Just shipped my second game : Holiday Cheer

So yeah I know ; long time no post.

You'll have to excuse me though. I've been quite busy you see I shipped my second game already!

My last post noted I was starting to port Pirates Treasure to C/C++.

We'll that went very well.

In fact so well that its done and on iTunes already here




There was one minor speed bump; call me foolish but Pirates Treasure was taken twice over on the iTunes store so I had to re-brand / re-name it as Pirate's Jewels.   It was a tough call what to re-name it as; there were a lot of options. In the end I had Pirate's Gold and Pirates Jewels


Interestingly enough teaching myself C/C++ was not difficult at all after having taught myself  BASIC/DBPRO. 

Honestly its mostly a matter of syntax and some more advanced ways of handling things that are largely pleasant surprises.  



Also I ended up putting the PC Version on a little site called IndieCity.com , you can view it here


My second title used the framework I created in Pirates, and I tuned it up even further and added some new features, as well as totally re-did all the graphics, music, sound effects and you now have Holiday Cheer

This was my wife's brilliant idea: She came up with the thought that I needed to do a holiday game for the upcoming thanksgiving/christmas time frame.

 She knew I wanted to re-use the code for the puzzle game ; but I was not thinking of that currently - so this was a nice suggestion that was very helpful.

So in the last 3 weeks I re-did all the applicable items and am extremely pleased with the results as you see in the attached screenshot.

The game has lots of nice atmospheric features, the gems falling are the sounds of sleigh bells jingling..  The soundtrack is a very upbeat rendition of Jingle Bells I purchased on a stock music site.  All the screens, menu's and text are either snowy or candy-cane coated as appropriate. Snow even falls on the screen while you are playing!



I had a lot of fun making this game, and I hope you have fun playing it!


And so in the end; instead of blogging I was busy writing and shipping games.

I do enjoy writing about game development so I will try to allocate a little time to blog here and there!

At this point I wish I had done so as I realize now there were a dozen really interesting things that happened along the way that I didn't share... I guess maybe what I really need to do is look into the idea of post-mortem blogging eh?

What are your thoughts?