Dreamland passes WM7 cert!

"Congratulations robert toone of SorceryGames LLC! Dreamland Chronicles has successfully passed certification for Windows Phone Marketplace! You may now publish your application to the Marketplace."

This is the joyous email i just looked at. It has taken a while for me to get through cert, but i am now there. In fact i have to say that the testing department have done an outstanding job. They really did try hard to help me out and were amazing with their blinding speed of failure. Very cool.
 
Now i have learn't a lot and hope that the next one can go a lot more smoothly. As you might have read in my previous post, i have now started designing some modifications for my Xblig games, just in case i want to move them over later. The biggest single feature to add is the use of the back button always going somewhere. Should  be easy enough i reckon.
 
Expect to see The Dreamland Chronicles Game on your WM7 now.
 
Laters

*Edit*
It appears i cannot instal Zune software to see my own game in the WM7 marketplace. So i hope it is there. (i have 64 bit Xp)

Dreamland Chronicles for the WM7 platform

I got an email several days ago saying that the open submissions would start on November 3rd. well it is noevmber 3rd now. I have stayed awake to be ready for the off and Whammo get my Dreamland game out onto this platform.

I am lucky enough to have a friend who has done this port for me of my Xblig title. If it looks ok on the machine we will port some other of my games. However I am still unable to post at the moment.

I know they may have mean't 'sometime' during the day, but heck i am Pacific time, it should be now!! it is a new day.

I have been so excited about this all day as well. Guess i'll need to try and sleep :S

G'night.

A Dreamland Chronicles Game - Now Cheaper

The update for Dreamland is finally out. I sure hope this will increase sales by a large factor (like 3 or more!!). This game is now finally at the right price point for what i think it is. So maybe from those 500 downloads a week i can grab maybe 50 or more sales. I can hope!!

Along with Dreamland going live onto the marketplace last night A Shooter was of course placed into Peer review. So far a Good guy named Bob Taco Ind (ok, thats not his real name), has sent me an email after testing the game. He brought up several points about things he does not like. I will be posting on them tonight, after i have responded to his email in about an hour. Needless to say i am looking forward to the conversation, Bob Taco works hard on the Xblig channel and i have to say i am a bit of a fan of his. Not that i always agree with his stances on rules etc. But i do not have to agree with everyone on design points etc. That is what makes life more interesting. (this last bit is the point of this post really :)

Laters

Dreamland Dollar version is in Peer Review

YAY! i finally have managed to upload the latest ccgame for A Dreamland Chronicles Game. It has taken me a while but i really think this is a good move. Now the game will be a dollar once it gets through and goes live. Replacing the 3 dollar version that is currently up there.

Last month (august) it got downloaded an amazing 455 times. I think this is awesome. However it's sell thru is only at 2.?% and that is bad. I hope that this new price point will get the conversion rate up above 10%, and therefore be making me more money and making the whole thing a lot more popular. It is a pity i cannot easily let all those people know that the price has been reduced (so far about 6K of them). ahh well.

at first i could not get the game down low enough, because i did not want to pixelate the beautiful artwork for the sake of more sell thru. Since that time i have ben able to get Xact to compress the Audio saving me about 12MB. Then i realized that some pages did not have to be so darned large. That was enough to just get me under the 50MB limit for 1 dollar games.

So hopefully it will be out in about a week or so, and maybe my sell thru will go through the roof. I can always hope. I can also hope that it will get many more downloads as the price point is lower.

Time will tell, and i will post about it in approximately a month.

G'night.

Xblig - A Shooter and more

It has been a very busy bunch of days for me this week. I have been very productive though and hopefully soon Xblig playtest will see some of the work i have been doing.

I will start with A Shooter...
I have been rewriting the highscore sharing class, even though it works in my game. The reason for this is simply because i cannot score share while actually playing my levels. Due to the massive garbage collection issues it stutters my side scroller so badly for a second or so, you will mostly die. That would be unfair and go against my friendly none cheating game policy. So i have rewritten the component to make it so there is no garbage collection (ok, there is a teeny tiny bit). Now i knwo i could have updated to the version2 component, but to be honest. When i lokoed at it, it was huge. I don't write huge anything. I write simple small amounts of code. So i have it mostly working and tonight when i have obtained my friends Xbox, i will be testing the score sharing once more. Efficiency is the name of the game here. A couple of frames hiccup ill be ok, but any more than that and i will have to work on it some more.

I think that after i have gotten this all working i will spend a bit of time tidying up the names of some of the variables and then put it here on the blog for people to use or reference if they want. The reason the names of variabels are a bit odd in places is because they were there while i was cutting the code base down. After it works will be the time to name verything to be more explanatery.

Tomorrow i will post about A Dreamland Chronicles Game update and the idea of Episodic content.

Laters