March 3, 2021
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!

February 7, 2020
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.

September 6, 2019
Not a One Trick Pony – Keeping the Customer Entertained

Glowing Eye Games has been going for eleven years now and we’ve learned some tricks of the trade along the way. In this blog, we’ll take a long at the pros of having a diverse range of games to suit all kinds of players.

 

Games have the miraculous ability to whisk you away into untold worlds: Ancient Egypt, a fairy-tale kingdom, a haunted house, but one man’s paradise is another man’s hell. Each world speaks to the individual. It has to be a place they’re willing to dwell in for hours on end. That’s why we have a huge selection of games to choose from, with diverse landscapes and characters, and even a few which – simply put – do exactly what it says on the tin, with no frills or distractions. Our games are derived from classics, such as solitaire and many of its popular variants, and Mexican train dominoes, so they’re not only beautiful, but beloved by every generation. We think that our themed games have meant that those generations can enjoy their favourite games with renewed joy.

 

 

Despite our small company, there are many ways in which to contact us. Communication, as someone once said, is key, and it’s certainly a part of our key to happy customers. The dialogue between us and our gamers is constant. Whether its comments on our social media, feedback or just general queries, we listen to what you have to say – and what you say feeds into our games. We put a game out into the world expecting it to grow and reshape as time goes on to ever home in on the exacting standards of our consumers.

 

Variety comes in because no single customer or gamer is the same. We have some people who use Pyramid Solitaire to teach their grandchildren basic maths, whilst others use it as a form of brain training. Whilst others relax, some would rather play competitively against themselves, friends or AI. Whatever they like, consistency is key when they decide to branch out. Every game has our own stamp through its style and gameplay, so the gamer is being treated to something new without going into unknown territory.

 

 

Our games also have their own individual customisability from the backgrounds to the settings. Whilst some games only allow you to make aesthetic changes, most of our games allow you to set how many cards you want to use (The Golf Card Game), how many rounds you want to play (Mexican Train Dominoes Gold) and if you want to play competitively or not (Pyramid Solitaire: Royal Gold). Mexican Train Dominoes is our most adaptable game, allowing you to play with your friends in a group by passing the device around and also to move the tiles around as the tactics come to you. This customisability and adaptability stemmed from the original games which are stilled played out on tables and desks. Most players have grown up learning the rules and playing the game with physical cards or tiles. It’s only polite to allow them to carry on playing their own way and give them the choice to do so on a tablet or phone.

 

 

 

We’ve been working on a word game currently, taking inspiration from hangman and Scrabble, but giving it a more refined appearance. It’ll have its own world, its own players and a few devotees of Glowing Eye Games, I’m sure. So, watch this space!

 

Classic card and boardgames needn’t be a dull thing of the past. We gave them a good update and a new modern face and they fell into the palm of our customer’s hand! If you’re developing your first game or perhaps you’ve already got a few under your belt, remember, you don’t need to pigeonhole yourself. Experiment, have fun, and as long as you take your audience along with you for the ride, you should have a loyal set of fans.

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