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.

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”

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’m sure you’re disappointed about the recent lack of new posts on my blog (at least I hope you are) but I will try to get up to speed in the new year. Anyway, I would like to give you a short summary of what was happening here at Codeminion for the last months and what we are currently up to.

The latest news is definitely the recent release of the second level expansion pack for Saqqarah. You can grab Egyptian Encounters here. We haven’t decided yet if we’ll be doing a third SaqPack. It depends heavily on your interest in this release, but if it gets any close to the reception of Monkey Monarchs – which sold more copies than Saqqarah on our website – I’m sure we’ll make another one. Another cool thing is that if you decide to purchase Egyptian Encounters you will take part in our contest to get a picture of you featured in our next game.

Speaking of games, we recently had a small revolution. For about 6 months we’ve been working hard on a very ambitious large scale project, but we came to a conclusion that we don’t have the necessary resources to finish it in less than 2 years which was our goal. But don’t worry, we changed our plans and we are now working in-house on two smaller announced games which are to be released in early 2010.

Keep your eyes on our website as we will be announcing the projects soon.
And happy holidays to you!

Tomorrow is our big day. Ancient Quest of Saqqarah will be launched on the first portal, namely BigFishGames. The game will be available exclusively on BigFish for two weeks in exchange for a small promotion campaign. After that time it will hopefully appear on all major portals. Of course please remember that the game was first soft-launched on Game Club Cafe and our users are enjoying the full version for almost two weeks now.  Anyway, the coming weeks and days will finally show what our game is ultimately worth. We are very nervous, so please keep your fingers crossed for us!

As you might know we’re currently very busy preparing localized builds of StoneLoops, finalizing Saqqarah, trying to port our games to Mac and negotiating a lot of agreements as we are trying hard to successfully self-publish our current titles. It all takes a lot of time and effort but there is nothing of big interest to write about, so I have decided to add the Spellscape soundtrack to the game music section. Sorry, no singing this time… Anyway, you may remember me writing a short postmortem of this first Codeminion game several days ago, but in case you missed it you can still find it here.