Unfortunately, I think the testers will need to be in the iPhone Developer Program to be able to install the game on their devices. (Correct me if I’m wrong!) But it doesn’t hurt to ask, right? So, any iPhone devs willing to test it for me? Drop me a comment if you’re interested. If not, I could try to find people on some dev forums. I do have my own iPhone 4 ordered as well, but I’m unsure if I get it before the game is finished..

UPDATE: I did get my own phone, so there is no need for this anymore. It worked quite well, I had to optimize text rendering though. Now it works pretty much 60 fps all the time. The optimizations also benefit older devices (except 3GS, which was running at 60 fps already) so it was time well spent.

I wanted announce that I’ve managed to start working on bringing Jewels to the iDevices (at least for iPhone + iPod touch), even with the taking-care-of-the-baby-business! I’ve only recently started writing it from the grounds up in C++ with some Objective-C (or actually Objective-C++). (If anybody remembers, the original PC-Jewels is written in C#/XNA, while the Android-version is naturally in Java.)

This time I’ll be using OpenGL ES (which, in retrospect, I should have used for the Android-version as well), so iPhone gamers will be getting the smoothest Jewels experience yet! I might even throw in some extra eye candy, just for the heck of it!

I’ve registered to the iPhone developer program, so I can test on the real devices, which is great. I’m aiming on making the game run perfectly on iPhone 3GS (and newer devices) hardware while still keeping it working fairly well on the older HW (like iPhone 3G). These are of course still only estimates, but something of a goal nevertheless. I’m liking the iPhone SDK so far, and even Objective-C isn’t as scary as it looked like before! But as I said, the majority of the code will be in C++. This actually makes a full circle: I had been using C++ for years before I made a switch to Java, and now I’m back in C++ along with learning Objective-C as well! Neat how things turn out.

As to why I’m doing Jewels again (for the third time!), instead of doing something else. Well, it has become a pattern of some sorts for me; while learning a new platform / language / API, I’ve ported Jewels over. The original was simply because I wanted to try coding with XNA. Android-version sprung out from the desire of learning to write for Android. It was a better game as well. And now it is iPhone. I’m learning new stuff and I firmly believe that this will be (again) the best Jewels yet!

Oh, I also noticed (only a few days ago) that there is already a game named JEWELS at the App Store! Just my luck. Any ideas for the name? I think I’ll have to go with iJewels or something like that, which I really didn’t want to do, but I guess there is no option but to change the name…

So there you have it. Hopefully iJewels (still don’t like that!) will gather some following on the iDevices — now I don’t expect it to be a mass hit like on Android, the competition is much tougher, but then again there is nothing to lose in doing the port (or rewrite, actually). I’m gaining some valuable code to reuse in future iPhone projects, even if the game was a flop.

I’m proud to say that my own top score for the Normal playmode is currently on the quite respectable ranking of 70141.. I did a bit better in the Timed game, ranking at 8167 at the moment. So yeah, there are some good scores about. On the Finland list I’m at rankings 41 and 11 respectively, yay!

I also completely redid the old and ugly Android-menus for something that works (and looks) a bit better, plus made some long overdue fixes here and there, but I guess I should’ve blogged about the release earlier; these other changes are not that interesting..

Also, this seems like a good opportunity to announce that there probably won’t be any bigger updates for Jewels later, I will do some bug fixes and like but nothing major, I think. I need to focus on other things, and due to a rather big personal event (of which I’ll post about a bit later) I need to priorize my time better. Nevertheless, I want to thank all the players, especially those numerous people that play the game regularly and keep it prospering on the Android Market! So thank you!

So it’s been a blast, I still cannot understand why it’s been so successfull. Ok, mostly because it’s Bejeweled, but there are loads of other B-clones on the Android Market, so that doesn’t explain it entirely. I guess there just was a (big) niche for a free & polished B-game.

Although some people have complained about the addition of ads — which are only in the main menu and not some distracting blinking colorful banners either, I need to clarify — turned out it really was the best thing to do. I’m not allowed to share any numbers, but it’s been waaay over my lowly expectations..

I’d like to express my gratitude and thanks to all those numerous active players, and of course to the good folk at Google AdSense for making this possible! I had never anticipated it, but turned out that ad supported apps and games are indeed a viable business model.

…and still it’s only the second most popular free game on the Market; I cannot beat that bloody Solitaire for the life of me!

Driftmoon

Check out Ville’s games at www.monkkonen.net or head directly to 2BeeGames in order to check the finalist games. You can place your vote in either of the sites.

I’ll write something about the porting experience from programmers point of view later; it definitely has been interesting as I have not done any mobile coding before this.

UPDATE on 13th of November:

Now that Jewels has been on the Market for a week, I’d like to share some statistics with you. Turned out that the game is a huge success (ok, it’s mainly because it’s Bewejeled, but interesting still), I had not anticipated this at all! At first I thought it’d break 5000 downloads before the last weekend (the game was released on Thursday). It did, Sunday the downloads were over 16 000. On Monday, it was over 32 000. And now, it’s over 100 000 installs, 92% of them active (i.e. still on users’ phones)!

