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.

Well, to wrap this post up, here are some pictures of her. The pics are from the oldest to the newest, left to right.

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!

You see, all this is my fault, unfortunately. I did an update checker in the Android-version of Jewels, that contacts the server to see if an update has been published. I had not anticipated the success the game would get, and made it simply to check for updates every time the game is started. This was a huge mistake, in retrospect. I don’t know why I didn’t realise the potential problem of checking for updates too often.. My website account was closed because of too much traffic to the version check script. So that’s why this site was down for several days.

I’ve deleted the script, released new versions of Jewels that contact to a static HTML-file (previously the script was PHP, which in turn increased the stress on the server) and — importantly — not every time the game is started. Still, looking at the access logs on the new server, things look unnerving. Many people have not updated the game, and thus there is loads of requests for the (now deleted) old update check script. I might need to take out the update checking altogether, then again most of the people won’t probably update to that version so…

Let’s hope that more people update to the latest Jewels and this huge rush of requests starts to calm down. Otherwise I’m looking at my account suspended, again.

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.

Ok, so I finally got around getting a proper hosting and a domain for my MHGames site, and here we are, at the sparkling new http://www.mhgames.org! Yay! I actually wanted .net-domain, but alas it was already taken (like was .com, .org was my third choice).. Oh well.

So what’s new? Here is a list of things I’ve been doing the past 1,5 weeks:

• I chose to use WordPress, with the intention of combining my existing site with my separate blog. This worked out nicely, I was able to import all my blog postings from Blogger without too much hassle! Great work WP-team. I can highly recommend WP for any blogging purposes, and even beyond that.
• I did a custom theme for this site, basically from scratch. Had some difficulties making it scalable, but it works. I’ve tested it in Firefox 3.5, Chrome, IE 7 & 8, Safari, Konqueror and the latest Opera. All of those worked fine, phew. The theme is valid XHTML and CSS, so I can always blame the browser if something doesn’t work! Needless to say, I’m happy with the results on how this theme turned out.
• Finally I crafted the old MHGames-content over to this new site.

Now that this site contains both my development blog and my games, direct all your gaming needs to this address, so to speak. I will eventually get rid of the old site, so remember to update your bookmarks, if any!

That is all this time, enjoy the new site and do drop a comment on what you like or don’t like. I hope to resume developing my game project now that this site is alive, stay tuned.

And that’s that. I guess this shall do as The First Post(tm).