Glowing Eye GamesGlowing Eye Games
  • Games
  • Blog
  • Team
  • Contact
  • INFO
  • Games
  • Blog
  • Team
  • Contact
  • INFO
April 25, 2019
A Decade of Magic Towers Solitaire: Lessons Learned

Ten years is a long time in the games business. Back then, online games made with Flash sustained thousands of small indie game developers. Games on Facebook were massive and helped build companies like Zynga and PlayFish. Slowly, old and clunky feature phones were replaced with iPhones and Android phones. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 fought in the console space, whilst the Nintendo Wii delighted people of every age and gender.

This was the time in which Magic Towers Solitaire was born. It was actually the third game we had ever created and was designed to help tick us over whilst we worked on our mega downloadable PC games. The first two games before Magic Towers Solitaire are now defunct and the PC games turned out to be a venture never to take off, but Magic Towers Solitaire is a survivor, and not for any old reason.  

Magic Towers Solitaire has a devoted fanbase, history behind it and is one of the founding stones on which we expanded our company. There are so many stories to tell from Glowing Eye Games but here are some lessons for all you indie developers to help you along the way to creating and sustaining your game and business. Class, take your seats!

 

Lesson 1:  

Take responsibility. 

Full of beans about our new game, we hired a small contractor in the Crimea to make it. All was well at first, until the graphics came back to us. In retrospect, our art brief was poor, so at first it looked like a childish game, which was not what we wanted. This mistake was on us and one which we had to pay for – not a great sum, but the mistake was memorable. We went back to the developer and asked for changes. Although at first the air was a little tense, we managed to collaborate and discuss terms to make something better. Always remember, if you’re paying for a service, don’t let emotion or mistakes stop you from starting something again. There’s no shame in admitting you were wrong. Even the best of us want to blame others for our mistakes, especially when working with outside sources. Take responsibility and you’ll get the results you want quicker. Likewise, if your contractor doesn’t take responsibility for their side, reconsider them.

 

Lesson 2:

Check your Trademarks!

When we first released Magic Towers, it was called Tri Towers Solitaire. OMG this was a massive mistake! Little did we know, it was already a registered trademark, so, out of the blue, we received some pretty threatening letters from the owner’s lawyers. What followed was a lotof paperwork, a lotof money and a lotof time getting our renamed game updated on the thousands of small websites on which it was hosted. This was a bad burn, especially considering we could barely afford to pay wages at the time. So, don’t go in blind, do your US trademark research!  This is much easier than been hounded by lawyers. (Honestly, they’re good at sending the dogs after you!).

 

Lesson 3:

Friendly competitors are worth having. Treat them well and if they’re decent they’ll do the same. 

Despite the frightening lawsuit, we weren’t completely down on our luck. Our previous sponsor, Jochen of Smiley Games, told us about Mindjolt, an exceptionally popular games service on Facebook at the time. Without Jochen’s tip-off, our company may not have survived the year. Magic Towers Solitaire became one of Mindjolt’s most popular games and even led to the creation of Pyramid Solitaire: Ancient Egypt, which is still one of our greatest successes. Jochen is now doing brilliant mobile Match 3 games and we have a good connection to this day.

 

Lesson 4: Maximize your distribution and platform coverage.

Back in the day, online indie games were mostly supported by other gaming websites. We’d noticed and been a part of clustering around the benefits of Facebook games, but there was still room for growth. We set up Solitaire Paradise, a website for all kinds of card games, which hosted our own and others’ games. This helped bring in revenue and promote our products. Additionally, there were websites that wanted games with their branding. We made nine deals here on Magic Towers alone, mostly easy jobs that brought in more revenue. Nowadays, you can advertise and implant your game on so many app and console stores, so never pen yourself in to one sector. There are so many more options, so take your time to investigate!

 

Lesson 5:

Cross Promote Everywhere.

Remember Jochen from lesson 3? Well, during our time as friendly competitors, we helped each other out with some cross promotion. Cross promotion is always worth doing between your own games, especially if you have a house style. Cross promotion with friendly developers is rarer, but if there is an overlap, you know players will move on sometime. So why not to someone who can send some new players back to you?

This way, you can expand your audience, rather than having to source new customers every time you release another game. Done well, you could have a long queue of them ready for you on the release date. We also promoted across platforms. Starting off with online PC games, we branched into the iPhone with a little help from a good university friend and royalty deal we could all trust and work with. We were always bug fixing, enhancing and updating. After some time, we had some small triumphs. Our game got featured by Apple in their category lists and was the number 1 card game in Uzbekistan. I still like saying that, it did well elsewhere too, but Uzbekistan is just a great sounding name for a country! 

 

Lesson 6:

Thank you for your custom. Please come again!

As mentioned in the above paragraph, there are lots of thing to mull over and improve. Most of the time, you’re not doing it to be fancy, it’s just things that makes it better for the customer. Make fonts more readable, port to Android or iPhone, clarify graphics and simplify instructions; these are all often well-received and keep players satisfied. So, no need to rest on your laurels once you’ve completed the game, you’ve got to tend that garden and get rid of the weeds!

 

Lesson 7:

Change is scary, but an old game can learn new tricks.

