Mar
03
Mexican Train Dominoes Gold has Just Pulled into the Switch and Steam Station!

 

Announcing our first ever Nintendo Switch and PC game release: Mexican Train Dominoes Gold! It’s a deserving family favorite that we’re happy to launch into the world for your gaming pleasure.

 

Mexican Train Dominoes Gold has been available on Apple and Android devices for a while, and more recently on Mac. However, we noticed that while there are other domino games around, there is definitely a gap in the market for Mexican Train Dominoes and it is one that we are well equipped to fill. Only time will tell how successful this venture will be, but the team did a great job with both the Switch and Windows ports. I thought this would be a good time to share some of the differences between touch screen phone development and developing for the Nintendo Switch. All aboard for several train-based words and puns as I steam ahead with this post… sigh…

 

Firstly, the PC version works well. One finger, one-touch games are fairly easy to translate to both PC and Mac. The normal changes were made while making sure menus work better for the mouse interface. The biggest effort was always going to be making our engine work on the PC and within the Steam framework a difficult job, but necessary.

 

The Nintendo Switch on the other hand was much tougher! It’s a fantastic console (that I love dearly, it’s no train wreck like the Wii U), but because we couldn’t rely on the touchscreen, we had to completely rework the control mechanism to efficiently support the controller. We created a grid system to place the dominoes and hoped that would be it. Nope! Of course, the management of the dominoes needed a lot more conducting than that.

 

Mexican Train Dominoes strategy involves the player creating chains of dominoes that they can lay on their row. This meant we needed a good way for the player to manage the dominoes. We had to get creative. When players moved the dominoes around, the arrangement of all the other dominoes was affected. It took us a while to create our domino inventory system, so it was quick and easy to use! It now shunts along the other dominoes when the chain is interrupted, keeping the order even when the player makes changes.

 

We had other challenges making the Switch version compared to the phone versions. Saving the game state on the Switch slows the whole system down to the point where we were experiencing a drop in frame rate that caused the game to temporarily stall. I mean dominoes is an intense game but should still do better than just chug along! We had to rework the save and resume game system to better fit the console. Most players won’t even notice the difference, but it showed us that we had been a little bit spoiled in the way mobile phones work with their seamless usage of the SSD.

 

After all this work, navigating Nintendo’s developers’ pages to get the game into lotcheck and arrange the marketing pages was surprisingly difficult. I do have to say that the people in Nintendo themselves especially in Europe would fix small errors without setting us back and their replies got us back on track quickly. That being said, the lotcheck went through pretty smoothly and it’s a vast improvement from the last Nintendo system I worked on which was the GameCube.

 

Of course, I’m talking like I ran this project, but I’m just the guy writing about it. The hard work was done by the team. Jasmine, Gregg, Steph, and Katie all pulled together to make Mexican Train Dominoes Gold a thoroughly enjoyable experience for the players on whatever format they want to play it on.

 

If you fancy taking a look yourself, you can find direct links to all the versions here!

Dec
04
M1 Macs and the Future of Apple Gaming

 

In the last few weeks Apple have released their very first MacBook with their self-designed CPU. This is the start of them moving away from Intel chips inside their laptops and desktop computers. We want players to be able to enjoy our games on as many machines as possible, so we got a MacBook Air to try it out. We were delighted, our games play well. One of my personal favourites, Mexican Train Dominoes Classic, plays perfectly. The iPad compatibility is impressive. Apps work and some productivity applications don’t even betray their iPad roots. This machine absolutely deserves the glowing reviews it’s been getting!

 

As for the iPad compatibility, I’ve found it a great bonus. The iPad has ended up getting its own collection of productivity software and games which I can now use. Anything that can be played with a single touch is perfect. Not all games and apps have been made available by the developers, but there are many that have. Previous purchases can be restored and the experience once you’ve found the apps that you want is, in most cases, seamless.

