Portrait mode added (optional) for easier use on a phone.Great Little War Game is rated 3.5 out of 5 by 24. Rated 5 out of 5 by MiniDowgy from overall its is a good game I first played this game in 2014 and I loved it. It is still one of my favorite games for mobile and a very good game on PC.We've bundled our picks for best Xbox One and best Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S games into a single list for the time being since the lineup of next-gen exclusive games is still very small.Witchers don't work for free, though.The Witcher 3 takes place in the midst of a large war between the Nilfgaardian Empire from the south, and the Northern Realms. Geralt's unique position as a master swordsman, accomplished alchemist, and expert occultist sees him keep all sorts of strange company, from simple townsfolk to kings and archwizards. Geralt is naturally caught in the political crossfire between the disparate nations of the North and the Nilfgaardian invaders, all while tracking his missing adopted daughter, Ciri, who seems caught up in some deadly intrigue of her own. There's also a list of backward compatible Xbox 360 and original Xbox games that work on the new systems too. We've collated our picks for best Xbox 360 games further below.'Great Little War Game is just that: a well-designed and enjoyable tactical war game perfect for those who enjoy the lighter side of virtual warfare.' Touch Arcade review: 5/5 'I'll call Great Little War Game 'great' without hesitation'.
When I point at Great Little War Game and say “our studio made that,” I really mean all of it. We can also fix bugs the same hour we hear about them, without waiting for a middleware provider to “get back to you.” As you’ll see later, this was important.But most of all it just feels like it’s all our own work. To that end we wrote all our own game-specific tools and tech: renderers, animation systems, sound engine — the works.In the indie world where time really is money, this probably sounds like madness to a lot of people, but because of this ethos, we can write games quicker than most, as our tools have been designed to work the way we do and we understand them forward and backward. Had we not had that feature, I’d probably be keeping my nose down in Barclays’ IT department by now and not writing this.We’d designed our tech to work in a platform independent manner, but we’d still not gotten around to making the game run on Android yet, so this was our next task. As a new nobody studio with an unknown brand and zero track record, we hadn’t even had that “what if” conversation in the office, so you can imagine we were ecstatic to see the feature show up when it did.I’m sure this was more luck than judgment (probably 100/0), but this feature turned out to be vital to our company, as those first few days of sales beforehand were looking truly grim. We didn’t know anyone there or any of that stuff they just plucked us out of nowhere. Back then, the whole Android scene was pretty new, and we didn’t have the staff for two major jobs at once regardless.Anyway, within a few days of release we got a front page New and Noteworthy feature from Apple. Although we were only making 10 cents gross on every sale, we were shifting about 400 copies a minute for almost 24 hours. If anyone wants to know the true power of PR, get Google to do an announcement with your name on it. We couldn’t believe it.And then some time later, Google hit their magic 10 billion downloads milestone and included Great Little War Game in its big promotion for that as well. We would not be in business today without them.It will come as a surprise to nobody that Advance Wars was our main inspiration. And sure enough … you get the picture.I think in the whole history of everything, the attention Great Little War Game got from the platform holders was beyond our wildest dreams, and we’re eternally grateful to them. If only they were all like that!At some point later on, we ported the game to Blackberry Playbook. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was the aesthetic I had in my head from the beginning, but then our artist showed us “Choro Q,” a Japanese toy line sold in the West as “Takara Penny Racers.” We were all instantly sold on the big rounded look and took that styling to the world of tanks and armor.Game controls: We thought long and hard about how the game controls should work – or more specifically how the viewpoint should work. I still feel guilty about not addressing this.)Men and machines: We needed a fairly unique style to make the game stand out and we discussed many ways to go with drawing the units. (The reason we didn’t supply the PC tool to do it is that it’s buggy and not written with the player in mind. This processing takes ages even on a beefy PC and is the sole reason we’ve not put a map editor into the actual game, despite many requests for it. We solved this by writing our own tool to extrude 3D meshes from height-difference contours found on a 2D tile map that the designer could lay out quickly.Performance in-game was also a key issue, so we had to ensure these meshes were uniform manifolds without intersections and overdraw. The problem here, though, was that this is much harder to make map geometry for – you can’t just line up a load of squares or cubes because the hex shapes intersect with each other and it looks awful. I have a particular dislike for games trying to cram a story in where none is needed, so this was our jibe at all that. Later on, we made the camera zoom in on fights as they play out which gave us the best of both worlds.If you’ve played it (if no, why not?), you’ll see right away that we went for a quirky and irreverent air throughout, as we didn’t want the game to be taken too seriously.We pick up some occasional flak for the thinness of the unfolding “story” running through the game, but most players realize this was deliberate. Gameplay always comes first, so we binned this idea completely and went with a bird’s-eye view for the main display. The problem with that though was it made the game much harder control. Luckily, the very first person we tried turned out to be extremely good and understood our needs perfectly. We have no in-house audio capability, so we had to contract this out. We had to keep this upbeat and jaunty whilst still sounding like a military march, and again that went perfectly. Total earnings to date, Android: $216,424.23You can clearly see the effect of our New and Noteworthy and the rather telling figures just before it. Total earnings to date, iOS: $283,760.53 It might surprise many to see that Android isn’t that far behind iOS, which goes against the grain of much perceived wisdom in the trade. The Android and iOS versions are by far and away the best performers, and between those two formats they’ve earned us about half a million dollars. Peg dmgInterestingly, this is where it ended. Salvation! Can you spot when the new and noteworthy started? Just two days in, initial sales had more than halved to about $400, with no indication of putting the brakes on by tomorrow. When we nearly quit mobile development and filed. The “long tail” on mobile seems long indeed.I put some interesting labels on for you. Not exactly an auspicious start to our new business, but we’d basically made it and decided to continue onward to see what the future would bring.After we’d launched on Android, we got to the point where we actually had a workable income and didn’t live in permanent fear of having to close next month. It saved our business, and our homes, but we were left in a state where there still wasn’t much new money coming in after the feature period had expired and sales settled down to a background level.There were five people to pay out of all this, three of us in the office and two contractors on a backend royalty deal, and the income just about managed to pay us all a living wage, barely. We’d lost our personal savings and got into some debt and had even got to the point of phoning the tax man for clemency on our mounting unpaid bills.When that first mammoth post-feature paycheck came in from Apple, my biz partner and I took most of it straight back out and used the money to dig ourselves out of our respective financial holes. To be frank, I do find it a bit depressing that most of our sales are based not on game quality but on how easy it is to find and tap an icon.The bad news for us is that before we switched to mobile development and began Great Little War Game, we had been stitched up by a former client we did a lot of that contracting work for.
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