Blogs - IgnitionStudios

It's been 4mths since we released our first title Monkey Mini Golf on the Windows mobile platform, with the game going from strength to strength.

We've been lucky enough to team up with a Taiwanese publisher, B+ Studio, and Microsoft to release our debut game 'Monkey Mini Golf' on Windows Mobile devices in Asia. Microsoft Taiwan showcased the title at their free Windows Phone seminar for the launch of Windows Mobile in Asia on November 30th and will continue to do so in December and January.

We'll post a video and some pics up of the event as soon as they come through.
In the meantime, we've begun work on a new title and will be posting our progress up on our website as wel go along. www.ignitionstudios.com.au
In the meantime, hope you guys have enjoyed a successful year as it come to a close.
Wishing a very merry festive season. :D

Shannon

Has been a while since our last post, and have been busy busy busy!

Monkey Mini Golf has now been out on the Windows Phone 7 device and
Marketplace since 4th of August, (around 20 days to date of this post)
and has been doing really well – making it into the top paid apps for
Windows Phone 7 on the Zune marketplace along side games such as Flight
Control, DeBlob and other various Live titles.

A BIG THANK YOU to all world wide who have supported us by downloading the game!
The team here at Ignition are very excited to hear people are having
fun playing the game and grateful for those taking a moment give us
feedback – some of which we have posted on the Monkey Mini Golf site.
As a result, we are now looking to extend the game with features you, the users, have asked us to add.

We are currently in the process of working out the details of how we
will achieve this, and will be posting with further information soon.

Of course, any feedback, comments, ratings or suggestions are always welcome!
If you have not the pleasure of meeting our cheeky monkeys, Mica and Zeb, then be sure to do so by downloading the game now via Zune!

We have a chat with the guys from WP7 Lab and answer a few of their questions about our game, its development process, and other WP7 related stuff...

"1. Considering that Ignition Studios is relatively new to the Windows Phone 7 market, we’re definitely interested in learning more about the guys and girls behind the company. So, don’t be shy and take turns to tell us a little bit about yourselves.

Shannon: Well, I’m South African born and moved to Australia when i was 12yrs old. I’ve done a bit of travel around the world, but have spent most of my time moving and travelling around Australia including Darwin, Adelaide and now Melbourne. I’d always been an artistic child and was constantly drawn to anything that was creative and fun.

I got my first taste for 3D in 1997 while studying a Cert. 4 in Applied design and continued drawing and doing creative work in my own time before i finally bit the bullet and moved to Melbourne to study the Bachelor degree at Qantm.

What made me take that final leap of faith? For me it was a career change moment where i realized I was sick of going from one job to another. I wanted to be my own boss, follow my passion, live a dream that I’d never given myself the opportunity to live.

Luke: I have always been interested in computers as a child. One of those kids who would resist going outside and instead be doing lines of code to make some dots appear on the school’s Apple IIe. I eventually found myself back there, and programming as I started my working carrier.

I began with business based programming, including contracting and managing small programming teams for many large businesses here in Australia. After seeing a flyer enticing people to study games programming, I made the life changing decision to leave my business carrier behind, and really peruse my dream – to develop games that people like to play and be a part of something creative. While my art skills being limited to stick figures, I have found games programming a way of producing something creative and fun..." Wp7lab.com

Well, we've just gone through the arduous task of submitting our first game title to Microsoft.We thought we'd post some of the things we had to go through to ensure that firstly the game was ready and secondly, we were ready for the process.

Okay, so once we had finished with our final tinkers on the actual game we had to check off the following things:

• We turned over our Leaderboards and Analytics to Live instead of debug.
• Ensure that we built the last game in a Release state
• We had to make sure the language setting was set in the Meta data

Next step was to create a packaged XAP file for the App Hub site.Now we had to jump through the hoops that was the Microsoft App hub site

• Step One - Upload your application - This is a simple section to fill out
• Step Two - Provide the application description - again another simple area
• Step Three - Set the application pricing - Now, although this is probably an area that has you dreaming about the dollar signs, there is a sticky section here... Worldwide Distribution! The issue with this is the fact that there are certain countries that will want your game to be rated and require a classification certificate for your game before you can sell it in their country.

You'll find that if you try to tick all of the countries to distribute to, you'll get a warning that looks something like this:
Cannot submit application. Missing game rating. OFLC-NZ missing rating and/or certificate USK missing rating and/or certificate DJCTQ missing rating and/or certificate Etc...
Basically, the site will highlight in Bold Orange writing, the countries that you need to have a certificate for. What you'll need to do is tick every country except for the ones that have the certificate requirement highlighted.This does mean that your game won't be released in those countries, but Microsofts say they are working on the problem and the reasone for the issue is: "We are supporting new countries in this release and some of them have mandatory game rating requirements".

You can read more on this issue here: Forums.create.msdn.com

• Step Four - Submit your application and confirmation - last but not least... the final step to submitting your game!

A step by step guide for submitting your game can be found on the app hub site here: Create.msdn.com

Here's another really good link. It's a detailed blog on the individual sections and codes needed to enter your bank account information when signing up for a Windows Phone 7 Marketplace account (note, this is for Australia only): Mobilewares.wordpress.com

Hope this helps out any other developers that are submitting for WP7!

We’re about to submit our game to Microsoft for approval and I’m sure we will be waiting with baited breath ’till we hear back from them. So it has been busy times in the office. Logan has been working on creating the trailer for Monkey Mini Golf that we hope to release in the next few days… no mean feat as there’s a lot of trimming, timing and editing that goes into creating a beautiful, stylised game trailer.

I’ve been tearing my hair out at creating smooth camera fly-through’s for the levels that introduce the player to the course when they first start. Not that it’s a difficult task in itself, simply that the way we’ve set it up probably needs a little more work than we expected. Basically, the camera system was set up to run off of two curves – one to run the camera on and the other is what the camera looks at. This makes animating the camera “interesting” to say the least, but nearly done.

As for Luke, he’s been hunkered down over the keyboard like a madman ironing out the little bugs so that we have a nice polished piece to release when it comes to the final day. He’s just added in the final audio, lovingly created by our audio professionals, Julian and Dan. The game is sounding fantastic! He has also just added in our metrics hook to allow us to see how the game performs in the real world. We have chosen Flurry to help us with this. Easy to implement, and will give us some valuable feedback on the game’s performance.

Right-e-o. Back to it for me

“Quality feedback comes from someone who has genuinely taken the time to play and understand your game. It is well thought out and useful. Empty feedback is quick and dirty and doesn’t require much thought or time.” Andrew, May 2011.

A fantastic article from Andrew from Brawsome regarding differentiating between useful and empty feedback!

We’ve spent alot of time over the last few weeks getting feedback from friends and family regarding the game, as well as total strangers and the feedback has ranged from the usual, “yeah, it’s good”, to the in-depth write up’s that our Qantm testers provided for us.

I have to say that the feedback process has been invaluable for our game process, although we were a little nervous about giving it over to people to play as we knew there was still a few things we had to fix. We think that in future we might bring the testing process of the game forward more because we believe having it so late in the timeline meant we were restricted in how much we could fix or change due to feedback we’ve received.