 

Of course, after work this shiny new gadget begged to be played with! So, I installed a game that I love: BattleTech. It does have a few bugs, but I was amazed it ran at all! What astounded me was how good the graphics were on this entry level laptop. I’ve tried running AAA games on Apple laptops before, but they’ve never been worth effort. Even my perennial favourite game of Worms runs terribly on a machine without an additional graphics card. It was a jerky, awful experience, even with time spent changing to the lowest settings.

 

Now business trips away will be filled with gaming goodness! Real high-quality games running well at good resolutions. I did some studying and found that the built-in GPU of Apple’s M1 chip is as powerful, maybe slightly more so, than the 1070Ti NVidia GeForce graphics card. Now granted this graphics card was released a few years ago, but epic games can finally be enjoyed. That’s the first time that’s ever happened on a basic Mac!

 

Now I don’t see this necessarily changing the world, but for many people owning a good laptop that can play games has traditionally meant buying a Windows PC. There’s really been no choice for anyone who needs and can only afford a single portable machine that they want to play blockbuster games on. That’s changed now, and of course, Apple’s design is beautiful and their products are reliable. I never thought I would see the day when I could recommend a basic Mac (well, do spend the extra $250 to get the machine above the very lowest one) to anyone who wanted to a play Call of Duty sometimes! It looks like Apple have just expanded the number of players that game developers will be able to offer their work to on the Mac. It’s a subtle change, one that I can’t imagine will yield immediate results, but in the long run it makes their machine more viable for many more people. It might start nudging consumers towards Apple computers, and I wonder if it will increase Apple’s market share?

 

With the iPad compatibility and stunning speed of new MacBook Air I can imagine these machines selling exceptionally well. However, things only start changing for game developers if more Macs are sold and enough users of the new Macs start using their machines more often to play games. Many games aren’t ported over from their Windows PC originals, but I expect the balance to shift.

Nov
19
Solitaire is For Life, Not Just For Christmas

 

Sing it with me! ‘Tis the season for a themed game, fa-la-la-la’ – Too soon? Alright, I’ll stop, but for some gamers, holiday themes are what get them in a celebratory mood. From festive Christmas to bunny-bouncing Easter, there seems to be no end to the party with games transforming month after month to suit the season.

 

Glowing Eye Games knows its customers love a game to stay familiar and at its best, so we never adopt seasonal skins. We do, however, provide whole games devoted to specific holidays. For example, Halloween Solitaire is beloved by all those who fancy a horror themed card game to get their spines tingling. Christmas Solitaire Tripeaks also suits the cozier, more festive feel that we all love about Christmas.

 

We have had our share of experimentation. Our green-themed St Patrick’s Tripeaks Solitaire never did us any favors and no one seemed to be interested enough to get fully on board. What we found from that experience was that our customers are led by a need for atmosphere. A seasonal game is not just a selection of themed images, but it has a specific feel. Halloween Solitaire is so popular because it is drenched in gothic iconography, spooky sound effects, bespoke cards with beloved legendary figures and eerie animations. Similarly, the soft jingling of bells, snowy landscape and a welcoming, rosy-cheeked Santa Claus give a perfect sense of Christmas. They are also accessible. From grandparents to children, and everyone in-between, these games are for everyone.

 

Both our Halloween and Christmas solitaire games are just another element of a person’s life that they can integrate into their celebration. Bake some gingerbread, pour a festive tipple, decorate your home, stick on a festive film or play some Christmas tunes. What would top that off better than settling down to a winter wonderland you can hold in the palm of your hand?

 

Seasonal games slot into a certain time, but we’ve found they are actually played all year round. Maybe it’s the comfort of a familiar game, perhaps they appreciate the artistry, or maybe they like to, now and again, unlock the sensation of a time they feel most joyful. We don’t think there should ever be a time limit on that.

