Casual Games Harmony

I have some very exciting news today. We have announced Return 2 Games, a series of very unique games developed at Tring Trunk (a company I founded almost 3 years ago with the guys from Twinbottles, authors of Brunhilda). I’m proud to present our first teaser trailer of the entire series.

I know it doesn’t reveal much, but it isn’t supposed to 🙂 It’s just eye candy at this point. But if you want to learn a bit more, there is a small FAQ at www.return2games.com. Unfortunately I can’t give any spoilers just yet, but we will be revealing much more in the months ahead and if you want to stay in the loop, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on Facebook or Twitter.

In other big news, I wrote a longer blogpost which explains what was going on at Codeminion for the last couple of years. So if you are wondering why Codeminion hasn’t released any new games since Phantasmat in 2011, be sure to read it.

We have finally ported Ancient Quest of Saqqarah to the iPad and today the game has been published on the AppStore 🙂 We are very excited about this release as the game is a true joy to play with touch controls. Check out for yourself here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/saqqarah-hd/id403523070?mt=8

While we are slowly commencing with our marketing efforts, I’d like to let everyone know that Bayo Bongo, our new puzzle game for iPhone/iPad has been accepted and published on the AppStore. You can get it here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bayo-bongo/id391999969?mt=8. If you’re a game reviewer interested in reviewing Bayo Bongo please contact us at info (at) codeminion (dot) com to receive redeem codes. Below you can see the game in action 🙂

I’d like to give you an update on the latest developments surrounding Brunhilda and to give a short sneak peak of what’s coming up. First of all, the game is already out and available for purchase at the official Brunhilda game website. It’s still a soft-launch, which means that it will still take some time before the game is released on the major casual game portals. Unfortunately I can’t give any numbers, but I can tell that this is the fastest selling game on www.codeminion.com that we had so far.

Continue reading “Brunhilda and the Dark Crystal Update”

For the last two months the game has been undergoing rigorous beta tests and has received lots of fixes and improvements. Now the game is finally available to the public, so visit the official website www.brunhildathegame.com, download the game and join Brunhilda on her adventurous journey through the different lands of the Magic Realm.

I hope you have lots of fun playing the game! Please note that this is a soft-launch of the game so if you have any feedback please share it with us, as we can still make improvements to the game before the big launch on the major portals.

If you enjoy our games and have a facebook account, you can now follow us at our facebook page. You can find our page at: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Codeminion/127088663974722?ref=ts
Once we get more followers (people who hit the “Like” button), we’ll be able to set up a friendly facebook username, so the link will be much simpler.

UPDATE: The current link is www.facebook.com/codeminion and it can also be accessed at www.facebook.codeminion.com. Thanks for liking us 🙂

As you can see, we’ve just launched a trailer our upcoming game Brunhilda and the Dark Crystal. The PC version of the game is currently in open beta, so if you want you can join our beta program, and test the game today!

 
You can view the trailers of our other games at our YouTube channel.

It seems we’re not alone in our struggle to bring our iPhone app back to the AppStore after it was removed basing on a complaint from a competitor. The StoneLoops! precedence has apparently repeated as more apps have been removed in the same questionable way. You can read about the AppVault case here.

Anyway, the authors of AppVault have created a petition so that Apple hopefully reconsiders its policy towards copyright infringement claims, which currently clearly allows serious abuse. In our opinion Apple should definitely put more effort into checking the validity of each claim, because automatic removal of disputed apps is already causing harm to developers and customers alike. You can find the petition here: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/open-competition-in-app-store

Thanks for your support and for helping us spread the news.

I’ve been recently receiving lots of questions about StoneLoops! and about our upcoming games so I decided that it’s high time to write about it. Even though we didn’t release any new games in 2009, the last year was quite good for us. We weren’t affected by the collapsing economy and we managed to release third expansion pack for Saqqarah, both StoneLoops! and Saqqarah were released on the iPhone and we also released a short flash webgame version of Saqqarah. But what you might not know is that in 2009 we have started working on 6 new games and we have an ambitious plan to launch all (or at least most) of them this year! Continue reading “More games coming up in 2010”

I know that lately I haven’t been blogging a lot, but recently something very notable  happened that I feel everybody should learn about. As you know our marble popping game StoneLoops! of Jurassica has been ported to the iPhone platform and proved to be a huge success. It  stayed in the global US app top 10 for almost two months and never dropped out of top 100. Until now that is, because today StoneLoops! has been removed from the App Store by Apple on the request of… MumboJumbo.

If you don’t know Mumbo Jumbo, this is the company that creates Luxor marble popping games. In fact Luxor is one of the  biggest marble popper franchises in the entire casual games market. When StoneLoops! was released on the PC and MAC it was over 3 years after the first Luxor game and the marble popping genre was almost dead. In result StoneLoops! never reached any serious top-tens and has stayed in the shadow of the giants – Luxor and Zuma. But on the iPhone it was the other way round.

Together with an external company Playcreek we managed to prepare a very solid port of StoneLoops! to the iPhone platform. It was a great success for us that we managed to launch the game sooner than MumboJumbo managed to complete their iPhone port of Luxor. In result the roles for StoneLoops! and Luxor have reversed in the AppStore. Due to an excellent port and good timing our game became the genre leader receiving hundreds of positive user reviews. In the meanwhile Luxor for the iPhone received very little attention and quickly dropped out of the various top100’s. I can imagine that MumboJumbo wasn’t entirely satisfied with this result, but hey – what can you do about it? It seems you can do quite a lot…

Continue reading “Where is StoneLoops? Or how to get rid of your competition in the Apple AppStore?”