Tiny TrackZ!

Tiny TrackZ iPad screenshot

Our new game Tiny TrackZ is finally out on the App Store!

Tiny TrackZ App Store

We’re really proud of this game so we’d love it if you all went out and bought it (at only $2.99/£2.29 it’s a steal!).

Our aim is to keep expanding Tiny TrackZ. Preferably without resorting to IAP packs of content if we can. So we’re keeping it simple. Essentially if Tiny TrackZ sells enough copies (i.e. we make the rent), then we can afford to add new content to the game for free. So the more players that buy the game, the more content you all get.

Think of it like a really easy Kickstarter campaign. You ‘pledge’ $2.99 and get your reward immediately. The more of your friends that buy the game, the more content you all get. (of course if everyone just downloads pirated copies, nobody gets anything).

App Store pricing and our new games

If you’ve read my previous blog you’ll know we’re switching from our Play Nice free to play system to a straightforward one of paid games.

The plan is to try and update our Play Nice games to have paid versions. Generally speaking they will be the same game but without the pay as you play options. We debated what to call them though? Snap Match Soccer Paid?, Fast Fishing Pro? Any Landing Plus?

Eventually we decided that as the new, paid, versions would be the ‘normal’ version of the game, it’s better to rename the old versions of the game by adding ‘PlayNice’ to them. So if you’ve got any of them, the name will change but they’ll still work the same.

We’re obviously keeping the old versions on the App Store as over a million players have downloaded them and they’re still being played every day. Plus some players have bought content and it would be unfair to penalise them. As far as is practical we’ll be keeping them updated too.

We’ve put a lot of thought into pricing too. With Flick Fishing we were one of the first app developers to recognise that gaining chart position made selling the game at the lowest price point of $0.99 worthwhile. That was of course the early days of the App Store and it worked fine then. However in the current App Store chart position isn’t quite so valid unless you can guarantee a top 10 position and way too many people seem to equate a $0.99 game with one they can wait for until it inevitably goes on offer as a free game. So we’re only going to keep the $0.99 price point for old games as a ‘budget’ label. These are our older or less popular games that we still want people playing but probably won’t have a lot of time to update that regularly.

For the bigger games we’re starting at $2.99 as a base point. Our thinking is pretty simple in that all our games are worth at least that and players who are only interested in cheaper or free games have plenty of options to trawl through 😉

Tiny TrackZ for instance is a simple (but rather deep) puzzle game, so the iOS version is going to be launched at $2.99 with the Mac version coming in at $6.99 (this covers the extra development time, lower customer base and wider range of machines to support). It may have some IAP packs to extend it at some point but only for big content add ons.

The relaunched Any Landing is going to be $3.99 as it will effectively be the same as the Play Nice version rewritten as if you’d paid the full $9.99 option for everything.  Fast Fishing will be $2.99 and Snap Match Soccer will be our first $0.99 budget title. We’re already testing the first version of Any Landing in paid mode.

Tiny TrackZ Promo Video

Here’s a little video we did for Tiny TrackZ!

The actual game will be out soon on August 13th for iOS and following soon after for OS X.

 

Music : “Ballycastle Bay” performed by the Fairey Band.

All rights reserved. Any unauthorised copying, reproduction, rental or broadcast of the information contained in this product is a violation of applicable laws.
Music under license from Delta Leisure Group.

Tiny TrackZ R&D

Sometimes when we write a game, we possibly take our research a little too seriously 🙂

Back in 2008 when we first started writing SlotZ Racer, I delved back into my childhood hobby of slot car racing and spent a lot of time playing, setting up tracks and racing Adam before I even started on the main code.

Just after SlotZ Racer was released in early 2009 I already started thinking about using the track system to do a railway game. Our dad used to be a big model railway nut, so we’d grown up building and running OO model railway layouts that either took up a spare room or an extended shed. It’s something neither of us had done in a while though, so I put together a prototype of a game called “TrackZ : Pocket Railway” (continuing the Z naming theme from SlotZ 😉 ) while I bought myself a small N Gauge set to experiment and generally play with to us back into the right mindset for model railways.

