MHGames

Just wanted to announce that I’ve finished the Android port of Jewels. It is now available through the Android Market, for free. The comments so far have been very positive, thank you. I’ll probably release an update later with some fixes and tweaks, but after that I think it’s time to start thinking about the next project.

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.

See anything different?

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.

Yes, I’ve started a blog. I’ll try to write here at least somewhat regularly, but knowing me, it’s probably not going to work.. I’m quite busy in school (a software project course going on right now, it’s big!) at the moment, but I should be able to do more this summer. On the other hand, I do have work then and I’m hoping to write my bachelor’s thesis too.. So we’ll see. I have some other plans too, but I’ll talk about them in another post.

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