Things have been pretty busy here at Meteor Creations the past few months with the release of Animals on Board for the iPhone and also recently for the Android (currently only available in Japan though) and we’re gearing up for the release of Animals on Baord Lite for iPhone. That should get all you Animal tossing fiends happy!!! I won’t give away too much, but players can look forward to 3 time attack modes which should wet their appetite for even more modes on the full version. Personally, my favorite mode is Time Attack Pairs which will make it onto the Lite version so there’ll be plenty of people for me to compete against!

We’re also working on a number of other titles at the moment, some of which we will be publishing ourselves and some of them for other parties so we’ll be sure to update you on the details, but you can look forward to a number of new releases over the next 3 or 4 months in all sorts of shapes and sizes. It’s a pretty exciting time for us!

Well, that’s all for now but as always, I’ll keep you in the loop of any new developments. Until then…

A good iPhone game will always sell itself! Well, if you’ve be reading our blog and just about every other developer blog out there, you’ll know that that isn’t really true. Even the best of games need a solid marketing strategy in order get the game noticed and then after that, well, it’s all up to the game.

It was my opinion that Animals on Board is not the kind of game that will immediately grab the attention of the public as on the surface it does not jump out at the average gamer. Now get it into their hands and they will be playing it until the cows (and all the other animals) come home! That’s why we were thinking about the long term for this title. Get some reviews up, offer some promotional giveaways, and generally just get the buzz going to cause a snowball effect and the gaming public would take over from there. There are times however that a game really does sell itself.

With much gratitude to Apple and their team, on the second day of release, Animals on Board has hit the New & Noteworthy section in Japan which is helping push it up the overall charts. This is quite a coveted position to be in, especially will all the competition out there and the barrage of IP-based budget price releases from the larger publishers.

What this means in the long-terms, who knows for sure, but for now, we here at Meteor Creations have a very positive outlook for Animals on Board. Let’s hope it continues in its success and proves that small, independent developers still have a place in the App Store.

Well, it’s finally coming upon us. Debugging is complete with thankfully very few hiccups, the new Animals on Board page is up and running with videos and screenshots, the game has successfully passed Apple’s approval process so now all that is left is to release it! Animals on Board will be hitting your local App Store on Wednesday November 10th in selected territories.

When I say all that is left is to release it, that is not strictly true. With iPhone titles, the biggest hurdle is getting noticed due to the App Store being chock-full of competing apps. Therefore, the marketing for a title is just as, if not more important than the title itself. As we speak, our little marketing bunnies are busy tapping away at their keyboards emailing review sites, magazines, press release sites, etc., to try and get the word out there that this game is awesome and is well-deserved of a coveted review which goes a long way in driving sales.

To be honest, we all here at Meteor Creations believe that the game sells itself. The game has tested extremely well over all of the categories so we’re hoping that both word of mouth and review sites will pick up on this which will carry some momentum in sales. We’re honored in Japan to be reviewed by the Weekly Famitsu website which holds a lot of clout in the gaming industry so hopefully some of the big sites in the US will follow suit and pick up the game themselves.

I’ll keep you all posted on how things are going and in the meantime, keep your fingers crossed for us that Animals on Board will be the huge hit we think it will be!

We’re currently running through the Animals on Board debugging process which to our team is a very important part of the development process. It basically tries to assure that the end user will be getting the highest quality game possible straight away rather than having to wait for updates to fix any problems. It seems that not everyone making iPhone apps put so much of a premium on this however…

I was discussing this topic with a friend of mine who also dabbles in the development of iPhone games for a company in the States, not much unlike ours, and he mentioned that it was not their general policy to spend the necessary time and cost trying to find and fix all game bugs before the release as the end user usually does a good job of providing feedback through iTunes comments and their website forum if they find any problems. Also, removing some debugging time from the tight development schedules gives the developer more time to improve the game features, refine gameplay, etc., so the user gets more bang for their buck! He went on to comment that for the end user, the low selling prices of the apps makes it forgivable if there are a few bugs upon release.

