This last week I was hoping on doing a lot of work on the new game.. but I think I only managed to work on the game one full day.
Most of my time was given to older games. I came up with a new icon-style for “2015” and I had to push that through to some of the games and to all the various app-stores and market places.
First, the new icon style! The previous one dates back to 2012 maybe even 2011, so it was about time to do some sort of big update. Since I now have the awesome high-res art from Scott for most of the games, I can create much prettier images for the icons. So gone is the pixelated look, and in comes a more polished art look.
The reasoning behind it is mainly two things. First, this looks a bit more professional, and less “amateur indie creates a game”. I do think that these icons will stand out slightly less, since they have a lot in common with most icons on the app-stores, but I believe that the professional look will keep discovery and downloads in balance.
The second reason is that I simply had to do it because I have ran into “issues” with Google Play featuring on my last few games where I had to do last minute icon changes to make sure it received a feature and adhered to the Google Play design styles.
So the next question I had was, which games get the new “2015” look? I’m just one guy, and I can not keep updating all my older games, even these five last games took me most of the week and a lot of tedious work getting the icons made, testing the games against new compiler versions, making sure they were all updated with the latest platform technologies. And I’m not even done yet cause on iOS I only updated Gunslugs2 and Heroes of Loot and none of the others (yet).
The 2011 era
Up-to this point I had always included the “2011” batch of games. These are the games I started creating since Meganoid 1, and with Meganoid I decided to start creating the games I love and not the games I hope “people” would love. From that point on I created ever improving games, bigger games, better games, and simply enjoyed my own games more. Also business wise things took off faster than before, so it was a clearly good direction to move in.
The games made since Meganoid always had updated icons, and received various updates.. but now it’s time for a new era of games, and maintaining all those older games isn’t possible anymore, and more strongly put: it’s not worth it business wise.
I might still find some time to bring some of those older games up-to-date soon, but I personally think there is more business sense in doing a “reboot” of some of those games and release those as completely new games.. so who knows, that might be a thing.
The 2015 era
Now I entered my “2015” era, technically this started back in 2012/2013 with Gunslugs 1 and continuing with Heroes of Loot and now Gunslugs 2. I think my games have evolved another step and are now bigger, more rounded, and more feature complete.
Right now I just finished uploading the new build of Meganoid 2 to Google Play and Amazon’s app-store, and a Meganoid2-free to Google Play with video-ads added. I also just completed the new build of Heroes of Loot on iOS, which is waiting approval along-side the Gunslugs 2 update.
I’m pretty much done with most of the updating work, and I actually hope to jump back into my turn-based game and do some cool stuff with that.
Behind the scenes I also had a lot of business thingies going on, with one of the results being the “Editor choice” award-icon-thingie on Google Play, and other things brewing.. so yeah, busy days for this Indie-developer, but it’s all very satisfying !
