Great news, our game Jewel Slide is now available for sale in the app store (or will be very shortly).
We’ve been working real hard on this one, and if you like bejeweled, or other such matching games give it a try! This game will form the basis for our soon to be released “Word Slide and Find”, so I hope you all enjoy it!
So we’re furiously working on our next game, and we came to a realization. While games like CryptoQuip are very enjoyable brain teasers, they only appeal to those who like to have their brains teased. Games like Angry Birds, and Draw Something are fun and engage your mind, but are easy to pick up without feeling like you’re a “smarty pants” as one customer told me.
So we came up with a wicked fun word game with cool interface, but as we played it on paper we realized it’s another smarty pants game, meaning we are targeting only those who want to engage their minds in word play… And there are many more people out there who just want a quick fun game.
So, we took the gameplay for our new word game and are going to develop a “bejeweled” version 1st. We will then use the same framework to develop the word/letter version of the game after the jeweled version is out there. Which would I rather play? Well the word version, but which will appeal to more people? Our research suggests keeping it simple will keep it fun for more people.
Hopefully by Canada day we will have at least the 1st “jewel” version released. If you’re a smarty pants you’ll have to wait a little longer, but trust me, it will be worth the wait.
Apple has approved our update to Star Chase, so now you can play it in your favorite language.
The app is now playable in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and of course English. More importantly it is now relatively easy to port to more languages, depending of course on how impactful this effort was to our sales.
If you have a request to port one of our games , please use our suggestion form, and have fun building the universe in your favorite language.
So I just finished submitting Star Chase with localization in English, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese!
A big shout out to Joanne who did all the German stuff, but more importantly wrote a bulletproof font rendering engine that easily allowed me to add fonts with accents! Had it been written by a lesser programmer, I’d no doubt have had to do more than just upload new font files.
So, for you English speaking people, who cares? But now we hope to reach out to the rest of the world. Looks for more localized apps in future.
Oh, the dream… Well, Neal Young and I had a jam session, and then afterwards I invented the skeleton of some kinda game we will probably make… Or maybe not. We played it in analog this morning and it actually was quite fun! We just need to finalize the rules (and then develop it) Instagram went for a billion dollars today, so I have to keep dreaming 
We’ve noticed many of the people playing star chase and rafters loot hail from countries that don’t speak English.
Given its also the next topic of my advanced programming course as well, we’re working on additional language support for star chase and then rafters loot.
Probably start with English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish but should get Mandarin and Arabic if we really want to target the world.
Stay tuned…
I’m excited to announce the launch of a new site for one of our clients!
The Canadian Registered Nurse Examination (CRNE) is the exam nurses must take before they can become “registered” nurses. Studying for the exam happens in addition to the formal education nurses receive, and from what I’ve learned studying is nearly a full time job to accomplish success.
If interested check out the site at CRNE study guide. It’s a work in progress and we will have a new design soon, but this will be the place to get high quality, original study materials!
Since the latest iPad has a retina display, we are working now to make sure all your favorite apps work very nicely on the new iPad.
We are starting with cryptoquip, then working through the other apps this weekend. The fixes are rather small, and we almost had code that already worked! We may also add some twitter integration depending how the main bug fixing goes so you can tweet those great quotes form inside the app.
While everyone else gets a new iPad for fun, we have to earn it! Still, looking forward to playing Star Chase and Cryptoquip on the latest iPad!
So we pre-ordered a new iPad today. Can’t wait to see the new retina display. (Hope our code works as expected for all our OpenGL apps). Not that we personally need one, but it will be nice since we bought an iPad one without a camera, and now we can try chatting from the couch with grandma. On the same lines I updated my own devices to 5.1 today without incident. Hopefully that experience is echoed across most users.
We’re still working on a couple of apps in the background, hopefully we’ll launch something by summer.
Also, I’m working with a colleague from MRU on a registered nurse study guide website. Should be up here in the next weeks.
That’s all for now.
So now that I’m getting in deep with exploring all the avenues to promote our apps, I inevitably created a facebook page for our company.
http://facebook.com/surjesoftware
Facebook lets me have multiple personalities, because you can decide to log in as the company or the human, which is insanely cool. Now I’ll have to see how to build that page into something useful, or it will become just another internet graveyard for content.
I’m hoping that the social aspect of facebook makes the page useful, which is why I’m going to blog about it tonight, and add a link to the site.
While we are working on our next suite of apps, we continually reflect on how our existing crop of apps is doing. While we are getting some consistent downloads, we figure we may get a greater return on investment from them if we advertize a little bit…
So we’re looking into many advertizing platforms and hope to see which one is most effective. So far we’re looking at :
I hope to come back to this story in a little while to announce my findings on which was most effective. I’m guessing google or iAD will be most effective, but I’m most intrigued by twtmob and facebook, the more social forms of advertizing. TwtMob in particular is intriguing because I’ll get actual twitter users to hawk our products, which I hope will be more effective than ads on the side of a web page which are more obvious and more easily ignored.
Stay tuned…