By the time we had the original prototype of TrackZ ready, Adam and I had both built N Gauge layouts. Mine being the original “Ives Yard”, built on my desktop around my iMac as an Inglenook Sidings style shunting layout (although with longer sidings).
SANYO DIGITAL CAMERA

Around this time, our publishers Freeverse were being bought out another publisher and there was a general change in direction as to what type of games they were interested in publishing. It was also getting obvious to us that TrackZ was turning into a huge project that could take us a couple of years to write if we carried on making it into the same sort of feature set as SlotZ Racer with a track editor (as railways are a lot more complicated!). So reluctantly we put the project on the back burner while we moved onto other games.

We didn’t stop railway modelling though. By that point it had become a proper hobby again, so here’s some pics of what I’ve been working on since then as my R&D for Tiny TrackZ…

My layout is called Ivebridge. It incorporates the original Ives Yard layout at one end but is now a much bigger layout with a lot more scenery.

Ivebridge ShedIMG_0001

While Adam spent some time working on his smaller Dunmarsh layout, he recently expanded the range of his hobby and he’s now helping out at the Isle of Wight Steam Railway, restoring a full size coach to its former glory..
Screen Shot 2015-08-04 at 15.32.17

Above all this though, we love writing games. So while researching the subject matter for them is fun and sometimes becomes a full on hobby in itself, the games are the fun bit!

Tiny TrackZ is due for release on iOS on August 13th with the OS X version to follow.

New Stuff and a change of direction!

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything, mostly because we’ve been working really hard to get Tiny TrackZ ready for launch in August (we’re even sponsoring the Touch Arcade podcast for a couple of weeks on launch, so tune in!).

We decided earlier in the year that we were going to change how we sell our games from now on. Our Play Nice system has been an interesting experiment in seeing if we can provide Free to Play games without over the top and unlimited micropayments and still earn enough revenue to fund game development. However it’s not really done well enough to pay the rent. We’re also not entirely happy with how free games are perceived and simply put, we’re having to do a lot of extra hard work to make games work for Play Nice without any real benefit.

So from now on, we’re keeping it simple. All our new games will be paid games. We’re also having a moratorium on sales and none of our paid games will be free for a day or at all, so if you like one of our games, you can buy it without worrying if it’ll be cheaper at some point (it won’t. In fact, the price might even go up).

We’re not ruling out having extra content added to our games as an IAP option but this will be extra content and not a payment to keep playing the game or change how the game plays.

Once Tiny TrackZ is released, I’m going back over all our old games and working on updates as well as new paid versions of the Play Nice ones. We’ll be keeping the Play Nice ones on the App Store, but they’ll also have straight paid versions for players who just want to play and pay.

Back to the Mac :)

It’s been about a decade since we last released a Mac game, which is way too long. Despite being a Mac only studio in terms of how we work (even our Xbox 360 games were written on Macs) various things have got in the way of releasing a new Mac game. It took me a while to get over not being able to use Codewarrior any more and by the time I got the hang of all the new API stuff on the Mac side, we were deep into writing iOS games.

The good news is that now we’ve started using Unity for our game development it makes it a lot easier to write Mac games alongside our iOS games and Fast Fishing will be on the Mac App Store soon!

The Mac version of Fast Fishing has all the tweaks and features that are going into the first update of the iPhone version so it’ll be pretty great!

Our next game (provisionally titled Tiny TrackZ) is being written as a Mac game too and should be launched very soon alongside its iOS counterpart. I’m going to be blogging the progress and some screenshots of it during development.

Weekend Projects- LittleBits to Lego

One of the hobbies I’ve been dabbling with the past few years is 3d printing after building an original RepRap Mendel. Given the depth of geekdom most visitors to this site probably fall under, I thought it might be an idea to showcase some of the useful bits I’ve uploaded to thingiverse in the past and fun new parts Im currently designing. One of the latest of these designs is an Adaptor to convert Lego technic into a nice framework for the LittleBits electronic project parts. Here it is mounting together some of the Korg LittleBits parts, you can download the file on Thingiverse here http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:440742 littlebits_lego