Aug
05
Review: Control

Okay, before we begin, let me give you a chance to get very angry. I have never seen X-Files (I was young, okay?) and the extent of my science fiction education came from intermittent episodes of Star Trek and Men in Black, not (and duck for flung debris) Star Wars. And I apologise. I just wasn’t there.

 

The gateway drug into the weird and warped was probably from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with a large array of monsters, demons and otherworldly creepy-crawlies to frighten and unnerve. After that, a few doses of Doctor Who and dabbling in horror sent me happily over the edge into everything from Alien to Signs. It didn’t really matter what monstrous form reared its head at the end, as long as I was unsettled and unnerved throughout.

 

This is exactly where Control comes into play.

 

There’s a lot to love about Control and mostly I can only think of good things. The design, the gameplay, the world building – it all blends into a delectable paranormal enthused slushy fit for slurping. Just watch out for the brain freeze.

 

The premise is simple: Jesse Faden arrives at The Oldest House in search of her brother. Years of hunting have led her to this exact moment in this exact deserted foyer. She calls out and, as the player, you wonder who or what might respond. That feeling never goes away. Like Theseus tying his thread to the post and entering the labyrinth, you just feel compelled to descend ever further. Only thing is, you expect answers and a lot of the time, they just mean more questions. This is the kind of deep-dive immersion I love. It’s mind-boggling, frustrating and completely addictive. With no other game have I sat and spent the time to read the documents you pick up along the way, indulging in their SCP vibes. (Don’t know it? Look it up and prepare to get lost).

 

Control isn’t explicitly a horror game, but science fiction always has a habit of falling into horror tropes such as body horror. Fear is in the unknown, the future is unknown, and it’s totally plausible that knocking on that door to the future you’re going to invite in things you never expected – or necessarily wanted. Such in Control, that is The Hiss. A disembodied presence that mutates its targets into unthinking soldiers bent on killing you.

 

Usually, the brutalist structure of The Federal Bureau of Control is a simple stark grey monochrome with a red carpet. The more you play the game, the more you’ll find ‘red’ means ‘The Hiss’. When first witnessing its impacts on the space, it’s like seeing a parallel universe crunching its jaws over the brickwork and trying to take a bite out. What results from this are a series of flinching, overlapping cubes, encroaching into the mundane office space like geometric tumours.

 

Control plays with this architectural ‘glitching’, fusing humdrum elements of normal life, like boring toilet cubicles and desks littered with paperwork, and suspending them in the glowing white Astral Plane – an empty space filled only with black cubes and the office debris. That’s not the only thing that’s suspended though. You also have Hiss infected employees, chanting in mid-air. Some of them, you’ll never be able to save.

 

Control gives you the sense of déjà vu. Maybe it’s heavy 60s design, 70s equipment of slide projectors and pneumatic tubes, or Jesse’s very modern-day leather jacket. Maybe it’s the normality of the stark office space, the professional jargon, the complaints and reports you can sift through. Maybe it’s just the gentle disconcertion that nothing is as it seems. As quickly as the monsters appear, they vanish, and you’re left in an empty room as if nothing happened.

May
19
On The Importance of Brand Consistency

Don’t judge a book by its cover – or, perhaps, you should.

 

You can tell a lot from a business from its consistency of branding. It’s more than quality pictures, games and text, it’s about style and how that carries on through the company from the game itself to the artwork.

For us at Glowing Eye Games, we love attention to detail and we love the little things. They are those subtle little morsels you might not even notice – and that’s the best part. Most of the time, you’re not meant to notice each that playing card is tailored to the theme of the game or how the load screen images have their own take on our logo. It’s just part of the overall experience and allows the game to be seamlessly immersive. You’d definitely notice if the background wasn’t quite right or if the sounds were discordant to the images.

