Fledgling Videogame Developer

After long period of hesitating I started to work on my first Unity3D app. To get things going, I selected very small and simple concept to work with.   Basically, Task Timer is a simple tool to track time used for different tasks. Main features: 3 independent timers that will run also on background and when display is turned off Minimal design: no bells and whistles included. Just the necessary functions! Fully-customizable task names (no limitations) Possibility to export timer data to email template (in csv format) Measurement accuracy: 1 second You can use Littlest Helper: Task Timer for your everyday time tracking tasks. And it is fully up to you how to use the data generated by the tool: Exported csv data can be taken directly e.g. to Excel (or equivalent) and processed as you wish. Get Task Timer from Google Play! I think this app would be a good tool for everyone who is should measure time used for different tasks (project workers, consultants, e...

"Shapecalypse: Cosmic Impact" is a fast-paced space battle game with unique twist. Attention and quick reflexes are required to be successful in this galactic war. Features: - Google Play leaderboard - Local highscore will be saved too - Geometrical aliens have 4 different attack styles (will be mixed) - Compelling background music - Easy to learn but hard to master Facitious story: Mankind decided to set up a colony on distant asteroid zone. Unfortunately, that part of the space was already inhabited by geometric alien race. So serious consequences will be expected! (what a surprise) Your task: Your mission is to defend the surface of distant astral body as long as possible. Geometric aliens will send geometrically shaped meteorites to crush the base, and you are the only one between them and rest of the colony. How? Geometrical alien shapes are coming from the sky in different formations. The only way to stop each wave is to catch one of the shapes with ...

After releasing Battlecards Android game, we started working on a game concept that was invented couple of years ago. At that times, I created quick&dirty prototype for testing basic game mechanics. Also, main characters were also drawn then. But for some reason we did not continue to work on it. The working title of this game has been "Fly Attack". But after some not-so-careful thinking we decived to rename it to "Fly Assault!". At least there are not too many games with same name in Google Play. :) Game itself is very simple and easy to play: There are flies coming from top of the screen and player tries to catch them before flies get in touch to muffins in the bottom of the screen. There are couple of special "weapons" available to boost killing the files: Fly poison and Frog. Please watch attached video clip from Youtube to get understanding of this game: Fly Assault! will be available at Google Play Store in July 2016. -Jussi

Last week I ran into situation where I noticed that my Android Keystore file used for signing e.g. Battlecards game was somehow corrupted. Obviously, I had  not done any backups of my keystore file, so there was no way to fix it. So I decided to generate new keystore and compile my app again with cocoon.io. But that was not so easy: After cocoon.io compilation was finished, I was not able to load new .apk to my testing device. Tablet complained that previous version of app has been signed using different key and refused to install new version. So I removed old version of Battlecards from tablet, and realized that I had to do same for all my test accounts that were created to that tablet. Only then I was able to install new version (signed with new key). After some struggling I was able to install new version generated with new keystore file and started the app. But then I noticed that all Google Play Game Services, including leaderboards, achievements, etc. were not working at ...

Hello Friends! Now it is time to present you the latest Android game from WestSloth Games . Game is called "Battlecards", and it is a digital version of ancient card game "War". There are several variations of this game, and our version is probably one of the simplest ones. Gameplay is as simple as it can get: The deck is shuffled and divided evenly among the players. On each round both players reveal the top card of their deck, and the player with the higher card takes both of the cards played and moves them to the bottom of his stack. Aces are high, and suits are ignored. If the two cards played are of equal value, then there is a "battle". Both players place the next card of their pile to the table. If topmost cards are still equal, battle continues with another set of cards. Battle will continue as long as either player has higher topmost card than the other one (or player runs out of cards on his/her deck). Winner gets all the cards that were on ...

Edit 14.3.2019: gamaan.com website will be discontinued in Autumn 2019, so links pointine there are removed from this article.  Very small percentage of our game ideas are completed and published. Most of projects are suspended (or even killed) during the early phases of game development, and only few are really published in form or another. But what happens to the ones which are not completed? In the past we have just left them to the corner of a hard disk, but now we decided to give them a second change. So we decided to create a site called gamaan.com  that is filled with unpublished game prototypes by   WestSloth Games . We wanted to give wide audience an opportunity to play and test these immature pieces of digital art and provide feedback about them. The maturity level of games varies a lot: some prototypes are in quite finished condition, but some of them can be very rough mechanics trials. We are collecting feedback on some parameters of game. If y...

To celebrate Christmas we decided to create a specific Android game with Santa, gift boxes, etc. Rocket Santa is a fun and entertaining horizontal scroller game where your task is to collect gift boxes and dodge chimneys and passing UFOs. Increasing game difficulty brings additional challenge to Rocket Santa. Also, humorous graphics and animations will bring extra fun factor to the game! This Christmas themed game requires fast reactions and good timing to achieve excellent results. Put your skills on test and see how far you can fly with Rocket Santa! Please see the demo video below: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year on behalf on  WestSloth Games ! -Jussi

I started App Store Optimization trial  in the beginning of September for an Android game called "Del Gibbon's Mad Maths". Based on Google Analytics data, it seems that this trial was not successful at all (what a surprise!). Target of this trial was to improve the game visibility at app store and get more installations. Both targets failed miserably: there were just handful of new installations during the last 3 months. This was the first time I was trying to do any sort of keyword research and optimization, so I guess the result was expected. But what were the reasons for the failure? I guess it was a combined effect of my inexperience in ASO plus usage of related key word research tools. Also, the quality and attractiveness of published game was not too high. If your app is crap, then it is pretty difficult to market it. At least your supporting material, including thumbnails, screenshots and videos should be high quality. What I can do better next time? Pro...

