Let’s Break Stuff! was shortlisted for 2 awards at the Engineers Ireland Game Developer Awards at the recent Games Fleadh 2013 in Thurles. I have been aware of this festival (now in its 10th year) but hadn’t travelled to it before. There’s a lot of impressive work going on there – kudos to Phil Bourke and his team at LIT-Tipperary.
Anyhow, LBS ended up winning the ‘best casual game’ award 
Well, the difficult road of putting together a social/multiplayer version of LBS is nearing its end at last. This was supposed to be a fun little addition to the game, but ended up being a lot more work than expected. I guess I’ll never learn 
There’s a fairly hefty server back-end looking after the creation and management of the online games, stats and competitions, as well as the client-side work involved in searching for friends, chatting, viewing and launching games, etc. Also the integration of Facebook for logins challenges and brags, Push Notifications in order to alert players when they have moves pending, and some In App Purchases to (hopefully) make some profit from it. The core xml system for storing and recovering game states is retained from the user-created-levels system I wrote for LBS back in August, but that turned out to be just a small part of the task.
Now, I’m not sure if this will prove to be as popular as LBS singleplayer. But at least it’s nearly done.
Main website here
Android version here
iOS coming soon
A month or so ago, I wrote a new ‘games and news HUD’ and loaded it into most of my deployed games. This operates by downloading a small package of news text and game logos from my webserver, and displaying these inside the game. The idea is that I will be able to notify people playing my older games, when a new game is released, without the need for any update of the older games on their appstores. This is particularly important on the iOS appstore, since change approvals are taking more than a week at the moment. The hope is to be able to co-ordinate as many downloads as possible as soon as a game is released.
Now.. Let’s Break Stuff! seems to be going a bit viral (especially on the Android); downloads are going up at a rapidly increasing rate in some countries (most notably, Italy, but also Spain and most recently, France). This is great, of course, but last night I checked in on the processes on the server, and Apache is taking a much bigger chunk of the CPU than it normally would. Nothing too alarming yet, but it’s averaging about 5% of CPU, when normally it wouldn’t even register. This is fine, but not being an expert on viral growth-curves, I can easily imagine this ramping up to what is effectively a DDOS attack within a few days, if the iOS downloads follow the trend I’m seeing on Android.
So I quickly removed the ‘games and news HUD’ from the Let’s Break Stuff! game, and sent the new version for approval on the iOS, BlackBerry and Android appstores. For once, Google’s total disregard for quality, copyright, or common decency (i.e., their lack of any approval process) is a good thing: the Android version was changed almost immediately. There’s a slightly tense wait for the next week while Apple do their thing though! On the one hand, a game going viral is of course the ultimate goal.. but on the other hand…
Let’s Break Stuff! has been live on the Android store for about a week, and was just released for iOS last night. Downloads on both the BlackBerry PlayBook and the Android have been good, so I’m hopeful for the iOS too, although each platform does seem to offer its own “challenges” in terms of getting some visibility.
The low numbers of apps on the PlayBook means that a game can get easy visibility, although the low number of devices out there means that only moderate success is really possible. Some other companies have used the lack of competition on the PlayBook as an excuse to raise their prices and take advantage; this seems really bad form to me so I have avoided doing that. On the Android market (Google Play) the “new app” status and listing in the “new app downloads chart” that each app gets for a month is a great idea, as it gives some visibility for a reasonable length of time before being released into the big hostile pond that is the main app store. I think it may be tougher on the iOS, since an app starts to get swamped with newer ones immediately upon release. Well, we’ll see….