Tag Archives: iOS

Super Mass Effect Black Hole

…that sucks all the money out of my wallet, that is.

Maybe this guy is in charge of the Mass Effect 3 marketing plan.

Here’s a trio of stories from Joystiq today:

The Mass Effect series is hitting iOS devices with Mass Effect Infiltrator, coming to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch soon, EA announced. Infiltrator is a third-person shooter featuring weapons and powers from the Mass Effect franchise, where players attempt to free prisoners from a hostile Cerberus base.

Players will receive awards for collecting evidence of Cerberus crimes in their mission, with each discovery and rescue increasing their Mass Effect 3 Galaxy at War Galactic Readiness rating. Actions in Infiltrator can affect the larger Mass Effect 3 storyline, and weapons unlocked in the mobile version can be used in Mass Effect 3.

Sold as long as it’s better and more meaningful than Mass Effect Galaxy (not hard to accomplish). IF it’s anything like the superb iOS versions of Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space that came out of EA I’m sure it will be great.

At an EA event in New York, the publisher revealed another iOS Mass Effect 3 tie-in, joining Infiltrator. “Mass Effect Datapad” is an iPad app that works with the console/PC game somehow. Details are currently slim on this one; we’ll get you more info as we learn it.

I’m buying this even if especially if it is an iPad-browsable version of the in-game Codex, which can trap me for hours if I’m not careful.

Reader Craig sent us this image of his GameStop receipt, where he purchased a code for some Mass Effect 3 DLC ahead of the game’s March 6 launch. He reports that he paid $10 for it.

I don’t ever know what this is other than a title but you can guess that odds are good that I am going to buy it.

The level of anticipation I have for this game is staggering, and I am starting to fear that it will not live up to my own lofty expectations. For me, Mass Effect stands next to Assassin’s Creed, Gears of War, and Uncharted as the defining series of this console generation.

(More on this in a future post.)

Scorekeeper for iOS

If you regularly play games that require manual scorekeeping, you should check this out:

It’s from Matt Rix, the guy who made Trainyard (which was coincidentally enough one of the games discussed in the article I linked yesterday).

The static screenshots of the app didn’t convince me, but seeing it in motion really sells it. It’s a universal app and it’s free for a limited time.

Thanks to Lance Willett for pointing me to this.

Money and the App Store

Emeric Thoa of The Game Bakers:

Eighteen months ago, when I left Ubisoft to start an independent game studio and focus on making my own games, I looked online a bit to get an idea of how much income I could expect to make as an indie. At Ubisoft I used to work on big AAA console games, and I had some figures in mind, but I knew they wouldn’t be relevant for my new life: $20M budgets, teams of 200 hundred people, 3 million sales at $70 per unit… I knew being an indie developer would be completely different, but I had very little information about how different it would be.

Angry Birds had taken off, Plants vs. Zombies was already a model, Doodle Jump was a good example of success, and soon after I started my “indie” life, Cut the Rope was selling a million copies a week. But except for what I call the “jackpots,” there were very few public stories or numbers on the web, and this meant we were a bit in the dark when we started SQUIDS. I have been tracking figures since then, and I’m writing this article to share what I’ve learned with my fellow indie dev buddies who might be in the same position I was, a year and a half ago.

In this article, I will present all of the post-mortems and figures I’ve found interesting, and I will also explain how SQUIDS fits into the overall picture. But first, I would like to quickly give my opinion on few of the App Store myths you may believe if you’re not an experienced iOS developer. There are plenty of ways to view the App Store, but my point is that you might be a bit surprised by what the App Store really means in terms of money.

This is a great piece with some sharp analysis of how the App Store economy runs and what’s needed to create and make a living off a hit iOS game. If you’ve ever wondered how the business side of that $5 app you just downloaded runs you should give this a read.

(via Clint Hocking.)

“Glider” Coming to iOS

Touch Arcade:

We’re happy to report that iOS gamers will soon have the chance to experience the magical little game that is Glider in Calhoun’s upcoming App Store release of Glider Classic. I recently had a conversation with Calhoun, who left Apple after 16 years this past summer in order to bring Glider to iOS, to find out more about his coming release.

I spent a lot of time playing Glider on my LCII back in the day and I’m thrilled to hear that it’s coming back. It’s an inventive game design and idea and should still be fun to play.

Game Dev Story and Loops

Graham McAllister for Edge Magazine:

For many gamers, it’s more likely that they will stop playing at the end of a level rather than in the middle of a level. However, in Game Dev Story, the end of a level is somewhat blurred, as once your game in development is complete, rather than be rewarded with the sales figures immediately, you have period of time where you see your game’s sales figures gradually increase. You’re not inactive, however, because you’ll be taking on contract jobs or starting another game development project so your staff don’t lie fallow, effectively starting a second game loop before the first has finished. This overlap in game loops removes a natural exit point from the game, making it much more likely that you’ll continue to play. Forever.

Game Dev Story ate up a lot of late night time for about a week for me, and it is very cleverly designed in this way. You are constantly being given new tasks to do and it’s not clear when they will end.

It also helps that the game has a ton of charm and even intentional occurrences of “Engrish.”

You can pick it up for iOS here if you are interested in seeing what this looks like. It’s $4 well spent.