These delightful details are handmade at the point of the game’s origin. Halloween Tripeaks has Dracula as the King, the Witch as the Queen and Frankenstein’s Monster as the Jack, whereas Magic Towers has a regal King, majestic Queen and princely Jack. Our most popular card game, Pyramid Solitaire: Ancient Egypt is entirely Egyptian themed with appropriate cards, font and background. It’s all about building the scene and creating an atmosphere our customers want to spend time in. This level of detail reflects the consistency to our brand and within our company, as each game is completed to the highest level of quality.

But it’s not just about logos and artwork, it’s about our players and respecting their own individuality. You may have noticed by now some of our games are the same game, just in different coats. Let’s take Tri-Peaks solitaire for example. Halloween, Magic Towers, Christmas and classic are all versions of Tri-Peaks with the same principles and same gameplay, however the key difference is that they target different types of people. We want everyone to enjoy the game and we don’t want anyone to feel they have to conform, bear flashy themes they don’t want or experience the game in any other way than how they would want to play it. We respect those who love the simplicity of our classic version of Tri-Peaks solitaire, just as much as our customers who love Christmas and jump on the chance to have a festive theme. It’s lovely that people still play it during the summer months! Similarly the same goes for Halloween, with ghoulish backgrounds and spooky sounds, and Magic Towers, which is the most calming of the four with an animated sky of passing clouds and twittering birds. Whichever game our customers prefer, they can guarantee they’ll be getting the same attention to detail and consistency of brand, as they would with any of our other games.

The point here is this: customers love to be immersed and they can tell immediately if something is made with care. If you’re a game developer or even a marketer, remember to pay attention to the little things, because, after all, they make up the whole. If you look after those details, they can help make your game an overall success.

Mar
18
The Perks of Being Social

 

When you think of gamers, you often think of a bored commuter, tapping away to pass the time, or someone holed up in a room with a plate of snacks and a headset. But actually, gamers come in many guises and from many different places. How to reach all these people? Well, social media is the answer, but don’t expect a one size fits all. Let’s go through the advantages of different social media sites.

 

Facebook

 

Facebook is huge! It caters for a wide range of ages, so it’s a great way to communicate with your audience, both young and old. They can comment, review and message, which allows us to maintain friendly customer service in a social space. Whenever we have news on our game, updates or something to share, Facebook is a great way to get that information out there in a quick and accessible way. It’s really lovely to see an array of emojis, comments on reviews and to get personal messages on how our players love the game. We can also take on their feedback and fix glitches if ever they arise.

 

Twitter

 

Twitter hosts a different type of follower. Unlike Facebook, where most, if not all, of our followers are actual players, Twitter is more of a gamer centre of independent game developers, sound technicians, artists and animators. Twitter has more of a business like feel, and our posts of our games, which we use on Facebook, just weren’t right for the cliental on Twitter. Instead, we show our awareness and appreciation of the wider game industry by posting linked articles from popular game websites to keep us in the current mindset. It’s also a great way to stay in the know of trends and how our fellow game devs are going.

 

Instagram

 

Games are image and video heavy, so Instagram is a perfect place to pitch. A picture tells a thousand words in this case, and when you have a professional feed of consistent artwork and details, it gives your followers great insight into your style, professionalism and popularity. The viewer can choose just to admire the picture or read on in the description. Most of the time we explain how or why we chose such an image to post. Sometimes it’s an update on something we’re proud of or an error to show we’re all human in the game dev world. Most of all, it’s giving advice on how to promote yourself as a business and a games company in the right way. Everyone loves the little details and you don’t need to write an essay to get your point across. Plus, it’s just lovely to look at.

 

Pinterest

 

An interesting social site to take advantage of, and this is mostly tailored to our cliental of men and women over 50. Pinterest is a haven for family fun, craft ideas and aesthetic pinboards. It’s also a great place to showcase videos of how our games work, as they automatically play when the viewer is scrolling through their feed. Pinterest users are interested to learn new things or gain new ideas. Tutorial videos or taster videos allow these users to realise there are many forms of solitaire they can play. A useful link and a handy space to explain the video reels in potential players.