Whilst Magic Towers Solitaire was ticking over, we decided to update Pyramid Solitaire: Ancient Egypt with new technology. We changed the timing of how the game was played and changed the graphics significantly, so that we were deluged with angry customer emails. We always take customer feedback to our heart, so we quickly went about doing a lot of fixes and alterations. Some of our changes were for the best and went unchanged, but the end result was that we lost a few customers. So, with Magic Towers Solitaire, we learnt our lesson and were far more cautious. Changes were gradual and What’s New updates helped keep the customer informed and prepared. Happily, the players kept playing! The transition was as smooth as a scoop of the finest, organic ice-cream (vegan option available). 

  

Lesson 8: Always keep improving! 

For complete disclosure it’s worth saying Magic Towers could do with some sprucing, so let’s take lesson 7 and make it a practical one!

 

Which of these updates should we do?

– additional themes

– new levels

– statistics tracking

– enhanced graphics with particle effects (oooh fancy!)

– updated characters

– improved menus

– a simple tutorial

– a veritable boat-load of little tune-ups.

 We’ll pick one or two of these with each update, just to keep the old fanbase satisfied while making it better for new players.

 

You see how this business works? Always maintain, update, keep it brand-spanking, sparkly new and it will seem that way to the customer, and maybe Magic Towers Solitaire will continue to bring joy and relaxation to players for another ten years! 


April 9, 2019
It’s the Little Things: Updating Sound for Pyramid Solitaire: Ancient Egypt

Ah, the sultry sounds of Pyramid Solitaire: Ancient Egypt. Fun-loving, with a heady mixture of somewhere exotic, somewhere you’d probably rather be. Visuals do so much for our games, but they’re often completed with the right balance of ambience. To create a soothing atmosphere, we delved into the world of audio to revamp Pyramid Solitaire: Ancient Egypt and give our players something to swoon over. Soon, we found the right sound for the overall game, but we’re sticklers for detail.

What about the sound when you remove a card from the tableau? After all, that’s the aim of the game and it’s gotta make you feel good!

So, the old sound was fine. It fitted the theme nicely and gave a twinkly wink of success initially. But after a few quick moves, the sound repeating multiple times in quick succession became kinda annoying. Actually, very annoying. So, we started out to find a replacement.

Finding the right sound has its own challenges, especially when the change is tiny. You don’t have symphony-sized room to make someone feel happy, you’ve got half a second. We trawled through our in-house library for some inspiration but found nothing that was both less irritating and just as emboldening, if not more. We ventured out of our own realm and into outside sources, mostly consisting of royalty free, creative commons sites, such as freesound.org, soundbible.com, and audiojungle.net. Yet, try as we might, we came out from our search empty handed and so very sad and disappointed.

Finally, we gathered our thoughts and decided to go for a one-time payment, licensed sound pack, chock full of different sound effects which would make an audio engineer weep with joy. It was audiojungle where we found this delightful pack, so the preliminary search was not a wasted journey after all. As a side note, we’d recommend any budding developer to make sure the licensing on audio suits your project, especially if players are going to be streaming the game. Make sure these sound effects can be used by any third party!

The pack was like a gift from the Gods and once opened this veritable Pandora’s box, we were totally entranced by the sheer range. Whilst we had set out to find only one upgraded sound effect, we were tempted by the many versatile sound effects on offer that could be used multiple times. With some crafty slicing and pitch altering, we came out with tons of new sound effects, which we implemented with wild abandon. Now, a countdown could be used at the beginning of the round, to enhance that feeling of achievement when the round was complete, and score totals had some extra added sparkle. These new effects all culminated into a warm fuzzy feeling, kind of like a reward on the ears.

Audacity handled the sound editing, a free wave editor, and then exported to Wwise. We use Wwise for all our projects, like many developers, including AAA developers.

Now we have a game which not only makes you feel great, but sounds great too, down to the smallest detail. We know only 20% of casual mobile players play with sound, but it’s important to get it right for those tuning in.


Archives
  • March 2023
  • December 2022
  • November 2022
  • September 2022
  • August 2022
  • July 2022
  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • March 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • August 2020
  • May 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • December 2019
  • November 2019
  • September 2019
  • August 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • October 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2017
  • July 2016
Recent Posts
  • Magic Towers Solitaire 2 (Kind Of!) March 8, 2023
  • Our Games Reimagined by AI December 19, 2022
  • Evolving Our Evergreen Game Magic Towers Solitaire November 2, 2022
Tags
advice ancient egypt art book canfield card game card games fantasy fun read game game dev game developer game dev tips gamer tips games glowing eye games history history of solitaire how to independent game indie indie business indie dev indie developer indie game indie game dev indie game developer litrpg magic towers solitaire mahjong mexican train dominoes mobile games pyramid solitaire pyramid solitaire ancient egypt Pyramid Solitaire Mummy's Curse short story solitaire solitaire trivia sound sound advice sound engineering spider solitaire theme trivia video game

Tweets
  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for grown-ups! https://t.co/mTbzufPfK3 #games #gamedev #classiccartoons28 minutes ago
Recent Posts
  • Magic Towers Solitaire 2 (Kind Of!) March 8, 2023
  • Our Games Reimagined by AI December 19, 2022
  • Evolving Our Evergreen Game Magic Towers Solitaire November 2, 2022
Get News & Updates
* indicates required
All data is held in accordance with GDPR.
Please see our Privacy Policy for more details.
Download Our Games
Please check out the app store to download all of our games for free.





© Glowing Eye Games. All Rights Reserved.
  • Glowing Eye Games
  • Game Speciality
  • Footer
This site uses cookies: Find out more.