Jewels is actually the second most popular (free) game in the Market right now with a average rating of 4.5 stars (596 ratings at the moment), only behind a Solitaire-game. Very nice. I’ve actually gotten more comments about Android-Jewels in a week, than I have from all my previous games combined during all these years, wow! So there’s definately market for good Android-games. I’m planning to make something a bit more original next,  so stay tuned.

Of course, it’s not all roses: I’ve released about a dozen updates but still there remains some mysterious bugs that don’t occur in most of the phones, but do in some.. Partly that is because Jewels was not originally writting  for phones (XNA as an environment is way simpler than Android!), and partly because I’ve probably screwed up something (my first Android app, after all). I will definitely try to design the next game to more solid and not so prone to these various bugs and crashes. But one thing bugs me: the Anroid phones are truly different from each other, although in theory the same code should work in most of them, in reality it won’t.. I’ve seeing reports of some really weird crashes that really should not be happening.

In other news..

I haven’t progressed on the game project, but I have played games. I finished Saints Row 2, it was a blast. Currently I’m playing InFAMOUS, which I bought recently. Great game! Thinking of buying Red Faction: Guerrilla next. So many great games, so little time..

So what do I think of the game? Well.. It’s a great game – much better than Oblivion, for example – looks great and sounds great. I enjoyed my time on the wastes a great deal. But… how could I put this… It’s not Fallout! :/ While there are plenty of things done right (the VATS system works quite nicely!), it’s still missing much of the good old Fallouty spirit.. The biggest problem is the dialogue: it’s just not that good, especially when compared to FO/FO2. NPCs feel like answering or quest machines. Where’s the humour? Not much of it left. The ending was not very good either, although not as bad as some people claim it to be.

Nevertheless, as I said, I enjoyed the game a lot, and will be playing it again. Perhaps they should’ve called it Fallout: Something something something, though. I had a few problems with the game: three freezes (two of them while approaching Evergreen Mills) where I must restart PS3, one crash and several little (graphical / physics) bugs. Not too bad, I guess. Lots of PS3 players have complained about worse problems.

And after completing FO3, I’ve been playing FO2 again, after many years. As I mentioned in my last post, I never actually finished the game and have held FO1 as the better game. Let’s see if the order changes after I finish the part two. It’s very hard though (at least in the beginning), much harder than I remembered. I think I’ve hit a bug though (I’m using Killaps unofficial patch 1.02.25 – highly recommended, I’ve yet to try the Restoration Project), skip the following paragraph to avoid FO2 spoilers.

*SPOILERS* I cannot seem to be able to give Bishops holotape and the Raider account book to Lynette in Vault City. I wiped out Bishops in New Reno, found the holotape in the safe. On my way to Vault City, I cleaned out the Raiders cave. At Vault City, I can tell several people I’ve neutralized the raider threat, and they say I should tell the First Citizen, but I cannot give the account book to Lynette. Nor the holotape. I tried before doing the Gecko power plant quests and after – doesn’t work. Oh well, I guess I cannot complete those quests then. *END SPOILERS*

Now I just need to plug GOG.com, the Good Old Games! The service is excellent, so far I’ve bought FO1, FO2 and Gothic. The games come prepatched and DRM free, it’s great. Good stuff, highly recommended.

I have played lot of games lately on the PS3, mostly Little Big Planet and in these last few days Fallout 3. Little Big Planet is really fun, especially when played together with others (in my case that means my fiancée Annemari <3). The Little Dead Space level was brilliant.

As for Fallout 3 (got it for Christmas), I’m very enthusiastic about it so far. * Feels a lot like Oblivion in places, but that doesn’t bother me since I like Oblivion. My current Oblivion save has almost 60 hours put into it, and the game isn’t nearly finished (I’m currently on the Shivering Isles expansion). The main quest is a bit dull, I don’t like cleaning the Oblivion gates (hence Shivering Isles).. Fallout 3 on the other hand seems much better and more interesting. Maybe that’s because there are hundreds of games in the generic fantasy world but only a handful (I’m only aware of Wasteland and Fallout 1 & 2) in a post-nuclear environment. This time Bethesda even hired more than three voice actors, wow! The game looks and sounds great, obviously. I guess I’ll comment it more after I’ve finished the game.

After I’m done with Fallout 3 (not too soon, I reckon), there’s a lot of unfinished stuff to play: GTA IV, Oblivion, Lego Batman.. In fact, I might even start Fallout 2 again, as I have never actually finished it(!). The original Fallout I’ve finished with at least three or four characters. Good times.

*) Yes, I’m aware the PS3 version is the worst of the bunch. However, it has trophies now and I haven’t had any problems so far, apart from some minor bugs like a severed molerat head that just couldn’t stop rolling around. The lack of anti-aliasing is a bit distracting, but nevertheless I can recommend the PS3 version… unless you got other options. I didn’t (my PC is a bit too old).