December 4, 2020
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.

August 5, 2020
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, 2020
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.

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.

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! 

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