 

Imgur and Reddit

 

These are two social media sites we have yet to figure out and see if they are worth the time. What steers us from using them, after a few test-runs and trials, is their lack of market. There are definitely people who use it who would be interested in our games, but they are harder to reach. Both are casual and eclectic. In order for find your tribe, there’s a medley of images and trends to wade through and even then, it’s not clear cut enough for our posts to gain much traction at all. It might also be due to the sheer amount of content being posted daily. However, we never say never, we’re just in-tune to their rhythm yet, so maybe we will try again in the future.

 

Use each social media’s assets to your advantage.

 

  • Facebook has great customer service potential and communication. Send messages, make reviews, like and comment. These are all helpful ways your players can get in touch with you, tell you what’s working within the game and what’s not.
  • Twitter relies on hashtags so start to understand where your market is looking. #Screenshotsunday, #fridayfeeling and #mondaymorning all posted on the right days and times allow a little more traction to hit. If there’s a new game out or some games news, check the trending hashtags to find more likeminded followers. Avoid bots!
  • Instagram also relies on hashtags, so be as niche or as general as you like, depending on who you’re trying to find. However, be aware that your images must be bright, accessible and understandable. Make sure none are too dark to see what is going on, blurry or jarring. Followers often take a look at the entire account to see if you’re worth following and that you’re not going to clutter their feed with ugly and irrelevant photographs or images.
  • Pinterest loves videos. If you have a landscape or portrait orientation video, it doesn’t matter, Pinterest will happily put it out there. Most of the time, we get over 1K views. Make sure your videos are professional, clean and as slick as your game actually runs. Sometimes people won’t watch for more than 10 seconds, so you have your chance and you better run with it.

 

Using different social media accounts just goes to show the diversity of your players and also the game industry you are a part of. It may seem overwhelming at first, but get into a good rhythm and become consistent with your posts, and over time you’ll start to see followers rack up. There’s also so many handy sites and tricks that can teach you when, what and where to post. Good luck!

Feb
07
Credit Where Credit’s Due

Orient Express Dominoes Credits

 

Okay, okay, you may scroll past the credits in games and films (fair enough, they take forever!), but we all know they’re important and we’d miss them if they weren’t there. It’s truly amazing and humbling to see how many hands go into making something so enjoyable to play or watch, so it’s only right their name is there!

 

In the games industry, credits to the creators and support staff sadly seem to be a thorny issue. Some companies, such as Rockstar Games, have what I consider to be an unfair draconian policy. For example, if a creator leaves the company before the game they have been working on is shipped, they won’t be mentioned at all. That’s pretty severe and it happens even if they’ve been working for years on it! I wonder how many developers on Red Dead Redemption 2 suffered that fate?

 

Other companies are even more lax and let their staff fall through the net without a blink of an eye. Back in the day, I worked at Glu Games on mobile games, long before the smart phones and iPhones came out. The policy was quite haphazard, so much so we often weren’t credited at all. There were always excuses, including lack of memory on those very old phones and fear of co-workers being poached by other developers. I’m understanding to a certain point, but, like the title of this piece, I always believe credit is owed where it is due, no matter how small the contribution. I gave a cursory glance over at Glu Games recently, downloaded one of their games and was disappointed to find none of the developers were credited. If there’s something good to be taken from my experience, it helped me make the decision to never act in such a way to demoralise our team.

 

Here at Glowing Eye Games, we have a different problem and that’s only come over time. Our games have stayed popular and are regularly updated to this day. This means they’ve had loads of different contributors over the years. Some of the team are no longer here and people have moved on. While some are still prominently displayed in the credits, others have been removed after a very long time has passed. There’s no solid policy at the moment on this, but I’m keen to create one that’s fair. Fair for me is noting that someone contributed in the past, and that current team members who are working on those games are prominently displayed. So, in the future, we’ll be adding a new credit title: – Previous Contributors. Right now, I don’t think we’ll list what their job was, but I want to make it known to them that their efforts were valued and remembered. Sometimes, it’s just the little things that can make someone’s day.