Now I’m not saying that his company’s view on this is just plain wrong, but I do believe this is starting to become more prevalent in the mobile phone app market which can never be a good thing. To put it bluntly, the end user is more than likely buying a faulty product with the publisher’s full knowledge. To me, this isn’t right, but I’d love to hear your views on this.

Rest assured however, that Animals on Board will be fully tested before release which should be in the very near future. Until then, I hope you enjoy playing a wealth of other bug-free apps!

For our last title, Hadoken Fighter, we released the game on a Friday in order to benefit from the higher sales volume throughout the weekend to hopefully push the game into the top 100 apps thereby giving it a fighting chance in the overcrowded App Store market. This did actually work in some of the territories, but what we gained in an initial boost over the weekend, we did not really gain from a steady high volume of downloads from remaining in the new releases section. The reason for this is that the majority of apps seem to be released over the weekend period as other publishers seem to have the same idea as us. The problem occurs that even though you get the early sales boost, as soon as you get into the new releases section, you are pushed out of it by the barrage of new apps being released over the weekend. It’s kind of a win/lose situation there so perhaps for Animals on Board we might try something different.

Releasing Animals on Board at the beginning of the week for example would allow it to stay in the new releases section for longer, at least 5 days as opposed to just 2 or maximum 3, creating a steady build up to the weekend at which point hopefully the game would be in the top 100 and then benefit from the higher sales of the weekend.

Hmmm, it definitely bears more thinking about and although I’m sure there’s no perfect solution, it’s always good to try out new things and test the waters. If you have any input on this topic, please leave a comment and start the discussion going!

With our last title, Hadoken Fighter, we used Open Feint which is perhaps the most well established of all the ranking platforms for iPhone Apps. We did have a few issues with it however which is pushing us away from using it for Animals on Board. The primary issue we had with it was the lack of localization support. Our game came in 12 languages yet Open Feint only supported 1 which meant that all users were greeted with an English Open Feint login page despite the game being set to another language. As I’m sure you’ll agree, this was by no means perfect. They did tell me though that they were planning on addressing this issue sometime later on this year. Our other issue with it was the lack of GUI customization which comes across as poor integration for the ranking system as the Open Feint standard GUI didn’t fit at all well within our game’s visual style.

We shopped around for another possibility and came across Scoreloop. This seems to fit our needs very well as even though it only currently supports 5 languages or so, they did tell me they could add more if necessary. Also, as Scoreloop isn’t really just a ranking platform but more a tool kit, you can customize the look and feel to your hearts content. Like Open Feint, they also offer free hosting of the leaderboards and were quick to respond to any questions I had. All in all, a good solution. The thing which sold Scoreloop for me was that they mentioned they would integrate it into Apple’s Game Center solution when it is released sometime at the end of the year or early next year. Scoreloop seems to be future proof if they can live up to their word.

The other alternative is for us just to develop and host our own system which may be quicker as we wouldn’t have to mess around with familiarizing ourselves with the Scoreloop SDK. Hmmm… The jury is still out on this one, but we’ll let you know once we come to a decision. Until then…

One of the big selling points to the games we develop here at Meteor Creations for self-publishing or for 2nd party publishers is our ability to expertly localize the titles due to our parent company, Unicon Products, having many years of experience in this field working with large publishers like Konami, Square Enix, Microsoft, Sega, etc,. It enables us to push our products into the generally smaller, untouched markets which can add a sizable increase in worldwide sales for very little cost.

Looking through the AppStore, it seems that very few of the games available offer more that 1 or 2 languages in their title, despite the fact that they are being sold to all markets. Currently, Apple is allowing titles to be published globally despite the product and its support only being available in limited languages. This is very different to Nintendo’s (and other platform developers) policy of making sure that a product can only be sold in a country if it is fully localized for that market such as products published in Canada requiring both an English and a French version of the game. Sure, the iPhone isn’t technically a games platform but with Apple carving out a more and more sizable portion of the gaming market, it’s time for them to start thinking like it.

