS, but the budget of the Studio never allowed us to get a decent monitor / keyboard / mouse combination, and it was a pain to work on. Jokes aside, it was a learning experience still. Seeing how all of the signing of certificates works.
• Xbox Live Indie Development – I’d used XNA before, but not on this scale, to create a fully fledged game. It was a great experience. Also the process behind deploying the game to the Xbox Live marketplace was a completely new experience and was great to learn about.
• Marketing, Marketing, Marketing!!! The main thing when developing Indie Games is getting the game noticed! It’s extremely difficult, but I actually found the Marketing component of making a game enjoyable. I made lots of contacts in the iPhone space! All will be useful for any future projects I may think about doing.
• Conferences – While working at  We Are Colin I went to a couple of conferences, which was a great learning experience. The Apple Developer Conference was the first we went to, in which they shared secrets about developing Successful Apps. We also went to the Develop Expo in Brighton, not a huge amount was going off in the Expo section, but was a good experience whatever.
• Running a Buisness! – This has gave me a great insight as to how businesses are ran. It’s even made me think long and hard about creating my own business at the end of Uni and when I’m financially stable .

End

Well, a big blog post to start a new year at University and describe what has happened over the past year! Keep an eye out for a post on what’s been happening so far at University this year, and a few pictures and demo’s of what’s been created!

Thanks for Reading!

Dave.