Nov
18
And Now for Something Completely Different

Back at the start of the year, Glowing Eye Games took a bit of a tangent. I mean, we love games, no doubt about that, but what else is there to do to pass the time? Read, of course! We’ve loved science fiction, horror and fantasy for quite some time. It’s a mainstay for many popular videogames, young and old (perhaps as far back even as Space Invaders!), but a lot of those ideas stem from books themselves.

 

After a lot of back and forth, thinking, writing, re-writing and re-writing some more, Glowing Eye Games produced No Bodies Buried by A. N. Warwick, a nail-biting science fiction horror novella. Short but definitely not sweet, this book was the springboard for us to take on another challenge.

 

Read No Bodies Buried!

 

Book writing and publishing is a totally different format to game development and publishing, but there are cross-over themes. You have the same back-and-forth between writer and editor, you have deadlines to meet, discussions about world-building, target market and an artist involved to help bind the book in a beautiful cover – even though it’s completely digital!

 

For our next adventure, we started out pursuing a LitRPG book, or Literary Role-Playing Game book. It’s a great market to get stuck into, with many books having great fantastical elements that really whisk the reader away without having to convince them too much. From research, we found the market was predominantly male, with a large amount being anywhere from teenager to late forties. That gave great scope to get stuck into, but it also meant that we needed to produce something that would cater for a range of interests and tastes.

 

But it’s not that simple.

 

We found a writer by advertising on Upwork [link]. Within a few days, that job had been shared on a number of sites throughout the globe, most of which we didn’t even know. Prepare to check your email regularly, especially the junk folder. You never know what could slip through the net!

 

Always base your decisions on written examples. As a rule, we did not even consider those who emailed without an example of their work, even if they were asking for clarification on what we wanted. It was all there in the job description, and any aspiring writer should know it is a competitive market out there. You’ve got to prove yourself from the off. It’s a very attractive and reassuring quality when you get someone who’s unafraid to jump into the deep end by giving us a story to read.

 

We got roughly thirty applications for the job, five of which were short-listed and two were chosen. Both had totally different ideas and we felt we had the ability to support both writers. One writer, however, dropped out shortly after hiring due to creative differences.

 

 

At the moment, the work is still ongoing, but what I can say is prepare to have many pots on the boil. We have an artist working on the cover, researcher looking into promotion and publishing and even a cartographer to give our fantasy book a very classic fantasy map.

 

The hottest boil is the one with your writer. We have weekly meetings to discuss the latest submitted chapters, but you may find your own writer might work differently. Make sure both of you are comfortable before you proceed or after a very short trial period.

 

Communication is key. Don’t be afraid to say if you’re unsure where the book is going or if you see problems occurring. A confident writer should be able to deal with creative criticism, as much as any of your work colleagues. Make sure you maintain patience, level-headedness but above all be open-minded. Whilst we agreed it to be a Lit-RPG novel, it’s turned out to be more like fantasy genre. This is an interesting diversion, but not an unwelcome one, as it’s allowed our writer to feel creatively passionate about her project, as well as keeping it close to the genre we were originally looking for, meaning our research and decision only has to undergo minor tweaks rather than an overhaul.

 

One last note to bear in mind is that prepare for deadlines to be overrun. Many freelance writers work other jobs on top of the one they’re working on for you; add a bit of writer’s block and some edits on our side, and you’ll be behind. Try to tune in to how comfortable you feel with a slower pace and how much you value quality or the wellbeing of your employee. It’s a fine balance and hard to tread if it’s getting down to crunch time. Be honest, understanding but firm, if you need to be. Sometimes having a bit of pressure is necessary to get the wheels turning again.

 

We’ll let you know how it goes in the future! The next blog will be about the trials of publishing, finalising artwork and promotion after publication.

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