Have you ever heard abut Monty Hall Problem? Basically, it is kind of a brain teaser that has been named according to the host of the television game show called "Let's Make a Deal". The starting point for this matter is the situation where there are three closed doors in front of you. Behind one door is a grand prize (money, car, whatever), and behind other two doors there is something less desirable (nothing, goat, etc.). Anyways, you have to pick one door. After selection is done, one door (with less desirable content) is opened for you. Now you have to decide whether you want to stay in your original selection or switch to other door. There are conflicting opinions which choice is better, but but now you can try it yourselves using this free Android application: Monty Hall Problem Simulator.  EDIT: Monty Hall Problem Simulator by WestSloth Games was removed from Google Play Store because of outdated API level. This was a nice and relaxing weekend project for me...

Now it is about 7 weeks since I started an ASO trial for one of my apps at Google Play. The target was to improve the visibility of " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths " Android game and get more downloads for it. I have no previous experience on ASO, so this really was the first try to do something for it. I did some keyword research, used a commercial tool for finding primary keyword(s), optimized app description with the findings, and so on. No idea if any of my methods were correct, but I was trying to follow the guidelines obtained from one ASO course from Udemy's collection. Unfortunately it seems that there were just few new downloads for the app for last 7 weeks, so I guess I was not able to do ASO properly at this time. Another option would be that my app is so bad (or looks so boring) that no-one wants to install it and give it a try. :) Anyways, I believe ASO alone is not enough to make your app successful. First of all your app should be interesting enough to ...

Since there has not been too many downloads for " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths " for Android, I started to investigate if there is something to improve app visibility at Play Store. To begin with something, I decided to get familiar with App Store Optimization (ASO). That is a process to improve app visibility at app store in a similar way than SEO for webpages. This was just to see if that helps at all in this case. In reality it might be that no one wants to play this game, but at least I have to try. :) After taking a short ASO training from Udemy course selection, I used a keyword tool (whose name I will not mention here) to find out primary keyword for my app. This keyword is now used as my app title at Google Play. Also, I tried to tune app description using the secondary keywords to maximize visibility. I am not too sure how I succeeded, but I guess the result can be seen during next weeks (or months). Who knows. My plan is to report the result of this ASO trial...

Perhaps no one has noticed, but I have had couple of months break in writing this blog. I've been extremely busy with my day job, so my leisure time projects have got less attention. Anyways, there has been some progress in my game development projects. Our second mobile game (SortOut!) was published at Google Play Store for some weeks ago. Game itself is very simple and easy to play: you just have to use your finger to swipe boxes to the corners with matching colors. Sounds easy, but I promise this no-brainer game is more challenging you first would imagine. :) We have been looking for game concepts that would suit well to the mobile devices. SortOut! is one of them, and we have couple of others under development. Let's see what comes out next... Please check video below to get an idea about the SortOut! gameplay and visual look. And of course we would appreciate if you spend couple of minutes your valuable time to install this application to your device. Just give it a ...

Our first Android game "Swing Rocket Dash" was developed using Construct 2 and the Android native build was done with Crosswalk. As promised in the previous article, I listed some experiences using Crosswalk to build Android application from Construct 2 HTML5 export. There is a great  tutorial for using Crosswalk flow  at Scirra's webpage. However, there are few things I'd like to add: On Build Settings (under Cordova 3.x settings) you have to define App ID field. That is used as package name at Google Play, and it is using reverse domain name notation, e.g.  com.myhost.myappname.  This name is unique for each app, and for "Swing Rocket Dash" we were using com.gamaan.swingrockets (gamaan.com is our own domain).  It is important to increment App Version Code field every time you create new version. Google Play wont't accept you new APK if it has same version number than any previously loaded package of your game You should also check the Plugins...

I am happy to tell that our first mobile game called "Swing Rocket Dash" was published at Google Play for ten days ago. Since we had no previous experience on creating Android applications, there was all kinds of a problems to be solved along the way. But anyways we got it somehow working. Game was developed using Construct 2, exported as HTML5, and finally built to Android native app using Crosswalk (Intel XDK). I will later provide separate article on this to clarify technical details and issues we met during the process.  Game was also published as HTML5 at Newgrounds . Basically, is was quite easy to make the release: HTML5 export was zipped so that index.html was on top level hierarchy, and zip package was uploaded to Newgrounds. I tried to add Newgrounds HTML5 API to this game, but for some reason it did not work as expected. So there are no medals in the game at the moment. Sorry! :) BTW, Docteur Pi did a video review of HTML5 version and it can be foun...

It's quite long time from my latest blog article, so I try to catch up what has happened lately.  First of all, we got "Dualball" flash game released to both Newgrounds and Kongregate . For some unkonwn reason, this game was extremely hard to get ready and published. And to be honest, there were some planned features we dropped out from the released version. We just had no motivation to implement those. Also, at summertime we planned to have Android version too, but that is not on our plans at the moment. There has been some queries from flash version players for us to create mobile version, but at this point I don't promise anything. Another change has been the slow migration from Stencyl to Construct 2. The reason for this has simply been the HTML5 capability of the latter one. Exported game can be played on almost any platform you can imagine, and the HTML5 output can be converted to some kind of "native" application e.g. for Android, iOS, WP, etc....