In general, Apple’s lack of policing on this matter seems to be a bit unfair on the end users despite their stance that it is the responsibility of the publisher to make sure it can handle any issues from the end-users. If a user has a problem and the publisher cannot offer support due to the language barrier, what are the end users to do? Well okay, Apple does offer a money back guarantee, but will the user really bother jumping through hoops to get their $1 back? I’m not so sure about that.

Here at Meteor Creations, we  ourselves have a problem with the lack of language support given  by Apple as we have 12 languages implemented in Hadoken Fighter yet in the App Store we can only add localized meta data (game descriptions) for a handful of languages. Therefore, despite having Russian language support for Hadoken Fighter, when a user in Russia goes to the App Store, they are only able to see the game description in English. In fairness, it does say on the left that the game is available in Russian, but the user will not be able to read the details of the game in order to make an informed decision about whether they should purchase the title.

I’m sure in time this will change despite the fact that most of Apple’s revenue for Apps does come from a very small number of countries. After all, Apple does have a good history of trying to please their users so we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for any news about that. If you have any thoughts on this matter, please leave a comment as we’re very interested to hear what people think on this matter.

So, it’s official, Meteor Creation’s new title for the iPhone will be “Animals on Board”!

We’ve all been busy working hard to make it the success we know it’s going to be. Marketing has already started with our official Facebook page being set up as well as out Twitter and YouTube so check those out when you get the chance and “Follow” or “Like” or why not even both! We’ll be coming out with various announcements and sneak peaks over the build up to the games release so keep an eye out for those.

If you like, you can become part of the development process and check out our Facebook page to give us your feedback on the initial animal designs! I can’t wait to hear what you all think about some of them. See you there!

I can’t say I’ve ever dropped my iPhone in water but on one occasion it did slip out of my hand and go sliding across a busy Tokyo sidewalk in the middle of a downpour. Lucky for me, it didn’t hit a big puddle.
If have happened to accidentally drop it in a puddle, forgot to take it out of your pockets when you go in the ocean or perhaps even purposefully drop it in the sink like the guys at iFixYouri, then you will find the do-it-yourself procedure posted by iFixYouri useful, especially since warranties don’t cover water damage.
According to iFixYouri, a repair shop for iPhones, water damaged iPhone is one of the most common iPhone repair types.

Here is what they suggest you do…

1. It is imperative to remove the iPhone out of the water ASAP. Once the iPhone is out of the water, you want to make sure it is powered off.

2. If you get a white pinwheel on the screen and it won’t turn of, you hold down the power button and home button until it turns off. In the video we failed to record it powering back on after we powered it off.
We simply repeated the ‘power off process’ and moved on to the next important step; remove the SIM card.

3. Once the SIM card is removed you want to put the iPhone in an uncooked bag of rice. Tighten the bag so all extra air is gone and seal it.

4. Wait 48 to 76 hours after the water exposure and then try it out. If you find at that time it is not functioning properly as a result of the iPhone water damage put back in the rice and mail it to iFixYouri who specialize in fixing water damaged iPhones.

You can also checkout the video demonstration of the procedure:

If it doesn’t get the phone working, feel free to send it to me as I’m in desperate need for some new coasters!

Now that we have decided with one game concept, (which we will announce very soon) it’s time to think of the look for the game. It’s a 2D game so we wanted to stay away from a generic flat look.

Our last game, “Hadoken Fighter” used black and white stickmen to keep things simple and not draw away from the stars of the show, which were the Hadokens.
The menus were also done to feel like an anime or manga.

This time we want the game to be more playful and fun. First I thought of doing the scribble look, but I thought that that has been overdone on the iPhone. After some thought and testing, we decided that a paper cut out look would suit the game well. We want the game to appeal to all ages, young and old, so if this is done right it might be visually a lot of fun.

I’ve never done this before so I find myself doing a lot of research and playing around. I thought it would be simple, but I’m finding it tough to make it look polished while keeping it loose. I wanted to cut a few corners with some tricks, but the textures aren’t looking like paper, so I have to rethink my approach.

Well, back to work!